American Outlaw - Jesse James [32]
I had no helmet on, of course. The only thing I could do was square up. I dipped my shoulders down, got low to him, and at the last possible moment, I extended straight into him, with my shoulder on his chin. The force of the impact lifted Troy Zuccolotto into the air and put him on his back. GUUHH!
Total silence fell over the yard for a good fifteen seconds, as Troy lay on the ground.
Finally, Johnny Pinece whispered, “Fuck.”
All the stoner kids were stunned. No one had ever touched Troy, because he was a guard, and he was a bully, and he was huge.
Troy came to his feet slowly. He dusted himself off, and cradling the ball in his hands, he approached me. I was kind of laughing. I couldn’t help it.
“You think that’s funny, you punk asshole?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
From four feet away, he winged the football at my face. From the crunch it made as it bounced off my nose, I knew that he’d broken it. As I bent to staunch the flow of blood, he walked slowly toward me.
“Still funny, right?” Troy hissed. “Still funny?”
I reached out and grabbed a hank of his precious blond hair and wrenched it downward, so that his head bent toward me. His huge neck strained like a bull, reddened and possibly about to burst. Amid his confusion, I smashed the side of my elbow into his temple. He looked at me, dazed. A river of crimson blood dripped down the front of my tan uniform, soaking and ruining it.
The guards separated us. I got put in an isolation cell for a month, for striking a guard. No surprise. By now, I knew the drill.
——
There is nothing to do in the isolation tank: absolutely nothing. Still, I thought it would be more of a party than it was. No roomies to bother you, and sleeping in every day—cool, huh? But I did all my sleeping on the first two or three days. After that, my body just wouldn’t sleep anymore. It was too rested. I just had the walls to stare at, and my hard iron bunk to lie on.
My immediate surroundings offered little in the way of distraction. My cell was tiny and cramped, its only outstanding feature a stainless-steel toilet with no lid.
So I would do Nothing. All day long. These days they would call it meditation, but for me, it was just survival. I had been hurt so badly for my entire life, and repeatedly so. But in isolation, I found a center of me that had never been touched. I don’t know how to describe it: all I was doing was sitting and being silent. But somehow, I found a way to go inside myself.
And to my surprise, I found a calmness there, the peace that comes with inspecting yourself and knowing that although you might not be perfect, you’ve sort of done the best you could. Defying all reasonable expectations, I actually still kind of liked and respected myself.
Every other day, I would receive a break from my Zen-like routine of doing Nothing, and thinking of absolutely Nothing, when I’d get handcuffed and escorted sixty feet down the hall to take a shower. The guard who took me to my beauty appointment would never speak to me. He wouldn’t even look at me.
“Doing good today?” I’d ask.
He’d respond with Nothing.
“Me? I’m terrific. Thanks for asking.”
The shower for those on isolation was tiny. The tile was scummy and the water never got warm. Five minutes in there was your max. Then the guard would bang hard on the door and you had to dry yourself off fast.
“That was fantastic,” I’d say, on the way back to my cell, my hands in cuffs, my face tingling from the cold water. “I feel utterly refreshed, thanks.” Zero response.
The key to not going completely batshit crazy, I quickly learned, was to keep moving. If I stopped moving, time stopped moving with me. So I stretched. I did push-ups and sit-ups. I stood on my head in my little square cell. I tried to jump straight up and land flat on both feet with my knees bent. It was a kind of Yoga for Delinquents, and I practiced it like a freakish devotee.
But after a week alone, I started to lose my focus. There were no books in isolation for me to Malcolm X myself into a genius. This was