Tear Gas 101

2005 I’m standing outside the prison with a small group of inmates waiting to be let back in. We are returning from our day job on the Plantation and I am covered in dust and grime. We salvage used hard drives and take the gold out of them. It’s shitty work but I make 17 cents an hour, the highest wage in this outfit. I’m thinking of walking the track one more time once we get in and I have showered. Maybe I missed something the first 500 times I walked it. You can’t walk into the same lap twice. Everything is always changing, an amphorous nebula of weirdness, spinning, moving, captured by the gravity of this planet as we shoot through space. You have to pay attention.

“OK professor, you gotta solve this question. Solve it. Need an answer,” says Cleves as we wait at the gate. Cleves is from Cleveland, thus the ingenious moniker and has some connection to dog fighting, or so I heard. I’ve been bestowed a professorship by nature of my glasses and the fact that I read most of my free time. Sets me apart from the crowd.

“Yo, the moon, is it a star or a planet? Come on, which is it?”

I hope someone doesn’t have money on this.

“Will I get shanked if I give the wrong answer, if I give any answer?”

“Professor, inmates only have shanks in the movies. Come on.”

Feels like a set up but I’ve had a good run.

We are huddled in a mass overseen by guards with rifles, as off to a Polish death camp. The large gate awaits the proper orders to open. It’s a series of three gates we pass through to finally return, a hurdle of metal detectors and body searches. Sometimes a cavity check. Spread the cheeks. Bend over.

As outdoor workers, we are the main suspects of smuggled contraband into the prison.

I notice my eyes are starting to sweat, a vague irritation in my nostrils. Whatever happened to the clean air act?

“The moon is an anomaly,” I answer. “It is both a planet and a star.”

“See?”

“See?”

“What’s an anomaly?”

Moving right along.

“OK, OK, do brown cows give chocolate milk?”

This is a tough one.

We are all starting to cough, something is going on.

“Tear gas,” someone says.

“Of course they give chocolate milk, where do you think it comes from?”

A bigger wave of gas rolls in, finishing us off.

“Open the gates assholes!” someone shouts.

“The Feds are practicing for assholes like you,” a guard informs us.” I learned later there was a Federal training building next door where agents practiced shooting their riot gear, lobbing bombs of tear gas, fingering their rubber bullets. Today was one such day. The wind was doing us no favors.

We stood and coughed, like the suffering Jews in Auschwitz. It didn’t bother me too much but my eyes stung.

The gate finally creaked open, slow and rusty, like we were entering Dracula’s castle, into another holding pen, but away from the wind.

“How do cows make chocolate milk then?” Cleves kept pushing. He was a young, wiry, Black guy with round glasses.

“They feed them Hershey bars,” I say with a straight face.

That settled things. Made sense. We crammed into the metal detection room. Unfree at last.