Why I Committed Suicide (47 page)

“Instead of a war on poverty, there’s a war on drugs that says the police can bother me.”

—TuPac

“How do you know where I’m at when you haven’t been where I’ve been, understand where I’m coming from?”

—Be Real

Sung to the Brady Bunch Tune:

Here’s the story,

of a college student,

who spent two years of his life behind bars.

All his friends thought that he went crazy,

because he wrecked their cars.

I’ve been back in here quite a few months now. I don’t really keep track of the time or anything anymore. There is weekend time and weekday time. It’s funny how weekend time is really dreaded around here. Weekend time is when you know there will be no progress made whatsoever on anything concerning you. Some of the other prisoners get visits but I’ve given up on expecting or getting upset and moody when nobody comes to see me. I guess it’s been a few weeks since I saw my sister and a few months since I’ve seen Jenifer. The mail doesn’t come on the weekend and the blacks take over the TV so they can watch Soul Train and Flava TV, a local rap video show. I must admit I’ve come to enjoy the latter after months without music. The people that keep track of time are the people that know when they are getting out or when they should be getting shipped down south to prison. It’s kind of funny that the county jail is so bad that people who know they are going to prison get bent out of shape when the guards run a chain and they are not on it.

“Running a chain” is what they call it when you catch the prison bus to go to the various farms. They cut the phones off early and announce the people getting shipped out later that night. The phones go off so that no-one will try to arrange sort of an elaborate Hollywood sabotage that frees the prisoners from the buses on their way down South. When you get to prison is actually when you get those “prisoners rights” that people out in the real world get so bent out of shape over. For instance, they still serve the Vitapro stuff that is used as a meat substitute here in County, the same protein stuff that is used to fatten cattle and sheep that are going to be slaughtered. After a riot or two down south that crap went out and semi-normal food was re-introduced. Down South a person can get magazine subscriptions and order books or other amenities that the everyday schmoe on the street takes for granted and doesn’t use, but people still don’t feel like prisoners deserve to utilize them. People are really fucking stupid if they think that keeping people from reading books in jail or eating food with nutrients could possibly be morally sound. If I’ve learned one thing in here it’s that one day, with the exception of maybe 1% of the people at the most, everyone is going to get out. If you are in your retirement years and you are old, frail, rightfully scared and vote republi-fuckin-can then of course you support mandatory minimum sentencing and cruel punishment because you are going to be dead and buried long before the chaff of society is released. Anyone that thinks in the short term like that would want those sorts of things. If everything becomes a label such as black and white, cops and robbers, get the bad guys and all that other bullshit, then prison makes sense. It’s a great short-term viable solution that is easy to ingest and gives great statistics for opinion polls. What gets to me is the younger people that think a system like this will ever work over a long period of time. My peers, before all this mess, agreed that the social security system would crumble under its own weight a long time before we ever see the same benefits it provides to our elders. It’s best to think of the current jail system in the same way.

Let’s ponder a moment and think about the definite. ONE DAY THE MAJORITY OF THESE PEOPLE WILL GET OUT OF JAIL. Why is it so easy to accept that one day the people we put away will come out totally unsuper-vised and unable to handle the changes society has been gradually going through while this person, this human being, has been stewing and becoming an instinc-tually surviving creature. This creature is no longer a man by society’s standards. We think we want our creatures manageably stupid and uneducated because we take away the books, education and reintegration programs. We establish conditions that allow this creature who is becoming stronger, meaner and more disgruntled to eventually re-enter society. The beast was sentenced to be punished, so we took away its rights in the name of punishment sent the filth into a concrete jungle where being the strongest and meanest are the only dominating traits worth developing. The creature is given handlers, which dictate when IT may eat or interact with others. The creature is continually at war with others of ITS own species so IT learns to fight, or to kill, or at the least the value of strength over knowledge. And then one day the gates that keep the foul stench of the dregs inside ITS properly sealed barrier suddenly swing open and the creature is told that IT is no longer an IT but a man and sent on ITS way to the proverbial happy ending. Except the happy sunshiny people that now call IT a man expect all to be forgiven and the years of instincts that kept IT alive to be abandoned instantly. A “yes massa, ise be good now, I learnt mah lesson” mentality to be firmly implanted into ITS thick dense skull. Except our creature has been tattooed with a mark on its forehead that informs anyone who might mistakenly take IT in and offer IT work or shelter, that IT may look like a man but inside, IT is still an IT. The creature is introduced to the things it missed out on—the sensory untouchable pleasures of the flesh of society’s daughters and granddaughters (or sons and grandsons depending on ITS preferences now)—unable to comprehend why the men that walk and talk just like IT are blessed with these things. IT becomes confused, frustrated, jealous and lost like a freakish Frankenstein monster that eventually fucks up so that the townsfolk have to chase IT to ITS cage or burn IT alive.

