Two Last Best Bar Stories Before I Die

                            

                                                                   Credit: Debbie Hill

Sixty years ago last month you would have found me sitting in Miss Jones’ 2^nd grade class. It doesn’t matter where, my family moved around a lot, but my best guess is that it was Normandie Avenue School in L.A. My teacher’s name was probably not Miss Jones but thru the years she remains an ageless young white woman, who at that time fit the stereotype of an elementary school teacher. Call her Miss Jones for our purpose. She had blond hair, not that that’s important. So, like, she was standing there in front of the class when another teacher entered the room through a side door and went up to Miss Jones and whispered something in her ear. 

This is my memory of the day. 

Our teacher’s face kind of collapsed. The other white lady who had spoken left the room and Miss Jones turned to us and tried to speak. She started to cry and then covered her face with her hands and she ran from the room. The voice of the school principal came on the public address system overhead.

“President Kennedy has been assassinated,” he said. “Class is over for today. You can go home.” 

We—the students in my 2^nd grade class—started to jump up and down and shout with joy. Because we didn’t know what “assassinated” meant but we know what you can go home means. 

Walking away from school that day with an older student, who knew what assassinated meant, he explained the word to me and that something bad had happened. My point would be that you have to know your audience. You have to know the maturity level, or education, or whatever, of whoever you’re talking to. To communicate effectively it’s super-important. Do people understand what you’re actually saying? Like, literally. When you’re communicating with someone it’s the first question to ask yourself really—no matter the circumstances. Be sure to do a mike check too. 

When a storyteller reaches a certain age, fear sets in. About the most important tales that you know but still haven’t gotten around to telling. That worry can also be true about so-called “bar stories,“ my favorite kind of anecdotes actually, of lives widely spent, that you would tell a co-worker after hours. Bellied up to the bar or at a corner table if you were doing serious drinking, after putting the workday behind. Telling others about the kind of happenings in your life that you might not find cause to mention otherwise. 

The kind of stories you trade in order to decide who pays for the next round, does that make sense? 

So, like, the big concern about aging is not just that you may die before you get the chance to tell somebody something. But also that you may not have the faculties left to say what you want to say. The way you want to say it. Or memory fades. That you may not still have all your marbles, as my mother used to say. She never lost hers, btw. 

My own memory has been underperforming recently. That risky age has been reached, it may be the weed but it could be the synapses, you feel me? 

My very real concern has been about losing to posterity two particular anecdotes that should be shared with somebody leaning over a bar. This may be last call. The answer to “Where were you when John Kennedy was shot?” is one. That’s the kind of question that people of my age ask each other, in between sips of tequila.

That anecdote was about something that happened in Dallas and the other one is about something that happened in Jerusalem. One was short and the other requires a little set-up. Overall this will be brief. Take another sip or another hit, as the case may be. My second anecdote is completely unrelated to the first and is instead about current—not historical—events.

Those immigrant workers on the kibbutzim attacked by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7? That could’ve been me, in a prior age, back in the proverbial day. Bold and potentially self-serving words, you may say, this guy is a drama queen trying to insert himself into international news. Not exactly. Take a moment and listen. Order another drink if you like—this one’s on me. So, like, years ago during the era of My Young Black Manhood, which lasted into my late 40s, those kibbutz agricultural workers who got snatched would have been a lot of American and European college-aged kids like me, who went to Israel to work for a few months or a few years, as volunteers—mitnadvim—in Israel’s agricultural fields. To set the scene.

Being a kibbutz volunteer was a job—kind of—six hours of labor six days a week, you got room and board, also a little pocket money and the chance to explore the Holy Land on your days off. You also got two packs of cigarettes a week if you were a smoker, that was the age, there were still smoke breaks at work, and if the kibbutz truck delivering the fruit or whatever was going anywhere interesting you could hitch a ride. You could plan your trip based upon successful hitchhiking because everyone thumbed everywhere. That was the Start Up Nation that Israel calls itself today. People hitched rides to get to appointments. 

As a kibbutz volunteer you got the chance to see another culture up close—eating with, working with and sleeping with the locals. My turn came in late ‘76, money running low while backpacking in North Africa after dropping out of UCLA. To set the scene. Someone told me about the kibbutz movement and after that my trek to Eretz Israel was like thousands of others before me. It was like we were First World refugees, laying on the deck of the ferry from Greece to Haifa and catching some rays, chatting up each other in various languages and listening on transistor radios to “Dancing Queen,” which had just come out. We were all going to do seasonal work in the Middle East. Which sounds totally dodgy today but was what you did if you were a twentysomething on the road, backpacking in Europe back in the day. 

It was a two-day trip from Greece across the Med, all of Israel’s land borders were closed and the only way in or out was by ferry or by plane, at a time when airplane tickets were still extraordinarily expensive. Followed by a short train trip to Tel Aviv—it’s a small country. This is my memory of the logistics. A bus to the Jewish Agency where an old man pointed at a map on the wall and told me that my new job was as an agricultural worker in the Jordan Valley. To set the scene finally. This was almost exactly half a century ago. The Jewish State then was still getting good press as an underdog in an area of the world where peril lurked and always has. Israel’s rep as a bully with a big uncle hadn’t yet been earned. 

Would you like another round? 

My worklife on kibbutz included picking bananas and avocados in the Galilee and weeding row crops near Jerusalem. Worked for a while with chickens, which are mean, hateful animals, and turkeys which are, like, so dumb it’s hard to describe. Working in the turkey shed, hundreds of birds around my feet, it was possible to believe the reports of these guys looking up in a rain storm and drowning, not that that’s important here. It was a wonderful time, actually, the Israelis were completely cool, never saw any racial prejudice on kibbutz or in the outside community, unlike at home. Except one time. Which is the subject of my second anecdote, my second best bar story left to tell. 

So, like, where the Israelis did draw a distinction though, in my experience, was between who was Jewish and who was not. That was the racial line, like color in the U.S., you might say. The Izzies really seemed to believe “the chosen people” thing too, which is not a big conversation starter with those of us from other cultures. You feel me? And which is anathema to black people in general who believe in the equality of all peeps and that no group is better than any other. But it was the Izzies' home and my upbringing was that you don’t criticize your host in his/her own crib. And there’s just not enough time til closing to get into all that here.

My first kibbutz—there would be four, through the years. The other three were all in the Galilee near the border of Lebanon and were populated by sabras, Israel-born Jews who knew the Arabs better than the new arrivals, it seemed, and called them “the cousins.” Most of the time. That’s a stereotype but it was kind of true of my experience.

My first kibbutz, on the other hand, was full of young American Jews who had come to the Middle East on a mission. This is where my second anecdote really begins. 

So, like, it’s a bad idea to try to generalize so long after the fact but stereotyping can still be a useful exercise. A shortcut to understanding, you might say. The Jewish kids at my first kibbutz were earnest and armed to the teeth—a fire in their eyes and all that—not that there’s anything wrong with that. Not to exaggerate, either. This assessment comes from what we know now, much more than any sudden recognition on my part at the time. But they were basically the kind of people, in hindsight, who are settlers in the West Bank today. It was that mindset, is that fair? Probably yeah. 

Although you didn’t know that at the time because you were a kid mostly looking to get laid and Gaza as we know it today hadn’t happened yet. Or was in its early stages of happening? The guys and girls on my first kibbutz were zealots—Zionists, although that noun wasn’t part of my vocabulary at the time. They were Southern California-born white kids who had probably been in some of my classes back in Westwood and who were now building a country. On somebody else's land? Seeing through the lens of a Hollywood screenplay is also possible—and that’s still popular both in Israel and in the U.S. today. The hero of that plot is the quintessential Israeli cowboy. These guys and girls see themselves as settlers on a frontier populated not by Native Americans but by Muslims. Who are the hostiles, would that be an oversimplification? It's not Winchesters anymore, it's M-4s. Not much has really changed thru the years in terms of the narrative. Flawed though it may be. 

My arrival in the Holy Land was purely based upon needing a place to crash for winter. But all in all, my stays on kibbutzim would total more than two years. Being a volunteer on a kibbutz full of young people turned out to be fun. You could be riding to work on a tractor in the morning and sitting next to you was a member of the Swedish Bikini Team. Or an ex-Japanese paratrooper just out of the army and also seeing the world. One winter the granddaughter of a former British prime minister worked with me in the communal kitchen of a leftist-led kibbutz in the Galilee. She was smoking hot, btw, the product of being fine thru generations of wealthy well-bred white women. There were radical intellectual Jewish chicks filling out IDF uniforms and carrying matching accessory assault rifle. There's just something about a Palestinian woman who looks like she knows her way around an AK-47, wouldn't you agree? Israel exposed me to a world that was beyond my imagination in terms of the variety of chicks alone. Not to sound superficial but in Israel the chicks were always hot.

Sex—not drugs or alcohol—was the social lubricant. On the kibbutzim where money was not the means of exchange, often pussy and dick were. In the Jordan Valley with the American kids for example there was a squad of soldiers assigned for security, who walked around in work clothes and looked like ordinary kibbutzniks but were there to protect a settlement in Indian Country, so to speak, if the Southern California cowboys couldn't handle it. To set the scene. 

So, like, one day a couple of totally hot little Jewish girls from New Jersey arrived as “volunteers” and instead of having to work in the fields like the rest of us, they stayed in their rooms, with a line of soldiers going in one at a time. Pulling an IDF train was their way of supporting the State of Israel. How cool is that? 

That is not the second of my last two important bar stories, btw. We’re getting closer. The girls from New Jersey would not actually even be in my top ten list of best bar stories from a life widely not necessarily well-lived. The Jersey girls are mentioned only to set the scene. The kibbutz was close to Jerusalem. You know who the Bedouins are, right? 

