Confessions of a Jack-Off Artist

2007 First Place Fiction

I had to get a feel for it at first. To others it’s second nature: some used to have a freaky old lady who’d like to see it when she was on the rag or had an outbreak; others used to peep through the window while they did it early in the morning on the way to the bus stop to catch a ride to Labor Force to shovel shit out of a ditch, to heft quarter-inch sheets of plywood up a hill, and, in the end, to make a lousy forty-five dollars, of which – after Labor Force and the government get theirs, bus fare, a couple of packs of Salems, three microwave burritos for lunch, and a couple of eight balls1 after work – you might have ten dollars left at the end of the day; or some people are just sickos.

Me, I’m different. I’ve never done none of that. Like any other twelve-year old, I figured out I could rub on my tally-wacker until my eyes twitched like they’d taken a life of their own, my whole body would tense, and my legs and feet would stretch to a point to where I thought I’d overstretched my ankle, then I’d – know what I’m saying? – nut. This artistry, this virtuosity, it’s hard to explain without telling a little about myself:

I like cocaine. No, I love it. It can be pure or stepped on with Inositol,2 B.C. Powder, or Equal. I’ll cook it up, draw it into the rig, and shoot it. I love bumpin’ coke because I get a feeling like when I was twelve and skeeted for the first time, except the rush is ten times more intense and lasts about fifteen to twenty minutes, but the feeling after bumpin’ isn’t like jacking off, where you’re tired and want to just lie there and feel your piece get soft, coil back into your shorts, and spudge a little puddle between your thigh and the cotton. Naw, you want another. The problem with that is pretty soon the veins in your arm become like deflated balloons. Then your other arm. Then your thighs. Then your neck. Then it’s like all your veins go underground, afraid of being the needle’s next victim. It reminds me of this one dude’s idea about – what is it? – diminishing marginal returns of profit, where the capitalists are constantly on the search for new labor to exploit and new markets to sell in. The market finally adjusts to keep the capitalists from reaping a profit. It’s chaos.3 That’s like shooting coke for a while. I’ve read a lot of other cool stuff, like by a dude4 named Ayn Rand, but there wasn’t anything about coke in it.

I was talking about my craft, though. In a sort of round-about way, I guess, I’ve revealed that I’m in prison, living in a two-man cell that’s five-by-nine feet. There are four tiers, 250 feet long, twenty-six cells on each tier. I live on the second tier, twenty-second cell. It’s quiet at the end of the cell block. At the front of the cell block there’s the day room; it’s where the TVs are, people play dominoes, and other sorts of things are perpetrated. The cells at the front of the block are loud because of the dayroom. But, I suppose, quiet is a relative thing in prison. Even at the end of the run, I can hear people clapping or singing with Ureathra Franklin5 on the radio or hollering at one another across the block:

“Hey! Ese Moe!”

“Hey!”

“You comin’ out on the next one?”6

“I don’t know.”

“I think the next one’s to go to la kitchona. ¿Que es par’ comir, anyway vato?”

“Creo que el chili mac.”

“Sìmon, tengo hambre.”

[Quiet for a couple of seconds]

“Hey! Ese Moe!”

“Hey!”

“So are you coming out on the next one?”

“No.”

“¿Porque? ¿Tienes commissaria?”

“Yeah.”

“You not gonna go to la kitchona?”7

“No.”

[Quiet except for laughter from a cell]

“Hey! Ese Moe!”

“Hey!”

“Yeah, I’m gonna go get the chili mac, huh? I gotta couple soups,8 but I was gonna use ’em to get a square.” 9

[A roar from the dayroom fills the quiet]

“Hey! Ese Moe!”

“Hey!”

“The Cowboys playing?”

“Sì.”

“You know anyone who got squares?”

“I think Pookie got some.”

“Pookie? Who’s Pookie?”

“He lives by you.”

“Ese?”

“No.”

“Mollo?”

“Sì.”

[Quiet]

“Hey! Ese Moe!”

“Hey!”

“¿Que Rollo?”

“Nothing, ese.”

“Say, you wanna smoke the square with me?”

“Naw, I’m cool, vato.”

[Cheering from the dayroom]

“Hey! Ese Moe!” [over the cheering]

“Hey!”

“¿Que rollo, ese?”

“Nothing, ese.”

“Say, can I get a soup and chili, and I’ll pay you back when we go to la tienda.”

I guess it’s never really quiet, even at night because people play radios and stuff’s still happening. The constant noise becomes a backdrop; silence is an alien being.

