Author’s note: Frog Gravy is a nonfiction incarceration account.
Names have been changed.
This post is from prison.
Frog Gravy contains graphic language.
Hannibal Mammogram is one of three Frog Gravy essays published in this anthology:
Jail art by Crane-Station/photo: Masonbennu-flickr
After I have breakfast with a woman who killed her husband, I am summonsed via intercom to the transportation section of the main building, for a mammogram. I signed up for this generous offer of a health screening, because I have never had a mammogram, although I am 48-years-old and my mother has been treated for breast cancer.
The intercom announcement is sort of a surprise because we are never told ahead of time when we will be going anywhere. For example, inmates are commonly awakened at 2 AM, told to pack and shipped to Otter Creek, the privately owned prison, without any notice or forewarning. We are told that the suddenness of such shipments and transports is for security.
In the transportation room, in a booth, a female guard watches while I strip off my clothes, including my socks.I am told to face the wall, bend over and spread my labia and ass cheeks, exposing what inmates refer to as the ‘brown eye.’I then squat and cough.
I am self-conscious because I have taken to shaving completely my pubic hair, and in the jails inmates made great fun of this. I feel the guard’s eyes examining my private areas, and she focuses not on the shaven area, but on the fact that I am not wearing any underwear. To me, State underwear are akin to adult diapers. She tells me that not wearing State underwear is a serious offense, a write-up, and time in the hole, and I tell her that my underwear are in the laundry, which is true, it is just that the same underwear have been in the laundry, unworn, since my arrival at the prison.
The guard then gives me a neon orange outfit to wear (prison clothing is tan Khaki for anyone curious) complete with an orange jacket.
Then she handcuffs me, in front.
She puts a lock-box over the handcuffs and locks it, so that I cannot move my hands.
She fits a locked belly-chain, twice wrapped, to the lock-box contraption. I cannot raise my arms or move my hands now, and I secretly pray that I do not experience a sudden itch.
She selects leg irons from a selection of chains and shackles hanging on the wall, and she shackles me in leg irons.
After this, she puts on a bullet-proof vest.
Over this, she dons a flack jacket.
Finally, she holsters a loaded gun, a .38 revolver, or some sort of large revolver.
I walk, tripping and stumbling on chains, to an awaiting van, where I am chain-locked to the seat and belted in.
At the hospital I am paraded by the passing public like a Hannibalistic circus freak, and then chain-locked to a bench to wait. The guard (they hate being called guards and I keep forgetting) -The officer has ¾-inch painted acrylic nails, and as she fingers the gun with them, I try to formulate a plan for when she accidently shoots me.
I finally decide that she is more likely to shoot herself, when she calls me to walk to the appointment. “Walk this way,” she says.
I try.
“Well COME ON,” she barks. “What in the fuck do you think you are doing anyway? We don’t have all day here!”
“I can’t,” I reply.
“What the fuck…”
“I am chained to the bench and I cannot stand up. You have locked the chain to the bench. I cannot stand or walk.”
In case I would have had to pee during my Hannibal outing, the officer has a specimen cup at-the-ready to drug test for substances that may have, per chance, diffused or otherwise virgin-birthed their way into my system.
I sit in silence on the ride back to the prison because I do not initiate conversation with anyone carrying a loaded gun anymore, until she says, “I need something.”
“Yeah, a nice lunch sounds pretty good,” I say. “Bet you are starved.”
“No,” she replies. “I wish I had a lot of money so that I would not have to do this job anymore.”
On arrival at the prison, I repeat the strip search and squat-and-cough inspection.
I keep telling myself, “The prison is in the mind.”
Ruthie’s 49-year-old mother just died. She was obese, like Ruthie, and she chain-smoked. She lived alone in a trailer. No one checked on her the entire weekend. She was found Monday, sitting next to the air conditioner, with an inhaler in her hand. The air conditioner was off, so the skin on the body split open and turned colors; the funeral will not be open casket.
Ruthie sits next to me at a steel table with a no-shank pen and paper. She starts to write a letter to a treatment center:
“I’m writeing to see if I could get into your program
Im really own drugs bad especily crack cocane I started using when I was 12 years old and it was pot then I started dranking at 16 then started snorting cocane at age 17 then about 19…”
“How do you spell snortin’?” asks Ruthie.
