There was a Coke machine deep inside the razor wire and fences and concrete and bars of Holman Prison in Atmore, Alabama, and I had to fill it. Why they sent me is anybody’s guess. But there I was at the front gate.
Summer seemed hotter there, or maybe it was the lack of vegetation. Either way, after several minutes of driver’s license and ID confirmation, they patted me down, took my pocketknife and keys, and I was in.
At the time, it looked fairly new, built in the late 1960s. Stark and angular, Holman is home to Alabama’s death row now. I don’t know if that was the case back then but I do know there were a lot of heavy-gauge steel doors between me and that machine that I had to fill somewhere near the middle of the maximum security prison. The man they assigned to escort me was easily twice my size and not fat at all.
“You’re safe with him,” said a guard with an air of absolute confidence.
It would just be me and this big man walking between guard stations, and nervous is hardly the word to describe my feeling. I had graduated high school only a month earlier, and my $2.10 an hour didn’t seem like enough for this job. All I had to do was walk in, fill the machine and walk out. I’d done this job for two summers. But never surrounded by murderers.
The man who was supposed to take me in stood quietly by the door. I still don’t remember his name. He was a prisoner serving a life sentence. He had been a bad man if the stories I heard were true. He was in for murder. Had killed a few men inside over the years, with a shaved down toothbrush. One of his eyes had turned milky white and he didn’t say a word. He was wide and black and looked at me and nodded a hello. I nodded back.
I was in good shape then, strong from football and young and tough, or so I thought. The man in front of me could have bench pressed a car and possibly ripped the tires off of it. However, he seemed docile in juxtaposition to his deadly reputation.
As we walked deeper and deeper into the prison, past clanking door after clanking door, the other inmates and even the guards deferred to the big man with the milky eye, almost hardly even looking at me. We only went through wide spaces, no cellblock hallways. White men who looked mean and scared from rough lives and black men who looked calloused and bent from rough treatment stared at the Cokes I pushed on the hand trucks. One pale, thin redneck with tattoos on both arms and a buzz cut yelled at me.
“Hey you there. Brang me some of them dranks over here and you might get out alive.”
I kept walking, looking straight ahead. I just wanted to be back in the truck headed home. My massive escort stopped and turned a cold stare back at him and the man shrunk down into a chair on the other side of the bars, where there was some type of equipment. He looked like a whipped dog; the look alone seemed to knock him down.
Through more steel gates and doors and buzzers, past guards who looked at me expressionless. This place made jail look like church, antiseptically devoid of feeling beyond fear and desperate loneliness and despair. Disinfectant oozed from the concrete and tile in a polished shine. The faces feigned defiance but nothing could hide the brutal truth that these men were locked away here and here was not a place you wanted to be for long. Most of them would be, many forever, until they died. Hopeless.
We reached the Coke machine and I filled it. When I was finished, I turned to the big man standing watch at my back and held out a can.
“Sir, would you like a Coke?” I asked. “It’s not cold but you could get some ice.”
He looked at me and then at the can. Silence. He didn’t look around but squinted directly into my eyes with his good eye and he spoke in a low whisper.
“I caint have one. Against the rules.” He paused. ” But I do appreciate you calling me sir. I appreciate that respect. That’s worth more than that whole machine filled with cold dranks.”
Before I left, I shook his big rough hand. I thought about the things he’d done in his life with those hands. Obviously, he’d killed people with them. He’d probably played marbles with them too, and thrown a baseball with them and hugged his mother with them. I drove back to the Coke plant with the humid wind blowing in my face. I looked at my 18-year-old hands on the steering wheel of the truck and I wondered what I would do with them in my life.
