by sam paul
I woke up a little later and there was a tray of food shoved under my door with no utensils. Macaroni mush of some sort, pineapple from a giant jumbo can and a cup of that awful red juice with the chemicals in it to make your sex drive decrease. I still can’t do the juice; I would rather drink out of the toilet/sink than be part of their experiment. Most of the retarded and crazy people love the crap they serve and I shoved most of my food back under the slot in the door for whoever wants it. A little while later the guards and trustees come through to pick up the trays. None of the other prisoners will look at any of us in our single cells. Not because most of us are naked, it’s just that the 2n floor has a prevailing sense of wrongness to it.
I met with the girl who was assigned to do my psychological evaluation pretty early the next morning. She looked up and down at my mostly naked body disdainfully, as if it was my choice to live like a savage. She was even younger than me and obviously still in training or else she just had no idea about any kind of psychology whatsoever since I could see right through her. She barely looked up and asked if I hear voices in my head. That’s her big evaluation. “Do you hear voices?” I ponder for a second, wondering whether I should say “yes, in fact I just talked to God yesterday” thinking maybe they could get me on some kick-ass reality distorting meds, but my need for clothing and warmth prevailed over my plot to haze out the next couple of months. I am definitely going to be spending some time in here and I would rather not do it in the same nasty cell. I try to joke with her and say “I heard some voices yelling at me to put some damn clothes on,” but she was too plutocratic or jaded to respond. It was as if she didn’t, or couldn’t, even see me as a human being any longer. I finally tell her, “Look, something got messed up and I know I am on suicide watch and I would PLEASE like some form of clothing since its damn near 50 degrees in here.” I even managed to say this nicely without the least bit of sarcasm in my voice, realizing she has the power to deprive me of clothing for a very long time. That’s about it. With my psyche summed up in a three minute conversation, she gets the guards to at least let me have my Dallas County jumper back but I’m still on sock and shoe probation for a week. I feel like slightly less of an animal now, but its creepy walking around my area knowing there could be poop particles clingingto my feet. I guess the idea is to prove my sanity by not going crazy on them for doing all this mental torture and other bullshit to me.
It’s ok. I can wait. If there’s always been the one thing I could do, it is waiting. Not like I have much of a choice anyway. My problem is that the voices DO talk to me. I feel better and know now that most voices are merely some form of the voice of God. But what if they are not? The voices tell me to do some pretty crazy things. Nothing particularly bad but I know that everything is subtle where head-voices are involved.
I made friends with the guy next door to me. Like solitary in Denton, they let everyone out to exercise in the dayroom once a day for about a half hour. It’s a measly ten foot space but you can change the channel on the only TV in the place and all the naked freaks in their cells can’t do anything except yell behind their glass and gesture lewdly. I’m pretty desensitized to that kind of crap by now. I like to put it on NOVA and educate them against their will.
Anyway I found out the kid next door to me got busted trying to walk out of a hospital in a stolen lab coat with two multi-gallon jugs of formaldehyde. You lace that in a joint and it fucks you up the same as PCP. Black people call it “water” or “wack.” It’s the poor man’s angel dust and it totally fucks your brain into stupidity. The kid isn’t too bright. They tagged him before he even got out the door of morgue, classified him as “fucked in the head” and he ended up on the second floor mental ward with me. I guess he’s been here for a while since he’s one of the only other residents wearing clothing. He’s even got shower shoes. Better off than I am.
No one will look you in the eyes up here except the psychos. There’s even an AIDS section on this floor. One hallway is nothing but entire rooms full of AIDS patients waiting to die. They do a lot to separate the folks that are closer to dying, but the couple of times I’ve walked by the places where they keep the infected people it looks a lot like a hospital from a civil war battlefield. There’s some really creepy shit to see in there and getting stuck in jail with the AIDS patients is high up on my list of crappy ways to die. I guess you have to experience all the sensations of isolation and the smell that emanates from their bodies as they decay behind a plexiglas zoo cage to really get that eerie prickly neck hair feeling I get when I’m near their tanks.
