Chapter 9: Trayvon — Sex, Love, and Like in Prison
Hayes CI — Dorms G1 & F1
This is part of a series. For more please go to the Table of Contents.
Trayvon … this is going to take a while to explain. Like Harry at the Swift Annex, I first met Trayvon at Hayes CI Intake, right off the bus we both came on. By the time we were inspected and sorted and put into lines according to dorm assignment and were walking out onto the compound I started looking around. Who was with me? I remembered that Intake is where I’d made my first friend at Swift Annex. And sure enough Trayvon was there. We seemed to hit it off right away, and we talked and helped each other out during those first few days of getting accustomed to our new surroundings.
Trayvon was 38 years old, black, in prison for his fourth time (if you include juvenile offenses, which he always did) for a horrible violent crime which he swore he didn’t commit — And which I won’t describe here because I decided early on that his claim of innocence deserved at least as much consideration as I had given Randy, my mentally unstable roommate in The Box at Swift Annex. I decided Trayvon was at least mostly innocent of his charges. As time passed I only became more convinced of that. The fact remains, however, that he was just a couple of years into a 40 year sentence with a 25 year mandatory minimum. His situation was not good.
As the days passed Trayvon and I continued to talk and get along quite well — until I realized he was hitting on me! He became quite open about that too — telling me he was a bisexual who preferred older white women and men, and complimenting me on my looks and personality. At first I found this rather shocking and disgusting — but as for shocking and disgusting sexual interests, who was I to talk anyway?
My first response was to tell Trayvon that as far as adult men were concerned I was not at all interested. I said, “After all, you’re way too old for me — but I’ll bet you were really cute when you were 10!” which grossed him out but didn’t stop him from continuing to hit on me. He told me several times that he was “totally fucked up” about me — and I have to admit that as the first couple of weeks went by I found his interest in me rather flattering! I’d never been hit on like this before — especially not by a man — but I gradually got over my initial reaction and just enjoyed it. I began to ask myself — should I really give in to this flattery? Should I experiment with a prison boyfriend?
Let’s consider a few reasons why this could be a really bad idea. That’s the first place my mind went as I obsessed about it). After all, it’s not like I met this guy at a church picnic. This was prison, and Trayvon was serving a long sentence for a horrible violent crime. All of his crimes had been violent, and although he denied his most recent charges — and I believed him — he readily admitted to the others. He said he’d “outgrown” his violent impulses, but then I caught him: Sitting right there on my locker bitching about something that happened in the kitchen, (he was assigned to PM food service) he fantasized out loud about how he’d like to “fuck somebody up!” I called him out on this just to make the point. He protested, “Oh but I wouldn’t never really do it …” to which I replied, “Yeah, but it ain’t like you don’t ever think about violence.” He made no reply. As the weeks passed he occasionally expressed a desire for violence when he was pissed off about something.
What were the chances things could end up violently between us — with me, of course, getting the shitty end? Might Trayvon force himself on me in a way that I was unwilling to accept but unable to stop?! These were not idle questions. I thought long and hard about this, but in the end I decided that no, he wouldn’t do that. Based on what, you ask? Good question — I don’t know.
Another consideration was, what was Trayvon getting out of this relationship? Obviously, he’d get a sex partner and at least some access to my canteen account. I knew he had absolutely no money, and he knew that I had at least some money. Perhaps he was really attracted to me and he was a mooch — I represented an opportunity to satisfy both needs! Was there anything truly wrong with that? At this early stage I told myself that as long as he didn’t get too greedy I was okay to let him have a soup or a honey bun when he wanted something. Why shouldn’t I reward him for his friendship? After all, I stood to get something out of this too — unlike my situation at Swift Annex I’d have a prison bad-ass on my side in case I got harassed or threatened.
Did Trayvon have HIV or some other STD? Of course he said no and said he had to get tested periodically and blah blah blah. I didn’t press the issue or insist on seeing the test results. Instead I asked myself — remember, this guy was assigned to kitchen duty — Would my state’s DOC assign a guy with HIV to that kind of job? I had to believe the answer was no, no way. Other inmates later laughed at my confidence in DOC! Also, he wasn’t taking any meds — either K.O.P. (“keep on person”) or single dose. Therefore I judged him to be healthy.
