Getting on the 77 bus was easy. It was something I used to do all the time. I’d just tell the driver I was homeless and needed to get to a shelter and they’d let me on every time. Now I had a cast—how could anyone say no? I slumped back in a seat, and we were soon cruising along the highway. When the bus started coasting through some of my old stomping grounds, a thought entered my head. We pulled into Bramalea City Centre, the air suspension hissing as the driver lowered the bus for me to get off. I hurried to catch the 1A bus to Four Corners, downtown Brampton.
I had a plan.
TURNING POINT
WHY THE FUCK AM I wandering in the desert like a wounded animal? I asked myself as the 1A entered the terminal.
“Last stop!” the driver called out. The bus pulled to a halt, and I stepped off onto the platform and closer to relief. I lit my stem. The sizzle of the stone gave way to a milky stream of smoke that coated the back of my throat. A fire engine howled in my ear, and my heart raced. I found myself striding to a nearby convenience store. I knew what I had to do. It didn’t matter that I’d never done anything like it before, or even wanted to. This was beyond wanting. This was need.
Leftover crumbs that resembled bone shards peppered the centre of my palm. With the tips of my fingers I packed them into my pipe and lit it. My leg still hurt, but when I took this last blast, the pain completely subsided. I was ready. I gritted my teeth, opened the door, and walked in.
It’s too late to turn back now. There’s nowhere left to go.
I swallowed hard and grabbed the first thing in sight—a submarine sandwich wrapped in foil and a small jug of kitty litter. I brought both to the counter and waited until the clerk rang open the register, then made my move.
“Give me all your money or I’ll kill you!” I yelled as I pointed my sub sandwich at the clerk. Lettuce and mayo flew everywhere.
The guy looked at me with a half-smirk. “Are you serious, pal?”
A long, awkward silence ensued, or at least it felt that way.
“Of course I’m serious! Give me the cash and hurry the fuck up!”
I could hear my voice rising to a falsetto pitch, but I meant it.
“Look, cowboy, I only have $90—store policy. You can take it; we’re insured, so I really don’t care. I just want to get home to my family. Understand?”
I understood. He stepped aside. My hand jittered and rifled through the till, firing change and bills all over the place. My other hand squeezed my sandwich through my fist like beef through a meat grinder. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the clerk picking up the phone. I scrambled and tried to bolt out the front door, but missed the handle and slammed headfirst into the glass.
“Ah!” I yelled, clutching my head and dropping even more cash. A goose egg instantly formed. I almost passed out, but kept running.
“You won’t get far with that cast on your leg,” the clerk hollered as I rounded the corner. “The cops are on their way right now, they’ll get you soon enough!”
That was supposed to be the plan: get arrested and go to jail, so I’d get taken care of, so my foot could be fixed, and so my life would be saved. I was desperate. I didn’t know what else to do anymore. I felt as though I had nowhere else to go, nowhere else to turn. But as soon as I was out of his sight, I jumped into the store’s dumpster and covered myself in trash. I sat there as frozen as a statue for a good four hours until the sounds of the police cruisers, helicopter, and dogs were gone. I was lucky, I guess. The juicy garbage smell must’ve masked my scent, and the police never even thought to look in the dumpster.
I emerged as smelly as a New York City rat and counted my take: $37.20.
I thought, This has got to be the worst moment of my life.
INDESTRUCTIBLE PINK DRESS
I IMAGINED COPS EVERYWHERE—BEHIND TREES, under cars, behind doors, inside toilets, under the fridge, in my coffee. The sheer terror—the constant looking over my shoulder—was maddening. Drugs didn’t help, and I couldn’t bear the paranoia.
I couldn’t go back to Samantha and the little apartment she’d rented for us. I’d cleaned out her bank account, $400, while she was at work one day and blew it all on coke and booze, afraid of withdrawal after my Tylenol 4 prescription ran out and couldn’t get it renewed because I’d gone through them too quickly. I wandered around feeling sorry for myself for about a week while my health deteriorated when I should’ve worried instead about the damage I’d caused Samantha, about how she’d eat and get to work for the next month. We’d gone through a lot of adventures together, living precariously in emergency services, in shitty rooms all over the city, on people’s couches, and under constant threat of violence for a long time.
It was the end of our four-year relationship.
I drifted in and out of shelters giving false names and slept on benches and in parks until one night a dive bar let me use the phone and I called the cops and told them I was the guy who’d committed the convenience store robbery in Brampton a few weeks earlier. I knew I’d be safer in jail than wandering around with no place to go. Society, I figured, cares more about criminals than they do about the homeless.
They came and picked me up.
The details of my arrest are sketchy at best. I remember the squad car ride to the station, how the officers were laughing at how bad I smelled, and the relief of knowing I was headed to jail, where I could rest and clean up and get some medical aid.
I also remember the brief statement I made against myself. “I did it,” I said. “Now lock me up and throw away the key.”
I just wanted a place to hide from the world. More than that, I wanted a place to crawl into and die in, like some wounded dog under a porch somewhere.
They charged me with robbery and shipped me off to the Maplehurst Correctional Complex in Milton to await my first court hearing.
