The first time I heard someone use the term “bid” was on my first day in federal prison, just four days before my 21st birthday. It was after the intake process, after I was fingerprinted, strip-searched, photographed, and given an inmate-ID card, an orange jumpsuit, and a roll of bedding. Before any of this, I’d been instructed by my pre-sentencing probation officer that I could bring “absolutely nothing” with me into the prison. “Just your body,” he’d said. So I left my eyeglasses at home, assuming I’d be issued a new pair. I walked blindly through a labyrinth of buzzing steel doors, deeper and deeper into the compound. When I asked about receiving a pair of glasses, one of the guards told me I’d have to wait until next year, since the eye doctor only came around once a year, and he’d just recently visited. Shuffling down the blurry corridor in my cheap, prison-issued slippers, also known as “Bruce Lees,” I was eventually handed off to a nearly identically stout, bald guard at E-Unit. He unlocked the heavy door using an old steel key, like a clichéd prison-movie scene. Everyone stared at me, the fresh meat. As he led me through the unit to my cell, down the bleak concrete hallway, it was hard to fully comprehend that this was my new existence, my home for the next seven years. Once the guard was gone, a few guys cornered me in my cell and demanded to see my paperwork, the documents new arrivals receive, which detail their criminal charges — prison’s version of a welcoming party, which shows up mostly just to find out if you’re a pedophile. This task is usually carried out by a group of guys from one’s hometown, which is easy to learn since the last three digits of your ID number indicate which district court handled your case — a kind of proxy for geography — information that, along with your name, is printed on the front of your shirt for everyone to see. The welcome party’s request to see your paperwork isn’t exactly a friendly one, and of course there’s a natural urge to resist. But refusing to show it is as good as admitting to being a child molester, so everyone just hands it over. Luckily for me, the crime I’d committed had gotten quite a bit of media coverage, so right off the bat one of the guys recognized me. “Oh, dang, you’re one of them art robbers!” he blurted out, chuckling in a high-pitched tone — and just like that, the interrogation was over. I was accepted into the community. In their words, it was because I was famous, but more importantly not a pedophile. The year before, when I was 19, my two best friends and I robbed the Rare Book Room of the Special Collections department at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, where one of them, Spencer, had been attending his first year of college. My other friend, Warren, and I were enrolled as freshmen at the University of Kentucky, which was just down the street. We later enlisted an acquaintance from high school, a guy named Chas, whose family was well-off, to act as both the getaway driver and financier. Among the millions of dollars’ worth of stolen artwork and rare manuscripts was a first edition of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.” The crime made headlines around the world, but it was an especially popular topic of conversation in our hometown of Lexington, about two hours from the prison. “A brazen plot doomed to fail,” read the front-page headline in the Lexington Herald-Leader, alongside our four mugshots, covering in exhaustive detail the case that had quickly been dubbed the “Transy Book Heist.” Most new guys just end up lying in bed on their first day; the bunk becomes a sanctuary, a safe space where they hide from others, as well as a new reality — as if you could just go to sleep and one day wake up and suddenly everything will be back to normal. After watching me lie in bed all day, my celly — a skinny, middle-aged dude from Detroit — tried to offer some words of encouragement. “Man, you gotta get a bid,” he said. “What’s that?” “You know — a bid. It’s how you do your time.” We went back and forth on the details. It seemed like an arcane term that didn’t really make sense until you’d lived in the system for a while. From what I could gather, the word seemed to derive from the noun “bit,” pertaining to the length of a prison sentence, much like a “stretch” or a “stint.” Something like: “This seven-year bit is a fuckin’ bummer.” “Bid” was something entirely different, more like a purpose or raison d’être. It was all about how you did your time, like finding a hobby or hustle to get you through your bit. For many guys, it was about winning, no matter what the endeavor was. Others just wanted to make money. Some guys used it simply as a way to occupy their minds. For everyone, though, it was all about escaping the slog of captivity. My celly told me he bid off a lot of things, but mostly just gambling — although he did like to dabble in some prison hooch from time to time. He said if I could find this thing — this sense of purpose — it would make all the difference in my life. Without it, he said, my sentence would feel like an endless misery. “Do the time,” he said. “Don’t let the time do you.” All across the compound, there were countless ways of bidding, from gambling to religion, education to gang life, sex, art, and prison jobs (the average prisoner only made about 10 to 50 cents per hour). Sports were a popular way to bid. Sometimes nearly the entire compound would come out for basketball games between cell blocks, with stakes high enough that the court would be encircled by guys shouting and cheering and spilling onto the court itself. You rooted for your cell block no matter what, and over time couldn’t help but develop an allegiance to it. Weightlifting seemed to be the most popular form of bidding. All day long you heard grunts and clashing iron coming from a covered corner of the yard, what we called the weight pile. It was a chaotic scene of unchecked alpha where you saw some pretty strange things, such as when one guy got so aroused while bench-pressing that he prematurely ejaculated in his sweatpants. He acted surprised when it happened, moaning in ecstatic bewilderment before slamming down the weight bar and running away in humiliation. Then there was the annual bodybuilding competition known as the “Peel Off.” The name was pretty obvious, as the most muscular guys on the compound would literally peel