My cell is quieter than the cells by the dayroom with all the hollering, dominoes slamming, laughing, guards screaming, motherfuckers yelling up to your cell looking for hot water or dope.10 This quiet makes my cell perfect for practicing my art.

I never intended to become an artist; it always seemed kind of idiotic – not jacking off, but the art of which I’m about to explain. It’s like getting tattoos: once started it’s hard to stop until one day you hop off the top bunk and realize that your neck has “Fuck the World” on it; your arms are covered to the wrist with wizards, “White Pride”, demons, and skulls; and your torso has a mural of Vikings or naked women who are supposed to look like they’re orgasming or something. Then, you’re like, “Fuck, how’d I get covered in tattoos?” Everything in prison is like that – one day you wake up and realize something has changed about yourself.

Other motherfuckers get involved in the art because it’s part of their nature. Like T-Bone, he’s the type I forgot to mention at the beginning – an obsessive, don’t-get-involved-with-him-because-he’ll-call all-the-time-and-hang-up-or-follow-you-around-on-his-off-days-from-his-job-as-a-garage-door-installer-if-you-ever-dump-him type, who loves women, young men, or anything with two legs or four legs. His preference is probably women though.

[Crowded, mid-afternoon dayroom. On the wood11 bench sits Mack, reading. Enter D.J. and T-Bone.]

T-Bone: Mack, bitch.

[D.J. sits on the bench. T-Bone falls on Mack like a felled tree.]

Mack: Get off me. You’re hot and sweaty, bitch.

[Mack tries to push him off]

T-Bone: But I whove you, dog.

[T-Bone tries to kiss Mack]

Mack: Y’all go to rec?

D.J.: Yeah.

T-Bone: What you reading, bitch? [snatches Mack’s book]

Mack: Hey, bitch! [snatches book back]

T-Bone: You’re always reading, stupid bitch. Who you think you are, Einstein. Jewish bitch.

D.J.: [laughs] Mackenstein, Mackenkranz, Makenberg, Mackenbaum. [laughs]

T-Bone: Cannery Row? What’s that shit about?

Mack: Read it and find out, illiterate-ass bitch.

T-Bone: Yeah, well I only read three writers: Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Tom Clancy. [to someone else] Say! Who’s comin’ on? [T-Bone leaves]

D.J.: [to T-Bone] Stalker bitch! [to Mack] That’s a sick motherfucker there.

Mack: Yeah.

D.J.: I mean what does he get in jacking off on a bitch dressed in a gray uniform?

Mack: I don’t know. He’s fucking out there.

T-Bone: Hell yeah, Miss Jefferson’s coming on. Ooo bitch. [grabs crotch] That ho is good, too. [walks over to Officer Jefferson]

D.J.: [to T-Bone] Nasty bitch! [to Mack] That ho has to weigh 300 pounds. That’s a sick motherfucker.

Mack: Stupid bitch.

That’s everyday: T-Bone and all the other gunslingers waiting for shift change to see if a female guard is coming on, catching the house12 if the ho is good,13 and knockin’ her off. Those guys really don’t understand the craft. Like most fine art, it’s lost on them.

But like I said, I got into this discipline by accident; the beauty of it just sprang on me, even though I originally thought it was stupid and nasty, like when my daughter was born – this horrible red lump with stringy blond hair forcing itself through something wonderful, now defiled by this tube of ground beef punching its way through, then, poof, my beautiful daughter. In the past I would probably have wanted to catch the house14 with a motherfucker who’d compare the birth of my daughter with knockin’ off a ho.

About a year ago, before I’d begun practicing my art, I was in the showers, the big Roman showers – long lines with ass cracks and several-inch scars, looking ahead; behind: dicks, man tits, and tattoos; and the smell of steam and humid body odor. That’s waiting in line. In the shower I found a spot for my towel and clothes and carried my tennis shoes with me into the shower, putting them over the shower head to keep them from getting stolen. I took in my surroundings one last time to make sure a man and his bitch ain’t gettin’ they paper15 or that something isn’t about to jump off. The shampoo hits my hair – I’m still watching – and when I wash it out, I go blind for a few seconds. If there’s racial tension, I’ll skip it.

This day, right after I washed the shampoo out, there’s this huge group of bosses, all new boots,16 led by Captain Romero. It’s S.O.P. to have a guard or two hanging around, but not women, not thirty-or-so new boots and seventy-five percent women – girls eighteen or nineteen, some visibly pregnant; others probably nearing the change or past. But you have to understand Captain Romero, or “Captain Romeo”; he’s the biggest booty bandit17 on the farm. Romeo likes young, boyish Mexicans or light-skinned toads,18 fortunately for me and the other woods. Besides being a punk, Romeo has a problem with women. He don’t think hoes should work in the penitentiary, but if they do, they should do a man’s job.

