JAILING: The Prison Memoirs of 00040 aka Clifford Irving by Irving Clifford

Author:Irving, Clifford [Irving, Clifford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs, Specific Groups, Crime & Criminals, True Accounts, True Crime, Criminals
Amazon: B006PWHDW0
Barnesnoble: B006PWHDW0
Publisher: Clifford Irving
Published: 2012-02-28T07:00:00+00:00

March 28

Here at Danbury they have euphemistic names for the dormitories and cell blocks. They’re called Hartford House, Fairfield Hall, Boston, Maine, etc. For two weeks I was in Massachusetts, in an A & O (Admission & Orientation) group. That was relatively uncrowded. A week ago I was moved to Providence House, an upstairs dorm with 76 howling lunatics, or so it seems. At night the radios are tuned to three or four different stations throughout the dorm, resulting in cacophony. The men argue constantly over what they’ll watch on TV in the evening. The only free bed was in that part of the dorm called the ghetto — all black, but for me. That’s okay. After six months at Allenwood I speak the language. Man, motherfucker, faggot.

My first temporary job here was cleaning the toilets. That was okay, too. No problem getting your hands dirty as long as you know where to find a bar of soap and hot water. Now I’m on the construction gang. Our first job was building an inside wall in the warehouse. And that was okay, too. We took turns laying bricks while the others bullshitted and smoked a joint and kept an eye out for the hack, who stayed in his little office with a pint of Southern Comfort. Then we went outside into the yard to build a wooden platform and corrugated metal roof for an outdoor weightlifting area. That was fine — the weather was cold but the work kept us warm.

Today, however, we were sent outside the walls to a nearby hillside area known as Hackville, where the hacks and prison officials have their houses. All of us had been classified minimum security. No supervision. We had to rake last autumn’s leaves. I didn’t like that at all. We had too much liberty and the leaves gave me an awful sense of time passing and time still to pass. The leaves were ochre and dark red, still crisp underfoot. The earth smelled of spring. The sky was such a clear bright blue that it hurt your eyes, and I didn’t have sunglasses. A car drove by with a blonde girl behind the wheel. The wife of the A.W. — the Associate Warden, who really runs the joint — stepped out on her back porch and offered us coffee and home-made chocolate chip cookies, which we accepted. We sat on the porch with her for a while. She was formally friendly, about thirty five and not bad looking, but sexual thoughts are cramped deep, deep inside me in a dungeon of their own. Light hurts their eyes, too, so to speak.

I didn’t like any of this excursion. It was too human, too normal, and in the joint you can’t afford to nurture the illusion that life is either one of those things. I’m applying for a transfer to a job that will keep me penned up.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.