Prisoners will speak to the importance of having a routine. It helps to have a schedule and stick to it. The years go by fast the more you do things the same way, the same time, same place. Science even supports this, for what that’s worth, as I’ve since seen a talk somebody gave, what was on YouTube—a TED Talk—wherein the guy talking’s a neuroscientist and says the trick to slowing time down so as you’re not depressed by how you’ll be dead in what’ll seem like five minutes is to change shit up as much as possible day to day, like drive a different way to get home every day, wear your watch on the other wrist than you normally do, shit like that, like jerk off with the left hand if you’re used to doing it with your right hand, whatever. You get it.
As a prisoner though, you want to do the opposite, you want to speed up the process of time, unless maybe you got a life sentence, in which case you may as well try and slow it down, that or just kill yourself, depending on how it’s all going, but this is neither here nor there because everybody where we were had an out date, and everybody could appreciate how important a routine was. It was the advice you invariably got from the old hands.
Get a routine, they’d say.
That was what I was aiming to do.
I had absurd goals as far as how many books I was going to read. I worked from 6:45 to 3:30. I meant to read at night in the cell. Then I was thinking how I ought to make sure to get outside sometimes. I’d go to lunch at 10:30, direct from work, and I didn’t have to go back until the work call at 11:45. There was an open move while the chow hall was open for lunch, what meant I could go to the yard then, get some daylight, walk around, listen to music. I wanted to make a point of listening to music too, to learn about classical music, for lack of a better way of putting it. I had got into the violins and pianos and shit while I was in jail, listening to public radio in Chicago and in Youngstown. I’d found it calming, calming in a way that felt like escaping. You could shut out the jail sounds with some violins or a piano—a piano like Chopin or Liszt. Incarceration is loud, in the pods, the housing units, the cellblocks, no matter what you call them, with the doors slamming and all, with the agonies, with the PA announcements. If you could block it out with something else, something that wasn’t meant to make you insane, it was like escaping—or like half escaping, anyways.
The yard was good for it. There was a field with a track going around—not like a proper track, more like a ring of asphalt, meant for walking on. It wasn’t like you could go for a walk the typical way. The fences and razor wire—and, moreover, the guarantee of repercussions—prevented you from walking very far going one way or another.
There were hills beyond the wire though. You could see those. It was an almost absurd amount of scenery for a prison to offer, surprising that the prison didn’t have it all strip-mined on GP. Most times you’ll be at a place and there will be nothing to see, nothing that’s worth looking at, while at this place you had the hills to look at, and there were trees on the hills. One hill even had little houses on it, and you could look at the houses and daydream about living in one of them, all comfortable and not incarcerated and getting high in the morning. Which was a beautiful thing to daydream about.
I wanted to be doing heroin in one of those houses. If I’d got a wish just then, it’d have probably been to live in one of those houses, in the clear, like paid for, and with a magic bag of dope that never ran out and people leaving me the fuck alone, especially the police and judges and people of that nature, hurbs in general, all of those types for real leaving me the fuck alone so I could bang that magic bag of dope in peace, with a rig that didn’t ever get dull, listen to whatever music I wanted to and maybe have a patio I could stand out on and smoke cigarettes and look at the trees, maybe go for a walk when I felt like it, and walk in a straight line for a while without worrying about any fences or razor wire, go up and down those hills and find places where it was nice to be, places nobody else went to or knew of, where shit was simply peaceful.
I had arrived the fall of that year, when the leaves were changing, as they’re wont to do, and the hills with the trees unspeakably beautiful then, to where your heart feigned death just to see them, on a day when as badly as life had gone, you felt you weren’t done with it yet, lifted up by the hope that the death of what was will lend to you, when you’re one who stays in the business of being fucked, a hope that’s more dear and dearer to you with each year that passes, on account of your having felt it less and less as time’s gone on, the more you’ve understood that hope is worthless, like all other forms of waiting, and how before long it will be too late, be it in twenty or forty years or the day after next, not that you’ll know when it is. But even the hopeless have their own consolation, that being that they’re not alone, that it makes no difference, in as much as the hills themselves will be dead and gone in time.
