I’ve always been a big Stephen King fan. In fact, I would say I pretty much cut my literary teeth on his early work: The Stand, Carrie, Cujo, The Dark Half, and especially collections of his short fiction like Night Shift. King was my introduction to “adult” books, ie: not Beverly Cleary, Edward Packard, or RL Stine. I think I was probably ten or eleven when I read my first Stephen King novel, so I forget which one it was, but I think it was either Needful Things or Thinner. His early work really is my favorite.
In an experiment I very much resonated with, Stephen King even wrote a series of books under a pseudonym, Richard Bachman, which I felt were actually some of his best work concerning mortality: The Long Walk, The Running Man (read the book, don’t see the cheesy 80’s Schwarzenegger movie), and of course, Rage (quite prophetic regarding school shootings). When asked why he did this, King responded:
“In 1968 or 1969, Paul McCartney said a wistful and startling thing in an interview. He said the Beatles had discussed the idea of going out on the road as a bar‑band named Randy and the Rockets. They would wear hokey capes and masks a la Count Five, he said, so no one would recognize them, and they would just have a raveup like in the old days. When the interviewer suggested they would be recognized by their voices, Paul seemed at first startled… and then a bit appalled. Memo to Paul McCartney, if he’s there: the interviewer was right. They would have recognized your voices, but before you even opened your mouths, they would have recognized George’s guitar licks. I did five books as Randy and the Rockets and I’ve been getting letters asking me if I was Richard Bachman from the very beginning… I think I did it to turn the heat down a little bit; to do something as someone other than Stephen King. I think that all novelists are inveterate role‑players and it was fun to be someone else for a while‑in this case, Richard Bachman.”
Unfortunately I genuinely believe the quality of King’s work has declined in his old age. I hated the way he ended Dark Tower. The epic series’ conclusion was obviously rushed by the author’s own sense of mortality, spurred by his infamous accident, and became narcissistic when he wove too much of his personal life into the grand finale. Some King books you feel like are indulgences granted to him by his publisher. I think King himself once even joked that he could publish his laundry list and sell a million copies, so I guess, whether it’s garbage or it’s gold, it’s a win-win for both publisher and author alike. But the Constant Reader is subjected to the wistful writings of a bitter old man, who realizes all too well he isn’t long for this world, and is really starting to get into the rind of life, having already exhausted its sweet, sweet innards.
They had DreamCatcher in jail, and I couldn’t even get through the first hundred pages of it. It was like wading through wet concrete. The story was so bogged down by pretentious, self-important yet tragically mundane, everyday Americana that it just wasn’t compelling. I think It maintained that balance between horror, suspense, and growing up in 60’s New England nostalgia, but DreamCatcher went a little overboard on the latter, the literary equivalent of playing Dire Straights’ Sultans of Swing stuck on repeat for a week and a half. I ended up trading it away just so I could re-read Jurassic Park for the millionth time. Another childhood favorite, especially because I related so well to the crazy mathematician Ian Malcolm, but that’s a whole other past-his-prime author, so obviously I’ve veered off topic.
Anyway, even though I criticize King rather harshly, I still love King. I bag on him, and yet utterly lack his accomplishment. He’s published a zillion novels and some of them are classics, or will be when he’s gone. If they teach Dickens’ pulp garbage in Jr. High, they might as well force middle schoolers to read King. The smart ones always have on their own, anyway. Shit, I personally believe that Oliver Stone’s Scarface is a far more relevant American tragedy than Macbeth, but I’m sure that’s blasphemy to the Texas State Board of Education.
The Green Mile was one of King’s books I didn’t very much care for. Kind of the beginning of the end for him. What many people don’t realize is that it was actually published as a serial. So, Stephen King had no idea how this story was going to end when he started it. He published like fifty or a hundred page little pamphlets of it every month, and you were supposed to sit there waiting in suspense, and then run out and go buy the new one the second it hit the shelves. Obviously, this would limit King as a writer, because once the first part of the story is out there, it’s out there. The author couldn’t go back and change the details to align with his new ideas in the final edit. But because King is a seasoned veteran writer, he actually pulled it off, and the result was a story Hollywood felt was good enough to make a movie of, starring Tom Hanks and that hulking black dude who looks like a menace, and yet is actually a giant teddy bear.
The plot is cheesy, unrealistic, and showcases typical faults that most critics find in King’s work: Too much mundane exposition, and over-reliance on Deus Ex Machina. And it was too reminiscent of other work by King which is far superior. If you’ve already read Shawshank Redemption, there’s no real need to waste your time with Green Mile. Shawshank is the quintessential 50’s prison story, and Green Mile is the formulaic safe bet.
The detail that stuck out to me the most as wrong or blatantly unrealistic is the idea that a prison guard might actually have compassion. That he might have a conscience. That he might question his state fascist overlords, and realize what a putrid fecal smudge on his own karma complicity with the Prison-Industrial Complex has smeared upon his very soul.
Here we see that the fatter a jail guard is, the surlier he is, which can be expressed graphically as a simple one to one ratio.
