Earning a Nickname: Slash

I don’t remember what my official sentence was for my incident with Mr. Jones. I know the first time I appeared before Mr. Saunders in Disciplinary Court he read my changes out to me, which included “Attempting to assault warder X.X. Jones.” ‘Attempted assault?’ I thought. ‘I kicked the fucker in the nuts! They were only charging me with attempted assault?’ I didn’t say anything out loud, very happy with that particular charge. But then could not keep my mouth shut.

“Who the fuck does it look like was assaulted?” I said to Saunders. I reached around my waist as far as the handcuffs would allow and tore the snaps open on my shirt so that he could see my bruised ribs. I knew what I looked like – my head was a bruised mess, and I was standing before him with a guard on each side of me keeping me on my feet because I could not stand on my own.

“They tell me you had to be restrained.” Saunders said, his eyes on my midsection, half a grin on his face.

“Fuck you, you cocksucker!” I said, and I guess I must have moved towards him because the guards swiftly pulled me back and held me firmly in place.

“Take him back to the hole.” Saunders said. So back to the hole I went without ever entering a plea on my charges. Perhaps I never did, I have no idea. I do know it would be the longest time I ever spent in segregation.

When I was finally taken out of the hole I knew I would not be going back to the unit I had come from. I don’t remember the details of how long I had been there, though my memory throws crazy numbers at me that I know can’t be true: two months total. Four weeks in the old hole, and then four in the new. That just cannot be correct. What I do know is that I was healed up before I was let out.

I was placed on Unit Four, which was the remand unit. The only reason I can see is that they thought this would be extra punishment for me. This was during the time when the Hells Angels in Halifax and the Sultans in St. John’s had been busted in a fairly large police operation, and Unit Four was packed full of bikers. I figure they thought I would be scared here, that it would make my time harder. They were wrong.

They locked me in a cell at the end of the unit and even put a piece of paper over the window, informing the other inmates that they were to stay away from my cell. I am happy to say, not many of the guys listened, and it was not long before I had all the cigarettes that I could smoke coming under the door to me. As I managed to chat a little with some of the guys, I soon had other treats coming my way, mainly hash. Nothing makes cell time more endurable then getting high.

After a week of cell time I was allowed out on the unit. My age again seemed to serve me well, as the Angels and Sultans treated me like I was their little brother. No one on the unit besides me had been sentenced yet and remand time can be very stressful. I saw some of the guys so angry I was actually afraid for the guards, but never did any of them say or do anything to me. Like I experienced on other units in the past, these guys liked this cocky little fifteen – year old.

There was one young guard who had more attitude than brains. He would come into our cells in the morning and kick our bunks to wake us up. He had no reason to do this. This was remand and there was no reason for anyone to be up early unless they wanted to be. It was just part of his power trip.

One morning he kicked the wrong bed. I heard yelling and made it out of my cell just in time to see this guard running off of the unit with a naked three hundred pound biker chasing him, screaming something about killing him the next time he kicked his bed. I laughed until I cried, bent over at the waist unable to control myself. It was the funniest thing I had seen in months. That short little man with the big attitude, running like a little girl. Great big naked dude running after him. For everything else… there’s MasterCard.

That guard gave up his kicking-wake-up routine. In fact, it was not long before there was never one guard alone on the until at a time. There was likely never supposed to be anyway if you want to check the rulebook, I’m not sure. It was put to a stop on that unit though.

I loved being on that unit. I had never felt safer during my time in Her Majesty’s. I hated it when I was whisked off to the hole again a while later (for arguing with a guard, and maybe cursing at him a little) because I knew I would be placed somewhere else.

I don’t know how the idea came up, but to this day I wish that it hadn’t. I was again on Unit two, the opposite side (I did end up on every range in general population before I was released after punching twelve months) and Glen and I somehow decided that we were both going to slash up that night. He had been depressed and talking about suicide for some time, but I never thought he would actually do anything about it. He sure sounded serious now though.

“Two of us at once! That would be something man!” he said, getting more excited the longer we talked about it.

“If we do this, I have no fucking intention of making it and ending up on Bottom Flat. Been there. Didn’t like it.” I said. If we slashed up and lived (which was not supposed to be the plan) we would be placed on the bottom flat under 24 – hour observation for who knows how long. That I did not want. This had to be all in or not at all.

Glen agreed – this was all the way or not at all, and he assured me that he was determined. We would do it right after lockup and that would give us plenty of time before the first count sometime after one am. Plenty of time to… well, bleed out.

This was basically a suicide plan that could have been achieved in other ways. For some reason though, Glen really wanted this to be a slashing event. He seemed to relish the thought of the blood and gore of it all. The guards finding us in pools of blood. For me, it was just a way out. I was calmly resigned.

I got my sleeping pills at med time, and then just watched TV and waited. Glen could barely sit still. He acted like a kid waiting for Santa. Now I was convinced the guy was nuts. I did not doubt my own sanity however. I knew what we were doing was beyond crazy, but to me it seemed like a perfectly reasonable way for me to put an end to it all. There was no reason to live when all I could see ahead was more of the same.

