Marty was in our custody for almost two years before his case was finally decided. During that time he went from normal and chatty to solemn and quiet, from sane and rational to bizarre and unstable, from tearful to jovial and back around again. This was not all that unusual for an inmate with a mental health condition. I had seen it before; the emotional roller coaster of mentally ill people can be astonishing and Marty’s array of daily mood swings and activities were not really out of the norm. What was uncommon, in my opinion, was that those emotions, mood swings and bouts of insanity seemed to coincide with visits from his psychiatrist.
We had to house Marty in with the sex offenders and child molesters, although whenever he began hearing the voices he was relocated into the infirmary until the moment passed. It was a high profile case and the killing of his son put him in danger from other inmates, so it was deemed he would be safest living with the other Protective Custody inmates. He got along okay for the most part during his stay with us. He not only gained about eighty pounds but he also watched football and baseball on the TV with the other guys, went out to the recreation yard regularly, joked with the officers, enjoyed visits from friends and clergy and learned how to play gin rummy and chess with his cellmates.
He also learned how to gauge the dates his psychiatrist would be coming to visit. About two days before each impending court ordered visit, Marty would begin to report the voices were threatening him again. He would stop talking or involving himself with others, would sit on his bunk and stare at the wall and take on the appearance of someone deep in a catatonic trance.
The psychiatrist who came to deal with Marty must have been a truly amazing doctor. Actually there were several doctors and psychologists who were involved in the case and for the most part, the ones who visited Marty in jail were true miracle workers. Not two hours after they visited and Marty was returned, silent and staring, to his cell, his voices would vanish and he would be back watching Roadrunner cartoons with his cellmates. I was amazed. Never had I seen such medical miracles!
I am not a doctor. I am not even a licensed psychologist, but I am capable of watching a person go from mental illness to mental normalcy in a period of an hour or so and finding it a bit unusual. I had a lot of opportunity to talk with Marty and he was almost always quiet, polite and willing to chat but he virtually never said one word about his parents or son. He did not seem capable of harming them, or of harming anyone for that matter. On the other hand, he did not attempt to hide his crime or ever deny his involvement, and there was no good motive for him to have committed such a travesty. It was a puzzle that was never solved to my satisfaction. Was he lead by voices to slaughter his parents and son? This is rather uncommon for schizophrenics; they rarely harm anyone except themselves, but still…
Marty did not go to prison, he was sent to the state hospital for an indeterminate period of time. Whatever demons were plaguing him 14 years ago have evidently left for greener pastures because, to my knowledge, he has not been back in the jail system and I am fairly sure he has been released from the state hospital. I have never forgotten him, however, nor have I forgotten the bloody photos of his four-year-old son and the mystery that surrounded it all.
I mentioned Marty in this memoir only because it is true that the mind is a strange thing. Most people would say a man would have to be insane to kill his family that way, but the Marty I knew for almost two years in jail was as normal as anyone else behind those bars, except when the psychiatrist was due. So, who can say? Regardless of what caused him to “snap” on that awful day, the result is that he is now living the rest of his life without his parents or the love of his son. I suppose that is punishment enough for any crime, premeditated or driven by a demon. And we will never really know for sure.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
"Marty"
For the average person it is difficult to know for sure if another person is truly mentally ill or, perhaps, just acting the part. Even professionals with walls full of PhD certificates can be fooled, and most of them will admit that. It is not an exact science, and there are so many levels of mental illness and personality disorders that overlap one another it becomes mind-boggling in and of itself.
Mental health professionals rely on self-reporting from their patients. There is no infallible blood test or x-ray that can tell if a person has schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or is antisocial. The only tests which psychologists and psychiatrists have all relied on are their patients answering of questions which are designed to provide insight into their mental condition.
In most cases this works well. The majority of people who are suffering from a mental or emotional disorder truly want to be helped and they do their best to interact with their doctor or counselor as candidly as they can. In these cases the doctor or counselor can generally make a pretty good diagnosis and is then able to treat the person with medications or counseling session or whatever is deemed necessary. It is the best system we have to date and it has helped countless thousands of people lead much better lives.
It does not, however, always work well within the criminal justice system. There are those in our society who commit crimes of every sort and then try to escape punishment for that crime by saying they are mentally ill and therefore not responsible for their actions. It comes down to whether or not the person knows, or knew, right from wrong. My opinion on that subject, though not professional, shall be reserved for the next chapter.
Marty came into the jail fresh from the emergency room at Yavapai Regional Medical Center. He had a glazed look on his face and his head was swathed with bandaging that seemed to cover some sort of protruding lump. It was not apparent if his zombie-like state was from medication or his current mental condition but he did attract a lot of attention from the jail staff. This, of course, was also due to the fact that he had just killed both his parents and his four-year-old son with a ball-peen hammer while his wife was out of town. Rumor had it that after slaughtering his immediate family, he then turned the hammer on himself and whacked himself in the head hard enough to necessitate a trip to the ER before taking him to jail. I might add, it was not hard enough to end his life, as it had his parents and son.