The women make horrible grimaces, tics, like little girls going through a wax museum of horrors; others had a calm face you know hides the greatest shame and fear. The pistols are pulled off the punks and pointed toward the women. When I was a kid I used to wish I was Superman-strong or invisible or could melt through walls so I could fix my problems. Right then, I didn’t want superpower, just a razor-sharp machete to run with through the showers, tennis shoes in one hand and machete in the other – swack, swack, swack.

I look at myself: I’m not hard, but I am naked – my piece hanging there like another torch in a lynch mob, like the song we’d sing at the Full Gospel church in Lufkin mom would take us to in the summer:

This little light of mine,

I’m gonna let it shine.
This little light of mine,
I’m gonna let it shine.

T-Bone’s having a go at it a couple of shower heads down. Covering up isn’t possible because a man don’t bar that shit:

Hide it under a bushel? No!
I’m gonna let it shine.
Hide it under a bushel? No!
I’m gonna let it shine.

So why not give into the pleasure of degradation like T-Bone? Because what I do is different. It’s art.

I read this one dude named Aristotle who said that art is a mimesis – the best art is that which closest resembles a true reproduction of reality. What T-Bone, Pookie, and Moe do, it’s not reality, not even an attempt at something real – it’s knockin’ off a ho. I’m reaching for something real, something beyond the in-and-outs, beyond the human kennel where I live. My entrance into this discipline, as I’ve said, was accidental:

[Enter Mack into the dayroom, takes a seat on the empty wood bench. Enter Jimbo.]

Jimbo: Hey, Mack, ya seen Dar’n?

Mack: I think he went to rec.

Jimbo: Fuck, I tol’ him to stay here so’s I could give’m these highlighters.

Mack: Yeah? What colors you got?

Jimbo: I got all’m.

Mack: Like what?

Jimbo: All’m.

Mack: You have, uh, brown.

Jimbo: Naw.

Mack: I thought you had all’m.

Jimbo: I gots urnge, yawler, pank, grane, an’ blue.

Mack: Which one was you gonna sell Darren?

Jimbo: The urnge and pank.

Mack: I’ll buy the yellow.

Jimbo: Awright, I’ll get the yawler fer ya on the next’n. You gonna be out hur?

Mack: Naw, I’ll get it from ya later.

Officer Thomas: Two row, in and out!

Jimbo: I’mma go get it. I’ll throw it up to ya.

Mack: Naw, I’ll get it later.

[Mack leaves the dayroom, passing Officer Thomas.]

Officer Thomas: What cell you in?

Mack: Twenty-two.

[Mack climbs the stairs, walks the tier to his cell, and goes inside. He takes off his shirt and begins wiping down the toilet.]

Jimbo: [from the tier below] Hey, Mack!

Mack: What?

Jimbo: Hur. [throws highlighter into Mack’s cell]

Mack: I said hold up on that.

Jimbo: It’s awright.

Mack: Naw, I said to hold up.

Jimbo: Huh?

Mack: Nevermind.

Jimbo: Brang me some stamps later.

Mack: Whatever.

After five hours of picking cotton, I didn’t much feel like doing anything but the necessary. Stripped to boxers, I sat on the stainless steel throne to shit. My cellie 19 left a new Buttman on his bunk for me to check out, which I did, after shitting. I scanned the glossy pics: this one cumming like a sprinkler, that one taking three men at once, another getting mud shoveled. Out comes the bottle of stay ready.20

Masturbation – especially with porn – was still unexplored territory at fifteen. At twice that age, I find masturbation an enjoyable nuisance, provided a steady flow of new pics continues. This hunger keeps the underground economy of porn moving. Some cells are twenty-four-hour news stands with a dozen or so hard-core books laying on a bunk for passerby to inquire about.

My art, however, can’t be practiced with these books of pleasure; it takes more.

Utilizing this new Buttman, I suddenly realized I wasn’t alone up here on the second tier in twenty-two cell. I had just reached for another shot of stay ready, the gang-bang money shot showing as the magazine rested on my naked knees. There she stood; gray uniform, orthopedic shoes, and clipboard in hand – Correctional Officer Thomas. She’s not bad looking, mid-fifties, relatively well kept. Maybe the years have made me less picky.

I can imagine what I looked like: butt naked with Buttman in my lap, reaching for another hit of stay ready, startled.