Once lockup time neared Glen got worse, talking a mile a minute and acting like a speed freak. I told him to settle down but it did no good. I was hoping that in his wound up state he didn’t screw up and tell someone else what we were planning.

He didn’t. Lockup time came.

As soon as my door was closed and locked, I put a pillowcase over the smoke detector in the ceiling so I could sit and smoke for a few minutes. I looked through the window in my door and Glen was looking my way from his cell, directly across the unit from mine. I held up my cigarette and then two fingers, meaning in ‘a couple of minutes’. I sat down on my bunk and took a fresh razor blade out of its paper wrapper, placed it on the desk, then lit my cigarette. I sat smoking, staring at the blade, thinking that I should be feeling something. I should be afraid, excited, something. Instead I felt calm, or maybe it was numb, I couldn’t decide.

I took my time with my smoke, then once it was finished I stood and went back to the door. It was only a moment before Glen appeared in his window. He held up a razor blade and then started nodding his head enthusiastically. I gave him a thumbs up, nodded back to him, then waved goodbye. I still felt nothing, no anxiety at all, nothing. I stripped down to my shorts, neatly folded my clothes and laid them in the shelf of the desk where I normally kept them. I was sitting on my bunk when I made the first cut. I simply held up my left arm and ran the blade across my wrist. It stung, but not badly and I knew the cut was not deep enough. Blood ran off of my wrist onto the floor in slow drops. I watched it for a moment, then slashed at my forearm, this time with force. My arm opened and I could see the layers of flesh before the gash filled with blood and the started pouring out in a stream.

Now I felt. The numb calmness was gone. My heart was racing, pounding in my head. My body began to shake and I slashed at my arm again. This time I saw things inside my arm – white things that I thought must be tendons and then blood began spraying out of the cut like a small fountain as I held my arm out, the stream rising and falling with my pulse.

I stood and walked over to the toilet and stared into the mirror above it. I knew how to make this work. I held the blade to my throat, watching in the mirror, seeing the crazed eyes staring back at me. Push in and pull, I thought. Just do it. I wondered how long I would be able to watch after I cut. Just push in and pull.

I couldn’t do it. I screamed in frustration and slashed my arm again, then at my upper leg. I went back to the mirror and watched as I dragged the blade down my chest, blood running down my torso. I carved a V in the inside of my upper arm, nearly down to my elbow, watching the skin open in the mirror. One long slow cut, then a second starting at the same spot and veering outwards. Looking at myself in the mirror I realized that I was crying, tears streaming down my face. My head was pounding and I felt dizzy, but more than that, I was confused. If I had not wanted to die, then why couldn’t I have just done the throat. One cut and it would have been over. So what did I want? What was I doing?

I turned away, and went back to my bunk, more blood dripping onto the floor. Two fountain like streams sprayed blood from my left arm, pulsating streams that still fluctuated with my pulse. I sat and watched… no longer knowing what to do, what I wanted. I decided it was too late to stop, and cut some more. My calves. My chest. I stabbed at veins in my inner elbow, and watched the blood spurt out. Then, with a couple final half-hearted cuts, I was done. I felt exhausted suddenly. I watched the blood running from my wombs and after some time realized that it was slowing. The blood was clotting, and I would be found here, alive, covered in blood. They would put me on the bottom flat.

I got down on the floor and started doing push-ups. I thought this would get the wombs flowing again, make me bleed faster, and it worked. I sat on the edge of the bed watching the fountains that had returned to their previous height, holding my arm out in front of me, staring at it. When it started to slow again, I did some more push-ups, determined again to die. I didn’t have any more cutting in me, I just couldn’t do any more, but I had to bleed as fast as possible.

Time was ticking away and I knew I had to hurry this up. They would be doing count before long and I would be caught. I did the pushup routine a couple of more times, each time the bleeding increased as expected. But soon I was just too tired to do any more. I was dizzy, the room was spinning, and I gave in to it and laid down on the bed.

I don’t know if I was awake or not when the guard found me. I seem to remember hearing yelling, perhaps “I need help in here!” I am not sure. I also don’t remember how I was taken off of the unit, but I assume I was carried.

I do remember one thing – thinking that I had failed. For all the slashing and bleeding I had done, I couldn’t have bleed nearly as much as I thought I had, because once they spent a considerable amount of time stitching me up, (168 stitches and they told me that they did not count the ones on the inside) I was simply taken back to the pen, and of course, placed on the hellish bottom flat.

For the next few days the guards and inmates alike referred to me as Frankenstein because of all the stitches. Then it changed to Slasher. Eventually it was just Slash, and that would be my new nickname, to eventually be tattooed on the top of my left hand, the acid from a nine – volt battery mixed with water and toothpaste for ink.

Glen later told me that he “nicked” his arm with a blade and then changed his mind. Guess he wasn’t that crazy after all. There is no forgetting the night I earned my nickname. The scars are a constant reminder.