After I finish my morning coffee, I wait for the cell door locks to disconnect and for the front of my cell to open up.

Now I’m able to go down a few tiers and out across the prison’s interior, over to the west side medical corridor, where I will try and loiter around inconspicuously, waiting for the 7:30 prison pill line to go past. The plan is to stand there as the infirm shuffle past to get their morning medications. I’m looking to exchange some food or cigarettes for some old man’s medications. I have two packs of Kools and a box of chocolate coffee cake in the big pockets of my heavy winter coat, inconspicuous.

The guards and nurses keep them all together, keep them all marching past in nice, neat, tight rows of sour-smelling, sick old men.

“Some narcotics for my morning, some narcotics to trade Kools and coffee cakes?” I ask.

It’s not long before an old timer I know steps up and drops a half of a 30 in my palm in exchange for the sundry items that I take out of my pockets and quickly pass to him. He’s told me several times before that he’d much rather have the cakes and smokes, that he really didn’t even need all the pills they gave him, that the three-pound lump in his stomach, although heavy and uncomfortable, didn’t cause him any actual pain. He’d only played it up for the doctors as being excruciating, so they would give him more meds, meds that he knew he would be able to trade.

“Stuff’s worth its weight in gold around here.” And he knows it too, already rich in my cigarettes.

In the morning light, I can see how sick he must really be. His face looks almost yellow, with skin pulled too tight, like old plastic ready to rip or tear as he grins a sideways smile and ruffs up the gray stubble on his chin with his fist. He smiles a smile set in chipped and coffee-stained artificial teeth afforded him by the prison dentist. Sick as he seems, he holds his smile as he walks away. He’s smiling because he knows he’s gonna get over on them. The state gave him 50 years, three years ago, for a murder that some kind of newly uncovered evidence proved he committed back in 1976.

“50 years! Joke’s on them suckas, cause I only got two more years left to live, at best. How they gonna get 50 years out of that? Yeah, fuck the police!” I hear him whisper in celebration of this personal victory.

“Yeah, fuck the police,” I whisper back and he walks away, keeps on following along with the shuffling sick call line.

I watch them all until they turn the corner and shuffle out of sight. How much longer he’ll be able to or want to hold on, I don’t know. How much longer will cigarettes, cupcakes, television, and breath be enough of a motivation for him to keep on? How much longer before he just says “fuck it” and gives up?

Can’t be much longer, not with a parasitic lump pulling from the main arteries. Fat lump taking for itself all the bubbly fresh aerated and nutrient-thick stuff for itself. Taking up and passing along only the thinnest of depleted deluge for the spleen, kidney, liver, and all those other all-so-important organs further on down the line.

This lump damming up the works and draining life. For what? For why? This lump that does nothing but grow bigger while the rest of the body’s internal components die. Can’t see past its own appetite. Greedy lump! A lump that will continue on regardless, continue on until the old man dies. Continue on until one morning he just won’t be there any longer. I’ll be there waiting for him, and he won’t come past, having died sometime in the night.

They’ll find him, most likely, at first count. That one count of the day where they want everybody awake and standing upright.

One morning, he won’t be standing, and there will be no movement coming from his bunk. So the guards will have to go into his cell. Protocol dictates that they check. And once inside, they’ll find that he’s died. Dead man to be quickly whisked off to wherever it is they take the bodies to.

Then the rest of the prison population will set down upon his possessions like a pack of grizzled pigeons, all swarming about and fighting with each other for who gets the best of the old man’s stuff. Somebody will get his boots, somebody will get his pillow, his sheets, the hospital pad for underneath the jail mattress. Somebody will get all his clothes, his TV, somebody will even get those coffee-stained false teeth soaking in a cup on the side of his bed, along with any packs of Kools and boxes of cakes he may have saved up.

And all that will matter to me is that he will be dead. Dead, gone, and never coming back. Dead and no longer able to cheek his pills for me. This damn tumor rotting up his guts!

Thinking in advance of this day, a day that I am sure can’t be that far way, I’ve begun to look for other options, other ways. Alternative avenues so I won’t be left for too many days without.

Now when I wait for him in the mornings, I search the faces of the other men in the sick call line. Searching for just the slightest hint of yellow on their skin or traces of jaundice in the whites of their eyes. Keeping on the lookout for sunken cheeks and the sharp angles of shoulders and rib cage starting to show at the edges. Men with just the right amount of hobbled motion and wincing expression giving away something seriously wrong inside.

And when I see the right combination of all of these things, then and only then will I cold solicit. Whisper quiet, whisper firm, whisper in hopes that they might have narcotics to trade.

“Some narcotics for my morning, some narcotics for cigarettes and coffee cakes?”

Christopher Verticelli #NE-1839
SCI-Phoenix
P.O. Box 33028
St Petersburg, FL 33733

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