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Non-Fiction
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| London Town | |
| By dotcommie | ||||
| 23 October 2006 | ||||
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Yes it's about me.egotistic and self indulgent I may be but I hear all writers are similar -There’s a popular theory about people, the ‘six degrees of separation’ theory. It claims we’re only ever six degrees removed from anyone else on the planet. Maybe it’s just a warm bus seat, a second hand purchase or inhaled smoke. Every little occurrence links us in some way with everyone on the planet. I don’t know about all that but I do sometimes think we’re six degrees separated from the people we know the best. Be they brother, sister, mother or lover some part always remains forever 6 steps out of reach. My story begins in the place where I was born not raised, London. The Great Attractor sucked me back in a drunken haze of bus stations, tickets paid and tattered National Express journeys, made remarkable only for the no smoking rules. A digression. White cider, the strong gut rotting kind, fogs my view. Supermarket smack, fight juice, liquid rage. Camden locks on a bright summer morning will remain in my mind as one of the best memories. As the Mexican mushrooms kicked in I lost interest in my magazine and was locked, fascinated by the play of sunlight on water. Like light gold poured over the water to hang like some impossibly beautiful oil. I remember a conversation, some odd exchange with an obscenely healthy Californian. Something about the nature of divinity, and Norse gods. I’m no longer sure if I imagined him or not but his enthusiasm and honest fascination for the British are what I remember. As night fell Camden revealed it’s more sinister aspect. I had attempted to return home earlier, but was defeated by a turnstile at the tube station. You have to put the ticket in to make it work. If your ticket is valid the turnstile does its turning. However this concept was impossible for me to grasp in my state. Speed, alcohol and mushrooms were warring for supremacy and leaving my mind like a four-year old’s. So I returned to my comfortable grass bank, only it grew less comfortable as night fell, so I retreated to the safety of some nearby bushes. Where some rotten teethed old pro found me. She warned me pretty clearly “ya know smack’eads stash the odd beetle round here don’t’cha? Sleep ‘ere you’re liable to get beat or stabbed” So I fell in with her. First she took me to a pizza place that was just closing, where we got some unwanted food. Then onto some other paved, neon area where I met her 13 year old son.. Left in his company I wandered, stopping briefly for cider, stopping again for a joint with an Angolan who limped on crutches. It was a Saturday night. As we scrambled over the roof of a nursery looking for the doorless playroom where their would be soft toys for pillows, The Met accosted us. Spat out, deposited in an ancient crumbling jail. The holding tank before me has seen centuries of smoke and likely its fair share of despair. Be thankful stones don’t speak. Speaking instead is the rooms 20th century addition, an all singing all dancing touch screen computer terminal that can attempt to sugar-coat the hellish pill you’ve swallowed in 12 different languages. At the moment it’s English, the spiel read by Ronnie Barker, in character as Fletch from Porridge. The tail end of a Mushroom and speed binge, and the absurdity, cause me a few minutes subdued sniggering. I am amongst 20 men in a room designed for 12 as screws grab us one by one to be issued with Smokers pack, bed roll and prison number. I have been in custody without a ciggie for 12 hours and the monkey digs his claws in tight. The only people smoking are the lucky already processed and they’re all huge tattooed guys whom I fear to even ask. An elderly Muslim keeps asking everyone where he is and who has a smoke, poor English but not that bad. As son as Uniforms arrive to see what the noise is about his refrain changes ‘I’m ok, I’m ok” he shrinks back in his seat. His fear of uniform is evident and not a little horrifying. “What am I doing ‘ere with all these criminals’ I turn to look. A black man, wiry, young; gold rimmed glasses and a broad grin ‘This is all an ‘horrible mistake, guv” Catching my eye he asks ‘You want that milk, bro?’ ‘Got any smoke?’ I ask desperation lending me bravery ‘Ganja for a bit o’ milk? Havin’ a fukin' laugh. Get your smokers pack. Gimme half your burn an the milk an I’ll do you a teenth." Happy already. Oh yes I am that simple. A little to smoke and I’m the happiest man alive Sometimes it takes a few hard knocks. Life deals them out in different proportions to bewildering varieties of people. To little you think your untouchable and become an insufferable prick. To many and you’re a psychiatrist’s paypacket. But get just enough, enough to know you’re not made of glass, and suddenly life is boring unless you’re living it on the edge. Suddenly the camaraderie of violent, flawed people becomes the greatest buzz in the world. We are brothers. We are scum. We are despised and we love it. With these people my flaws are nothing. First cell mate. A tall short haired London Irish type. Walks with crutches. He begins by showing me shotgun wounds, horrific gouges and scorch marks on his legs. Amidst tales of old crimes and regrets past, we bond over a couple of joints and a shared love of Leonard Cohen. In a five by three foot cell, with a background of screams yells and ever present banging, I fall asleep to a light, off-key Irish brogue ‘Suzanne takes you down, to her place by the river’. First morning. Screw appears. Big capable black lady, red streak in night black hair. “C’moan bwoy, movin’ you to detox wing” “I’m not cluckin’” Puzzled expression “I ain’t on smack miss. I’m no crackhead. I don’t need no detox wing” “Aright, don’ come moanin about detox later den’” I know why they think I’m on gear. Alcohol and speed abuse have left me with a laisse-faire attitude towards food and such disinterest has left me a very skinny young man. “What about induction miss” She looks irritated. “I’ll tell you when it’s induction ya’hear?” I hear. Association is a joke. 40 guys on a narrow landing milling around trading newspapers cigarettes, the ever present queue for the meds hatch. The food by the way is appalling. Breakfast is given out with the evening meal, a carton of milk and a cereal packet. My cellmate let me know that, this being summer, the milk would be rotten by the morn. So I ate my weetabix that night. The evening meal was mystery meat in a stew (for us non-veggie Christians) with mashed potatoes. These potatoes have been peeled, boiled and mashed. They’ve never even dreamt of butter or milk or a few green herbs. The stew is awful. Despite this I trough it down eagerly having become accustomed to shoveling anything edible mouthwards. I dread to think what the Halal or Vegetarian options tasted like. Let me tell you what the signing in process was like. First I made the mistake of calling the desk bloke ‘mate. With horrified contempt he looked at me “I ain’tcher mate” he spat “my mistake guv’” I reply. Then came the emptying of pockets, to reveal my vast wealth of thirty pence sterling, in tiny denominations i.e coppers “ya fuckin pauper” booms the screw, a right comedian “they could’ve got you for vagrancy lad” several witty, cutting and foolish replies run through my mind before I make the wise decision to keep a sullen silence. The desk-bound hero regards me with the sort of disgust that I reserve for dung-beetles and nonces. REMAND I want to scream INNOCENT TILL PROVEN! But these little distinctions mean nothing once you’re actually in their grasp. Then this big mans aura of disdain is broken as he dismisses me, no doubt eager to intimidate his next victim This is my second experience of ‘her majesties pleasure’ Every nation seems banged up here. Two cells down a Vietnamese quartet play some obscure Indochinese board game using paper and pens and bits of stone. Opposite me are three African blokes speaking what sounds like French. I take them be Congolese. The coterie I hang on the fringes of are a mixture of white and black Londoners, all speaking in that unmistakable accent, that veers from jocularity to menace in the space of a syllable. Off to one end are the various sub-continentals differences of hindu/islam put aside for solidarity. And strolling through it all, white shirted screws, big, grim looking men with attitudes of weary disdain. Through this bizarre group walks me, a skinny white boy in search of a few books to stave off the boredom of 22 hour bang-up. First I find a biography of Napoleon. Morning association finishes and it’s back to the grim space I’m calling home temporarily. Smoke a joint with Fergus and hear about why he’s in. Conspiracy o murder is the charge he’s facing. The wounds to his legs are recent but unrelated to the charge he’s facing. They happened after the incident he’s in on remand for. He tells me, frankly, that he waited in the car, keeping the engine running while his