Free Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in Man's Prison by T. J. Parsell Page A

worries.
"Yeah, well, they can pull on this all day long then 'cause I ain't giving up shit."
Randy tousled my hair and smiled. "Just stick close to me kid, I got your back." He leaned over and checked out my ass.
"Fuck you too," I said.
He and the other laughed.
I smiled too, but I didn't think it was funny. One of those guys at the table had grabbed my ass, and I knew they were testing me, as Rick said they would. I didn't know which one had done it and I couldn't have taken them all on, so I just pretended it hadn't happened. I knew that was probably a mistake, but I didn't know what else to do.
Lunch was a watered-down stew, with potatoes and carrots, a few celery bits and a shredded piece of meat that looked pretty creepy. The roll was stale, and the coleslaw had started to turn sour. But the Kool-Aid, unsweetened in a metal cup, tasted like well water. But that and a skinny piece of yellow cake, topped in a dark brown chocolate, was the only thing I could swallow. Randy said they mixed something called saltpeter into the Kool-Aid to keep us from wanting to fuck each other. I looked over at the other tables, where someone had grabbed my ass and hoped that this was true. But later on, when the library cart came around, I read in the dictionary that it was used for curing a different kind of meat.
As we waited for the guard to come back, I tore off a piece of my bread and tossed it to the floor. I watched as one of the birds sat at an empty table, patiently perched, waiting for a moment when no one was looking. I turned my head for only a second, and when I looked back, both bird and bread were gone.
In the first three cells of Two-Special, there were three black drag queens. Charlene, Tiffany, and Lisa Marie. Lisa Marie was a pre-op transsexual, who already had breasts. She looked just like a woman, except for her genitals, so Charlene and Tiffany started calling her Miss Thing.

I was never clear which of the other two was who, and all three made me too uncomfortable to ask. All three were in their twenties, with exaggerated feminine features: arched eyebrows, long hair and nails, and tin-sounding voices intended to imitate women. I felt embarrassed to walk past their cells. I didn't want to look in, but at the same time I couldn't help myself. All three stared back in uncharacteristic silence. They usually had something to say about everyone, but with me, they just stared quietly.
I was placed in a cell a few down from theirs. In between, were several white guys who looked young and mostly frightened. I hoped I did a better job hiding my fear.
The drag queens' cells were filled with all the trappings of a wealthy prisoner: cigarettes and coffee, commissary items, potato chips, pastries, and bags of candy. The inmates called the goods Zoos Zoos and Wham Whams. I don't know if those were the names of specific treats, or just the slang, but it was the currency of prison, along with drugs and homemade liquor. As far as material goods were concerned, the queens were well treated. The more time an inmate had to serve, the sooner his fantasies were replaced. Drag queens were the closest thing to women some of these guys would see for a long time, and there weren't that many of them to go around, so they were in high demand. I often smelled pot coming from the direction of their cells, and I noticed they were called to the infirmary on a daily basis. Inmate clerks inside the walls prepared the call-out lists, so the "girls" left each morning and returned late in the afternoons, often with fresh boxes filled from the commissary.
Once lights went out that night, I saw something crawl up my wall. It was a cockroach, the size of the one I'd seen that morning at the county jail. I killed it quickly with my heavy state shoe, but no sooner had I smashed that one, then a few more appeared. There were two walls in my cell, one on each side, and a rack of bars at the front and back. The guards walked both catwalks, sometimes sneaking up