Marty was the first (and to my knowledge the only) inmate from which I ever took footprints as well as fingerprints. During and after the attack he had walked through the blood barefoot and left footprints at the scene so it was necessary to print his feet in ink. I’m not sure how necessary this was because Marty never denied committing the murders. His defense was insanity.
Before the killings he had driven himself to the ER that morning or afternoon, I do not recall which, and reported to the hospital staff he was hearing voices that were telling him to do terrible things, some of these were to kill his family. This was in order to “save” them from something even more horrendous, but I was never clear on what that might have been. The story began that the family contacted the local mental health facility and after a screening, Marty was given an antidepressant and then released. At that point he proceeded to drive home and kill his family, whose members were either demons themselves, or were going to be attacked by demons. This was a lot of years ago and I have forgotten some of the minute facts. The main point, which I remember well, were the photos I saw of his four-year-old son lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor...
Mental health professionals rely on self-reporting from their patients. There is no infallible blood test or x-ray that can tell if a person has schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or is antisocial. The only tests which psychologists and psychiatrists have all relied on are their patients answering of questions which are designed to provide insight into their mental condition.
In most cases this works well. The majority of people who are suffering from a mental or emotional disorder truly want to be helped and they do their best to interact with their doctor or counselor as candidly as they can. In these cases the doctor or counselor can generally make a pretty good diagnosis and is then able to treat the person with medications or counseling session or whatever is deemed necessary. It is the best system we have to date and it has helped countless thousands of people lead much better lives.
It does not, however, always work well within the criminal justice system. There are those in our society who commit crimes of every sort and then try to escape punishment for that crime by saying they are mentally ill and therefore not responsible for their actions. It comes down to whether or not the person knows, or knew, right from wrong. My opinion on that subject, though not professional, shall be reserved for the next chapter.
Marty came into the jail fresh from the emergency room at Yavapai Regional Medical Center. He had a glazed look on his face and his head was swathed with bandaging that seemed to cover some sort of protruding lump. It was not apparent if his zombie-like state was from medication or his current mental condition but he did attract a lot of attention from the jail staff. This, of course, was also due to the fact that he had just killed both his parents and his four-year-old son with a ball-peen hammer while his wife was out of town. Rumor had it that after slaughtering his immediate family, he then turned the hammer on himself and whacked himself in the head hard enough to necessitate a trip to the ER before taking him to jail. I might add, it was not hard enough to end his life, as it had his parents and son.
Marty was the first (and to my knowledge the only) inmate from which I ever took footprints as well as fingerprints. During and after the attack he had walked through the blood barefoot and left footprints at the scene so it was necessary to print his feet in ink. I’m not sure how necessary this was because Marty never denied committing the murders. His defense was insanity.
Before the killings he had driven himself to the ER that morning or afternoon, I do not recall which, and reported to the hospital staff he was hearing voices that were telling him to do terrible things, some of these were to kill his family. This was in order to “save” them from something even more horrendous, but I was never clear on what that might have been. The story began that the family contacted the local mental health facility and after a screening, Marty was given an antidepressant and then released. At that point he proceeded to drive home and kill his family, whose members were either demons themselves, or were going to be attacked by demons. This was a lot of years ago and I have forgotten some of the minute facts. The main point, which I remember well, were the photos I saw of his four-year-old son lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor...
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Carl was a Vietnam Vet who had come home from the war living in another universe. He was in and out of Yavapai County jail a few times in my first years working there, typically for being a public nuisance. I don’t believe he ever harmed anyone but he was big, scruffy and dirty-looking and wandered around town in his battered, filthy Army fatigues while being very loud and opinionated.
Carl’s diagnosis was Paranoid Schizophrenia, which does not mean (contrary to what many believe) he had a split or dual personality. It means, in layman’s terms, he had a split with reality, and Carl’s split was a real doozey! It was a chasm, actually, something akin to the Grand Canyon.
It is no wonder to me that Schizophrenics become paranoid. They exist in a world we do not hear or see but one that is all too real to them. If I had to live my days with several unknown (and sometimes well-known) people shouting at me inside my head, or listen to a barrage of demons giving me orders to cut crosses on myself with a tuna can lid, I would be paranoid, too.
They also know people are plotting against them. These people might be Iraqi hit men, or KGB spies, or even our own CIA agents who are trying to force the terrified Schizophrenic to commit a drug deal for them. They know this because they hear the voices talking as plain as day. Voices we can’t hear but voices they can’t get rid of, twenty-four-seven three-sixty-five. They have very distinct memories about aliens and the well-known and dreaded rectal probe, not to mention sexual encounters with the infamous Bat Boy. It has to be a very scary thing. A good percentage of Schizophrenics wind up committing suicide and I’m not sure I blame them.
