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15
A NIGHT ON THE TOWN

Once I had established myself, life in prison wasn't too hard. I had my own comfortable cell with a warm bed, kitchen facilities, a stereo system, a mobile phone and a television. I had bought new clothes, was back to full health and never hungry, and the other inmates had stopped attacking me. With all the cocaine parties and my new friends, those first few months passed fairly quickly. I kept my spirits up because I was constantly learning new things and, best of all, I had my freedom to look forward to and hopefully a big chunk of money from the secondhand car deal to go with it.

However, I noticed that things really started to slow down around late October. It had been six months since I had arrived, and obtaining my freedom was taking a lot longer than my lawyers had first promised. I know I shouldn't complain, because prison life was pretty soft. The only obligation was to be out of bed for the morning roll call, known as the lista. After that, the guards almost never entered the prison complex, so I could do anything I wanted: I could sleep all day, study Spanish, cook a meal, smoke dope, read, talk with Ricardo, get drunk, watch television or sniff cocaine with Jack.

So, as far as prisons go, San Pedro was a good one. But it was still a prison. I was still stuck there all day, every day; I still had to sleep on the same mattress every night; I still had to wake up every morning surrounded by the same four walls and look up at the same ceiling. And although I was now free to move around the other sections during the day, I didn't feel completely safe doing so. The other prisoners still resented me for being a foreigner, so I kept to myself a lot of the time. When I wasn't taking cocaine with Jack, I spent entire days locked in my room doing almost nothing. It felt like I was slowly going crazy from