The best days would be overcast. I could go outside on my own time and listen to violins and pianos on the headphones, look at the trees on the hills, where the leaves were dying, where another year I already regretted made its deathbed, and it was the closest I could get to being alone. I wanted to be alone then. Alone was the closest thing of all to free.
I’d got away with this a few days as of that morning. I’d gone out to the yard with some headphones on and walked the track. I didn’t hear a sound except violins or pianos or some near equivalent. I’d have to keep an eye on the gate or else I’d miss the work call, because no way could I have heard it. That on its own was lovely enough. I didn’t like to have to hear the PA. That was the voice of the enemy. In the early morning it’d have been bad too, they’d have had it cranked up, control would. It was the fucked-up captain we had at the time who’d put control up to it. The way they did the PA in the mornings then, there was no being asleep after six. They’d really let us have it with that, blasting us awake. You knew how Noriega had felt. On the yard, that was out of mind though. On the yard, my thoughts were only my own.
Up until Steve caught up with me:
“McFly!”
Jesus, fuck.
“Earth to McFly!”
The downfall of a routine was it could be hijacked. You had to be on the lookout for that. Like I’d been set on having time I was by myself, on the yard after lunch, what I could count on every day, except it wasn’t to be, because Steve walked the track then.
The violins were fucked.
Ditto the pianos.
“It’s been noticed that you eat with the Mexicans,” he said.
“I do.”
“Why do you eat with the Mexicans?”
“I’m cool with a Honduran guy. He’s my neighbor. We both play soccer.”
“I heard you play soccer.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not very good though.”
“I’ve only been playing a few months. This is the first place I’ve ever played on grass. My neighbor, he’s probably the best player on the compound though. He played professionally.”
“Was that in Honduras?”
“Yeah, in Honduras.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“He caught a weed case.”
“How’d he do that if he was playing soccer in Honduras?”
“He wasn’t.”
“He was here.”
“Yeah. He had a thing back in Honduras. He shot a cop.”
“Well, goddamn.”
“He didn’t kill him, I don’t think, just shot him.”
“So he was on the run.”
“No, I don’t think so. I don’t think he got in any trouble. The cop had shot him first. Also, he was a cop too.”
“Who? Your neighbor?”
“Yeah, he was a cop.”
“This was after he was a professional soccer player.”
“Presumably.”
“So a cop shot another cop, who was your neighbor, and then he shot the cop back.”
“Yeah.”
“And he told you he was a cop.”
“He doesn’t give a fuck.”
“Apparently not.”
“He thinks it’s funny. He gets out in, like, spring. He got, like, three fucking years for growing some weed, is all.”
“They’re deporting him?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“He’s not worried about getting shot again when he goes back to Honduras.”
“He doesn’t seem to be.”
“And he told you you could eat with the Mexicans.”
“Dude likes to talk about soccer. We were waiting to go to chow, talking about soccer. We get called to chow. We’re talking about soccer. We go through the line. He’s still talking about soccer. He doesn’t want to stop. He says it’s cool, I can go ahead and eat where he eats at. He’s a nice guy.”
“He’s a nice guy who shoots policemen.”
“The policeman shot him first. And he was also a policeman, so it’s kind of different.”
“He’s an attempted cop killer.”
“I think he shot him in the leg. They both got shot in the leg, I think. Maybe it wasn’t like they were trying to kill each other.”
“Interesting.”
“Yeah, he’s alright.”
“You should eat with the white guys though.”
“I mean, that’s fine. I don’t really do that race shit.”
“And that’s your prerogative. But the problem is you’re in prison, and when you’re in prison and you don’t eat with your own race, people start asking questions. They might think that you’re trying to hide something.”
“I’m not worried about it.”
“Maybe you should be. We’re at a low-security prison. A lot of pedophiles are walking the compound.”
“Yeah, but I’m not a pedophile.”
“So I’ve heard. On the other hand, I don’t know that for a fact.”
“I don’t see what the big deal is.”
