That Hard Livin is Gonna Catch Up to You Boy )pt. 8[

There exists, in any occupation, the propensity to become lazy, to have one’s passion for a particular profession diminish over time. This is true of jail house guards as much as it is true of janitors. I had made mention in a previous post of the idea that 2/3 of the guards employed by Kitsap County didn’t want to be there, implying that the other half (not great with fractions) did want to be there. I arrived at this number purely through a subjective observation of the behavior I witnessed while serving my time. The number is not as important as the message that not everyone who was in charge of keeping the peace in the jail was interested in keeping the peace in the jail; this became problematic one Thursday morning at lunch (note: we took our lunch in the morning).

There was this kid in our block who was, for lack of a better term, slow; he had a hard time understanding simple concepts, and was highly agitated almost all of the time.  I think his long-held insecurities were exacerbated by the fact that he had no where to go and be alone to process through his thoughts when he became frustrated.  There was a horrible benefit to getting your name called for clean-up detail, and that was an extra meal tray…so if your name was up, your digestive system had to work twice as hard to dispose of the mounds of what was referred to as food in the K.C.B&B.  I had a hard time choking down one, let alone what came after.  This kid’s name was up for clean-up detail so the guards (two cage rattlers) handed the kid his two trays, but the kid didn’t understand why he was receiving two trays.  Now the guards that wanted to be there (the non-cage rattlers) would’ve taken a moment to explain the circumstances to this kid, as it was no well-kept secret that he was a little disabled, but these two just started tearing into the kid without relent until the kid walked away, in tears, to his table…still confused.  Agitated as ever, he grew more and more unsettled as each of the inmates tried to explain the circumstances to him; unfortunately, the damage had been done and the kid couldn’t really even hear what the inmates had to say.  He was spun up.  Finally, when one of the guys came up and tried to take his tray (another kid that should not have been in County, rather a state hospital) the kid snapped, he  threw his food across the room, and began telling some other guy that he was “gonna lock him down” (no one really knew what that meant).  The guards, of course, swooped in to see what the ruckus was about, asking, “what happened?”; none of us had the stones to tell them it was all their fault, we hadn’t the stones nor the opportunity.  “LOCK DOWN!”  We all went to our bunks as they cuffed the kid up and took him to solitary.  On his way out one of the guards made an off-handed comment about it being too bad that Western State (a mental hospital in Western Washington) was over-full; thus making the point that he understood that the kid had mental issues.  This was a wake-up call for me, the realization that things could get out of control quickly, that I had little control over my destiny, and that the guys whose job it was to maintain control, weren’t interested in maintaining control.  I imagine this was some sort of karmic payback for my misspent youth when I would go down to the beach, find small crabs under the rocks, and put two of them in a Dixie cup to see how they’d react.  In my defense, I was an idiot with no regard for anything but myself…I’m not sure how the guards would defend their behavior.

I was truly shaken, and had to fight the urge to cry; I was angry and scared and the only hope I had was in Christ, and that made me uncomfortable.  I had always felt that I’d done a good job trusting in Christ, but it’s hard to maintain that delusion when all the things I used to supplement that trust were gone and I was left with nothing but the reality that trusting Christ made me uncomfortable.  So I prayed and tried not to look weak and dug my heels in a little deeper, as I had four days and a wake-up before I could go home to my girls.  After seeing how things could go wrong in five minutes, it seemed like an eternity.

For the most part, I passed my time reading, and writing.  Every evening at 6pm I got to call home which was bitter-sweet, I could hear over the phone (when I could hear) the strain in my wife’s voice as she tried to hide her stress, and I could hear my little girl’s vocabulary growing exponentially in a short time.  It was a constant reminder of the time I was losing.  Ten days isn’t a great deal of time, I know many families are separated for longer spans, under nobler circumstance, but it was hard for me to be away from my wife and daughter.

Monday, October eighteenth at six in the morning my name was called, it was time for me to go home.  I was returned my clothes, my I.D., and my black-framed sun-glasses, and I, along with two other guys, was led to an elevator that dropped us two floors to a corridor that had but one door, a door to the outside.  I walked out toward my wife’s work to see my wife and daughter for the first time in a dime (or is that ten years…ten is ten you ask me) wondering how they would receive me, what it would feel like to be home, and where I could get a cup of coffee.  There was also the not so insignificant detail of whether or not this whole thing would work out…would we be allowed to adopt our second daughter from China, or had I blown it, terminally.

That Hard Livin is Gonna Catch Up to You Boy )se7en[

That's just a lot of eggs

Captain, Road Prison 36: You gonna get used to wearin’ them chains afer a while, Luke. Don’t you never stop listenin’ to them clinking. ‘Cause they gonna remind you of what I been saying. For your own good.
Luke: Wish you’d stop bein’ so good to me, cap’n.