There are so many people in my life that will never see or comprehend the shit that is going on right now. People pay good money to law enforcement and jails to keep the stuff of nightmares away from their doorstep. This is not America; itis someplace in between heaven and hell. Winston Churchill once said “When you’re going through hell, keep going.” That’s all I’m trying to do right now, keep going.
Thankfully I convinced some of the more able-minded shrinks to let me go and be a trustee. I think it was my multiple written grievances regarding a medical complaint about a sore on my ass-cheek that finally got them to get me down to tank 2E in the basement. While I was on the medical wing, the doctors or old lady nurses had to look at my ass every time I wrote a complaint about it, and having them have to look at my ass every once in a while was about the only bonus that went along with the being in with the crazies. Other than the benefit of just being able to act loony-tune crazy of course. But you know, when you are around enough people that are actually crazy and they can out-crazy you before they even wake up for breakfast, it’s quite a fucking reality check. It’s not the “mama’s-boy-needs-an-antidepressant-and-nice-soothing-therapy-because-he-brought-home-a-’C’-in-chemistry” crazy. Some of those guys really need serious help in a sad sort of way and they’re stuck in nothing more than a modern day dungeon. If anything, being around them cheered me up as much as God’s saving grace on the day I killed myself. They helped remind me that I’m functional and that I can control most of my urges and that it’s wrong to throw shit on people (at least in public) or decorate your walls with it.
When I was being led out of there, after I made trustee, I saw a guy come in that was nailed to a cross and freaking out on some sort of PCP. He wasn’t nailed to an actual cross of course, but the County has this giant wooden “X” with feet and hand restraints and this guy was flipped out on the worst bad acid-trip from hell. Being in jail, naked, immobilized, and left in a pool of urine while having a mental breakdown as people ignore and step around me is close to my idea of hell. The young kid was gnashing his teeth and trying to bite off pieces of himself he was flipping out so bad. Mental health is a nasty business sometimes. The cross was just a cute reminder of that.
“Tripping is the like having a dream while you are more wide awake and aware than you have ever been in your life…the thing is that while most dreams are pleasant, some can become nightmares without warning. The bad thing about having a nightmare while you are awake is that there is no waking up with a sigh of relief and instantly knowing everything is all-better because it wasn’t real. Things can get so very real sometimes.”
Tank 2E is cool. It’s mostly full of black guys and they are all Crips or people who are cool with the Crips. I guess after enough fights the guards quickly figure out who’s with which gang and try and keep the peace by keeping them all together. I know there is a tank of Bloods on the same floor and once when one of them did something to piss off a cop or a guard they tossed him in here with us. He looked around and after a few minutes he started banging on the walls and screaming to the guards to get him out of there. The guys had a good laugh watching him beg to get taken back out to his old cell. The guards laughed at him too but were smart enough to pull him out before anything serious happened.
Nobody wants to lose their trustee status down here, especially since we get to go by the kitchen sometimes. Being
able to go to the kitchen and eat a piece of bread or get some water with ice is worth its weight in gold. Fighting your fellow man over the colors he wears while we are all in white jumpsuits is stupid and can wait until freedom comes, or at least until the lights go out, whichever comes first. I guess being tossed in with the gang members was supposed to be my punishment for the psych-ward ass trick, but I’ve gotten along great with all these guys so far. If you piss off the wrong cop during processing you can get assigned to an “agg” tank (Agg=Aggravated=Highly Pissed Off=Your’ White Ass Is Dead). This was the best they could come up with.
I’ve said it before, white guys are the minority in here and I’m always outnumbered 5-1 at the very least. If some guard wanted to get back at me he could throw me in any tank, casually toss in just a hint of racist tendencies about me or my name, then watch me get beaten on camera, tape it and take it home for personal enjoyment. The guys in 2E are cool though. They’ve taught me how to flash authentic gang signs and write graffiti and even explained what it means and where it came from. It’s actually fascinating to get the inside scoop and to be accepted by a hidden culture inside America’s culture with its own rules, territories and definition of “kin-folk”. If they ever stick me in the Government Building (that’s where the serial killers, serious murders and aggravated assault guys go) I might have a chance if I get thrown in with the right set. If not, I fight anyway.
