Every prisoner does it. Talks of it. Thinks of it. Entertains himself with wild fantasies of it. I wonder, if I clobber that fat bastard guard over his head, steal that milk truck and smash it through the prison's fences, will I make it back home before they gun me down? Or, the Department of Corrections sure has some odd notions about what constitutes "proper diet," don't they? Nothing like the chicken and gravy over biscuits Mama makes back home, huh? Or something to that effect. From Day One, when you get your ID number, six digits in white you'll carry everywhere across your back like a burden, less a stigma than a cross to bear as you stumble along the path to your own private Golgotha, where you’ve been told you’ll find your ghost. What else is there to talk about in here? The sun glinting off the razor-sharp tips topping the fences encircling the compound like a galvanized ouroboros, the devilish heat in summer, the ungodly cold in winter, the conspicuous, desperate lack of a familiar's touch? Well, yeah, but that shit gets really old, like stinky-cheese old, really fast. There's any number of rumors you can repeat, of course. Prisoners doing this and doing that, most are going home; the Lifers never will, not while they're alive, anyway. It provides a balance to the chaos, though, talking of home, because it is necessary, like how walking upright requires two limbs. To remind yourself of better days, better places, better people. To keep on reminding yourself that that is who you really are. That you don't really belong in this place, not because you aren't guilty of something, but because it isn't fair that both God and the Devil used you to pay out their threats to one another. That you had not always gone days, sometimes dozens of days, without a decent night's sleep or a proper meal or enough clean sheets and underwear. That there is a whole other kind of world outside these bars and walls, and you know it because you once lived it. Round and round and round and round, like a manic gerbil on a wheel to nowhere fast — these, your thoughts of home. 

Except for those stuck in a tape loop of idolized grievances, no one talks too much about his crime, especially the rapist and the child molester, for obvious reasons; there is a reluctance to do so, a hesitance, as if faltering at the instant before breaking a commandment or a superstition. But stories of conquest, financial hits or misses, the pleasing memories, the more spectacular rising to legendary status by repeated telling, most of us young enough, off-the-streets fresh enough, to recall the flavors of McDonald's burgers, a cold beer, the faint brine of our best girl's kisses. "Fresh fish": that's what the Old Heads call you in your early days, because that's what you are — raw, soft, rolled tight as sushi in a wrap of green notions and salty with belligerent self-preservation. Playing and replaying in your mind what you coulda, shoulda, woulda done differently. If you could go back in time, until thoughts of home, inevitable, inexorable, ineluctable as crashing surf, erode your defenses to take over and dominate. Of home — just the words on the sensitive tip of your tongue become something, a lifeline to hold on to, a welcome distraction from the unflinching gainsaying of the D.O.C.'s seemingly unending proceedings.

Try to imagine this: A bus painted white, with blacked-out windows, full of new prisoners, hisses to a stop before disgorging its load outside the prison, the grumbles and fears of looming incarceration, the chink-chink-chink of belly chains and ankle shackles as you shuffle into a formation queue, standing shoulder-on in a line-up of all the criminal sins and double-sins for the first of the twenty-million head counts you will endure over the coming years, the varied odors of forty-three men in close, constant contact for hour upon sweaty hour, a hot breeze kicking up dust bunnies and bits of paper flotsam over your head, drawing your gaze for a moment up the side of the prison's intimidatingly high walls, windows slitted like your best girl's jealous eyes, roof drain pipes and steam service standing proud as throbbing neck veins, uneven brick the color and texture of her cheeks rouged and pricked by temper and scorn — don't want to look there, like finding The Beast you've always known was hiding in her closet. You bring your focus back down, maybe notice a cat gone feral cowering low behind a neatly trimmed bush, lilac or rosehip, something pretty and perfumed, growing beneath an open office window, perhaps the warden's. Once, twice, it blinks at you, licks its paw before swiping it across its whiskers. You wonder if someone ever owned this cat, whether its fur was anything other than a dirty, drabby yellow. You don't know, maybe it belonged to a little girl — Mandy or Sandy or Lisa — who hugged it, kissed it, dressed it in tiny sunglasses, a tiny fedora, and a tiny scarf knitted for this cat by the little girl's favorite aunt — Betty or Debbie or Carol — and papered her Facebook account with LOLcat pictures of it; a little girl whose many nights of crying failed to bring her beloved cat's return. Or, maybe, her parents (specifically, her overworked father at her mother's overwrought, insistent hand wringing) surprised her with a new kitten, same two-tone-marmalade coloring and striping as the dearly departed, this one with one blue eye. The little girl, distraught, at first rejected it, refused even to be in the same room with it because it reminded her too much of Rufus or Mrs. Whiskerson or Tiddlywinks, but then, in a couple days or weeks, she picked up the new kitten, its heart-rending mewling for some attention too much for her to ignore any longer, cradled it like a baby, instilled in her already, at seven or nine or ten, a maternal instinct.