Thursday night, the night when I was hanging out with the boys, the night before I turned myself in, the fellas asked me how I would handle myself in jail…would I be passive, or aggressive. How would I carry myself? I was sure of this answer; “Like Cool Hand Luke,” I said.(If you’ve yet to see the film; really, what are you waiting for?)  I walk in I keep my head down, I do my time, be as passive as can be, without allowing myself to be vulnerable…real cool.  So you can imagine my surprise when I walked into the hellish dorm-like cell, grabbed the biggest guy in the buildin’ and started tearing him limb from limb…you can imagine.  In reality, the story goes more like this here.

As I walked in I noticed a Television hanging on the wall directly to my left, by now it was Sunday, and football (the NFL kind) was playing. The bulk of my new roommates were gathered around betting cakes from future meals (cakes are actually this yellow dry brick of carbohydrate that hovers between sweet corn bread and constipation, they are the most well used form of currency among the residents of the Kitsap County Bed & Breakfast).  Directly in front of me was a group of tables, intended for mealtime, with enough seats for thirty-six souls, thirty-six sadistic souls.  To the left of the tables were a group of bunks, enough for thirty-two people, who hate sleep.  To the left of those was a bathroom with four sinks, five toilets, and five showers…that’s right the toilets and the sinks were separate…classy.  Straight back from the door I entered was a door that led to the “yard” which was a twenty foot by twenty-five foot concrete pad surrounded by twenty foot walls, three of them, and covered with a chain-link fence.  The yard was the only space where one could exercise, push-ups and sit-ups, no apparatus was provided and in fact such things were considered contra-band, though some guys would take their bags and fill them with books that were provided by people who donated them to the jail-house; they would use them to do curls and squat-thrust type calisthenics.  Next to the door to the yard was a cot, it was to be my cot.  There were no bunks left…over-crowding in a county jail!?!?!  Perchance there is trouble in our utopia.  Some blame the criminals, others blame the system, after seeing for myself; I agree.  When I sat down on my cot to organize my things…there are rules here Donny (this ain’t ‘Nam), I noticed the guy on the cot next to me was sleeping…not a football fan, he was more into “Dukes of Hazard”, it was alarming the amount of contact I had with that stupid show in the span of ten days, this after decades of avoidance.

Once the guy next to my cot woke up, he started catching me up on the politics of the room, there were two guys who sort of ran the room. One was a huge guy who’d been there for three years trying to fight a manufacturing charge involving meth. (Trucker Tic-Tacs)  The other one was a guy, about my size, who was a little younger than me and had spent the bulk of his adult life in various cages meant to rehabilitate his broken brain, and help him “play ball” with the rest of society.  So far, they hadn’t worked. (the cages)  My neighbor seemed to have been locked up on account of his social retardation.  I know, its not illegal but it was his most egregious fault as far as I could tell.  His story is actually a cautionary tale of convenience store dress codes, the moral of which being: do not go to the convenience store in your pajamas if you’ve a warrant for your arrest.  The bathtub chemist was a Bonhoeffer fan, the lifer was a Jehovah’s Witness…strange.

This room had a few rules, some enforced by the guards (a group of guys, 2/3 of which wished they were somewhere else), and some by the inmates (a group of guys, 3/3 of which wished they were somewhere else).  The guards rules involved being “locked down” to your cot or bunk from 11p until 8a in the morning, except for breakfast which was at 5a, and also from 2p until4p.  No exercise in the room except to walk around the perimeter, slowly.  And, you must stand on-line for meals, whether you plan on eating or not, for this was when role was taken.  I feel taking role right before mealtime is a bad idea, especially when the meals are basically mounds of substance that defy one to find anything about them recognizable based upon one’s dealings with nature.  If one was healthy enough to make it to the meal line, and something happened after, there would be empirical evidence as to what was the culprit.  Also, they frowned upon fighting…they did however, enjoy rattling the cage.  This played itself out in horrible fashion one day at lunch, we’ll get to that; next post.  The inmate’s rules had to do, mainly, with maintaining solidarity…not taking advantage of one another.  One was not allowed to give food away for free, one could only trade, which was unfortunate for me, because I didn’t want the food I could get anymore than the food I had.  Lose, lose.  It also was hard to get used to because I’ve a bit of a communist’s mindset, in as much as if I have something I don’t want, I really have no motivation to be compensated for it…I’d rather just give it away.  The rest just had to do with personal responsibility.  No one but you should have to pay for your mistakes, was the over-arching ethos.  Next post I’m gonna wrap this up, including the story of the cage rattling, and the conclusion of the adoption story.  It may take two posts, but this concludes this post…see you next week.