“s-n-o-r-t-i-n-g,” I reply.
She thanks me and continues:
“…then about 19 crack cocane I stop using drugs there for awhile when I found out I was pregnet I had 2 little girls did good for awhile unlike the father of my kids, my old man, went to jail for about 2 years at first I stayed clean about 4 months after he got locked up.”
This is the first and only period in the letter so far. She continues:
“then things got hard for me, like paying bills, supporting my kids, just life in general, and everyone around almost did crack cocane, so I look for that for an axcuse, to start back smoking crack-cocane, I started smoking crack-cocane for about the first 6 months then started doing it all almost, But I never really been addicted to pills, like I’ll have a crack pipe and a meth pipe goin at the same time and my old man wuz sellin dope and doin weekins in jail…”
Ruthie giggles and says, “A crack pipe and a meth pipe at the same time, that is high, don’t you thank that’s high?”
She continues writing:
“…my reasons I looked up to my sister when I wuz a child is my sister took care of me when my mom wuz in and out of jail and on drugs.”
Ruthie never knew her real mother, the one who just died, until Ruthie was 18, and they met each other here in this jail. Until that time, Ruthie had a last name and a social security number given to her by her foster parents. Then, her real mother gave her a name and a social security number, since the foster parents had been sexually abusive.
I ask, “What about your father?”
“Oh, he was murdered,” replies Ruthie. “I got a tattoo of him right here, on my arm. Yeah, he was murdered. It was in the news.”
“What happened to him?” I ask.
“Oh, it was over money. They done hung him with his own belt buckle. This man and this lady.”
Terry says, “Well fuck me runnin’.”
“They tried to stuff him into the trunk of a car, but he was too big, so they done drug him back into the house. I saw his body. He’d been dead for a week. He was split open, and there was maggots everywhere. Seein’ that changes you. I ain’t been right after seein’ that. Don’t you think it changes you, Rachel?”
“I cannot imagine that,” I say.
Down the hall, a guard yells at a white man in an isolation cell to “stop acting black,” and further down the hall, Harry yells from his isolation cell, “HELP! Let me out! Helpmehelpme help. HELP!” The mailman comes and retrieves Sirkka’s outgoing trick letters that she has written in hopes of receiving some commissary money.
Ruthie says, “And Mama’s body done swolled up and busted. They cain’t have no open casket. They say the smell was awful.”
Terry asks, “Where did your mama live?”
“The trailer park out Twin Oaks Road by the church and down by the liquor store.”
I note that everything in Kentucky seems to be in relation to a church, a jail or a liquor store.
Ruthie says, “Yeah, and you know when that lady came by the cell with Brother Phillip?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She had me sign some papers to say they could sell Mama’s trailer, and car, and all her things, so they could bury her. They said that that burial insurance wasn’t no good.”
“Oh jeez,” I say. “It was probably a scam.”
“Now I ain’t got nowhere to go when I git out,” says Ruthie. “I ain’t gonna have nothing.”
Christie says, “You signed something?”
I ask, “Do you have a copy?”
“No,” says Ruthie. “I shouldn’t a signed it, huh?”
Christie says, “Ruthie! Don’t ever sign anything when you don’t know what it is!”
In the next day or so, Ruthie leaves the jail in handcuffs, to spend ½ hour at her mother’s funeral. One of the jail guards, Sally, knew Ruthie’s mother and sent flowers; they were the only flowers that anyone sent. The day after the funeral, guards come by and get Ruthie, and she returns to the cell in tears and in hives. She has been charged with two new felonies, each carrying a potential additional five-year sentence: giving a false name and giving a false address.
The address is false, because the trailer was sold, to pay for the mother’s burial.The name was false, because Ruthie provided both her foster care name and the name that her real mother had given her.
Ruthie was 9th-grade special educated and did not understand the forms. She is on disability and cannot even work a cash register because she cannot count back change. She is obese, because she does not know anything about nutrition or diet. She does not understand her own drug addiction, and she does not really even understand her original charges.
