Velociworld

COSMIC JUSTICE

That Geoghan story got me to thinking about something I did a long time ago that I'd forgotten about, and had never shared, but I'm pretty certain I committed no crimes, so here you go:

In the summer of 1979 I had a couple of months to kill before going to law school, my previous employer's establishment having burned down (this business was next door to The Emerald Room, a strip club, and so we paid some rent and moved into that establishment for a couple of months in order to handle our incoming inventory out of the second floor, but that's another blog for another day).

So I took an eight week gig at the Chatham County Jail as a correctional officer. Figured I'd troll for some future clients. A jailer, man. Fuckin' A. You walk in the doors and some kind of Wyatt Earp Sadism Virus grips you. Total Control. Strange...

So they brought these two guys in to cool their heels for an appeal on their sentences. These fellows had given two girls a ride home after the ZZ Top concert in Savannah in 1974, taken them out to the woods, and raped them and shotgunned them. One of the girls lived, miraculously, and these guys had life sentences, the federal moratorium on the death penalty being in effect at the time.

We kept the inmates segregated by race, for the usual reasons, and at one point there was an influx of white prisoners on federal charges, waiting on appeals. That put the white dorm over 12, the max. Now we could have sent a few guys to the 3rd floor, but that meant paperwork, so a coworker and I took the two murderer/rapists, who had reputations as Bad Asses, and thought they were the cocks of the walk, tough guys, and put them in the black dorm, where there were only 3 guys. But what 3 guys they were. One had killed a man with one blow from a pool cue. He did 1,000 push-ups and 1,000 sit ups every day. Another had flensed a guy into about forty pieces with a switchblade. The third guy had blown away a liquor store owner. They were what is known in Bureau Of Prison Technicalese as Extremely Dangerous Motherfuckers Who Don't Play Well With Others. And yet they were actually model inmates. Never complained, never groused, ate their vegetables and kept their mouths shut. It was a pleasure doing business with them, actually.

So we put these two Reservoir Dogs in with them, for administrative reasons, and the next morning they both had two black eyes, busted lips, blood-encrusted noses, and, if I am not mistaken, seriously ruptured rectums. These fellas had seen the wrong end of a fuckstick for a change. Left them in there for three days, then, when the federal boys got transferred to the third floor, we put them back in the white dorm, where even the jaywalkers and Lysol-huffers mocked them. Our grand experiment in Social Integration was an abject failure. I had so wanted these folks to Just Get Along.

I think about those two boys from time-to-time, and hope they like Reidsville. It's better than The Chair in Jackson, which is what they really deserved.