Some of the voices that entertain them are of a kinder, gentler nature, however. I remember one inmate who was scheduled to see the facility psychiatrist one afternoon but refused to attend the appointment because “the voices are really being funny today.” He was enjoying their company and did not want anything to interrupt the group.
Often the Schizophrenic has a really fascinating life and he will tell you all about it. I’ve known some inmates who (in their minds) were multimillion dollar record producers or financial investors to the President. I even met and got to know the man who invented Plutonium. Really! He told me so. I’ve met Harrison Ford’s brother (Bruce), Howard Hughes’ psychiatrist, and the man who embalmed Elvis. (Yes, alas, it appears Elvis truly is dead). I also met a twenty-year-old girl who kept digging up her dead cat and bringing it to bed with her because, “it got cold at night”. Her poor parents did not know what to do about this and so eventually charged her with criminal littering and had her put in jail where they knew she would get help for her mental health issues one way or another.
It is not all that unusual, actually. Families are often at wit’s end when dealing with schizophrenic children or siblings. It is a frightening disease, which often takes on some violent and weird overtones. If help cannot be gotten from the world outside families will sometimes resort to having the family member arrested, hoping the taxpayers can lend support. We usually do, one way or another, but schizophrenia is a lifelong affliction that is treatable but not curable, and the likelihood of the jail system being there to keep that person safe and off the streets indefinitely is pretty slim.
Carl fell midway between the KGB agents and discovering Plutonium. He was never jovial but he did have times when he seemed to be able to hold a semi-realistic conversation about the voices coming from the TV, (which actually belonged to Walter Cronkite), or what he had had for lunch (sometimes laced with arsenic, but Carl was immune to that poison). He also had a lot of religious dementia. This holds true with a majority of schizophrenics. They almost all have had conversations with God or angels or both and in many cases they actually are God or Jesus or one of the prophets; incognito, of course.
In Carl’s case, when he was on the streets and not in jail, he had an open line to the Almighty, Himself. They discussed a multitude of problems here on earth and Carl was the “One” that God had chosen to help him solve all the tribulations of Mankind. The problem was when Carl was in jail his signal to God was interrupted and they lost contact. There was just too much metal and too many telephonic devices. This was when Carl became hardest to handle.
My father used to tell me, “You cannot have a battle of wits with an unarmed person”, which meant that wasting words on someone who was unable to comprehend them was self-defeating. The officers all tried to get Carl to abide by jail rules, calm down, stop threatening and throwing his meal trays around the room, but when Carl was not connected to God he got pretty irate. He even became dangerous to other inmates. No amount of reasoning or cajoling ever helped, but there was one very clever nurse who invented the cure.
Katie was her name. She had worked in the jail for a while before I got there so she knew the place fairly well. To say Katie was a warm, fuzzy kind of nurse would have been a huge fib. She was caustic, snide, impatient and sometimes close to mean, but she had a way of mind-melding with the mentally ill. I never really understood how, but she really seemed to know what to say to our wacko population at just the right time. (Remember, I told you earlier on that wacko is a medical term.)
At one point during Carl’s first or second visit, Katie grew weary of dealing with his ranting and decided to try and re-establish Carl’s connection to God. There was a large oval chip in the cinder block wall at the side of Carl’s cell that had been stained from someone at an earlier time with red punch. Katie pointed it out to Carl, in whispers of course, and told him that was the Hotline to God, put in only for Carl’s use, and that if Carl told anyone about it, the line would be removed.
“Put your elbow on the red spot,” Katie told him. Carl did that. “Now listen to your thumb,” Carl did that, too, by pressing his thumb into his ear. “Do you hear Him?” Katie asked with a hopeful expression.
I remember the big grin that spread across Carl’s weathered face. His eyes actually took on a glow, “Yeah! I do! I hear Him!” he exclaimed with the joy of a child.
For the next few weeks, and on every visit thereafter, Carl spent most of his days with his elbow pressed up to the hole in the wall and his thumb in his ear. His conversations with God were solemn and lengthy and when they weren’t conversing, Carl spent his time writing down God’s instructions in a commissary notebook. This was, no doubt, for use when he was released and could get back to saving Mankind.
Carl’s visits to the jail stopped rather suddenly and since the last time he was there I saw him around town, now and then, still wearing his Army fatigues and still scaring people with his warnings and prophecies. Evidently the local police decided it wasn’t worth dragging him into jail constantly and began ignoring his antics. Recently, though, he seems to have disappeared completely. Like many other inmates I worked with, I don’t know what happened to Carl. I hope he is all right but there’s no telling. He should be, as long as he keeps his Hotline to God open.
