#that90sincarceration

[davycoquette]

depraved new world, dec. 1993

Content warning for a short aside about oral sex. After an uncomfortable phone conversation with his father a year into his incarceration, Ruck eats paper and makes nice with his cellmate.

RJ was moved to the annex, and Ruck briefly had the cell to himself. Even the quiet and the freedom to choose the television station, however, was not enough to stitch together the wound that had been tearing itself incrementally wider since his conversation with Donovan Rucker.

During leisure hours, Coy liked to visit. He’d let Ruck fuck him for nothing, or next to it. You got my back, right? and once for a Time Out bar he’d saved from the cafeteria. Sometimes they’d hang a sheet over the cell door and Coy would sit on the cold concrete between his thighs and suck him off. Ruck didn’t know if he hated him more for acting as if he liked it, or because he was so damn good at it.

He knew he hated himself more than he hated Coy.

The visits stopped when Roland Fairfax was assigned to the cell with him. The man was dark-headed, with eyes far too kind for prison. Ruck, who had moved his things down to the bottom bunk, asked him what he’d done.

Roland wouldn’t answer the question.

“Nothin’ with kids?” Ruck asked, the same as RJ had asked him when he was new. “You ain’t killed no dog, didja?”

Roland said it was neither of those, but he was aloof, and Ruck wasn’t interested in knowing him better, or in much of anything. He spent his free time in his bunk, and counted down the days without anything to look forward to.

For his good behavior, he was permitted to add a few touches to the cell. First and foremost he wanted his guitar — but also a pen and notebook.

Bess and Nattie brought both of these the next time they visited, and he drew crude tattoo ideas in the notebook and practiced his guitar out in the yard. It was harder now. The finger he had broken didn’t move as easily as it had, and he’d been a year without practice. It was unsatisfying, too, to play an electric guitar without an amp.

It soon collected dust in the corner — though Roland started to mess with it — and Ruck worked at penning letters.

One was for Lou. It was short, and he thanked him for his friendship and patience, and all the weed. He asked about Angie and her big tits. The letter ended with an offer for Lou and Angie to send him photos of the latter — bra optional — if they so desired.

Another was for Nicely. He was like a father — kind of — and had always done right by Ruck. He was mostly sorry for all the times he’d smoked in the cars instead of working, but instead made his apology about letting the old man down by getting locked up and leaving him without a gopher. (He figured that was an easily replaceable position, but sent the letter anyway.)

Last, he penned the one he'd wanted a pen for in the first place.

i’m sorry for how i acted. you were the only real freind i had and i always had a good time when i was with you. i should’ve said fuck whatever anybody else thinks, i should’ve stood by you. you’ll probally be glad to know my dad found out everything anyways so trying to act like you didn’t mean nothing to me didn’t do me any good. i still think about you and wish we’d got to go to all those places we said we was going to. i wish we was still freinds and sometimes i think i’m never gonna know anybody again how i knew you. i hope you’re doing good wherever you are & that you have good people. i miss you man, i wish things was diffrent.

He leaned over the notebook in his bunk and reread the sentimental slop over again. His heart twisted up in his chest, and he tore the shred of paper in half to save the lower section of the page and methodically fed it into his mouth.

Roland listened to the sound of chewing and paper crinkling for a long while from the top bunk, then asked, “You wanna take a walk?”

They took a few slow laps around the yard. Roland didn’t ask him anything, didn’t tell him anything. They talked about prison lunches instead, and the strange cartoons on television these days. MTV and working at the plant (which Roland was still trying to swing).

They didn’t talk about anything important, but it was an easy conversation, and Ruck felt a little lighter when they made it back to the cell for the night.

@fortunatetragedy tag for youuuu

[davycoquette]

the summer of our discontent

June, 1996

Ruck took the stairs slowly with his cigarette clenched between his teeth. At the bottom, he shifted his gig bag and backpack on his shoulder and stared into the wet morning fog. 

His life unfurled ahead of him; a flat, unbending, and featureless road.

There was no sidewalk, so he walked in the overgrown bluegrass. He headed west, toward the Styx River, because why the fuck not? It felt as if he had been borne into this world just then, disconnected from the brief and meaningless past before Decatur. He had nothing now but his baggage, which guided him like a migratory instinct toward one of the last places he had been besides home.

The fog simmered away in the heat and he sat on the curb at Crossroads eating a cold gas station breakfast pizza between sips of Grapico. The sun tanned the back of his neck and drops of sweat fell from his jaw onto the sandy asphalt.

At the intersection a man in a sweat-yellowed undershirt that clung to his ribs stopped him to ask for something. His voice was a copperhead hiss and Ruck eyed the calluses on his upturned palms.

“I cain’t understand you,” he said, and left the man mumbling where the four paths met.

In Hurricane he reached the edge of the earth and the air was heavy with salt and damp. He watched the Spanish moss on the cypress trees swing over the Tensaw River then on impulse thumbed his way into the back of a pickup that came shuddering down Bayou Road.

The driver was an old man with eyes as yellow as his few teeth, and his wife, aged indeterminably between forty and seventy, asked Ruck if he didn’t want out before they merged onto 65. He addressed her through the open back glass, and told her no, he’d better sit tight.

