At this moment, they are beating on the
doors and raising Hell down in the Hole, which is really the Adjustment Center.
A few
minutes ago, a con broke out of his cell and tried to cut a guard’s guts out. The
guard broke into a run and the con cut him in the buttocks instead, one hundred
and nineteen times, using a box cutter he smuggled in from the kitchen…
That was my
introduction to Bodie McIlvane’s memoir Doing
Time in Hell. His widow had asked me
to “look over it.” Her husband had
written it after he retired.
I spread the
pages out on the dining room table, sorted them according to chapters, lined up
the photos in another neat stack, and also the poems.
Soon I had the
Dedication, Introduction, and a couple of chapters underway.
As chance would
have it, however, I had novels of my own being released and I stopped work on Doing Time to proof their galleys. Then something else came up, and I started
procrastinating…it can wait a little
longer…pretty soon, the manuscript was left sitting on the table while I
worked on my own stories. Occasionally
I’d pick up a page and look at it, perhaps type part of a chapter or go over
what I’d already transcribed and revise and edit a little but that was all.
Then one day,
an ambulance wailed as it pulled into the parking lot. I hated that sound. It meant someone was
leaving the apartment building…permanently. A few days later, I found out
who…Mrs. McIlvane.
As expected,
guilt set in. I was ashamed, putting off
working on that book because it looked to be a tedious and exhausting exercise.
I dropped everything and then and there concentrated on Bodie’s manuscript. It
didn’t take long to finish once I got started. Then I had to decide what to do
with it. No one had said anything about
getting it published. All Mrs. McIlvane
had wanted was for it to be put into some kind of “order.” To make up for the
way I had put off working on it, I decided I was going to get it published.
As luck would
have it, Class Act Books had just come under new ownership and they were
advertising they wanted fiction and non-fiction. So…
I sent it to
Class Act Books, figuring I’d start there and work my way around. They accepted
it.
Doing
Time in Hell is a memoir, the story of an oilrig wildcatter from
Louisiana who was “conned” into applying for a job with the Nebraska Penal
System. I say conned because Bodie didn’t want to become a prison guard. He just filled out the application to please
his father-in-law. To his surprise, he was accepted, and ended up working at
the Nebraska State Penitentiary for twelve years. It’s an interesting story, an
entertaining story, and all the more so because it’s a true one, told in plain
language.
Bodie McIlvane
wrote it in the hope that his story will “help
people understand what goes on in prison, and show that both the inmate and the
correctional officer are Doing Time.”
The only
difference is, the officers are doing it on the Installment Plan.
EXCERPT:
The inmates had
everything but their freedom and they had to escape to get that.
The main thing we do is count the inmates and
make sure they’re there.
Nobody
moves until the counting is done and everyone is accounted for. Make sure you
see skin and breathing.
Sometimes they try to hide under their bunks
or wherever they can but if the count is short, then we count again until
sooner or later everyone is accounted for.
One officer discovered he was counting a dummy
while the inmate was downtown drinking in a bar. He refused to believe the man
he had been counting was caught and in a cell at the Death Row House. I had to
relieve him so he could go and see. After that, he started kicking in the
doors. That was a pretty good way to make sure the guy under the covers was a
real person and not dead or a mannequin.
Doing
Time in Hell available at Class Act Books.
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