"Where were you heading?" my dad asks me.
"I was just walking up two blocks to call you from Casey's."
"You couldn't just wait around? I'm not that late or anything."
"I know. I was just walking up two blocks to call you from Casey's."
"I mean, 4:43 a.m. is kind of a tough time to hit spot-on."
"I know. I just stepped outside and saw the world around me—it seemed violent, unreal—I’m not accustomed to The Outside."
I wake up on a stale lima-bean mattress and hard pillow, which I immediately knock off the head of the bed to the bunk below. "Fuck." I've come into a cold sniveling state and I know my sleep is done; whatever time it is I'll be awake until release. I look through the narrow hard Plexiglas window to the scene outside: a sweeping parking lot majestic in its total vacancy and some industrial-looking smokestacks. Using my hands lamely, scrunching my face in focus I determine which way is what and where the sun might rise: East today, probably. That's the opposite side of the prison and I can't see any early-morning rays. I need badly to blow my nose so I drop as lightly as possible to the cement floor below, turning to rifle through my plastic bin of commodities. I take out my personal roll of toilet paper and leave the room quietly. I know I have some obligations to attend to, and I know that will kill some time, so I check the clock now and decipher in the darkness the digits 3:53. I'm relieved. It could just as soon be 1:00.
Sitting on the toilet with my jumpsuit around my calves, in plain sight of anyone who'd happen by, a familiar line of prose happens through my head. It's from William Carlos Williams' short introduction to Howl, and it goes: "Say what you will, he proves to us, in spite of the most debasing experiences that life can offer a man, the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith—and the art! to persist." I don't know about "spirit of love," and I've never produced a work of "art!" but sitting there with the taste in my mouth and the scruff on my chin—(when the body is subjected to jumpsuits and lousy living conditions, a chemical is released causing course and uneven facial hair to grow at unprecedented rates, just to complete the image of downtroddenness)—I certainly thought "debasing experiences, debasing experiences,” like a persistent echo of humiliation.
I sit to the side of a TV suspended on the wall at a wobbly table ranking my "favorite things," one to one-hundred-and-one. This includes people, places—musicians, songs, books, psychoactives. I compile it quite neat and orderly with an all-caps heading including the date. To the right of each item I include categorization—“1. Sex—Biological Pursuit; 2. Writing—Creative Pursuit; 72. Spaghetti with Meat Sauce—Hearty Meal; 101. Ranking Things—Neurotic Habit" and so such drivel just to make it through time, just to eat up some time. A six-foot-five, three-hundred pound inmate of what we call the "black" persuasion asks me "What are you doing," and points at my pile of chicken-scratched loose-leaf. "Uh, just killing time," I say shrugging. He doesn't follow up.
The cushions have come off Sarah Keane's couch, so we should put them back on. But there's only one cushion—how does it go? I say it goes like this but Brittany stalls, puzzled. At last she accepts it and the couch fills up quick, but I sprawl-out on the floor lazily, entirely comfortable. I smile drunkenly and say "I love you, Maddie Ficken, you're the best," or so, and reach out and touch her arm as she smiles from the couch. This gets a big "Aww" from the audience and I roll onto my back. "These benzodiazepines are the best," I say—and then I start excitedly—someone just said "Xanax" on the TV and I'm giddy from coincidence. Then I see the narrow Plexiglas window and I'm awake, out of the hypnagogic state I sometimes enter when binge-drinking interrupts my sleeping habits. I've managed to sleep—for how long? And what the fuck kind of crazy dream?
I'm called alone from the "Drunk Tank" to be transferred to General Population. First I'm taken back for a change of jumpsuit and a routine strip-search. I stand before the officer stark naked and sweating slightly. "Lift up your scrotum, for me. Turn around. Show me the bottom of your right foot—left. Spread your legs apart." I’m thinking, in retrospect, this is what I should have done earlier this morning: I should've taken the hard-plastic "spork" I was given to eat my Mini-Wheats and shoved it up my asshole. Then, using my determination and world-class forearms, I would use that little spork to tunnel my way to freedom, effectively reducing my 36-hours-to-life sentence, Shawshank Redemption style. As I stand bent over my white scratched-up calves I lament my shortsightedness. But I hold no resentment for the guard: he is simply doing his job. The guards work alternating twelve hour shifts; they appear tired, weary—passionate flame to uphold the peace burnt out from years of doling out Tylenol and cheap Salisbury steak to ungrateful inmates. Yes, empathy is the key. There is no difference between the cop and the kid getting busted—they all relate to a universal oneness.
It's just, of course, the cop's a total asshole.
I'm taken back to Cellblock I and introduced to real hard-time jail. I'm assigned a room where I lay my mattress and pillow on the narrow top-bunk. I brush my teeth in the dirty white-porcelain sink, seeing my face is more white, pimply and worn-out than I recently remember. I nervously situate myself beside a stack of magazines (Car and Driver, GQ) and beat-up books of logic puzzles. It's only me and a fat, bespectacled middle-aged man with a newspaper out here this time of the morning. He greets me kindly and asks if I've just got in. I answer, yes, and ask how long he's in for. "Twenty," he says shortly, and I don't think he means hours.