So, like, they are an Arab peep—not being an expert myself and basically pulling this from my ass or from Wikipedia. And having gotten it wrong before. But the relationship of the Bedouins with their neighbors the Palestinians has been fraught. To say the least. Because everyone’s relationship with everyone else in the Middle East has been fraught? Is that fair? “A widely quoted Bedouin [saying],” according to Wikipedia, “‘I am against my brother, my brother and I are against my cousin, my cousin and I are against the stranger,’" sometimes quoted as, "I and my brother are against my cousin, I and my cousin are against the stranger." That’s all the background you need. Take another sip, we’re almost there. This will be a whole lot better than Miss Jones of Normandie Avenue School.

So, like, my contact with the Bedouins was limited to their service in the Border Police. You’d see the border cops in the kibbutz fields because the kibbutz was near Jordan and was on land that had been a “depopulated” Palestinian settlement, whatever that means. And because Israel is a small country. You’re always near a border. Or, later, at my next kibbutz, near Lebanon—you’d see B.P. for the same reason—you were next to a dodgy international frontier. Walking through the second kibbutz’s banana plantation, in the Western Galilee, you came around a tree at 6 o’clock in the morning and a Bedouin in a Border Police uniform was just standing there, staring at you. Silent and stealthy—not shifty, that’s not my intent. The Bedouins are known as great trackers actually, and that is what the Israelis employ them to do in the Border Police. In the Western movie narrative that the Izzies like so much—to describe their struggle with the Palis—the Bedouins are the “Indian scouts” who work for the cavalry that is led by Ariel Sharon or Bibi Netanyahu but previously John Wayne or Henry Fonda? That’s not a completely accurate analogy but it works. The Border Police also patrol Jerusalem. 

So, like, my first kibbutz was close to the aforementioned J’town. We worked until noon or early afternoon and were free for the rest of the day and some afternoons were spent in the city, after hitchhiking in or taking a sherut, the big Mercedes touring cars that served as taxis, that the Germans sent to Israel as reparations for the Holocaust? Not that that’s important here. So, like, me walking down the street in Jerusalem one day, minding my own black business the way the Constitution says a man has a right to do? Guess what happened. This is worth the price of a damn drink.

The Border Police stopped me! No lie. They jacked me up just like pigs back home in the U.S. do. 

And you know what they said when they realized their mistake? 

“Sorry. We thought you were Palestinian.”

That is my last best bar story and you have to admit it’s pretty damn good. It’s totally superior to the New Jersey girls who came to the Holy Land to pull a train. And is only told now because weed has replaced alcohol in my diet and in case fate makes today my last on earth—that kind of thinking, you know? Not to get all gloomy as an oldster. Like, if God asked me, “Do you have anything else to say before I pull the celestial plug?” my reply would be, “Can I tell you first about what happened to me in Jerusalem?”

 It had to be told. 

And if people notice a certain similarity between Black Lives Matter and the struggle of the Palis against the Izzies, that’s because there is a certain similarity. It’s also why African Americans want nothing to do with attempts to seek our support for the wrong side in the quarrel. Black people know oppression when we see it. This refusal on our part seems to upset American Jews inordinately, who say that black people owe the Jewish community for support during the civil rights struggle. 

That’s an incomplete narrative, actually. Over seven hundred black GIs died in combat during the Second World War, fighting to liberate Jews from the Nazis. We’ve already paid a lot. We owe American Jews money but they owe us blood. We’re in each other’s debt in other words and black people won’t be silenced. The Bombing of Gaza needs to stop. 

Notes from the Texas Gulag

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You may ask, like, how did you first know you were in an alternate universe of health care? The answer is one word. Actually two words—an acute medical condition. Jaw fracture. 

Having worked adult trauma at the county hospital in Austin back in the day and having seen a couple of jaw fractures in my time, not to sound all cocky—but that’s guys in nursing, isn’t it? We call it the way we see it and don’t sugarcoat like the chicks do. A lot of boy-nurses like to lean in with our testicles, instead of pushing nuts aside, you feel me? It’s like that working in a prison hospital too. This is a pretty tough crowd on both sides of the nurses station glass. 

At Hospital Galveston the number of prisoners with broken jaws seemed, well, extraordinarily high. According to my estimate as a nurse who has done trauma before. Inordinate, isn’t that the word? As in IFH—inordinately fucking high. Like really fucking way high, bro, as one might say to a colleague while waiting for a turn at n the narcotics cabinet but not write in a learned nursing journal. Taking report from the ER nurse or from the day nurse on my own unit—at change of shift, at Hospital Galveston, on Galveston Island, home to Texas prison system health care. To set the scene. The cause of the broken jaws always seems to be the same thing, that the prisoner “slipped in his cell” and hit his face on the metal sink. 

The report from the ER nurse is on the phone but report from the prior shift about the patient who is now my responsibility for the next twelve hours is in person at the nurse’s station, or even better standing next to the bed and looking at the patient in the hospital bed. Night shift starts at 7 p.m. So, like, “jaw fracture,” the day shift nurse described the cause of the prisoner’s injury as “hit the sink,” while the day nurse giving report raised the index and middle fingers of both hands in the air—and said it, you know while wiggling those fingers. Like making quotation marks, “slipped and fell,” like, sure. Wiggling his fingers to emphasize doubt because the guy had almost certainly broken his jaw while getting the shit kicked out of him in prison. Hello! Not to sound all cynical or anything. Later, doing a physical assessment of the same guy—the prisoner with the broken jaw—he looked me full in the eye and mumbled very convincingly that he had indeed slipped or fell. That was “the mechanism of injury” like the ED doc would call it. Hard surface instead of blunt force or whatever when three guys got you alone in the shower. 

A good nurse doesn’t always need to know what caused an injury in order to know how to take care of the patient. An Officer explained to me, btw, the only thing worse than getting the shit kicked out of you in TDCJ is being labelled a snitch, which can be fatal. Whereas a broken jaw is only painful. Until you come to come to Galveston Island to have the fracture set. 

Another nurse who used to be a guard gave me a critical insight regarding prison health and all these broken jaws. The real mechanism of injury is machismo. Testosterone is another drug that flows freely in Lone Star prisons, in addition to weed and meth. In this dangerous environment the risk is not a small cell with a metal sink but a lot of young guys who are trying to establish their rank in a hierarchy. Or who may have big mouths and say the wrong thing to the wrong peeps. You know? Most of these broken jaw guys are young —young to me—in my experience some of them do indeed have a mouth on them. But how is the black male caregiver—culturally humble and conscious of his own biases—to act? Is it my place to judge, as Florence Nightingale might ask. What should one think of the way my brown brother from Laredo or from Eagle Pass, who got caught robbing a supermarket, expresses his pain? Is that really my place? To determine if he’s a bitch or not? Is that really the RN’s call? A lot of Hospital Galveston patients just want to take a painkiller and watch TV.

 The broken jaw guys are mostly Latinos, not to stereotype. A nurse from Galveston County Jail which is on the other end of the island told me that at her lockup it’s black eyes. “I’ll ask them,” she said, “how’d you get a black eye and they’ll say that they fell. It’s always the young guys.” 

On a 1 to 10 scale the pain is always 10, that’s been my experience too, civilian broken jaws and the prison kind too. Until the swelling goes down. When they’re first out of surgery the broken jaw guys kind of look like chipmunks and can only mumble, usually to ask for more meds. So, like, that’s an introduction to Hospital Galveston. It’s a shithole, basically, the Texas Gulag—like the Black Hole of Calcutta without the hole. It’s a job to me. Outside the prison hospital, the island’s main moneymakers are tourism and health care/research at University of Texas Medical Branch, which is the name of the academic medical center that has the contract to care for the state’s prisoners, not to repeat myself, who get shipped in from across the Lone Star State. By ambulance and by bus. That’s the system. Medical Branch is my employer but the Texas Department of Criminal Justice—aka the state prison system, TDCJ as it is fondly know —did my pre-employment security check and had to okay the hire. In the past, Galveston’s employers were not so picky about using black labor. The city’s original business was cotton—not corrections. 

The textile was produced by slaves up in the Brazos River Valley where my Daddy’s family is from actually, and was exported from the Port of Galveston, behind campus, where my maternal great grandfather worked on the docks. To set the scene. This is where Juneteenth was declared, also up the street from campus, you probably know that already if you’ve heard of Galveston before. At the end of the Civil War. That Act of Liberation freed Daddy’s family from life on an East Texas plantation, while Mother’s people arrived from the Caribbean as what she called “monkey-chasers from Jamaica.” Her language, not mine. Who came to Galveston after Emancipation as free men to work on the docks. Or so we were told. To set the scene again. Galveston is my ancestral home. Here or Brenham in the Brazos Valley where Father’s family was from. My belief is that my mother was born in the same hospital that now employs me, but on the maternity department’s black side. 

The local history center says there was an African American hospital built on the island just after the Great Hurricane of 1900, but pushback from white residents shut it down. Again, Galveston Island is Old South and some vestiges of plantation life and the cotton economy remained years later and remain still. There’s supposed to be a photograph in the Galveston archives from the days immediately after the 1900 storm showing white men holding guns on Black People and forcing them to clean up the debris and bodies after the storm. Not having seen the photo myself. Medical Branch is also my alma mater, btw, where my Highest Honors graduation in the Science of Nursing took place two decades ago, not to brag. My nursing job back then, back in the day, was nights in the Children’s Hospital, now it’s nights on the prison side taking care of old men and old women who may be on their last ride in Texas, off into the sunset. The similarities between pediatric nursing and prison nursing are that both begin with the letter p and both involve substances that begin with p. Like pee. And poop. To set the scene yet again. This may be way too much information but did you know that a newborn’s pee can be odorless? And a baby’s poop can be almost fragrant up to, oh, about a couple of weeks after birth or so? That’s my experience working in a hospital nursery and having changed more than the average black man’s share of baby bottoms. Not like you would want to dab a little baby poop behind your ear before going out on a date or anything but relatively speaking, as seen thru the caregiving lens. 