We again admonish Ruthie for signing forms that she does not understand. We tell her to go before the judge and explain her inability to comprehend, her education level and her learning disability.I feel a terrible sense of guilt, because Ruthie had initially asked me for help with the forms, and I told her that it was inappropriate for me to see her private information and help her with legal documents. I honestly thought that an appropriate person such as a public defender would help Ruthie.
Note: While Fred is completing a post on expert witnesses, here is a nonfiction post on incarceration. This essay is published in an anthology along with two others. The online essays are each stand-alone, and they alternate between jail and prison in no particular order.
barn at winter by Crane-Station on flickr. jail art done at Ricky’s World.
In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer.
-Albert Camus
Frog Gravy is a nonfiction incarceration account.
Inmate names are changed.
Frog Gravy contains graphic language.
McCracken County Jail Cell 107, winter, 2008
Meg announces to the cell that she is on her period.
“So?” says Christie.
“So, I get out in two weeks, and I can get some dick!”
Meg lives in a motel on the outside, where she trades her body for drugs. She has nine children; many of them were born while Meg was in jail. After Meg is released and after she gets her ‘dick,’ her tenth child will be born in prison, but we do not know this yet.
She has made the comment about getting some ‘dick’ to be mean, because she knows that the rest of the cell occupants are serving lengthier sentences than she has ever had to serve, and that we will be unable to know a man’s touch or have sex, and she will.
When the announcement about dick does not elicit much of a response, Meg starts in on Christie, who, having been denied drug court and now faces 24 years for nonviolent drug-related charges, is desperately depressed. Christie stays on her bunk all the time now, crying.
One of Christie’s felonies, by the way, is for a cold check in the amount of something like one dollar and seventy-two cents, whereas Meg, who will walk out of the jail and get some dick and get pregnant two weeks from now, has a lengthy history of theft and possession charges that, for some reason, she has never had to worry much about, in terms of serving any time.
Rather, during her frequent yet brief accomodations in the McCracken County Jail, she busies herself with the passive-aggressive practices of constant manipulation and torment of fellow inmates who will be serving lengthy sentences entombed in cement with no hope. Each time, Meg leaves, and gets some dick, among other things.
Meg says to Christie, “I think you are overreacting.”
“I can’t help it,” says Christie. “I’m not overreacting. I feel really, really, really bad inside. People notice that there is something wrong. I can’t quit crying. I don’t mean to be such a bitch about it. I just don’t know what to do about it. I sleep 15 hours a day now. I can’t handle this.”
“It’ll be all right,” says Meg, who, two weeks from now will be having sex.
“You don’t know that,” says Christie.” I’m sorry. This isn’t me, but I just don’t know what to do.”
Christie cries.
Down the hall, Harry yells from his isolation cell, “HELLLLP! PLEEEEASE! Somebody! Let me out! Helpme helpmehelpme helpmehelpme Helllllpp…”
Sally is on the phone, calling her mother “a fucking whore.”
Sally calls her mother every five minutes or so, and treats her like a disobedient child. She says, at maximum volume, “I love you! Shut your fucking mouth, you’re nuthin’ but a lazy whore.”
Sally’s mother shouts back. Sally also screams at her 17-year-old son on the phone. She holds the receiver and says to us, “He ain’t got his books for home school yet. Can you believe that shit? My mother ain’t even got his books! She ain’t nuthin’ but a useless whore, don’t do nuthin’ but lay on her back all day.”
Because Sally is currently a guest in the jail, her son is supposed to be homeschooled by Sally’s mother, who is addicted to Vicodin and who never completed the eighth grade.
The son is also apparently very sick, with some kind of severe illness that Sally cannot define. Munchausen by Proxy I think to myself, although I never say it. I think this to myself privately because Sally also self-reports severe, undefined illness in herself, and the mother is dysfunctional, and there is too much collective severe-yet-undefined illness in a young group of closely connected people. Sally looks healthy and robust. It is Christie, crying on her bunk, unable to get up, that I worry about.
I like Sally, and we get along well. I do not agree with how she speaks to her mother or her son, but Sally is amicable to fellow inmates, and she has a delightful sense of humor.