their clothes off down to their underwear, which was twisted up tightly like a thong. Standing on top of the softball bleachers, they’d proceed through the standard bodybuilder poses — double biceps, lat spreads, side chest, etc. — flexing, holding, making awkward eye contact with the spectators, while a group of judges analyzed them from the front row. Some guys would starve themselves for weeks before the event so that their muscles would pop. It wasn’t clear if anyone actually knew what they were doing, competitors and judges alike, but no doubt every year they would crown a winner, the only prize being bragging rights. Sometimes, perhaps inevitably, certain bids overlapped, propped up by their own sub-economies. Some guys bid off of gambling on the games — basketball, softball, soccer — while others sold food to the crowd. Cooking homemade (in other words, cell-made) food was probably the most common form of bidding. To do this, the cell chefs would often rely on overpriced commissary items, which they would use to concoct elaborate rice bowls, burritos, even pizzas, using just a microwave and simple ingredients like packaged meats, ramen noodles, and seasoning salt. Even if only momentarily, these meals gave you comfort and escape from the everyday wretchedness of prison life. The lack of acceptable food in the chow hall tended to wear on guys after a while. Slops of meat-mush, dirt-covered beans, rotten potatoes: The list of foul dishes runs on and on. Fajita Fridays turned my stomach the most, consisting of nothing more than a tortilla filled with a rancid dollop of stringy chicken innards. If you couldn’t make it to the commissary, every unit had at least one “store man” to supply your needs, someone who stocked up on commissary items based on demand, then sold the goods for a marked-up price. Since you were allowed to visit the commissary only once a week, having a store man in each unit was essential. The convenience of on-demand goods kept him in business and his bid forever indispensable. Another side of this equation was the illicit chow hall food trade, which consisted of things like eggs, meat, spices, dairy and vegetables. The chow-hall workers would smuggle items out of the kitchen to sell in their units. Since certain ingredients could only be obtained in the chow hall, this trade was a key component of the housing-unit cooking establishment. It also played into another overlapping bid: the prison hooch trade. To make an alcoholic beverage, you needed a steady supply of fruit (or other ingredients like potatoes or tomato paste), plus a great deal of sugar. Guys were constantly getting busted smuggling this stuff out. Time and again, you’d see them being frisked outside the chow hall, pushed up against the wall with their arms and legs spread apart, guards removing hidden bundles of contraband from their clothes, sometimes taped to their bodies. The guys who made it past the guards would hand off their spoils to the bootleggers, who then cooked the ingredients. The process basically consisted of bagging up a concoction of fruit, water, and sugar, then storing it inside cavities carved into a cell’s walls, allowing time for the fruit to ferment and the sugar to turn into alcohol. The process usually involved several people, most of whom kept watch. My own bidding was heavily influenced by being incarcerated with Warren and Spencer. The three of us had been close friends since our early teens, when we started playing club soccer together in Kentucky. From the start, we all just clicked. Even at a young age, Spencer was already a gifted artist, and Warren a well-read thinker with political aspirations. Over the years, we encouraged each other to reject our Southern conservative upbringings for a more subversive approach to life, which may have had something to do with why we all ended up in federal prison together. One day you’re reading “Fight Club” and debating the finer points of German idealism, and the next you’re robbing a rare books collection for millions of dollars’ worth of artwork and rare manuscripts — a seamless transition. That said, having friends in prison was a major boon, especially since we were young, and it was our first bit. There was something comforting in knowing that no matter how hard life got, my best friends were right there with me, going through the exact same situation. The three of us created our own way of bidding. The main principles were self-education, meditation, exercise, and artistic development. We saw it as a way to remake ourselves, stripping away layers of who we were according to how the place we came from had defined us. For me, this meant not so much that I would change through prison, but that, looking back, I hadn’t really existed as a real person until prison. The illusory values of my Southern, religious, conservative, materialist culture — and materialism in particular — suddenly faded, like a palimpsest, a ghost of a self. Once we’d shed our old skins and eaten enough chicken gizzards, when our hair and beards were long and tangled, when we were wearing rags for clothes and couldn’t care less about appearances or pleasures, when the insatiable, boundless and obligatory attachment to status and idolization and things was finally gone (all the things, never enough things) — that’s when we could start to rebuild. To outsiders, our rituals made us seem a little crazy. (“Those three amigos are loco,” they’d say.) We made up words and ways of speaking that only we could understand. Warren, Spencer and I adopted new names for ourselves — Chip, Din, and Pep, respectively — based loosely on a skit on Adult Swim’s “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” We didn’t know exactly why the skit seemed central to our new circumstances, but whatever the reason, it went deep, as if the absurdity of the show mirrored the absurdity of our prison lives and life itself.  RELATED STORIES
| Prison Life | |