Was I the only guy he was hitting on or were there others — either right there in my dorm or in the kitchen where he worked sixdays per week? Did I care about that? A prison dorm is about the least private place you can live in, so I could see almost all of Trayvon’s interactions with others. He had other friends, black & white. Did it look like he was hitting on any of those guys? Answer — no. As to whether I cared, I must’ve cared or I wouldn’t have been paying so much attention. But I told myself I cared not out of jealousy but because I was still trying to figure out his real motives and worried about getting an STD.
I asked myself: If I do this does that make me unfaithful to my ex-wife with whom I hoped to reconcile when I got out? What would that mean? We were divorced!
Could doing this somehow turn me gay after a lifetime of being straight — at least as it relates to adults? I didn’t know yet because I hadn’t had this experience yet. But I thought — no. I was making a special exception for this “friend with benefits,” an exception that would end when we ended. I thought, “Trayvon is a unique situation. How many other young black guys could possibly be interested in an older white man?” So far, I didn’t feel any gayer. I was just messing around and having some disgusting fun. It was a prison thing.
Before turning to the potential benefits Trayvon had to offer as a “friend with benefits” I need to mention one last rather serious problem that I did not think about ahead of time — although in hindsight I really should have! That was, suppose we were found out? Suppose rumors about us began to fly around the dorm just because I was spending a lot of time hanging around Trayvon’s bunk and we’re smiling at each other a lot? What would we do, if anything, to squelch such rumors?
Maybe it’s just as well I didn’t think about that because as I said, a prison dorm is the least private place you can get. Rumors are inevitable, Getting caught was always a possibility. If I’d worried about all this I might not have proceeded. Maybe that would’ve been the best decision after all.
So now I’ve covered all the potential negatives. There were a lot of them. But what about the positives? What did Trayvon have to offer as a potential friend and “messing around” sex partner?
In hindsight I can see that Trayvon met several physical & social requirements for the kind of male sex partner I might be attracted to. Yes, being black (or some other exotic dark-skinned race) was one of them. (This has never been a consideration with me for a woman.) He had very little body hair — he didn’t even need to shave because he had almost no beard. He had very few tattoos. Okay, so it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why these attributes would be of interest to an old pervert like me. They fed into my fantasies of having sex with somebody with a child-like appearance. But so what? Trayvon was almost 40 years old!
So taking all this into account it was a good thing Trayvon wasn’t a hairy white guy with a lot of tattoos because I’d have found that really repulsive!
Also, Trayvon didn’t act like an effeminate gay guy. Red once described him as “a gay guy who’s trying to act like a straight tough guy” — but since he had five kids and a string of baby mamas to show for it, Red’s sarcastic description wasn’t fair anyway. His own description of himself as a bisexual rings true. In hindsight I can see that I wouldn’t be at all interested in an effeminate gay guy. I can be friends with an out-of-the-closet gay guy — Jerry at Swift Annex was totally out of the closet. It’s the sex part that would’ve been a turn-off if Trayvon had been effeminate.
I was looking for a friend that I enjoyed being with, and only secondarily for the “extra benefits.” In that department it’s only fair to point out that Trayvon was a younger black guy whose interests were about what you’d expect — Sports, card-playing & street talk, whereas I am an older white guy who’s not interested in any of those things. However, if I had made that an ironclad friendship requirement in addition to everything else, that would exclude just about everybody and I’d have had no friends at all while I was in prison. Trayvon was good enough.
Lastly, he proved up front he was willing to make the first move by hitting on me. There’s no way I’d ever go around hitting on black guys looking for sex inside or outside of prison. Never. All in all I was convinced this friendship with benefits was sincere on his part, and a unique situation never to be repeated in my life.
The main advantage for me to having Trayvon as a friend was of course that he could be my protection man. Early on he said, “Ain’t nobody gonna do shit to you — you got a black friend.” Ummm … okay … and by this time he’d also let it be known around the dorm that I was his “dog” and anybody that fucks with me, he was gonna fuck over. Now remember, this was coming from a guy who everybody knew was doing 25–40 for a violent crime, and even though he insisted he didn’t do it — and I believed him — his protection was not idle talk and everybody knew that too.