Carl’s diagnosis was Paranoid Schizophrenia, which does not mean (contrary to what many believe) he had a split or dual personality. It means, in layman’s terms, he had a split with reality, and Carl’s split was a real doozey! It was a chasm, actually, something akin to the Grand Canyon.
It is no wonder to me that Schizophrenics become paranoid. They exist in a world we do not hear or see but one that is all too real to them. If I had to live my days with several unknown (and sometimes well-known) people shouting at me inside my head, or listen to a barrage of demons giving me orders to cut crosses on myself with a tuna can lid, I would be paranoid, too.
They also know people are plotting against them. These people might be Iraqi hit men, or KGB spies, or even our own CIA agents who are trying to force the terrified Schizophrenic to commit a drug deal for them. They know this because they hear the voices talking as plain as day. Voices we can’t hear but voices they can’t get rid of, twenty-four-seven three-sixty-five. They have very distinct memories about aliens and the well-known and dreaded rectal probe, not to mention sexual encounters with the infamous Bat Boy. It has to be a very scary thing. A good percentage of Schizophrenics wind up committing suicide and I’m not sure I blame them.
Some of the voices that entertain them are of a kinder, gentler nature, however. I remember one inmate who was scheduled to see the facility psychiatrist one afternoon but refused to attend the appointment because “the voices are really being funny today.” He was enjoying their company and did not want anything to interrupt the group.
Often the Schizophrenic has a really fascinating life and he will tell you all about it. I’ve known some inmates who (in their minds) were multimillion dollar record producers or financial investors to the President. I even met and got to know the man who invented Plutonium. Really! He told me so. I’ve met Harrison Ford’s brother (Bruce), Howard Hughes’ psychiatrist, and the man who embalmed Elvis. (Yes, alas, it appears Elvis truly is dead). I also met a twenty-year-old girl who kept digging up her dead cat and bringing it to bed with her because, “it got cold at night”. Her poor parents did not know what to do about this and so eventually charged her with criminal littering and had her put in jail where they knew she would get help for her mental health issues one way or another.
It is not all that unusual, actually. Families are often at wit’s end when dealing with schizophrenic children or siblings. It is a frightening disease, which often takes on some violent and weird overtones. If help cannot be gotten from the world outside families will sometimes resort to having the family member arrested, hoping the taxpayers can lend support. We usually do, one way or another, but schizophrenia is a lifelong affliction that is treatable but not curable, and the likelihood of the jail system being there to keep that person safe and off the streets indefinitely is pretty slim.
Carl fell midway between the KGB agents and discovering Plutonium. He was never jovial but he did have times when he seemed to be able to hold a semi-realistic conversation about the voices coming from the TV, (which actually belonged to Walter Cronkite), or what he had had for lunch (sometimes laced with arsenic, but Carl was immune to that poison). He also had a lot of religious dementia. This holds true with a majority of schizophrenics. They almost all have had conversations with God or angels or both and in many cases they actually are God or Jesus or one of the prophets; incognito, of course.
In Carl’s case, when he was on the streets and not in jail, he had an open line to the Almighty, Himself. They discussed a multitude of problems here on earth and Carl was the “One” that God had chosen to help him solve all the tribulations of Mankind. The problem was when Carl was in jail his signal to God was interrupted and they lost contact. There was just too much metal and too many telephonic devices. This was when Carl became hardest to handle.
My father used to tell me, “You cannot have a battle of wits with an unarmed person”, which meant that wasting words on someone who was unable to comprehend them was self-defeating. The officers all tried to get Carl to abide by jail rules, calm down, stop threatening and throwing his meal trays around the room, but when Carl was not connected to God he got pretty irate. He even became dangerous to other inmates. No amount of reasoning or cajoling ever helped, but there was one very clever nurse who invented the cure.
Katie was her name. She had worked in the jail for a while before I got there so she knew the place fairly well. To say Katie was a warm, fuzzy kind of nurse would have been a huge fib. She was caustic, snide, impatient and sometimes close to mean, but she had a way of mind-melding with the mentally ill. I never really understood how, but she really seemed to know what to say to our wacko population at just the right time. (Remember, I told you earlier on that wacko is a medical term.)
At one point during Carl’s first or second visit, Katie grew weary of dealing with his ranting and decided to try and re-establish Carl’s connection to God. There was a large oval chip in the cinder block wall at the side of Carl’s cell that had been stained from someone at an earlier time with red punch. Katie pointed it out to Carl, in whispers of course, and told him that was the Hotline to God, put in only for Carl’s use, and that if Carl told anyone about it, the line would be removed.