Okay, so I’m going on a melodramatic rant here right? Then let me back pedal and reduce this to its simplest form. History supports that segregation doesn’t work, so we’ll have to establish that rule as a given. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or you would have them do unto your surviving family.

It is really that easy.

I’m learning to savor the books that I read in here because it is so infrequent that I am blessed with a good one. I used to read about a book a day and read them as if I was trying to finish them in order to complete an assignment or something. As the supply dwindles I am forced to read more slowly. My comprehension level remains the same although it was already close to perfect. I liken the trend to a connoisseur of fine wine. I spend more on one bottle and savor it slowly instead of drinking tubs of Boone’s Farm. The only thing is, in here, I am drinking Boone’s Farm and savoring it as a bottle of fine Scotch. I always establish myself as the library person. Once a week or month or whenever, someone goes to get books off the library cart. You can trade whatever books you have into the library one for one. I always hide more magazines and extra books in my socks and pants though. Some people are able to smuggle drugs into jail with them or cigarettes into the court holding tanks. I have to smuggle extra books. Pretty fucked up.

If you get up early enough in the morning you can watch this little closed circuit TV show that they run on the television that is supposedly put on by the inmates. There is a black guy and white guy sitting in a room with about 20 records, musical discards from some guard’s Goodwill pile no doubt. They play these records and just sit there looking into the camera while the music plays. I suppose there is someone working the camera because he pans around the room sometimes to let everyone know there is nothing of interest in their booth and sometimes the camera just tilts slowly up to the ceiling and stays there for a few minutes. I asked around about these guys at first trying to glean how they got such a tasty trustee job but nobody knew, then one day I realized that they must have only taped about five of these shows because they repeat every week or so and it’s the same damn recording. I guess that’s not a bad thing since even I didn’t notice that the shows were repeating until about six weeks into the series. I have a lot of time on my hands to ponder these sorts of things too.

Another thing that is odd is that in order to have a hot cup of water for coffee, or to simply heat a cup of water for sterilization purposes after getting it from the sink at the top of the toilet, you have to buy or use these things they call stingers. Stingers are such crude devices; I would never even have thought they existed in this modern world. Basically it consists of a plug that goes into the one live socket in the dayroom of our tank, and the other end is a metal loop that gets really fucking hot. I’m not a rocket scientist but I think the concept of channeling raw electricity into a cup of water is inherently a dangerous proposition. Plus if you leave these “stingers” plugged in without the metal part being in water the end of it gets glowing red-hot and will explode into molten chunks of metallic pain. These explosive properties are known to happen even while in the cup of water on occasion, which can destroy the only assigned cup that they issue each person upon containment.

In case I haven’t given a rundown of the basic admission supplies, when you get here they give you a tortuously uncomfortable mattress, a sheet, a blanket, a cup, a spoon, and a pair of very worn and usually stained boxers. If any of these things get destroyed, the jail can fine you or charge you with destruction of county property if they have a bone up their ass. If your cup gets destroyed then you don’t have anything to shove through the slot in the door for tea or juice at mealtime and you have to drink directly form the toilet/sink.