uncle went into a pub and unloaded a sawn off at point blank range on someone. The Intended victim must be the luckiest man alive because he escaped with minor stomach wounds. Fergus, as a waiting accomplice, is fighting this; his fourth murder related charge. It is halfway through his story that I realize the sort of people I’ve been banged up with. Napoleon keeps me sane. The accounts of how he revolutionized first artillery, and later a whole society, becoming the most feared general of his time. Later to die in English imposed exile on some god-forsaken rock. We couldn’t just kill him of course, that would have left us a maytr... Reality fades in the unwelcome bastard. A lanky dreadlocked bloke is now sharing my cell “you’re in for silly tings aint cha” “Bollox mate. If I had an address they’d bail me to it” Giggling six foot blokes are a new one on me. He explains how he’s just released from the hospital wing. Two centuries earlier he’d have been a razor sharp court jester, but he makes my sides ache. Blanketed wrapped like Mary’s clothes he enacts wickedly, mimicking screws with hysterical accuracy. Of all the pad mates he really made me laugh. He wasn’t concerned with his current lockup; no he always had some extra- legal help This guy I’d started calling friend was taken back to the hospital because he kept asking a screw if he’d ‘taste my shit’ you may say of course he was sectioned. His bizarre sense of humor betrayed him. Classed as schizophrenic and dumped in that murky world, the state funded mental homes completed his sense of dissonance. Oh perhaps I should mention that my palmate was black. Which means he’ll be watched should he ever have kids. We ain’t racist no more, not overtly anyway. Easier to diagnose a nigra with schizophrenia, push him into a deprived area and give him drug dealing as employment.. Cause when the shit hits the fan, they have the perfect excuse to tighten the screws and employ more policeman. Pentonville showed a remarkable, tolerated multi-culture. While the Vietnamese guys practiced obscure games, a group of enlish-carribean blokes rapped away in the centre of the exercise yard. Glashin, who’s seen me as the complete innocent I am, propels me round with a firm hand under my elbow and a running commentary on the state of the prison.- he’s the wiry gold rimmed guy who sorted my cannabis problems out. “I know you’re in jail mate but that ai’nt no excuse to stop shaving and teeth brushing. What you want them to see you broken? Sort it out mate and I might ave another smoke for ya” It wasn’t the promise of smoke more the advice that focused me. They wouldn’t see me broken, unmanned. Fuck that. So back to normal personal routines, observing them routines with a diligence bordering on obsessive. Personal grooming is one of the few things left to a man jailed, so they become vastly important. I was very suspicious of their washing service. In my last incarceration the laundry cons had fucked up some nice garments so in my cell I instigated my own methods. Over the protests of my cellmate. First I smashed a disposable razor to expose the blade. Then I used it to cut washing lines from the bedding I was given. Then I took the razor to a bar of soap, shaving thin amounts of soap bar and fiddling them to a powder. From this beginning I washed all my clothes in my sink, a time consuming and laborious process, but time is one thing I had no shortage of. Don’t let anyone tell you that suicide in prison are the fault of the authorities. My washing lines could’ve become a noose with very little modification. I was given enough time alone that I could have ended it very easily. The job of prison is not to prevent suicide, no it’s job is to provide a visible consequence to crime. You might agree with this deterrent or you might see it as a badly misguided attempt for justice, but however you view it, some people cannot remain on the streets. They are just too dangerouse. Prison taught me two things. One the prisoners are kept under a certain amount of consent. Those forced into an unfair regime rebel, and no govener wants to be seen to have lost control of his nick. So they walk a fine line between tolerance and intolerance. Two if you have a problem, prison is not where it’ll be solved. Incarceration only amplifies your problems. And given the amount people offering to sell me guns and drugs when I got out, I can assume jail is nothing but a bandage for societies wounds, and a place where the criminally minded can make some excellent contacts.
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