See, I didn't want to start.
I had made the decision to keep my head down, do my time, and then move the fuck on with my life.
But when his hand landed on my shoulder, shoving me back into the wall, well, let's just say it happened.
You know what I mean.
The rage.
That thing that moved through my veins, that burned them like battery acid, that made rational thought impossible, that turned me into a monster I wasn't at any other time.
By the time the alarms went off, and the C.O. came running, the Irish dude's face was all blood and broken bones.
Me, well, I went to the SHU.
And had time added onto my sentence.
Not much since I was new, he was a bully, and the warden knew how it went, but time. They jacked me up to seven years, but I was told I would only serve six, then have a year of parole on the outside. Not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things. But time.
Extra time.
Because of the exact same thing that got me shipped off to prison in the first place.
Naked. In a cement floor and walled room with no window, no nothing except for a hard bed with no mattress and a stainless steel sink and toilet combo. For months.
Yeah.
It set a man to thinking.
It was the only way not to go crazy.
And, being I am who I am, my thoughts went first to my family. They'd been there. At my trial. Of course. I wouldn't have expected anything less. Hell, I had them tattooed on my arm.
Vis necia vinci.
A power ignorant of defeat.
It was right there on my skin, though anyone who knew the Mallicks knew that shit - that mentality, that loyalty, that love - that went right down into the marrow.
I hadn't engaged them. I hadn't even looked their way. Just like I hadn't given them what they needed from me at the police station the night of my arrest. They needed to hear it was okay, that I would be okay.
They needed that from me.
The problem was, I couldn't give it to them.
I didn't have it.
At the time, shame was something not unknown to me. I had felt it time and time again when I came back out of my spiral, when I realized what I had done. It had never been a lasting thing, though. I guess that was the difference. Because there had never been any kind of repercussions from my actions - mostly due to the fact that I only ever beat people who were in the underbelly and had it coming - I could accept it and move on.
This time, I couldn't do that.
Every single day I was paying for what I had done.
There was no accepting it and moving on when it was the very reason I was eating slop, showering with other men, and having lights out at nine at night like a fucking eleven-year-old.
It wasn't that the bastard didn't have it coming.
I'd never forget the sound of that woman's screams, her pleas for it to stop, for someone to help her. I could still see her face when I closed my eyes at night - all bloodied and broken open.
He deserved every last punch the motherfucker got for putting his hands on a woman.
But he wasn't in the underbelly.
He was connected.
And daddy-o wanted my nuts in a noose.
So he got that.
I would have gotten off if it was anyone else. No jury would have convicted me when they saw the pictures of that woman from the hospital. You know, the ones the nurses took before her husband's lawyer showed up and ushered her out for 'home treatment.'
It was a case of right time, right act, wrong family.
The shame didn't start until I was trying to get Coop to sit down for his treat, and the cops came out of nowhere with a warrant.
If there was one word to describe how I felt when they pulled up, sirens going, attitudes getting thrown around, my face getting slammed onto a hood as bracelets went around my wrists, that word was humiliation.
It was embarrassment I had never known before.
And it didn't stop there as I had been paraded through the station, interrogated, gotten called a lowlife piece of shit.
I heard it enough, I started to agree with it.
Off to jail to wait for trial. Strip search. Blue overalls.
Fucking animals, the guards would say.
To trial.
Like any other lowlife piece of shit.
Sentence handed down.
Bus to prison. Strip search. Orange pants and white tee. Trapped in a cage.
Fucking animals.
Given a toothbrush, travel paste, a bar of soap, and a roll of toilet paper.
Like every other lowlife piece of shit.
It wasn't until three weeks in the SHU that I realized it.
There would be no end to it.
The rage outs.
My own personal battle between Bruce Banner and Hulk.