That Hard Livin is Gonna Catch Up to You Boy ) #6[

America's most enduring and affable throw-back to racism--The General Lee

When last we left our hero, he was being wheeled into an over-sized lemur cage on a hand-truck in a straight jacket with a leather mask placed over his face, to protect those with-in striking distance.  One problem exists with this lead in; I’m way ahead of myself.  I described my first hours in the belly of the K.C. B&B, but please allow me to digress a bit.

Wednesday I was sentenced, Friday morning I turned myself in, But between those days (in usual fashion) was Thursday, and Thursday night my friends and I meet for what we’ve named, guy’s night (mainly because there are only guys there).  My friends knew that I was going to be put away for a few days (10 if all went well) and that I was essentially spending my last hours of freedom with them, so they determined that I should be allowed to choose what we had on the television for the night.  We never really watch T.V. at Rick’s house, we just have it on to serve as background noise and to suggest topics of discussion on slower nights.  I chose “The Dukes of Hazard”, and while I didn’t give it much thought that night, perhaps I made that particular choice because of the good natured ribbing “the man” (represented by Roscoe and Boss Hogg) gets while mishandling every opportunity to bring those rascally red-necks to justice.  The theme song included the lyric,”someday the mountain lion get ’em, but the law never will”, sadly I never caught the episode wherein the mountain lion got ’em…it sounded delightful.  Thursday was a good night, but alas, it was not to last, for now it was mid-morning Friday…and I was on my way into the lemur cage.

The guard who led me to my digs was a woman about three inches shorter than I, those who know me realize how rarely this happens to me, and was a real ass-kicker…She hit the door and immediately tore into the man who was in the cell that I’d also be staying.  His offense, using the two pads for the bunks on his bunk alone, this is not smiled upon in the lemur cage.  “Great”, I thought,” get him nice and pissed-off and then leave…this should work out spankingly. (Warning: the word spankingly is not a recognized adverb in American nomenclature, and should not be used as such.)  He returned what would become my bunk pad to my bunk, the top one.  Luckily, regardless of whether or not my cell mate was pissed-off, he was not to be my celly for long, he left after a couple of hours.  Before he left, he gave me the impression that he was in for a much more egregious offense than my own; as such, I made note that there was a possibility that I might be housed with people with a lot less to lose than I, and that I should be very careful whilst in the lemur cage.

I spent the next day in the cell alone.  During that time the toilet sink was not an issue…there was plenty of time for that to change, and change it did.

The next day I got a new cell mate, he was a black guy who had been picked up in Kitsap County for a parole violation involving drugs.  He was quite certain, and hopeful, that he’d be extradited to Thurston County.  I’m not sure why on either account.  He was a nice guy, and we made a little small talk, mainly concerning the rules, and he quickly got busy making a deuce in the toilink.  (Note: There is no barrier between the toilink and the bunks…only four and a half feet of air and opportunity.)  I’m assuming this brought him a great deal of relief, but it left me with a fair bit of anxiety as to how many more times I would have to endure this particular hardship of adult time-outery.  Shortly after dropping the Browns off at the Super-Bowl, my cell-mate asked me if I smoked weed, I told him that I didn’t, his reply was the question, “Do you mind if I do?”.  This is the definition of the term “loaded question”.  What was I supposed to say,” Gee, I wish you wouldn’t”?  The fact was that I really didn’t care one way or the other, I just wanted to get home to my girls as quickly as possible, which meant keeping the old sniffer clean.  I told him that he could do whatever he wanted to do, I was going to go to sleep, and if anyone hit the door my plan was to sit straight up in bed and ask, “What the hell is that smell?”.  He told me he would see to it that I wouldn’t get in trouble.  This, interestingly enough, was my point.  I laid down, feigning sleep, wondering where the contra-band had been stored, given the sequence of the events leading up to my celly enjoying his jail-spliff. (Google spelling suggestion for jail-spliff: jail spiffy…)  After about seven meals, three sleepless nights, one shower, several embarrassing potty breaks, one enlightening conversation concerning Hawaiian real estate, and a five in the morning incident involving me, the stairs, and my breakfast tray, I was called out of the lemur cage to my new home.  This new spot could aptly be described as one of the shittiest frat/flop houses ever envisioned by the most noon-day brilliant sadist nature has ever produced.  Do you think I’m exaggerating?  Take a look at posts 1-4, there-in lies a recipe for finding out for yourself…do yourself a favor; take my word for it.  That was just my first impression; the room, it turns out, was really insignificant in comparison to the possible pit-falls the sum of all its parts, of which I was becoming, had to offer.