“It’s not a big deal. I’m only trying to advise you, because you need advice. If you were at the penitentiary, like at Terre Haute, where I’ve done time, and you tried to pull some shit like that, you’d have two choices. You could either check in or you could get fucked up. You’d probably get stabbed.”
“Seems a bit petty.”
“And you could try and make that point, but in most instances the white guys would have stabbed you up already, they’d have at least split your head open, and the guy who told you that you could eat with the Mexicans would have got stabbed up also, by the Mexicans, because that’s just the way it is.”
“Yeah, but we’re not there.”
“No, we’re not.”
He paused then, maybe thinking about the pen at Terre Haute, where they’d sent him the second time he’d been fucked around by the feds. It’d been his first stop on the second bit. They’d wanted to teach him a lesson, he would say of it later.
“So when your friend gets deported,” he said, “what do you intend to do then?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re tolerated over there because this friend of yours, I guess, is the best soccer player on the compound . . . for now. Then he goes, and all of a sudden you might not be welcome there anymore. This may come as a surprise to you, but you’re a white guy, and there are Mexicans who don’t like white guys, because there’s a lot of history there, CIA shit, coup d’états, shit we’re not even told about. Texas used to belong to Mexico, so did California, not that they were doing much with it at the time.”
“I know all that, man.”
“It might just be that there are some Mexicans who simply don’t want to eat with a white guy because they’ve come down from a high-security place where prison politics is observed, strictly, and you eating with them makes them feel uncomfortable because it goes against procedure. Do you ever ask yourself how you make them feel? Or are you so preoccupied with trying to not be white that you don’t care?”
“. . .”
I got to know about Steve this way, walking the track with him. He had another year left to do before he was eligible for halfway house, and I’d be walking the track with him at lunch, Mondays through Fridays, until then. It was a routine, and a routine wasn’t a thing you could break, because breaking a routine was considered a bad look, what meant you lacked character.
So I got to know about Steve. He had grown up working in the car business. His dad had sold cars, which accounted for that. What was more a mystery was how Steve came to work at the United States Congress when he was only eighteen years old. He worked in the mailroom of the Capitol building. He had been the top man, the top kid, whatever, a rising star, and he still counted hisself as an authority on national politics for this.
In a parallel universe, Steve may have made a career out of it, may have met the right people. Somebody important may have noticed him. In a parallel universe, Steven J. Raines could have been president of the United States, only in this universe it all got fucked up. Steve branched out into the drugs business, selling weed and cocaine to staffers, to House representatives and senators, to their friends and mistresses.
This was how he told it to me.
One day the people came for him—FBI or Secret Service or one of those, I don’t remember this particular detail.
They said, Are you Steven J. Raines?
And he’d known what it was about.
They didn’t prosecute him, oddly enough, didn’t even handcuff him. They just had a word with him was all, asked him where he would like to go. He told them he wanted to go to Miami Beach. They put him on the next train, told him if he showed his face in Washington again, they were going to kill him.
“They were pretty cool guys,” he would say.
That had been his first brush with the law. He landed on his feet almost. There had been an offer from the Air Force Academy.
He was told he could be a navigator.
He was into it.
He didn’t get past the psych exam though.
Probably a credit to him, in light of everything.
Besides, fuck it.
He was still young. He was in his prime. When he walked into a room, women swooned. It was the 1980s. Cheers was the big show on TV, and Steve looked like Ted Danson, aka Sam Malone, who was the main guy.
Steve looked like Ted Danson if Ted Danson earned his living charging people a quarter to punch him in the face. In other words, Steve was even better looking than Ted Danson. So he married well, to an heiress, of all things.
“She was a great beauty,” he would say of her.
