A religious service or meeting of one denomination or another was held in jail every day. I guess it's not surprising that many inmates "Find God." Amazing what one does when afraid. Public expressions of contrition and regret for the crimes committed were common, especially if it helped your cause - and your cause could be anything from pleasing the priest or fitting in with a group of inmates to getting a pad of paper and a pen. Contrition could help your case too - especially if you were sentenced to participate in a drug or alcohol program. This new found piety often came in the form of regular service attendance, obnoxious Bible-thumping and a completely unrecognizable personality change. Sinners to saints. It happened all the time.
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
― Winston Churchill
My cellmate was a fine example of piety gone mad. Every morning she would walk around the day room for a good hour, Bible in hand, reciting scriptures and clinging to her rosary. She looked like a mad woman with her wild and crazy hair. "C" espoused the Bible at any chance she could to anyone who would listen. She and I agreed, for the sake of harmony in the home, to disagree and the subject of Jesus was off limits. She'd occasionally slip in questions like "Are you mad at God?" just to try and get a rise out of me. C told me that she worked for the Archdiocese of Las Vegas, where she lived as a secretary to a parish Priest. True? I don't know. What is true is that she went to every service available and convinced each denomination that she was a devout Christian, Jew, Muslim, whatever just to get the free stuff they handed out, mostly the food. Real food. Bloody ingenious!
"Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door."
― Emily Dickinson
C shared too. I also got to eat what she brought back to the cell and I now know the difference between Halal and Haram food preparation laid down by the laws of the Quran.
“The ends you serve that are selfish will take you no further than yourself but the ends you serve that are for all, in common, will take you into eternity.”
― Marcus Garvey
What ticked me off about the whole thing was that C hated everyone. Oh, she was nice to your face but as soon as you were out of earshot venom came out of her mouth about you. She was a mean, vindictive soul with little to no self-analytical skills. She certainly had none of the God-like qualities that she claimed to live by. C could chew your ear off with monologues which contained words like salvation, goodness, mercy and redemption. I don't know about all that, but she did have one Biblical quote down pat:
"Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst."
― John 6:35
Brittany and I were cellmates for 10 days. She was 18 and I was 54. We played a lot of cards and she kept me laughing with her antics and kept me abreast of the gossip in the unit. She named me Gangsta Grandma and urged me to write the rhyme. We performed it in the rec. yard together in front of the women in Bravo to a standing ovation I might add!You have to imagine the rap beat and Ice, Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice. ICE is
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the uninitiated.
GANGSTA GRANDMA
I'm a gangsta grandma and this is my rhyme
I 'bin in the 'po 'po house a long, long time
When I tried to bond out they weren't so nice
They said, "You got a hold and it comes from
ICE, ICE baby
Chorus: Gangsta Grandma, Gangsta Grandma (performed by Brit twirling her waist-length hair)
ICE, ICE baby
Gangsta Grandma, Gangsta Grandma
Depoo's playing cards
Jay's playing hoes
Cheryl walks around saying "Shut the French doors"
Tiffany trades all the chow that she can
Sara says to S.A. drain the cooler man, I need some
ICE, ICE baby
Gangsta Grandma, Gangsta Grandma
ICE, ICE baby
Gangsta Grandma, Gangsta Grandma
Jo-Jo sees the light and Tamala's detained
Hamilton and Swisher are at it once again
Baby Mama gets bigger and the girls are flappin'
Chip reads the cards and tells us what will happen
In paradise, ICE baby
Gangsta Grandma, Gangsta Grandma
ICE, ICE baby
Gangsta Grandma, Gangsta Grandma
United States,
United States,
Estados Unidos...
Awwww fuck it.
At the start of my incarceration I wasn't aware of the importance of a commissary account and what it could afford you. It played a huge difference in making day to day life more comfortable, especially for women. Decent shampoo and conditioner, brand name soap and body lotion, better deodorant, pommade for hair, a toothbrush longer than your pinkie and other necessities like a writing pad, pen and stamped envelopes. But by far the most important item in your weekly brown bag of goodies was the bag(s) of coffee. Coffee is a quick and cheap and legitimate buzz. If you didn't drink much before you went to jail, and I didn't, you sure did once you got there.
