By Joshua Aston

His name was Evil. He was the fourth cellie in my first month of being locked up. It was the first time I’d been locked up & was definitely going to be the last, and the process of meeting new people in this stressful environment was exhaustive. The first cellie of mine lasted a day while I went through orientation. Neither of us really slept; I suspect we didn’t know or trust eachother well enough. I got moved to another pod full of new & wild kids the next afternoon. The next cellie was a white boy that was full of excitement & drama. That only lasted a month before I got sent to the hole, a punishment for handling a situation wrongly. The concept of the “hole” was terrifying & I was obviously scared shitless; especially when I walked into a cell with my new cellie. He was a big white boy they all called ‘Big Country.’ I met him as he crawled out of the mattress. We wore only our boxers & were given no bedding when placed on the bread loaf program, but we got along well together & enjoyed each others company for the next week. After that I met Evil. 

Evil was a young tough skin head that had been doing time in lock up since he could remember. He was the same age as I was, only sixteen, but he was already scarring his body with tattoos; which would be a lifelong endeavor for most, but not him. He had some terrible art done, but what can you expect from a prison style tattoo done by youths. There was a swastiga on his chest along with the words ‘white power’ & so much more. He wasn’t a terrifying guy except for his tattoos & lower bite, he was only 20 pounds heavier than me putting him at 145 pounds.

I saw a tattoo of four lonesome dots & when I asked what they meant he said, “my-crazy-whitelife!” One dot for each word. I had no doubt his life was crazy. Mine was turning out to be pretty crazy too, I thought.

In the earlier part of the months we lived together as cellies he convinced me that I wasn’t a white boy unless I got the four dots. “Every white boy should have them,” he said. I was white & didn’t know much about the world in general, especially this one, so I succumbed to peer pressure. He broke out some ink & a needle. The ink was made from crushed up pencil lead & shampoo, & the needle was a sharpened staple attached to a pencil with string.

Evil was always reminencing about fights he’d been in. Doing time in Adobe Mountain, another juvenile detention center, he fought every day when he wasn’t in isolation. He fought everyone, including staff. A lot of times he fought simply because he was the minority racially. Because he was white he was often jumped by boys of different skin color. He’d learnt to stick with other white boys while looking out for other white kids. Those, however, that refused his help and or to click up with his band found themselves at his mercy as he beat them down until they understood they were going to suffer unless with him. It was a cruel part of him & he prided himself for it as well as being a great scrapper.

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