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all part of a great conspiracy against him. After three years of detention, the only English he could master was “I deed not know dere was coke on dee plane.”
    The detention facility we were in was the worst jail I have ever experienced. Even the condemned Bordeaux Jail and the inhuman Parthenais Detention Centre in Montreal looked good next to this hundred-year-old five-storey dungeon. Talk about a crowbar hotel. The entire building was made of iron bars and cages stacked top to bottom and side by side on five levels. There was an exercise yard on the roof but it was the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes per visit. With the city traffic down below and the smokestacks from the adjacent buildingsbelching oil fumes on every side, there was no fresh air to be had. The roof was fenced off like a monkey cage, as if anyone was going to try to scale down five stories of rotting bricks in an attempt to escape. In addition to the monkey cage construction, armed guards were positioned in towers on each corner of the roof deck to prevent escapes and riots. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do. There were a couple of basketball hoops on the roof deck, but they were quickly taken over by the black population. As soon as the blacks were tired of playing, the Puerto Ricans took over the court. I think I threw the basketball once during my entire stay. One of the black inmates tried to intimidate me by suggesting that I had better watch my tight young ass at night, what with all the fags around.
    “They better like fucking corpses,” I said, “because that’s what it will take before I let that ever happen!”
    In spite of my bravado, I traded Bishop a pack of smokes for his top bunk and let him take mine on the bottom. From then on, I slept with one eye open to keep watch on the others in my cellblock. I was glad that Bishop was with me because I did not know another soul in the jail or in the entire state of New York. He used to piss me off by comparing the detention centre to his boarding school experience and saying that it was not so bad. Not so bad? It was fucking terrible! There was no privacy. The food was tasteless slop. The routine was totally boring, with nothing to do. The furnace fan dried out your nose all night until you could hardly breathe. There was constant noise and light, even at night. You were surrounded by illiterate idiots. The beds were like cots, with worn out springs. The floor was cold concrete. The walls were metal bars. Every smell was shared throughout the entire cellblock. On top of it all, I had no idea when it all might end.
    My only salvation was in my dreams, which became more vivid and real than ever before. One dream in particular saw me diving from a sailboat into a turquoise Jamaican ocean. The experience was so real and refreshing that I was totally depressed when I awoke in the slammer. Nevertheless, I saw it as a certain sign of my future and I felt from then on that all was not lost.
    One evening after supper, I opened my bunk drawer to get a bag of potato chips that I had been saving for a bedtime snack. The chips were gone and I was furious. I asked Bishop if he knew what had happened to them and he told me he had taken them to exchange for his cigarettes that he had lost in a game of gin. I was livid. I was ready to throttle him. That bag of chips was all I had to look forward to in that rotten cage and Bishop had taken them without even asking. I was working up to giving Bishop a well-deserved beating when his gin partner offered to give me my chips back in exchange for what was left of Bishop’s smokes. It surprised me how far I was prepared to go over a bag of chips. That was the first and only time I can remember having an argument with my friend Bishop.
    After several weeks of living hell, we made an application for a legal aid lawyer and applied for bail. After several delays, our bail was granted, but Bishop had no money so I called Barbara in Montreal and asked