I know, I know. You are still upset that Barrett Brown is no longer writing his prison diaries for FrontBurner. You consider him a total sellout for leaving to write for Glenn Greenwald’s Intercept. Please, I urge you, let the anger go. Be happy for Barrett. Well, except for the fact that he’s still in the hole and was recently given another 30 days there, in addition to the 30 he’s already done, plus three months of phone, commissary, visiting, and email restriction. You’ll learn all that and more if you read his column that just went up on The Intercept. My favorite part, though, was the following description of his new cellmate. I’m sure Greenwald will forgive the length of this excerpt:
[M]y new cellmate here in the SHU snuck over to Dallas from Mexico when he was 15, became the leader of a gang, did a year in state prison for shooting another drug dealer with a shotgun, sometimes consulted a local television psychic called Indio Apache for intel by which to better plot his criminal strategy, and worships Santa Muerte, the skeletal narco-deity beloved throughout the Mexican underworld. He has three kids, is currently serving a 15-year sentence for conspiring to distribute methamphetamines, is listed on his indictment as having seven different aliases, and is, he tells me, “almost 20 years old.” In the federal system, this qualifies him as a moderately interesting person. And, yes, here in Texas dealing meth is 15 times more serious than shooting someone with a shotgun.
Panchito Villa, as I’ll call him, is actually a very good cellmate. For one thing, he gives me the bread from our food trays, which is a big deal here in the SHU where one can’t get commissary, and particularly at this prison, where the rations have been inexplicably reduced over the last two years. Apparently his old boxing coach weaned him off bread products during training and the lesson stuck. Also he drew some very impressive decorations on our cell wall, including a life-size depiction of what would appear to be Princess Zelda wearing a handkerchief over her lower face gangster-style and sporting the tag “Vata Loca” tattooed above her eyes.
One morning, the two of us discussed the possibility that, this being Wednesday, which is hamburger day, our lunch might perhaps include potato wedges — a relatively beloved dish that the prison manages to provide once or twice a month — instead of the potato chips that it pawns off on us more often than not. Panchito knelt before the photograph of a robed skeleton that serves as a makeshift shrine to Santa Muerte and prayed to her on our behalf, asking that she intercede in this matter. An hour later, we received our hamburgers accompanied by potato wedges, and afterwards Panchito led me in a Spanish prayer of thanksgiving to our benefactress. The sad thing is that, given the alternative explanation is that the prison administration decided to feed us a sufficient lunch in accordance with the national standards, and given how rarely this actually ends up happening on any given day under the reign of our jerk-off warden, Rodney Chandler, and also taking into account what I’ve already documented in prior columns regarding this prison’s ongoing failure to meet a whole range of such standards on everything from hygiene to due process, there’s a better than even chance that it really was Santa Muerte who got us the fucking potato wedges.
On a day when we happened to receive cornbread with our dinner, Panchito handed it over to me as usual.
“Are you sure you don’t want this?” I asked. “I think cornbread isn’t as bad for you.”
“I don’t want to risk it,” replied the shotgun-wielding child soldier who makes pacts with demons for potato wedges.
