NEWS FLASH!

 

Breaking news this morning from our resident John Coffey guy.  He shared an anecdote about how his neighbors once approached him to inquire if he might be selling drugs out of his house.  This really ticked him off, so he yelled at them, calling them racists for accusing him of dealing drugs just because he was Black, etc., etc.  They said, wait a minute, we’re talking about all the cars coming in day and night, staying a minute, then driving off.  Oh yeah, he shouted back, the reason for that is (and I quote):  “I’m a popular-ass mother__r, people like me, come from all over to just say, hey!” 

 

Yeah.  Like people make pilgrimages to his house, just to bask in his presence or something.  Anyway, he wraps up this tale of magnificence and badness with the following:  “I really put them racists in their place, I mean how dare they?  Of course, I was moving product, but how dare them to think that?  Hmm?”

 

I asked, have you considered that the reason they thought you were selling drugs might have been BECAUSE YOU WERE SELLING DRUGS?  Wish you could have seen his sincere indignation about this, that anyone would accuse him of such a thing – absolutely amazing!

Confirmation Bias

 

The news about the Washington Football Team parting ways with quarterback Duane Haskins led to the following discussion between my cellie and me.  Apparently, former NFL player and current sports analyst Booger MacFarland (who happens to be Black – adding an extra dimension to this whole thing) claimed that Haskins was just another example of young Black athletes being more concerned with image and branding than with getting the job done.

 

My cellie felt this proved that, as he believes, Black people are lazy:   “I mean, even another Black guy said it!”  Thus began our discussion of the term “confirmation bias.”

 

I asked him if failed quarterbacks Johnny Manziel and Ryan Leaf represented all White athletes.  “Of course not,” he replied.  So then, why would you think Haskins stands in for all Black people?  Or even Black quarterbacks?  Just getting started, I offered the sterling examples of Russell Wilson, Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, and Jalen Hurts.  And you know what, I actually had him thinking.

 

Stepping away from pro football, I asked him to also consider the prison library lady. Yesterday, she and her co-worker – both Black – came by and handed out book request forms, which she came back to collect, saying, “I’ll bring your books tomorrow.”  Well, by the 4 pm count, still no books!  Books are basically our only form of diversion in lockdown, so as the afternoon dragged on, our disappointment evolved into ranting up and down the hall.

 

“See, I told you those library workers are all lazy!”

“Did it on purpose, lying to us, see they’re all spiteful!”

 

I counted five different guys sharing these complaints, all having their bias confirmed.  The truth most likely during the Covid crisis is that they weren’t allowed back onto our ward. That said, I find this thinking runs rampant in prison, generalizing from the particular, as in “I told you, all ______ are ______, just look at _______!”  But as we talked, it seemed that my cellie was gradually coming around to my point.  I told him that before coming to prison, I didn’t know anyone from Tennessee and assumed they must all be meth-addled hillbillies cursed with marginal grammar, missing teeth, and closets full of Sudafed (of course, I knew that wasn’t true, figuring that a few of those preppy Vandy students must in fact be native Tennesseans).  And, wouldn’t you know it, having now met my cellie and his homeboys, my bias has been confirmed!  He laughed at that one, and admitted I may have a point.

 

From the Far Right to Antifa to BLM to the police, all we hear about are the few bad apples, so folks end up branding the whole based on the few who confirm their preconceived biases.  Which brings me back to the library lady.  I tried to explain that the only FACT we had was that the books had not been delivered, as promised.  Why, though, must we pass judgment and personalize everything?  The block went quiet for a minute, and then the guys all loudly agreed that I was crazy.  Oh well.  I tried.  It works for me.  But seriously isn’t it better to err on the side of open-mindedness than on the closed door of prejudice?

Losing the Fuzz War

 

It’s a grim day for the Anti-Orange-Fuzz Brigade. The tide is turning, we are losing the battle.  Fuzz has infiltrated and is taking over. Just this morning, I awoke with a stuffed nose, thinking my allergies were acting up. I grabbed some toilet paper and went to work at what felt like a meteor-sized booger. Much to my chagrin, what finally emerged was a hardened glob of orange fuzz!  I apply some deodorant and it comes away with orange fuzz. Between my toes, behind my ears. A guy down the hall claims to have passed an orange fuzz-laced kidney stone.

