It was 2011, one of Lake Butler RMC’s fucked up years. They’d just stopped selling tobacco, so everyone inside the dorm was on edge, the kind of tension that cuts, like a razor blade the officers were prone to pass during the night shift. When I say everyone was wound tight, that meant the COs as well.
Once the four o’clock count passed, chow would be called. I remember returning to the dorm to a mess; guards were tearing everyone’s house up. When I say house, what I really mean is our steel bunk with a shitty mattress, a terrible pillow, a scratchy polyester blanket, and a locker. For the person sleeping on the top bunk, a floor locker made from steel (heavy as shit) that sat at the foot of the bunk. For the bottom bunk, the coveted steel locker had four wheels, a top desk drawer and one compartment where you could store your little possessions.
Fights would break out sometimes over who would get the bottom bunk, but generally they went to people with seniority (how many years in), or sometimes to the top bunk guy who might have a little pull on the compound. Like me. I’d only been inside actual prison for a year, maybe even less, but walking back to the dorm after chow I knew the officers wouldn’t spare anybody. Top bunk, bottom bunk, they don’t give a fuck. Anybody can get it, and that’s what the hell they set out to do. Tear your life apart.
Lockers would be flipped over, all your measly possessions thrown across the dorm, guys scrambling over each other trying to pin down that one letter from a lover or mother, thrown far, far away from your own bunk. Beds all fucked up, blanket on the dirty ass floor, everything within that coveted roll locker emptied and torn to shit, and when I say torn to shit, I mean it. Pictures ripped apart, or missing.
It was a real shit show after some renegade officer decided they wanted to fuck with somebody. It’s funny, you’d think it was a hundred officers whipping through the place like an F5 tornado, but it was a two-man team alone, a sergeant and one officer, who could really do damage. And they sure did. There were close to eighty of us inside those dorms, but I’m not gonna lie, those police had us shook because we knew they would do way worse than fuck your bunk up. That was child’s play at Lake Butler, something all of us were used to.
I’d like you to stop right here and think about it. Ask yourself, what do you think I mean when I say, “they could do way worse?” If you don’t feel a shiver right this instant, starting at the back of your neck and tracing down your entire spine, making your legs wobbly, well, then. I leave it to your imagination.
Back to the dorm, walking back from chow. So, the dorm was a mess, my bunk seemed like it had a bomb dropped on it. Debris was everywhere. “Yo, Tat, your bunk fucked up, bro.” I had to laugh, because it sure was. But upon my mattress was this magazine; it seemed like it was placed there specifically for me. I went to view its contents. Some sort of celebrity mag. Shit… in my opinion, but since my books had been taken, thrown away by the terrorists, I decided to keep it. Reading was a way for me to escape the madness of prison dorm life, even if it was about some Hollywood somebody catching a DUI.
After locating all my belongings, listening to everyone bitch about the sergeant tearing the dorm up, and remaking my bunk before master count, I laid down with that damn Hollywood magazine and scanned the pages. Trash, more trash, nope, not that diva glam mess, but then. What’s this? My eyes grew as large as a guy who just dropped acid. No fucking way. I couldn’t believe it. Is this real? How on earth has nobody taken this out?
It was glorious for a guy who hadn’t been around a woman in two years (well, a woman besides an officer), one year in the county and one year here, so this was different. Wanna know who it was? Well, you must have guessed from the title of this story, but it was no less surprising, fucking shocking. It was Pamela Anderson in a damn skimpy Baywatch swimsuit. You know, one of those one-piece ones that damn near showed everything. And I’ll let you in on a secret: since grade school I’d had a serious crush on her. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.
It wasn’t only one page of a magazine. When you turned the magazine to the side, Pamela would fall out in what seemed to be life size. A real deal fucking Pamela Anderson poster. Shit, this is crazy.
For whatever reason I took that Pamela Anderson poster and grabbed some state toothpaste, the kind that could literally clean brass better than any polish available (sometimes COs would get us to grab that shit when they had to clean something off the floor or a wall somewhere inside the prison, and that stuff worked like a dream, but I wasn’t dreaming, not that night), and I squirted four fat globs onto the side of my locker, pasting Pamela to it. When I read my books, or that crummy damn magazine, just a turn of my head to the right, or even a side eye, I’d see her in that orange-red one-piece swimsuit staring at me with a fierce look. A look like she was upset with you, but she knew you wanted her, kinda like she was angry you didn’t write her that week, while she waited for you at home.
I don’t know why that poster made me feel better about life or my circumstances, but I made a promise. The officers were going to have to kill me before I took that poster down. My friends were fucking terrified for me. They’d laugh when they said, “Tatter, you know them fucking officers are gonna fuck you up during master count, right?” And I knew it, they knew it, we all knew it. I didn’t give a damn. Let ’em. Who gives a fuck, one of my old school mantras that would kick in when shit was hopeless. But for whatever reason I didn’t care.
And then master count was called. “Everyone get the fuck to your bunks, it’s fuckin COUNT TIME!”
They’d bark like rabid dogs, fuckers.
Ugh, I hate to refer to them as dogs. Rabid fucking. I don’t know, they’d bark, scream, and yell. Damn them, is what I thought, eyeing Pamela for the hundredth time.
“Baby, you aren’t coming down. I don’t even care if I catch an ass whooping or go to confinement.”
They stormed in like storm troopers invading a planet, marching past, each inmate reading their inmate ID. ######, ######, and then before you know it, they were upon me. These officers have a talent for finding anything contraband at Lake Butler. I said, with a straight face, staring right at him, V19743. And this asshole wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring at the marvel of Pamela Anderson. Her in that one-piece swimsuit, it was like she was glaring at him, daring him to rip her down, be one of those asshole pieces of shit men. Tear me apart, motherfucker. Go on, do it. Bitch.
And this guy looks from her to me, back to her, and back to me, and moves on.
Whoa. No way.
That really happened.
Every one of the guys was looking my direction, all eighty of them, couldn’t believe what just transpired, because this officer on shift was the real deal, the kind of guy who might have more bodies under his belt than half the dorm (if you don’t know what that means, again, use your imagination). I had to smile at Pamela.
“You a bad mothafucka, you.”
And life continued.
During every count and every search, Pamela stared every one of those officers the fuck down, giving all of them the exact same glare, in that damn orange-red one-piece swimsuit. That locker became the safest locker on the entire compound. Nobody fucked with Pamela. Not even the women officers. I was a young dumb jit with a death wish, but Pamela saved me many times from my bunk being flipped and torn apart. I swear nobody had one thing pasted on their lockers, they wouldn’t allow it, ever, but Pamela had a pass, it seemed. It got to the point where guys were begging me to hide their drugs in my locker, or a knife, an illegal cell phone. Shit was mad crazy, but all of this is true.
Inside an institution as fucked up as Lake Butler, fucking Pamela Anderson didn’t fear shit. She mocked the officers. Laughed at them. Her eyes challenged their character, their egos, all of it. And all I can say, for that last year she rode with me before the riot, before I was transferred, pasted right fucking there, to the side of my locker, is… thank you, Pamela Anderson. You, for real, made my life so much easier, and far more peaceful. You’re the best.
You really showed those officers who really ran that fucking dorm.
