I took a deep breath and let out a sigh. The razor wire had stopped glistening. The cornfields, beyond the fence, had been freshly plowed. It was early May, and they were ready for seeding. The blue water tower in the distance was fading in the sky.
"Parsell," the Guard called out. "You've got mail." He handed me the letter. "News from home."
I took the letter from him. It had already been opened. "Did you read it?" I asked, suspicious of the slight grin on his face. He shrugged and walked away.
"It's from Claudia, my ex-girlfriend," I said to Slide Step.
"Girlfriend?"
I wanted to wait until I was alone to read it, but couldn't with Slide Step there.
"Did she send a picture?" he asked.
"No." I said, for which I was grateful. She was slightly overweight and not that attractive. We were better friends than we were boyfriend and girlfriend. The relationship was more on her insistence than it was on mine. She needed a date for the prom, and I didn't have one. After that, everyone just assumed we were a couple, and it developed from there.
"Out there tryin' to be a man, huh?" Slide Step said.
I swatted him on the arm.
The letter was six weeks old and had been forwarded from Jackson to Riverside.
Dear Tim:
I debated writing you, especially after the ivay things turned out, and the way you treated me those last fewv days, but I thought you should know I'm pregnant.
I stopped reading. "Oh my God!"
"What?
"She's pregnant!"
"By who?"
I looked at him, but ignored his comment.
I don't know what to do. My parents will kill me when they find out.
Her father never liked me. He considered me from the wrong kind of family. And her mom didn't trust me-not since that time she watched inc wrestling with Claudia's younger brother in the back yard. I was sixteen, and John was fifteen, but he already had a slight mustache and when his shirt came up while I pinned him down, the muscles in his stomach were rippled. I looked up and saw Claudia's mom staring at me from the kitchen window. She ordered John to come into the house.
If it were up to me, I never would have slept with her, but she was pretty insistent about that as well. I did it for her, as much to prove to my classmates that I wasn't a fag.
"It could he a good thing that's she pregnant," Slide Step said.
"How so?"
"When you go back to court for sentencing," he said. "The judge might cut you some slack if you tell him you've got a kid on the way."
"Does that make you a grandfather?" I asked.
This time, Slide Step swatted me.
I didn't know what to think. I couldn't imagine being a father. And now especially, what kind of example would I be-a prison punk for a dad. She didn't say what she was going to do. I'd thought for sure, her parents had thrown away my letter before she got a chance to read it.
"You never told me you slept with girls," Slide Step said.
"You never asked," I said. "I told you I'd never slept with a man."
It occurred to me that other than Slide Step, I had no one to confide in. The next closest person was Manley, but he was more like a babysitter, and his loyalty was to Slide Step. So I didn't have anyone I could be open with. Cisco had just been released, and was probably already in search of his gay motorcycle gangbang. No wonder he was called a horny bitch.
I was horny too. It seemed like all I ever thought about was sex. I was seventeen, so if the wind blew slightly, in any direction, my dick got hard. Though it was sex with someone my own age that I was thinking about.
I was constantly ignoring or turning down offers from older convicts that wanted to sneak off somewhere and do something. I wondered how I would feel if I were in a prison with men my own age. Then maybe I wouldn't mind being pimped. It might even be fun, like Silk Daddy said, doing what I like to do and getting paid for it all at the same time. But that was just fantasy stuff that went on inside my head. The only sex I'd had in here was with those I was forced into having it with-and it wouldn't be until I was with someone I liked that I'd know for certain if I was really gay or not. Maybe these homosexual feelings were just a phase I was going through.
When Manley told one about swapping up, having sex with other boys, he referred to it as "bumping pussies." "I don't have a pussy," I told him as I laughed and grabbed my crotch and shook it at him.
"That's OK," he said. "Then you can just rub your big clits together."
I chased him up the hallway, laughing the whole way.
Swapping up with other boys didn't interest me. If I had a type other than someone my own age, it was not a boy or queen. I liked men, masculine men, but other than Scatter Brain, I hadn't seen anyone who aroused me.
Manley said, "I think you'll like Chet's boy, Brett. He's away at court, now, but he's due back any day now. If you like him, ask Slide Step's permission."
"I don't think so," I said.
When Slide Step set me up with Josh, he was able to do so because Josh was white. But since Scatter was black, it was a lot more complicated. Doing something with Scatter would have raised the issue of disrespect to Slide Step, and it potentially could have created an opening for my being knocked off by Scatter.
The men in prison seemed to live by the same rules that pimps did out on the street. If a boy or queen agreed to go along with another man, it was up to the
