Chain Gang All Stars

“The J stands for Jeremiah.”

“What?”

“The J stands for—”

“Shut the fuck up, Craft,” Officer Lawrence says.

“Please.”

“Please what?”

“Please do not Influence me, sir.” I have never meant a request so purely. There’s fools that think the Influencer is some Taser. It ain’t. To be Influenced is to be made to feel the most pain your brain can produce at once. To be Influenced is to have your neural pathways rewritten so that you can become a better vessel for physical hurt. It allows your brain to take more than it should ever. It changes you in ways I don’t want to disco—

The black rod sticks into my neck and—

Then he punches me in the shoulder.

And my shoulder explodes.

I can feel the bone shatter, my tendons firing into the air. I—I—[*1]

“I’m sorry!” I scream.

I scream.

I look, terrified, at my shoulder. It’s still there. And it is bloodless. Somehow, some way. The black dart is still in my neck. The Influencer. This thing in my neck is the lord of all. That I know clearly.

This is the black rod’s hell. I’m in hell. Hell full of ugly angels.

“You don’t think that’s enough, Lawrence?” Angel 1 says from outside the door. The black rod, needle at the end, is still in my neck promising everything will never be well.

“What the fuck you care?” Angel 2 says. Angel 2 is what I know Lawrence is truly called. I see it now. He holds the black dart. Angel 2 is who I must serve not to die each day. I tell him all he wants to know so that he might spare me some kind light. But today he has chosen not to spare any.

“He’s had enough today.”

“You really love these rapist motherfuckers, don’t you?” Angel 2 says.

“Rapist motherfucker” is one of my names. My other is Simon J. Craft, the J is for—

“Jump up in the air, Craft,” Angel 2 says.

And I try to fly. I can’t. My wrists are locked to the bed with metal cuffs. When I try to jump the cuffs pull on my wrists and my wrists know all the pain this universe has. I scream and it doesn’t make anything better. If my screams could heal anything there’d be no sickness or strife in this world. Here, the Angels love to hear you scream.

“What’s your name, muthafucker?” Angel 2 says.

“Rapist muthafucker,” I say, lava pouring from my wrists it feels like. The spittle crawling down my lips is like claws tearing at my face.

“You shut the fuck up or I swear I’ll knock your head off.”

And sometimes they don’t want you to scream at all.

I try to scream more quietly. The room smells like piss and my own wild pain. Angel 2 laughs.

“She probably screamed too and that still didn’t stop you, right? Right?”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

My name is Simon J. Craft.

“Why the fuck you always saying your name? You think that’s funny?”

The rod sticking into my neck is tied to a cord that is connected to a shooter on Angel 2’s waist. I don’t know what parts of what I’m thinking come out to my tongue. Or if maybe the Angels can hear my thoughts. I try to think quietly for their destruction.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“No. Not funny.”

“That’s what I thought,” Angel 2 says, and pulls the Influencer out of my neck.

“Thank you.” Thank you. “Thank you.” Thank you. “Thank you.” Thank you. “Thank you.”

“All right, muthafucker, don’t try and suck my dick now.”

“Thank you.” Thank you. “Thank you.” Thank you. My body is no longer glass. For this I am only gratitude. In the moments after Influence I don’t remember who I am, or why I’m here, or what I did to find hell. But I am grateful for its end. So grateful. So grateful.

“You better be grateful, for all I’m helping you.”

“Thank you, thank you.”

Angel 1 watches from just beyond the door.

“Nothing Ruiz throws at you will ever feel half as bad as what you just felt,” Angel 2 says. “You understand that?”

“Thank you, thank you.”

“Imma have you so ready for these fights you have coming. You’re gonna be thanking me the rest of your life.”

The black rod is in his hands. He presses a button. The rod retracts into its shooter.

“Thank you.” Thank you.

“Last week Ruiz whooped your ass. In two weeks we’ll have the rematch. Then we’ll complete the trilogy. If you win in two weeks, though—well, you better win.”

