Deviant’s Edge 2.0

Part 1 County Time and The Walls

I’m certain that I deserved to go to prison. I was not the innocent man, or the peaceful drug offender. I was among the lowest of street scum, a small time junky hood who would deal, con, rob and steal, often more out of sheer boredom than any genuine need for drugs. In that sense, I can say I was a success; that was who I’d set out to become, consciously, with premeditation after my own unarrestable but despicable behavior showed me once and for all who I really was. So why not be what others see, and do my best to live up to their fantasies? I was living in my own trashy and surrealistic novel, an ongoing narrative of actions and sensations streaming through my mind, as if I was already writing the script for the movie based on those days. All that is in fact a “whole other story,” but the result was that I ended up in prison, more or less convinced that it was where I belonged and what I deserved.

Remember that lame old ad that showed a forlorn-looking panhandler holding a paper cup receiving a coin from someone passing by with the voiceover stating with certainty that “nobody wants to grow up to be a junky?” Well I wanted to. I knew it was just a question of time before I found the needle. I didn’t want to grow up to go to prison at the age of 35, but I knew at least on a subconscious level that it was coming. I had nightmares about it years before my first felony conviction.

******

I felt that perhaps the sentence I received was too harsh for my actual crimes, but that I deserved it for other things that could not be defined within the Colorado Revised Statutes. Could I be charged with being “one cold motherfucker” or a “crazy desperate asshole” or in the final analysis, just a “dumbass?” What I had done to my first wife and child by repeatedly choosing to inject myself with sacred poisons was horrific even in my own eyes, yet not something anyone chose to formally charge me with. What I had done to my lovers both male and female, falling in love with them, winning their love, and then systematically killing the relationship so I could do the whole thing over again is as common as it is depraved, but not a crime.

Some fucked up credit card/Santa Claus western notion of karma named the sentencing judge as its agent in my mind, but by the time I was in the state prison system, I had shed many burdens, and lessened my demands from life. Things can always get worse, but given time, patience, and willingness to alter one’s own perceptions, they usually get better. From the concrete floor of the City Jail holding area to the stinky little one man cells with two or three men packed in, things change. Even if you end up sleeping with your feet next to the toilet, or under the bunk, things have improved, because you have a mattress. You might even get a blanket. By the time you get to your county jail cell, you have sheets, a blanket, and a mattress with a built-in pillow-like hump at one end. Things seem to get better until the withdrawal sets in.

******

“In the East B.F. Egypt Adult Detention Facility, I went into methadone withdrawal while incarcerated for the fourth time. My nerves turned to white hot barbed wire, my flesh turned to scalding red jello.”*

******

Martinez is snoring. He’s not a bad guy really, just a Chicano methamphetamine dealer unlucky enough to get caught with a shotgun, but lucky enough to have no meth with him, except in his bloodstream. Now he’s catching up on some sleep. It’s not like I can sleep anyway, I feel like there are hundreds of tiny fishhooks being dragged through my flesh while tiny worms eat the muscles of my extremities. Every couple of hours it feels like someone kicks me in the gut one time, but good. This is methadone withdrawal,. I send a kite to the infirmary, seeing if I can get something to take the edge off.

It was January 15th 1995 when that last, horribly bungled robbery put me in that shit-hole of a suburban Jail, the Adams County Detention Facility. This is my first time in Adams County, and in Boulder and Denver they at least give you something, like clonidine, Tranxene, or Phenergan, to get you through that agonizing first few days. The kite comes back with the following written on it:

“We are sorry sir; we don’t treat withdrawal from drugs.” It’s Tylenol and water from then on. I toy with the idea of suicide, but some perverse aspect of my personality rejects it at an option.
I was at fault in even creating the smallest chance that this could happen, and the fact was that it almost had to happen; but I also decided that in time someone would pay for making me suffer in this way.

People are not denied medications for migraines, depression, upset stomachs, constipation, and a host of other non-lethal ailments that seem to be endemic to county jails, but withdrawal is viewed as deserved suffering that is unworthy of treatment. In most cases, people survive withdrawal from heroin, morphine and methadone, although I still insist that methadone is the worst of the three. Unlike alcohol withdrawal, withdrawal from narcotics is generally not considered to be life-threatening, however, the pain and misery of the experience has driven people to suicide, and lethal seizures can result from severe withdrawal. As I write this today, only Denver County out of all the county jails I’ve been held in has started an experimental program of providing inmates with methadone at the country’s expense. Early results of this and other experiments seem to indicate that inmates treated with methadone in jail, are less likely to re-offend when released. It’s just common sense. Boulder County, the wealthiest county I have ever served time in, let me suffer through withdrawal with only the mildest of medications to take the edge off, although they did not cut off my Xanax prescription. Now, I hear you can get methadone in Boulder too, but it will cost you 25.00 dollars per day. I am sure that all who can afford it, fork over the 25 bucks gladly.