“Put your elbow on the red spot,” Katie told him. Carl did that. “Now listen to your thumb,” Carl did that, too, by pressing his thumb into his ear. “Do you hear Him?” Katie asked with a hopeful expression.
I remember the big grin that spread across Carl’s weathered face. His eyes actually took on a glow, “Yeah! I do! I hear Him!” he exclaimed with the joy of a child.
For the next few weeks, and on every visit thereafter, Carl spent most of his days with his elbow pressed up to the hole in the wall and his thumb in his ear. His conversations with God were solemn and lengthy and when they weren’t conversing, Carl spent his time writing down God’s instructions in a commissary notebook. This was, no doubt, for use when he was released and could get back to saving Mankind.
Carl’s visits to the jail stopped rather suddenly and since the last time he was there I saw him around town, now and then, still wearing his Army fatigues and still scaring people with his warnings and prophecies. Evidently the local police decided it wasn’t worth dragging him into jail constantly and began ignoring his antics. Recently, though, he seems to have disappeared completely. Like many other inmates I worked with, I don’t know what happened to Carl. I hope he is all right but there’s no telling. He should be, as long as he keeps his Hotline to God open.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
There is nothing amusing about mental illness. It typically strikes without warning, often lasts a lifetime, and can leave devastation in its wake. The jails and prisons in this country are gradually becoming mental health facilities, and over the past ten years it has not even been gradual. It is now more like a great Mental Health tsunami that is washing over the nation, taking with it all the pride, dignity and future of every soul caught in its churning flood. Jails and prisons, especially jails, are not prepared to take on this burden of mentally ill inmates. Jails are meant to house inmates for short periods of time, hence the term Detention. Jails detain and house people who are being held over for trials or for disposition of their cases, anywhere from twenty-four hours to, well, however long it takes. If a person has broken the law, he or she will remain in jail until they can bond out; are released by the courts; or have a disposition imposed upon them. Typically it is a few weeks or months and because of that the jail systems rarely have enough funding or staffing to provide the long-term care necessary for the mentally ill.
Sometimes mental illness is brought on by drug or alcohol abuse. This can be temporary, such as a person “coming down” from alcohol or any sort of drug; or permanent from damage caused by their substance abuse over very long periods of time. You see a lot of both within the jail system and it is never pleasant.
The first person I ever saw with the DT’s (delirium tremens) was a hardcore alcoholic who had been brought into jail for shoplifting. I had only been there a week or two and was fascinated by the man, who was being housed in the jail infirmary. As the alcohol wore off, he began to display a series of very distressing actions. His entire countenance changed and his face took on an expression of horror. He dug at the edges of the window in the cell door until his fingers were raw. He stood on his bunk, holding himself in terror as he watched something that I could not see, crawling about on the floor, crying for help from anyone who would listen.
Finally my nerves began to wear as thin as his were and I tried to talk to him, thinking I might be able to do what the nurses could not, which was to help the poor guy settle down. I tried to assure him there were no creatures in his cell and that no one was going to harm him. His response was to quote me passages from Revelations mixed with other assorted Bible verses and passages, which did not seem to have much to do with the demons nipping at his toes.
I finally asked him if he wanted me to get the chaplain for him. That was when he announced he had already talked to God and God told him if his eye offended him he should pluck it out. I was about to try to explain to him that this was not a literal order from God and that he would feel a lot better about it after getting some sleep, but he was not listening. In the time it took for me to say about six words the terrified inmate reached up with his thumb and plucked out his eyeball!
I was not prepared for that. Forty-two years of life had not prepared me to see someone pluck out his eyeball when standing eighteen inches in front of me. There was a window in the door between us but even if there had not been, I would not have had a clue as to what I should do. I believe I came close to passing out. I know I stumbled backwards into the wall I and must have made a sound of some sort because the nurse on duty leaped up from her desk and, thankfully, took over.
I do not remember that inmate’s name but I do remember he was my first introduction to the world of mental illness. During the following years I worked with hundreds of mentally ill inmates, some who acted out even worse than the man who plucked out his eye during a bout of DT’s, and some who were just mildly disturbed. Some made me cringe, some made me cry, some made me laugh. All were memorable.
Sometimes mental illness is brought on by drug or alcohol abuse. This can be temporary, such as a person “coming down” from alcohol or any sort of drug; or permanent from damage caused by their substance abuse over very long periods of time. You see a lot of both within the jail system and it is never pleasant.
The first person I ever saw with the DT’s (delirium tremens) was a hardcore alcoholic who had been brought into jail for shoplifting. I had only been there a week or two and was fascinated by the man, who was being housed in the jail infirmary. As the alcohol wore off, he began to display a series of very distressing actions. His entire countenance changed and his face took on an expression of horror. He dug at the edges of the window in the cell door until his fingers were raw. He stood on his bunk, holding himself in terror as he watched something that I could not see, crawling about on the floor, crying for help from anyone who would listen.
