Why I Committed Suicide (46 page)

I understand Tuddy-Mac’s point of view a little better now. In a twisted way, he’s Sir Gawain and the State of Texas is his Green Knight. He’s got to prove moral aptitude, not to society but to his kinfolk, so that he can show he has the courage to bare his neck for the killing blow. He’s got to experience this as his testament of manhood for his family. It’s his primitive right of passage adapted to our modern age, and he’s not going to back down. I can almost respect that in a twisted way but then I keep thinking
what a dumb motherfucker
! Get out on the street for God’s sake and be free for a minute before you take the prison time, it’s not like it will go away.

I’m realizing more and more that our so-called law enforcement is a supply and demand business. More cops on the street means that more arrests are needed to justify their expense. Simple supply-side economics. Cops have a demand that criminals supply: themselves. If there are not enough criminals, we have to make something criminal to feed the ever-growing demand placed on society by the police. Surely I’m not the first person to see this, but maybe I’m the only one inside that can write plainly enough so that it makes sense.

Even though we are all in the same underground trustee crew tank together, I’m the one-man trustee person who cleans the offices where they collect and process all the fines and bail money that people bring in. The office is like what I imagine a casino counting room might be like. There are stacks of cash just lying around, probably close to a hundred grand a night is taken in through the little slots in the bulletproof glass by the officers there. I’m the only prisoner allowed in the room, so every night they drag me out of bed to go down and clean the office where they are busy collecting money orders and wrinkled up stacks of twenty and hundred dollar bills which they pile on the counter. It’s like a slave trade where people can come to buy their loved ones back from the kidnappers. I basically empty all the wastepaper baskets, sweep/mop the floors and empty their ashtrays. The whole process takes about an hour but I usually stretch it into two so I can watch the people coming to the window. The sort of people that come into the entryway of the jail to bail out somebody or other is an odd mix of people to say the least. I’ve seen prostitutes and pimps with fur coats pay a twenty thousand dollar bond from a wad of hundreds they whip out of some hidden pocket. The looks they give the cops when they pay this much cash to them are full of suppressed anger, yet there’s some pride in showing off all that money at the same time. I’ve seen groups of Mexicans pooling twenty dollars each to afford a hundred dollar bond for somebody with a public intoxication charge. Every night is something different and if I’m lucky I’ll see a hot chick waiting for her boyfriend. One night there was even a fight out in the lobby between two women of ill repute over who was taking so and so home.

With all the distractions, I’m praying the keystone wanna-be cops never have any money missing out of their awkward stacks because it will definitely mean a thorough search of bodily cavities that I don’t care to have searched. They are all “officially” cops but since they are on desk duty, I think they must be pretty low on the food chain. Sort of like a private or Sergeant in the Army maybe. Why is it that the guys who get picked on are the same guys who like to lord the little bit of power they do have over the little guy? There is this one redheaded bastard, a real prick, who doesn’t talk much and I’ve overheard that he’s trying to get authorized to be a street cop. Just smile and mop up while he purposefully throws cigarette butts at me or on the floor right where I have been mopping. He’ll be a great cop.

For the most part, the cops in here are all right guys stuck in dead-end government jobs. There are pictures of the head Sergeant standing next to ungodly amounts of seized drugs in his office and a framed copy of the tax stamp they give to people licensed to grow marijuana. I had always thought the tax stamp was a myth or an urban legend designed to lure in gullible first time growers, but it’s actually real. I’ve examined it up close several times while “dusting” the pictures in his office. The Sergeant is an all right guy for the most part; he’s bought me a Coke one or two times and he’s good natured about not having to do a whole lot for his job. I don’t think he was ever a grower though. Other than around his waist I mean. Ha ha.