There’s a Monopoly board in here that the brothers have taught me how to kick ass on. There’s nothing better than holding a fistful of gold five hundreds and telling someone, “Nigger, get your skanky ho’s the fuck off my property ‘fore I cornhole your ass!” Monopoly can get to be a contact sport sometimes, but it’s all in fun. I’m just doing time till I get this probation and then get sent back.
Yes, sent back, did you expect apologetic reform? God tells me I have to come back again. He certainly didn’t promise it would be easy, he made that point quite clear in the mental ward, but he’s there, I know it and as a believer I can tell the world to fuck off. Put that in the Sunday motivational pamphlet. God told me to tell you to “fuck off and pull your heads out of your asses.”
My bunkmate is this young African-looking kid that is one dumb motherfucker. He calls himself (or “hiself’ as he pronounces it) Tuddy-Mac (Tuddy rhymes with moody for some reason), which is his Crip gang name. Not a wannabe gang member but the genuine don’t fuck around and wear the wrong color violent gang member. His head is a deep dark oblong shape, creating the illusion of angular ebony. For being a gangbanger and a little thick-headed he’s not too stupid even for a dumb motherfucker. It’s just that some of his priorities are way out of whack. Let me see if I can write that out a little better just in case he finds this and manages to decipher my normal English usages without every plural word having a “Z” on the end.
Tuddy’s in here for the typical “selling a controlled substance” rap that most of the brothers are in here for. One day I expect someone is going to finally take some sort of action against these blatantly racially biased arrest policies, but until that happens were going to keep building jails for guys like Tuddy since he’s only one of the many easy-target, low-level dealers who are just trying to make a living doing the best paying job in their neighborhood. It boggled my mind at first when he explained to me about the cash potential there is for him to sell drugs. I’ve calculated that when Tuddy’s actively out in the street he’s making at least five times as much money as any highly paid doctor or lawyer and he’s only 19! When you work maybe half the day and do whatever you want while working, the incentives for selling drugs far outweigh the potential consequences of possibly doing some prison time. Day one high school economics teaches the basics of supply and demand, plus anyone watching enough History Channel should know that people always take risks for exorbitant lumps of cold hard cash. Since we’ve infused the poorer areas with drugs and continue to buy them there, America continually perpetuates its own problem. Truly the scariest thing that could happen to a major drug dealer would be complete legalization, the slim profit margin and taxes would make most of the dealers go away within five years as the economy adjusted to acceptance of these new policies. I’m starting to truly suspect that a lot of lobbying by people that want to continue to perpetuate the drug war originally comes from people heavily involved in drug trafficking. People that prefer to keep their industry illegal. They are so high up the food chain that they will never be in any form of legal trouble, at least not without millions of dollars and lives being lost to bring one corporate head of the mythical hydra to so called “justice”.
We all should think of the drug war in terms of office supplies. There isn’t much profit in supplying them since anyone with a little starting capital can open a store and sell them. However, say that all the office supplies were made illegal tomorrow, most companies would still need them and as people’s stockpiles dwindled, the cost of the legalities involved with purchase would drive up prices, and as prices and profits rose, so would competition. Without a legal form of protection against indiscretions by rival office suppliers, there would soon be a network of underground suppliers and purchasers and eventually harsh violence over supplies and profits would likely occur. Now someone reading this might be thinking, “yeah but office supplies are not dangerous to use and people don’t need drugs the way they need office supplies so its not a fair illustration of the economics.” This is where it can get tricky, because I truly believe that Americans NEED drugs. The same way we need television. It’s all an opiate for the masses in one form or another, fueling counterculture and creativity but most of all it provides an escape for the average drone worker bee to relax or alter their perception of reality. So many people crammed into such small city areas is an unnatural way to live, most cities are reliant on outside sources for everything from agriculture to water to entertainment, and so the need for extreme psychotherapy and contentment in some form is absolutely necessary. Ponder that the next time you are in a bar drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette.
