What Happened In Prison - Part II: The Convict

McNeil Island Corrections Center (MICC) was a “real prison”, compared to the Washington Corrections Center (WCC) that I had been transferred from in 1984. The main cellblocks were five tiers high, with the traditional bars on the front of all the cells. Most of the cells were 15' deep and 20' wide and housed eight men on four sets of bunks, two bunks against opposite walls, and a single toilet and sink against the wet wall at the back of the cell. By this time my hatred for the System had finally begun to take root, and this gave me a little bit of status with the other inmates who called themselves “convicts”. I'd learned to hide my fear behind cold expressions and not let myself be bullied by the more aggressive inmates. Luckily, nobody at MICC knew about how I got raped and “punked out” at WCC in Shelton. I was also finally able to grow a little bit of hair on my face and it seems that went a long way to help deter all but the most hard-core predators. So after a few half-hearted attempts to pressure me by a few of the seasoned predators, I was pretty much left alone. And then something interesting happened. I started to attract the attention of a different kind of inmate. These were older mosre experienced convicts who I guess saw something in my youth and determination to stand up for myself that must have reminded them of themselves when they were younger. Several of these older convicts took me under their wings, which they wouldn't have done if they had not seen me standing up against the pressure. (They were “older” to me but still young themselves, not more than 30 years or so). None of them ever made any sexual advanced toward me, and having their friendship pretty much squelched all the remaining interest I got from would-be attackers. But, more importantly, they taught me how to not just survive, but to thrive in prison. Instead of just waiting for the “System” to assign me a job (like I did at Shelton), they encouraged me to go after a job I wanted. So, after I was assigned to the dish-tank in the kitchen, I went straight to the head-cook and told him I worked as a “cook-five” at Madigan Army Medical Center. And that I wanted to cook instead of wash dishes. (The “cook-five” job was part of the “Youth Summer Employment Program” that I was part of for four months while at the Dyslin's Boy's Ranch, so I did actually know something about institutional cooking). The cook asked me a few questions about safe food handling and how to operate and clean he steam kettles and grills. After I answered his questions he hired me on the spot. That was another “lucky break” for me, because the inmate cooks were all part of the older more experienced convicts in the kitchen who formed a priviledged clique that even the guards gave some respect to (mostly since these older convicts kept things running smoothly, which made the guard's job easier). And the cooks ate well, very well! At MICC there was a butcher's shop attached to the kitchen. And the inmate butchers were part of the cook's clique. So we had steak and eggs for breakfast (not all the time, but often enough), and fed on juicy pork chops while everyone else ate “mexican surprize”. And, of course, we were also “in” with the bakers, so doughnuts and cake were status quo. Actually, I'm exaggerating here a little, but only just a little. We weren't supposed to eat anything except what was on the menu, so we had to be discrete. But I'm not exaggerating at all to tell you that when we walked out of the kitchen with a half dozen “Dagwoods” (delux sandwiches) wrapped in plastic and tied around our waist for our buddies back in the cell blocks, the kitchen guards never shook us down. They knew not to. In the mean time, I had also signed up on the school floor for the Vocational Electronics Program. I had always been fascinated by TV's since I was a kid. Not just the TV programs, but I wanted to know how TV's actually worked. The waiting list for the electronics program was over a year long, but one of my older convict friends suggested that I go out to the electronics shop and talk to the instructor. So I did. Fred Schuneman had built the electronics program himself, almost from scratch. And inmates who signed up for the program usually only did so with little real interest. So when I showed up in his office begging to be moved up the list because I had “always wanted to learn electronics”, he didn't hesitate. I got into the program right away, and did well. I especially liked the hand's on labs, and the self-paced format, which allowed me to zip through the material quickly. Before long, other students started to come to me for help, and I became a sort of unofficial teacher's aide.

So, I was now working in the kitchen and going to school at the same time, which kept me pretty busy. In my spare time, on the weekends, I liked to play volleyball on the yard, and spend time in the library reading books about computers and psychology that I could barely understand. I read about computers for the same reason I was taking electronics lessons. I had seen an Apple IIe computer once, and even though I wasn't even allowed to touch it at the time, I just knew I had to find out how it worked. So I began reading books in the library on computers, and even computer programming, long before the first time I actually touched a computer. I read books on psychology and self-help, because I always wanted to understand my “sexual deviancy” problem. I thought that if I understood how my brain worked then I should be able to “fix it” myself. I definitely wasn't getting any help from the “Correctional System”, and I had decided that “God” wasn't going to do anything for me either. So, my only hope for getting well was to educate myself as much as I could. I took what few psychology and self-help classes were offered by the school, but mostly I familiarized myself with the “psychology and self-help” bookshelf in the library at MICC, as I had once familiarized myself with the “religion and philosophy” bookshelf while I was at WCC. Education was my only hope of ever returning to a “normal” life on the streets, so I took it seriously and read everything I could get my hands on that I thought might help me understand what was “wrong” with me.