Meanwhile, Meg has come back to the cell from a brief visit to the jail library. The library is a jail cell with mostly paperback romance novels and religious materials, and a remarkable dearth of literature. Meg sets an arm load of romance novels onto the steel table, and then starts gossiping about YaYa, who was in the library, gossiping about Amy. YaYa is not here to defend herself.
Meg says, “I just wanted to hit her.”
I say, “She’s pretty big. Maybe that is not such a good idea. You know, hitting her.”
“The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
Meg taps on the wall to the cell next door, to arrange for her delivery of drugs for the evening, in the form of the inmate-next-door’s psych meds. Everything went okay for her first delivery, and I secretly hope that everything will continue to go okay, because when Meg is on someone else’s psych meds, she usually shuts up.
They make some arrangement.
Later, I am doing exercises on the floor next to the steel door when the steel door flies open, nearly hitting me, and there stands Tiffany, the sergeant, and she is irate. She says, “Who got the note from Carter!?”
“Who’s Carter?” I say.
“Who got that note from Carter!?”
Just then, we realize that Meg’s drug arrangement has not gone as planned. Carter, the inmate next door who was on psych medication, had wrapped two pills in paper and ‘fished’ them underneath her cell door and into our cell, under the door. But it did not work, because the note got stuck.
Tiffany leaves. Meg goes off on Carter. “Dumb bitch, she shoulda knocked.”
We watch while guards come to the cell next door, remove Carter, and take her to the hole.
Meg smiles, giggles, and laughs, as though she had nothing whatsoever to do with the note or the pills in the note. She dismisses the whole incident, and gets on the phone to make arrangements with someone on the outside to smuggle cigarettes into the jail. Later, she tries to get me to make an appointment with the nurse and lie about some ailment, so that Meg can get Tylenol pills, or any pills. I refuse.
When I refuse, she makes fun of me, of my trial, of my conviction, of my lengthy sentence, and of the fact that she will be getting dick two weeks from now and I will not be getting any dick until it is too late for me to have sex, because I am too old.
In my mind I try to come up with reasons for meanness and lack of empathy among warehoused humans in the same predicament, and I wonder if people in the train cars during the holocaust were mean to each other. What is it, exactly, that brings out such hate? Perhaps it is overcrowding or demeaning, dehumanizing treatment, or lost confidence in ‘the system,’ or female jealousy, mental illness, lack of stimulus, or hormones, or frustration and separation from love, touch and family. Maybe it is a combination of everything.
I fold my cranes out of scavenged paper. I move them around. I adjust the towel on my head. I go into the bathroom and climb onto the steel toilet and look through the slit to the dumpsters outside.
I return to the steel table. I put the tiny cranes with the big cranes.
Note: Here is another Frog Gravy post by Crane Station that she has given me permission to post here. For more Frog Gravy, please visit her website at http://froggravy.wordpress.com/
In case you missed it:
Birds drawn at Ricky’s World by Crane-Station. Sorry if you have seen this. I have more jail art, but am having a temporary camera issue, that will be resolved soon. Thank you for your patience!
When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.
-Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis
Frog Gravy is a nonfiction incarceration account.
Inmate names are changed.
Frog Gravy contains graphic language.
McCracken County Jail Cell 107, winter, 2008
I am turning into a bat.
I wear a cape to fend off the cold. I am going blind from the fluorescent lighting. I wear a towel on my head. I speak very little. I have hair on my face and on my body that I have no way of controlling and it embarrasses me.
My cape is my greying thin sheet. Sometimes I put the grey square scratchy wool blanket on top of the sheet, but it itches me because I am allergic to wool. When I asked for a cotton blanket, the jail staff refused because I was unable to provide documentation from an outside physician stating that I am allergic to wool.
I am in the toilet trying to brush what is left of a tooth that lost a crown. I have asked to see a dentist for more than a moth now, to no avail.
