Today’s artistic offering is a print of the bottom of my jail sneaker. The art teacher wanted us to do some homework that we could accomplish in the pod, i.e. without any pencils or crayons, pastels, or anything of the sort. She gave each of us a small rectangular piece of cardboard and sent us on our way. For my project I used a very thick mix of instant coffee, as thick as ink, and dabbed it on the bottom of my sneaker which fit perfectly within the cardboard. I “printed” my sneaker sole and let it dry. Then I brought the result into class and used oil paint sticks, some colored pens, and a scraping tool to finish the work. I call it “Size 11”, which is my show size, of course.
The overwhelming feeling that I felt in jail was one of extreme apathy. To say that the majority of the inmates in jail (any jail) are down on their luck is an understatement. For them a period spent in jail (a bid) is a time to eat, sleep, get healthy (think free medical/dental), and stay out of the weather. The jails are most full during the colder, winter months with many of the inmates being street people who are rounded up every year for the crime of ‘public intoxication’. The saddest thing in the world for me was understanding that going to jail was a viable alternative to living in the free world for these guys. They weren’t even criminals. They were sick, mentally ill, homeless and jobless. They were, and are, invisible to most of society. They are the great unwashed. Some of them were even driven to levels of desperation by their plight to commit crimes. I often think of one fellow, Dean, who threw a brick through the window of a police cruiser so he would be arrested in late September and serve an 8 month sentence for destruction of city property. He was a local guy, everyone knew him, and he was not a threat. He was just another human being living in his own painful hell.
The drug dealers were another sad bunch. Many of them had become convinced that the gold chains, shiny cars, and sexy women shown on TV was the real thing, the end all and be all of life. The believed the hype, and the hype was this: If you want to be a gangster, then you want to be man. You live the gangster lifestyle and part of that lifestyle is doing time. These guys would be making $1000 a week selling crack, living high on the hog, for 6 months, maybe a year, and then they’d get busted and end up doing 18 months in county. For them, that was OK. That was the trade-off for the lifestyle.
These guys will never get clean and sober. Sobriety does not pay them the benefits they want. There is no ‘bling-bling’ in sobriety, but what there is is honesty. Getting honest is not part of the gangsta life. Being kind and truthful does not pay, nor does respecting all people as people and not pieces of meat.
All of this made me sad. I also began to feel far superior to many of these guys. I thought of them as ‘idiots’ and ‘scumbags’ and ‘worthless street trash’. This was a very bad thing for me to do, but thankfully I came to my senses. It was easy, really. One day I looked around at my surroundings and I realized that I was wearing the same clothes as they were, eating the same food, and damn if my cell wasn’t exactly like all the rest. That was when I became humble and learned to love my fellow man. That has made all the difference.
Inmate #1229
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