Chain Gang 3
Part 2
The First Day
When you're a slave, you get to thinking. There's a lot of time for thinking in a place like that penitentiary. I was no great shakes at learning - lazy and a bum rather than stupid, I'd say now. But in there you get to thinking all kinds of things. Oh, there are the normal things - like when am I gonna be fed and will it be, like, worth eating? Let me tell you that sure doesn't go a long way in a place like that. You need more to fill your time than the thoughts of a dumb animal. That's giving in to them. That's playing their game. There's no books and sure as hell no TV - nothing to educate you except what you make of your situation. I guess I'm apologizing in advance for giving you some of the thinking I did and I'm not claiming it's profound or anything.
Like this whole thing with the chains, welded on and all. They're there, they're like that, to fuck with your mind. If you were tied up, say, rather than in chains then I think you'd waste a lot of time thinking about escape - because you know ropes can be cut. All right, you may not have a knife but then you might be foolish enough to keep your hopes alive by thinking of a bit of broken glass, or a jagged beer can or a broken beer bottle. But what way is there out of chains and metal? They know that. It fucks your mind because you soon know there's no way out., know it deep inside yourself. The reason chains have always been used to bind slaves and animals is to keep them in their place and that place is pretty damn low so that a slave begins to think he's an animal and not a man. Then, they keep you in A place, a physical space and you soon know you're not going far with the weight of them, and the restricted length of them.
Remember the other 'slaves' had all shuffled out, linked to one another? Reminded of their status with every step. Leaving me on my ownsome. And when you're not stepping out on a work detail but chained to a wall then you are going nowhere, and man I mean nowhere. You're kept on too short a chain to do more than shift around a bit now and again to stop cramp setting in. Yep, they know that. And that's all they care about. A guard can easily forget all about the prisoners under his charge when they're not in front of his eyes. You can't misbehave, you can't do anything. But sit there and think. And they sure as hell don't care where your mind takes off - lucky for you if it does; lucky for you if you have a few pleasant memories to cling to for survival.
Some slaves couldn't take it. The States raise us in a culture of instant gratification. We got money, we gotta have something to spend it on. So we're assailed on all sides with glittering imagery. They set out to seduce us and they do that by throwing all this crap at us. Buy this! And this! And this! Pleasure is bought and our souls lose out. So when a slave finds himself chained by the neck to a wall what distractions are there in his surroundings? What when he is in one of the punishment cells with days on end with so little to look at? What when, worst of all, he is in the Pit and he can see nothing at all? Then you need inner resources and we're not brought up with much in the way of those. You panic, first off, you fight the chains that enslave you. Then you calm down a little, maybe whimpering to yourself a bit, grateful just to hear a human sound, even if it is being drawn from you in your misery and pain. The lucky ones have something inside them, something to fall back on, to help them through the darkness of their souls.
But it takes a while for the mind even to try to escape because at first you don't realise that where you go in your mind is the only freedom you're gonna know. At first all I could do was stare at the chains in disbelief. And there's a reality about chains and manacles and metal collars that you can't get away from. They don't give a bit, there's no subtle moulding to the body going to take place, no matter how long they're welded on for. So you shift and the metal bites. Before he left me, that fat bastard Bob had switched the chain that attached me to the wall from a piece over a metre long - giving me the opportunity to lie down and turn around a bit during the uneasy sleep I'd managed from sheer exhaustion - to something no longer than the distance from wrist to elbow.
My bare feet touched the rough wall behind me. I was on my knees, facing the door of the cell. Already they hurt and strangely enough it was the straw I had slept on which had caused the problem. That chain held me in that position. I couldn't lie down; I couldn't kneel any lower. I was more or less fixed there. When the chain had been attached to my collar, I had been kneeling on the straw. But it was unevenly scattered so that it bunched and sloped and rolled. That meant one knee was higher than the other, not much but enough to concern me - should I try to move about a bit and even it up? But if I did, what if I were to fall? So all my thoughts at that stage were directed to my worry of strangling myself. So much so that I did try to spread the straw about a bit, the lovely outcome of my efforts being that I ended up more or less kneeling on the hard, cold, stone floor. And during that first, endless day, now and again I did doze off for a few seconds until my nodding head would stretch that chain to its limits and I'd be as sharply wakened as I might have been by a kick to my body.
I passed time by worrying all the goddman time. What if cramps set in? What if I fell asleep? Would I strangle myself? Would my wrists and ankles and neck toughen up so that the angry red sores caused by the metal would fade and cease to irritate? I was so concerned with all the little details of my bondage that I forgot why I hadn't been linked up to the others and marched outside for the 'hard labour' part of my sentence.
