Saving Danny James

DANNY JAMES was a short, wiry, good-natured convict with a handlebar mustache and a marine haircut. At forty-six he started losing weight and having trouble with his coordination. After a plague of tests, the doctor told him that he had Lou Gehrig’s disease and that it was terminal. He had six months to live. Danny ignored the traditional stages experienced by dying men and went straight to a weary anger that kept him going. Well, it was anger, candy, and cigarettes that kept him alive. No counseling, no support group. The state gave Danny morphine, as much as he wanted, to sedate him and help with the sudden, frightening pain in his hands, feet, and neck. He’d been in prison for twenty-one years for a brutal murder, sentenced to life with an infinitesimal chance of parole. His family no longer wrote or visited.

The state bounced Danny around from prison to prison as he lost thirty pounds and much of the mobility in his hands and feet, which painfully curled up. He finally landed at California Men’s Colony, where I’m an inmate, and quickly gained notoriety on the yard for his morphine prescription of 360 milligrams a day, enough to kill the garden-variety pain of two people for a week: a new record and a source of fascination to the local junkies.

I encountered Danny through Pat, a slight white-boy hustler who lived with a six-foot-seven black queen. Pat owed me two jars of coffee (value twelve dollars) for having typed his hopeless legal briefs, and he’d somehow hectored Danny into paying the debt. I was hesitant to accept.

“Why in the hell are you paying Pat’s debt?” I asked Danny.

“I knew him at Pelican Bay,” Danny said, mush-mouthed, fighting his ruined tongue, one of the first muscles to go with Lou Gehrig’s disease. I struggled to understand him.

“Do you owe him money?” I asked.

“No, we were friends at —”

“Yeah, yeah, I got that.” When you’ve been down a good while, people you’ve met at other joints take the place of family. “But are you sure you’re cool with this?” I felt bad about this obviously sick man paying another convict’s debt. On the other hand, I wanted my money.

“That’s ok, I can afford it. I got it like that. I’m going to be dead pretty soon, anyway,” he said, cheerily resigned, though I detected a touch of anger at someone.

“Come on, now,” I said. “Think positive.”

“Nope, I’m done for,” Danny insisted.

“I’m telling you, positive thinking accomplishes miracles.” I say this a lot, even though I am in prison.

I was drawn to Danny. I don’t know why. I’d never known anyone who’d been given a fatal prognosis like his. That he refused to fight or deny it seemed noteworthy somehow.

I later found out that Danny was selling his morphine to the local drug addicts in order to buy sodas, cigarettes, and candy. Pat wasn’t the only one hustling him. A couple of lowlifes pressured him to lend them money daily. With his garbled speech, the predators assumed Danny was mentally handicapped, a crippled man with resources and therefore ripe for the plucking. Danny’s cellie, Whitney, was one of the worst offenders. He had a shaved head and was covered with tattoos of skulls, demons, large-breasted women, and dragons.

There are few ideal cellies on our yard, which is inhabited by people who are either on psych meds, gender confused, or terminal. I ended up here because I take fifteen milligrams of Remeron, supposedly for anxiety. I told the psychiatrists, “Of course I’m anxious. I’m worried about the people who aren’t anxious.” But, eight years into my twenty-two-year sentence (for having robbed banks with a toy gun), I’d decided to keep taking the Remeron because people on psych meds aren’t allowed to be sent to one of the desert prisons. I think of it as antidesert medication.

Danny often complained about Whitney while we played dominoes on the yard: Whitney kicked him out of the cell whenever he wanted privacy. He wouldn’t let Danny smoke in the cell and wouldn’t use an earphone on his tv — a big issue in a cramped space with two televisions. At California Men’s Colony we live in the worst cells in the state. During the day one of the bunks in each cell has to be pushed up and secured to the wall with chains, like in a cartoon. It’s called an “x-bed” (short for “extra bed”). Whitney had forced Danny into the x-bed, which meant Danny couldn’t lie down between the hours of 6:30 a.m. and 8 p.m. Another of the x-bed’s many drawbacks is that the toilet is barely three feet from your head when you’re sleeping.

I was unhappy with my cellmate, Skipper, a bipolar kitchen
worker with anger issues and bowel disorders, so Danny touched on the idea of our becoming cellies. But my cell was on the second floor, and Danny had to live on the first floor because of his limited mobility. And I couldn’t move in with him, because Whitney refused to move out.

We talked about this particular problem on the yard one night while playing dominoes against our usual adversaries, Czech and Sorrow. The four of us gossiped, made up rumors, and talked shit nonstop to keep warm on the cold November evening.

“Twenty-five points! Thanks for the setup, bitch,” crowed Czech.

“Fuck you,” Danny growled happily. “That was blind luck.”

“Say what?”

“Fuck you.”

“Hey, idiots, quit your bullshit and drop a bone. Play the game!” Sorrow said.

“Whose turn is it?” I asked.

“Yours!” everyone yelled.

Danny cursed, accused, and threatened our opponents with damnation and defeat while fingering his dominoes as if they were ancient bones that could tell the future; his hands, little more than a collection of bones themselves, caressed each domino lovingly. He always played exactly right, setting his foes up for disaster, and he would cackle and berate everyone with his broken tongue, including me, his partner. Though it violated protocol, he demanded to mix the dominoes up before each hand, pushing them in complicated circles for longer than necessary until we rudely cursed him, which he enjoyed. We let the dying man perform his drawn-out ritual. Benedicamus Domino (Let us bless the Lord).

Danny continued to complain about Whitney, who hung out with our yard’s skinhead crew. Sorrow was one of the leaders of the skinheads, and when Danny said that Whitney wouldn’t move out, Sorrow replied, “We’ll see about that.”

Whitney heard about our plan through yard gossip and sat next to me the next day at chow. “You don’t want to move in with Danny,” he told me. “He’s nothing but trouble. I have to tie his shoes for him and make him shower. He stinks like cigarettes and smokes pot. Every day I have to remind him to get his meds. He eats his meals in the cell, he’s ungrateful, and you won’t be sleeping, because he moans and groans and mutters all night long. I have to wake him up three or four times a night.” Whitney clenched his fists and turned red at the thoughts rattling in his head.

“Why?” I asked, even though, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in prison, it’s to let angry people wind down and not to question them.

Whitney stared at me, confused that I’d interrupted the flow of his bile and discontent. “Why what?”

“Why do you wake up a guy who is dying every night?”

“So I can sleep. It’s annoying.”

“Danny snores so loud you can’t sleep?”

“No! Aren’t you listening? He makes weird noises, humming and moaning all night. It’s annoying, and you don’t want to move in with him. End of story.”

“If Danny is so much trouble,” I said, “why do you want to stay in a cell with him?”

“Because moving’s a hassle,” Whitney said.

“Look,” I said, “if you want to make the crippled guy move, he and I will find another cell. Do what you have to do. Let me know by tomorrow.”

The next day one of Danny’s neighbors told me that Whitney stole a bunch of Danny’s groceries. All I had to do was drop this information on Sorrow, and he and the skinheads would have felt obliged to get rid of Whitney one way or another, because the skinheads have sworn to protect older or helpless white convicts. But for some reason Danny begged me not to let anybody know about Whitney’s stealing.

It didn’t matter: Whitney decided to move out. He found a newly arrived inmate in another building, which was his only choice, since his reputation as a rude lunatic was known throughout the prison. And so, even though I’d learned over and over that taking on someone else’s troubles can be the last few crumbs of burden that bring the whole thing crashing down, I moved in with Danny.                               

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