“Mr. Caine,” he says, “I want you to tell the court exactly what happened on the night of July 3, 2005.”
I didn’t fucking know what happened.
My lawyer and the DA rushed the bench together. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it looked bad—the judge was getting all red in the face.
When my lawyer came back, he whispered to me, “The deal was, no allocution. We’ll have to straighten him out in chambers.”
They called a recess. I went back to the holding cell. They probably had a long lunch.
When they brought me back in, my lawyer told me, “Just say ‘yes’ every time they ask you a question.”
After that, it didn’t take long. Then they were all finished with me.
The papers said I got five years. They always report the max, never the minimum.
But, this time, they weren’t lying. I knew the Board was never going to cut me loose early. It’s easier to do time when you don’t get yourself all fucked up hoping for something. Hoping for anything, that’s a mistake.
I didn’t last long in the Sex Offender Treatment Unit. Once they finally figured out I was never going to talk about some rape I never did, they kicked me out. That’s when I knew I wasn’t getting any of that “good time” off my sentence for sure.
If you wanted to be in treatment, you had to talk about what you did. They called it “owning your behavior.” I thought that was pretty funny, considering that the only reason you were there was that the State owned your body.
Some stooge—greasy little slob, a real veteran of what they called “group”—he decided to confront me.
“Confront” is what they call it when you get to spit on a guy and he can’t make you pay for doing it. Like calling a man a pussy from the other side of the bars.
“You have to take responsibility, Tim,” he said. “That’s when the healing can begin.”
“The assholes of those little kids you fucked, think they healed up by now, ChiMo?”
“We’re not talking about me.”
“Who’s ‘we,’ ChiMo? I’m talking about you. What’s your problem? Too much fucking ‘stress’? You don’t like it, go back to your cell and jack off some more, you baby-raping sack of puke.”
“No personal attacks,” the whiny little shrink who came in twice a week to run the group said, not looking at me. “And we don’t use terms like ‘ChiMo’ in here.”
“Look in one of those books of yours,” I told the shrink. “See if it tells you what it means, you call a guy ‘ChiMo’ like it’s his name.”
“I know what it means,” he told me, all snotty and superior.
“No, you don’t. You think all it means is ‘child molester’? Maybe in this room. But outside this little ‘group’ of yours, it’s another world. And it’s got different rules.”
“We all agreed—”
“ ‘All’? Me, I didn’t agree to shit.”
I turned in my chair so I could look at all of them, one at a time. “How many of you skinners walk the yard? You, the greasy punk with the beard, you think fucking your own kid makes you special? Yeah, I know, you’re all special, right?”
None of them said a word.
“What’s that tell you?” I asked the shrink.
He looked everywhere but my eyes, rubbed the patch on the elbow of his sport jacket, like it would give him strength. “Societal attitudes—”
“Man, I can see why they all love you. Gonna write a lot of sweet letters to the Parole Board for them, huh? You fucking chump—all that college and you still get played for a retard? Or maybe you just get your rocks off listening to their stories, is that it?”
I crossed my arms. Not to make the biceps pop, the way some of those iron freaks do. Just to wall me off from them … and make them see it. “Me, I’m not in PC,” I said. “I can walk the yard.” I turned to look at the shrink. “You think that’s because of your faggot ‘societal attitudes,’ you don’t know shit. I can walk the yard because the people out there don’t care about what you did to someone else—they only care about what you can do to them.”
When I got back from Yard later, I found the paper in my cell. I knew it had to be from the people who run the place—who else’s got enough juice to get a kite put right on your bunk?