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The culture of jail is one of banality, of a sameness and predictability. My clothing consisted of 3 sets of identical dark blue scrubs, with white boxers, white socks, a pair of flipflops for the shower and “lounging” around and a pair of low-top sneakers, a la Converse. The sneakers are actually made by a company in North Carolina owned by Bob Barker. Yes, you heard it right, Bob Barker, the one-and-only host of The Price Is Right. Apparently he makes a lot of money because of the corrections community and is a major supplier of clothing for much of the country’s institutions. Now that is banal. The Price Is Right, C’mon down!

My days, without incident were scheduled to insure orderliness. We were locked down for the night at 9:30PM. At 7AM the electronic doors would unlock,CRACK!, snapping open in a procession from cell to cell. Breakfast was at 7:15. We were back in the pod by 7:45 at the latest. Most of the guys went back to bed and slept until lunch. Some of them sat down in front of 1 of the 2 large color TVs and vegged out. It is possible to do your time that way. Many people do, from what I’ve seen. Those are the same people that keep on coming back through the revolving door of the system. They never change themselves or grow. I don’t think I watched more than 6 or 7 hours of TV in my entire 19 months. I made myself busy and began to read. I read as much as possible. There was a library cart with about 100 books that would be replenished every week or so, at the whims of the inmates. Most of the selection was crap; cheap detective writing and whatnot, but there were occasional nuggets (Waiting For Godot springs to mind) of history, literature, and biography. Where these books came from I don’t know, but I hazard a guess that they were donated to the facility. I supplemented the cart with tons of books from the outside. The policy was that we could have books sent in from the outside as long as they were not hardbound and had been sent from the publisher or a bookstore. That was no problem for me. My father was fond of Amazon.com and my mother utilized The Oblong Books And Records in nearby Millerton, N.Y. Through this great gift I had a huge pipeline to and from the outside world. Magazines were allowed through the regular mail so I had my subscriptions to The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and the AA Grapevine transferred to the jail. Although my calls were somewhat limited, my family had the money to set up a calling card system for the telephones so that I could call them whenever I was able. I tried not to abuse this, however, and became a prolific letter writer. Much of my letter writing was full of self-hate, although some was full of hope. Such is the path to a clear conscience.

Compared to the majority of the inmates, I was a very wealthy man. I had a visit every week form someone, I received tons of mail, and I was very active in the programs offered to me by the system. I took part in a writing course, an art course, all of the sobriety programs, and I had a job. All of these activities took off time from the end of my sentence. But as I said, these were the days without incident.

We spent a lot of time locked down, for one reason or the other. Usually because there was some kind of fight. Violence was a common occurrence in the pod. Card games would dissolve into chaos over a bad hand, inmates would turn Neanderthal over where they were going to sit and watch TV, telephones would be demanded and denied, the list goes on. The point to remember is that violence was the only coping mechanism that many of these guys knew about. Their whole lives had been lived around violence and fear, so that’s how they lived in the present. I avoided them as much as possible. There were a few who were OK. They were a sad lot, though. Invariably they were in for drugs or alcohol, or the results thereof. But still, we could talk program, and all the things that we would do when we were released, and the places we’d go…These are the dreams of the jailed; to go and not stop going, to move like you cannot move within the walls of a jail.

The best philosophy was to do your own time, not someone else’s. I saw too many guys waste energy and lose their shit over someone else and their crime. I tried to not rent space in my head, and sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t and this, I believe, was a result of resentment over the many advantages that I had compared to most. All the visits (including my weekly Tuesday morning visit from my therapist), the stacks of mail, the books, the phone calls, etc…All set me apart from the masses. Many inmates never received a visit, and the mail they picked up in the evening was all bad news. There was no hope for them outside the concrete walls. The best that they could hope for was a profitable summer selling crack and then a warm place to sleep in the winter. This last hope was typically jail, a viable alternative to freezing to death on the street. I’m sure I was the cause of many resentments, and I certainly had a few when I arrived. Over time they were washed away, though, because of the work I did on myself. I changed in jail. I will never be the same. There are ghosts that will always haunt me and I have made peace with them, clutching their cold hands like the friends they need to be.