She laughed, laughed so hard I thought she would topple backwards off the run. I’m sure I did look hilarious frozen with lubrication in my hand and the look of a cornered animal on my face. As she cracked up, the terror on my face became shame, and shame became arousal. I stroked myself.

“Okay, let’s see,” she grinned at her count roster.21 “Mack. You gonna be all right? Not gonna have a heart attack on me?”

“No,” I gasped, all over the gang-bang money shot.

“Uh-hmm,” she chuckled. “Next time, don’t have a heart attack.”

Next time? Man, that felt good. It felt better than good, almost real . . . almost. This wasn’t like T-Bone knockin’ off a ho; it had something real – a mimesis. Pornography isn’t real. It’s more real than real. The rest of the penitentiary as well seems, well, I don’t know, not real, a simulation. The mimesis is as close as I can get. That’s the art.

They say some artists become obsessed with their art. That’s where I’m at. This isn’t like my coke obsession or an obsession with tattoos. It isn’t knockin’ off a ho either. What I possess is a passion, a passion for my newly discovered art – mimesis.

“Four.”

The bench press machine lowers to your chest.

“Five.”

After setting the weight down, you start to get up.

“Hell no,” T-Bone pins you to the bench. “You’ve got two more in you. I’ll ride with you.”

You do a forced rep.

“Six.”

Another.

“Seven.”

Head feeling like a soap bubble, you sit up, shoulders to nipples a hot, squirming mass of angry earthworms beneath the skin.

“Where you going, Mack?” T-Bone says.

“I’m through. Gonna walk around the yard.

Rutty, pock-marked, the trail on the grass yard has enough treacherous terrain to sprain ankles or tear ACL in an inattentive jogger. You walk quickly, passing different groups of prisoners, being passed by joggers.

“ . . . That nigga talkin’ ’bout some mo’ shit, so I tol’ him ta gimme the key.”

“To the Park Avenue?”

“Yeah. I says this gone too far out hur.”

“Sho’ right.”

But it was too late ’cause that otha ho-ass nigga gone dropped a dime.”22

“No shit?”

“Yeah. So’s I . . . ”

“I could go in on the next one, catch the cell, and take the bird bath 23 before my cellie gets back.”

“ . . . When I was in Costa Rica, the Pacific side, I was buying two ounces of coke for fifty dollars . . . ”

A spooked water buffalo of a runner clomps by.

“Who’s working the block? Damn, Ms. Goodson is on.”

“ . . . The main thing is that you listen to the spirit.”

“Amen.”

“Jesus said the spirit will lead us into all truth, but He didn’t say the Spirit will give us everything we want right away. We have to suffer as our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ did.”

“Amen. Amen.”

“But our suffering is necessary. Our father prunes us like a gardener does the tree to help us grow in the Spirit. And the suffering we go through now, we know, is only a moment compared to the gifts the Spirit bestows . . . ”

“Damn, won’t the call it?”

Tromp, tromp, tromp.

“These lazy motherfuckers. What’s keeping it?

“¿Porque?”

“Porque el no chingaso. El vato es la fresa.” 24

“No shit? Necesitamos . . . ”

“Finally! There they go.”

You go through a door back inside the prison. The halls have the eternal smell of the prison soap’s universal fragrance mixed with urine and a tinge of marijuana. At G-Row, a guard turns a brass key big enough to be a baby’s teether to let you on the cell block. Correctional Officer Goodson opens the door to the dayroom.

“Where you been?” she asks.

“Rec.”

“Oh.”

“Have you run the in yet?”

“No.”

“You haven’t been around much lately.”

“They’ve had me in the tower.”

“Cadillacin’.”

“Naw, I don’t like being in the towers. It’s boring.”

“Yeah, it’s boring over here too, when you’re not around.”

She laughs.

“Why do they put you in the tower so much? All that time in the Army, they think you’re a sharpshooter with the AR-15.”

“I am, but that’s not it. I pissed off Romeo.”

“What you do?”

“I’m not a man.”

You both laugh.

“Mack,” her face lights up. “I just remembered. You got mail.”

“Hold on to it and bring it up.”

“Nuh-uh, you’re gonna make me work.”

“I’m not gonna make you work. I’m just gonna take a bath and get ready for you.”

“What?” her eyes widen.

“Officer Goodson,” the guard that turned the key to let you on the block calls.

You grin at her.

“Mmm-mm, bad boy,” she says before going to see what the officer in the hall wants.

Heading over to the only place the whites may sit – the wood bench – you see that it is overfull, except that Alf sits on a portion of the end.