A few months into a baby’s life the stink starts to attach, for whatever reason, while the poop of a 60-year-old—like some of these old prisoners at Hospital Galveston, in the custody of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the aforementioned TDCJ? Some of the shit here emits an aroma that is positively fucking deadly all the time. Not to be graphic, but opening the diaper of an old inmate—like many of Hospital Galveston’s patients, not to repeat myself—can be like taking a hit of poison gas in the trenches of World War I. You know, back back back in the day? Not having been there personally but having read the history. My old job at Medical Branch included changing diapers on a lot of babies and lately it’s been changing diapers on a lot of old men who the Texas prison system will not release even if the inmate is too feeble to use the urinal or to turn himself in bed. Prisoners like these remain dangerous, officially. The State of Texas and Governor Abbott are making a big policy mistake regarding these ill inmates, it seems to me as someone on the front lines of health care, which is a phrase that nurses started using liberally during the COVID pandemic and that some would say applies here. The bureaucratic error by the State of Texas does not involve keeping a lot of apparently harmless old men behind bars, long after they are no longer a danger to society. There may actually be a good reason to do that, they may not have anywhere else to go. Bad care might be better than none at all. Some of these folks on Unit 7C of Hospital Galveston, which is my home unit btw, have nowhere else to receive care. 

Like the cancer patients who want oncology treatment and will commit a crime to get it? Instead this time it’s a different dynamic entirely and is driven by land, actually, like everything else in Texas. The sheer fucking size of the state. The size of the Lone Star State has to be figured into every public policy decision and that didn’t happen here, with TDCJ, and the results have been murderous. Someone just forgot—most likely a Democrat, back in the day when the D’s were still in power. 

So, like, Texas is a big place and that’s a big problem for prison health care because inmates have to be transported to receive care. From dozens of lost pissspot locales across the state, where the last generation of prisons was built. Which was a Texas-sized bad policy decision by state government, mostly the fault of Yellow Dog Democrats, liberal by allegiance, but without much common sense, not so much evil Republicans like you would normally expect. Evil is also afoot today at Medical Branch and at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which are the euphemistic titles of the Gulag that employs me. This diary of working nights on 7C—this healthcare confession—is Hospital Galveston Confidential. It chronicles my last patient care job, nights in correctional health care, looking out from a prison tower on the sunny Gulf Coast. The Island is a major vacation spot too but my patients never see to the beach. Galveston is known for humid days, balmy nights, mosquitos the size of sparrows—with global warming the little fuckers never die off. The beach water is cloudy all the time because the Mississippi mixes with the Atlantic here. That’s all the geography you need to know. The history is that Galveston used to be the richest and most important city in Texas but isn’t anymore. It's still kinda Old South—in good and bad ways. There used to be a slave market downtown actually, not to sound all medieval. The island has kind of a New Orleans corrupt/sinful feel but the music and the food aren’t as good as in N.O. and the corruption not as palpable. Galveston is where hurricanes hit directly, right? Climate isn’t my best subject, while New Orleans is inland and doesn’t get as much flooding? So, like, every decade or so a big storm hits Galveston Island and washes away the sin, you could say. The prison bus brings it back again. 

You probably want to know the most depressing aspect of prison health care, people generally want to know to the worst first. Who was my scariest patient and what were the most freaky or macabre crimes? If you’re a sentimentalist like me, you would probably agree about a really heartbreaking young guy during my time working the floor. He was a black stick-up artist from South Texas—maybe 22 or 23 years old. He was a good looking kid who probably got more than his share of pussy in the Free World, not that that’s important here. So, like, he had breast cancer. Yes, men do get breast cancer but it’s rarer obviously than with women. There was an opportunistic infection spread everywhere across his chest too, oncology is not my area either, like an alien microbe? Like something escaped from the National Lab, which is just down the street on campus, actually, Biosecurity Level 4, or whatever—Wuhan-on-the Gulf, as it might be called. 

That is Galveston Island. That’s the Medical Branch campus. To set the scene again. The far end of the island includes the freaks and ghouls who live on the water along the causeway leading to Houston. The near end is Medical Branch and all these doctors and scientists. And the prison hospital in an undisclosed location on campus. So, like, this black kid with breast cancer was in a lot of pain but he was always polite and reasonable about any delay with his meds. He knew he was dying and he died with dignity. 

Another nurse told me that this particular Black Gunslinger—Texas produces too many, although their storylines can be surprisingly uplifting. He was waiting for his grandmother to visit him before letting go, seen through the lens of the lone Black Cowboy narrative. Before setting off on his last lonely ride? That’s what happened, actually. His grandmother came to see him and he died down in ICU. Mostly there doesn’t seem to be a lot of tearjerking drama, or none that anyone is talking about at the nurses station, where it’s my practice to listen in. This is a busy med-surg unit, you feel me, with guards on the door. Some of these patients are precisely the mean mofos that the State of Texas says they are but others are probably entirely innocent, that’s my professional view, as seen through an injustice lens. And that includes the women, there are some super scary ladies on the unit, call me so not-a-gentleman if you will. 

There were two old ladies in a room a little while ago, one was my patient and one not—one black and one white. To set the scene. The black prisoner had whacked her mother back in the day and the white lady distributed parts of her significant other over a number of West Texas counties. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. She wanted to spread the love. Some people might call it romantic. 

The two of them got along like peas in a pod, at night they didn’t seem to sleep, you’d go into the room in the middle of the night to give meds or on rounds or whatever, it’s the middle of the fucking night and they’re lying there in bed in the dark chattering like teenagers after lights out. Just a couple of old ladies who had a shared history of homicide of loved ones. Or.it was like they’re chatting on the porch back of the nursing home, back home in Pisspot, in the pineywoods this side of the Louisiana state line? 

Hospital beds are supposed to be kept low to the ground, to avoid falls, but the black murderess—the lady who whacked her mom? She asked me to raise her all the way up and leave her high, against the rules. The risk being me getting a write-up—disciplined, which the prudent nurse tries not to do. Until she explained that being high gave her a view through the security window looking out on the Port of Galveston, ships coming and going and all that. And my heart melted. It was the kind of scene she probably hadn’t seen in 20 years and would never see again. She was very sweet and she had good veins which is unusually important to nurses. Because this prison is part of a major research institution—Medical Branch, my employer and alma mater. 

There are a lot of labs to be collected. A lot of blood taken and given. So, like, any R.N.—me or any of my co-workers, we might say about one of the patients, the two old ladies in the room or anyone else, “Oh yeah, he killed a family of five. But he has good veins if you need to stick him.” We say good veins like it’s a positive personality trait. 

Killing a family of five is actually pertinent to any discussion of Hospital Galveston, btw, which is what this healthcare facility is officially called—Texas prison healthcare central, run by the University of Texas Medical Branch. Aka the Lone Star Gulag. Where sick inmates of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice are cared for or come to die. To set the scene again. 

You will recall from the news last year that a convicted murderer—a man named Lopez—escaped TDCJ medical transport. Offender Lopez—those people, what can you say? Not to sound all racist or anything but American blacks have tried to show Latinos that crime is not the way! The Latino community has been maddeningly slow to take our advice and good counsel. But we digress. 

So, like, Offender Lopez escaped from a TDCJ bus on his way to the TDCJ hospital in Huntsville and while on the run he killed a grandfather and four kids at the family vacation home somewhere up near Waco? Does that sound familiar? It was all over the news last year, for a while. Texas produces more than its share of mass killers and sometimes it’s hard to sort them out. Late last year? Before being killed himself in a gunfight with police, down near S.A., isn’t that right? Wasn’t that the chain of events? So, like, the escape of Gustavo Artemio Lopez has produced a lot of handwringing by officials at the Texas Capitol and for good reason, the barbarity of the crime was shocking. A family on an isolated ranch slaughtered. But it’s actually just the latest TDCJ-related bloodletting. Because at all hours of the day and night, sick and allegedly-sick prisoners—the maimed and the dying—guys with broken jaws—are traveling on Texas highways going to and from Hospital Galveston or Texas Tech, in the West Texas prairie, which also takes care of Long Star State prisoners. To set the scene yet again. 

So, like, this guy who killed the family was on his way from his prison unit to a non-emergency medical appointment in Huntsville when he escaped. That’s what Jolie McCulloch of the Texas Tribune reported right off. Let’s start there. This chain of events was confirmed when the State of Texas issued a much-anticipated public report—a white paper full of alleged facts about Offender Lopez‘s slaughter of the innocents and what may have been his unleashed anger at his unlawful detainment, depending on the lens used. There was just a single word redacted from the state report on the first paragraph—regarding what kind of appointment the killer was on his way to, when he got away and started to whack people. A big hint is that the word that was blacked-out has seven letters and begins with m, like “medical.” Or six letters and begins with h, like “health.” And we know that because the rest of the 20-odd pages goes into great detail about the difficulties and risks of transporting patients from prison units across the state to hospitals in Lubbock and in Huntsville and on Galveston Island on the balmy Gulf Coast. 

TDCJ, the state prison system, is a keep-the-lid-on-a-problem kind of state agency, not the get-ahead-of-the-curve kind which is less common in Lone Star government. Conservative means liking things the way they are both in Huntsville, where the prisons historically have been headquartered, and at the State Capitol. We’re going to do some of the heavy lifting for TDCJ here and explain what the risks are for keeping state prison inmates healthy in Texas. It’s an important subject—and don’t forget why. The Big Picture is appalling, courtesy of Big Data. The U.S. imprisons more people than any other country in the world. And Texas really loves to lock people up and follows only the federal government and the State of California in number of people behind bars. At TDCJ’s 100 or so units or prisons. 