Here are the haiku…

#8.
A shined steel mirror
throws a wavy reflection
on my waking face.

#11.
There are no sounds here
only noises late at night
that disturb my sleep.

#110.
Heavily wept tears,
thick and salty, hot with pain:
my awakening.

Inmate #1229

As the ‘slider’ (a large steel door that slides open and closed) opened up into D Pod, I was greeted with a volley of shouts of “There he is!” and “he’s the one!”, all bullshit, really, and I was to learn that everyone was greeted that way, for the most part. Since I was new I was escorted into an enclosed area, separated from the rest of the pod by large Plexiglas windows. There were 4 cells in the enclosure. All the cells were the same, as were the pods, differentiated only by their pod color. As I said before, D-Pod was blue/gray. The diagram at the top is what they looked like.

I unpacked my meager belongings and stored them in the cubby under my steel bunk. No bedsprings here. This was a state-of-the-art jail, with no bars, only 3 inch thick steel doors with narrow windows leading into a 6’w x 10’l x 12’h room. At the opposite end of the room room the door was the window that gave me a view of the outside perimeter, surrounded by razor wire. The steel doors were controlled by an electronic/magnetic deadbolt. The Co’s console had the release switch for all the doors. It was dark and gloomy, so I turned on the light. The long enclosed fluorescent flickered on quickly and illuminated me with the only type of light that I would see on a regular basis for the next 19 months. As I was reading through my paperwork and settling in, it suddenly hit me:

I was in jail. And not just overnight. I had learned my lesson, but no one was letting me out anytime soon.

There was a payphone in the enclosure and I hurried to make a call to home. I was not allowed to say goodbye to my family in court. The judge would not allow this to take place. So I made my first of hundreds of phone calls using the jail collect call system. The sound of my mother’s voice crushed me as she answered. There was a pause while the system connected us, and there she was, as if she was right next door. I couldn’t contain myself. I said, “Oh, Momma, I’m so sorry…” We both started crying, and she said that she was sorry, too. She asked about some of the formalities, making small talk, I think. Then we cried some more. She told me to be strong, that I’d make it through this, that she’d be there for me, that we would all be together again soon. I told her that I loved her, and that I’d call her again soon. Then we hung up.

I walked to the CO’s desk and asked for a pen. He handed me the pens used by inmates; a rubbery thing made up of a short ballpoint inkstem and a flexible type of grip. I went back to my cell-I had no cellmate-sat down at my bolted-to-the-wall steel desk, took out the only paper I had, which was a copy of the rules and regulations, found a blank spot, and began to write. Nothing survives of the first 4 days of this ordeal. Where the writing went, I do not know. Maybe I didn’t write anything at all. My first entry begin on January 12, 2003:

“5 days in-physical assault is a possibility. The powers that be say that they are here to protect us from ourselves as well as other stuff. I’ve already had one offer from the protection rackets. $30 in an (canteen) account and he’ll protect me. Very illegal-for me as well. I was non-committal about acceptance.”

Looking back I can see how I was assessing my survival situation, the way a shipwrecked sailor may assess his own predicament. He would make sure he wasn’t hurt, tally his meager possessions, and set about building shelter, maybe make a fire if he could. With that first sentence I was able to stake a claim on my own existence. If I had paid the protection money, there would have been no end to the swindling. Once that door is opened my life would be over. By not accepting the offer, I showed that I was not easily swayed by the scary rumblings of the natives. This offer would come around a couple more times and I would rebuff it every time. My small holdings at that time were few, but important. I had my wits, my intelligence, and, thank God, my sobriety. I came in to jail with a program. AA would be my light in the darkest of days yet to come. My sobriety gave me power, and an edge, over others. I was focused on today, just today, and getting through it. My first lesson had been learned: I only had to worry about today.

That night I cried myself to sleep.

#1229