In jail, coffee is money as surely as dollar bills are. Like money, coffee got everyone excited. Keeping coffee once you had it was as hard as keeping your paycheck intact on the outside. Everyone wanted a piece of it. A 4oz. bag of instant coffee cost $3.35 Creamer was 50¢ for 10 and so was sugar. Roughly 15 cups in a bag, therefore a cup of coffee with 2 creamers and a sugar cost 42¢. I tried to get 2 bags a week and given that you always gave some away that usually lasted me a week.
It soon became apparent that I would have to do something to get more money/coffee or candy bars. I wasn't getting enough money put into my account from my friends on the outside to support my phone habits not to mention my store needs. I couldn't cut hair. That was always a good way to make coffee. Someone else had the market on making designer stationary - but watching her helped me come up with a way of my own. Martine showed me how to color artwork with baby powder deodorant and colored magazine pages. I could draw for people and color the drawings, but what? I had already signed up for "Art Behind Bars" and so was able to get card stock. After some trial and error I launched my series of postcards "Jail Bird Blues". The women loved them - and more importantly, paid for them! Each one cost 2 Snickers, or Milky Ways or a few healthy spoonfuls of coffee. Then I came out with colorful, handwoven, custom made wallets. They were great for keeping important papers or family photos. They were also pretty lucrative. Now, combine all that with the fact that I was getting Rolling Stone, Vogue and Glamor Magazine subscriptions sent to me which I rented out, plus I was in the only cell that had hot water. The women needed hot water to make coffee... Yup, after a while I was doing just fine in jail making lots of coffee.
The first question I was asked in jail was "What are you here for?" And I must have heard the same question a hundred times before my six months was up. I stopped answering it after the first day. Actually for perhaps the first time in my life I didn't feel the need to explain anything. There was no one there that I needed anything from. There was no one there that I felt the need to impress. I would be housed and fed and clothed regardless of who liked me or who I pissed off. It was very liberating. I chose to clam up. The only person I felt the need to communicate with was the nurse practitioner and that was only until I realized she wasn't listening to anything I had to say, so I stopped talking to her and just hid the pills that I didn't want to take which eventually got me in a world of trouble, but that's for a different blog.
Now this is not to say that I didn't talk at all, but I chose my confidantes carefully. One woman was a legal whiz and until I had figured out with my attorney what was going to happen to me I would ask questions of Dulcie. Caroline was friends with one of the guards and whenever I needed something from a guard I would go to her. Meghan and I both liked to do Sudoku. She would find all the hard puzzles, do them first in pencil, erase the answers and pass them along to me. Hey, it kept my brain from atrophying. Cheryl always had the best books which she shared generously with me and vice versa, plus if she had coffee and I didn't, I could always count on her for a spoonful.
Now Chip, she was my lifeline in jail. We played countless games of Scrabble and were together for most of each and every day. I talked about my personal life with Chip and she told me all about her life with Mitch in Belize. We were both artists. We laughed a lot together and we cried some too. Chip got out of jail a couple of months before me and I wrote to her when she'd left. When I got deported back to England we emailed each other on a regular basis. Chip, Mitch, Randy and I all lived together in Punta Gorda, Belize for three months just before I came to Mexico. It was interesting to see who she was outside of jail. She was much more flamboyant in her own environment. I enjoyed spending time with her. Chip died suddenly from a very short illness in Belize last December. I am glad I got to know her. I miss her a lot.
If you've lived in The Florida Keys you know that the water pressure is mediocre at best. Not so in jail. The water pressure rocks and sometimes the showers are too hot. That being said, the showers were contentious for many women. Something about a bunch of naked twenty-somethings washing away the day's grime turned them into nasty school kids. Mean and spiteful all in the name of fun. Some got louder and more brash and others became more timid and shy much like any situation that could leave one vulnerable. You had to have a pretty thick skin to be impervious to the little rotters' jeers and insults or be a good enough sport to just let it all roll off your back.
