Why I Committed Suicide (44 page)

I’m going to kill myself. No meticulous planning. No slow degradation. Straight Richard Cory all the way. My old belt should be good for a simple hanging, maybe strong enough to crack my neck if I do it right. No note. She knows I love her and everyone else knows I’ve tweaked, what could I possibly put in writing that might explain it all? One last call to my mom to let them know not to be afraid. I’ve finally figured out a permanent solution to my permanent problems. I have the advantage of knowing it gets better on the other side.

Goodbye Jenifer, I loved you so much.

Suicide Watch

Thankfully I’m still here on this plane of existence, but I’m royally pissed at my mom for doing something I can’t bring myself to forgive her for right now.

God intervened in my misery right after I wrote my last note of desperation, when my thoughts were still at their darkest. I retired to an empty cell in the 72 hour holdover tank wearing the same clothes I had been wearing when arrested 6 months ago and then released and re-arrested last night. Six months of stink plus one day and I smelled like a corpse. I took the old leather belt from around my waist and worked it into a loop that would tighten around my neck as I leaned forward to hang from the bottom bunk, hopefully cutting off my air supply long enough to die before anyone checked up on me. It was the only way to do it without someone noticing and intervening, long enough for me to finish the job.

I got down on my knees and said one last prayer for forgiveness. A year or so before, after the accident, I had asked God to show me a better way within 2 years or I would terminate my existence for the benefit of society and I apologized to Him for ending our agreement early and not living up to my end of the bargain.

But as I put the loop of belt over my head and around my neck I heard a commotion down in the dayroom. People were gathered near the front windows like the guards were passing out free beer, so in spite of the welcome distraction, my curiosity got the best of me. I figured my business could wait another minute anyway and I walked down the thick metal steps to see what was going on.

Apparently somebody in the 72 hour holding tank next to ours had hung himself during the same moment I was praying and contemplating the best way to hang myself without botching the job. There’s nothing more pitiful to see than an unsuccessful suicide attempt
except maybe a heroin addict killing himself slowly.
I pushed through the crowd of miscreants and watched through the unbreakably thick windows as a group of guards were carrying the anonymous body of a man wrapped in a prison blanket out of the next tank. Part of the blanket had fallen open and as he bounced past I could see the empty eyes and tortured expression of his poor soul reflecting back at me. Dead.

While the other prisoners around me started crazily hooting and shouting insults at this man’s body I just stood slack-jawed and realized right then and there how stupid it would be to give in and actually die in this place. All the bastards were getting me down and I was about to blindly commit the only unforgivable sin. Seeing that guy’s face was the only thing that could have kept me alive that day and as I watched his body being taken away, it was if all my worries and sins and troubles went with him.

I went back to my cell, put my belt back on the right way and just cried and cried and cried for the longest time while God sat next to me on the bunk not saying a word. Without speaking he touched my head, filled my mind with a fraction of His awareness and then when I blinked he was gone. Conversation over. I felt reborn, still angry and emotional and confused, but reborn as a child of innocence and light. I KNEW right then that no matter whatever happened next, everything would be ok. I shuddered at the thought of what I had almost done and how close I came to ending it all. I shuddered to think how that poor man had to sacrifice himself to save my life, a few minutes difference, one forgotten prayer and I could just as easily have been HIS example.

My mother made the call to the jail after I hung up on them so abruptly earlier that evening. I guess I was wearing my emotions on my sleeve and she figured out what I was going to try and do. I was still feeling good and smiling about actually “talking” to God when
they
came into the tank and grabbed me, dragging me down the metal stairs, down the hall and threw me in a freezing solitary 6x6 cell with a wide-angle camera in the corner. Since one guy had succeeded in killing himself today the guards decided to actually take my mother’s warning call seriously whereas normally the guards prefer to just leave the animals in their cages to wipe themselves out whenever possible. I tried talking to the SS guards, insisting I wasn’t suicidal, but their only preventive response was to toss me into the blinding white concrete room. They took my shoes, slammed the door and left me in there for hours.

…and hours…

…and a few more hours. To amuse myself I decided to see if this was an actual suicide prevention cell and I wanted to see how closely they were monitoring me, so I pretended like I had a broken neck and lay down on the floor in a crooked death-pose. When nothing happened after about twenty minutes I got bored and used some wet toilet paper to cover up the lens of the camera instead.

About thirty minutes later a huge black man came running down the hall and when he saw through the plexiglass that I was sitting there, still alive, he got pissed and yelled at me to take the toilet paper off the “goddamn camera.” I do. It’s so cold that I keep trying to stuff wet toilet paper into the air conditioning vent and block it off, but the toilet paper quickly dries out and won’t stick to the ceiling. So I decide to cover the camera again instead.

This time an hour passes before the guy comes down to yell at me, a steroid-abusing white guard with a marine haircut and veins bulging from his forehead. I tell him to let me the hell out of this meat locker and I’ll stop covering the camera. He tells me they are working on it and goes away again. I give him about 30 minutes before I cover up the camera again.

There must have been a shift change because the next time anyone comes by, it’s only to give me a bologna sandwich and a cup of their evil juice. A couple of guards with extra stripes on their shoulders walk down a bit later and tell me I need to uncover the camera. I explain to them that if I wanted to commit suicide and they were really monitoring me to prevent it, then I would already be dead. I try and compromise by asking them to put me in general population and inquiring what the basis is for keeping me under “observation” when they are clearly not observing me. That’s when I officially found out about my mom’s call.

Many, many cold hours later I eventually just stretched out trying to preserve my body heat in the most economical way possible. My lips were blue and I’d long since tired of fucking with the guards.

Sometime in the middle of the next morning I got another bologna sandwich and some coffee and then a crew of guards came to escort me to the second floor, which had a funny smell to it. They took away every scrap of clothes I had, except my boxer shorts, and tossed me in a single cell similar to the solitary cell I had in Denton. The difference is that this one looks like it’s straight out of a sixties mental institution. From what I can see, I’m lucky that I got to keep my boxer shorts. Most of the people in here are buckass naked which I originally thought was their mentally unstable personal choice, but apparently the standard procedure is to remove ALL clothing from potential suicides. Perhaps it’s just in case we decide to eat our county jail uniforms and freeze to death. This floor is fucking killing me already. The people I see around me are the people I see as reflections of myself. The previous tenant of my room felt the need to write on the walls with his feces. I guess that was a while ago, but human shit is kind of like cat pee, once you are committed to decorating the walls of your room with feces there really is no Martha Stewart jailhouse solution to getting it all off.
They
must have hosed out the room or something but there are still nasty little remnants stuck in the grout between the tiles.

Still, feces and all, it might not be so bad if I had clothes. They strip you of all socks, shoes, clothes, mattress and blanket and put you in a plexiglas cell to “observe” just in case you invent some magical way to hurt yourself with absolutely nothing. The thick plexiglas is covered with a layer of gunk or God-knows what (He said I wouldn’t want to know), but it’s there so whatever mental help they have on staff can stare at you and make notes without having to get too close. My cell has got the standard toilet/sink and a raised section of crumbling tile and concrete that is where the mattress and bed are supposed to go. After I wiped the dirt, shit and old toilet paper off of that little area as best I could, I lay down on the cold tile to try and get some form of sleep even though there were big bugs making noise around me everywhere. And take it from me, there’s not much worse than sitting on an ice cold metal toilet seat and having a giant water roach run out from under the lip of the toilet and across your balls. Yeech.

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 2
n
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.