An oncology nurse at Hospital Galveston told me the other day about sitting down beside an inmate with cancer, in order to start an IV to give the guy chemotherapy. The inmate said to her, “I could grab that needle and stick it in your eye before you could do anything about it.” Naturally the oncology lady was taken aback and distracted from completing her task and she called her supervisor to come and try to start the line to give the guy his chemo. Because sometimes, for whatever reason, there needs to be a different nurse. But the supervisor came and was also frightened and declined to treat and the prisoner was returned to his home unit, in Shitville, Texas, which is just a little past Ft. Worth. Without receiving the care that he had come to Medical Branch to receive. There’s not much patience for behaviors by patients, btw, that’s my impression working here, the hospital is run by the University of Texas, btw, as mentioned above. Any prisoner who refuses care or who threatens/commits violence will almost inevitably be sent back to serve out the sentence without treatment, because there’s always another prisoner who does want care and who will cooperate and not endanger healthcare workers. That’s the theory and it appears fair in practice, no? Something else that the oncology nurse said is also pertinent.

Some of TDCJ’s inmates with cancer diagnoses who have served their sentences, and been released, will commit another crime on the outside—in the so-called Free World. Can you guess why? Because TDCJ is one of only two sources of free cancer care in the Lone Star State. To set the scene again. The inmate wants to come back to prison for free chemo, so he does another crime and gets caught—or whatever—is that how it works? Or do you call Capitol Hill and threaten your congressman because prosecution will be federal and the health care is better in federal prison? How is that for fucked-up incentives? Hospital Galveston is kind of a weird environment, yeah, for a couple of reasons not related to its exceptional patient population.

There may be questionable incentives in prison health care too, just like in the Free World. Especially if your prior experience is Free World health where health care is also fucked up but fucked up in a different way. 

 

 

         

 

ii)

 

TDCJ buses are all white, you can’t miss them on the causeway to the island. This is Texas’s Devils Island, just like French Guiana off the damn coast of South America. The prisoners’ uniforms are all white too. 

The buses are going to and from the Gulag, not to repeat myself, on the way to medical appointments, riding hundreds of miles to see a provider at a hospital in Galveston or in Lubbock or Huntsville. It’s a logistics nightmare and dangerous as can be. To set the scene. So, like, the kid with breast cancer who was waiting for his grandmother to visit so that he could die? You wouldn’t believe it coming from Hollywood but it’s Hospital Galveston on a micro level. 

There’s also the macro view, during the pandemic the number of state prisoners dropped because courthouses were closed and there were few new arrivals on the bus from the county jail. Now the courts are up and running again and people are being locked up, which is the way we like our jurisprudence in the Lone Star State. There’s no better remedy for wrongdoing than twenty years in TDCJ, that’s what a lot of Texas juries believe. Or until you get the ultimate treatment—the injection that cures all ills, like riding Old Lightning did back in the day. 

Hospital Galveston which is what the prison hospital at Medical Branch is officially called—my employer—serves inmates in state prisons in about eighty percent of the state, an area roughly the size of France. Patients from units like Rosharon, Coffield and Gatesville, where the ladies stay, all east of the Pecos River, all come to Medical Branch. While sick inmates west of the Pecos, like Montford, Mechler, or Clements are seen by providers in Lubbock, at Texas Tech. Where my advanced study in nursing is now taking place, at the Health Sciences Center. To set the scene again. 

My graduate advisor was actually working in Tech’s ED in Lubbock back in the day, that day—like early 2000s: A TDCJ prisoner who had been brought in for treatment tricked a guard and escaped and raped two Tech nurses. That’s the considerable. downside of the job. After being hired at UTMB for 7a to 7p, the dreaded night shift—my orientation included a lecture on safety for new employees, given by an Officer, which is how the TDCJ guards are called.

So, like, this Officer—she was kind of hot, actually, not that that’s important here. 

She told us in this security orientation about the wily ways of prisoners who will want to seduce us or trick us. You feel me? And that got my attention big time, especially when she said, “TDCJ does not negotiate.”

 In case of hostage-taking, like what happened to the two nurses in Texas Tech’s ED, who were held hostage and assaulted? The hot Officer said that prisoners have been known to trap the nurse or nurse’s aide in a room and push the bed in front of the door, to bar entry and exit and—presumably—then start issuing demands. That TDCJ, headquartered in Huntsville, in the pineywoods of East Texas, will ignore. Just so you know. Not so sound all brave or anything. 

In fact there’s a bloody history of hostage taking at TDCJ, at a unit in Huntsville actually, amongst the drooping moss and concertina wire of East Texas, that did not end well for the hostages. You have to understand and approve of TDCJ’s non-negotiation policy theoretically—on a macro level, on a macho level if you will. That is completely laudable. But on a micro level it’s my ass as mentioned above. It got my attention big time, you know, when the Officer told us that. To set the scene again. 

The other thing the TDCJ lady said was to treat all the prisoners the same. She meant in the sense of considering all of these folks to be potentially dangerous, without wondering why a particular individual is in custody of the State of Texas. This was probably good advice but if you’re curious—and like to know details—TDCJ assigns a risk level to each inmate that has as much or more to do with their behavior in prison than whatever evil or alleged evil that got the person behind bars in the first place. Assuming that the inmate really is a villain and not merely a political prisoner of the Lone Star State. Who do exist, in great number, most of whom having two things in common, they are black and locked up. 

A Black Man or even one of my Latino Brothers who has refused to bow down to The Man and shot it out with the pigs instead? 

Couldn’t that be the real backstory on the guy under my care right now in Bed 3? 

So, like, the TDCJ lady at our new hire in-service said not to worry why the inmate was sentenced to prison, unless he or she is completely a mad fiend, my words not hers. In that case you may want to know. Like, again my words not hers. If the patient has a free-world history of strangling people you may not want to expose your neck when leaning over to listen to the heart, right? That would be my take on proper patient assessment. 

But what’s most important is behavior behind bars not what he or she allegedly did before the prison gate closed, so to speak, that’s what the Officers all say. That advice actually jibes with Nursing’s Prime Directive that everyone should be treated equally. And as a practical matter you’re too busy on a busy hospital unit to look up a patient’s alleged crimes and misdemeanors because, as the Officer said, it doesn’t really matter. 

Cellulitis on a guy who hacked up and barbecued Aunt Lucy looks just like cellulitis on a bank robber or a member of the Mexican Mafia. Hello! Or a member of the Black Liberation Army who has been wrongfully accused, you feel me? The guilty and the innocent are indistinguishable in the nursing context, and everyone deserves to be pitied in the custody of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, whoever the patient is and whatever they’ve done, for the love of God. Not to sound all noble but as an experienced RN. Having said that, TDCJ is a shithole. If you’re asking my professional opinion. 

So, like, that’s been the trend during my brief time at Hospital Galveston, having been quickly involved in the care of a lot of people. Not to bitch or anything but they said at the hiring fair that the ratio of patients on med-surg was 5 to 1 for nurses on nights but really it’s always six. Not to be all disappointed or anything because all hospitals lie about nurse staffing levels, in my modest opinion. It’s six on days too, btw, at 7C, which is especially hard to do on day shift with all the doctors getting in the way and asking for shit and the procedures and studies, or whatever. The night charge nurse also gets six, which makes me sad, to tell you the truth. Not to bitch about work or patient ratios or anything, but Hospital Galveston is a busy place. 

There are times after a patient interaction when you may just want to know, you know, whether it’s useful knowledge or not to the primary mission of caregiving.

“What is this guy in for?” 

Because the patient is really strange or a pain or threatening or whatever. So, like, my curiosity about a patient has only been piqued a few times—and luckily, TDCJ offers a way to satisfy my interest. With its “Inmate Search” app that tells you what unit a prisoner is on—across the hundred TDCJ units in the great expanse of the Lone Star State. What crime he or she was sentenced for. Length of sentence and in what county the trial took place. The Internet is the next step from there and you’ve got your guy or girl and can read up. Sometimes it does help to learn what you can on what may turn out to be a challenging patient. To cut to the chase, of those patients who got me wondering, probably eighty percent were men and about half of those were convicted of sex offenses, often involving kids. Of the other half, half of the half (25% for those who are math-challenged like me) were your average murderers and armed robbery-types, gunslingers of some kind or another, and the rest were drug offenses, dealing not so much possession like you might expect. Surprisingly few drug crimes overall actually, which is good, although another nurse told me of a recent admission to our ICU for a drug overdose, this guy coming from one of the units in deep East Texas where he had obviously taken some bad shit or taken too much of the good shit and almost killed himself? 

White collar criminals have been, like, totally missing among my patients. My preference would be at least one or two fraudsters, because they’re always white guys or Asians and will help even out the disparities in incarceration. Not to sound all racist. 

As a black person who does not entirely believe that the Texas criminal justice system is colorblind, thru that lens? My impression of Hospital Galveston is that the races are pretty evenly distributed, with blacks, whites and Hispanics in more or less equal proportion, a one-third, one-third, one-third kind of ratio. Which is of interest only because blacks make up only about 13% of the population of the state. Is that a law enforcement outcome discrepancy or a healthcare discrepancy? You tell me. It might make a good Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) paper for a nursing journal. 

Regarding black inmates specifically, speaking as an advocate, speaking as part of a long tradition of nursing advocacy? My natural inclination—looking across the wards of Hospital Galveston—is to follow the one-third, one-third, one-third view of guilt. 1/3 of the African Americans prisoners in Hospital Galveston did exactly what they were charged with. That’s my best guess. Another 1/3 are in prison because they got caught in a law enforcement net even though they were not technically guilty of whatever they were sentenced for. Call it karma, call it civil rights violation, call it what you will. Which actually has an analog in my own childhood because in black family life the belief in crime and punishment is absolute. My mother had a wicked backhand that she didn’t use for tennis. You were being slapped not for what you did this time but also for what she never had a chance to slap you for before. Does that make sense? That’s TDCJ too. 

