Having been in the penitentiary for an unfortunately large part of my adult years, I’ve had my finger involuntarily on the pulse of prison parlance. I am intimately in touch with the special language spoken behind bars and the vernacular that infuses day-to-day conversation here.
A new word crept its way into the prison patois a couple of years ago. Gurp. On any given day, walking around the yard, one was almost certain to hear one prisoner ask another, “Hey, man, got any gurps?” I knew it had something to do with drugs, specifically illicit pharmaceuticals, but I didn’t know which one. I didn’t really care. Here, trouble sticks to drugs like hair on soap, and I had all the trouble I care for a long time ago.
As the word gurp evolved from a noun into a verb (“Check out Two-Bit-Tony: he sure is gurped out today”) and then into an adjective whereby one may be gurpified, gurptastic, or even gurpalicious, I had to sit up and pay attention.
Prison is full of dope. Alongside the old standards—pot, coke, meth, and heroin, which come in through guards and visitors—are black-market psychotropics issued to inmates at pill line every day: Thorazine, Haldol, Elavil, Xanax, and others. Although the pharmacy doesn’t provide the Ferris wheel of fun that street drugs do, there is a place on the midway for any head change in this circus of doom.
Over sixty percent of the inmate population takes some sort of psychiatric medication. The Department of Corrections owns its own pharmacy and is only too happy to give anyone a bit of chemical comfort. It costs taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, but it provides the prison with a tidy profit and keeps the herd under control. The most recent trend in psych-meds is Wellbutrin. It is an anti-depressant with a kick. People say it is like snorting speed. Yes, I said snorting; very few inmates swallow their pills. We shoot them, we smoke them, and, in the absence of a needle or matches, we crush them up and snort them. Hits quicker and has more of a back-home feel, I suppose.
The majority of the inmate populace doesn’t make much money. Prison jobs pay in the neighborhood of five dollars a month, and with poverty one of the driving forces behind crime in this country, indigence abounds. Readily available prescription medication solves that problem. And while a Thorazine or Elavil tablet might fetch fifty cents to a dollar on the black market, Wellbutrin is worth ten dollars per 300-milligram pill. An inmate getting two pills a day might earn $600 a month. Demand is insatiable.
It did not take long for word to get back to the administration that half the yard was snorting their (or someone else’s) Wellbutrin. To arrest the secondary market, nurses dispensing Well-butrin were ordered to crush the pills and float them in a cup of water. But that caused most inmates to stop taking their prescriptions. With profits at the pharmacy flagging and depression intensifying, administrators reversed their policy of crushing the pills and Wellbutrin was back in business, although with new security procedures in place.
Leaving the pill line, inmates are required to open their mouths, lift their tongues, and run their fingers around their gums while a guard examines with a flashlight. Makes it tough to hide a pill. The solution: swallow the pill and don’t take any water with it. After leaving the pill line and making it several feet around the corner of the building…gurp…up comes the pill. They puke it out.
I was completely ignorant of the etymology of gurp until this past winter, when my buddy Roger and I were walking home from dinner past the pill line. It was shortly after a snowstorm, and we noticed several dozen colorful piles of vomit in the snow. I mentioned that it appeared as though dinner had disagreed with a lot of people, and Roger informed me such was not the case, pointing to the pill window and explaining the derivation of the word.
I couldn’t help but more closely examine the frightful scene, with various colors in the pristine snow representing the beverage choices of inmates at dinner: orange drink, purple drink, red drink, blue drink, green drink, yellow drink. And in the deeper drifts, where it had melted through to an appreciable depth, there were vomit holes and evidence of these fiends excavating through the foul miasma of chilled regurgitant. I stood there as if I were five and someone had just told me that Santa Claus was Dad and Dad pooped out the presents. Roger said, “Yep, just like momma birds.” I nearly added to the scene when Roger pointed out several whole, unchewed peanuts and suggested we might rinse them off and save them for a snack.
Several young fellows recently received an object lesson in snorting gurps. Often drug addicts in prison form little cliques or co-ops. They pool their drugs and share their paraphernalia. Needles are hard to come by, lighters and matches are rare; sharing makes sense. And if one guy’s stash gets busted, he doesn’t have to do without—he has homies, a communal supply of drugs. Probably a bad idea anywhere. In prison, ghastly.
So the lads share their gurps, share a straw to snort them, and share the good times. They occasionally share a bad cold, but isn’t that inconsequential, in light of all the other benefits of sharing? It seemed like a fine idea until they shared an unusually virulent strain of MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) in their nasal cavities.
Whether the vector was vomit or sharing a straw, they will never know. What they do know is how quickly a MRSA infection grows in an environment that is made almost exclusively of mucous membrane and soft tissue. They returned from a trip to the hospital, each of them missing pieces of their lips, nose, or face.
When an inmate undergoes a dramatic change in appearance—growing or shaving a beard, going from long hair to bald, new tattoos—he is required to have a new photo made. So dramatic were the changes in their facial characteristics that every one of the poor bastards had to have a new picture taken. I think of it every time I walk past the pill line and see the bright, colorful snow that looks like a springtime flower garden blooming in the dead of winter. Gurptastic.
John David Cochran is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, a father, a carpenter, a welder, an avid outdoorsman, a horseman, a convict, and an aspiring writer.
