He was my cellie for nine months

You asked me twice so I'll tell it and then we're done with it.

Fox Lake. Unit six, upper tier, two-man cell. Nine months with the same guy, which don't really happen, guys get moved around all the time. February to November.

He was from Racine. Terry. Thirty-four. Worked in the laundry and read westerns, Louis L'Amour mostly, and he'd have maybe forty of them under the bunk at any given time. Library cart came Thursdays.

I had the bottom bunk because I was in there first. That's how it works and you don't argue about it, and he didn't argue about it.

He was like six three and that bunk is six foot even. So he slept kind of folded up, which he complained about exactly one time and then never again.

Standing count at four in the afternoon and you gotta be on your feet where they can see your hands. There's one at 9:30. The two o'clock in the morning you just lay there and they come down the tier with a flashlight.

People think it goes dark at night. It don't. There's a little bulb over the door that stays on the whole time so the CO can see in.

I was in the kitchen the whole bid. Up at 3:30. Everybody thinks that's the worst job in there and it ain't. You're out of the cell before anybody else is awake. You eat better too.

Canteen, a soup was 39 cents. The chicken one. Honey buns were 75. He drank the coffee and I don't, so he'd buy the coffee and I'd buy the soups and we'd eat out of whatever was on the shelf. Everybody does that with their cellie or they don't say a word to each other for nine months.

I never asked him what he was in for and he never asked me. People don't believe that but it's normal. Half the guys in there you never find out.

There's a strip by the bunk where you can put pictures up. I had my girls up there, school pictures, the ones where they make them sit in front of that blue background. He didn't have nothing up. I noticed it and I never said nothing about it.

There's no weights no more either, they took all that out years back. Just the bars and the floor. You do that every day for four years because there's nothing else to do with your hands.

July it gets bad in there. No air moving at all. You buy a fan off canteen for twenty-two bucks and it just blows the hot air on you.

First time was July. He came down off his bunk after the 9:30 and got in mine and we had sex, and then he went back up and I laid there. In the morning we went to chow. It's not that deep.

Twice a week after that. Sometimes more than that.

There was a CO named Krause who had our unit Tuesdays and Wednesdays and he'd walk the tier right after the 9:30 and then not come back around till the two o'clock. So you learn the schedule. Everybody in there learns the schedule for their own reasons, that ain't special to me.

One night in August somebody's door popped early for a med pass and you could hear it three cells down, and that was it for that night. Didn't even talk about it. He just went back up.

Guy two doors down, Pope, said something in the dayroom one time. Not to me. To somebody else, and he was laughing when he said it. We stopped for about three weeks after that.

You gotta be right about who knows what in there. I'm not gonna get into it past that.

Then it was Tuesdays again. I don't know what else to tell you.

You keep coming at it from different sides and it's gonna be the same answer.

My sister came up twice the whole four years. It's two hours each way from Milwaukee and she's got her own stuff going on, so I'm not sitting here saying anything about my sister.

I been out fourteen months. First Tuesday of the month I go see my PO downtown. Twenty minutes, same four questions every time. My sister's address is the one on his paper.

I run a press on third out in Oak Creek. Ten at night till six twenty in the morning. It's loud enough you keep the plugs in. You don't talk to nobody for eight hours, which suits me fine. Guy on my line did a bid at Fox Lake too, before my time.

I got my girls every other weekend. Their mom picks which weekend. The little one was in kindergarten in them school pictures and she's in fourth grade now. First week out my sister had to show me how you pay the bus off your phone.

He was easy to live with though, I'll give him that. He kept his stuff on his side. He didn't run his mouth when I was trying to sleep.

Sometimes he'd read a part out loud off one of them books. Some old cowboy saying something smart to another one, and he'd start laughing before he got to the end of it.

They came for him the second week of November, about six in the morning. Pack out. You get a bag and twenty minutes and they don't tell you the night before, because they don't want you telling anybody. He was going to Redgranite.

He said alright. He put his stuff in the bag and the books went back on the cart because you can't take library books with you. Then he put his hand out and I shook it and he was in the hallway.

No, I never looked him up. He's probably out by now. I don't know.

Two days later they put a kid in there from Beloit who talked in his sleep about a car he used to have.