I have just taken a shower. The cell has no toilet paper, and so, when you have a bowel movement, you have to cup your hand underneath your crotch, and make a run for it, out of the toilet area and through the cell to the shower stall. Someone must stand guard, because the inside of the cell is visible to the hallway occupants. The hallway occupants are usually working Class D men, because Class D women are not allowed to work hallway jobs. No one wants the working men to see them running through the cell naked with shit and piss cupped in one hand, and so we look out for each other. In the shower, you use the other hand to depress the push-button spout that issues a ten-second spray of cold water. Some inmates use rags after they pee, but after a bowel movement, you really have to do the shower thing.
In the cell, YaYa works on a grievance about the lack of toilet paper and we all sign it. It says (picture coming with update- we currently have a nonworking camera):
We have been without tissue paper for 8 hours or more and the 2nd shift is telling us to get it on the 1st shift, they are too busy now. We are without tissue and no guards will bring us any.. We’ve asked and still no tissue. The jail gets money for state, federal and county inmates. There is no reason we should have to drip-dry. We are not animals.
The response reads:
You are given allotted amount of t/p and feminine products. You must use them accordingly.
Meanwhile, in the cell, Meg says to Lea, “I have pinkeye. Isn’t that contagious?”
“It’s incredibly contagious,” says Lea.
Christie says, “I can’t afford to get pinkeye in my eye socket. I can not afford to get pinkeye.”
I say, “Write a note to the doctor.”
Tina says, “Wash your hands.”
“I do wash my hands,” says Meg.
“They won’t do nuthin,’” says Lea. “They want you to get full-blown pinkeye, so everybody in the mutherfucker’ll get it. I’ve been here when everybody in the place had it.”
Down the hall, Harry shouts from his isolation cell, “PLEEEEASE! Somebody,HELP!!”
On the television news, the Amish men, six or seven of them, are in court in neighboring Graves County. Their hats are off and they are quiet. Displaying a large reflective orange triangle on their horse-drawn buggy does not coincide with their religious beliefs, and they are opposing the charges. Graves County is eager to accommodate the Amish in their county jail, and so the jail has pre-ordered dark gray outfits for the men.
I am actually sort of an autistic bat. I speak little, because I want to avoid conflict. It does not help that much. Inmates make fun of me anyway, because I am not from here, and because I took my case to trial. But it is okay that they make fun of me, because everyone is in pain anyway.
I write because there is absolutely nothing else to do but listen, write down what I hear, readjust my towel hat and my cape, and fold cranes out of paper scraps. For breakfast we had applesauce, sausage and cereal; for lunch we had a hamburger patty, corn, an apple and green beans, and for dinner we had a hamburger patty, sweet potatoes, carrots and cake.
I wander to the hallway window and read a new sign that is posted there, regarding a new clergy visitation policy. The letter is from the jailer, and it is lengthy. It says in part:
Clergy Visitation Policy
The staff at McCracken County Jail recognize the importance of one-on-one clergy visits in the rehabilitation of inmates…
However,to ensure the safety of…
The gist of the lengthy letter is that the jail will now limit clergy visits to entombed inmates by narrowing the times that clergy can visit, and increasing the red tape for both clergy and inmates to coordinate such visits.
-Clergy must now show their theological licensing credentials and documents to the jail staff, and the staff must approve the credentials.
-Hours for clergy visits will be limited to:
8:30-10:30 M-F (no weekends)
(11:30-4:30 M, T, Th,F (no weekends)
-No more than 30 minutes per visit.
-No lay clergy will be allowed. (So much for the laity! ie: nuns and deacons)
-No more than 2 visits per week.
-Clergy must be listed on a visiting list and the visiting list must be approved by the in-house jail chaplain. In other words, if you are not from the area, or if you do not happen to know any clergy in the area, you are shit-out-of-luck.
There are 450-475 inmates warehoused in this jail at any given time. Non-religious texts and educational materials are banned. The only materials allowed are specific types of religious materials. Okay. So now, we agree to get to know God better, and what does the jail do? They limit clergy visits.
To insinuate that clergy, many of whom have ministered in this jail for a long time, somehow compromise inmate safety during brief visits over the phone behind bullet-proof glass is insulting to the clergy who dedicate ministry to this jail.
