Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in Man's Prison by T. Parsell (ready to read books TXT) 📕

During the movies you could usually see someone giving his man head, especially if they had been separated into different housing units. They would have to find some other places to hook up, and the movies were dark and convenient.

Occasionally, some boy would end up blowing several guys in a row. It was done as punishment if someone was caught cheating; or it could be his man was just sharing him; or perhaps he was being made to hustle by turning tricks at $5 a pop. It was hard to focus on the movie when you could hear the heavy breathing and slurping behind you.

I looked up at Slide Step and curled my face. "I'd never do that."

"You better not." He grinned.

I hit his arm.

Slide Step looked over his shoulder at Bottoms, who was bobbing his way down the line. "That boy's been banged more times than an old screen door," he said.

"In a wind storm," someone next to us added.

Slide Step said it was the usually the bucket heads that did that sort of thing, meaning the punks and ugly boys or the nasty queens.

I felt sorry for Bottoms.

"In Jackson," Slide Step said. "They hooked up in church."

"In church?" I couldn't imagine anything more sacrilegious.

"Square business. They'd meet up in the balcony." Slide Step smiled and turned to watch the movie.

The film that night was The Mack, starring Max Julien and Richard Pryor. It was about an ex-con named Goldie, who, in an early scene, told his mother he had to go out and fight The Man the only way he knew how. So he became a Mack, a big city pimp, complete with a hat and velvet cape. He drove a Cadillac and carried a gold-tipped cane.

You could always tell what the inmates thought of a movie because they talked throughout it. They would yell up at the screen, as if they were home in their own living rooms. "Kill that peckerwood," someone screamed, or if they didn't like a character-"Aw, motherfucker! You ain't shit."

Entertainment was important to convicts. It broke up the monotony of being confined, but if it wasn't happening, they were quick to make it up on their own. Like when a character came on the screen with an obvious flaw that was similar to one of the inmates. Someone would yell, "Look at Dexter up there, y'all, with his big old nasty fangs."

In The Mack, when Goldie and his brother killed two white cops who earlier had killed their mother, the auditorium went crazy. Mothers were sacred to inmates so it was like lighting had hit one of the gun towers. "Man, don't nobody want to fuck with a motherfucker's momma," someone in the front of the auditorium said.

For the most part, the guards left us alone. I think they understood that movies not only killed time, but they helped us burn off some of our hostilities.

Slide Step said The Mack showed what it was really like on the street. I was fascinated by the whole concept. Why did a girl need a pimp anyway, and how did they get her to have sex and turn over all her money? Slide Step pointed out Silk Daddy to me, a convict who was serving time for pandering (the legal name for pimping).

Silk Daddy, at forty, was older than most of the others there. His welltrimmed mustache was sprinkled with a few gray hairs. He had dark brown skin that glistened and a short-length afro that was perfectly shaped by the pick he kept in his front shirt pocket. I was standing maybe three feet away, but I could still smell the scent of cocoa butter.

"How do you get them to do it?" I asked.

"Well now," he said, "let's kick it around and see." He took a Kool cigarette from his pack by neatly unfolding the silver tabs and then replacing the foil so that it looked like it wasn't opened. "But before I answer that for you, let me ask you a few things first." He took out a lighter and lit the cigarette. "You like to have sex, don't you?"

At that point, no, I didn't, but he didn't give me a chance to answer.

"Of course you do, Baby, everybody do." He blew smoke in my direction. "It's one of the most enjoyable things we Homo sapiens like to do."

I smiled, because I knew what the word meant, but wondered if he had a double meaning in mind.

"And," he said, pausing to take another drag from his cigarette. "It's one of the few things The Man can't stop us from doing. Even in here. So what's the one commodity you can give up, but you still gets to keep?"

He stared at me with a dazzle in his eyes, as if he were getting high on the sound of his own words. "Sex," he said. "Now ain't that a wonderful thing? It's the only thing in the world you can sell and still maintain ownership of. Can you dig what I'm sayin'? You're doing it any way. So it's like getting paid for what you like to do. So you get to give it up, you get to keep it, you enjoy doing it-no, make that love doing it-and you get paid for it all at the sane time. Now what could be more beautiful than that?"

Wow, I thought, it did make a lot of sense.

"Thanks, Silk Daddy."

"All right now," he chuckled. "Be sure to tell Slide Step I said hello."

As I ran down the stairs to catch up with Slide Step, Silk Daddy's "girls" were standing at the bottom of the landing. They were two black queens, Pootie and Miss Pepper, and they were made up as usual with red-colored lips and shirts tied at the mid-drift. Pootie had long braded hair and Miss Pepper's, which was shorter, looked nappy and tussled. It was probably from all the fun they were having getting paid during the film.