man’s balls. Again they laughed. That was it I had had enough. Fuck this job! Heart pumping, sweat and gheri curl juice
dripping down my forehead, I was about to make a B-line towards the gate to get
the fuck out of there! Then my
conscience came into play, ‘Negro you need this job. Man up! What about your family, your kids?’ As I held that note in my hand looking up at
this towering inmate, I thought, ‘Fuck the kids! I am out.’ Then I thought, ‘You’re going to
let this big nigga stop you from getting all that pussy this job has to offer? Oh, hell no!’
With my priorities in the right place, I mustered up some testicles
and was about to handle this big nigga, y eah
right, when all of my tormentors yelled out simultaneously, "Ohh shit! Here comes the C.O.!" ‘What the fuck was I?’ I thought. Then they parted like the Red Sea. I looked ahead expecting some 7-foot 10-inch
Corrections Officer when out of the crowd walked this 105-pound, 4-foot something
female. She had salt and pepper hair and
a pair of glasses that she wore on her nose.
"Back the fuck up!" she yelled
They did. She then
grabbed me by my arm and led me away from the crowd. I looked like a kid that got his ass beat whose
momma had to take him away from all the little kids at the playground. She then screamed to the other female Officer
who had let me in.
"Ooooh girl, they sent me a big one this time,” she
said, “Kinda cute like the rapper Fabulous!”
An inmate yelled out from the upper tier, "Look at that
nigga's gut. You mean more like
Flabulous!” The inmates laughed loud and
hard.
Yeah, so that was the cool dude’s from Harlem first look at
what was to come. The rest of the day
went pretty much like that and when it was over, I tore the gate off its hinges
getting the fuck out of there.
CHAPTER
7
For the next couple of days, classes went on with boring
instructors telling us the do's and don'ts of being a Corrections Officer Academy
style. They were telling us not to mess
around with the inmates, emphasizing that that would
jeopardize our jobs by bringing things to inmates or fraternizing with
them in any way . Point blank, these individuals don't care
about you or your family. They don't
have anything to do all day but scheme on you. They focus on what they can get from you or what they can get you to do
for them. Then they gave us all kinds of
examples of how we could get into trouble. The examples that stood out the most had to do
with undo familiarity, and the use of force. These made sense and at the same time didn’t make any sense at all.
It went like this; you’re now a Corrections Officer. You now have peace officer status. Whoooo! You now have just a teensy bit more police power than the average Joe. I say that to say this, as an almighty Corrections
Officer you’re going to be held in high regard to uphold the law, mainly in the
jails but also to some extent on the streets as well. This also meant that your life, as you know it,
is over. This meant that Juju and Toejoe,
your best-friends since grade school, can no
longer be a part of your life if they have felonies. It states that you’re not to associate with
any known felon. That means if your
grandmoms was a gangster in her hey-day and accumulated some felonies, by Corrections
guideline you can no longer go visit her in the Projects for Christmas. If your neighborhood is anything like mine,
that would be anybody in a fifty mile radius. That means if you are seen hanging out with
people that have felonies or you’re seen in pictures with said individuals, you
can be brought up on charges and could possibly lose your job.
It didn’t make sense to me because I wondered did they
really expect us to turn off our feelings and emotions toward people who have been a part of our lives before we obtained
this job? I
knew right away