Angel 2 pats me on my shoulder. I start to scream, but when the hand touches me it feels like a dull regular touch, not hell. Angel 2 squeezes.

“You have good strong traps. Make sure you’re working out every day. I want you to do your push-ups, crunches, shadowbox for a couple of hours. If you win in two weeks we’ll make sure you have at least four hours out of the hole.”

“Thank you.”

“You need to be thanking me every day of your damn life, bitch.” He smiles.

“Thank you,” I say. Smiling, not because I want to, but because after the Influence the face muscles do what they want for some time.

“That’s what I like to hear, you sick muthafucker.” And then Angel 2, Lawrence, leaves. I hear his laugh as it slides down the hall.

Angel 1, Officer Greggs, stands still beyond the door. He disappears, then he returns. I feel him there. He comes in. He unlocks me from the bed end. I can move, do anything I want.

I’ve already started to feel myself returning. This is how it goes. The last couple months, as they’ve put me in the prison fight league they’ve set up. It’s not exactly an opt-in-or-out program.

Greggs looks at me. I roll my shoulders, my body returning to me. Mine again. He hands me a towel. I sit it by the bed, afraid to have anything touch me for the moment.

“There’s people that rip their own eyes out after being Influenced one time,” Greggs says. “You know that?”

“I understand it.” And I do, very well.

“You know how many times he’s done this to you?”

I shake my head. It’s hard to say because even now as the pain is gone and I am forever grateful to not have that rod in my neck, once you’ve been Influenced it never really stops. Once you’ve been Influenced, you are always being Influenced. Some of us anyways. That’s how it’s been for me. Always waiting for it to come again.

“That was your sixth time,” he says. “You have a legitimate cause to file a complaint. Do you know who you file complaints with?”

Sometimes I’m sure I can’t be killed. Sometimes I’m not sure if I’ve already died.

“Lawrence,” I say.

“Exactly,” Greggs says. “What that means is that this is your life now. I don’t know what else to say about it.” He’s also holding a new set of gray clothes in his hands. I always know what the angels are hiding in their hands. “It also means that if he tells you to win that match in two weeks, you better win that match. ’Cause it’s getting stomach-turning watching this shit every couple of days. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Thank you,” I say.

“Don’t thank me. I’m not doing anything for you. I’m letting you know what is.”

I don’t say anything.

“I will say, though. The fact that you can still respond and shit after all that…” He raises a fist to me, and I raise my arm to hit knuckles against his.

“Your name is Simon Craft,” he says. “You remember your name, I think you’ll be okay.” He drops the fresh clothes on my bed.

“Simon J. Craft,” I say. He nods.

When he leaves I write “Simon J. Craft” into the walls. Over and over. I lie down and write it out into my eyelids. I have nightmares where my body explodes over and over in different ways. I feel all of it. When I wake up my jaw aches from smiling and frowning and all the ways the pain shapes my face.

—

There is no ring. Just a hall on the F block. Lawrence leads me there and we have to walk through half of general pop it seems. All those bodies just walking around, it’s easy to forget what freedom looks like. Compared to where I stay, this is freedom. A lighter layer of hell.

“White bro look crazy,” I hear them say as Lawrence leads me to where I’m to kill a man called Ruiz.

It smells like stink and iron, like something is dead and rotting.

Lawrence leans back to me and speaks into my ear so I can hear him. He isn’t holding the black wand, so even as I walk toward a man that’s waiting to kill, I know that the pain I feel will be of the earth and not of hell, and so I worry not at all. No worry in me. Joy even.

“If you win tonight, that’s a week I promise you there won’t be any Influencer. If you lose, I don’t care what kind of shape you’re in, you’re gonna have a long night, you understand me?”

“Thank you,” I say.

“I want you to try to hurt him, okay? Don’t worry about him. That’s what he’s gonna be thinking too. And if you don’t win today, you understand, don’t you?”

“Thank you. I understand.”

He looks forward and I know as well as anything in this world that I will not allow myself to go back to the black wand.