Something like that logic is at work in the state’s prisons. He or she may not have done the exact same illegal and/or violent shit that got him or her locked up in the first place but did do a lot of other similarly illegal shit, without getting popped by the pigs. It’s a kind of guilt by association but only involves one person and that person ends up behind bars. 

Another 1/3 of these brothers and sisters who are my patients—this is said even though we, the patient and me,  bond as black people in a white racist world. The second 1/3 of these brothers and sisters are guilty as a motherfucker. So, finally and most crucially, the last third 1/3 of black patients in Hospital Galveston were just the closest African-Americans at hand when white police decided to make an arrest. That scenario is especially likely if the arrest was made anywhere among the pineywoods of East Texas, near Pisspot where there’s a prison conveniently located, called the Pisspot Unit. The white bus doesn’t have far to go from the courthouse to prison in a county where Jim Crow still lives. 

For example, there was a sister among my patients recently, completely smoking hotand oh, maybe 35 years old? 

She was locked up for repeated drunk driving. Like she was “going to kill somebody,” isn’t that what the judge always says and maybe sometimes it’s true. But certainly not with this woman. She was too fine. 

Anyone could tell just looking at her in her prison whites that she was an angel, sent down by God to test us and completely innocent of the charge of felony DWI. She was too fine to do the crime, as we say in the black community, Like, there are some chicks who are too hot to be held responsible for their actions even if they did exactly what was charged. This chick was one of those. 

Or she already had wasted somebody—she was on her third or fourth offense? That’s what the TDCJ app said! And somehow the knowledge of what she was in for made taking care of her easier. She was not a hardened felon. She was a beautiful woman who had come to a bad end. Courtesy of the State of Texas.

Obviously she was sentenced on false charges, that would be my whole point. She was probably set up by a white female cop who was, like, jealous? It’s totally possible. 

With Latinos my guess is that there’s about a 3-to-1 split, 75% in prison based upon some kind of genuine illegal activity, and a quarter completely innocent like the aforementioned one-third of black guys and black girls and the especially fine sister who got the DWI. This is a kind of back-of-the-envelope calculation based upon my time on Galveston Island. Wrongdoing here is always a relative thing because there’s always been so much sin. It’s an island tradition. The white prisoners are all presumed guilty or mostly guilty, by definition, not to sound racist. But in a criminal justice system that favors white people and that whites control it seems less likely that white inmates got swept up innocently when mostly white cops were arresting people without real evidence. Does that make sense? 

The point is that on the wards, doing your rounds, you have to treat everyone well because that’s what nurses do and because you don’t know if the patient really is a felon. Most of the time you don’t know what they’re behind bars for at all, unless you consult TDCJ’s handy “Inmate Search.” That is part of the moral burden of a prison nurse. To check the app or not? Mostly not. Btw, among my patients at Hospital Galveston so far have been only two Asians—both Vietnamese guys. This is said with utmost respect and affection for the noble Vietnamese people. And in recognition of their struggle and ultimate victory over the White Man. 

And no attempt to stereotype. All apologies in advamce, but Vietnamese guys have just as short a fuse as black people! How cool is that? The Viets are almost as bad as Latinos—who kind of take the cake. According to my calculations. How cool is that? We’re all the same, after all, because race is just a societal construct, in other words something that somebody made up. At least that’s what they teach in nursing school. So, like, this is a true story. There’s a historical document somewhere in the Texas Archives to back it up. Immediately after the Civil War a Union officer arrived by horse from New Orleans, after the Rebels in Texas had surrendered. To set the scene. 

He visited a Texas prison, apparently in Huntsville, and reported to D.C. that he believed the Lone Star government was using the prisons as a means of controlling the black population. 

You think? Is that even possible? 

Twenty years later, after the report to D.C., my great-grandfather was sentenced to life in Huntsville, for a murder committed in Washington County actually, which is not far from Huntsville, so he didn’t have far to go. To set the scene again. 

Because instead of waiting for dark like anybody else, anyone with sense, he shot somebody in the middle of the afternoon on a busy street with plenty of witnesses! If you were wondering—you know—what 1/3 of prisoners je fit into?

Geographically TDCJ is a system of units, originally around Huntsville and in East Texas, and now spread across the state, about, what 100 unit total? Housing over one hundred thousand men and women. Having set foot in an actual unit only twice in my life, long before Florence Nightingale entered my life, both times back in the day in Huntsville, which is still the administrative home of TDCJ and where Daddy’s Daddy’s Daddy did his time. So, like, there’s a connection. Both my visits were to the Ellis Unit which still exists and where condemned men used to wait to get whacked back in the day, if my memory is correct. Or was where they were held just prior to getting whacked? My first visit to Huntsville back in the day was late ‘70s or maybe the spring of 1980. The prisoner was a white guy who was condemned to die and he looked at me through the glass partition the way tigers look at little kids through the glass at a zoo. 

Have you ever noticed that hungry look?

 This white guy seemed to be completely predatory and sociopathic. Those people, what can you say? Not to sound all racist. 

You knew what Caucasians were like back then, the 1970s, that was a time before there were any black or Latino serial killers. Like nine times out of ten, the picture in the newspaper of the Mad Fiend was a white guy. And this predatory-looking white guy in the Ellis Unit visitation room was the one they decided to let out. He was released on a technicality, killed again and was killed himself—if memory serves true. He was shot in a gunfight with pigs somewhere in the Hill Country. The other guy who brought me to Huntsville was a black inmate who was the Lone Star State’s most prominent political prisoner back in the day. For however long he was locked up. Lee Otis Johnson was his name. 

Lee Otis was a Righteous Brother who was sentenced to 17 years by a Houston judge for a joint, in a less cannabis-friendly America than we live in today. 

The point is that Democrats complain that the Republican conquest of Texas was somehow unfairly accomplished—nefarious. But the Texas Democratic Party was running on fumes when the change came. The D’s had made some pretty bad decisions—including harsher sentences, like the Imprisonment of Lee Otis Johnson—and prison locations, which was maybe numero uno on a long list of bad policy decisions by the last Democrats to be governor. The D’s rolled the dice and the State of Texas lost. Where to lock people up? That was the question and the state didn’t get it right. 

Where to place the next generation of prisons? The decisionmakers did not consider an aging prisoner population or mandatory sentences or availability of healthcare facilities in Pisspot, Texas, next to Shithole, in Shithole County. Which is where the new prison got built. 

It was a bad decision made in Austin to provide economic stimulation to a dying ranch town somewhere in the Panhandle, in a county with a total population of 12. In order to keep the county in the Democratic Party. 

The D’s failed to predict the effect of mandatory sentences, which means elderly inmates staying in prison longer, and new prisons holding a lot of old men—and old women. Like some of these guys lying in beds now in Hospital Galveston with no hope for release. Who can’t even toilet themselves. Mixed with rising healthcare costs and the lack of healthcare facilities in the far corners of the state where the new prisons were built. 

The consequence of which has been a lot of white buses and ambulances on the road to Galveston, which is Texas’s original Sin City, on the sunny Gulf Coast. It would make a good paper for the Health Sciences Center actually, where my studies are coming to a felicitous end. How has the distribution of prisons in the state guaranteed bad care for its prisoners? No one really listens to nurses though. Until it’s too late. So, like, early one morning when the routine labs were being drawn, the patients are stuck like every fucking morning, to set the scene.

 Usually at 4 a.m., in time for the results to be ready when the residents arrive on daily rounds. To set the scene again. At midnight the nurses can start drawing blood, actually. That way, doing it early, the physicians already know what they want to order when they arrive, not to repeat myself, because they have access to results on their phone. That morning with my needle already in this inmate’s arm, he looked up at me and spoke. 

“You know, to be honest,” he told me, “I don ‘t really like black guys.” 

My reply, “You know, to be honest, black guys don’t really like you, motherfucker,” began to form on my lips. 

You have to be able to talk a little shit to do this job and sometimes you may need to be direct. Profanity is never called for unless it’s called for, that’s my rule in other domains of my life too. It hadn’t happened to me yet, my interactions with the prisoners were all cordial up to that point. But you like to keep your options open with this patient population, even the grannies. She could have whacked somebody back in the day. Only utmost professionalism and Florence Nightingale—the Lady with the Lamp whose caregiving spirit infuses my black soul—kept me from going off. 

Only Florence, whispering in my ear, stopped me from telling this patient where to go and what to do when he got there. 

The prisoner was a little used-up looking Latino guy, probably mid-50s and probably looked the same way since he was 35. A lot of the inmates look surprisingly okay, their skin for example, if you look past the tattoos. Because they’ve been in prison so long and there are theoretically no drugs or alcohol or pussy/dick in TDCJ—or whatever may have afflicted you in the Free World—that is missing behind bars. Theoretically.

The quantity of white bread alone that the prisoners eat could be fatal, that’s a sure cause of ill health—starch. But the guys and girls do get plenty of time to sleep. It’s an almost monastic experience, what they describe, if a monastery had bad food and gun towers and was noisy like a bitch. It’s a no smoking environment, fyi, again in theory, for both guards and inmates. But not this guy—the Latino who didn’t like black guys. 

He didn’t look particularly healthy, no. This guy was not like he was going to the great beyond anytime soon, either. Pasty, which was a concern but nothing acute. His feet looked okay, which is my quick way of assessing someone’s overall health. He just looked kind of old and vulnerable and used up, not to repeat myself. By way of explanation of his rude comment about black men, he said that he went to a mostly-black high school where some of the brothers apparently made him feel like a punk. Is that right? 

That was my question to him. As long as he was talking about his insecurities, even vis-à-vis the Black Race, he wasn’t complaining about the needle. He had absolutely no veins, not to cry like a punk myself. He wasn’t pulling his arm away, nothing like that, you know, which was cool. As a patient he had a right to refuse labs but he did not. He could say whatever he wanted to say within reason, that was my attitude, you have to keep an open mind in correctional health care because everyone has a lot of issues, including the staff. 