Back to Tuddy though, I think his real name might be Sean. The kid is young and most likely a high school dropout but he’s as smart as a whip. Completely immature and no formal sentence structuring is evident in any of his letters to and from home, but he can rap his dick off as easily as if he’s ordering drive-thru. He keeps going to court for his narcotics bit and they keep offering him probation and he keeps turning it down every time. They send him out to court and he comes back with the papers that would have let him walk out of this hellhole right the same day and he’s rejected the offer every freakin’ time. Everyone in here keeps telling him that he’s off his gourd staying inside when he could be out drinking a 40 oz or fucking some hot pussy by tonight. Tuddy wants nothing less than prison time and he keeps telling his court appointed lawyer that and then he comes back totally pissed that they even bothered to call him out for court. I’ll go into the unpleasant experience of the hassle of going to court some other time. Going to court is a hassle for everyone involved. Putting on hand cuffs at 4 a.m., multiple searches, no smoking, people losing the rest of their lives…Every time I look at him I just keep thinking to myself, dumb motherfucker dumb motherfucker DUMB MOTHERFUCKER.
What’s even crazier is that this isn’t an isolated incident. A lot of these young kids are trying to get time down in prison rather than get out on probation. I thought maybe it was because their lifestyle wouldn’t allow them to stay out free on probation and maybe they just want to do a little bit of prison time, get it all over with and be completely free. I could maybe respect that, but that’s not what is going on. It took me a while but I was asking him questions while we were slamming bones one day and he started telling me about some of his family. It seems his father and his uncles and some of his brothers are all doing jail time or have done time for something or other, almost all of it has something to do with drugs. The way he was brought up and the culture of his whole family has helped hi
m come to terms with literally living under a state of constant oppression. It’s normal to get arrested for things that he and his family don’t consider a crime. When Teddy’s in jail there is already a complete support system in place that provides money and people that can look after his family while he’s inside. When he’s out of jail or prison, a large portion of the money he makes is going back into the family to help out others whose kinfolk are locked away. They have evolved their family dynamic around being screwed by the government and support each other through the ups and downs. Guys who are not related refer to each other as “kinfolk.” Someone from the same gang or set or street or junior high school is one of your “kinfolk”.
The first time you get sent away, going to prison is a right of passage. You know that scene in Goodfella’s where Ray Liotta’s character gets pinched for the first time and all the mob guys are waiting for him when he gets out, congratulating him for taking it like a man and not bending over for the fuzz? This is almost a perversion of that concept and the whole family accepts it as part of their life. It’s the same with some of the Mexicans too, although they’ll try like hell to stay out of prison as long as they can, when they finally do go down South, a son or a brother will step into that person’s shoes and keep the family financially able to survive. That’s why so called drug organizations will never be infiltrated; there are far too many families to go through to even get close to the top of the heap.
The older black guys tell me that the young kids are going crazy down in prison, that there is no order and that the lifers even stay away from this new breed of kid. Texas has lowered the adult conviction age whenever they see fit, so these 14, 15 and 16 year old kids are getting life sentences and really long stretches of time thanks to biased mandatory sentencing laws. When you are 16 and you get sent to prison for 10 or 20 years you can’t imagine even living long enough to get out. They are getting down to these prisons and “acting the fool” as they say. Making their own version of home, killing each other, raping each other and going nuts the way only really young people with nothing to lose can do. It’s this generations’ Vietnam and it’s really fucking serious. I’m in the middle of another civil war based on other people’s insanity and moral convictions that those of us in the trenches have no way of ever justifying. Most people can’t grasp the dynamics of anything outside these walls anymore. Soon we’re going to be talking about 40 year old men that have been locked down since before their dick first got hard, guys who have only had sex by raping another person of the same sex, and they are going to get out of jail with nothing in their brains except some fucked up psychological trauma to add to their original economic disparity.