Finally my nerves began to wear as thin as his were and I tried to talk to him, thinking I might be able to do what the nurses could not, which was to help the poor guy settle down. I tried to assure him there were no creatures in his cell and that no one was going to harm him. His response was to quote me passages from Revelations mixed with other assorted Bible verses and passages, which did not seem to have much to do with the demons nipping at his toes.
I finally asked him if he wanted me to get the chaplain for him. That was when he announced he had already talked to God and God told him if his eye offended him he should pluck it out. I was about to try to explain to him that this was not a literal order from God and that he would feel a lot better about it after getting some sleep, but he was not listening. In the time it took for me to say about six words the terrified inmate reached up with his thumb and plucked out his eyeball!
I was not prepared for that. Forty-two years of life had not prepared me to see someone pluck out his eyeball when standing eighteen inches in front of me. There was a window in the door between us but even if there had not been, I would not have had a clue as to what I should do. I believe I came close to passing out. I know I stumbled backwards into the wall I and must have made a sound of some sort because the nurse on duty leaped up from her desk and, thankfully, took over.
I do not remember that inmate’s name but I do remember he was my first introduction to the world of mental illness. During the following years I worked with hundreds of mentally ill inmates, some who acted out even worse than the man who plucked out his eye during a bout of DT’s, and some who were just mildly disturbed. Some made me cringe, some made me cry, some made me laugh. All were memorable.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Misty uncovered....
She went with Misty back into the dress-out room which used to be a small bathroom with a shower and sink and privacy for the changing of street attire into the orange jail uniform. It typically took about five minutes to do a proper and complete dress-out but it was only about sixty seconds before Lena came charging out of the door with a face as red as a stop light.
“Hey!” she exclaimed, her expression a mixture of surprise and annoyance, “That’s not a woman, you jerks! I suppose you think this is real funny, right?”
The idea that someone was playing a practical joke on Lena was really not that hard to believe, it was not at all unusual for officers to torment one another with embarrassing tricks and antics. But to my knowledge, nor that of the Sergeant or other officer on staff, no such practical joke was in process.
“Are you serious?” Sarge asked.
Lena was huffing with annoyance, “That’s a gawdam guy!” she spouted. “And if you think I’m gonna strip search him, you better think again! Real hard!”
Several looks were exchanged and then Rudy, the other male officer, walked over to the change-out room and peered in. His shoulders began to shake, not with fear or annoyance but with the hysterical laughter he was trying to hide. He was unable to contain himself very well though, and when he looked back around at Sarge his eyes were tearing with hilarity.
“She’s right, Sarge, it’s a guy.” He said between gulps of air. “You want me to finish dressing him out?”
Sarge was grinning, not at Misty’s disclosure, but at the furious annoyance on Lena’s face. “I guess you better,” he replied in his typically Former-Marine tone of voice. “Can’t have our little Lena writing us up for harassment.”
The next five minutes was just a back and forth continuum of snide remarks between Sarge and Lena. I was standing by, wondering how poor Misty was faring through it all and also wondering why he did not say something when he was taken back into the bathroom to dress out. Later, after I had gotten to know him, I understood why, but on that summer evening I had not yet come to figure out the workings of the transvestite’s mind.
Rudy immerged in a few minutes with Misty in front of him, now wearing the orange jail uniform and looking somewhat abashed but not really upset. Rudy tossed something to Lena, which she caught in both hands. It was a rather large roll of money.
“Found this on him,” Rudy said, “Better put it on his books.”
“How’d they miss that on the pat down?” Sarge inquired.
Meanwhile, Lena was looking at the roll of bills with a wrinkled nose, “Geeeze, it’s wet...” she murmured, and then her green eyes shot open like ping-pong balls and with a shriek and an audible gag, she flung the money across the booking area and began doing the yucky-bug dance and rubbing her hands against her thighs like she wanted to peel the skin off.
“Ahhh, crap, Rudy! Ah, dammit!” she shouted fiercely. “That’s not funny, you chicken-lips!”
Rudy, Sarge, and even I were laughing in unison by then. Sarge took several moments to catch his breath and then finally asked Rudy where he found the roll of cash. Rudy explained that Misty had his genitals secured back out of sight with a wire bread tie and that the cash had been fastened there along with the package. Further examination proved there was nothing more hidden within.
Once the hilarity ebbed, I began to wonder how on earth Misty, whose real name was Mitchell, ever managed to secure himself so well that he could have worn those spandex pants without a hint of his gender being evident, even through a surface pat-down. Wire bread ties must be amazing things! The discomfort it certainly caused him made me shudder.