“You better.”

“Why the fuck he smiling so much?” one of the men, a gray shirt and pants, says.

“That’s not a smile,” another says. “That’s that shit.”

“Oh shit,” says a man so short he looks like a child. “Sorry, bro,” he says to me, to the idea of me.

I look at them and they look down to the ground, or they stare as if I’m the animal they’ve always hoped to see. They stare like they want a reminder of what never to become.

“That’s that Cheese Rash shit. They be cheesing like that after the Influence. That’s fucked up,” says a voice that comes from a face I can’t see.

“You’re next if you don’t shut the fuck up,” Angel 2 says, and the voice disappears. In the far end of the block they’ve put four orange cones on the ground. The bodies are arranged into a square. The ring is made of men of different colors, all wearing the same color. And then, next to each cone, there are the guards in tan and black and shining badges on their chests and weapons wrapped around their waists.

In the “ring,” sitting on an orange bucket turned upside down, is Ruiz. In our first match a month and a half ago, Ruiz made it so my nose won’t ever look the same. I woke up to Lawrence telling me the next day I really was about to feel the pain. And he was right. Whoever holds the black rod is always right. Remember this above all things you’ll ever know. Remember this before you remember your own name.

The bodies move aside and then close like a door behind me. There’s a bucket turned upside down there in front of me too. It’s green. Lawrence presses my shoulder and all it feels like is a hand on a shoulder. With the black wand it would feel like molten power licking its way through the muscle. When it’s gone everything is so easy. And so never to feel that again I am certain that Ruiz is a man I will kill.

“Three rounds. You win,” Lawrence says in my ear, “and this week, no stimulation. Fuck him up, champ.”

“Sorry,” I say to him, and also to Ruiz, and also to all the demons here and in the world and in me that brought me here.

“Don’t be sorry. I want him to be sorry. Get up, you’re on.”

A man who used to be in a cell across from me before they threw me into the hole is standing near the cone over Ruiz’s left shoulder. He gives me a nod of recognition. I stand up and so does Ruiz.

A guard steps in the middle of the ring of bodies.

“Don’t nobody move an inch from how y’all are now. That’s a good eight feet either way. I want them to have room to work.” At the word “work” the crowd of men cheers. It’s an inexplicable yeahhhhh that comes because something they have been anticipating is quickly approaching.

Lawrence helps me take my shirt off. Ruiz does the same. He hasn’t stopped looking at me. I’m probably smiling at him.

“Shut the fuck up,” the guard in the center of the ring says. He’s bald and small. Beads of sweat grow above his eyebrows.

“This is gonna be three rounds, three minutes each. We don’t got all day to be down here and I know you dumb muthafuckers ain’t great at math, but that’s just nine minutes of fighting. Y’all will have a minute and a half between each round to catch your breath.

“All moves allowed. You can box or do that karate shit if that’s what you want. If you wanna tap out you can’t just tap out, you also have to scream, ‘I’m a bitch!’ ”

The crowd hoots with laughter. Big laughter. The bald guard smiles at his own brilliance. Even in hell angels love to think themselves funny.

“That’s a joke. Ain’t no tapping out. This not even ten minutes, ain’t no reason to tap.

“Y’all ready?” he says, looking at me and Ruiz.

“Remember, don’t put your fists down,” Lawrence says.

I nod and raise my fists.

“Let’s do this,” the bald guard says. He disappears into the ring of people. It’s hot and the air is made mostly of the breath of these hungry men.

“Go,” Lawrence says. And I go.

One step in.

Ruiz shuffles forward and throws a jab to test my guard. He throws another quick flash of bare left knuckles. I don’t move at all for it. It’s short. He throws a straight as he moves forward and I can almost read the word “CAPO” he has on his right hand. The same kind of punch broke my nose our last fight. This time it seems as though Ruiz is moving through some invisible bind. Everything seems slower than before.

I slip the punch and load to punch Ruiz hard in the liver. I pull back and try to rip my fist all the way through his body.