When I’m done cleaning for them and they’ve patted me down for office supplies, as if I’m going to give them an easy misdemeanor arrest while IN jail. I usually go and sit with the rest of the guys in my tank in the processing room where they work. The other guys do all the fingerprinting of new residents before they go to the intake tank and they also clean up as cops bring in their usual herd of people every night. We all work the graveyard shift in #2E and so we get to see most interesting late night arrestees as they come in. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to convey the scenes of outright brutality and abuse prisoners receive at the hands of the guards that process people into jail but I try and write about the more interesting things in my letters to people as they happen.

The processing department is the first place you go once you get to jail. Not many people know this and the police surely don’t advertise it, but when the cops pick a guy up on the street, their job is to get that person to jail. By choice or because they are all punks, a cops attitude is usually, “I’m not qualified to pass judgment (or even make a decision on my own based in reality most of the time) so I’ll take you to the place where they can do that for me.” The police pull into an underground guarded garage, turn in their gun so nobody can grab it, and you stay cuffed until you’re on the second floor where you go through processing. Processing is where they take all your money and anything valuable that someone else might steal and stab you for while you are in the holding tank. A lot of this money somehow never makes it to storage and since everyone
knows
how prisoners exaggerate, there is a nice little “my word against yours” kind of corruption thing going on. The guards also search your pockets and clothes and add a few more charges if you are carrying any drugs or if they need to plant anything on you. Processing is where the real shit breaks out and they have a staff of people I refer to as bouncers that handle any trouble while a prisoner is being processed. The bouncers are thugs in specially tailored uniforms designed to resemble the black Special Forces uniforms used in the Army. They have pockets everywhere, full of devices of torture or rations or spare change for the candy machine or whatever. Their tight black pants tuck into their spit-shined steel-toed black shin-high boots. Just add attitude.

The problem is that these punk-ass guards end up creating a lot of the trouble my guys have to clean up, and our shift includes one particularly bad seed. Chopper is a huge black man who stands close to seven feet tall and he revels in the chaos of this place. I sit to the side and watch him interact with prisoners as they come in. Chopper loves to use whatever form of formal ‘fuck-you-up-bad’ martial arts he’s learned to literally beat the shit out of these people. He even smiles as he twists arms to the point of breaking. I’ve seen soccer moms picked up for unpaid tickets that he’ll toss in with the crack heads and other people who will corner them in their cells. I’ve even seen one guard stand at the door while another will go in and ‘coerce’ or maybe rape young girls too drunk to know any better.

There are a lot of people that come through the door that you can tell are most likely innocent. I guesstimate it at about a 7 to 1 ratio of guilty people in here. Meaning for every six or seven people that are saying they are innocent, one of them is most likely telling the truth. Some people know the routine and go through the processing department under the watchful eye of the goons without saying anything. Some people have never interacted with people that can even conceive of thinking on this low brutal mental scale and their protests of innocence and attempts to hold onto the simplest of their sacred rights are met with extreme force.

Chopper’s favorites are the drunk driving rednecks that pour into this place on Friday and Saturday nights. Most are still drunk and pissed off that they are there, so he’ll stand right next to them and talk shit about their mom or scream at them until the drunk will try and push him away or cuss him out. That’s when he uses his boots to break people’s legs or kick out some of their teeth. Sometimes they will arrest two men outside a bar that have been fighting with each other, both will be bruised, bloody and strapped to those wooden cross looking things that basically bends them over backwards and prevents all movement. They put these hogtied guys on a flatbed cart and wheel them in all strapped down. Rare is the time when I haven’t seen Chopper get a few good licks on these totally immobilized people, breaking a rib or giving them an elbow to the eye. This is pure twisted legalized evil and I wish I could film it to pass to
any
news agency. I literally hope he gets killed in one of his own melees but I seriously doubt the world is that lucky. Most of the other goons just eat donuts while watching him kick people’s asses all night and if it gets too crazy they’ll all dog pile a prisoner and really fuck him up. I’ve had to look away many times and I’ve been threatened with being taken off trustee duty if I ever yell at them to stop again. One protest from me was enough to get a busted lip and some kidney shots so I mostly just watch and fume when I see something really bad, feeling totally powerless. So when I say we have to clean up the processing room it usually means cleaning the trash from people’s pockets, somebody’s vomit from an overdose or too much drink and the blood that Chopper splatters on the floor.