Why would anyone take a job like prison guard? Certainly not the money. It seems to me as though it would get really boring after a while. A smart person would move onto something more interesting, productive, and engaging. You might eventually want to contribute something to the world, instead of milking the teet of institutionalized bigotry, corruption, and oppression. So then, it stands to reason that the guards who stay, stay because they enjoy being in control of those weaker than them, or those who have been handicapped by the state. It’s a sadistic power trip thing. There are several rituals that the guards make the prisoners perform.
They wake you up at 7AM in the morning in jail. You are expected to be standing at the foot of your bed at attention, ready to have your head counted. There are four head counts every day: one in the morning, one at lunch, one at dinner time, and one at bed time. The one in the morning is the worst. You probably got shit quality sleep on a deliberately crappy gym mattress that doesn’t even pretend to keep the jagged, rusted metal bed frame from jabbing you in the back, and then you get woken up before the sun rises, by some brash redneck yelling in your ear and fluorescent lights in your eyes. For 90 fucking days.
Sometimes they play little games to torture you. I remember one time, right after I had eaten a breakfast consisting of shitty oatmeal, this guard decided to take another guard’s Whataburger order right in front of everyone. Because why would the guards want to eat the shitty, low-protein jail food when they could go out and buy a real meal? “I want a double-double, with lettuce, tomatoes, mustard, bacon, jalapenos, large fries, and a chocolate shake,” he loudly proclaimed, in front of a hundred people who were starving.
The guards thrived on these petty little control games they played with inmates. They would “toss” or search, your cell, and if they found anything, even just a half a Snicker’s bar, they would give you demerits for “opened commissary”. You can’t just have a half a Snicker’s bar. You have to either keep it sealed or eat the whole thing. You can’t even split it with a homeboy. That would be commerce. Technically, it is against the rules to even trade anything in jail, and the guards will nail you on little shit like that any time they notice it.
Their favorite thing to do was put someone on lockdown. If you’re on lockdown, you can’t leave your cell, go in the day room, watch TV, or talk to anyone. You are confined to a hundred square foot space while everyone else plays spades. And you had to wear a special yellow jumper just so you would be humiliated. I only got lockdown once the whole time I was in jail, and it was over something so trivial I can’t even remember. I talked during quiet time, traded lunch entrees with another inmate, or I crossed some imaginary border of a space the guards were trying to keep clear at the moment.
If you got in a fight, they would move you to the SHU (Special Housing Unit), which was like AdSeg (Administrative Segregation) or Solitary Confinement in any other jail. This happened to me briefly when I was in a fight, which the guard broke up, so I was actually glad there was a guard that night. Of course, I had a hard time respecting guards who make less money than I would if I hadn’t been incarcerated at the time. I probably had more education, job skills, and a better career than most of the guards in that jail. So, it’s difficult to respect their sometimes nonsensical orders, but all in all, I tried and did pretty well.
That’s thing about jail guards: you are kinda glad they are there to protect you from the bigger inmates who are legitimately criminally insane, but you still resent their authority and don’t have much respect for them personally. If you are refined enough to distinguish class or lack thereof, then you will notice they treat you as the same head of cattle as the real-life monsters in jail, even if you are a good person who got railroaded. Whether you are a serial killer or a poor man who got caught stealing bread to feed his starving family, they don’t care either way, and you are just a number to them.
Over time, authority makes prison guards psycho-pathological with indifference. I heard about this one guard who was a real big prick to everyone, and then one day, on the outside, a bunch of former inmates caught him slippin’ at Wal-mart, and put the smack down on him. Supposedly there was a video on YouTube, but I never could find it. Some guards were worse than others, but none of them were crooked by way of lenience. We never got any drugs smuggled into the pod through the guards or anything like that. Some of them were cool, but most of them were just too strict, like drill sergeants in an army you never had any intention of signing up for. The kind of person who gets in your face and tries to hold you to some ridiculous standard, for no practical reason, just to target you for state-sanctioned good old jocky redneck bullying, of the same variety that goes on in most middle school gyms. That’s what happens to all the lunch money-thieving bullies after they drop out of high school: the state gives them badges, guns, and the authority to continue their bullying on behalf of the state.
The guards never hesitated to get physical, whether it was to frisk you before visitation, or to plunge a knee into your back, crushing you into the ground, while they cuffed you. At best, they treat you like a child, and at worst, they treat you like an animal.
There were even female guards. In the men’s section of the jail. Again, I ask you to examine the motivations of any woman who would want this job. Obviously, the female guards were sick, sadistic, misandrist control freaks, so I had zero problem giving them shit. Sometimes, they would patrol the cell block at night, and they couldn’t really tell who was saying what in the dark, so I made up a little lullaby for them:
“G, a guard, a female guard,
D, my dick for her to suck…
T, some tits for me to grab,
B, a bitch I’d like to fuck…”
This rallied the other prisoners to start hooting, hollering, and whistling at the female guard. She got so rattled by this, they eventually changed her assignment back to the female cellblock. I think she’s still saving up for gender re-assignment, though.
Until next time, guard yourselves, readers.
Book Reviews from Jail 