******
Martinez is still snoring. I read the graffiti that has been painstakingly scratched into the paint, with some contraband piece of metal that an inmate can always find; a staple, the clip from an ID badge, maybe even a “shiv.” Too many gang names to keep track of but the West Side Ballerz, and the GKI are prominent. Someone else has carved their own commentary into the discussion “Fucking gang-banging pussies grow up fuckheads!” County time is always the hardest time, unless one enters the prison system with delusions of being “a real man,” a sure ticket to supermax.

Suffering grows familiar and banal, the concept that there is any alternative to it fades. Lack of distraction from the withdrawal becomes my nemesis. I don’t really sleep for about a month. To endure the suffering was no act of strength and bravery; there simply wasn’t any other choice. Complaining would not have yielded any positive result.

People tell me that I should spend a little time outside of the cell, and walk around a little, maybe use the exercise machines. Most days I just stay in bed, getting up only for meals which I usually give away, the medication nurse, and the occasional chess game. I have no money for commissary at first, and from time to time someone offers me a cup of black, foul-tasting instant coffee made with hot tap water. I accept this brew gratefully, and sometimes it elevates my mood enough to play chess or board games.

After a sleepless month I put in a request form or “kite” as they are called asking to see the shrink. I also get up the nerve to ask my parents for some money for commissary. I feel horrible, guilty as hell for what I’ve done to them this time; there is no need to feign remorse.
I ask for more money than I really need. At this point I’m starting to face the reality of a substantial prison sentence.

******

More than anything, I just want to sleep. The doctor gives me Sinequan, an odd antidepressant with heavily sedating side-effects that decrease rapidly as the body adjusts to the drug. When the Sinequan stops working, he prescribes imipramine. The imipramine works better. I’m able to make a few trips to the Boulder county jail on the basis of some foolish confessions I had made, thinking that this would help my cause and possibly get me transferred to Boulder for the rest of my pre-sentence confinement.

All I get are extra felonies on my record, with shorter sentences run concurrently with the longest one. However there are a few blessed weeks in Boulder with Tranxene, a long lasting benzodiazepine drug, that a kindly female psychiatrist in Boulder prescribes to me through the jail infirmary (most jails don’t allow such things). This makes the accursed worms beneath my skin to stop crawling, so that I cam actually stand to be awake.

My pre-sentence confinement lasts 265 days. The jail-shrink prescribes another heavily sedating psych med, in this case the “antipsychotic” Mellaril. Between that and the imipramine, I I’m to avoid being awake more than six or seven hours a day. Eventually I can eat again. I develop an extreme sugar habit, buying cookies, candy bars, and junk food from canteen, along with the almost obligatory ramen noodle soups.

I read “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood and a Steven King anthology. I read Sartre’s The Age of Reason and much in the way of obscure, escapist science fiction. I listen to jailhouse preachers in impromptu bible study and rap-sessions but fail to see the light. My weight goes up to 170 pounds from its junky-slim 130 lbs.

I don’t care that my physique is like that of “The Penguin,” I just sleep more and eat more sugar. A pre-sentence investigator tells me she’s recommending a halfway house or treatment program. All I can think of is just how long it would take me to get out the door, down to the dope-zone, and start speedballing.

Some crack finds its way in. I trade my headphone radio for a couple of hits, these two young white dudes get a piece and we smoke it through a chicken bone, making torches with yellow legal pad paper ignited by an arc using wire, pencil lead, and the light switch. We smoke up the cell, and all of the rock, but for some reason the guards don’t to notice a thing.

On another occasion some methamphetamine comes in with a meth-cook who I’d met in the Denver county jail a while back. I don’t even like that stuff very much, but it’s an opportunity to do drugs in jail. It’s always hard to say exactly how contraband gets in to a facility. In a non-smoking county jail, the occasional appearance of a full pack of “Cadillacs” (complete, regular cigarettes) would seem to point to really lax security or even staff complicity. But sometimes, after going through the facility’s screening procedure, it becomes obvious that certain drugs could only have come from one place, out of someone’s asshole. “Keestering it” or “putting it in the safe” are a couple of the euphemisms used.
Cavity searches are almost unheard of because now the law requires that they be done by qualified medical personnel. In Denver County I once heard a guard say “if it’s in your ass, it’s yours, we don’t want it.”