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In time, this little madness grew into a philosophy of sorts, an ideal we strived toward that paradoxically only seemed attainable within prison. To do so, we needed to give ourselves up to this thing, this belief, this way of being. No one word could possibly define it, but we had to give it a name. We called it the “din.” Prison is the great equalizer. Everyone plays by the same rules. Although many factors are out of your control, you have to walk a fine line between mettle and modesty to survive, all while trying not to draw too much attention to yourself. In many ways, prison is like a rowdy, high-stakes middle school full of aggressive and confrontational men all constantly and at once seeking to demonstrate masculine superiority, stoked by enough gossip to put a sewing circle to shame. Almost every day you’d hear rumors going around, complete fabrications started for someone’s own self-interest or amusement. But it was hearsay with real consequences, and so you had to stay on top of it. We even had a name for the rumor mill: “inmate.com.” For example, you’d hear guys start conversations like, “Yo, man, I heard on inmate.com…” or “According to inmate.com…” followed by some absurd statement that was almost certainly incorrect, like a prison version of the telephone game. It took a while to accept that my old life was gone, that I’d be a completely different person after this experience. Prison changes you, there’s no question about it, but how you let it change you often dictates how you’ll bid, and accordingly, the direction your life will go. Due to a lack of rehabilitative outlets, most guys continued their same lifestyle as before prison. Although one’s environment may have changed, the hustle did not. To go against this way of life meant to go against a deeply ingrained ideology of survival, one born out of inequity and practiced through self-preservation. In this sense, for many, it was not only unnatural but perilous to go against the long-established prison order — after all, no one wants to be culled from the herd. Terms like “rehabilitation” were regularly tossed around by prosecutors, judges, probation officers and prison officials. Year after year, you’d wait for the rehabilitation to take effect, but nothing ever happened. Early into my sentence, it became clear that to make any sort of positive change in your life, you’d have to do it completely on your own, and against all odds. Since the three of us had been arrested during our freshman year of college, and the prison didn’t offer undergraduate degrees, Warren, Spencer and I set up mock university courses for ourselves, using standard textbooks from core subjects like math, science, history, economics, foreign language and psychology. Much like a standard course load, our days were divided into different classes, with each of us overseeing the group’s progress on a particular subject. We were devoted to a rigorous class schedule. Because we were all housed in different units, we had to meet during open movements in unrestricted areas of the prison such as the library, yard or gym. At the end of every class, the instructor assigned work due for the following session. Seeing as how self-education was the objective, homework wasn’t seen as an inconvenience; rather, it was a privilege, although sometimes it did take some wrangling to get a Spanish assignment turned in on time. Prison life, especially for anyone new to it, can be a merciless world to navigate. To survive, you have to adapt quickly and learn the language. A lot has to go right, and it constantly feels like a precarious balancing act with grim consequences. Sometimes it seemed impossible to go on living another minute in such a hopeless environment. But if you take it one day at a time, eventually it all starts to make some sort of sense. For a first-timer, the shift in lifestyle can be so drastic that it can feel liberating to finally find your own groove, and maybe even your own bid. It gives you a reason to get out of bed, push through to another day. The other thing about prison is that just when you think you’re starting to get the hang of it, everything changes in an instant. I was in line at the commissary, same as every week, holding an empty mesh laundry bag and waiting to slip a folded-up order sheet through a slot in the wall so I could then catch the items as they came flying out of a nearby window. On this particular day, I wasn’t there for much, just a few essentials: ramen noodles, deodorant, batteries for my Walkman. My janitorial job only brought in about fifteen dollars a month, so there were never any opportunities to splurge. Out of nowhere, I spotted two burly prison guards pushing through the crowd and heading my way. I didn’t give it much thought — I hadn’t done anything wrong — until they were looming over me. “Borsuk,” the larger one muttered. “Come with us.” They walked me back into the compound, down a long corridor with what must have been half a dozen security checkpoints, and eventually to the lieutenant’s office. I couldn’t figure out what kind of situation I was walking into. I asked the guards if they knew what was going on, but they didn’t say a thing. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t good. The fact that I hadn’t done anything wrong only made it worse. I’d seen guys returning from the lieutenant’s office devastated after being informed of some terrible news back home. By the time I walked through the door, I was sure someone I loved had died. The lieutenant on duty, an exceptionally short, mustachioed man with a high-and-tight haircut, was wearing his signature camouflage fatigues and Cavalry Stetson. He told me to take a seat, probably just so he could stand over me. “You’re being reclassified,” he said. “Reclassified … what does that mean?” “It means you’re being shipped out — relocated.” Relocated didn’t make any sense. I’d been at Ashland Federal Correctional Institution for two years with zero disciplinary infractions. For all intents and purposes, I was a model inmate. I pressed the lieutenant for details, but he cut me off mid-sentence. “It came from high up,” he said, pointing his finger upward. “That’s all I can tell you. I’ve already said too much.” Editor’s note: The writer has changed some names of people mentioned in this essay but not the events described. Eric Borsuk is the author of “American Animals,” the memoir featured in the motion picture of the same name. His writing has appeared in The Marshall Project and VICE Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, where he serves on the board of directors of Die Jim Crow Records, the nation’s first nonprofit record label for justice-impacted musicians. He also works with organizations around the U.S. to spotlight the stories of currently and formerly incarcerated individuals. |