So there you have it. I could have that kind of protection and keep a good and useful friend at Hayes CI — if…
All I had to do was be a little bit generous with my canteen account, and a little more generous with my body — and run all the risks I just described.
Before I conclude this section, let’s not overlook the very disturbing parallels between the “protection” Trayvon was offering and the extortion I’d been threatened with at the Swift Annex. Because in theory at least, pay-to-stay extortion is also partly a protection racket. The payments you make to the extortionist(s) are also supposedly “protection money” whereby they “protect” you from being extorted or fucked over by others. Which of course means they own you and you are their bitch. This was exactly what I was trying to escape by checking in to the Box at the Swift Annex.
Yet here I was, less than two months later, about to enter into a relationship with Trayvon, who would become my “protection man” in return for some generosity at the canteen and some as-yet undefined amount of “messing around sex.” Please tell me what about that doesn’t sound like a protection racket?
When you put it that way it sure does! As I was considering what to do it was important to pose the question to myself in these, the harshest possible terms. But if anybody had ever put it that way to Trayvon — or if for some reason Trayvon ever reads this story of my anxiety about him — I’m sure he will be absolutely furious! I can hear him now: “Fuck you, bitch! I didn’t never ask you for no canteen shit! And I damn sure didn’t never put down on you or force you to do nothin’! MAYBE I SHOULD HAVE! I start bein’ your friend cuz I like you, an now you say I’m an extortionist? Git the fuck outta here!”
In fact he’d probably say much worse even than that! And if he put it that way, he’d have a damned good point! Especially in light of the events that followed when he and all the other food service workers were transferred to F Dorm — which I will describe in Chapter 10. Whatever I decided to do, I had obsessed about all the positives and negatives for long enough. I was going into it willingly. It was not extortion.
And so, about two weeks after arriving at Rutherford B. Hayes Correctional Institution, and a little over a week after telling Trayvon I was “not at all interested in adult men,” I now told him I was okay to do a little messing around.
Messing around
So how was “messing around sex” with Trayvon? In some ways it didn’t live up to its advance billing — but that wasn’t Trayvon’s fault. Rather, it was because in this least private place the opportunities to do almost anything and not get caught are vanishingly small. Our “messing around” consisted mostly of suggestive talk — which, I admit, was fun.
Beyond that, one opportunity was after the last evening count, when they would turn the lights off but allow the inmates to use the TV room for a while. Technically there was “no visiting allowed” during that time but a lot of guys did visit each others’ bunks, and if my neighbors were all off doing something else Trayvon could come over and sit on my bunk and “visit” and we could mess around and grope each other as long as we kept a sharp lookout for anybody coming & going.
Another kind of messing around was in the shower. Suppose the two of us just happened to take showers at the same time, at a time when — oh by the way — nobody else was there? But here again, we had to be careful because there were always people coming and going and the dorm officers station — the Bubble — was right there.
So as you can see, the great majority of what went on fit in to the category of “just messing around.” It was disgusting fun. There was no romantic kissing or hugging, which I wasn’t interested in anyway. It was “juvenile” — the kind of shit pre-teen kids might do — which I readily admit fit right into my own mental defect and charges.
It wasn’t long before rumors started to fly all over the dorm. As you can imagine they were always wildly exaggerated — if only we were really doing all those things it might’ve been great fun! We tried to be discreet, but …
What’s love got to do with it?
Was I ever in love with Trayvon, or was I just letting him have what he wanted from me to get the help & protection I wanted from him? Was Trayvon really in love with me, or did he just want sex and access to my canteen account?
Considering Trayvon — yes, his love was real, and remained real even as I was writing this over six months after the last time we saw each other. I think of it this way: I was definitely not the most obvious older white man for him to start hitting on if all he wanted was to mooch off somebody. I am a fairly stingy old coot and Trayvon learned that early on. Furthermore, if he was just in it to mooch he’d have kicked my memory to the curb and found another sugar daddy ASAP when I left — but six months later that did not seem to have happened. Therefore I believe there was something real whenever he would say, “There’s only one man I’m completely fucked up over around here, and that’s you, Z!”