“Get up,” you tell Alf, who quickly acquiesces with lowered eyes to take a position by the urinal. Your command is firm. Alf is a ho: he won’t fight to protect himself, so he pays others to “protect” him with commissary items, by cleaning houses and clothes, and sexual favors. He is, in essence, a coward. No one likes a coward, especially in the hypermasculine world of prison. Forcing him off the bench is not animus, nor does it give any pleasure. It is the reality of prison living – establishing a suitable place in the hierarchy for yourself, campaigning for respect, and oppressing the weaker to keep from being labeled weak. It must be done, and no one can know how you feel.

“Mack, what’s up, dog?” says Poore, a pale kid with SS lightning bolts on his neck, skinny but hardened by Channelview trailer parks and the Texas Youth Commission.

“Not a damn thing,” you say.

“Hey, Alf you ain’t gotta squat by the pisser,” Poore pats his lap. “You can sit on my lap.”

Alf stares at this shoelaces while Poore laughs and ribs you a bit.

“Two row!” Ms. Goodson screams.

“I’m gone.”

Twenty-two cell is dark and empty. Stripped down, you take a bird bath, using a wet wash cloth, first, to wipe down, then soaping. The anticipation has already made you erect.

You start to stroke as Ms. Goodson’s voice can be heard down the tier. Your throat constricts as her gravelly voice nears. In the cell there is the smell of lye soap and the sound of soapy flesh rubbing flesh, galoshes in the mud. You can hear her husky voice at the next cell. From belly button to knee there are a million pricks from a million invisible bolts of electricity, foretelling the imminent. Stop. Stop. Deep breaths. She stands before the cell, blond, slight kangaroo pouch.

“Mack, you got mail,” she nearly whispers.

You go to the bars.

“Lemme see your ID.”

Giving her your card, she brushes your fingers, which reverberates through your body like a deep bass boom. As she pretends to look down at the ID card, you begin again. Separated by a barred, iron door, you share something, a normally private act, in secrecy.

End Notes and Errata

1. street idiom: refers to a brand of malt liquor called Olde English 800 sold in fourteen-ounce cans, usually in pairs.

2. Brand name of a white, powdery B12 compound.

3. (?) Seems to be making reference to the work of Karl Marx and Friedrick Engels.

4. (sic) (?) It is possible that he does not know that Ayn Rand was a woman, or perhaps, dude is being used in a non-gender specific format. Colloquially, dude is often used to refer to persons of any sex, gender, or non-gender; however, I do not know if this is as yet accepted usage. All of this may be incidental as it is probably the case that the former is true.

5. (sic)

6. prison idiom: refers to a process about once an hour where guards allow prisoners to come out of their cells or go into them; also called in and out.

7. (sic) A Spanglish/prison variant of la cocina.

8. prison/street idiom: refers to a common food item bought by prisoners in commissaries, composed of a dry, eighty-six-gram, deep-fried block of noodles with a foil-sealed seasoning packet, all of which is further sealed in a thin plastic wrapping; brand name Ramen Noodles; sold by Maruchan, Inc., Irvine, CA 92618.

9. prison/street idiom: a cigarette.

10. prison idiom: in this context, dope refers to instant coffee.

11. prison idiom: refers to a white prisoner who refuses extortionists and supports other extortion-refusing whites in the daily race war of prison life; truncated version of peckerwood, a pejorative epithet outside prison for whites of low socioeconomic status and acculturation.

12. prison idiom: refers to going into one’s cell, but has transformative semantics based upon context. It can refer to, for example, going into the cell to fight so not to be discovered by the guards, or, also, can refer to a homosexual act between an extortion-refusing and an extortion-accepting prisoner.

13. prison idiom: refers to a female officer who will not write a disciplinary infraction on a prisoner who is caught masturbating.

14. See note 12.

15. prison idiom: a sexual act, usually homosexual.

16. prison idiom: new prisoners or guards.

17. prison idiom: an extortion-refusing prisoner who has a penchant for anal sex, usually taking it by force.

18. prison idiom: a pejorative racial epithet directed toward blacks.

19. prison idiom: a cellmate.

20. prison idiom: skin moisturizer.

21. prison idiom: a computer-generated list of prisoners used to track and to count them.

22. street/prison idiom: informing the authorities of illegal activities, usually for money or favors.

23. prison idiom: a bath taken in the sink of the cell; analogous to the idiom “whore’s bath.”

24. Spanglish/prison idiom: refers to a homosexual or extortion-accepting prisoner.