Process: An Excerpt
Steven R. Perez
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2025 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Nonfiction
Foros wakes me up at 9:36 a.m. asking about a K2 stick. He wants to know if he finished it last night.
"I don't know," I say, "I don't think so."
I go back to sleep and wake up at 12:16 in the afternoon. I walk to the cell door barefooted to look out the window and into the dayroom. I get to the front of the toilet, and the bottom of my foot sticks to a blob of eight-hour-old hooch on the concrete. I grab my house shoes from under my bunk, a brand new pair of black rubber imitation Crocs, and slide my feet into them. The smell of rotten beer and burnt tea leaves laced with K2 lingers in the cell. I can't stop thinking about how much I hate this place.
I hang my sheet up from wall to wall and take a sit down on the stainless steel toilet. The sheet serves as a curtain between me, sitting on the toilet, and Foros, lying on the top bunk. While sitting on the toilet relieving myself, I see, on the floor, next to Foros's red and black chessboard, half a K2 stick, burnt on one end.
A K2 stick is a sixteenth of an inch strip of paper soaked in K2 and rolled into a pinner joint of shredded-up tea leaves no fatter than the lead of a No. 2 pencil. K2, also called toonchee, or toon, is a blend of synthetic cannabinoids sprayed onto and soaked into sheets of paper. Each page goes for a grand. A cutout, from the page, the size of a driver's license, goes for a hundred fifty. A stick goes for two dollars.
The problem is that inmates are dropping dead left and right from K2 overdoses. Smokers never really know what they're smoking. And when they see another inmate on the floor in the fetal position having a seizure from a toon attack, they say, "I need some of that shit!"
According to a newsletter I read one time from the Texas Inmate Families Association, the chemicals found in K2 are not really cannabinoids. They're called "cannabinoids" because they affect the same brain cell receptors as delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient in marijuana. But K2 is not at all like marijuana. K2 can be made with nearly 100 different chemicals, and the amount and type of chemicals used vary widely from batch to batch. Some inmates say that PCP, fentanyl, horse tranquilizer, rat poison, roach poison, and even brake fluid are among the chemicals mixed into K2.
So I'm sitting on the toilet looking at the roach next to the chessboard, and thinking, Man we're outta there if them laws come in here for a cell search and find that roach. Foros and I will be separated and moved to a disciplinary building for (at least) a year and a half. No hot meals. No commissary. No contact visits. No writing classes. I'll be locked in a cell 24/7 babysitting another toon head because this penitentiary is infested with that shit. On top of that, I could lose my hardship transfer, which was a privileged move to this prison eighty-five miles from my home town, Corpus Christi, to be close to my family, and get shipped upstate to a prison 500-900 miles away from home.
I think about it no more and reach down and over with my naked ass cheeks glued to the stainless steel toilet. I grab the K2 roach, drop it between my legs, through the crotch, and into the toilet. I reach back with my left hand, push the button, and flush it down the toilet.
#
Six officers crowd around Big Boy and Calbo's cell door banging on it.
"Open the fuckin' door!" they shout over and over again.
Foros says from the top bunk, "They're comin' down on Big Boy."
It's just past one in the morning. The chaos wakes me up from a deep sleep.
I open my eyes, stand up, and walk to the door. I look down to Two Row and see officers swarming around Big Boy's door. Big Boy has the door locked shut with a rigged-up lock. But after a minute or so, the officers pry it open with crowbars and run in on him and his celly.
Big Boy comes out first, his wrists cuffed behind his back. Then Calbo. Big Boy has no shirt on. He's got a fresh razor-fade haircut, his hair combed to the side, with a razor-cut part. His eyebrows furrowed to a straight line, wrinkles above the bridge of his nose, his lips parallel with his eyebrows. He's turning his head side to side. They both have their glasses on.
An hour later, the officers bring Calbo back and put him in the cell. I don't know what happened to Big Boy. I don't know what he did or what they think he did. But whatever they're accusing him of has to be serious. They're probably locking him up in 12 Building right now in a one-man cell where the rats, roaches, and ants crawl or skitter over you while you sleep and Covid-19 lingers in the air.
#
I lie in my bunk in the dark staring out the window at the puddles of water on the rec yard. The raindrops. The cool breeze blowing through the blue iron grating on the cell windows. The mist floating to my bunk. The smell of raindrops hitting the dirt.
The raindrops in the water puddles remind me of home. The street lights shining off the water on the streets. The sound of rain hitting the street. I remember making love to a seventeen-year-old girl named Myra when I was sixteen, in the pouring rain. The picnic table had a roof that kept us from getting soaked. Trees all around us. A huge pond for fishing. A sidewalk around the pond. Turtles and ducks. Lots of ducks walking around us. Raindrops in the dark.
