Joyce Carol Oates has a long history with prisons—she’s sprinkled them throughout her stories, tweeted about their poor conditions, and edited a collection of stories by incarcerated men and women. At least one of her novels is banned in some facilities. So she was the perfect judge for American Short Fiction’s 2019 Insider Prize, our contest for incarcerated writers. In the memoir category, she selected “Bucknaked Gurney Unit,” by Kevin Murphy, writing that his “memoir of humiliation and the loss of a sense of self is particularly eloquent and poignant.” We asked Murphy’s writing teacher Deb Olin Unferth about him and she wrote, “For such a morose writer he is a very friendly guy.” She continued: “He writes about his most humiliating moments in the prison with such grace and honesty and open vulnerability—and even a sense of humor—that the character gains dignity through his words.”
We hope you enjoy the piece, and you can read the winner of the fiction category here.
Naked and defeated, I stand on a manhole cover in the middle of a Texas prison. This is what my life has come to, stripped bare, humiliated, and set like a statue for all to see.
It’s 1996 and I’m waiting in line with ten other men. It’s cold and we’ve been standing outside for thirty minutes, freezing. We’re waiting to go to commissary and we’ve just been given slips to fill out. I’m wearing a thin, green, TDC issued jacket that’s two sizes too small for me. The zipper is broken, the sleeves run out well before my arms do and there’s a tear on the right shoulder. My pants are as big on me as the jacket is small and I’m juggling to keep one closed and one up, while trying to fill out the slip I’ve been given.
I’ve spent the last three months listening to horror stories about this place. One of the things I was told was that I needed to find the biggest guy and fight him as soon as I got here. Win or lose, no one would mess with me after that. I’d be fighting to keep my property, and my manhood. I wasn’t looking forward to fighting the biggest guy I could find but I wasn’t ready to give up my property or my manhood.
Looking down at my slip I realized I didn’t know what to put on it. I don’t want to walk into the section I’ll be housed on with a bag full of stuff, making myself a target before I find the biggest guy.
I look over the shoulder of the guy in front of me. He’s covered in tattoos so I think he must have done this before. Coffee is the first thing on his list so it becomes the first on mine. When I look again he turns to me and says, “What’s up?”
He says it like, what are you doing, but I say, “What’s up?” like I’m saying hi and he turns away and blocks his list from me.
I end up putting a little of everything and not a lot of anything, at least I’ll have something without having too much.
We stand in the cold with our bags of commissary and wait. I need to use the bathroom and the cold isn’t helping and I dance in a tight circle hoping that I’ll be able to hold it until someone comes for us.
An officer finally comes and escorts us to where we’re to be housed for the next couple of weeks. It isn’t on the buildings where everyone else is housed, it’s in the main building where the intake, commissary, and medical department is located. Everyone that’s housed with me are new to the unit too and there isn’t anyone trying to take anything from anyone and no one is wanting to fight. So far this place is nothing like I was led to believe, but then again, I’m not on the buildings where what they call population is housed.
Sitting on one of the benches outside of medical waiting for my name to be called, a guy beside me asks, “Where you fall out of?” He’s a toothless pear with two sticks for arms.
“East Texas. How about you?”
“South Dallas.”
I didn’t realize that Dallas had sides, but it seems all big cities do. I think that the next time I’m asked I’m going to say, “Texas, Eastside.”
Two weeks later, after going through countless tests and exams, we’re moved to the buildings.
My fear of walking into the buildings with a bag full of stuff is a wasted worry. Between me getting the wrong stuff, not enough stuff, and being served bad stuff at the chow hall (my first meal was a sausage that looked like it was in a condom), I’d finished off most of my stuff.
Walking into the section I’m assigned to, I get a surreal feeling, an almost dream-like feeling, like this place isn’t really here, that I’m not really here. It isn’t anything like I’d imagined.
The room is large. There’s twenty-four metal bunk beds along the walls. Everything is in the open, even the showers. I’d gotten used to the open toilets in the county but the open showers are new. There are benches facing two TVs that are mounted above the shower and toilet areas, this should be interesting.
I start looking around for the biggest guy in the room and realize that it’s me. At first I think this is funny but then it dawns on me that if I’m looking for the biggest guy, then so will the next guy who’s heard the horror stories and advice from the country jails. This should be fun.
My assigned bunk bed is in one of the corners and there is another set of beds across from mine. This means that I have neighbors.
I unpack what little stuff I have and make up my bed. I lie back on it and wait for someone to come talk to me but no one does. This place is nothing like I was told it would be.
Later, when it’s count time, everyone goes to their bunks to be counted and I meet my neighbors. There’s Blackie, who is not named for the color of his skin but because he’s the black sheep of his family. Then there’s Ninety-Nine who’s got a lot of time, and Steve who’s just Steve. They tell me all about the unit, who to watch out for, when the best times to shower are, to never mess with the TVs, that they are a hot spot for fights. The rundown of the unit, in their telling, doesn’t seem too bad.
I struggle with homesickness and while I do start to adjust to my new environment, it’s a slow process. There’s no help in here for anyone to cope with the loss of family and friends. The nights are the hardest for me, the longing to be back home is almost more than I can bear, and most nights I fall asleep in the dampness of silently shed tears.