I sleep for a couple hours before two things happened—in what order, I'm not sure. One, a guard brings me my milk and "walking taco" and tells me my release has been set for 4:43 a.m. Monday—35 hours from now, I figure—quick math, right—and two I am joined by my first drunken companion—a portly, bearded ethnic man who lays laughing hysterically, insanely, and muttering to himself something about "masturbate" and "Hawkeye." By one a.m. I am stone-sober and sleepless and the drunk tank is filling with characters fast. There's a blonde boy sobbing emotionally over some Public Intox or PAULA that might keep him out of medical school. There's a scowling short skin-head who looks like he was made not to speak or think but attack—hit things at high speeds with his truculent skull and snow shovel forehead; I vaguely think he was present at my last jail stay. The kicker for me is the last two to arrive, in quick succession for they were picked up together. They are in their early twenties, well-groomed, and look perfectly contented to spend their nights in jail. Please do not misunderstand me: I am not remotely homophobic and in fact, in the gay-marriage debate, I think it should be not only legal, but, perhaps, mandatory. But when they start kissing on the mat next to me, as I lay tireless and confused—I wish they wouldn't. To cope with anxiety and make it through the night, in the absence of a clock or conversation, I am plucking a single square of toilet paper at approximate fifteen-minute intervals. I give it up when I've stockpiled 28 tiny squares, or, I should hope, seven difficult hours. I wait for prison breakfast.
I'm escorted into the Johnson County jail with handcuffs on my wrists and borrowed flip-flops on my feet. "Through that door and straight ahead. Left at that door, through the open door back to the wood bench."
I am perfectly courteous and respectful.
"Blow hard, now. Okay." Time is hurtling two-speed but I feel lucid, coherent, sober. I'm stepping a straight line. "If you don't mind my asking, what did I blow?"
"Why don't you take a crack at it."
"Uh...point-one-four?" Too high.
"Try doubling that, and subtracting four."
"Point-two-four?"
"Hey—quick math."
"Right."
Now they tell me to get naked and step into the bright orange jumpsuit. They put me through my steps, they take my mug shot (I playfully try to show as much tooth and eyeball as possible given the elasticity of my God-given face), and they give me my call—my mom. I ask her to bring the eighty dollars due for my retention, but don’t say "That's a good deal for a two-night stay." Then I'm walked back to the drunk-tank and left alone to get some quality sleep.
I wake up overflowing with angry energy and looking for some outlet. I'm scowling, fuming—I want to get drunk. I want to steal all the liquor in Cedar Rapids. I want to take something out on myself and take it out on the world, too, in this peculiar nonviolent way I know how. I call The Driver and throw on some clothes, big clothes, loose clothes, old clothes—I want to look as twenty-one as I can. I ask The Driver first to drive to the friendly CVS with uncapped handles of Black Velvet. It was a great find, an easy swipe—and now I've pilfered a half dozen of these handles in less than a month. I'm good at stealing. Cooking is an art, and most nefarious acts are, too: stealing can be beautiful. This was a routine job, almost too easy: I walked in past the cashier and the photo center, turned into the money aisle, waited for the overweight customer to mosey along, and did what I could do.
"Well, they finally capped all the BV," I say as I enter the getaway car.
"Oh, yeah?"
"So I got Hawkeye, instead" I say smiling and pulling the big jug of poison from the crotch of my pants. Fifteen minutes later I'm shuffling through the Taco Bell parking lot adjacent to a Wal-Mart Supercenter with two bottles of Bacardi clanging in my pants. I flash a fat grin at The Driver and gesture humorously at the bulge. "Cashiers and greeters just think I look like the kind of guy with a big cock," I once said, explaining my gift, "They say 'Oh, he's got that big cock.’” The Driver and I head back toward our side of town, but not before stopping off for another handle of Hawkeye.
"Oh my God, Andy,” says The Driver, “How do you do it? You are untouchable—you’re some kind of God."
I start drinking at 7 o'clock Thursday, and I won't stop until Saturday afternoon. The time will be blurred in my memory—weaving in and out and waking up and coming-to at every different time and place. I'll be up and down the stairs, in and out of bed, even around Iowa City trapped in this crazy endless drunken vortex. My memories are anachronously twisted and tangled and all pervaded with the bad taste of black-out: did I say this, did I do this, did so-and-so get-with that-guy? By the time I'm tearing toilet paper I'm trying, impossibly, to get the events of two days squared up in my mind. "Okay:" I begin, and I start working forward from Thursday, "I woke up overflowing with angry energy..." and I step cautiously across haphazard memories until I reach the one that seemed to do it, to set this all in motion: "So then I took the pie, and ran...and he called the police...and they fingerprinted the pie..."
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