Everybody has a story to tell too, you have to be cool and accepting of whatever it may be. It’s their story, not yours. 

But in prison there are also overriding dynamics, like safety. And Hospital Galveston is a particularly chaotic environment, because it’s where two super-chaotic forces meet, health care and incarceration. On this little island. Three chaotic systems if you include the Texas highway system, that also affects which patients come to the Island of Sin and when. To set the scene.

 

 

iii)

Had “the talk” with the night nurses, who are mostly female. If anything security-related happens on the unit, they cannot rely on me. Because Lucius is out of here. Like, gone. If a colleague needs help passing meds or an extra pair of hands picking up a patient who has fallen, sure thing. But help subduing a violent and/or crazy patient? That’s not part of my job description. If things get really ugly, and getting out of the building entirely becomes necessary, you know those bedsheets that everyone likes to tie together to escape with?  It’ll work for a nurse as well as a prisoner. That’s my belief.

So, like, ou probably think that working this job the nurses will be rude or dismissive of the inmates under care. That is oh-so not the case on 7C. Not in my experience. Even in the glassed-in privacy of the nurses station, on my home unit—even as we refer to the senior surgical resident as an asshole and wonder how an especially clueless intern got into or out of medical school? The patients are still shown respect. No shit, yeah, not to sound all noble but it’s true. It’s weird and wonderful and a maybe beautiful thing that you can find respect and dignity in the oddest places, including the Texas Gulag, TDCJ for short. In Hospital Galveston it’s Mr. So-and-So, or bed number so-and-so if we don’t remember the name. 

Respect for the patient is beat into you in nursing school and anyone who has worked practically any amount of time knows that patients—whoever they are—are vulnerable and they rely on the RNs and mostly trust us and we mostly reciprocate the trust. Mostly. Without knowing or caring who the inmate killed or raped or ripped off or even if he or she actually did any of those things or is merely a pawn of the nefarious State of Texas. Aka the White Man. Which is my view most of the time frankly, that it’s racial perfidy in the American South. This view is that the heart and soul of institutional evil in the Lone Star State is TDCJ, not to sound all judgmental. And, besides, the real enemy—every nurse soon realizes—is the doctor. Even if you have to watch your ass with patients sometimes too. 

During that post-hiring in-service with TDCJ when the guard lady talked about what not to do? She especially warned us about not getting too close to these guys or girls—the hospitalized inmates. Or believing their shit. Like, he’s really going to marry you or whatever when he gets out of prison if you just smuggle a phone or some weed to him now? Please! That’s what the lady from TDCJ asked us in the security in-service before we went to work on our individual departments. She asked us and we shook our heads. No! That was the rhetorical question from the Officer. You don’t want to reciprocate to that level, no, that was her message. My nursing unit manager when she hired me said the same thing, she warned me, you know? 

She said that my job was to render care but not get involved. Don’t get too close. Which was kind of an unnecessary warning, me being at Hospital Galveston mostly for the paycheck, UTMB pays nurses pretty well. Not being here on the Island of Sin looking for friends or potential soul mates, you know? Although some of the guards are hot and are technically fair game. But any closeness with a patient means jail time and is a sure 100% nursing license-killer. My co-workers warned me specifically that the female inmates are dangerous, with their mouths, because they will make up shit about nurses, especially guys. When there are a lot of female patients—ours is a coed facility, you’ll be happy to know, just no mixing in the rooms. When there are a lot of female patients the drama level is PFH, pretty fucking high to use the n0n-technical term. Women are a growth trend in American prisons, btw, and they need to behave better or not get caught, the same rules as for guys, that’s my belief. It’s only fair. We won’t get into that here. The point is that you have to treat people like people and leave at home any bad attitude or prejudices you may have. Rudeness is not called for in Hospital Galveston until it’s called for. The only exceptions to this rule in health care overall are paramedics and ER nurses, some people say corrections HCWs too, because you have to deal with crazy people or the highly intoxicated or dangerous or all three. To say nothing of the crazy and dangerous. 

On the wards at Hospital Galveston it’s not necessary to go off on anybody, usually. In my experience. The patients are there because they are sick, that call has already been made. If the prisoner gives you too much shit you just call the Officer, you feel me, who are always there. And even the TDCJ guards—the “Officers” as they definitely prefer to be called—are mostly cool. Especially the older black women. They’re like my mother, may she R.I.P. Who had a terrible backhand but would usually listen first? Before letting fly with that hand. The guards have pepper spray instead. One thing about the pepper spray, or so the Officers tell me, don’t let it impress you too much. The guards say that most of the guys who they’re even thinking of using pepper spray on have already been sprayed so much at their home units they think it’s perfume. Not to disappoint. If there’s really going to be trouble you’ll hear a call overhead for guards to go to a particular location. They swarm the inmate in question, just like cops swarm a nigger out on the street, prior to shooting him. Whereas in TDCJ a beat down would be more likely than a shooting. A guy will end up with a broken jaw for instance.

 So, like, TDCJ guards are overwhelmingly minority and predominately black. A lot of women. Sometimes the Officers call the inmate “Mister” or “Miss,” just like the nurses do. “Now Mr. Johnson,” you’ll hear an older black woman’s voice ask a patient somewhere down the hall, she’s standing at the entrance to a room and addressing someone thru the doorway, “do you really want to do that?” 

And Mr. Johnson really does want to do that, whatever that is, because that’s why he was trying to do it in the first place, when he got caught. But hearing the lady Officer’s question he lays back down on the bed without anyone having to wrestle him to the ground or whatever. Because the black lady was cool. Courtesy really helps with this patient population, if you’re thinking that you may one day do this kind of work one day. Precisely because these guys and girls have been treated like shit on their individual units or in jail or by the police or whoever. Or by life, that’s my feeling, not to go all psychosocial on you. But an apology at Hospital Galveston is golden. Unless the guy has already lost it, you know, which is when you may want to shout “Help” instead and run for a secure door. Don’t ever lie. That’s what they warned us in pediatrics back in the day, not to lie because “the kids lose all trust in adults.” So, like, taking care of kids, it seems to me, you had to lie, by telling what they used to call summer camp lies. Like when adults tell the children to get on the bus we’re going to the beach when really they’re going to the library? That kind of thing. Like, dude, this isn’t medicine—it’s a special candy syrup! At Hospital Galveston they won’t believe you. Even if you’re telling the truth. So, like, these guys and girls are super suspicious.

With prisoners you really are sorry about their conditions or circumstances, locked up like damn animals, cooking in the damn cells back on the units. But you can’t get into that on a 12-hour shift. There’s too much other shit. At least the black prisoners should be pitied, as mentioned before, empathy and sympathy both—according to my calculations. A surprisingly high percentage of black prisoners are innocent of the crime. Or of this particular crime, the one they got locked up for. A third of these brothers and sisters are not even guilty at all, unlike white guys who are almost certainly genuine perps. An example is illustrative. 

So, like, there was this brother doing time for something sex-related, statutory rape, like, he was a 16-will-get-you-20 guy, as the inmates say. To set the scene. The girl was too young. So, like, this inmate was giving me shit during a medication run one night with him and two other guys on acute—7C—my home unit. The patient room had three electric hospital beds, used to be only two, a metal sink mounted on the wall. An open bathroom with a toilet and a partially-closed shower. Privacy none or very very little, a TV up on the wall. Can you picture that? If you’re a patient in the Free World or anywhere else, you don’t fuck with a nurse on med pass because we have to pay attention in order to get it right. In the modern American hospital the patients are taking something for fucking everything including the time of day. There are a lot of pills, a lot of shots and lot of IV sticks, and a lot of IV meds. In Hospital Galveston it’s not that it’s so many meds, really, it’s that there are so many patients, a lot of surprisingly heavy patients, people who need shit done. 

So, like, this 16-will-get-you-20 brother was showing off in front of the two other guys in the room by hassling me. Which the patients don’t normally do because they like being in the prison hospital more than they like being in the prison, wherever it is, in the scrubland of South Texas, or the Oil Country of the southeast coastal plain, or the pineywoods of East Texas, and they don’t want to get sent back right away. And everybody likes nurses, right? Hospital Galveston has better food than wherever they’re coming from and there’s air conditioning they don’t have on their home unit. What’s not to like? With the TV overhead these guys control their own channel selection, that’s a form of empowerment, right? Just like in the Free World. There are painkillers too. Who could ask for anything more? So, like, it turned out this guy who was ragging me at bedside had something contagious and he got moved to a room by himself, that’s not important here. But in addition to whatever illness placed him in isolation, he had an ugly leg wound that had gotten nasty. 

A lot of prisoners have leg wounds because the Texas prisons in addition to being very hot are very dirty, by all accounts. Not to be judgmental of Governor Abbott and the Republican wrecking crew at the State Legislature. To set the scene. You see a lot of leg and foot-related conditions that should not be there, except the prisons are shitholes. Which is what the public wants, shitty conditions for shitty people, or so we are told. And it’s probably true, the Texas public is bloodthirsty and wants its pound of flesh or a maximum sentence for what are often very bloody crimes. Even if you didn’t really do it, somebody has to pay. As seen thru an Amnesty Project lens. But heat and filth and lack of circulation are a potent combination to promote infection. 

So, like, one night after changing this guy’s foot dressing, we got into an argument, me and the 16-will-get-you-20 guy who was black and from a semi-rural county near S.A. To set the scene again. He wanted me to bring him some ice cream. No shit. Which wasn’t going to happen in this lifetime. You know those little institutional cups of ice cream you get when you’re a patient in the Free World? Hospital Galveston has those too but they are reserved for cancer patients who need extra calories. There are protocols to follow on 7C. And my preference is not to start breaking rules at work until my probationary period is over, you feel me? So, like, we kind of got into it—me and this black guy, the 16-will-get-you-20 guy. Talking shit to each other. 

