James

Growing up around here, there wasn’t lots of jobs. But there used to be. There was a factory and it provided most of the jobs in this town. They was good-paying jobs too. They was union jobs, with great bennys.

Now what do we got? Nothing. All them jobs, they got shipped to Mexico, China, India, Vietnam, those places.

Bro, I can only imagine what became of those jobs. I can see some poor fuck in a sweatshop, a scrawny fuck, hunched over a table. The poor fuck in some sweatbox, getting eaten alive by bloodthirsty mosquitoes, hot as like he stepped out of a fricken’ sauna and the poor bastard is fucking chained by a dog collar to a table and shit.

Oh, and there’s a mean son-of-a-bitch, a bossman, a cross-eyed son-of-a-bitch, and the bossman’s stalking the floor, carrying a stick and whacking the assembly line workers over their poor fucking heads.

Ah, the poor fucks. Yeah, bro, I can imagine those jobs, what became of them.

Those was good jobs once. My Gramps worked in the factory. His wife stayed home and raised the kids. That was back when a dollar meant something. That was back when a man could support a family on a decent wage. It ain’t like that nowadays, you know.

My old man was gonna work in the factory, but it closed before he finished high school. The prison was the only place that pays a decent wage.

It’s either work in the prison, or wind up in the prison, we say. That’s the curse of this town. Everyone ends up in that prison in some way. Even those who tried to escape through the army. If those poor bastards didn’t get shipped back in a casket, they came back missing legs or arms, or shellshocked, unable to function, fucking vegetables, or they’re hooked on pills.

Fucking Iraq War. I tell you, bro, the stories I heard ... Those soldiers talking about how they still smell the stench of death, they still feel the strangling heat of that filthy desert ... They have nightmares every fucking night. They hate to sleep.

A lot of those guys, the vets, they wound up in the prison too; they were on pills or choked out their wives, or both. I can’t even count how many veterans we got in the prison. Like I says, no one in this town escapes the prison, in body or soul ... We’re all fucking inmates...

I guess my Pops got lucky that he worked the guard tower. His job was pressing buttons. His job was to sit on his ass. To be honest, I’d have loved to take his spot up there. But once he took early retirement, back before I started, they replaced him with another fat old geezer. Probably for the best, anyhow. Fat geezer guards don’t do well in the cell blocks.

Maybe when I’m old enough they’ll stick me up there. It’s heaven up there compared to the hell I work in.

Prison is hell. It’s hotter than hell in the summer. It’s cold as Eskimo pussy in the winter. There’s no heating and no AC. It’s the construction. The “cost-cutting” design of the place. It’s like the metal bars and the cinder blocks of concrete just kick up the cold, heat up the heat, fucking worsen everything. It’s fucking hell, bro ... It’s hell...

Plus, it stinks. Christ on a pogo stick, does it fucking reek in there. It stinks like this putrid mix of shit, piss, puke, body odors, and cleaning fluid. Prison’s got a particular stink to it. It’s fucking horrible. But after a while, you stop noticing it as much...

And prison, ah, bro, it’s loud too. The noise is nonstop. People always yelling, clanking on their doors, clanking on their cell’s bars, shouting at each other.