Meg leaves and vacates her prime real estate and we all rotate our positions in the concrete and steel cell for four, that will soon house six again, as soon as Meg’s replacement arrives. I am in line for a choice spot on a steel bunk next to the cement wall. I started at the beach, between the toilet and the shower on the cement floor. Then I moved to the mountains on a top bunk where the lights were in my face, but now I am hoping for a cave before I lose my eyesight.
In my cave I reflect on the clergy visits and surmise that if I were to ask for a Shaman or a Unitarian, I would be deemed a witch and burned at the stake. Eventually, I dose off.
Note: Crane-Station is writing Frog Gravy, a true account of the time she served in two county jails and the women’s penitentiary at PeWee Valley (pronounced PeeWee) in Kentucky after she was sentenced to 8 years in prison for DUI, possession of a rock of crack cocaine, and tampering with evidence (attempting to conceal the rock behind the rear seat of the police vehicle in which she was being transported for a blood draw).
As most of y’all know, I am her husband and I am writing the Frog Gravy legal case. We will be merging our work and seeking to publish it in 2012.
We were married when we moved to Paducah, KY from Moscow, ID, where I taught at the University of Idaho College of Law. We moved to Paducah because I had accepted a new teaching position at a start-up law school. Our lives soon came apart. She was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to prison. I was fired from my teaching job after I blew the whistle on the Dean and Assistant Dean for skimming student loan money wired by the lender, Student Loan Express, into the school’s bank account.
I am absolutely certain she is innocent and I believe she was framed and taken down to silence me. I came to town with a reputation for exposing corruption, due to my innocence project work, and the legal system in Paducah is corrupt.
I am currently writing and posting the Killer Cross, which I prepared for her public defender, Chris McNeill, to use in cross examining McCracken County Sheriff’s Deputy Eddie McGuire, the man who arrested Crane Station. He refused to use it.
I do not believe any jury would have convicted her, if they had witnessed the killer cross that never happened. Read it for yourself and I believe you will agree.
This is Chapter 72 of Frog Gravy and I am posting it here for y’all to read. I will be posting more chapters in the future.
Please check out her website where you can find the first 71 chapters of Frog Gravy, plus other stuff she has written.
barn at winter by Crane-Station on flickr. jail art done at Ricky’s World.
In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer.
-Albert Camus
Frog Gravy is a nonfiction incarceration account.
Inmate names are changed.
Frog Gravy contains graphic language.
McCracken County Jail Cell 107, winter, 2008
Meg announces to the cell that she is on her period.
“So?” says Christie.
“So, I get out in two weeks, and I can get some dick!”
Meg lives in a motel on the outside, where she trades her body for drugs. She has nine children; many of them were born while Meg was in jail. After Meg is released and after she gets her ‘dick,’ her tenth child will be born in prison, but we do not know this yet.
She has made the comment about getting some ‘dick’ to be mean, because she knows that the rest of the cell occupants are serving lengthier sentences than she has ever had to serve, and that we will be unable to know a man’s touch or have sex, and she will.
When the announcement about dick does not elicit much of a response, Meg starts in on Christie, who, having been denied drug court and now faces 24 years for nonviolent drug-related charges, is desperately depressed. Christie stays on her bunk all the time now, crying.
One of Christie’s felonies, by the way, is for a cold check in the amount of something like one dollar and seventy-two cents, whereas Meg, who will walk out of the jail and get some dick and get pregnant two weeks from now, has a lengthy history of theft and possession charges that, for some reason, she has never had to worry much about, in terms of serving any time.
Rather, during her frequent yet brief accomodations in the McCracken County Jail, she busies herself with the passive-aggressive practices of constant manipulation and torment of fellow inmates who will be serving lengthy sentences entombed in cement with no hope. Each time, Meg leaves, and gets some dick, among other things.
Meg says to Christie, “I think you are overreacting.”
“I can’t help it,” says Christie. I’m not overreacting. I feel really, really, really bad inside. People notice that there is something wrong. I can’t quit crying. I don’t mean to be such a bitch about it. I just don’t know what to do about it. I sleep 15 hours a day now. I can’t handle this.”
“It’ll be all right,” says Meg, who, two weeks from now will be having sex.
“You don’t know that,” says Christie.” I’m sorry. This isn’t me, but I just don’t know what to do.”