At sunset he tilted his head back to gaze up at the weathering steel arches of the Dolly Parton Bridge, then closed his eyes and breathed in the cloying wetland stench.

It was dark when they let him off at the edge of Creola, and he walked south to the La Quinta to book a room with his lawn-keeping money.

His clothes peeled audibly off his skin and he scrubbed them with a bar of handsoap in the bathroom sink after a long shower. He draped them over the rusted balcony railing and smoked a cigarette while he watched one treefrog fuck another one on the fake stucco wall. Voices carried down from the balcony above his, and Ruck left the sliding door open when he went in to drop his towel and fall into bed.

Close to nine in the morning he woke, removed a treefrog from the curtain, fetched his clothes from the balcony, and crushed Adderall on the little table next to the TV set. He got dressed and headed down to the lobby, where he fixed himself coffee and a waffle while his teeth chattered and the blood threatened to burst out of his veins.

Inspired, he walked down to the truck stop after breakfast with the previous day’s clothes souring in his backpack. He wandered the lot in the heatwaves and an old trucker leaned his head out his cab window and said, “You’re ‘bout the meanest lookin’ lizard I ever seen.”

Ruck hauled himself up on the passenger side step to goad the man into a fight, but the Yorkshire terrier in the seat jumped up and bit him the moment his fingers hooked over the edge of the window and the fire was doused from his blood. He dropped a few coins in the payphone outside and summoned a cab while sucking the joint of his finger.

Mobile was a short ride south of the truck stop, but the fare was twenty bucks he couldn’t afford to spend. Outside a musty music store at the fringe of the business district, he set up in the shadow of a live oak growing from the sidewalk and earned a couple bucks playing some Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash. A kid from the University wanted Freebird and Ruck played and sang a while, but the young man rode off on his bike half the song in and the street cleared out.Ruck picked up a late lunch from a mom and pop oyster bar, and sat reading the free classifieds he picked up from a stand outside. There wasn’t much of anything — except that the Greater Gulf State Fair was hiring. On closer inspection, they wanted interns from the college — but he couldn’t see the harm in paying a visit, anyway. Surely the damn fair didn’t intend to run a background check, and anyway, his attention had been good and grabbed by the logo of the cowboy astride a bronc printed in the ad.

[davycoquette]

room with a coup, dec. 1992

Early into his prison career, young Ruck gets his shit kicked in.

One minute he was telling a stout inmate to ‘get the hella offa me’ when he crowded him in the breakfast line — the next, he felt like a rabbit tossed into a pack of starving dogs. In the chaos, he understood one of them had a problem with Travis, who ran in RJ’s circle. Ruck barely knew Travis, and he sure as hell didn’t want to get his ass beat for him, but they seemed to have enough dislike for him, too.

That he could tell, he got in one punch. He felt the curves and angles of a jawbone briefly fit into the jigsaw of his knuckles, the impact shuddering up into his shoulder. Then, instant retaliation. He had not been hit so hard in his life — it felt like his brain kept going and slammed into the opposite side of his skull. He was dazed, mouth hanging open in stupid shock, the side of his face needles like it’d fallen asleep.

Then his stomach — that came from somewhere else — and all the air was gone from his lungs and he couldn’t draw any more. His vision blurred, the world tilted. He fell on his ass without feeling it, and he knew straight away that was not enough. He was done, but they weren’t going to go away until they were pulled off him, and in the last look he got of their long silhouettes Stone Henged around him, he didn’t see anybody coming.

Somebody kicked him in the side of the head and he was on his side, hands grappling blindly for something to protect. His face? His throat? His balls? There were more feet coming than he had limbs to guard himself, and in the end his ring finger was cocked back at a sickening angle and the blood from his busted lip made a Jackson Pollock of the cafeteria floor.

He hadn’t even realized the stout one was sitting on him until the rest had been pulled away. A big guard linked his hands under the inmate’s armpits and hauled him off Ruck, who immediately picked himself up. His tongue explored the interior of his mouth and he nudged a wobbly premolar out of its socket before spitting it out onto the linoleum.

A few hours passed in the infirmary. He saw x-rays of his own skull, the fracture on his cheekbone. A nurse held a mirror in front of him and gingerly pointed out the damage, but it was all plain as day. He didn’t recognize this ugly, mean face. The hair shorn down to a shadow, the eyes glazed over in apathy, the asymmetry and fat lip.

He was back in his cell by sundown, his hand encased in what looked like a giant oven mitt. Dante ran some water from the faucet and stood on his own bunk so he could reach over Ruck’s and stick a wet sock to the side of his face.

“They didn’t give you no ice?”

He grunted a negative.

“Damn, sorry, Güero. You look like shit.”

Dante was transferring out soon, heading to California. He said he had grown up there, so he wasn’t worried.

He’d been working nightly on a tattoo on Ruck’s side — a skull with a blunt pinched between its teeth, vines and wildflowers blossoming out of the jaw and eye sockets. Without consulting Ruck, Dante blacked out one of the teeth.