#
The momma kingbird we've been watching for the last three days finishes building her nest on top of the razor wire fence outside our cell window. The nest is so perfectly built. A round hole in a bed of twigs, cotton, and thread. She flops around inside the nest digging the hole deeper and deeper. Working it. Making it just right. Preparing to lay her eggs.
#
A Mexican-Indian officer with an aqua-colored Covid mask lets us out for showers one cell at a time.
"It's twelve thirty-five," he says, "you got till twelve forty-two."
On the way back to the cell from the shower, I stop at Rojas and Tee's cell. Rojas lends me his screwdriver, a steel clip from a free world writing pen. I need it to put TNT back on my radio. He tells me how to open up my radio and turn a certain screw on the tuner box just to the right. It works. I have TNT again. We rig our dial radios to catch TV stations. It's an old penitentiary trick that goes back before my time. Probably some electronics guru introduced it to someone, and it spread throughout the system.
The TVs are on in the dayroom. We watch them through the windows in the cell door. The sports TV is straight ahead. The movie TV is so far to the right of our cell that we can hardly see it. But if we turn our head and put our cheek on the door, from a certain angle, through the iron grating in our cell door windows, we can see the TV.
Foros ties his plastic mirror to the outside of the window grating on the left side of the cell door, so we can see the movie TV through the reflection of the plastic mirror. He does this by tying two shoelaces together longways and dropping one end of the shoestring through the grating all the way down to the floor, so he can pull that end back into the door at the bottom. Then he ties the end of the shoestrings to the mirror, slides the mirror under the door, and fishes the mirror up on the outside of the door to the outside of the window, where he positions the mirror at just the right angle and ties it to the grating.
He unclips the headphones from his headpiece and puts them inside our coffee cups, so we can hear the TV. The news keeps us connected to the outside world. Movies help us escape these concrete walls and razor wire fences. So we do all we can to see and hear the TV.
Rojas stops by our cell and makes fun of Foros for the way he was acting the other night when he was drunk and hollering, slurring, and gurgling outta the cell door windows at three in the morning for a whole hour. Big Boy made fun of him too, when he came by the cell, before the laws took him.
"Don't do that shit in the world," says Rojas, "I would've tied you up and put you in the corner. It sounded like Steve O had you hogtied. Like a pig squealing. Those people in the world ain't gonna put up with that shit. Que no pare el pisto." The liquor doesn't stop. "Ni siquiera a las tres de la mañana." Not even at three in the morning.
"Que no pare," says Foros. It doesn't stop. As if it were funny.
The TVs are on TBS and ESPN. I can't catch TBS or ESPN on my radio. Rojas tells me I have to mess with the coil inside the radio to catch those stations. I can turn a screw, but I don't know how to mess with that coil. I'm hoping the lawman puts the TV on TNT later.
Suicide Squad is on TNT. Suicide Squad makes me sad because Will Smith and the little girl remind me of me and my daughter. On the movie, Will Smith's character is torn away from his baby girl and locked up far away in a prison cell. That's what happened to me and my baby girl. It's been thirteen and a half years. Forty-six and a half to go. I pray to God he gets her through it.
The officer comes into the cell block with the remote and changes the channel on the movie TV to ABC. I turn the dial on my radio to catch ABC News.
The lead story on every news program is the same. A White cop killed an unarmed Black Houston man named George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The police officer forced his knee on his neck until he choked him to death. Over and over again before dying on the street with his hands cuffed behind his back, George Floyd said, "I can't breathe," and he asked for his mother.
Three other cops were present when George Floyd was murdered. The Minneapolis mayor says, ''This officer failed in the most basic human sense.''
All four cops are fired. Riots break out. Industrial and commercial neighborhoods go up in flames. And the precinct police station is seized, breached, and burned.
#
The momma kingbird is fluttering inside the perfectly round hole in her nest, digging deeper and deeper into it as if she's gonna hide down in there something more precious than any diamond on this planet.
#
I wake up at noon thinking when is this gonna end. I put the sheet up and cover the cell door windows halfway up with a towel. I sit down to relieve myself. Before I let one go, I reach back with my left hand and push the button for a courtesy flush. No flush. The water's off.
''The water's off?" I ask Foros.
Foros is lying on the top bunk. Yesterday, I noticed he needs a haircut. I can barely see the Dallas Cowboys star on the back of his head.
''Yeah," he says, "it's been off since this morning."
"I'm glad I pushed the button before I let one go."
I stand up and pull up my shorts.
