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

may have saved my life from contracting AIDS a few years later when HIV infection became so prevalent in the early 1980s-especially considering the self-destructive ways I was acting out then with drugs and booze.

Had it not been for those times I shared with Slide Step at Riverside, I don't think I could have survived those first few months at MTU. I searched for what it was that I got from him, but I couldn't put it into words. Yet I knew it was a lot more than what I was getting from Moseley. I couldn't show Moseley what I was feeling inside. To show that, would have invited more attacks-if for nothing more than his passing entertainment. So I pretended nothing bothered me, and in time I got so good at it, I could fool even myself.

Each time I went to the bathroom following sex, I would start bleeding. The doctor at MTU sent me over to the infirmary at Riverside, to see the visiting proctologist. When they brought me over in the van, and we made our way up the winding landscaped drive, past the small watermill and a sunken garden-I thought about asking the hospital staff if they could keep me there. I had filed several grievances, requesting a transfer hack to Riverside, but the response was always the same: Without a disciplinary reason or compelling need for protection, your request is denied. If I were to complain of being raped, I would have to tell them who it was that were raping me.

"I'd kill a fucking snitch," I'd heard said many times. It was one of the few sentiments that crossed all racial lines.

When I got there, someone quickly sent word to Slide Step, who ran right over.

"Arc you all right?" He yelled up from the courtyard, to me at the window. I could see his breath in the winter air.

"Uh-huh," I nodded. Seeing him made me miss the place more. "MTU sucks," I shouted to him, "They won't let me come back."

"That's what I hear, Squeeze."

"I miss it here," I said. And I missed hearing him call me Squeeze, but I couldn't say that out loud. It would have taken too much for me to go there, and I think Slide Step knew this. He felt the same way. And though we were now each in separate prisons, we both still lived in a world that prohibited the expression of feelings.

He looked up and nodded at me. "You just don't know, Squeeze."

We stood there another moment, until the nurse came out and called me into the office. A guard walked up to Slide Step threatening him with a ticket for being out of place. He waved at me and backed away.

Loneliness, which had long been my boyhood friend, was starting to suffocate me.

The proctologist placed a long, metal tube-like instrument on the tray next to the examining table. I asked what he intended to do with it. It looked like a telescope, with an eyepiece on one end and a small light built-in to the tip at the other end.

"It's not any worse than what's been going up there," he half-joked, but when he saw I wasn't smiling, he looked as though he regretted saying it. He cranked a knob at the side of the table and one end folded down and receded into a place to kneel on. "Get up here and bend forward over the table," he said. "This shouldn't hurt much. The position will make it easier for you." He squeezed some K-Y jelly onto his gloved finger and then massaged the opening of my ass. I could feel my body tense up, because I wasn't sure I could trust him, but like everything else, there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it. It felt humiliating, but he was right-it wasn't anything worse than what I had already been through.

"Listen, I understand," he said, when he was finished examining me. "You guys are young and all full of hormones."

I looked down at the floor. My hopes of his helping me were quickly dashed. He was wrong-he didn't understand. How could this man not see what had happened to me?

I had a fissure, a tear on the rectum wall, but it wasn't so serious that I would need stitching or surgery. "I want you to take a sitz bath with Epsom salts, and use this medicine I give you. And try not to irritate any more for the next couple of weeks."

Did he think I had any control over the situation? I just nodded and looked away.

When I got back from Riverside, Moseley wasn't happy with the doctor's orders, but since they were moving me to A-unit to be next to the infirmary, there was nothing he could do about it. Inmates weren't allowed inside the other units and so now maybe, lie wouldn't be able to run my life. I avoided the yard as much as possible. On a good day, Moseley was as thorny as the barbed wire fence that surrounded the prison, but now that he couldn't fuck me, he had become enraged. I was counting the days until he left for the corrections center-a halfway house out in the world. There were twenty-three to go.

"What are you going to do when you get there?" someone asked.

"I'm gonna hang with this boy I used to own," Moseley said.

"A fag?" his friend asked.

"Fags got money too," he said. He didn't care I was standing right there.

When Moseley made me meet him in one of the bathrooms at the school, I received another misconduct for being out of place. So when I went to my hearing for the ticket, the hearing officer asked if I was having problems with Moseley.

"He has a reputation for harassing younger inmates," the hearing officer said. "Do you want to tell me about it?"

I shook any head. This time, I couldn't bear to look at the Inmate Advocate.

He frowned and I knew suddenly that