Another sad part is that the boxer shorts Dallas county issued used to all be white, but so many people were taking them home with them upon release, for souvenirs I suppose (?!?!), that the newest boxers they issue are (and I’m not fucking joking or exaggerating) FLOURESCENT PINK. You probably can fathom that it doesn’t go over very well to walk around all day in jail wearing nothing but bright pink underwear. Instead of exchanging mine on monthly laundry day, I now have to wash them in the sink with a bar of soap or rinse them out while I’m in the shower. Plus I’m thinking of taking them with me when I leave, out of protest and to stick some other unlucky sod with the new issues. Denton jail had microwaves and cable TV. Dallas has repeating closed circuit TV, stingers, and pink boxer shorts.

To a dog, the act of me wielding a crude instrument such as a knife must seem amazing. All I’m saying is that there are still some things that people view as amazing which could hypothetically be common place to some of us.

Here’s some great jail-yard terminology that I heard the other day when two ‘bruthas’ were about to throw down, including “bizzaatch,” “blow-holed she-goat,” and “stanky mackerel crotch”. Think of how many extreme reactions you can get when you announce to someone that you’re going to “watch them in the holding cell getting their buttery cornhole gangraped by a bunch of drunk bikers.” It’s so extreme that it cracks me up.

Today some people came by in white lab coats and said they were giving mandatory flu shots for the entire unit. I became pretty suspect but they did a roll call and there ended up not being any way to get around it. I asked them specifically what they were giving us and got a standard flu-shot answer that didn’t seem quite right to me. I asked them what company they were with (no response) and why a private laboratory would sponsor a jail-related act of good will (no response). I did notice they charted everyone’s skin color and racial makeup when they administered whatever it was. There is one guy that has been in here for over a year, Junior, and he said they gave him this right when he came to this tank about a year ago. When they realized they had the same person from last year the people in the coats got really excited and took him off somewhere. He said that later they asked him a whole bunch of questions about how he felt and if he had noticed any unusual symptoms and how often he’d gotten sick in the past year. He also said they held him down and drew blood out of his back! I’ve got to get out of here soon. I suspect a pharmaceutical company is sub-contracting without the states-knowledge or something. I’m tired of being a second class citizen in here.

I read somewhere that teenagers retain forty percent more when they get more sleep. The amount of quality REM sleep allows them to process information and think about new ways to approach situations and incorporate new skills. I am getting more sleep than I have ever had in my life. So much sleep that it doesn’t feel good to sleep anymore. 14-16 hours a day is not the way our behavioral cycle is naturally supposed to rotate.

A lot of what I learned is that I never want to forget this experience, ever. Whether I climb above it or sink down into more sorrow and eventually sweet death, I’ll never forget what I’ve seen and Jack, a friend of mine, finally got around to doing my “hook,” or first crappy tat. I traded one jar of peanut butter for my first tattoo and it was all done with a sharpened staple melted into the end of a pen. The ink was just charcoal from a burnt piece of paper mixed with some water and my arm bled like crazy. I got this crazy but talented black kid named Crispy to design it for a candy bar. I said I wanted a sun with an acrylic “S” in the middle and he created a really funky design for me to use. I can’t have the sun on my face so I want to at least have it somewhere on my body.

Why did I need to learn that laptops are the best thing on the market to steal right now? People don’t pay any attention to them and you can take them easily from airports. Why did I need to learn a few different ways to steal car? Why did I need to learn that Home Depot accepts returns for cash without receipts? Why did I have to meet new guys who can get me the same drugs I’m trying to stay away from?

There’s a bond when you spend even a little time with somebody in jail. They trust implicitly that you’re not a fucking cop. It’s like a confessional disguised with bragging in here. The people to avoid in county are the ones who won’t tell you what’s going on in any part of their lives. The troubled ones that are on the phone all the time and have that crazy haunted look in their eyes.