Liberty Prison

Liberty prison was over a hundred years old by the time Ricky Dussett arrived and though in all that time no-one had ever escaped, Ricky made a vow on his very first day that he’d break free from the joint.

It probably looked easy. Rick’s cell was on the south side of the prison, so he could see the sea from between the bars on his window. Just one wall between him and his freedom.

Ricky was facing a lifetime’s stretch, fifty years plus, for the murder of a narcotics cop found dead in his apartment. Unlike the other prisoners, he never claimed he was innocent, or even guilty, just that he wanted out. Outside the prison walls the sixties were in full swing and he wanted to be part of it.

Ricky tested out every possible escape route, learning his way round and getting to know prison routines and systems, making a note of delivery and collection times for food, waste and everything else that came into or left the prison. He never had visitors himself, but he questioned everyone who’d speak to him about the visitation times, what systems and checks the visitors went through, whether they were allowed physical contact (they weren’t).

It was in his third week that Ricky saw the first glimmer of a chance. Every workday, the prisoners were marched into a nearby quarry to break rocks, hard, primitive punishment. That day, Ricky saw an opportunity, the broken point of a pickaxe, about four inches long, lying on the floor, abandoned. Perfect as a weapon, or as a tool.

He picked up the pickaxe head and secured it in the only place it wouldn’t be found, inside the cavity of his anus. Of course, the more thorough searches included even the internals of the bottom, but on this occasion he was lucky, after a day spent with the cold lump of metal up his bum he eventually made it back to the relative safety of his cell.

What Ricky would have liked to have done is to start chipping through the wall with his pickaxe, but that sort of thing would be noticed by the guards. Even if he covered the hole by hanging up his shirt over it, or even covering it with a picture of his fiancé or the poster of a Hollywood pinup. The guards in Liberty Prison were trained to look out for bloody great holes in the wall, it’s why no-one had ever escaped.

A tunnel was a more realistic option, though it would take a great deal more digging and many years more work. Where to start a tunnel? The whole cell was searched regularly, including under the bed, but there was one possibility. The cell was as old as the prison was and dated back to the time when cells had one bucket for excrement and one bucket for washing. A sink had been added a few years ago (he still had to use a bucket for everything else) and as a result, whereas the rest of the floor was pure concrete, the area around the sink had been covered with metre-square concrete slabs, where the ground had been dug up to fit pipes.

It was possible, by slowly chipping away over many nights, to loosen one of the slabs, slide it away, start digging a tunnel, and slide the slab back over the hole when he had finished the night's work. The only disadvantage of this scheme was that the sink was over to the right of the door, which meant an extra six metres to dig underneath his own cell before he even reached the wall. However, that was still a better option than getting caught.

On the fifth night he managed to free the stone slab and immediately started chipping away at the concrete underneath. He made steady progress and by the end of the night had enough space to hide the pickaxe - up to then he had been hiding it up his bottom ever day for fear of it being found in one of the regular cell searches.

That still left a problem, however, how to dispose of the rock he had uncovered? The pants and shirt provided by the prison had only the smallest of pockets and even the slightest handful of gravel would bulge out and cause him to get searched. The only option was to hide it in the same place he’d hidden the pickaxe, up his bottom. He had never been strip-searched going out to the quarry, only coming back or at random points through the day, so he thought he should be safe. Besides, who would ever think he was smuggling rocks into a quarry?

He collected the small pile of stones, dust and gravel he had chipped free into a sock and, with much inconvenience that I will spare you the details of, inserted the sock into his rear passage. Soon after arriving at the quarry he obtained permission to ‘empty his rattlesnake’ and, with great joy, removed the burden from his bum and threw the contents of the sock onto the ground, where it would eventually be collected by prisoners, turned into concrete and used to build another prison cell. Ricky took great pleasure in the pointlessness of existence.

The routine continued for many weeks, then many months. A year later the tunnel felt like something substantial, at several metres long, but it was still below his cell, if he dug up to the surface now all he’d have would be a secret passage to the slop bucket. The problem wasn’t that the pick was too small to dig with, rather there was simply a limit to how much rubbish he could dispose of, his bottom was already pained to the max by just a small sock-full. He realised it was going to take a very long time to reach the fence, some twenty metres away from the wall of his cell. It was lucky Ricky was patient and determined.

Then his plans hit a proverbial rock. “This is Fatty,” the guards announced one day, shoving the aforementioned fat man into Ricky’s cell. Fatty snarled at him, a jungle beast making first play at claiming territory. The guards ran around for a while, turning the room from a single into a double, during which time Ricky and Fatty spoke not a word to each other. Fatty soon claimed the top bunk, the best bunk, to himself, even though his big fat arse threatened to tear through the thin bedding and bring his enormous rump crashing onto Ricky’s head.