He makes a sound as if some small animal jumped from somewhere he didn’t expect and surprised him.

His body feels solid but completely breakable. I try to punch through.

He gasps, stumbles back. There is a sound of cheering and movement and it seems the crowd too is a slowed-down film.

There is fear in Ruiz’s eyes. It’s a look that everyone understands even if they’ve never seen it before. The look makes me feel very briefly as though this is all there is. I almost forget what the black rod can do to a body. I love the forgetting. The right-here of Ruiz breathing quick breaths. He throws a big hook. This one is even slower than the straight, it feels like. I duck it and load up everything into an upper that I know will break Ruiz’s jaw.

The crowd choruses his pain. A collective Ohhh.

Then I punch him again with a hook in the newly broken jaw. He looks dizzy, confused. His body acting on its own, he throws another quick straight. I see it coming and let it hit my face. I close my eyes and take in the feeling, which I know is pain but is so far from what the black rod does it’s almost hard to tell.

Ruiz’s punch feels like only a suggestion of pain, not anything like the real thing. The look on his face as he connects fills me again with what I quickly know is my new favorite thing in the world. His terror makes me forget the fear I always feel. And this delight is what I think about as I wrestle Ruiz to the ground, straddle him, and punch and break his face until Lawrence and the others pull me off him, and I am disappointed because as they pull me Ruiz’s face is such that I can’t see fear or anything else on it at all.

—

“Fuck, Craft,” Lawrence says. “If I lose my fucking job for this…What the fuck.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. Back in my hell I leap down to his feet. Bowing. Head on the floor. Hoping with all I am that he’ll stomp me with his boots until I’m just a smear on the floor and not go for the black rod.

“No, you’re gonna be sorry. If he’s dead I promise you’ll be sorry for the rest of your life.”[*2]

I know Ruiz is dead.[*3]

Greggs says, “Your shift almost through, Lawrence, let’s leave it.” I run to my small hell’s corner. Praying to slip through the concrete.

“Fuck that,” Lawrence says. And I press farther and farther into the corner’s marked scratches, lines of time. I cry into that wall, begging.

Lawrence leaves and the waiting is almost as sickening as what’s to come. Almost but also definitely not. While he’s gone, Greggs steps into my hell, through the door, and sits on my sleep space. He rubs his eyes as if he is very tired. As if he is the one who will be ripped apart soon.

“There’s a way out, you know.”

I look at him. Every inch of me thirsty for whatever freedom he might be speaking of. I cry into the corner.

“It’s fucked up to have a grown man become what he’s making out of you. There’s a way for people like you to at least be somewhere else.”

“Please,” I beg.

Every second is a second that Angel 2 is not there, and so I try to stretch them. I try to pull time slow, the way it felt as I smashed the life out of Ruiz.

“There’s a place you can go. You’ll die, but it will be easier than this,” Angel 1 says.

“Please. Anything,” I say.

“Can you act right? You have to be right enough in the head to sign a paper. Say yes to some questions. You have to know your name and be able to sign it. You think you can do that?”

“My name is Simon J. Craft,” I say.

I hear the stomps of Angel 2 at the hall’s end. Men howl and bang as they always do, but I hear his boots perfectly.

“Tell me again,” Angel 1 says.

“Simon J. Craft,” I say.

“If you can remember that past today you’ll have a way out.”

“No,” I say. Past today means living through Angel 2 again. Please, I think. “Don’t let it—”

“Fuck you doing?” Angel 2 says as Angel 1 places his hands on his thighs and stands up.

“Just making sure he don’t bash his head open waiting on you.”

“Don’t even worry about that,” Angel 2 says, spit shining on his lips. “This one’s a fighter.”

And then for the next three hours everything I am becomes was—

*1 Don’t look down. Help me. Please. Help me.

*2 He was right.

*3 His name was Angelo Ruiz, his family were those who kept him fed, safe, who raised him; they made him tough, taught him to fight, they made money. They had opps, they defended their territory. He could have walked, but you don’t sell out family.