“Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man’s Prison”

Review by Jennifer Farbar

(02/13/2007)    There is a vein that runs through the heart of American culture, carrying idealized notions of manhood — men as warriors, outlaws, defenders, and avengers. Think John Wayne or James Cagney. Tough guys who eat leather for breakfast and hold their pants up with rattlesnake hides.

    The coursing of that blood can often be traced through generations, as with young men who enlist in the military because their fathers served, or the way the sons of farmers and ranchers will fight the odds to keep tilling their family soil, herding the cattle. Sometimes, though, that vein flows with something equally powerful but often less noble, pushing young men as if off a cliff into the same pocked territory where their forebears stumbled.

    T.J. Parsell was just 17 years old when he was arrested for “half-jokingly” holding up a local Photo Mat with a toy gun. His father and an older brother, as well as an uncle, had preceded Mr. Parsell into the custody of the corrections facilities of Michigan, and doing time had become something of a family tradition, something the men joked about while drinking beer by the bonfire.

    In his recently published book, “Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man’s Prison,” Mr. Parsell, a Sag Harbor resident and member of the Ashawagh Hall Writers Workshop, describes the missteps and bad choices, as well as a certain inevitability, that led to his incarceration.

    Although he was not yet 18 and the “holdup” had been something of a prank, Mr. Parsell’s lawyer told him that as far as the court was concerned, it didn’t matter that the gun wasn’t real, only that the young woman in the store thought it was. He was convicted of felony armed robbery and sentenced to 4 to 15 years in prison.

    With extraordinary emotional bravery and clarity of expression, Mr. Parsell’s memoir describes what it was like for a young nascently gay man to enter prison in 1978, to become a citizen of a whole other country, where rape is a fact of life and prison hierarchy is defined by distorted notions of manhood and masculinity. (“Fish” is the term used by other inmates to describe new arrivals, as in “you’re dripping wet, fresh out of the tank.”)

    “Dad and Uncle Ronnie had served time in reform school, when they were kids,” Mr. Parsell writes, “for stealing cars and breaking into a business. He said that when he was there, candy bars were left on the pillows of new prisoners, and if a guy ate it, someone who wanted it back would confront him later. If the fish had eaten it, he would have to give up something else in return, which usually meant a sexual favor.”

    Because Mr. Parsell had the additional disadvantages of being young and attractive in a prison filled with men, some of whom were twice his age and many of whom were serving multiple life or 20-years-to-life sentences, his time was defined by the constant threat or reality of forced sex. As a young fish, he would become the property of an older inmate who would in turn provide him with protection.

    The way it was explained to him, Mr. Parsell writes, is that “Doing it with one is better than doing it with anyone who can catch you.” Or as one prison guard says to an inmate who complains about sexual brutality, “If you don’t want to get raped, don’t go to prison.” In this and other ways, Mr. Parsell’s memoir serves to illustrate the shortcomings of our country’s growing prison system.

    As a “fish,” Mr. Parsell is first quarantined with other new prisoners in the Wayne County Jail, in downtown Detroit, pending his assignment to a facility. His hope that he will be sent to some kind of camp because of his age (“Trust me,” his lawyer says to him in court when he is being arraigned, “you’ll go to a minimum-security camp, and with good time, you’ll be back on the streets in no time”) vanishes as soon as he sits down across from the psychologist at the State Prison of Southern Michigan, in Jackson, where he has been taken for classification.

    The psychologist, without looking up from Mr. Parsell’s file, informs him that because he has a “control hold,” due to the severity of the charges against him, he will be “going inside” pending his formal sentencing for holding up the Photo Mat.

    “Inside” meant inside the walls of a maximum-security facility, and the prospect terrified Mr. Parsell. “My lawyer said I would go to a camp,” he countered.

    “But the psychologist didn’t respond, he just continued reading the file.”

    When he does finally look up from his desk, it is to taunt the young man, asking whether he has ever experienced sexual intercourse with a man.

    Mr. Parsell later found out that the psychologist had written in his file that he was “violent and dangerous,” and recommended that he be sent to the Michigan Reformatory, which inmates referred to as “gladiator school.” Fortunately, the classification committee determined that Mr. Parsell was “too young and vulnerable” to go there, and sent him instead to the Riverside Correctional Facility, in Ionia, Mich.

    “As the state van made its exit from I-96 and headed north on a small two-lane highway,” Mr. Parsell wrote of his trip to Riverside, “the men inside the van, who were mostly from Detroit, tried to swallow up and devour everything they could see, hear, and smell, and squirrel it away for the oncoming famine.”

    Mr. Parsell grew up in Dearborn, Mich., a small working-class suburb of Detroit. He was just barely becoming aware of his sexual preference for men at the time of his incarceration. “There weren’t any queers in my part of town,” he writes, “and I didn’t know of any other part that had them either. It was the Midwest in the 1970s and people didn’t talk about these things, especially not in my neighborhood, unless it was the butt of a joke.”

    Like many rape victims, he becomes worried that because he has fantasized about having sex with men, or experienced even a “split second of pleasure” during forced intercourse, he has somehow “brought it upon” himself.

    Early on in his stay at Riverside, Mr. Parsell is offered some “spud juice” by another inmate. (“Spud juice,” also known as “pruno” or “home brew,” is made by fermenting fruit, which prisoners do in their cells.) Well into his second cup of the stuff, Mr. Parsell realizes he has been drugged. It turns out that his drink has been spiked with Thorazine, a strong antipsychotic medication commonly prescribed in prisons and frequently hoarded by inmates. Mr. Parsell subsequently experiences what can only be described as a waking nightmare: He is mentally present but physically immobilized when he is taken into a cell and repeatedly and painfully raped by several inmates.

    Each chapter of Mr. Parsell’s largely chronological memoir begins with a few italicized paragraphs, often describing some childhood memory, focusing in particular on the innocence of those times but seeing also, in retrospect, some shadow of the troubles that would plague him in his adulthood.

    Chapter 13, titled “Lasting Impressions,” begins with Mr. Parsell’s earliest recollection of his attraction to men: “Now I was almost 13, Mom gave in and finally agreed to take me to an R-rated movie. I was eager to show I could handle it. We saw ‘Papillon,’ which was French for butterfly, starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.”

    “It was based on the true story of an innocent man, framed for murder, who was sentenced to life on the penal colony known as Devil’s Island. After several attempts at escaping, he was hospitalized in the prison infirmary, where a trustee came on to the ward and placed a red carnation in the mouth of a young prisoner lying on a cot. I shifted in my seat as he ran his hand over the young man’s bare chest, across his stomach and into his underwear. I was terrified, as I watched this scene unfold, that my mom could hear my heart pounding. It was the first time I felt a sexual stir, and it was something I would never forget.”

    Mr. Parsell is the president of Stop Prisoner Rape, a group dedicated to prison reform — in particular to altering the hierarchy of a system in which many corrections officers “look the other way,” or worse, when inmates are raped or otherwise brutalized.

    In a country that confines more citizens, per capita, than any other (currently 2.2 million), and where recidivism is the rule rather than an exception, something has clearly gone very wrong, Mr. Parsell argues, particularly since some 99 percent of those entering the prison system have substance abuse problems that will go largely untreated while they are incarcerated.

    That Mr. Parsell not only survived multiple rapes and serious emotional scarring, but emerged, as if from a horrible chrysalis, both intact and intent on telling his story, is nothing short of remarkable.

    “Fish” glistens with the kind of truth and bravery that remain humanity’s best and only hope for redemption.

“Fish: A Memoir of a
Boy in a Man’s Prison”
T.J. Parsell
Carroll & Graf, $24.95