“Just before I met her, two men had died because she was that beautiful. The one guy had killed the other guy and then committed suicide after they took him to jail. It was a scandal that rocked the foundations of that community. She was thought of as the most beautiful woman in the area, and there was a lot of money out there, a lot of beautiful women. It was like they bred them like horses. Her dad and I got along great. I went into the family business. I became a gentleman farmer. I had it made. It didn’t last long. She kept trying to change me, bro. And when that didn’t work out like she had thought it would, she grew mean, always reminding me that none of the shit was really mine. I was a kept man. She wanted to put me in my place, or in what she thought my place was. It was all bad. I started drinking too much, doing a little cocaine when I wasn’t supposed to be doing any cocaine, fucking other women. In the end, she divorced me. I wasn’t allowed to talk to her. They wouldn’t let me on the ranch, not even to get my clothes. I left there with the shirt on my back. I nearly froze to death in a ditch, like a goddamned dog. It’s a miracle I was able to find my way back to Miami Beach. I really should be dead, but I had seen the writing on the wall, saw the way she was acting, and I knew I was living on borrowed time. I’m a lot of things, but I’m not stupid. By then I had already fucked one of her relatives. So I started putting some money away, a little here, a little there, so that way when the hammer came down, I knew I wasn’t going to starve, at least not right away.”
He received no settlement:
“I didn’t ask for alimony. I didn’t want the money. The only thing that I wanted was my self-respect back.”
But in Steve’s case, I will say, I think it was the car business that pushed him over the edge.
After his marriage fucked up, Steve got back into the car business, and on the surface it may have seemed like the right move, he may have seemed to be doing alright, to have reasons to be optimistic. It got to be the 1990s, a prosperous time in America. Nobody really knew then, and Steve was selling cars, going to work on time, doing a fine job of it.
Steve knew the car business.
He even liked it, he said.
Selling cars was no joke though.
He told me all about it:
“I don’t care if you’re an old widow walking onto the lot with your grandchildren. I’m gonna rip your head off and shit down your neck.”
“Christ, man.”
“You can’t have a conscience in the car business. Not in Miami, you can’t.”
So as you see, perhaps it was the iniquities of the car business, the miserable capitalism, what pushed him over the edge. Or perhaps it was the cocaine, because he was on cocaine. It could have been the sun. We’ll never actually know. When we talk about motives, the best we can do is theories. What’s facts is Steve robbed a couple banks and got caught and he didn’t really try not to.
The way he’d gone about it, he brought an unloaded shotgun, walked into a place, took a little money, and drove away. Then he stopped in a bar to get a drink.
I hope I’m doing it justice. Maybe Paul Harvey told it better. Work with me though.
Picture this guy Steve, a car salesman. He’s wearing slacks probably, and a golf-shirt-looking thing. His car’s probably not a piece of shit because he sells cars. And he’s cruising around, looking like Sam Malone had a baby with a Frankenstein monster.
A handsome fucker.
What does he do?
Well, like I already said, he needed a drink. He’s just held up a bank, so money’s not a problem. He’d like to go to a nice place maybe, the type of place a businessman would go. He is like a businessman, after all.
And he does.
He leaves the shotgun in the car, not that it especially matters, seeing as it’s unloaded. It’s just that Steve doesn’t want to be rude. This is a nice bar, and you can’t just do whatever you want in nice places. That isn’t how it works. Steve knows this.
He does bring the money in with him.
Some of it, at least.
The bar is empty, or nearly empty.
Steve sits at a table. It’s the kind of bar where somebody will come to the table and take your order. It’s probably a restaurant. That’s unimportant. Steve doesn’t want food, because he’s coked up. It’s daylight out, but he’s on some rock-and-roll shit. He’s feeling good. He’s got confidence, a certain confidence: that of a man in control of his own destiny, in Miami Beach.
He’s sitting in the bar area of the establishment, so it’s the bartender who sees him. The bartender will remember him because Steve is very high on cocaine and he probably still looks a lot like Sam Malone at this point in his life and Cheers is still fresh on everybody’s mind—no doubt on a bartender’s mind. Basically the zeitgeist has walked into the bar, and he’s got money to burn. Like all habitual cocaine users, Steve likes to see a little money get blown now and then. Yet you would think that since it’s Miami and since it’s the ’90s, a coke user wouldn’t raise a bartender’s suspicion, not even at a nice place like this. Post–Miami Vice, people are expecting this sort of thing, one imagines.
The same goes for people fucking off a lot of money.