******

The days move, slow befouled, constipated time, unlike my intestines that continue to go into spasms at random times, when something would come up and kick me yet again. The term “writhing in peristalsis” appears repeatedly in the narratives and “cut ups” of William S. Burroughs, but one can only understand exactly why after going through untreated withdrawal a few times. For a long time I simply can’t stand to be awake at all, because the nightmare of being conscious could only stop if I awakened from it into sleep.

******

I hear about Oklahoma City, and I think “Good, someone finally hit back,” as the reality of a senseless war crime by a half-witted white supremacist hasn’t yet sunk in. I get a crude tattoo of a bomb on my left arm using a sharpened staple.

******

Towards the end of the summer, I enter a plea of guilty while heavily medicated, somehow convincing the judge that I understand the full ramifications of my plea, although I don’t. In September, I appear before another judge, Michael Ensor. I tell him that I did it, there is no excuse and that I deserve whatever I get. The judge agrees and gives me 16 years, the maximum possible sentence under the plea agreement. I thank the judge and my attorney as I leave the courtroom.

My existence is improving again. I have nothing left to worry about. The shrink tells me “Now don’t catastrophise,” and while it is hard to define a 16 year sentence as anything less than a catastrophe, I know what he means. I continued to prepare myself mentally for the state prison, talking to more experienced inmates about life “behind the walls” and trying to imagine just how I would fit in to that society. By now I’m just “crazy”. Heavily medicated and clearly not caring what I look like, the label comes to me naturally. In prison culture, there are many worse things to be than crazy.

One of our fellows is Iranian. The white boys harass him mercilessly until he begs the guard to move him, at which point they all start calling him a rat. The guards move him to another pod. There’s a kid they call “Rubberhead,” and his shaven skull with a little Hare Krishna style tail in the back looks like rubber, for sure. I’m coming to accept my fate more as each day passes, but can’t not summon up the bravado and humor that some of the repeat offenders display. For a while, I eat with the “brothers” at their table, which was the ping pong table with the net removed. The other whites seem to want nothing to do with me but the six or seven some odd black guys in the pod –the number changed as people came and went- don’t seem to mind my presence. I usually give away a substantial portion of my tray to someone or other. Even though I can eat again, the jail food remains nauseating.

One day at lunch, an older white convict with a shaved head invites me to sit at his table, sayins “you don’t have to sit with them.,” I accept his invitation. I figure that I won’t really be missed by the blacks, but if I turn down this invitation, it will be an insult to one of my elders, the kind of people who in time will tell me what I need to know to survive, not just physically, but psychically too. In prison I would get to know some of the black lifers too, but race wasn’t the issue, what I needed was the wisdom of experience, knowledge that only comes over time, and at a high price. In the prison, the madhouse, the halfway house and treatment programs, or for that matter concentration camps, this type of simple but vital knowledge is the most valuable gift that one could hope to receive from another inmate.

******

I buy another headphone radio to replace the first one that I’d traded for a couple of crack hits; it turns out to be a SONY, a lot better than last one. I start going out to the “yard.” Yard time consists of being allowed outside for an hour in the afternoon or evening. “Outside” is a small triangle of concrete surrounded by the walls of the jail itself, and covered with a heavy wire grid. If I look up, the sky can be seen through the grating.

I go to night yard and pace around with the radio on, listening to a Denver hard-rock station, and trying hard to find something acceptable in the whole scenario. I see my first glimpse of a different kind of freedom, a feeling that some prisoners eventually find they can’t live without. It is the freedom to not give a shit about anything, to go crazy, to forget.

******

Three weeks after sentencing I’m transferred into the custody of the Colorado Department of Corrections. The guard up in the glass cage calla my name, mispronouncing it so badly that I don’t know who he’s calling at first. When I finally figure it out and leave my cell, he tells me to “pack it up”. A crowd of people gather around my door. They know I can’t take any of my canteen food with me. Greedy and vulture-like, hovering with their hands out, most get what they came for as I keep giving stuff away, until finally the guard comes down and runs them all off. As I leave the pod with what is left of my life stuffed into one large clear plastic trash bag, little bits of parting advice find my ears,

“Don’t let ‘em get to you!”

“Don’t take no shit from anyone,”

“Don’t worry, you’ll be OK, just do your own time mind your own business, don’t bother no one they won’t bother you.”

One of the guards offers his own trite attempt at humor:

“Don’t bend over to pick up the soap…”

I have one fruit pie left and I eat it in the holding cell while waiting for the van.