Misty, all the while, was taking everything pretty much in stride. I got the impression this was not the first time he had experienced such a situation and if he was embarrassed by it he did not let on. It was also not his first time in jail. He seemed accepting of the whole ordeal.
Typical of the gay community, Misty had one of the keenest senses of humor I have ever known. He had practically invented the word “campy”. He was housed with the sex offenders and child molesters, not because he had even one single trait that earned him that status, but because he was one of those “lost inmates” who could not be placed in the general population for his own safety. That dormitory area was at the far end of the long, echoing hallway, and so every time I went in back to talk with an inmate in one of the other dorms, Misty would pick up on my voice and shout from the back in his very best falsetto, “Hey, Girlfriend!”
You always knew when Misty was being moved, too. As he would pass along by the other dorms, escorted by officers to wherever he was supposed to be, there resounded a flood of hoots, wolf whistles and catcalls that was almost deafening. And not being one to let the others down, Misty would offer up his best hip-wiggle as he passed.
He was in our jail for several months, during which time we grew to be pretty good friends. He invited me to “do lunch” with him some day after he was out and I told him I would love to. I learned that he shaved his entire body every day, which, considering the cheap, plastic razors the jail issues to it’s inmates, would have been enough to dissuade most people from his particular lifestyle. He used red punch to color his fingernails, lips and cheeks, and the women’s buttery pencil shaving concoction for mascara. He never looked quite as feminine as the evening we booked him in but he always turned heads as he walked by, and he had mastered the same walk that made Marilyn Monroe a superstar.
He was also a twenty-three-year-old kid, in my eyes, and well educated at that. During his time in the Yavapai County jail we spent quite a few hours talking about life and all its intricacies. He eventually dropped the falsetto and gay camp and began to expose himself in emotional ways to me.
He was from the Midwest, had left home a couple of years before and was prostituting himself to earn the money for a sex change. He told me his family, good Bible-Belt farm stock, had no idea where he was nor that he was transsexual. “It would kill them,” he told me sadly. I asked him if he didn’t think it was already killing them, not knowing what had become of their son, and he replied that if I knew his family I would understand. They would rather think him dead than know he was transsexual.
It eventually occurred to me that the urge for any human being to want to change his or her sex must be incredible. It was far more than an impulse or a sexual fantasy. To endure the verbal slings and arrows and actual physical discomfort they subjected themselves to, it had to be an incredible psychological obsession or need. Why would anyone choose to be Gay or Lesbian or Transsexual or even a Cross-Dresser? It seems to be the loneliest and most emotionally painful lifestyle one could ever imagine. The desire, the need for that life must be terribly intense, certainly not a life anyone would want to choose capriciously.
Misty could never explain it to me, at least not so that I understood. It was just who he was. He explained he had never felt like “Mitchell”. Ever. His early years had been a series of bad jokes, fights, verbal attacks and lectures from his parents, and his delight in playing with Barbie Dolls. He admitted to me that wanting to change one’s sex, or living a Gay lifestyle, was not natural and probably could be considered sinful if one looked at life that way. He also told me he simply could not live as “Mitchell” anymore - that the thoughts he had of suicide were far scarier than the process he was trying to undertake to become Misty.
I remember thinking that Misty was more like a caricature of women than how real women act or speak. So often that seems to be the case with Gay men - their assumed idiosyncrasies are far more feminine than most of us females truly are. It’s as if they see the ideal woman as a combination of Betty Boop and Mae West, and they strive to identify with that. It’s an impossible journey.
Misty finished his case in our county and eventually was extradited down to Maricopa County to face charges there. I never knew what exactly became of him but I assume he did a little prison time. I have thought about him on and off over the years, hoping he might have gone home to the farm and reconnected with his family, knowing he probably did not. He could be a woman by now, or maybe he is still prostituting himself to try and earn the fee for that change. Or maybe he is dead. I hope not. I probably will never know but I’d like to keep that lunch date one day.
“Hey!” she exclaimed, her expression a mixture of surprise and annoyance, “That’s not a woman, you jerks! I suppose you think this is real funny, right?”
The idea that someone was playing a practical joke on Lena was really not that hard to believe, it was not at all unusual for officers to torment one another with embarrassing tricks and antics. But to my knowledge, nor that of the Sergeant or other officer on staff, no such practical joke was in process.
“Are you serious?” Sarge asked.
Lena was huffing with annoyance, “That’s a gawdam guy!” she spouted. “And if you think I’m gonna strip search him, you better think again! Real hard!”
Several looks were exchanged and then Rudy, the other male officer, walked over to the change-out room and peered in. His shoulders began to shake, not with fear or annoyance but with the hysterical laughter he was trying to hide. He was unable to contain himself very well though, and when he looked back around at Sarge his eyes were tearing with hilarity.