What about me? Here the answer is — no, I was never in love with Trayvon and I’m not now. I was and still am in love with my now ex-wife. But I was and still am in like with Trayvon. Whenever he would tell me he loved me and try to get me to respond in kind, that’s what I always told him: “I don’t love you, Trayvon, but I’m definitely in like with you.” Once, when he asked me what I could possibly mean by that I admitted, “Well look at me — I’ve been following you around like a little puppy dog. It ain’t love, but I definitely like you.” Then he gestured down towards his crotch and said, “But you in love with this, ain’t you?” I didn’t respond because I didn’t want to say no, I’m really not in love with that either, but I’m definitely messing around with it.
It all came to an end only about a month after it started when the prison administration decided to move all the “food service” guys into the same dorm — which was F Dorm, right next door, but even that short distance stopped everything except seeing each other at the chow hall and in the rec yard. Up to that point I’d never gone to the morning “required rec yard” even once because as a houseman I was exempt. Trayvon was “required” to go in the morning, but most afternoons he was at work in the kitchen. Now I started going a couple of times per week. Trayvon was especially anxious for me to go on Saturdays when morning rec was not required and the rec yard was relatively empty & quiet — he figured we’d have a chance for some messing around sex and tried to entice me to a couple of places out there he thought were secluded enough, but I was too paranoid to do it.
Instead, I liked to sit in the shade of the rec yard pavilion, watch Trayvon play basketball & cut up with his friends and say to myself, “There he goes, my guy — none of those guys knows what goes on between us and even if they’ve heard the rumors they don’t seem to care.” Sometimes we’d “walk the track” together & talk, or just hang out on the bleachers (there was an old ballfield on the yard). In short, we were dogs.
So close … and then, goodbye!
As I will describe in the next few chapters of my story, I went thru a lot of effort and made several stupid blunders trying to get myself moved to Trayvon’s dorm — including spending over two weeks in the Box while I was at it — and in the end I was almost successful. For the last three weeks of my time at Hayes CI we were on opposite sides of the same dorm building, and although Trayvon & I saw a lot of each other the opportunities for sex — even “messing around” sex — were pretty limited … but not impossible.
Wandering into the wrong side of the dorm (after morning chow, for example) was a rule violation punishable by a 30-day trip to the Box, but in truth guys did it pretty often and almost never were punished. Furthermore you would think that the dorm officers, who were there every day & could see both sides of the dorm, would realize when somebody was out of place — but in fact they almost never seemed to — maybe they just didn’t care. All I had to do was keep myself busy — for example cleaning the bathroom sinks (which was my job as a houseman) on the wrong side of the dorm — and the officers never seemed to notice. As I’ve mentioned before, the bathroom was a place where opportunities for messing around could be found. I even got stuck over there during “count time” once and wasn’t caught because the overall number for our dorm still came out okay. I would just slip out when they called some activity like “AM Education!” and wander back to my side of the dorm and the game was over. Of course this was not something you could do on a regular basis or you really would get caught and that would be very bad! Over the three week period we risked it only 2 or 3 times.
As I will describe in more detail in Chapter 10, Trayvon wrote a letter to my brother. In fact he wrote more than one letter and in one of them he asked my brother to help him locate his mother whom he had not heard from in the two years he was in prison. My brother found her! — something for which as you can imagine Trayvon was eternally grateful.
He wrote to his mom — I supplied the paper, envelope & stamp. She wrote back — at least she did that first time. Then Trayvon did something he should not have — he called his mother using someone’s illicit cell phone. You can hardly blame him for wanting to talk to his mom, but use of a prison cell phone does not come cheap and Trayvon had no money at all so he had to use the phone “on credit” hoping either his mom would put some money on his account — which she did not — or that he could get the money from me before the ruinous “late payment fees” began to pile up. If he didn’t pay there could even be threats of violence. Unfortunately Trayvon did this at a time when I had just squandered what money I had on a failed scheme — I was broke too!
What could I do to help my best friend, just as I discovered I was about to be transferred and we’d never see each other again? I gave him all the unopened food in my locker and spent down the last $7.50 of my canteen account on a list of stuff provided by the cell phone owner. Then I wrote to my brother asking him to please put some money in Trayvon’s account — just enough to cover this one debt — and promised that if he’d do that Trayvon andI would learn our lesson and never ask for money again. As it turned out, Trayvon did continue to ask my brother for money which ended up pissing him off. I did all this on my last full day at Hayes Correctional Institution.