I was given a really good tip one night while taking a shower. Never shave your bikini area. Use Neet, Nair whatever. No bumps or very little, no itching, no redness. How did I go through most of my life not knowing this?
Everyone gains weight in jail. There's really no way around it. The three meals that we ate every day were loaded with carbohydrates and you would have to speed walk around the day room 24/7 to get rid of the calories. When we were taking a shower it became all too apparent whose commissary account was padded. The only food you could buy in jail was filled with unpronounceable ingredients along with red dye #4 and yellow dye #2. If you had lots of money and your jail sentence was long enough I believe you could die from the carcinogenic snack food that the jail sold you or from morbid obesity. It is no accident that prison snack food is healthier for you than jail food. They have to keep you longer, and preferably alive.
Once I figured out that there was a market for my artwork and payment was in the form of Snickers Bars, Milky Ways and Reece's Peanut Butter Cups my reasonably svelte physique gained 20lbs and to date I am still trying to lose the extra weight.
Key West Detention Center is the only jail that houses women in the Florida Keys. If you're arrested in the upper Keys or Marathon you will be kept in a holding cell until around midnight when the bus arrives to take you down to Key West making stops along the way to pick up more detainees. So when the bus gets into Key West there's sometimes a few women on board. If you happen to be awake when they get in at about 1:00am it's always interesting to see who's new. And, you can pretty much guess what they're in for just by looking at them.
All the really thin girls are in for using crack - almost. Sometimes an alcoholic is skin and bones, but you don't see that too often. Sometimes there's a healthy-looking crack user but not too often. They mostly always have long, stringy bleached hair. The crack addicts are in for possession or solicitation. The length of their stay in jail is dependent on how old they are, or how old they look. The older they are, the longer they've been in the game, the more times they've been arrested, the longer the sentence. Could be three months, six months or up to a year. Rarely do they go away to prison. Usually that's only for drug dealers.
The chronic alcoholics are plump, round but rarely obese. Most look tired and weathered. They often have a few bruises somewhere on their bodies. Their faces are red and their noses are bulbous. Alcoholics can be in jail for any number of reasons. In Key West the charge is often an open container charge. Now let me tell you that's a racket. I mean come on! Party Town Central and the boys in blue go around town and the beaches rounding up locals and tourists for drinking out of an open bottle or can and send them to jail. I suppose it makes revenue for the City. Everyone arrested for an open container pays a fine. The tourists bail out the next morning and the locals can stay anywhere from a week to a month. In Key West the open containers and the trespassers make up about 10 percent of the female inmate population.
The woman that comes in looking like the girl next door or your boss i.e. completely normal is the tourist who partied too much the night before, had a fight with her boyfriend in public and found herself in a blue uniform the next morning. She has a blotchy face from hours of crying and she looks scared to death. More often than not these poor things are bailed out before they make up their beds and you never even know their names.
Chip and I played Scrabble every day at least twice a day for the four months or so that we were in jail together. She was the perfect Scrabble partner for me; a wonderful loser - all smiles, never pouted, genuinely happy for me when I got a seven letter word, rarely challenged anything I put on the board. She hardly ever won. She was content to let me bask in the glow of Scrabble Queen glory. You get the idea? Perfect! I am the total opposite. It's only after decades of practice that I can successfully mask the seething anger I feel toward anyone who beats me. It's sort of OK if the win is genuinely hard won. If someone has put all their sweat, blood and brain power into pulling off a last minute victory, well, then Bravo! But if the person is just naturally smarter, has a larger vocabulary or worse, can magically twist unrelated letters to pull out amazing feats of lexicology, I revert to a toddler having a temper tantrum. On the outside I smile and murmur the expected niceties and inside there is a civil war going on. This, I think shows a major, but basic flaw in my personality. There, now you know.