Thus, this little girl forgets her old cat, forgets that she hugged it, kissed it, dressed it in sunglasses, a fedora, and a scarf knitted special by her favorite aunt, forgets it was she who took all those saccharine pictures, the ones now doomed to cyberspace oblivion by the little girl's little finger pressing down on her keyboard's delete button. You can tell by the blank stare in the cat's eyes that it couldn't care less, it's perfectly capable of meeting its own needs. You bend low at the knees, whistle, say, "Here, kitty, kitty," looking for attention of your own from somewhere, someone, something, though it comes from a surly guard barking at you to Get your ass back in line, knucklehead or shithead or Bumstead. This cat's head swivels to face you, ears pricked, gaze intent, whiskers twitching with its nose, as if in anticipation of a morsel it wouldn’t have to chase down, an instant before it returns to licking itself clean. Strange, you think, now that I recollect, that cat looks like Rusty. Although it reminds you of the pet your best girl once adored, you fail to capture its interest, its mind, its heart.

As you imagine all that, a memory surfaces of home, a day at the creek with your best girl, beach blanket spread over green grass, swimming in the sun shining on bare bodies, petting and purring to music on radio turned low, ants in the barbecue sauce, upturned bottles, and other things. If you can't do that, can't for the life of you recall some specific point of pleasure in your past, it's hard to know what can or will happen to you once you are inside these bars and walls. Probably you'll go stir crazy, or just die from regret. 

Everyone recognizes that it's different for those who have children at home, or responsibilities, remaining obligations. Had them, before The State stepped in to relieve those burdens. Snake or Smoke or Buddy, the man chained to your personal space, whines and whines just above his considerably foul breath, something south of stinky cheese, about his very pregnant wife, on how she's ready to pop out his kid at any moment now and he can't be there. The Why-Oh-Whys tumble over his teeth like white water running over a cataract. Other men in line cling to their bibles as they might to a life-preserver, praying to God to keep their damned souls from drowning in Hell's Lake of Fire. For some, it's to be a vacation, an extended getaway from the pressures of the streets; no more need for wheelin', dealin', stealin', or gunplay. These men laugh and cut-up, call each other Punkass or Bitch or Nigga. Some of those from the Big City will reunite with family and friends. These men won't need reminding of home — for home has preceded them inside — where they will speak of nothing but, because it's always there, right in front of them, available, accessible, tangible, comfortable: home.

It isn't quite the same with me, though. I don't mean to suggest that I have no home or some rip-snorting war story by which to find inclusion. I do. Lots of 'em. It's just that I was orphaned by a pulmonary embolism at birth, then "disappeared" into The System, a casualty of institutionalization before my first crying jag had even ended. I come from Everywhere, Anywhere, Nowhere. Once, when I was ten, on the third Adoption Day of that particular year, one of the matrons at the orphanage noticed my sticky hands, what remained of a lemon sucker I'd pilfered from the doctor's office. "Got to clean you up, you dirty boy, make you presentable so you can go to a new home," she said, not unsmiling. I let her because I liked her, the first woman who ever showed me true kindness, a model for the other mother I'd lost. She liked to rub my head a lot, with tenderness in her touch and in her eyes, like the act itself was a personal reminder of someone she loved who had died young, or she saw me as a talisman for good luck, like rubbing the fat belly of a tiny, smiling golden Buddha. I had thick hair, a shade darker than that of a field mouse, curly, some of it stuck to the fingers of my right hand where I'd been brushing it from my eyes, like a shower of constant brown tears. The matron smoothed it back with warm water, and again. "We need to trim this a bit," she said. "Sound fun?" 