 

So, I am again faced with having to improve my methods. Improvise or perish, right?  My new modified Fuzz Collector Method (FCM): I grab my size 13 orange Croc’s (no, I’m not six feet tall, the guard had a worse eye for sizing than a stoned teenager at Payless who spends most of his day debating his equally brain-dead buddies over the cinematic contributions of Sean Penn as Spicolli vs. Keanu in Bill & Ted, while also constantly looking for George Carlin at the Circle K and asserting “Strange things are afoot….” (While robbing the store blind of knock-off Vans and calling all the customers Mr. Hand.))  Okay, so yes, size 13’s.

 

My new technique:  I pull my socks over the Orange Croc’s, tugging them up like a hideous pair of gaiters.  I then shuffle about the room like an extra from “Land of the Lost” (late 70s-early 80s tv version, not the horrendous Will Farrell remake), hoping that any fuzz displaced into the air may be caught by static electricity in the gaiters. 

 

Unfortunately, my cellie appears to be working for the enemy.  Have begun to suspect that he sprinkles orange fuzz while I sleep. I mean, no matter how often I explain standard Anti-Fuzz Protocol to him, it doesn’t work. Picture Bill Murray proclaiming, “Army training, sir!” and you’ll have a good idea of his discipline.  Guy’s a 300-lb. orange pixy dust sprinkling Tinkerbell. 

 

And if that’s not bad enough, he has this amazing ability to generate trash. I made a trash can out of brown paper bags, but it’s as if the receptacle repels him!  I’m thinking of writing a play “Felix and Oscar in the Pen.”  But fear that Jack Klugman’s estate would sue me.  But seriously, here’s an example: While looking for a ketchup packet “stored” under his mattress, he discovered that it had burst. He dipped his finger in the mess, tasted it, then scraped the rest from the metal bunk and applied it to his hamburger. The Felix in me cringes!

Jailhouse Shakespeare

 

They say that Shakespeare either coined or brought into common usage some very familiar words, such as “assassination” (MacBeth), “bedroom” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), “countless” (Titus Andronicus), “fashionable” (some other play), “frugal” and “laughable” (Merchant of Venice), “lonely” and “useful” (King John).  Not all of his coinages were “successful” (Titus, again), however, such as “crimeless” for innocent, “facinorous” for wicked, and “recountment” for narrative.   

 

All this as a lead in to this new guy on the unit, who aspires to be a poet/spoken word artist.  My nickname for him is “Green Mile”, because he sounds exactly like John Coffey.  He has invented some new words and some creative usages of familiar words. Only time will tell if he’s the Bard of the era.

 

I submit for your consideration, complete with Green Mile’s definitions:

 

Trans-gent-dyke (n.) – One of them f—ked up dudes, don’t know if he a man or a woman.

 

Oyster (n.) – You know, like a clam, but in a lake. Some people call ‘em “cloysters.”

 

Jaunt (n.) – A general purpose noun, possibly derived from “joint”.  Ex. “You eat that chicken? That jaunt was bangin’.  Or “I wrote a new jaunt” (poem).  Or “I read the shit out of that jaunt” (book).

 

Med-i-nurse (n.) – A medical staffer who works at a federal prison.  Ex. All the change jinglin’ in her purse, I hear her comin’, it’s the medinurse.”

 

I wish I could remember more of these words, but it’s hard to hear over the constantly flushing toilet!  I do wonder, though, if our John Coffey may have a pet mouse?

I Have Had Enough!

 

Christmas in the SHU. That’s right, we did Thanksgiving in here, and now closing in on Day 50 of protective covid quarantine. We blew through Christmas, and it looks like we are going to hit the Trifecta and sail past New Year’s (not a corona-free unit with space for us).  For dinner Christmas Day, a malnourished Cornish game hen – had to be small enough to squeeze through the tray slot – green beans, corn, rice, and a slice of wheat bread.  What a feast!  But beats our bag lunch of mystery meat, PB&J and two mini-pies.  All while locked in the box for God only knows how much longer.

 

Phone call home?  Nope! A temporary moratorium on the 5:45 am wake-up lights? Nope!  Worst Christmas ever?  You bet.  At least the pies weren’t bad.  The highlight of the week was cell rotation, done for sanitation purposes, so an orderly can clean the cells while they’re empty.  Everyone in the SHU is on quarantine, so none of us could have Covid, but even so, they slap on handcuffs and move us to different cells in a new wing.  The cleaning is no great shakes, either, consisting of a Styrofoam cup full of liquid cleaner. The previous resident of our new cell clearly did not rank cleanliness very highly.  Took me an hour to scrub the place, with one orange sock on each hand (it was either the socks or my washcloth).  My cellmate thought the place didn’t look too bad.  He was right, if we lived under a bridge!

