Time Will Tell

By {“E”} - Erobos Abzu Lamashtu

All in all, it took 18 years…like a tour of duty, I went back after a 2yr absence, not because I had to, but because there was a job left unfinished…There was no job security involved, no guarantee that I would make it out and return to the land of the living…If, after sleeping in Central Booking, then contracting TB, crabs, and a foul attitude in a cramped, overcrowded Brooklyn House Bullpen for days, bodies raw and funkified, turning into the steady diet of wonder bread, baloney & cheese, and quarter waters AKA, “crackhead juice,” constantly scratching my crotch and sometimes scalp, like a dog with mange, sweat so acidic, I’ve gotten heat rashes under my armpits and the insides of my thighs, invisible slow burn fire attempting to decompose living flesh, like taking extra-fine sandpaper and grinding down to the white meat, cooking in mine own skin, no mercy for the leper who we are, we who have refused for 8 days to go Rikers Island, until they tricked us onto the bus, Rikers Island, where a major uprising that had been brewing for decades, finally hit the fan, it was 1990, and the worst case scenario that we all casually thought we were ready for, exploded…and we were not ready! Don’t get that fucked up!

After we were hoodwinked by a pig’s trail of upper commandant Brooklyn House brass, we were shuttled to “You Won’t Be Smilin’ On Rikers Island,'' HDM, “House of the Dead Man,” the home of murders, drugs, guns, gangs, butcher knives, scalpels, and kingpins, where the guys running each of the cell blocks, were averaging minimum sentences of 100 years, give or take a few weeks, where gurneys and black, life sized, Ziploc bags carrying what was somebody’s son, father, uncle, lover, husband, boyfriend, neighbor, all under the auspices and management of unmitigated, undiluted, non-distilled corruption in a uniform with keys, radios, sticks, and golf carts…it was like if the mob became prison guards…just like that…the bus from Brooklyn House, seemed to have the same express privileges as the presidential motorcade! We rocketed through the streets, ignored red lights, flew down unlit and dimly lit alleyways, if the driver had hit someone, it’ll just be an unsolved hit & run, and that would be that; we speed into every single pothole of varying sizes, I learned rather quickly to keep my ass off the hard plastic/metal combo seat so that it wouldn’t bang into the base of my spine and rocket me up with the potential of slamming the top my skull into the roof of the bus;…I was curious about the sudden urgency to ferry us at such a terrific speed…it was because we weren’t the only borough jail that was refusing to take the trip! Rikers turnover quota was slammed to a halt…we again refused to leave the reception bullpen at HDM, already used to being more than a week in a cell, the 8 (9 originally) strong were split up and there were about 3 of us selected for HDM…from the bullpen to the pissy rotunda for 3 days, leather jacket becoming my pillow…I mused to myself, if I avoided problems the way I’m avoiding them here, I’d never be arrested…but we’re different people in the streets, ain’t that right?

All the TV coverage was the same, helicopter angles, prison guards, turnkeys-trust and believe they’re not correctional anything save protecting their own asses-ambulances were only allowed to take the guards, if they had prisoners in need of treatment they were turned around, guys who could walk, were put out of the ambulance, walk back to the inner checkpoint, get shackled and dumped right back to wound factory, House Of Pain…this was allowed to happen with TV cameras running live…no outrage…some prisoners were alive, some not some much…survivors would be spouting war stories for the rest of their lives! All the elements that were in place then are in place now...The hourglass has been flipped, but it’s the same sand…In spite of all of that, I still came back, did everything but throw a rope ladder over the wall, work left undone, something to prove, did I learn anything significant, Fuck No! I unlearned, I became a stranger in my own life, to mine own self be false, whatever knowledge, manhood, maturity, that was supposed to stain itself upon me, fell into a dead Soul, a vessel of relentless pain, a motherless child with no future, going wherever the currents of reality pushed and pulled me…The iceberg mountains of the Howling Wilderness of Upstate New York, didn’t impart many useful lessons either…Just like you can take someone to the door but only they can walk through it; you can show a boy manhood, but you can’t push him into it…He will fail…Every time…Even beauty is rationed like food, wide blue sky is plentiful, beautiful people are few and far between, and they’re usually taken care of, catered to and put to soft, subtle, specific work…Where else would you find pretty female faces, save for the visages of some of these young men…I remember saving bread not to feed the seagulls, who’ll turn right around and shit on you…a metaphor for life…but to eat later…”wrong time to be a vegan asshole,” my inner codefendant said, everybody's a critic…Up here, people with pale or pink skin, blue, green, or grey eyes, yellow hair, silver goatees, who burn in the summer and porcelain in the winter, these colored people, are undereducated, pig and cow farmers, wafting; smell their former lives, blowing through the compound…the logic is; it takes the worst to oversee the worst, they put us far away and take us out like garbage; where we’re not around to stink up the place…My body felt hollow…In May of 2005, my Spirit started to burn up my plasma…I’m half the man I used to be, and it’s a good thing too…I would’ve been full to the brim with too much damage and toxicity to survive in any world…I smiled at the inevitable comedies, not just on Tel-lie-vision, the ones walking around me on two legs, former (and current) junkies, crackheads, petty thieves, child molesters, rapists, recidivists, gangbangers, all become Moses-like moralists, in a world that’s on average, 1 square mile that doesn’t exist outside of itself, so basically, none of that shit counts…I look at myself in a group photo and my face is so contorted with pain, and distorted with rage, I don’t even recognize who the fuck I am…I was chosen for this incarcerative narrative before I was born, I am qualified for sure…a part of me is still there…a part of me will always be there….

{“E”} - Erobos Abzu Lamashtu's living experience of being an undocumented/stateless man of color, Bisexual-experience, and having an 18yr history with the city and state prison systems, ICE, and the immigration detention system. He has also lived in homeless shelters for 4 1/2 years in NYC and has been on ICE parole for 11 years and counting. {"E''} has been doing Creative Writing periodically for 11yrs now. He's lived in program housing for over 7yrs now.