Every other Wednesday, Guzman and I take the inmates with missing limbs down to Dankmeyer to get fitted for prosthetics. They hobble onto the state van, quivering in their chest restraints and leg shackles like wet insect wings. Leg shackles for the ones with both legs—standard issue, thick steel wrapped around each ankle, big heavy chain jingling between them like rapper jewelry. The ones with no arms—or one arm—are restrained with thick leather belts. More chains and tethers are looped from the belts down to the leg shackles.
I’m already behind the wheel of the Transit PTV with the S&W Model 65 the state gives me and a tiny bottle of Feel Free in my front pocket.
I like to drive and Guzman likes to do the speech.
The first thing he does is make it clear to the inmates that they won’t be leaving with their new legs, that today’s field trip is for sizing and fit only, that a mold will be made, and that the completed prosthetic will be shipped to the prison. He leaves the boiler plate speech there and freestyles it from that point on. What he should say is something like:
If anyone thinks about acting up while we’re here, carrying on, getting slick with the staff, trying anything stupid, there’s gonna be all kinds of consequences. We cut this shit short, y’all go back without your fitting, I throw you in ad seg.
But this is not what Guzman says. Instead he says, “They gonna make you a new limb, not a new brain, so don’t get any bright ideas, dummies!”
He turns around when he says this and permasmiles through the metal grating that separates us from the prisoners. He says DING and pinches his fingers above the top of his head like he is holding a lightbulb above it. His gray teeth are like tombstones.
“Try anything stupid,” he barks, “you’ll be leaving with less limbs than you came here with, dig that?”
The inmates will grumble at this point, or at least wince and suck their teeth and such.
Guzman snorts. “I don’t care if you got one leg, no legs, or half a damn arm; act up, I’ll put you in the ground so fast you’ll wish you ain’t have none of that shit. No foolishness. Just sit there and drool or whatever it is y’all do, while they measure your stumps. Yall ain’t disabled to me. Y’all differently abled. Able to get your asses beat differently if you try to play with the big dog.”
This time, Guzman’s freestyled speech devolves into one-liners and cruel jokes. “Now, what you call an inmate with one leg?”
He looks at each sad, weathered face. They cast their eyes down. “Late for count!”
Guzman cracks up laughing, pounds his chest like King Kong.
“Hold up, hold up, hold up. It’s kinda like y'all halfway to freedom anyway! Haha! Halfway. Get it? But don’t trip y’all. Get it? Don’t trip?”
Guzman’s cruelty homes in on an inmate with an eyepatch. “How about you, Barker? You got one leg and one eye. We should call you Eileen, you feel me? Get it? Eye-lean?”
Barker cringes and Guzman belts out laughter. I laugh a bit too then feel bad for doing so. It’s like a cold blue ache in the pit of my chest. It’s like watching a video of your child from when they were younger and couldn’t speak clearly and knowing this moment can never happen again, knowing you can never turn back and start over—this is what it feels like.
I think about how bad it is but still not as bad as when I worked security at University Hospital. They gave me pleated white slacks and a starched white shirt and sometimes I got stuck in the glass elevator and had to pry the doors open and how I would have a black ring on my white shirt, wrapped around the chest area, grease stains from having to pull myself out. How I had to keep the badge on me at all times and how the purple Ravens lanyard felt like a noose. They never tell you that you have to escort the doctors everywhere. You have to go downstairs with them, down to Basement Level 2 where they keep the bodies on ice, so they can get tissue samples. You have to use your badge to let them in and stand at the entrance to the frozen room while they slice a chunk out of one of the corpse’s torsos or thighs or upper arms. They drop their pound of flesh in a plastic freezer bag and hold it out in front of them. They show you that they only took a tissue sample, that this is all they are leaving with. The flesh is cold and looks like whale meat. Like the slabs of Alaskan Cod at the Waverly Farmers Market. Bloodless. You escort the doctors back upstairs.
“What you call an inmate with one leg?” Guzman barks. He’s still completely turned around in his seat. “Hip Hop! Call that motherfucker Hip Hop!”
I take the Hammonds Ferry Road exit and see two young boys flogging each other with four-foot fluorescent tubes. One of them gets a good whack in on the other, causing the bulb to explode into a cloud of moth dust. They both hunch over and start coughing or laughing or coughing and laughing as I bend the left past Atlantic Pressure Washers, and then, as often happens in Baltimore on a day that ends with the letter Y, we are interrupted by a white Acura with dead tags blowing the red light at Nursery Road.