He said he had a “right” to ice cream. Those people, what can you say? 

What was that word that Caucasians used to use about niggers, back, back in the day? When Ronald Reagan was President and somebody invented “Welfare Queen”? “Entitled,” that’s it. Close neighbor to entitlements, which is not a bad word in Black English, btw. African Americans feel we’re owed something, yeah. Like we think we deserve something without working for it? Well, yeah, except we did work for it, during slavery, we built the country, we just didn’t get paid. We won’t get into that here. The issue was ice cream. 

Those people, really! 

So, like, it was me telling him he didn’t have a right to shit without saying the shit part. So, like, a lot of the prisoners at Hospital Galveston really get into asking for snacks and drinks, crackers and chocolate pudding and all that, orange juice in little containers at 3 a.m., you know? It’s their right as patients to get snacks. Which the guards say that these guys/girls would have to buy on their home units in the prison commissary but are given free of charge to our patients. Not to generalize but sometimes the inmate asks the nurse or the nurse’s aide for shit and then don’t drink it. It’s like that in the Free World too. There reaches a point of privilege and expectation on the part of a patient in a hospital—prison or Free World—that makes him or her pretty fucking insufferable actually. The nurses reach a consensus in conference at the nurses station at 2 a.m. In a Free World hospital it’s the middle of the night and everybody is talking about Miss Jones in Room 109 who “needs to go home now,” whether she’s cured or not. Because she thinks this is a hotel. After a few days some of the inmates start to think that too, like they’re at Hotel Galveston, which is down the beach about a mile towards Houston, not Hospital Galveston which is where you really are, bro. 

Sometimes you have to explain the facts of life. Some of these guys and girls are testing bounds, just like kids, what-can-I-get-away-with-here-with-this-here-motherfucker? And they will ask for stuff they aren’t even going to consume, just because they saw another prisoner get it. Or they start hoarding shit like they’re back in their cell, in Pisspot, on the Pisspot Unit, or wherever, in the semi-damned indignity of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. This particular brother’s bedside table was already full of shit he hadn’t eaten. But he was fixated on ice cream and my fixation was on telling him no. There we were, two strong black men going at it—about ice cream. Voices raised at two a.m. 

Then it struck me like a lightning bolt—straight to my heart. 

Maybe he didn’t do the crime and instead of being his caregiver that made me part of his oppression. Which was an awful feeling, really, really, really bad, a feeling deep in the pit of the stomach which is where my moral pain localizes. No lie. Nelson Mandela who did a lot of time in a cell before becoming Liberator of South Africa, and all, before becoming our collective consciousness—Mandela liked to say that you can judge a society by how it cares for prisoners. You can judge a nurse that way too. 

“You’re shouting at me just because I asked for something!” this brother told me. Words to that effect. Which was right, actually. He got an injured vibe going, it was pretty persuasive actually. Like he was Mother Teresa and someone just pinched his ass? This prisoner was pretty convincing, actually, never underestimate an inmate’s mouth. That’s the message here. It can be a pretty formidable thing. 

These guys and girls have nothing to do all day but talk, for years on end—guilty or not. Some of them develop potent verbal skills and that’s coming from somebody who has talked a little shit in his time. Most of these guys are way over my head in terms of self-righteous rap. And they can go on for hours—just talking shit—like those famous Negro men of old who said they could stay in the pussy for a full hour without busting the nut? Like the legendary Sixty Minute Men—but talking not fucking. These guys are found in abundance in TDCJ. They have nothing else to occupy themselves, for years at a time, so they talk shit. But suddenly, my caring, nurturing side as a RN came forward and filled my breast with compassion. My inner Florence Nightingale spoke up, even though Florence was a white chick. 

“The ice cream is a non-starter. You’re just not going to get it. But I shouldn’t have raised my voice. I apologize if I offended you.” Hearing myself say it and not quite believing it either, but it was a start!

Having apologized maybe ten times total in my entire time working with adult patients, not to sound all macho or obtuse or anything, and eight of those were, like, totally insincere. But this was coming from my heart and soul, corazon y alma and all that. Like a fine Spanish chick will tell you and you believe it, because she’s fine, even though she’s also mentirosa? 

And this 16-will-get-you-20 guy looked at me and blinked. In a confrontation the first one to blink is the loser, you know that’s what President Kennedy said after he went toe to toe with the Soviets over nuclear missiles in Cuba, back in the day. Here the issue was vanilla or chocolate. The patient made it sound just as important. 

He kept talking about what he wanted but by now you could see that the wind was out of his sails. And instead of me being only kind of sincere in my last apology to a patient, a few years ago at another facility, my apology this time was almost wholly sincere! Like, that’s progress, right, in my ethical development. And it’s like, so, not the first impression people have of me, sincerity. 

So, like, looking back over my shoulder, feeling like there was someone else there, besides me and the 16-will-get-you-20 guy. It was the Lieutenant, the supervisor of the guards, standing behind me in the room. She was a hot black chick, actually, maybe half my age. There’s just something about women in uniform, wouldn’t you agree? Especially when they carry handcuffs? Someone must have called her because of the raised voices and now she stepped forward to the bedside. The prisoner was still bitching, but you could tell his heart wasn’t in it. “The nurse already apologized,” the Lieutenant said. “What more do you want?” 

“I want ice cream. I feel I have a right to it.” Those people! And instead of me saying, “No, you don’t, mofo,” there was just a noble silence on my part. Like Denzel Washington after he has capped all the white people in the room? 

Me gathering up my wound dressing shit—gauze and saline, bandage scissors and all—and leaving, with the Lieutenant still there and listening but planning to do absolutely nothing because that’s what supervisors do, absolutely fuck all. That’s how you get promoted in the first place in Huntsville, where TDCJ is headquartered, the less you do the higher you go. The Lieutenants listen well but do fuck all. Not to generalize. They just appear from nowhere when things start to get hot. Anyway a couple of days later, the same thing—another black guy—this time behind bars for murder and he wouldn’t let me draw blood and me threatening to tell the doctors, around 4 a.m. and my whole plan was to get out on time and start drinking at like 7:30 in the morning? To set the scene. “What they goina do,” he asked, “send me to prison? I been locked up for 33 years.” 

Actually he had been locked up for 37 years, not to be stickler for detail, according to the TDCJ app. Some of these guys who are never-going-to-get-out lose track of time. It’s like all the heavy lighting overhead in the ICU, a patient gets disoriented about time because there may be no cues to night and day. There’s so much light all the time, it’s always daytime. In prison it’s like that too, the time just passes in a continuous blur. Not to sound all transcendental. So, like, the pressure had been building between me and this guy over a couple of days, there was a little machismo in the room, my balls can be pretty big too. He had a real attitude. Probably based upon the fact he would never get out. Except in a box. 

So, like, he was talking shit to me now at, like, four o’clock when my patience is at its lowest. So, like, we got into it pretty good, once again two proud black men going mano a mano with our mouths—when we should have been fucking with white people instead, right? That’s one way to see it.  hru a Black Revolutionary lens. And then, suddenly, a noble spirit came over me at this guy’s bedside, just like before with the ice cream guy. Like Florence Nightingale but with a penis, you could call it. “Listen dude, let’s start over,” me basically saying to him, “I’m sorry if I was rude to you.” There was at least a one-third chance that he never did the deed, after all. And me turning to look behind me, once again there was a hot black Lieutenant, just standing there, listening therapeutically or getting ready for a take-down. She had long, painted nails, like what good was she going to be if it got physical? How did she intend to save my ass with those fingers? Sometimes even sisters act dumb like white chicks—what they do in the name of fashion. But that’s why guys make better nurses. We’re ruthlessly practical. 

So, like, the Lieutenant stepped forward to the alleged murderer’s bedside to do some therapeutic listening but he was adult enough to have already moved on. Jesus, he had beautiful veins too, not to get all sentimental, black men usually have the best veins, that’s been my observation through the years. Unless they’re drug users and they’ve used up all their intravenous access, which is a big bummer at four o’clock in the morning with a needle in your hand. If you’re just learning about it for the first time because it’s been busy and you haven’t had a chance to do a full assessment yet? Hello! He was a beautiful guy too actually, like a model or athlete—tall and built like a NBA guard. Not a big guy but big enough to hit some three-pointers. He probably got more than his share when he was back in the Free World, it was amazing that he could look so good after all these years behind lock and key. He was the Beautiful Prisoner, not to go all literary on you.

His hair was in graying corn rolls, he had a big, healthy smile, and he was slim overall but well-muscled without being showy like guys who hang out in the gym. He just had a hip replacement so not everything was going well but he still looked good for his age which was our age actually, he was maybe five years younger than me. He liked to try to chat up the Officers too, he was exactly the kind of guy they warned us about in security orientation, really. When the TDCJ lady talked about manipulators, remember? He was in for like, he had nothing to lose.

The female Officers rolled their eyes at him like he was full of shit, him telling her that he had missed her since the last lockdown, or since last time she pepper-sprayed him. Or whatever, what can you say? You could tell that the Officer liked what she heard. The weaker sex and all that. Women are vulnerable in a way that a noble Black Man can never allow himself to be. Based upon my experience at nurses stations, listening to the chatter, women do have a weakness for good bullshit, that is almost as strong as men’s attraction to tits and asses. A lot of chicks like a guy who has a rap even when she knows it’s b.s., she still wants to hear it, that’s pathological, right? Even when women know it’s bullshit they still want to know what it sounds like, in order to judge a guy’s game and compare notes with other chicks later, not to repeat myself but having had the discussion multiple times on nightshift at hospital nurses stations across this great country, at 3 a.m. when women give up their secrets. But we digress. So, like, the guy who got my second apology was the lady killer or presumed lady-killer. In fact that may have been why he was in prison in the first place, he killed a lady. My policy is never to ask anybody why they’re doing time because it’s not like you’re going to get the truth, right? And life is too short. These guys live to talk. It’s how they pass time, not to repeat myself, an anecdote that one of these guys is telling may never end. You ask a guy at Hospital Galveston how his arrest for bank robbery in Midland went down back in 2013 and he starts with his father losing his job in the Oklahoma oil patch back in ‘83. An hour later he’s still talking and he hasn’t gotten to Texas yet. Please.