Upon arrival, I was processed, strip-searched, and clothed in an orange jumpsuit, then thrown in the general population bullpen with the other prisoners. I broke a jailhouse rule the instant I was caged—I whistled. Four young guys jumped me from behind and stomped on my head until I was almost unconscious. I’m not sure why they stopped—there wasn’t a guard in sight. Maybe they just ran out of energy.
When a guard finally came to take us off to our individual pods, I told him I was suicidal, and that I’d tried to swallow a plastic spoon near the toilet.
“What happened to your face?” he asked with a smirk, spinning his keys on his finger.
“I fell over when I was taking a shit,” I replied, my head throbbing. The guys in the bullpen laughed and confirmed my story when he asked for verification.
They pulled me out of gen pop and stuck me in the protective custody holding cells, then processed me out to solitary confinement a few hours later.
I came to realize solitary confinement, or “the hole,” usually isn’t that bad a place to go while doing a short stretch of time. Sometimes prisoners earned their way there by beating someone senseless or because they wouldn’t squeal on their comrades—both commendable things inside. Sometimes those prisoners even got to wear their orange overalls down to the hole, and you could almost see the laurel wreaths on them as the guards paraded them past everyone.
Not me.
I went into solitary confinement because I’d been banged out of general population and then squawked on myself because I was suicidal. From that point on, I was marked as a bitch during my stay at the Milton Hilton, and I was always paranoid someone might find out I’d chirped on Mike and Stefan. To underscore my humiliation and horror, I was outfitted in an indestructible pink dress with no arms or legs—the standard garb given to prisoners on suicide watch. It was made from space-age padded polyester, about eight layers thick, with diamond diagonal stitching and a collar wide enough to jam a pumpkin through, and it felt tougher than a bulletproof Kevlar vest. It was tear-proof, so you couldn’t rip it apart and make a braid to hang yourself with. Which I tried to do.
It resembled a loose miniskirt
crossed with a tight poncho, and all the guys whistled when the guards walked me down to isolation.
“Shake them fries, baby!” one inmate called.
“She’s mine,” called another, rattling the Plexiglas on his cell door.
The rest just blew me kisses and made hearts with their hands.
I wasn’t ready for this shit.
Inside the hole, there were no blankets, no pillows, no contact, no respect. There was just me, my little pink dress, a blue jail-issue Bible, concrete, my thoughts, and time.
Graffiti was scrawled all over the cinder block walls, lavish script done in the finest dried feces, blood, and pencil someone must’ve smuggled in in their ass, addressed to God or Satan or other deities I wasn’t familiar with. And, of course, there were pictures of giant penises and vaginas everywhere, decorated with old claw marks, broken fingernails, smears of snot, and magnificent pictures of the sun and trees for background effect.
The first few days were excruciating. I entered withdrawal on day two with no medical support—no Librium or Valium or anything. I was getting antibiotics for my foot, because I’d told them about it, but I was too whacked out to mention my addiction. Just my luck, I thought as the furies of Hades engulfed and drowned my brown ass in the river Styx.
Breathing was laboured and almost impossible. Vomit and diarrhea fired out of me every forty-five minutes or so. I never got to the toilet in time. My cell looked like it’d been peppered with a strange kind of mud, corn, and peanut shotgun.
My bones sang shrill notes of agonizing pain that vibrated right down to the marrow, shattering and pulverizing my frame into piles of bloody talcum powder. Vivid colonies of maggots burrowed through my flesh and brain and hatched out of my skin into plump flies the size of raisins that clouded the neon light the guards never turned off.
As I lay there convulsing and wishing I would die, the soft voice of my kokum whispered gently in my ear, but her road-allowance song couldn’t drive away the insects and demons. She was gone as soon as she came.
I shook.
I vibrated.
I quaked.
The horizon of the cell shifted up and down more violently, I imagined, than the crust of the earth during an earthquake.
If the physical symptoms of alcohol delirium tremens just about killed me, the ever-increasing psychosis of withdrawal from crack broke me into shards of shame and pity and guilt that burned under my forehead like napalm watered with gasoline and lit by a blowtorch. The sharp edges of my memories stabbed into my consciousness, shredding my mind into fragile ribbons of dark introspection. Faces from the past—my grandmother; Mrs. R., the French teacher; Leeroy; Karen; Ivan, the kid I robbed; Samantha—all came in like razor-edged knives to disembowel me on the altar of long-ago transgressions.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I pleaded, my eyes riveted shut, my tears run dry, my hands held aloft, trying to shield myself from a lifetime of mistakes. Dimensions folded in upon one another with a force that crumpled me in upon myself. I tried in vain to stop the implosion, to gather my intestines from the frozen cell floor, but the walls kept squeezing in and my guts just wouldn’t fit back into the empty cavity that was my existence.
I writhed and squirmed, twisted and thrashed, and somewhere in my flailing, the side of my face chanced upon the only thing in the cell—the Bible.
Creator sends me a fucking message now! I sneered, pissed off by the timing.
