Cliff was sitting on a bucket outside his cell. He lived in the very last cell on his tier and only had to worry about foot traffic from one direction.
When I first met him, he was hunched over a crafty little cardboard table. He had art supplies and cardstock out for drawing. I dropped my bags at his doorstep.
Cliff stood and shook my hand. He was tall, Black and in his 50s. We exchanged names.
I looked inside his tiny cell. He was tidy. Cliff had a 13-inch flat-screen TV, a Walkman CD player. He stored his boxes under his bunk bed and hung clotheslines on the walls.
No pinup girls. No boom box. Great.
Cliff sat on the bucket while I unpacked and talked.
“I’m Muslim,” I led with, awaiting his response. Islam was often a dealbreaker for cellmates. “I’m going to pray in here,” I went on. He didn’t seem to mind.
“You OK with sittin’ when you piss?” I asked next. Backsplash on the floor from the toilet was a dealbreaker for me.
“No, I don’t mind,” he said.
“Sure?”
“Yeah, it’s cool,” Cliff said. “I heard it’s easier on the prostate anyway.”
Cliff directed me to the cleaning supplies. I toweled down the top bunk and locker.
Cliff invited me to use his hot pot and TV. I appreciated the gesture but declined. Mishaps with other people’s property could turn ugly in prison.
The bottom bunk was always the seat of power in prison. The guy on the bottom controlled the floor. I didn’t mind the top, but I wanted that bottom at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center; the top bunk was coined “the coffin” because a low-slung locker over the bed made for a tight squeeze.
I crawled into the bed and tried rolling on my side. My hip got wedged between the bed and locker. I laid flat like a dead man for the rest of the night.
Cliff didn’t pull out his list of rules that night. I didn’t either. I put off any fantasies of a Machiavellian coup to overthrow Cliff from the bottom rack.
We worked out a schedule for toilet use and naps. We broke bread and watched ball games on TV.
There was just one issue that torpedoed our otherwise easy living arrangement.
Cliff was a hermit.
That was a problem because celltime alone is paramount, even sacred, to lifers like me.
Cliff rarely left our cell. He sat by the door while I slept, while I used the toilet, while I wrote letters. It made my skin crawl. I felt like I was being watched 24/7.
We never discussed Cliff not leaving the cell, but I believe he understood what he was doing and still didn’t budge. He’d leave for an appointment, a shower, or a phone call but always seemed to come back only minutes later. He was a loner and painfully introverted.
I began to hate his bucket and table. I wanted to kick it over. I felt selfish for these thoughts.
A month into our cellship I put in a request to move to living quarters with greater freedom, modeled after Scandinavian prisons, where I would have no cellmates. I was accepted, and I moved on from Cliff.