Christie cries.
Down the hall, Harry yells from his isolation cell, “HELLLLP! PLEEEEASE! Somebody! Let me out! Helpme helpmehelpme helpmehelpme Helllllpp…”
Sally is on the phone, calling her mother “a fucking whore.”
Sally calls her mother every five minutes or so, and treats her like a disobedient child. She says, at maximum volume, “I love you! Shut your fucking mouth, you’re nuthin’ but a lazy whore.”
Sally’s mother shouts back. Sally also screams at her 17-year-old son on the phone. She holds the receiver and says to us, “He ain’t got his books for home school yet. Can you believe that shit? My mother ain’t even got his books! She ain’t nuthin’ but a useless whore, don’t do nuthin’ but lay on her back all day.”
The son is supposed to be homeschooled by Sally’s mother, who is addicted to Vicodin and who never completed the eighth grade, because Sally is in jail.
The son is also apparently very sick, with some kind of severe illness that Sally cannot define. Munchausen by Proxy I think to myself, although I never say it. I think this to myself privately because Sally also self-reports severe, undefined illness in herself, and the mother is dysfunctional, and there is too much collective severe-yet-undefined illness in a young group of closely connected people. Sally looks healthy and robust. It is Christie, crying on her bunk, unable to get up, that I worry about.
I like Sally, and we get along well. I do not agree with how she speaks to her mother or her son, but Sally is amicable to fellow inmates, and she has a delightful sense of humor.
Meanwhile, Meg has come back to the cell from a brief visit to the jail library. The library is a jail cell with mostly paperback romance novels and religious materials, and a remarkable dearth of literature. Meg sets an arm load of romance novels onto the steel table, and then starts gossiping about YaYa, who was in the library, gossiping about Amy. YaYa is not here to defend herself.
Meg says, “I just wanted to hit her.”
I say, “She’s pretty big. Maybe that is not such a good idea. You know, hitting her.”
“The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
Meg taps on the wall to the cell next door, to arrange for her delivery of drugs for the evening, in the form of the inmate-next-door’s psych meds. Everything went okay for her first delivery, and I secretly hope that everything will continue to go okay, because when Meg is on someone else’s psych meds, she usually shuts up.
They make some arrangement.
Later, I am doing exercises on the floor next to the steel door when the steel door flies open, nearly hitting me, and there stands Tiffany, the sergeant, and she is irate. She says, “Who got the note from Carter!?”
“Who’s Carter?” I say.
“Who got that note from Carter!?”
Just then, we realize that Meg’s drug arrangement has not gone as planned. Carter, the inmate next door who was on psych medication, had wrapped two pills in paper and ‘fished’ them underneath her cell door and into our cell, under the door. But it did not work, because the note got stuck.
Tiffany leaves. Meg goes off on Carter. “Dumb bitch, she shoulda knocked.”
Meg smiles, giggles, and laughs, as though she had nothing whatsoever to do with the note or the pills in the note. She dismisses the whole incident, and gets on the phone to make arrangements with someone on the outside to smuggle cigarettes into the jail. Later, she tries to get me to make an appointment with the nurse and lie about some ailment, so that Meg can get Tylenol pills, or any pills. I refuse.
When I refuse, she makes fun of me, of my trial, of my conviction, of my lengthy sentence, and of the fact that she will be getting dick two weeks from now and I will not be getting any dick until it is too late for me to have sex, because I am too old.
In my mind I try to come up with reasons for meanness and lack of empathy among warehoused humans in the same predicament, and I wonder if people in the train cars during the holocaust were mean to each other. What is it, exactly, that brings out such hate? Perhaps it is overcrowding or demeaning, dehumanizing treatment, or lost confidence in ‘the system,’ or female jealousy, mental illness, lack of stimulus, or hormones, or frustration and separation from love, touch and family. Maybe it is a combination of everything.
I fold my cranes out of scavenged paper. I move them around. I adjust the towel on my head. I go into the bathroom and climb onto the steel toilet and look through the slit to the dumpsters outside.
I return to the steel table. I put the tiny cranes with the big cranes.
Posted by masonblue 