Overhearing is always an option though, and if things are slow—Sunday night for example. Listening at a prisoner’s door can help pass time. Catching parts of the conversation, especially if you’re doing a task that takes a little while, like a dressing change. Or fucking with an IV, and you can ask directed questions like they told us in nursing school is so important for success in patient assessment? Human assessment, too.

And if his rap is not entertaining you just tell him you have to go do something else. Which is always true. If it’s not interesting you can break off the interlude and say you have to chart. Or just walk away like you weren’t listening in the first place. That’s kind of why the wards attract me, life on the infamous med-surg unit. It can be entirely cool if you aren’t taken hostage and if you use a filter.

If you’re working in the ER, on the other hand, you’re only seeing people for a short time and the explanation of what happened has to be really succinct. If you work in the ICU—the patients are out of it. Or they’re in too much pain to talk. Or they can’t talk even if they want to, because there’s a tube down their throat. But on the wards the patients can effectively narrate their condition in life and if it’s not interesting or it’s obvious bullshit—you just say you have to go do something and walk away. My weakness is not wanting to walk away frankly. Being interested in the Human Condition and all that. Even when you have another patient to see. Once back in the day, working trauma for the county hospital in Austin, going into a room to do a dressing on a patient who was hit by a shotgun blast to his stomach? To set the scene. 

His lower belly was a mess. There was a bag to collect poop, soiled gauze and blood and drainage—he talked me through the dressing change, it was my first time with this particular patient and he knew how to change the dressing better than the nurses did. Because he’d seen it done so many times. So, like, we’re talking about other shit too and he told me how he was shot. His wife did it. His old lady. How wrong is that?

She found out he was cheating and she met him coming home—getting out of his car in their own driveway in Austin. She was apparently aiming for the offending anatomy but missed a tad high. You know what he said were the last words he heard, after being shot but before passing out? “Children, go inside,” his wife said to their kids. “I’ve shot your father.” Isn’t that moving? 

That’s what kind of got me started listening in hospitals. Moments of truth in the continuing drama of health care, not to go all transcendental on you or sound like Dalai Lama. That guy’s wife who pulled the trigger? She may be one of my patients right now at Hospital Galveston, if she hasn’t finished her sentence yet. How special is that? Another time on adult trauma, also in Austin, it was a black guy who was a player—he liked the married ladies. Like the white guy who got shot by his wife? But this black guy got shot by the husband who was being cheated on. The cuckold, you know? Just to mix it up. 

And the brother who was shot with his dick out was paralyzed. In Austin people always say that your downfall is karma and that’s my belief to, here on the Island of Sin. Austin is a very karma-heavy town, while Galveston is more Biblical as in original sin, you feel me? 

So, like, that black guy was literally climbing out a bedroom window when the bullet hit him in the lower back, hit the spinal cord or whatever and he was suddenly a paraplegic. Here’s the zinger. He was unable to use his bone after that, is that karma or what? Was God looking down and pronouncing judgment or what? Black people are a people of faith. And this partially-paralyzed patient—even though he could not back it up—was still talking some pretty smooth shit to the female nurses! He would have been getting all kinds of pussy with a rap like that if he had a bone that worked That’s what is meant by the indomitable human spirit. The hospital in Austin was my first job as a nurse and adult trauma prepared me for other aspects of care at Hospital Galveston, which is likely to be my last patient care job, btw, not to repeat myself. The first concern at Hospital Galveston frankly is not illness, it’s escape. 

We also had a couple of escapes from adult trauma, back in the day, which should be mentioned in the corrections health care context. Escape—elopement whatever you want to call it, doing a runner is a danger at any hospital, even if it’s the Free World. During my early training in Austin, back back in the day, there were two escapes which guide my views today at Medical Branch regarding the escaping patient population. A big issue in prison medicine is who is trying to get out the window and how? Not why, which we already know, he’s a prisoner of TDCJ, but how. The first two times for me were at the hospital in downtown Austin also apply as background to escape from the Texas Alcatraz, Medical Branch’s campus on Galveston Island. 

So, like, one patient on trauma was a head injury who somehow got away from supervision at our nurses station, where we had him sitting in his wheelchair so that we could watch him. He ended up rolling down Congress Avenue, in front of the Capitol, still in his wheelchair. The cops called us and said he was wearing our hospital gown. That is technically an elopement, not an escapeThe second guy was a real prisoner, also on adult trauma, don’t know what he was in County Jail for but he came over with a deputy and was handcuffed to the bed in a room for a few days, on the end of the floor, nearest the Capitol. To set the scene. His window kind of looked out on a little hillside that leads up to the Senate side of the building, from Red River Street, in the middle of River City. To set the scene again. 

The deputies on watch in the hospital room get bored with that duty pretty damn quick and were prone to fall asleep in a chair in the corner of the room. But this inmate made a lot of noise, groaning and all from the time of his arrival, which probably made it hard for the deputy to take a nap. The prisoner moaning about pain and how bad he felt, you know? It was an act! It was totally an act. He was trying to put the guard off his guard. How cool is that? Those people! He was Latino, yeah, makes you wish he was black. 

So, like, it happened on my day off which is disappointing to report because it would’ve been cool to be there and get his autograph before he went out the window. Anyway the moaning inmate somehow managed to get out of his handcuffs and jumped down onto the roof of a lower building next door and was, like, gone. He was lucky because that was an era when hospital windows still opened, unlike now you’re sealed in and breathing recycled air all shift. At Hospital Galveston the escapees somehow go through the wall, that’s my understanding, at least that’s what people tell me, not having been here long enough to see an escape yet but kind of hoping, you know, just for the experience?

A former Lieutenant who is now retired said he walked into a bathroom in Hospital Galveston back in the day, and there was just a hole in the wall and a rope of bedsheets. He ran and got his pistol, he said, but that guy was gone too, just like my guy back in the World Capital of Live Music. Which was somehow reassuring because one likes to think bedsheets are still used for escapees. Even in the high tech world in which we live, there are some ways of doing things that never change. And the TDCJ security response to an escape was still the Lieutenant running to get his pistol, just like in a movie? The more things change the more they stay the same, no? Prison health care is not primarily about health. The biggest priority is preventing escape. Once you accept that reality, giving care gets easier. The ex-Lieutenant couldn’t remember if the escaped guy when he had to grab his pistol was the same inmate who later whacked someone up near Dallas. A nurse who helped orient me said he was doing patient care one day and went home and on the eleven o’clock news they were talking about an inmate who had just escaped and the nurse recognized the guy’s name because he had been taking care of the guy earlier that day. What a coincide, that’s Hospital Galveston too. Like, how cool is that? Escapees can be dangerous and all but the social worker in me likes to see people at least making an effort to change their life’s circumstances. Even if that means going out a window. Especially because approximately one-third of the black inmates aren’t guilty in the first place, again according to my calculations. And escape is an important consideration because TDCJ doesn’t negotiate. 

In TDCJ’s hierarchy of crime, in the prison corridors, high up are bank robbers and murders, low as you can go are sexual predators, but above all are inmates who have escaped prison, even if they were caught later. Just the act of successfully escaping a major prison can heap kudos on an inmate’s criminal career. An Officer was talking to me the other day about a prisoner on another unit of Hospital Galveston who escaped twice. Even the Officer talked about the guy like he was a rock star. That guy who escaped at Texas Tech E.R. and raped those two nurses? He was a brother, sad to say, and he must have been part of that one-third of Negro inmates who actually did the deed, whatever crime they were charged with in the first place. He was a mean nigger and all that. Some do exist, but a lesser percentage than the White Man claims, as seen thru a psychosocial nursing lens, and less than guilty white inmates, that’s my whole point really. 

So, like, the Texas Tech black guy was already serving a 140-year sentence for rape and other shit when he was taken to the emergency room in Lubbock. Prison Legal Newstakes up the account from there. This short tells you everything you need to know about escaping prisoners in the health care context, at Hospital Galveston and anywhere else, actually. “A Texas prisoner used a fake gun to back down an armed guard and hold an entire SWAT team at bay for over an hour. Dekenya Nelson used a hairbrush, soap, a deodorant bottle, and pages from the Bible to make a convincingly real-looking weapon,” Prison Legal News reported. 

“For almost 90 minutes Nelson also held two University Medical Center nurses hostage. During that time he is alleged to have sexually assaulted both women. Nelson was a prisoner at the Smith Unit in Lamesa TX when he was transported to University Medical Center for treatment of internal bleeding caused by swallowing a can opener. He was placed in a room with a prison guard and an armed guard was stationed outside the door. When Nelson complained of the cold, he was given a blanket.” To set the scene. Under cover of the blanket Nelson used a hidden key to remove his handcuffs. “Once freed, he produced the fake gun he had hidden in his jump suit. The guard in the room swung his nightstick at Nelson and missed.” It gets worse, kind of like a Saturday Night Live skit, but this was real. 

The State of Texas added another 175 years to Nelson’s sentence, if you consult the TDCJ app it doesn’t even bother saying when he's eligible for release or whatever because he’ll never see the Free World again. Inmate Nelson is in Huntsville, btw, at the venerable Ellis Unit, and has become quite an accomplished writ writer. He even sued Medical Branch over care at Hospital Galveston once. How cool is that? There is compassion at TDCJ, to give the Gulag the credit it deserves, but it’s rare.