Back in the kitchen the institution was starting to cut back on the food budget by reducing how much food inmates could have. One morning as I was frying eggs on the serving line (inmates could have their eggs cooked to order in those days), a guard came and told me to only serve two eggs per inmate. I ignored him and just kept giving the inmates who came through the line as many eggs as they wanted (usually four, sometimes six). After awhile the guard came up and told me again to serve only two eggs per inmate. I said, “Okay”. But when the next inmate asked for four eggs, I gave him four eggs, even while the guard was still standing there. The guard left in a huff. Then, another inmate cook who saw the guard leave in a hurry and heading back toward the cook-supervisor's office, came up to me and asked, “What was that all about?” I told him that the guard had told me to serve only two eggs and I refused to do it. The other inmate cook left, also toward the supervisor's office. A little while later I saw the guard and other inmate cook return to their usual positions on the serving line, which surprized me since I had expected to get pulled from the line and given an infraction for “refusing to obey an order”, or worse. But I finished serving that morning with no further incidents. As it turned out, the other inmate cook also realized that I would probably be infracted and pulled off the line, if not fired. So he went to the supervisor and while the guard was still complaining about my refusal to obey, the other inmate said that if I were pulled from the line none of the other convicts would take my place, and if I were infracted the entire morning crew would quit. So that explained why I didn't get in trouble. Nowadays inmates could never pull a stunt like that. They'd lock down the whole prison first. But back then, the convicts had a lot more power than today. Because I was programming so well, with a full time job and school, and staying out of trouble, I ended up getting moved to “preferred housing”. At first I went to “Two-house”, which was an older cellblock that was only three tiers high and all single man cells. While in Two-house, I began very discretely giving sex pleasure to one two other convicts (I only remember one specifically, but there may have been two). I would come to the TV room during late-night wearing only a long bathrobe, which was commonly done, but I'd only have on a pair of sport-jocky underpants beneath the robe (or sometimes nothing at all), and a pair of thick wool socks that acted like slippers, and made it appear as though I had on more clothes beneath the robe. Then, after I was alone in the TV room, I'd take off my robe and masterbate to fantasies of letting other inmates have sex with me. I usually did this all by myself, but after a while, at least one other inmate noticed that I spent a lot of time in the TV room at night alone, so he started hanging out later than usual to see what would happen, and sure enough, I started letting him watch me masterbate and I even let him touch me while I was naked. But we never had intercourse, not even oral, and I never let him do more than just touch me with his hands while I masterbated. I got off on the power and control I seemed to have over him. We ended up becoming good friends (since we would converse a lot while all this was going on), and he never tried to go any further than I was willing to let him. He respected me, and that was a new experience for me when it came to sex. I should also note that while masterbating by myself in the TV room at nights seems bizarre, it made sense to me because by doing so I could cut off my fantasies of child rape. Masterbating in the TV room was a way for me to get excited without fantasizing about children. The risk of getting caught provided a kind of adrenaline kick, while the environment itself, a place where inmates normally congregated, provided tactile support for my fantasies while at the same time interfering with any kind of fantasies about children. It was like therapy for me, in more ways than one, not to mention, great exercise, since I often got very physical as I acted out my fantasies (e.g. dancing erotically in front of the room while I fantasized a room full of cheering inmates eager to have sex with me). I should also point out that in all my years in prison I never once got into trouble for my sexual behavior. Unlike other queens and homosexuals, who typically had more infractions for having sex than they could count, I never got caught or infracted once. There were a couple of times I came close to getting caught, but I never actually got caught. Nor did I ever contract a single sexually transmitted disease, not even crabs or herpes. I like to think this was because I was always very careful. But, I would not be being completely honest if I did not admit that I had at least some help from lady luck. Though I never needed a lot of luck, mostly because I was never as sexually active with other inmates as I was with myself. I often fantasized about having sex with ten inmates at a time, but I rarely ever had sex with even one (not counting the times I was raped at WCC). Even after I came out on my own as a queen (openly gay) I was almost completely monogamous, almost, but now I'm getting ahead of myself.

