Cellmates (standard:adventure, 3682 words)
Author: bonetone1957	Added: Apr 22 2003	Views/Reads: 3555/2340	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A rookie inmate makes a deal to survive in the penitentiary

CELLMATES Even at two in the morning the cellblock in a maximum security
penitentiary was never completely devoid of noise. The main lights were 
extinguished, the televisions and radios shut off, and the order for 
silence about the cellblock has been blared over the intercom. But it 
was never completely silent. You could still hear the graveyard shift 
guard with his radio turned down low as he paced up and down the row, 
the toilets flushing, tormented men crying out in their sleep, jacking 
off, coughing, sneezing, farting, sobbing. Then there was the 
occasional cry of pain and anguish as an inmate decided to take himself 
out by slashing his wrists with a homemade shank but then couldn't 
handle the pain of what he had just done to himself or the fear of what 
was yet to come. Some nights, like tonight, you heard an inmate, almost 
always a fish, scream out “Mommy.” For some reason when a fish, fresh 
from the street, got turned out for the first time, he often called out 
for his “Mommy.” Thad Jensen had heard grown men scream that out 
probably close to a hundred times since he had been locked down for his 
fifteen years. Fifteen years today since it was past midnight already. 
Today was the day. He be getting his walking papers in about a dozen 
hours. No parole guidelines for him to follow, he had done his whole 
bit. From an early age the locals always said that he was a bully. A 
bad kid. A no good punk destined to go nowhere but jail or the 
cemetery. The locals had been right. He was just seventeen years old 
the night he committed the crime that got him sent up. Already drunk 
one Friday night on the old man‘s vodka, he had walked into a 
convenience store and tried to waltz out with a twelve pack of beer. 
The clerk, a pensioner in his sixties, had chased Thad into the parking 
lot, where Thad who was big for his age, had broken the clerk's nose 
and jaw with a series of brutal punches. After a witness called in the 
crime, a high speed chase ensued which ended with Thad face down on the 
pavement and his hands cuffed behind him, his parent's car totaled 
against a telephone pole. He was tried as an adult and was given a 
sentence of fifteen years but would be eligible for parole in four if 
he behaved while serving his sentence. He had no reaction to the 
sentence. He showed no remorse. And he sure as shit didn't behave while 
serving his sentence. Because of his age he was sent to the St. Cloud 
Reformatory where he learned that since he was white he was now a 
minority . He was quickly recruited by an Aryan prison gang, and 
because of his size, which would become greatly enhanced by hours spent 
on the weight pile, he became a valuable enforcer. Young naïve Thad 
bought the wannabe Nazi's bullshit rhetoric hook, line, and sinker, and 
soon he was sporting a swastika on his chest and carrying around a 
bootleg copy of Mein Kampf, even though he didn't understand a fucking 
word of it. It didn't take him long before he began to build a thick 
jacket with the prison administration. He was written up numerous times 
for assault, possession of narcotics and weapons, disrespect to 
officers, and dozens of other infractions. The day he reached his 
twenty first birthday, rather than being released on parole, he was 
shackled and transferred to the penitentiary at Stillwater where he was 
greeted with open arms by his fellow comrades. Stillwater Penitentiary 
was the turf of the white prison gangs. Thad was finally at home. And 
that's where twelve years later Thad Jensen found himself. On his final 
night in the joint he laid in his bunk and mentally reviewed his 
personal resume. He had survived dozens of prison gang wars and 
uprisings. He had been stabbed. He had been shot (barely grazed but 
still shot) by a tower guard during a riot. He had been gassed and 
maced. He had spent months in the hole without letting the assholes 
break him. He was a high ranking lieutenant with the Aryans. And now he 
had fulfilled the terms of his sentence without the benefit of parole. 
He would walk out the gates a free man. He was also thirty-three years 
old, had no home to go to, no family to speak of since they had all 
disowned him over the years, had the education of a mentally challenged 
fifth grader, and no idea what  life outside these walls held for him. 
His counselor had managed to find him a room at a shelter upon his 
release along with a job at a aluminum can recycling plant. The job 
started at minimum wage. Thad heard his cellmate stir in the bunk 
underneath him. “Sounds like someone is getting it tonight.” “Yea, it's 
Tuesday. Fresh meat always gets brought in on Tuesdays.” “I didn't. 
They brought me in on a weekend.” replied his cellmate. “Well, you're a 
whole different fucking matter all together. You're one of those high 
profile cases.” His cellmate was indeed high profile and more. He 
possessed what inmates called a “freak” jacket. Timothy Logan had been 
a twenty-six year old mortuary sciences student who had been picked up 
for raping and killing a sixteen year old girl who was on her way home 
from a high school basketball game. What the police found when they 
tossed his apartment brought him semi-national attention. Timothy had 


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