“Hey, Chilly, you better leave that dude alone,” someone said. “Anybody that laughs behind gettin the shit slapped out of em definitely ain’t dealin with a full deck.”

Oddly enough, Chilly must have taken my antics to heart because he didn’t mess with me anymore. It’s possible that laughing did save my ass, since there is a policy in the joint against fucking with people who act crazy.

ONCE I WAS OUT in the general population, my laughing strategy turned to silence. I was given a job assignment in the laundry room and spent most of my non-working hours in the library reading or in the dorm writing letters. When I wrote to family and friends I tried to maintain the fiction that everything was copacetic. But my handwriting told a different story as the words shivered uncontrollably across the page like the last dash of a chicken whose neck has been wrung.

I avoided any recreation that pitted me against anyone other than myself. I had witnessed too many situations where a physical contest became a matter of life and death. So I chose jogging: an exercise where I could use my breath without the fear that I might lose it on a jive tip…

And from the get go I had no wind at all: my legs blown out after just one lap. But a stack of laps buffered my early fatigue. Soon jogging and doing time shacked up in my sweat. And there was just enough salt in my perspiration for me to get a taste of being down as my body wagged toward a raise from a fall.

Except for Hardknocks, I had very little to say to anyone. I tried to carry myself in such a way that if anyone fucked with me, they had to be wrong. However, my high-flown moral stance wasn’t necessarily a deterrent if someone decided to get down mean and wrong with me for lack of anything better to do.

“Hey, Ellington, come on down to the gym and run a few games. We need a third man,” a dude said.

“No, I don’t feel like it.”

“Come on, man, you ain’t doin nuthin.”

“Yes, I am. I’m reading.”

“You can do that later.”

“But I’m doing it now.”

His jaws loaded up with rocks until his face was only a stone’s throw away from Mount Rushmore.

“Don’t ever need anything around me, Ellington,” he said.

“Hey, man, I just don’t want to play.”

“Sooner or later you’ll have to. And the longer you wait, the more you’ll have to pay. And I ain’t talkin about basketball.”

It was like I was back at day one, trying to figure out the basic prescription for survival. Before I wasn’t enough. Now I was too much.

“You getting too jailwise,” Hardknocks warned me.

“What do you mean?”

“You too self-reliant. You should a played ball with those cats.”

“I thought you said it’s better to stand alone.”