Steve gets his drink. He gets another. Let’s say he got some food too. He doesn’t eat it, just orders it and looks at it and maybe has a few bites. The TV’s on. It’s showing The Price Is Right. Bob Barker’s up there, going beauties this beauties that. Salt-of-the-earth type people are abasing themselves, one after another, all for dryers and Jet Skis, all to be seen for once, to be near to Bob Barker. It doesn’t get more famous than Bob Barker right now. The man is an American institution. The man is bigger than Pat Sajak and Vanna White put together. He’s bigger than the pope. He’s untouchable, and everybody knows what he does. He gets away with it, running wide-open. Nobody can touch him.
Steve doesn’t even fuck with TV. He doesn’t notice. Steve was in Congress. Steve was a gentleman farmer. Steve was married to a beautiful woman. Steve’s good at selling cars. Steve just robbed a bank. Steve’s getting bored.
This is when the shit gets interesting.
Steve pays his tab or whatever, leaves a big tip, a hundred-dollar tip. One bill, a hundred. Leaves it on the table like it isn’t a big deal. It’s the 1990s and a hundred dollars is not a fucking joke. He leaves it on the table though, and he’s on his way.
Where does he go?
He robs another bank.
He didn’t, you say.
But you bet your ass he did.
Thing is, he didn’t just do it right away. He had to drive there. He had to decide that he really wanted to do it. In the meantime, the Showcase Showdown is over, The Price Is Right goes off.
What comes on?
The local news.
What’s the local news talking about?
A bank robbery.
Indeed.
Let’s go.
What happens next?
Steve goes back to the same bar. Does he have a funny feeling? Is the staff acting differently toward him? Maybe. The bartender definitely saw him on the news. The bartender already recognized him. I don’t know if Steve wore a mask, but I doubt it. Steve isn’t the type to try and get away with some shit. That’s how he is.
The bartender’s already phoned the police. The bartender phoned the police before Steve came back. The bartender told the police that the guy was just in the bar, spending money like there were no tomorrow, left a big tip, a hundred-dollar bill on a hundred-dollar tab, ordered shrimp cocktail, the catch of the day, barely touched it, probably on drugs.
So what does the bartender do now?
Does the bartender warn Steve off? Does the bartender say, Steve, you probably ought to scram, the law’s about to come in here, looking for you?
Fuck no. The bartender gets on the phone again.
Just because somebody’s a bartender doesn’t mean shit’s cool. Tons of bartenders don’t even drink alcohol. And that isn’t to say one has to drink alcohol to be cool. All it means is, if you think a bartender who doesn’t drink won’t sell you out in a second, then you’re a babe in these woods.
Bartender calls 9-1-1 this time.
“He’s here,” says the bartender.
“Who’s here?”
“The bank robber from TV.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m a hundred percent sure it’s him.”
Thanks for the tip.
One day there’s sympathy for a criminal, and the next day they want you dead. It all depends what movies just came out and whether or not there’s a war on. That’s just how it goes when you’ve got so many who haven’t been anywhere. It’s those ones and the ones who forget where they’ve been. They’re the ones you have to watch out for. You can’t trust anybody who hasn’t been fucked or doesn’t remember it. People are dangerous when they don’t know what kind of time they’re on. It doesn’t make them bad people. Show me a hypocrite and I’ll show you somebody who’s trying. They can bay for that blood all day. What’s that to the likes of us, who’ve already been down? Why explain? There’s no saying what makes us go wrong. We just do. Then it’s wreckage. Explaining is easy because it’s meaningless. We all lie, and we lie to ourselves. If we didn’t lie, we couldn’t live like this. We have to live, though. Sooner or later, everybody’s an asshole. 
Nico Walker is the formerly incarcerated author of the novel Cherry (Knopf, 2018). Walker was released from custody in April 2020 and lives in the Northern District of Mississippi, where he is fulfilling a five-year period of federal supervision. His work has been featured in Esquire, Interview Magazine, New York Magazine, GQ, and Office Magazine. He is married to the poet Rachel Rabbit White.
Illustration: Michael Carney