"Oh, no," I said. "Mama would never forgive me for that." I twisted from her grasp and ran to join the kid parade, cruising in and amongst The Potentials for my third family and another home. 

I'd made a friend there. His name was Danny. Thin as a candlestick, with a gray, waxy complexion in stark relief of his dark, wounded eyes, sunken like his cheeks, two craters in a skull faceted by the grind of incurable suffering; he was fragile as a moment, feeling so poorly. This was in the days when our collective understanding of AIDS counted for little more than uncomfortable ignorance, when you were more than unlucky for catching the virus. You were separated out, cashiered, thrown away. The drugs they gave him — generic morphine — eased only his physical pain. No one expected him to ever find a real home. He knew who Richard Petty was, though, and Dale Earnhardt and Tim Richmond, who would one day die of the same disease, and which one was the best race car driver. We watched them make their left turns on Sundays, whoopin' and hollerin' at the screen, cryin' foul at every tire smokin' fender cub. In the end he was getting huge doses, but even in his stupor he had a habit of muttering. He repeated numbers over and over. Three, forty-three, fourteen, five, two . . . three, forty-three, fourteen, five, two . . . . Everyone thought he might be remembering the combination to a lock, or was picking random Bingo numbers. I told them it was the serial order of his favorite drivers' car numbers. They believed me only when Danny would sometimes mix in Petty or Foyt. His mind had been hit hard; no one at the orphanage knew what to do but feel crummy, sorry, make fun of him. Some of the other kids began to watch the races either from a sense of curiosity or pity, probably both. One or two discovered a whole new world, but the rest, impatience had torched their imaginations to the ground long ago, the psyche's insurance job on the soul. They drifted away, went to new homes, or simply just left.

When Danny's pain got the better of him, as it did more and more frequently toward the end, his voice grew louder and louder, signaling his nurse to intervene with the needle. We could tell when the drug took full effect because he would stop counting suddenly, as if he was stomping on the brakes to avoid a tire-squealin', metal-crunchin' wreck in one of the races we watched together. One or another of the older kids would take up the order, even in mid-count — -teen, five, two . . . three, forty-three, fourteen — to titters of laughter. No one crueler than a kid, especially when he's a prisoner. 

Once on the inside, thinking of home takes on that same obsessive quality. Things worth going over and over, trying to dig deep, mining for those rare nuggets of truth, or pleasure. Perhaps that is the difference between me and Snake or Smoke or Buddy, those other men shackled together up and down that line. Home for me is not exactly a lifeline to grab hold of; rather, it is something to figure out, to comprehend, to be counted among the many things that seem familiar and strange. Like the novelty of the inmate intake process — the smells, not quite rank, not quite antiseptic, the cold rolled clang of steel on steel, the variable personalities, the abrasive attitudes, the piles of paperwork — which chips at me, roughens my serrated edges, forcing me to realize that there is always an institutional mattress for an unloved child. It does not seem possible that my life is as I recall it. I do recall it, though; isn't that some sort of proof — my memories, my testimony against a prosecution by existential angst? I insist that there had to be times, moments, occasions when I was present but not there, adrift among the constellations in the freckles on my arms and hands, or soaring with the swifts, or tumbling along with the dandelion fuzz, when I was wanted, needed, or otherwise spoken to, as if, finally, it was my opinion being sought. I treasure those kinds of memories. They become my escape. And this is something you must understand about life on the inside, if you are to understand anything: To talk of home, your face squeezed into the bars nearest your neighbor's side of your cell, the things you share in the still of the wee hours. If there is a split-second, the briefest of moments, faster than the blink of your eye, when the import of what you say rings in your neighbor's ear, or vice versa — then, in that tiny bit of time, he has the memory too. He can hear, feel, taste, smell, almost touch all the pleasures of home. And just like that, your gerbil's off and running, round and round and round and round. Man, oh man, home, sweet home.

//Seven Scott is a contributor to The Periphery.