I snatched it up and hurled it against the wall. It bounced back and landed near my throbbing leg. It lay open to Psalm 32, but the words in the passage ran like black ants in all directions. I kicked it away. It landed near the base of my concrete bed, pages splayed open once again, waiting.
I never read the damned thing.
SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
i dreamt i tread
upon cobblestones
of that ancient city,
Jerusalem.
where once
David betrayed Uriah,
his crown
replaced
by broken bones and sores,
withered in iniquity.
there,
upon marble floors,
he cried out.
met by all he was:
a coyote
languishing in the land of jackals.
selah
SHARING THE LOVE
I FINALLY SOBERED UP, AND within days the infection in my foot began to subside. I couldn’t yet defend myself, so they put me in the protective-custody wing, where I could mend.
Lauriston, my cellmate, was a man of seventy from Bermuda. He said he was in for probation violation, but I was skeptical. People in on breach never get more than thirty days, and here he apparently was with two years plus a day. Had he committed some heinous crime? Or had he done just what he said he’d done? Was he just what he said he was? You could never trust other inmates.
I also wondered how he had set up the sugar trade that had made him wealthy in packaged sugars. Each inmate only got one sugar packet on his breakfast tray, one for lunch for our tea, and one for dinner, again for tea, but Lauriston had a pillowcase full of sugar packets, and he consumed at least five of them at each meal. They were a real commodity in jail and could buy food and help make mash liquor from orange peels, water, and bread; along with tobacco and dope, mash was a top jail product.
At mealtimes, the sugars would just pour into our cell.
“Here, Lauriston,” said Bucky, the quartermaster—the inmate who gives out and controls the food, the most powerful and respected position on the range, a collection of cells that form a holding area where inmates do the majority of their time.
Lauriston reached both hands through the food port and Bucky dropped a sock full of sugar packages into them.
“Thanks, young blood. I have something for you. Hold up.” Lauriston reached down onto his dinner tray and handed Bucky his potatoes.
Bucky dapped his fist on Lauriston’s and thanked him for the carbs—much-needed fuel, as Bucky worked out compulsively three hours a day.
“I got you, wisdom. Always.”
Bucky smiled and continued distributing the rest of the trays to the other cells down the line.
“You see that, Indian,” Lauriston said to me. “Give to the next man and the next man prosper with you.”
“It’s a nice theory,” I snapped, “but how do you know they won’t just take your stuff?”
“What are you thinking, fool? Wake up. We are people, too, you know. We give and trust just like all those people on the outside, like all those good people. Know this: all brethren who give to his brethren prosper by his brother, and all those selfish bloodclaat that don’t, get nothing but fire.”
Lauriston was quite angry. It looked like he was going to start swinging. He kissed his teeth and muttered something, then became deadly serious.
“You see me? I’m an old man, I got no family, no drugs, no tobacco, no candy bars—I got nothing. But still my canteen’s rammed with goodies and my belly full. These convicts can take anything from me, but I know to give, even in this place. And I trust these guys and they know it. Some of them never been trusted in their whole lives. You know what that’s worth in Babylon?”
“I’m sorry, Lauriston. I just . . .” I scurried to the back wall to get ready to defend myself.
“Calm your ass, I’d never hit a cripple. Listen to me—I’m trying to help you. Try it. Give away your food and don’t ask for nothing. That means a lot in here. Trust those guys to be good people. But never give it to a bombaclot who tries to take it; if that happens, then you beat his ass—life and death.”
I agreed to heed his advice and went to bed, all the while thinking about his pile of sugar.
The next morning when Bucky came around, I took my breakfast tray, grabbed my cereal package and bag of milk, and handed it to Bucky.
“Here, take it,” I said.
Bucky just glanced at me, put them on his tray, and continued on.
/> Nothing came back. I waited for an hour, looking over at him while he played cards with the other quartermaster, Priest. He didn’t so much as peer up at me.
What a prick, I thought. At lockout, I walked over to the shower, took off my overalls, and was about to get into the stall when Bucky came up to me with Priest and grabbed me.
“What the fuck, you crazy, star?” he said. “You gonna wash your dirty ass in my shower? You never wash your dirty self, star.”
Bucky was right, I never showered. I was as afraid of getting an infection in my foot as much as I was afraid of getting raped. Those fears kept me perpetually dirty and stinky. But today I had to shower, my terrible body odour was making it difficult for me and Lauriston to eat in our cell, and I’d forced myself into the stall. I could feel my face turning white at the thought of being beaten, even raped, by Bucky and Priest. I closed my eyes and wished it would end quickly.
“You can’t go in there, bomba. Open your eyes. Open them and look at me!” Bucky yelled.
But my eyes remained glued shut, my body stiff as a board.
Bucky shouted again, only louder this time. “Open your bloodclaat eyes, star. You can’t go in there. Not with your foot wound open like that. Here,” Bucky said.
I felt something squishy press against my chest. I opened my eyes a crack, careful to protect them from a fist or finger gouge. Bucky was handing me his black jail sandals.
“You need to wear these to keep your feet off the ground. The bacteria is on the ground; if you step on it, it will get in your wound and you’ll lose your foot.”
From the Ashes Page 21