Tuddy came in today from visitation and I found out later that his brother had died last week and nobody could get in to tell him until after the ceremony. I guess the cliché that white people instinctively run towards trouble is true. I could tell he was hurting and while the other black guys in the tank could also tell something was up with him and backed off, I was the one who finally tried to be a pal and asked him what was wrong? He was so upset and angry that he sucker punched
me
and I got in a couple quick ineffective retaliatory shots to his nose before the other brothers pulled him back. It was cool that the other guys were there for me when it all went down because given another minute Tuddy could have taken me apart like a surgeon. He didn’t mean me any specific harm, this place just gets to people. Feeling so powerless compels a man to do something to regain a sense of power.

He never apologized, but I could tell we were still cool a little later; his brain just needed time to process everything that had happened or to shove it down deep so it wouldn’t affect him. This place is slowly killing a piece of everyone.

Well I’m back out on the streets after another three months of waiting. The problem is that in Texas you have one foot in prison and one foot on a banana peel. I’m going to enjoy myself as best I can for a few weeks, try to rekindle my love with Jen and be with her as much as possible before I violate again. I know I’m an addict now and hooking back up with her means I’ll soon be a part of the smack-run again but it’ll give me the chance to be involved in helping her life for a little while. For this little while I’m going to devote my life to her, even if I can’t find a way to tell her that I’m going to have to go back. She would get angry if I told her why, but I want her to remember me as I loved her. I would die for her but I won’t get all wacky obsessed with her again just to have it taken all away, if not for my sake, then hers.

Besides, this getting out of jail crap is a big joke anyway. I’m expected to pay the County money to be free, yet nobody will hire me in a job that can pay my start-from-scratch living expenses. Then, on top of that, when I’m not scraping money together to help them build new jails, I’m supposed to do community service. Then, on top of THAT, I’m supposed to find a way to pay for a series of classes that gets me a letter that says I’m rehabilitated. I sorry I have to refuse to comply, but thanks for letting me out on my temporary jail pass.

I still have no family to turn to and I won’t ask Jenifer to help. I have no possessions, no more worries and I’ll do what I can to settle my affairs with the time I’m given. They’ll be able to give me up to two years once I’m back inside. That’s just the way it is and what I might have to do. Since I’ve missed two birthdays and every holiday at least once while I’ve been incarcerated, a few more won’t make much difference.

Jenifer, I have ego now and I’m not scared. I hope one day you’ll understand that I don’t know what the hell I’m doing but I’m doing what I think is right for both of us. Dammit Jenifer, I love you, I pray everyday now. I pray that you will heal. I’ve never stopped loving you as you are. I still fantasize that I want to have a child with you and that one day we can magically live together for the rest of our lives. I’m just grateful to know you and to have been a part of your life in a small way since I think you are the most truly magnificent person I’ve ever met. I know we’ll always be friends and I guess that should come first, even if the way we have to get there is a shitty road to be on.

A part of me had to die to gain the little bit of wisdom I needed to have these thoughts and write these words, but I never envisioned having to hit rock bottom when I prayed to God for knowledge. The trouble with wisdom is that most of it comes from experience. Le Petit Mort.

My dad once said Jenifer reminded him of Katherine Hepburn. I think he meant it as a compliment though. The only image I have of Hepburn is the wrinkly scratchy throat lady who was a bitch to everyone. Apparently she was somebody especially beautiful a long, long time ago. God shaped Jenifer’s soul to suit her face. I now know that if I ever want to achieve my full potential, be better than blue collar, I cannot indulge in my fantasy of a life together. My denial of the ordinary forbids my indulgence and eventual stagnation. Please just know and remember that I will always love you.