Once my transfer was confirmed that afternoon before I was to leave, Trayvon’s reaction was something like denial — he avoided me the rest of the night and barely acknowledged me the next morning when I waved goodbye thru the dorm office windows. But then when they gathered all the transfers into the laundry and storage room which was between the two bathrooms and all the doors between the dorms were open for a few minutes he came over, waved goodbye and yelled, “Stay in touch!”
“Write to my brother!” I yelled back. (Inmates are prohibited from writing to each other).
“I will!” he yelled — then the doors all closed and we transfers were on our way. Goodbye Trayvon!
Trayvon did write to my brother, and we did “stay in touch” that way for the rest of my time in prison.
“The Game”
It so happened that I didn’t last long at all in my next camp — River CI — before having to “check in” to the Box again. That’s a very sad & scary tale that I’ll tell you all about later on. Part of the time I spent rotting in the River CI jail I had a gay/transexual roommate named “Star Extreme,” and one day she told me about guys who played what she called “The Game.”
Guys who played “The Game” were always on the lookout for a potential fresh piece of hot meat getting off the bus at their prison. When that fresh hot boy arrived at the dorm there was always some dude there to start flirting with him, telling him how fucked up they were about that boy and trying to get in his pants. One of the first things they had to offer that boy was “protection.” “Ain’t nobody gonna fuck with you while I’m around Babe. You need anything? I’ll take care of it.” etc. etc.
There is, however, always a certain price to be paid for all this attention & protection. Sooner or later that hot boy’s new lover is gonna ask for some favors: “Hang onta this toochie for me, Baby” — or — “Stick this cell phone up your butt so the po-lice don’t find it during the shakedown. Ya know I’ll make it right for ya Baby … “ etc. etc. Once that hot boy gives in to this, he is owned.
But an even better way to play “The Game” is — find a sex partner with money, so that boy is actually taking care of you and not the other way around. The hot boy gets fucked and pays for it too! What a deal!
As I listened to Star describe The Game I couldn’t help asking myself, did this not sound a little like someone I knew? Like Trayvon, in fact? The answer to that question was, yes, it did. So in one respect, Trayvon was playing his own version of The Game with me — a version in which he was looking for an older white man with money — and I had gone along with it. But here’s the thing: If you go back and read everything I said & thought & worried about Trayvon during those first few weeks after I met him, it’s not like I was unaware of what was going on although I didn’t have a name for it like “The Game.” Instead I decided to go along with The Game, to be “a little generous with my canteen account and a little more generous with my body” in return for the friendship & protection he offered.
And I have to say — he really did stick his neck out for me several times, including times when I ignored his good advice and fucked up. He never asked me to put myself at risk for him by holding any contraband or anything remotely like that. In that respect, our relationship was no game for either one of us.
So the real question was: Would I have done it over again with Trayvon now that I knew what Game he was playing? The answer is YES I would, but I’d have told him up front that I knew how The Game was played.
Dumping Trayvon
As I said before, Trayvon & I “stayed in touch” throughout my time in prison through my brother. Unfortunately, as time went on Trayvon also became more and more of a mooch toward my brother. He didn’t like that at all. Not to mention the fact that my brother looked up his charges on line and was horrified by them. Unlike me he was not inclined to forgive him or believe his protestations of innocence.
By the time I got out my brother had enough and insisted that he was no longer going to serve as the go-between for me and Trayvon. As for myself, I was of a mind to make a clean break in life after I got out. Part of that was living up to my original pledge not to look up or stay in touch with anybody I’d met in prison. Besides, I was sure there were rules against corresponding with any inmate or associating with any convicted felon while on probation, an assumption my probation officer was happy to confirm at our very first meeting.
That meant dumping Trayvon. I knew this was in my best interest, but still I didn’t like it. As I attempted to explain to my brother, I could hardly blame Trayvon for trying to contact me, or even for being a mooch. He had absolutely nothing and nobody to turn to for help, and with a 40 year sentence for a horrible violent crime his situation was pretty desperate. After a couple of letters & phone calls his mom had stopped responding, and the rest of his family — siblings, cousins & children — all deserted him long ago. My brother was unmoved. He figured a violent criminal was getting what was coming to him.
I still think of Trayvon often. I wonder what he’s doing right now? Rotting in prison, that’s what.
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