When a position came open in the electronics shop for a toolroom clerk, I quit my job in the kitchen and went to work for Fred Schuneman. The pay was the same (19.5 cents per hour, or about 23 dollars per month), and there were far fewer fringe benefits, and somewhat less prestige. The other workers in the electronics shop were mostly regular “inmates”, as opposed to “convicts”, but I didn't mind. The important thing to me was that I could be closer to computers. There were two Apple IIe computers in the shop, and every once and a while I would actually get to use one (usually by volunteering to do some tedious typing or other work). Then one magical day Fred came into the toolroom where I was working and asked me if I wanted a computer to work with. The shop had ended up with a spare Apple IIe from the school that was in the shop for repairs, but it had already been replaced at the school by the time it was fixed. So now the computer was just taking up room in the shop. Fred decided it may as well take up room in the tool room where I could use it. This was the first computer that I had essentially unrestricted access to, and I was more than ready for it. I had been studying not just programming languages, but also computer architecture, digital electronics, and just about anything else I could that had to do with computers. And now I could for the first time start applying what I had been learning. In the first month with the Apple computer I wrote a machine-code program that could beat anyone at a game called Mastermind (a colored peg sequence guessing game). I had assembled the program by hand, without the aid of another program called an assembler. I used the technical specs for the 6502e processor chip, and punched in hexidecimal numbers as the instructions instead of higher level command words. In other words, I did it the old fashioned (and very hard) way and I learned. Then I built a light-pen from spare electronic parts around the shop, including the machine-code “driver” for the pen, which plugged into an empty chip socket on the mother board of the Apple IIe. And soon after that (I had saved my pennies from work and bought a real compiler program called “Merlin”, so now I could start writing more advanced programs). I wrote a graphical compession algorythm that allowed my programs to create animated graphics with the very limited memory of computers in those days (my Apple had only 128 Kilobytes of RAM!). This was years before I ever heard of “gifs” (the popular little animated graphics all over the Internet today), which pretty much do the same thing my program did back then. When the vocational welding instructor saw me demonstrating my animation program he asked if I could use it to create a quiz program for his welding class that would have animated graphics along with each question. I said I could, and I did. I called the program “Quiz Wiz” (and years later I wrote a much more sophisticated Web-based version of Quiz Wiz for another vocational program at Monroe, Washington, that, last I heard, is still in use today.) I even once wrote a firmware hack (a program that takes over for the software that comes built into the computer hardware) that I called “Err-go!” and submitted it for publication to a popular magazine for Apple II computers called “Nibble”. My article was rejected, but I still think it was a great hack (it let Applesolf BASIC programmers write programs that could jump to labelled subroutines instead of just numbered routines, a feature that is standard today). In other words, yes, I had proven myself to be a genuine wiz kid. And, I took on all of the haughty airs that go along with such status. Well, I wasn't that haughty, but haughty enough to demand people to “leave me alone!” while I was working on the computer. I eventually got moved out of the tool room and took over the shops main computer, which was a suped-up Apple II e (with 512 k memory and 40 Mb external hard drive! Woo-hoo!). I became, officially, one of the shop techs (doing actual electronic repair work), but I spent most of my time on the computer.

An important aspect of my obsession with computers is that it provided me with a strong distraction from my sexual exploits. By the time I was turning myself into a computer wiz I had been moved to a housing unit called Summit House. It was the ultimate in “preferred” housing units. I could, and would, sit up in the laundry room at Summit House half the night, writing programs and studying, using the large tables, that were meant for folding clothes on, as my study desk, with books and papers spread out all over. I did not have time for fantasies, or dancing naked in the TV room. Computers seemed to be my salvation. Well, maybe not my “salvation”, but they had a definite impact on my fantasies. I recall that while I was studying computers, I still masterbated frequently.But my fantasies had become almost exclusively adult oriented. I never did “like” fantasizing about children. It was “pleasurable” to do so, but it always made me feel bad. So being able to fantasize about sex with other men was much preferable, and with my new social status as a “wiz kid” I found that I had a place in the adult world after all. For the first time I started feeling like I was an adult, not just a kid anymore. I was 24 years old.

I graduated with honors and special recognition with an AS degree in Electronics Service. At the graduation ceremony I was approached by a woman from Institutional Industries who congratulated me on my honors then offered me a job programming IBM computers in the industries offices. The job would pay five times what I was earning in the Electronics Shop, (over a dollar an hour) and was by far one of the best paying jobs in prison. But, I politely declined her offer, citing loyalty to the Electronics program. I felt I should “give back” what the program had given me.

Suddenly my world got turned upside down, again. Only this time in a good way! The Parole Board had been ordered by the courts to bring the minimum terms of all inmates in their charge, “within range of the SRA” (Sentencing Reform Act – a new set of laws that was supposed to provide predetermined sentences for all crimes and get rid of the Parole Board). Well, as I've mentioned before, my sentence was more than three times over the SRA range, so the Parole Board had to reduce my time. When they did so, they set a new sentence that was still over the SRA range for my crime, but it was under what I had already served! So what I expected to be a routine review hearing turned into a parole hearing! They asked me if I had any parole plans. I said, no. They asked what I would do if I were parole. I said, I didn't know. I simply wasn't prepared. They asked if I was willing to get sex offender treatment on the streets, and I said, of course. And then, right then and there, completely out of the blue, they found me parolable! It was over! I was going home! I'm emotional even now as I write this and remember how happy I was. My mother was still living in Tacoma at the same house I had been arrested at as a 16-year-old boy. I could go live with her, get a job, help her pay the mortage (she was close to loosing the house because of not being able to keep the payments up). And everything would be okay again! I was going home, at long long last! But, that's not what happened, not even close. It was another seven years before I actually got out on parole, and by then my mother had long lost the house, and I had long lost any hope of ever returning to a “normal” life. By the time I finally did get paroled I had only one purpose in life, revenge! It was the only thing I felt that I had to live for after what “they” did to me over the course of the next seven years. They destroyed every last hope I had and threw all my efforts to heal myself right back in my face. But, that's another chapter, that I call “The Transition”.