 

I have had enough!  Enough of the ill-fitting orange clothes. Enough of the bagged meals pushed through the slot. The freezing-ass cold stainless steel toilet. Drinking out of an old milk carton, because we have no cups. Enough with the plastic sporks! The random screamers, door bangers and cell-block philosophers at 3 am.  Enough with the flashlight under the door every half hour at night. The cheap-ass razors (might as well just pluck every hair from your face), the lack of sunlight (some of the fairer-skinned guys are nearly translucent at this point).  AHHHGG!!!

 

My cellie’s hillbilly charm is starting to wear thin, too.  He explained today how he gets that the law allows “them queers” to get married, but they should make it illegal for them to kiss in public, “unless they are some hot-ass broads.”  This after explaining that “White Pride” isn’t in any way related to racism, it’s just about keeping the race pure and strong, not “weakening” it through “mixing.”  I give up.  Funny thing, as I’ve written before, he is nice to everyone, regardless of color, but he has some messed up beliefs.  I could title the saga of the past fifty days “My Life with MAGA.”  Dude definitely buys what Trump is selling.  At times, as he drones on, I could swear his voice morphs into that of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, explaining, “What the President means to say….”

 

Speaking of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and yes, at this point I do know that I’m rambling, ranting and digressing, but it’s my rant, so any teachers with degrees from high-falutin’ schools founded way back in like 1693 be damned. Enough with themes! Enough with topic sentences!  I shall meander through this piece like Stephen King getting paid by the page! Was I just channeling Opus from Bloom County?  (If you don’t know who Opus is, look it up on the Interwebs (Berkeley Breathed also wrote a great youth/adult book entitled Flawed Dogs)). You can thank Al Gore, because you know he created the Internet, just ask him (look it up). He said it about the same time he was ginning up the “Climate Change” nonsense. I heard that Coast to Coast is about the release a secret Trump report that those island nations in the South Pacific are not disappearing from rising sea levels. They are actually being flooded by Tipper Gore’s tears. She’s still upset about how her music censorship backfired when someone told her “Greased Lightnin’” isn’t really just about cars.  Forced her to cancel the annual “Tipper and Friends do Grease” holiday spectacular.  And she had finally beaten out that bitch Hilary for the part of Sandy. Who knew the Monica Lewinsky Halloween outfit would be so appreciated by Director Bill Clinton?

 

Uh, where was I now?  Sarah Sanders, right! But first we have to discuss Sean Spicer. Remember him? Feels like sooo long ago. Although he was providing the world’s comics with pure gold material, he eventually realized that the Trump Presidency had “jumped the shark” (if unfamiliar, Google “the Fonz + Shark”) and his podium had entered the express lane to career implosion.  Dude hit the ejector switch, quit and then tried to pull a Shatner  What’s a Shatner, you ask? A Shatner is when you realize the joke is on you, embrace it, and resurrect your career, as famously demonstrated by old Captain Kirk himself. (A political entertainment example would be Bill O’Reilly going on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, proving he could laugh at himself, thus gaining new fans.)  So Spicer pulls his Shatner and we get Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Poor woman. You could see how defending Trump’s insanity wore her down. By the end of her tenure, she looked as if she had just gone five rounds with Rhonda Rousey.  Drawn and limp.  I expected Sally Strothers to pop up and tell us that we could help for just a dollar a day!  But she, too, got out before it was too late.   

 

Okay, I’m finished. Feel much better.

 

Finally, to tie this all together:  Enough of this crappy, blotting, ink-stingy flexi-SHU pen!

White Noise - SHU Style

 

First I recall they sold tapes with white noise (ocean waves, soft rain, maybe a breeze rustling through leaves), then came the dedicated “sleep machines,” and I’m sure by now there must be dozens of apps that help ease you off to slumberland. Well, after all this time dealing with the noises of the SHU, I’m gonna have to find one with three unique sound settings:  (1) constantly flushing toilet, (2) incessant Echo Man, and (3) “Chicken.”  The soundtrack of nighttime on the SHU, lulling me to sleep like a sledgehammer to the skull!  Allow me to elaborate:

Constantly Flushing Toilet:  Okay, this is a stainless steel toilet with some serious flushing power. On the International Scale of Flushing Strength, ranging from 1-10, with 1 being a gently swirling eddy barely taking down a tissue, and 10 flushing a whole roll of 4-ply Charmin, these things are cranked to 11.  I’ve seen them suck down a whole apple and a t-shirt.  Legend has it that a guy lost his arm in one.  Now imagine that on the other side of the wall where you are nestled in your pile of orange fuzz, in your marginally clean prison garb (see earlier posts), that one of these Defecation Hurricanes gets stuck in Flush Mode Non-Stop!  ALL NIGHT!  What am I to do?  What will soothe me to sleep?  Don’t worry, there’s always…

Incessant Echo Man: Turns out the stainless steel shower is a great place to produce an echo through the pipes.  Apparently, like a child discovering his voice for the first time, some guy just can’t get enough of this echo effect. Every damned night he hoots and hollers nonsensical ramblings into his shower, inflicting these howls on the rest of us. I thought, surely the novelty will wear off after 1, 2…10 days?  No such luck. I mean, won’t his cellie get tired of it? No sirree, you can also hear that idiot in the background cackling with laughter, Echo Man’s personal laugh track.  We all decided to treat them like children.  Ignore them, and they’ll stop, right? The Ferber Method for annoying inmates. But just when we appear to be making headway, someone will shout, “Shut the F___ up!” and we are back to Square One.  On occasion, though, we get lucky, and Echo Man takes a break, leaving us with good old reliable “Chicken.”

Chicken:  This guy sleeps all day and stays awake all night. He begins and ends any verbal exchange with deranged chicken-hen-rooster sounds.  A typical example:

Dude:  Hey Chicken, what’s up?

Chicken:  Bab-Bah-Bowk, nothin’ just readin’.

Dude: What you readin’?

Chicken:  A book called 1984 written in like 1940 about the future, but it’s now in the past, aww shit my head hurts.  Chicken out – cockadoodle-doo!

Dude: (laughing hysterically), Damn, that Chicken’s crazy! 

These barnyard conversations continue until 2-3 am every night.

So, finally, blessedly, you drift off to sleep, only to hear the dreaded click of the light switches coming on between 5:30 and 6:30 am.  Thus we launch another Groundhog Day of our non-punishment SHU Covid Quarantine. I must have missed the CDC guidelines on this protocol!

40 Days and 40 Nights in the SHU

 

So here we sit, still in the SHU (the “hole”).  Some may say, “40 days?  What’s the big deal? I’ve heard of guys doing years in solitary!” or “I did 4 months for one shot.” Therein lies the difference. If we had violated some rule, then this could be viewed as a logical consequence of bad behavior. All I did was get locked down for eight months, have a succession of covid-positive cellmates, go to work to clean for staff and inmates through it all, and then as my reward, get transferred hundreds of miles away to another prison, just as the virus eased up in the prison where I’ve lived for several years, and just as the virus is exploding at the new place.  Before transfer, they put you in the SHU as quarantine.  After arrival at the new place, they keep you in the SHU for quarantine, and now, here we sit, because there is no safe place to put us, they say.  After a month and a half in a tiny cell with another prisoner, any effort at a positive outlook is fading.

 

The food is still good, but a book to read, a breath of fresh air, a glimpse of the outdoors, or even a new face to see would be a Godsend.  Most guys in here sleep all day just to make it through, but I haven’t resorted to that yet. My cellie has it mastered. I assume he sleeps night and day both, but I’m not sure. After forcing myself to stay awake during what they say is daylight hours, in an effort to maintain some kind of normality, I’m out cold at night. 

 

As I’m writing this, someone is calling out to “Young Covid” the SHU rapper, who has been losing steam, too. He’s turned to writing love songs, at least that’s what he calls them. I’m dubious, because I heard him brainstorming words that rhyme with “bitch”. Maybe a pet name?

 

The rumor is that some guys in the compound are popping positive for covid, so we may be stuck here even longer.  I don’t even want to think about that, and then what if they do let us out of SHU and call another lockdown like in the other prison?  I’ve been through one widespread outbreak behind bars, and somehow made it through without getting sick. Coud I get so lucky again?  I thought I was brought here for my protection, but out of the frying pan into the fire.  At least I can say that the staff here appears to be straightforward and candid about our situation, unlike the mess I left behind.

 

Oh – a wink of light!  The Book Unicorn did show-up!  Says we may get some books to spell our boredom in a couple days!