Therapy by Weightlifting
In prison, we forge our own code of honor
By Anthony Mammana
Another morning in prison. They seem to come fast, while sleep comes slowly. Most nights, I close my eyes, but my mind drifts — sometimes for hours — before it surrenders to the night. And no sooner have I finally fallen asleep, some sound or other disturbance pulls me back into awareness.
Once asleep, most days I resist waking for as long as I can. I lay there in bed half asleep. In that magic hour, I watch my semi-sleeping mind, observing it still processing from the night before, clinging to dreams, conjuring thought chains and creating its own word streams. I cling to this state, preferring anything other than the sensory assault of another day of stark, unnatural lighting, colorless desolation, the smell of warehoused humans, the sound of endless multilingual chatter, and the daily cycle of Orwellian-style intercom announcements about PREA (the Prison Rape Elimination Act) and COVID. It’s the Bureau of Prisons’ unique brand of low-grade, bureaucratic, psychological terrorism.
And in this early-morning state of mind, I linger. I think. I imagine. I imagine. Ideas for poetry emerge from my tickertape of a muse:
Pride mutes my tongue
Pain excites my mind
Chaos trapped inside me
No comfort I can find
……………….So I write
On this particular morning, my reverie ends with a tap on my leg. It’s my man, Patch, is alerting me that it’s time to wake up and get my shit together. It’s time to work out.
It is back day. The upper and lower back make up one of the largest muscle groups in the body, so it can generate real power. Power that can be therapeutic to harness.
The like-minded men in our building gather behind a locked steel door, waiting for the compound to open and for the move to recreation to be called.
It is, and off we go.
The weight pile at Fort Dix federal prison* is outdoors. It is a cold and windy December day in New Jersey. The pavilion housing the gym is fenced-in, open-air and constantly exposed to the elements. The equipment is old, weathered, rusted: a graveyard of benches, racks and steel plates on plates on plates that animate for just a few hours every day when the inmates arrive.
My partners today are Patch and Red. Patch is tall with a slim, athletic build. His other features include a bald head, goatee and high-quality, well-placed tattoos. Patch lifts weights with the endurance of a runner and the drive of a man working toward some future conquest that may require force.
Red is as tall as Patch but has a very different presence. Red has mass, like a muscle-bound juggernaut built for running through walls. He also has the red hair indicative of his Irish descent, kept close-cropped and military-like. His eyeglasses and disarming smile lend him the air of a bespectacled gorilla just happy to be doing gorilla things in the gym.
Both are good men to have on your team in this environment.
During our workout, Patch keeps the pace, timing the interval between every set and reveling in the intensity his fitness level allows.
At the end of every set, Red piles on more 45-pound plates, adding to what was already heavy and saying things like, “Lightweight!….Come on!” — psyching himself up for the next lift.
I do my utmost to match my brothers at all times, but today is Red’s day. His ability to bent-over-row 300-plus pounds eclipses the rest of us. My grip strength fails first. Both hands no longer want to open or close.
It goes on like this for a while.
On the final set, Red is in the bent-over-row position, hitting his heaviest weight yet — struggling with each repetition to pull hundreds of pounds to his chest. Suddenly, blood begins trickling from his nose, dripping onto his hand in the middle of his set. Alarmed and curious, the associations fly in my head. I’ve only seen spontaneous bleeding like this once before, during a power-lifting competition. Near the top of the lift, the athlete’s nose began gushing bright red blood before a stunned audience. The athlete paid it no mind and set the world deadlifting record. It was an impressive display. Red’s bleeding was subdued in comparison, but reminiscent, nonetheless.
I joke with him, saying, “Red, you’re making us look good!” And point out the blood on his hand.
Red stops and wipes it away.
Patch smiles.
Our workout soon ends, but the incident stays on my mind. The warrior/poet in me saw something special in that moment. That there is honor in the effort. Red pushed himself hard, possibly knocking on death’s door. His effort and willingness to self-harm in the fight for self-improvement in an environment that worked against it commanded my respect.
I realized that however flawed we may be, we are men trying to create our own destinies through whatever path is available to us. We are warriors in waiting, waiting for the day when our preparation will meet opportunity. We are at war with ourselves, with both our past and our future. And in doing so, we form a brotherhood of pain, practicing a discipline of kamikaze self-improvement.
Thus is life
My country tis of thee
This is why we bleed
For recreation
In the land of the free
*Fort Dix is a low-security prison. Weights have been removed from institutions with higher security levels.