Intake

We make the short trip to the Denver Diagnostic and Reception Center (DRDC) from Adams County, there are two other guys in the van. They take away my county jail uniform and replace it with an orange jumpsuit. They give me a pair of state-issue shoes, heavy, black “Plainsman” work boots, with carefully notched soles to ensure good footprints. They take away my headphone radio and give me the option of donating it to Goodwill Industries, which I do. Ordinary dry-cell batteries are contraband in CDOC. They say you can make explosives out of them.

We have lunch; the food is much better than anything the county had ever serves, but they don’t give us enough time to eat it all. Fifteen minutes after the first to be served sat down, they march us back to our cells, so the folks toward the end of the line are just out of luck. I only get to have a couple of bites of the delicious chocolate pudding and processed “whipped topping” pie.

As we enter the huge three tiered housing unit, I hear a guard yelling at someone making some noise up on the third tier.

“Shut the fuck up. Just where do you think you are the county jail?”

The guard, a thin middle aged black man looks at us, saying quietly, “Oh, that just makes me so mad.” I silently thank the guard. I have no desire for any more jail noise either.
Until we can be “diagnosed” and classified, we are all considered to be maximum security inmates. We are housed in separate cells, and only allowed out for meals, showers, and the various components of the intake procedure.

One afternoon as filled with standardized I.Q. and psychological testing, with the familiar #2 pencils and answer sheet covered with rows of little boxes to fill. That little smear of pencil lead will become a piece of binary code in a computer that eventually will become some minuscule part of a report, to be glanced at by a bored case-manager, filed, and forgotten.

Medical looks at a small tumor on my finger that’s been bleeding on and off ever since the county jail. The Dr. in Adams County had said it was a wart, and offered to look at it again in 90 days. At DRDC, a young PA decides to cut it off and send it for a biopsy. I tell him that at one point it had been removed, diagnosed as a basal cell carcinoma, and grown back, which he take a bit more seriously than the county jail doctor. He even prescribes about five days worth of Tylenol/codeine #3 for me, for which I am most grateful.

Codeine, quietude, a few readable books with a religious theme, novels of Jews escaping the Nazis from Poland, and heading for Palestine, better food than I’d had for a long time, and, after a few days, tobacco. It’s as close to paradise as I’ve been for a long time. CDOC has not yet banned smoking throughout the system. Only the tier porters, guys who’ve gotten hung up at DRDC for one reason or another, and taken janitorial jobs to get a little more time out of the cells, have lighters. The guards make sure that the tier porters make the rounds with the lighters at least four times a day. I haven’t ordered any canteen yet, but I trade a bottle of shampoo for a decent little sack of bugler and some papers. When I light that first smoke, I feel, for the first time in a long time, that life is good again.

My hair gets filthy and greasy from lack of shampoo; if I take my little blue stocking cap off, (a valuable item that DOC issues to all incoming prisoners), my hair sticks out in all directions in sharp angular tufts and clumps. A drug counselor comes to see me; he asks me many questions which I answer honestly. He asks me about my hair, and I just shrug. Why should I care? I have no one to be pretty for. He asks me to try to have my hair clean when he came back. I don’t.

He’s got some intake form for something called the “Crossroads to Freedom House,” a prison Therapeutic Community (TC) for serious drug offenders and violent offenders with drug problems. I refuse to sign it or have anything to do with it, telling him that I just don’t think I’d fit in, in a TC. I stop shaving for the time being. I try washing my hair with state issued lye-soap, but that just makes it worse. Finally, a fellow prisoner takes pity on me and tosses me his shampoo bottle.

We have individual showers out on the tier, with no curtains. No need to worry about bending over here; the worst that can happen is some perverted guard behind the tinted glass in the cage looking at your asshole.

******

We’re shuffled from one building to the next, after one week. After the second week is done, we we’re shuffled to a third building. By that time we have been diagnosed and classified. I meet with a case manager who simply advises me to avoid hot UAs and “refusal to work” write-ups, if I ever want tpmake parole. A mental health woman lectures a group of us about the treatments available, including a couple of “therapeutic communities” within the prison system for drug offenders and sex offenders respectively. She says that successful participation in a TC could significantly shorten a sentence, and that even inmates with very long sentences and life sentences can benefit, in terms of the type of time they will end up serving. She asks us to tell someone if we’re thinking about suicide. She also advises against it.
“You’ll go out of here in a body bag, and you’ll be forgotten pretty quickly, that’s all you’ll accomplish.”