That Hard Livin is Gonna Catch Up to You Boy ) Cinc0 [

“I’m not that bad…I’m not that bad…I’m not that bad” -Robert De Niro (as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull)

In jail you hear this movie quote over and over, there is really no getting away from this sentiment, it matters little whether you hear it, verbatim, running through your own mind, or variations of the message in every conversation which you have the misfortune of being caught up…it’s there.  It is true you know…or, more to the point, it can be true–depending upon one’s definition of the word “that”.  This may seem like Clintonian minutia, but we all quibble about what the definition of “is” is, we’re just not as critical of ourselves as we were of William Jefferson.  La Motta repeated these words over and over as he beat the piss out of his hands on a brick wall, having found himself in a jail cell after several legal discrepancies that amounted to making some mistakes, none of which were motivated by any specific malice…he essentially was struggling with the arbitrary nature of what society refers to as “law and order” (bong, bong) (ubiquitous, ain’t it).  This is an abstract idea with which one is confronted if one is lucky enough to be incarcerated.  I was that lucky once…let me tell you about it.

It was a Friday morning, early…earlier than any unemployed man should be expected to greet the day.  My in-laws came over to my wife’s and my house to watch our little LuLu so Kristy could take me to the jail house on her way to where she worked, next door.  We carpooled.  I was dressed in jeans, a white t-shirt, and a green button-down; my shoes, Chucky Taylors–black.  Beyond my clothing I wore a pair of black sunglasses and carried my punched Washington State driver’s license so that the jailer would see I was who I said I was.  She saw.  As we walked into the Kitsap County Jail I noticed that the lobby was decorated in a fashion that had a flair for the sparse; there was only one place to sit, it was a bench donated by the rotary club that doubled as a time capsule, I sat down and instantly realized it was primarily designed to be used as a time capsule.  Note/Warning: Almost every, if not every, piece of furniture used to equip the Kitsap County Jail was chosen for its ability to make you wish you had no lower back…thats right, all of the furniture leaves you with the impression that life would be better sans the lumbar portion of your spine…I don’t know how that would work, but it is a fool who seeks logic in the chambers of the human heart (especially when that human has a bad back).

The clerk sat behind a sheet of lex-an with a chute beneath it meant to pass things back and forth; I gave her my paperwork that stated I was supposed to be turning myself in, and she called for some bell-hops to come and see me to my room.  The bell-hops were dressed like cops, and saw to it that I turned over all of my earthly possessions (shades and ID) before showing me to the booking area.  The place hadn’t changed much since last I graced the dismal halls; this time they showed to a changing room where I disrobed, was made to stand in positions that left nothing to the imagination (jail guards are not keen on imagination), and received the outfit I’d be sporting for the duration.  I also received a bag with all of the supplies I would need to survive the visit, the kit included 1 toothbrush, 1 small tube of toothpaste, 1 small bar of “soap”, 1 towel, 1 washcloth, 1 spoon, 1 cup, some writing supplies, 2 pair of boxer shorts (brown), 2 pair of socks (gray…ill-fitting), a sheet, and a blanket.  I was allowed to keep my white t-shirt to wear underneath my green O.R. scrubs (am I wrong, or is there some thinly veiled irony buried here?).  For foot-wear, I received a pair of rubber sandals.

The next stop was a way-point between booking and processing, it was a place to stay while the powers that be determined with whom you should be held which was determined by the severity of your malfeasance.  The room was a scaled-up version of a lemur cage; a large glass wall facing out to the main hub where the guards keep a watchful eye.  The back wall was a collection of cells, around twenty-four of them on two levels.  On both levels there were about five shower bays with doors designed to conceal ones wedding tackle.  Each cell was a solid door cell, the doors had a small window that we were not allowed to look through, at the back of the cell there was another window that we were not able to see through.  The cell was 8′ by 12′ give or take, and had 2 bunks, stacked on top of one another, one stainless steel desk with a stool of the same material, also there was a mirror, and a toilet-sink combination, which was for going potty and brushing your teeth, respectively.  I felt this amenity amalgam deserved its own name, I came up with–disgusting (some might have said toink, or sinlet, but when one gets the opportunity to use this marvel of the miscreants, one tends to be drained of one’s wit).  The schedule in this area was a twenty-two hour lock down which meant we stayed in our cells for twenty-two hours then we were able to eat our dinner in the common area on the main-floor, on the upper level we took our dinner there, the lower level were allowed breakfast there, we had two hours to eat, shoot the shine, and clean the area; we could also shower during this time.  There was no television, and the only books available were bibles.  I read and wrote quite a bit.  I have a couple of great stories from this period with which I could not do justice in thirty words or less, (I am trying to stay below 1000 words) so we will revisit this next post.