Another bad thing about this place is that it’s a transfer facility. This means that men are being shipped from here all of the time. You can only stay here for two years, unless you are assigned here and few are. On top of other things, this makes it hard to make friends. If you do, one of you will be moved before long and chances are that you’ll never see each other again. Guys come and go like the Texas weather.
There’s a lot of officers that work here. Some of them are cool, but there are some that think it’s their job to punish us. One of the punishers is a man called Joker. We call him that because of a tattoo of a joker on his forearm. Every day there are three shakedowns. Three bunks are picked and today was my turn and Joker was doing the shaking down. He finds that I have one extra sock and he writes me a case for it. When I say something to him about it, he writes me up for threatening an officer. The threatening an officer case gets thrown out, but the one for the extra sock keeps me from making store for fifteen days.
All of the time I’ve been here I was worried about the other men that were locked up with me, but it wasn’t them that I needed to worry about, it was the officers. They are the ones that make it hard for you in this place.
The officers were always messing with us, cussing at us, calling us crackheads, “Look out Crackhead, shut the hell up Crackhead, Line it up Crackhead.” One of their favorite things to do was to make you strip and stand on a manhole cover. Almost every day there would be someone standing there naked. It was almost commonplace. I never thought that someday I’d be the one standing there, but I was wrong.
I was on the way to chow, we were having baked chicken, something that doesn’t happen very often.
“I hear you don’t like chicken,” Steve teases. Everyone likes chicken.
“I don’t know who lied to you. Probably the same one that told me you didn’t like chicken.”
“Yeah, that’s a lying ass dude.”
“Look out, Crackhead,” Joker yells from the side of the walkway.
I look to see who he’s talking to and I’m surprised to see that it’s me. I point to myself and say as innocently as I can, “Me?”
“Yeah you, dumbass. What part of shut the fuck up are you having trouble with?”
I do the inmate thing and try to deny that I was doing anything. “I wasn’t talking.”
“Get over here.”
I walk over to where he’s standing.
“Get out of them,” he barks.
I undress and hand him my clothes one piece at a time. He shakes them and throws them on the ground.
“Boxers, too.”
I pull them off and throw them on the ground where he points, where the rest of the clothes lie.
He nods to the manhole cover and tells me, “Go on, you know what to do.”
I look over to the manhole cover sitting several feet off in the grass and raised about two feet in the air by a mound of concrete. “For talking?” I ask.
“You disobeying a direct order, offender?” he smiles.
I walk over and step up on the cast iron plate. It’s hot from the sun and I dance from one foot to the other with my hands covering my groin. I watch as the rest of the unit passes by on their way to chow.
Humiliation overcomes the heat from the blistering hot circle of iron. My heart pounds and races and a knot forms in the pit of my stomach. The world blurs as tears gather, and I look down and they call away from me.
Hatred like I’ve never known before fills me. It mixes with the same, scorn, and humiliation. I ball my fists in rage and squeeze them until my arms shake with the effort.
Standing there, naked in the sun, something in me changes, something deep, something that I know I’ll never get back. It’s as gone to me as my freedom. What was there, the goodness, happiness, the caring, is gone. Where compassion for the guards was, there’s only darkness, a hate and an anger that scares me.
I stand there on the manhole cover until everyone is finished eating and has gone back to their buildings. Then another boss comes over and tells me, “Get dressed.”
“What about chow?” I ask as I pick up my clothes.
“Chow’s over.”
I look up at him and for a second I think I see something, a little something in his eyes, regret maybe, knowledge of the injustice that I’d just suffered, but then it’s gone and I realize that anyone that works here is incapable of compassion, of emotion.
I dress as he watches, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever was there, the shyness, the humility, the shame, is gone. It was consumed upon that manhole cover at the unit that has come to be known as Bucknaked Gurney.
When I was locked up I told my mother, “I don’t want this place to change me. I like who I am.” I can see now that what I wanted I didn’t get and the person I was is no more.
Kevin Murphy, aka Cricket, was born May 13, 1969 in a small town in East Texas. He’s currently incarcerated in a maximum security prison in Southern Texas called J.B. Connolly Unit. He’s enrolled in the Pen-City Writers program sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin and run by the writer and professor Deb Olin Unferth. His writing has appeared in two issues of the Pen-City Writers literary journals. They’ve also appeared in VICE magazine online, in two issues of Redeemed magazine, and several other publications. He was the third runner up in the Insider Prize contest last year and winner of this year’s contest in the memoir category.He writes to be heard in a world where no one seems to listen, and he writes as a way of healing in a world that he believes is broken and in need of repair.
Joyce Carol Oates is the acclaimed author of over fifty novels and the recipient of national and international honors and awards for her work, including a National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize. She has also written a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Princeton University, where she has taught in the Program in Creative Writing since 1978.
Emily Chammah and Maurice Chammah are assistant editors at American Short Fiction and co-direct the Insider Prize. Emily is a Fulbright Fellow, and the winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her fiction can be found in The Common. Maurice is a staff writer at The Marshall Project, where he reports on the U.S. criminal justice system.
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of four books, most recently the story collection Wait Till You See Me Dance. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, Vice, Tin House, the New York Times, and McSweeney’s. An associate professor at the University of Texas in Austin and an American Short Fiction advisory board member, she also runs a creative writing program at the John B. Connally Unit, a penitentiary in southern Texas.