"I'm not gonna leave that in the toilet while we're stuck in the cell."
I remember the time, seven or eight years ago, when the City of Kenedy cut our water off for five weeks. This entire 3,000-man prison, except for the kitchen, the chapel, and the administration building, had no running water for five weeks.
We had to line our toilet bowls with newspaper; make newspaper baskets inside the toilets; shit in the newspaper; wipe; wrap up the excrement and shitty toilet paper inside the newspaper; put it in a plastic potato chip bag, if we had one; and throw it out on the run in front of our cells, or in the dayroom. If one of us had a chance to get out of our cell, we'd either sweep up the shit bags and stuff them in the aluminum trash can in the cell block or throw them outta the windows on the side of the buildings. Most of the time, we were locked in our cells.
Some inmates didn't even make a newspaper basket to shit in. They just laid the newspaper on the cell floor, squat, and let it out on the newspaper. We urinated in water bottles and chunked the bottles onto the run or into the dayroom. Some of us threw the newspaper, feces and all, outside of the cell windows, through the grating. On the edge of the buildings.
The aluminum trash cans in the dayrooms overflowed with newspaper bombs loaded with excrement. Aluminum trash cans brimming with human feces.
Other inmates didn't even bother with the newspaper. They just crapped and urinated in the toilets every day until the toilets were so full of feces that the officers had to move the inmates outta those cells. Then, they just did it again.
The stench was emetic. Everywhere I walked on the compound, wherever I was allowed to walk, it reeked of human feces. Even on the breezeways, outside of the buildings.
The inmates took matters into their own hands in order to get the water back on. Some inmates had cell phones, which was a felony. They took photos of toilets packed with feces, urine, and toilet paper. They sent the photos electronically to the news stations in San Antonio, which is about forty-five miles northeast from here.
The news stations sent airplanes overhead. They took photos of the prison from the airplanes. The photos came out on the news. The prison power structure ordered portable toilets and water trucks. After a few more days, the City of Kenedy released their water for us to use.
#
Another officer hits the block. A huge Spanish-speaking man wearing an aqua-colored medical mask. He's letting guys on One Row outta their cells to fill their bottles with ice water from the cooler. I call out to him.
"Boss man! Three Row, Twenty Cell!"
He looks up at our cell door, raises his right hand and his index finger as if signaling the number one. Then he turns around and walks outta the cell block through the front door and goes into the cell block next to ours.
Rojas's cell mate Tee is standing outside of their cell two doors down from us. Another lifer. Black American with sorrel-colored skin. He's been in prison at least a quarter century.
I'm watching him with one eye through the gap on the side of our cell door between the door and the wall.
"Tee," I say, ''would you tell that lawman when he comes up here to roll our door, so I can use the restroom in the dayroom? I gotta take a dump."
"Yeah, I got you."
The officer comes back to our cell block. He's sweating profusely. The temperature has risen up to the nineties. The officer up in the picket control booth is a Mexican-Indian girl wearing round black-rimmed glasses. She has a helper she's training, a young Latina whose skin tone is a lot lighter than the Mexican girl. The Latina girl is wearing a baseball cap. Both girls are wearing face masks.
I look at my face in the mirror. My brown skin clean shaven and still smooth. My right eye, the lazy eye. My shaved head. The bone protruding from the bridge of my nose from a bar fight fourteen years ago. Black half moons under my eyes. And crow's feet starting to reveal themselves on the outside corners of my eyes.
The heat-stricken heavy-footed officer isn't on the block for more than three minutes, and he's trying to leave again. This time the girls shut the door on him from the picket. They point him to Tee on Three Row. The officer turns his head side to side, pouts with his head down, and slaps the outside of his thighs with the palms of his hands, as if saying, behind the mask, "Fuck."
The officer toddles his way up the stairs, though I can't see him. The girls open up Tee's cell door for him. Then the officer comes to our cell. The girls open our door, so I can use the dayroom toilet. Foros walks out to get some ice water.
I get to the dayroom toilet and find that someone has beat me to it. The toilet is full of shit. But that's not gonna stop me. I put my shower shoes on the toilet seat, so I don't have to put my bare skin on the filthy steel. I sit down and let it go. The girls in the picket try to avoid looking my way.
While I sit on the toilet I start to think about Foros and Big Boy and George Floyd. About my own life. About life in general. About how it seems like everything always just goes to shit. And even so, we keep going. For me, it ain't so bad. I could be hooked on K2 or locked up in 12 Building with all those roaches and rats and ants or dead on the street with my hands cuffed behind my back and a cop's knee on my neck. But I'm not. So I gotta make the best of it while I can.