But that wasn’t the main problem. Ricky simply had to risk letting Fatty in on his plan. The danger was that Fatty would try to gain favour with the guards by reporting the escape plan, though to be honest, he didn’t seem the sort that would try to kiss butt with anyone. Hopefully the extra work Fatty could contribute would make up for the time it would take to widen the tunnel enough for Fatty to fit into it.

That night, the two men had still barely exchanged a word when Ricky took the gamble of his life, lifted the metre square block and showed Fatty the work he had done already. Fatty was also facing life in Liberty, so agreed immediately. “I’m gonna have to lose weight ain’t I?” he said, though for the next five years he lost not an ounce and the tunnel was dug extra-large to accommodate him.

“The only problem,” Ricky warned, “is that there’s no easy way to dispose of the earth we dig up.” He went on to describe the process of shoving a sock up his bottom. Reluctantly Fatty agreed to dispose of his share, “After all I’ve got a bigger arse than you have.” he said, patting his bum proudly.

It wasn’t until the next morning that it became apparent how true this statement was. For some reason, Fatty’s anal capacity was simply enormous, he fitted two full socks up with room to spare - far more than Ricky could have managed in a week. This meant that the tunnel began to proceed at vastly increased pace, with the two men digging for four hours every night and dispatching the rubble into their bottoms. Within a week Fatty’s arse had widened still further and he managed four socks a night, that was nearly five sock-fulls between them every day.

With the common bond of their escape plan, and their shared complains of screaming bum pain, they become best buddies, would sit together every mealtime and hang out together in the yard, fight each other‘s fights.

The next five years passed in pretty much the same way, Sunday to Friday nights the friends would stay up late digging their tunnel, taking sockfulls of earth with them to their work in the quarry the next day. Saturday nights they caught up on their sleep, as they didn’t work Sunday. The tunnel grew at remarkable speed, in this time they had expanded well beyond the reaches of their cell. According to the tape measure that Ricky had managed to buy off of Get-things Gordon, the tunnel stretched twenty-nine metres from the cell wall. One more metre, plus a couple more just to make sure, and they could start digging upwards.

They had averaged more than six metres a year, which meant that they were six months away from freedom. Or would have been, if it hadn’t been for the new guard.

Since living with Ricky, Fatty had settled down considerably, and was no longer the restless thug he had once been, constantly getting into fights with fellow prisoners, prison guards and once even a passing priest. At Liberty, with his focus purely on escape, Fatty had become something of a model prisoner, had even been learning to read and write. Only Ricky and Fatty knew that this was to help him get work after they left.

However, Fatty was known elsewhere in the prison system as an out and out trouble maker, so when Rubelous Johnson arrived, he arrived with the memory of the punkish fat rebel who’d punched him in the kitchens many years previously at Standard State Prison. Johnson’s tales of Fatty’s insolence and aggression soon changed the way he was regarded and treated by the other guards, and he started to become the constant butt of weight-related comments and more than his fair share of searches and other inconveniences.

Johnson was the worst, taking every opportunity to bump into Fatty, taunting him with kicks, punches and total, unrestrained verbal; knowing that just one punch or kick back and he’d have Fatty slammed into solitary. Liberty Prison tolerated not even the slightest hint of rebellion. However, eventually Johnson went too far.

They had just started a day’s work in the quarry, Fatty hadn’t even had a chance to relieve himself of his socks, when Rubelous Johnson started at him; calling his mother a whore, calling him a fat fuckin’ son of a whore and jabbing him with his baton, telling him that “You don’t have the fuckin’ balls to fight back, do you son?”

But, unfortunately, Fatty did have the balls. Reaching his hand into the crevice of his anus, he grabbed a sizeable chunk of rock, one he had dislodged from the tunnel the previous night, and before he had thought through the consequences, he had smashed Rubelous Johnson in the side of his head with it.

Johnson’s face expressed surprise, shock and terror in the same instant, which is why he died with his face in devil-fearing contortion. Fatty was immediately surrounded by a squad of angry, vengeful guards, who marched him straight to solitary confinement, not caring how bruised he got on the way.

