I had only been at Southampton Correctional Center a while when, sometime during the 1980’s, this guy hatches an ingenious plan.
I’m trying to remember the details of the incident that resulted from the plans, but my memory of things related to prison are so often blurred by my desperate need to forget things related to prison.
Just the same, here goes.
Though first, I want to backtrack to another instance of another plan that was more ingenious, but still pathetic.
We were all walking from the chow hall to our assigned buildings one day when, in broad daylight and without the least advantage brought on by weather or any other distracting occurrence, three guys bolted for the fence.
From the start it broke up the monotony, I’ll admit. I remember they were over the first fence within seconds of reaching it, which alone would have depleted me after a meal of fried bologna and beans.
What still rings in my ear to this day are the shots that followed, maybe ten in a row, and then the woman in the tower, holding the rifle she’d just fired, hollering, “STOP!, OR I’LL SHOOT!”
One of the guys was shot in the foot. I remember that because I knew he worked in the prison’s shoe shop, where inmate-issued shoes were manufactured. He’d once made me a great pair of shoes, to order, even! I loved those shoes, and I only paid a case of cigarettes for them, no matter what anyone else claimed to know at the time.
I remember catching up with that guy years later, having been transferred to another prison a few weeks before he rolled up. He said to me, after some time catching me up on the rec yard, “I wanted to hang out with you more back at Southampton, but you seemed so busy.”
“Well,” I said. “You solved the problem of wanting to spend more time with someone you inevitably saw a hundred times a day, without fail, by jumping a fence and getting shot in the foot.”
He looked at me and said what I’ve noticed to be a refrain that applies to so many instances of men in action.
“That wasn’t the plan,” he admitted.
So fast-forward (sans the fast part) a while and those fence-jumping geniuses get the upstaging they longed for.
There we all are, a bunch of semi-doomed convicts sitting out on the rec yard, enjoying a sunny day and not a care in the world. Gathered at the brick base of an enormous water tower.
We were just doing what we did best: loitering.
Out of nowhere, this guy started to climb the water tower.
“What’s the plan, Henry?” I remember someone asking me.
“How the hell should I know?” I asked in return.
“You’re white,” another guy pointed out.
“…and he’s white,” someone else added.
“He may be trying to get to the top,” I finally answered.
“White people — think they got all the answers,” said yet another voice, this one belonging to Lewis.
Please allow me a moment to share a story about Lewis. Please!
I was in the visiting room one weekend and there sat Lewis with what had to be his twin brother. Just identical! I nodded at Lewis, he nodded back, saying, “Henwy Guy, dis my twin!”
I gave a thumbs-up. Did I mention Lewis had a speech impediment? He stuttered and mispronounced things in a combination that, to be perfectly honest and considering he never shut up, made me fantasize about severing his head and kicking it over the fence like a soccer ball. But he was occasionally endearing, like that time he told his treatment counselor that I was right about her dressing like a hooker.
(We had the same treatment counselor.)
Years later at Greensville Correctional Center, where I’d encounter Lewis again, he was in the visiting room one weekend with his identical brother, I noticed.
Later that evening I said to Lewis, “I see your twin came to visit again.”
“Dat my other twin,” Lewis said.
“He looks exactly like you and your twin brother,” I observed.
“Because he a twin, too,” Lewis informed me.
“So he’s got another twin?” I asked, no more confused by Lewis than usual.
“No, dummie,” Lewis said impatiently. “He my other twin.”
“Your other twin?” I asked.
“Sure,” Lewis said proudly. “They three of us. We all twins, you know, born at the same time, duh?!”
Where was I? Oh, right, white guy climbing water tower…
So we’re all looking up at this guy, and someone asks, “can you believe what this world is coming to, when you got a white boy climbing a water tower in a prison?”
“Maybe he’s thirsty,” I finally said, kind of defensive at this point.
“Maybe he’s gonna jump,” someone said.
“Then shouldn’t we move?” I asked.
And we all did. We got back far enough to see him make it to the top, which was the most entertainment we’d had in a while since it was rerun season on the television and all.
That’s when the guards in the three towers most proximate to that part of the prison came out onto the tower decks and gave some pretty perplexed looks. Then some other guards hurriedly made their way onto the rec yard, all of them asking the same question.
“What’s he do’n that shit for?”
“Maybe he wants to get to the top,” I finally said.
“Do you have some information we don’t have?” One guard asked me.
“Well,” I shared. “It would seem he’s climbing upward, which would indicate a desire to reach the top more than to be down here with us, but I don’t want to be overly speculative.”
Just then that guard gets on his walkie-talkie and says, “Got one climbing the water tower, probably trying to reach the top.”
“Henwy Guy done gone and told on that man,” Lewis said, “just cause he trying to climb da tower.”
“He’s looking right at it happening before his eyes, Lewis,” I said.
“White folks just don’t know how to stick together,” another guy said.
So the dude finally reaches the top and, straight out of the Caucasian Convict Handbook, removes his shirt, balls it up and throws it. We all — prisoners and the gathering guards — simultaneously cock our heads to one side like the first time a dog sees Scooby Doo on TV, as the unfortunate garment unfolded more with every few feet of descent, finally landing on a patch of grass, completely flat.
“Whatta ya suppose that means?” One guard asked aloud.
I knew not to say, “It means he’s removed his damn shirt and, like a jackass, hurled it from the tower deck, you feckless dick!” Since that would only mean I had special insight into the matter and had therefore been somehow involved.
So I just shook my head as a measure of restraint.
More guards. More looking up. Finally one of the tower guards asks over the walkie-talkie, “Is this an attempted escape?”
“Maybe,” came a response from one of the guards. “But don’t shoot him.”
“Can I order him to come down?” The tower guard asked next.
“Sure, why not,” said the guard on the ground nearest all of us.
“INMATE ON THE WATER TOWER! COME DOWN IMMEDIATELY.” Said the tower guard in a way that sounded serious enough.
“Should I make that a direct order?” The tower guard asks over the walkie-talkie.
“Sure, give it a whirl,” came the response.
“THAT’S A DIRECT ORDER…WHAT I SAID A SECOND AGO!” Said the tower guard.
“GO STICK YOUR COCK IN YOUR MOTHER’S ASSHOLE!” came the voice from the top of the tower.
“What did he say?” The guard tower asked over the walkie-talkie.
“He said he’s not gonna comply,” The guard on the ground responded.
To this day, I don’t have a clue why that guy climbed the water tower or what he’d hoped to accomplish. There was speculation that he originally wanted to commit suicide, but he didn’t.
There was also this story that he had a girlfriend who had agreed to highjack a helicopter and get him. Granted, I made that story up and said it to a few people, but it was in fact a story and did indeed circulate.
But years later I did run into that guy who climbed the water tower, this time at Augusta Correctional Center, ironically located high in the mountains of Virginia. I remember he needed someone to write a legal letter for him and heard I’d just rolled up.
After a while of trying to translate what he was saying into a legal document for his attorney, I took a break to politely ask him, “what was with the whole water tower deal?”
“Huh?” He asked.
“I mean, you ended up in a lot of trouble behind it,” I said.
And that’s when he said it. Just like it had been written before he’d ever done it. It had been quite a few years since I’d seen him on the ground, and he looked older, tired, defeated, lost despite the confinement.
“That wasn’t the plan,” he said.
I’ve been on this side of the fence for the better part of twenty years now. And time has marched on. But the one thing that remains just as true out here as in there is that a dumbass’s plan is usually a dumbass plan.