One odd thing about the guards and the dictionaries: They kept the dictionaries behind the officer's desk. You had to trade in your ID badge to borrow one. I don't know why, you'd think they were made of gold leaf when in fact there was not one complete dictionary just many parts of several books. If you complained that your book only went from A-L and asked if you could please get the rest, they just about had a conniption fit. They went all huffy and gave you a dirty look as if you'd ripped the book in half yourself. And it wasn't just one or two of them. They were all like that.
At night a competitive volley ball game went on in the rec. yard. All those delightfully sweaty twenty-somethings running around in the dark, chasing a ball and laughing their heads off. High-fiving every play, even the bad ones and genuinely having a good time while us old farts sat on the side lines cheering them on. Jail's not all bad.
How does it go? Those who eat together stick together. Or is it those who pray together? Anyway, the three families that hung out in Key West Jail on a regularly rotating basis certainly shared a lot of meals and a lot of church time.
Family number one consisted of Mum and daughter and grandchild if you count the fact that daughter was pregnant. They were the "Gruesome Twosome" that I did everything in my power to steer clear of. They went everywhere together and you could hear them coming a mile away screaming obscenities and laughing raucously . You didn't dare look sideways at Mum for fear of getting your throat slit, well - a slight exaggeration, but not by much. She was known as "Box Cutter Lonnie". 'Nuf said.
Family number two was Auntie, her three daughters and her niece. They were much less frightening but equally disturbing in as much as there were so many of them. The mind boggles. I don't even think their crimes were related which means they were all breaking the law at roughly the same time committing completely unrelated crimes. The niece and I used to cross paths once in a while. She was eighteen and pretty confused as most eighteen year-olds are. She was trying to be a little toughy but the veil was flimsy. You could see that if someone would just step up and steer her in the right direction (clearly not her Auntie), she would be OK. If I'd had half my family in jail with me, I don't think I would have had much to whine about at all. But she sure did. Waaah, waaah, waaah. It was constant.
Family number three was perhaps the strangest. Two sisters who traded off with each other for a bed in jail or so it seemed. I saw both of them twice in my stay there. They were likeable, well read and intelligent. When I first arrived in jail one sister was already there. A few days later sister number two arrived and a short while after that the first sister was released. This happened twice. Whether or not it was planned, I don't know. But they only spent a month inside each time and their paths crossed for only a day or two. They looked alike so it took a minute to figure out which one you were talking to. I never did ask either of them what she was there for. It was all a little bit spooky. Key West is a very expensive place to live. Maybe they shared a one-room apartment and part of the deal was that they got to have it to themselves? OooEeeOoo!
Food in jail is a big deal, no a HUGE deal. For the first few day you can't eat anything because you are so freaked out that you are actually incarcerated, plus the food truly is disgusting. Once you are semi-accustomed to your new surroundings you can't get enough of it. Every waking moment is governed by what you will be consuming for your next meal. You have to be really sick to skip a meal.
Breakfast was always my favorite. The oatmeal in Key West Jail is good. It reminded me of the thick stodgy stuff I grew up on in England. On Tuesday mornings I would trade my slice of baloney, which for some unknown reason lots of women seemed to like, for a second helping of oatmeal, which very few of them liked. Thursdays were the best. We'd have oatmeal and cinnamon coffee cake. I still can't recreate that oatmeal at home and I have tried many times.
Nothing about suppers was appealing. Nothing. It was a strange phenomenon to witness though - the bartering of food. Women would walk up and down the aisles between the tables trading in loud whispers their "mystery meat" for someone's fruit cup. No one liked the food and who could blame them. The meat wasn't real or if it was, it was unrecognizable. Any salad was simply a limp piece of iceberg lettuce. There was never a fresh vegetable to be seen and mashed potatoes could have passed for wallpaper paste. But the funny thing was, if the guard yelled out "Who wants an extra tray?", you would have thought you were amongst the bulls at Pamplona - get out of the way or suffer the consequences.
|
RSS Feed