Until a guard I hadn't yet seen entered the room. I don't think he was very tall, below average I'd say but you don't get a full sense of how tall someone is when you are held at that level. I'd say the top of my head came up to his waist. But what he may have lacked in height he made up for in bulk. Broad shouldered, stocky, muscular - these may have made him appear smaller, as did the peaked cap pulled almost ludicrously low over his eyes. It was one of those where the peak descends really in a straight line down the forehead, forcing the wearer to raise his head to see where he is going. And increasing the sense of arrogance, somehow. The uniform's guaranteed to send a shiver down your spine - black, with gleaming, high boots, almost Nazi. They know what it looks like and the effect it's going to have on a slave.
This duly had its effect on me in the seconds that my eyes registered his arrival. I knew better than to stare at him. I hadn't been told that this was a general rule but, believe me, this was one of those situations where you just know that my eyes meeting his would lead to punishment, and with me on so short a chain I didn't think I'd come out of any encounter any too well.
I shifted uneasily, now reminded of what I was there for. This man exuded brutality in every step, in every movement and I braced thinking that the nailed boots which now rang on the stone floor would probably soon be kicking me.
I was trembling, so afraid of what might be about to happen to me, ready to cry and scream and plead and shed any dignity I might have had left. He was whistling softly - some awful redneck country number, the kind that's always about heartbreak in lovin' families - and this frightened me more. I just knew that, for a man like that, knocking a chained slave about would be part of his day's pleasure. He'd feel unfulfilled without it. The type that just exists to dominate and punish.
I waited for blows - they didn't come. I was looking at the ground but he was so close to me I could see his spades of hands fumbling with the buttons of his fly and pulling out his dick. I could smell the damn thing, cheesy and unclean. I waited for the punch that would make me look up, waited for the hand forcing my mouth open - for what? To suck his cock? Or just to drink his piss? It didn't happen. He didn't touch me, didn't spit in my mouth, didn't lay a finger on me. This guy simply kept on whistling and pissed over my head, didn't bother aiming for my mouth. I had been pissed on by fat Bob. This was no worse. As I had received no order I did nothing. I didn't open my mouth like I had to with Bob. Warm, acrid piss gushed over me as I kneeled with bowed head in front of him.
He left. I started to laugh, at first a snigger, then chuckling, then great waves of laughter welled up from inside me and came pouring out - mad, hysterical laughter. I thought it was just relief at not having been punished in any way, not having been beaten as I had been last night or kicked as I had been that morning. But as my laughter changed to sobs I knew why hysteria had not been far from the surface. I suddenly knew why I felt sick to my stomach. It wasn't the piss, the smell of it, the sight of it streaming down my face and chest.
It was as if I wasn't there, didn't exist. But that was not quite true either - I knew that I was there and he knew it too, he had walked directly to me. But it meant nothing to him. I wasn't a man, a thinking, rational creature. I wasn't even as high in the scale as an animal. I was a thing, inanimate, an object, a receptacle, a urinal.
That was my lowest point in all the time I spent there. Oh, I would face what normal people would think was worse than this. I would feel steelcapped boots kicking me, I would feel the lash on my back, the lash on my chest and, worst of all, the lash on my groin. But I learned to get through these things, just like I found a way through the punishment cells and the Pit, too. I found a space in myself where I could float away and believe it wasn't happening to me but to someone else. Yes, part of me even came to love the physical punishment. This was easier because I knew that in some way I was connected to the man who was whipping me - I could feel him through the whip and so I knew he existed and he knew I did. But this guard who had just pissed on me with such indifference took me to despair because he took away all sense of my humanity. But by the end of the day I knew I was lucky.
I was lucky - because it was Independence Day and most of the guards were on holiday. So it was a quiet day where I had only the occasional toilet duty to take care of and could be left with my mind. And my mind helped me to come to terms with the desperate straits I found myself in, helped me plan a way forward, a way to deal with all the abuse and degradation that would continue to be heaped on me.
I was lucky - because that mad old judge who had sentenced me to this hell hole less than twenty-four hours previously did exactly the same to two punk kids - brothers - who were sent by God to replace me in this toilet duty and the first of them did so the following morning.
I was lucky - to reach the lowest point of my experience on my very first day! I was around to see others going round for days, weeks, in some cases months, bewildered by what was happening to them. Unable to comprehend that they mattered as much as flies on shit. In despair for all that time, crying themselves to sleep, always attracting attention to themselves with their sniveling and whining - just like I had been a day before. And for some who couldn't settle to it even after months, just couldn't adapt to their situation, well then the only way out was madness.
But I was different from those poor slaves. I was going to stay out of trouble as much as possible, I'd go along with anything asked of me, no matter how low and vile and degraded because I was going to survive.
To be continued...