Free Handsome Harry by James Carlos Blake

a tapered hole in the concrete floor for you to do your business in.That hole in the floor is what you never forget about solitary confinement at M City. Each time you went in the hole the stink seared your throat and made your eyes water. After a few days you’d almost get used to it. Then the next time you got sent to the hole the stench seemed worse than before.
    They gave you a small half loaf of bread and a quart of water a day, shoving it in through a little gate at the foot of the cell door. Rather than eat the bread, some of us would use it for a pillow. A lot of people would be surprised at how long you can go without food, and how easily. Once you get past the first few days, you even stop being hungry. It’s mostly a matter of will. You will yourself not to break, no matter what.
    There were two main tricks to doing time in the hole. One was to occupy your mind with some particular thing the whole time you were in there—naming the players on every major league team, trying to remember the exact detail of some house you’d lived in, things like that. The other, which was harder to do but often more effective, was to think of nothing at all, to go into a kind of trance for as much of the time as you could. There were occasional distractions of course, mainly the cockroaches and the rats that came up out of the waste hole to get at your bread after the light went out.
    I’d been to the hole a half-dozen times before I managed to catch a rat. The bastard bit me good before I crushed it to death and my hand swelled up like I was wearing a winter glove. I thought I’d get the plague or some god-awful thing, but after a week the hand didn’t hurt anymore, and a week after that it was almost back to normal size. Anyhow, the day after I got the rat, when the guard opened the little gate to pass in my bread and water, I said Here’s a snack for you, pal, and shoved the thing out through the gate. Its eyes were bugging out and its bloody mouth was open and full of blue gut. Judging by the sound, I’d say if the hack didn’t puke he came close to it.
    That was your trump card, see—showing them you could takeanything they dished out. Each trip to the hole was another chance to show them you could take it better than they ever could.
     
    M y longest lockups were for trying to escape. M City had a rep as a tough joint to break out of. I saw guys try all sorts of ways but only twice did anybody make it beyond the walls. In the first case three guys busted out and a few days later were spotted running into a cornfield. The cops set the field on fire and drove them out and recaptured them, one with half his face burned off. In the second instance two cons went over the wall and were found in some hick burg three days later. They were breaking into a hardware store in the middle of a Sunday afternoon when a pair of cops showed up. They tried to run for it and the cops shot them dead. The cons were still in their prison grays. After each of those breaks, M City of course made changes to prevent the same sort from being repeated.
    My first attempt was really dopey. I hid in a truckload of laundry. They laughed at me for a fool when they checked the truck at the gate and found me. I got a beating and a week in the hole.
    The next time, Joe Pantano and Russell Clark were with me. We jumped two guards outside the tin shop, gagged them and wired their hands behind them, and then Russell and I put on their uniforms and led Pantano toward the administration building like we were escorting a prisoner. We were halfway there when one of the hacks we’d trussed up came running in his underwear, squealing through the gag like a pig at slaughtering time, his hands still behind him. We kept on walking and the guards on the wall yelled for us to halt and bam-bam, here came the warning shots. One of the bullets ricocheted off the walkway and hit Pantano in the throat, and he went down. They yelled to put our hands up or they’d blow