In solitary, Fatty was treated like the sort of scum who would kill a guard, often they would forget to feed him, toilet paper was a luxury he never saw and, worst of all for Fatty, there was no chance to talk to Ricky, let alone finish the escape with him. The previous record for serving solitary confinement in Liberty Prison was a year and two days, but Fatty sailed passed that. “If that fat fuck ever takes one step out of solitary, I’m resigning,” one guard had said, though which one was hard to tell as it was a view they all shared. Nobody had any intention of ever letting him out.

Ricky fared little better. No new cellmate was found for him, so he had the opportunity to carry on digging, but his greatly inferior anal capacity meant that progress became tremendously slow. Over the next two, three years, he progressed a distance that would have taken a month, or two, with Fatty. His progress was slowed further by the development of anal problems, his bottom having gone through too much, had rebelled, he’d developed piles, he suffered from severe bouts of constipation, followed by equally dreadful spells of diarrhoea. Even the thought of sticking a sock of rocks up there made him burst into tears, but to his credit he still did it, though with the swollen piles he could fit even less in there.

One particular bout of diarrhoea left Ricky in a fever, so bad that even the Liberty guards didn’t force him to work. For six days solid he sweated the fever out, all of the time leaking a furious gush of liquid shit. On the seventh day he awoke to a jab in the ribs from one of the more friendly guards.

“Bad news Ricky, your single room’s about to be sublet again. Seems there are too many bad people in the world and not enough cells to keep them in.”

Another cell mate! Whilst Ricky missed Fatty immensely and was really struggling to finish the tunnel, the last thing he wanted was a fresh face. A new governor had started a few weeks previously and was known to be very supportive of prison grasses. In just those few days a number of prisoners had walked out of the prison and, surely no coincidence, two prison gambling rings, three drug rings and a few other crooked deals had been exposed. It was a no-brainer, show the governor a tunnel that your cell-mate had clearly spent a decade digging, and you were walking out the door and Ricky was being moved to a nice safe cell in the solitary confinement block.

The other bad news was that he was deemed fit enough to start back at work. At least, having been out of action for so long, he didn’t have any rocks to carry up his backside, but nonetheless it was an exhausting day in the summer heat, breaking rocks. With his hope of escape virtually gone, he could barely find the energy he needed.

Back in the prison he almost crawled back to his cell. All he wanted to do was to crash onto his bed and sleep, but there on the bunk was his new room-mate. A slim lad this time, tall and muscular, he slept with a snore that expressed genuine anger.

Ricky collapsed on the bottom bunk, not wanting to think about how he might go about winning over the new guy. He slept the sleep of a man with the sorest ass in Liberty.

In the night he felt his new cellmate poking at him, whispering to him. “The tunnel,” the new guy said, “we gotta start back on the tunnel.”

It was Fatty, he recognised Fatty’s voice, but where the fuck had Fatty come from?

He woke up with a jolt, expecting to find Fatty’s ghost a haunting at him, but there he was in person, at least what was left of him, for all the fat that made up Fatty was gone. The starvation diet that the guards had forced on him, combined with the press-ups and sit-ups he had done all day to relieve the boredom, had made him thin and fit.

“I got out at last,” Fatty explained, “the new governor took pity on me.”

But Fatty didn’t want to sit and chat, he wanted to dig, to finish the tunnel and escape. They dug a cautious amount that first night, on account of Ricky’s diarrhoea and Fatty’s reduced size, but amazingly, even though his arse had shrunk to almost nothing, Fatty’s internal capacity remained the same, he could still fit the full four socks full.

Over the next few weeks they made famous progress on the tunnel. They had reached their destination, dug up to the to top and had just the surface to go. They spent the next few days preparing for their life on the run. Fatty, still paying for his behaviour, had been given an extra job in the kitchens on top of his work in the quarry. Normally this burden would be enough to break a man, but for Fatty this was perfect. He was able, using his enormous anal crevice, to smuggle out bulk-sized cans of food and drink, small sacks of potatoes, even knives and spoons.

He also brought flattened empty cans back to the cell. What these were for wasn’t clear to Ricky at first, but when Fatty walked into the cell one day with a soldering iron up his bum it became clear. At night, down in the tunnel, the flattened tins were welded together into a perfectly functional boat.

On Saturday night they were ready to leave. The final layer of rock was removed within minutes and, in the dark of night, it was no problem at all for them to reach the shore.

That night they set sail in their tin can boat, armed with a sack each full of provisions and useful utensils, and in no time at all had steered the two miles to the shore.

By the time the tunnel was discovered they were already far away. What became of them is unclear, there are so many versions of the story, in some of them they became master criminals, in others they just settled down and found work. What’s for sure though, is that they never again had to stuff their bottoms full of the rocks that had imprisoned them.