“She’s right, Sarge, it’s a guy.” He said between gulps of air. “You want me to finish dressing him out?”
Sarge was grinning, not at Misty’s disclosure, but at the furious annoyance on Lena’s face. “I guess you better,” he replied in his typically Former-Marine tone of voice. “Can’t have our little Lena writing us up for harassment.”
The next five minutes was just a back and forth continuum of snide remarks between Sarge and Lena. I was standing by, wondering how poor Misty was faring through it all and also wondering why he did not say something when he was taken back into the bathroom to dress out. Later, after I had gotten to know him, I understood why, but on that summer evening I had not yet come to figure out the workings of the transvestite’s mind.
Rudy immerged in a few minutes with Misty in front of him, now wearing the orange jail uniform and looking somewhat abashed but not really upset. Rudy tossed something to Lena, which she caught in both hands. It was a rather large roll of money.
“Found this on him,” Rudy said, “Better put it on his books.”
“How’d they miss that on the pat down?” Sarge inquired.
Meanwhile, Lena was looking at the roll of bills with a wrinkled nose, “Geeeze, it’s wet...” she murmured, and then her green eyes shot open like ping-pong balls and with a shriek and an audible gag, she flung the money across the booking area and began doing the yucky-bug dance and rubbing her hands against her thighs like she wanted to peel the skin off.
“Ahhh, crap, Rudy! Ah, dammit!” she shouted fiercely. “That’s not funny, you chicken-lips!”
Rudy, Sarge, and even I were laughing in unison by then. Sarge took several moments to catch his breath and then finally asked Rudy where he found the roll of cash. Rudy explained that Misty had his genitals secured back out of sight with a wire bread tie and that the cash had been fastened there along with the package. Further examination proved there was nothing more hidden within.
Once the hilarity ebbed, I began to wonder how on earth Misty, whose real name was Mitchell, ever managed to secure himself so well that he could have worn those spandex pants without a hint of his gender being evident, even through a surface pat-down. Wire bread ties must be amazing things! The discomfort it certainly caused him made me shudder.
Misty, all the while, was taking everything pretty much in stride. I got the impression this was not the first time he had experienced such a situation and if he was embarrassed by it he did not let on. It was also not his first time in jail. He seemed accepting of the whole ordeal.
Typical of the gay community, Misty had one of the keenest senses of humor I have ever known. He had practically invented the word “campy”. He was housed with the sex offenders and child molesters, not because he had even one single trait that earned him that status, but because he was one of those “lost inmates” who could not be placed in the general population for his own safety. That dormitory area was at the far end of the long, echoing hallway, and so every time I went in back to talk with an inmate in one of the other dorms, Misty would pick up on my voice and shout from the back in his very best falsetto, “Hey, Girlfriend!”
You always knew when Misty was being moved, too. As he would pass along by the other dorms, escorted by officers to wherever he was supposed to be, there resounded a flood of hoots, wolf whistles and catcalls that was almost deafening. And not being one to let the others down, Misty would offer up his best hip-wiggle as he passed.
He was in our jail for several months, during which time we grew to be pretty good friends. He invited me to “do lunch” with him some day after he was out and I told him I would love to. I learned that he shaved his entire body every day, which, considering the cheap, plastic razors the jail issues to it’s inmates, would have been enough to dissuade most people from his particular lifestyle. He used red punch to color his fingernails, lips and cheeks, and the women’s buttery pencil shaving concoction for mascara. He never looked quite as feminine as the evening we booked him in but he always turned heads as he walked by, and he had mastered the same walk that made Marilyn Monroe a superstar.
He was also a twenty-three-year-old kid, in my eyes, and well educated at that. During his time in the Yavapai County jail we spent quite a few hours talking about life and all its intricacies. He eventually dropped the falsetto and gay camp and began to expose himself in emotional ways to me.
He was from the Midwest, had left home a couple of years before and was prostituting himself to earn the money for a sex change. He told me his family, good Bible-Belt farm stock, had no idea where he was nor that he was transsexual. “It would kill them,” he told me sadly. I asked him if he didn’t think it was already killing them, not knowing what had become of their son, and he replied that if I knew his family I would understand. They would rather think him dead than know he was transsexual.
It eventually occurred to me that the urge for any human being to want to change his or her sex must be incredible. It was far more than an impulse or a sexual fantasy. To endure the verbal slings and arrows and actual physical discomfort they subjected themselves to, it had to be an incredible psychological obsession or need. Why would anyone choose to be Gay or Lesbian or Transsexual or even a Cross-Dresser? It seems to be the loneliest and most emotionally painful lifestyle one could ever imagine. The desire, the need for that life must be terribly intense, certainly not a life anyone would want to choose capriciously.
Misty could never explain it to me, at least not so that I understood. It was just who he was. He explained he had never felt like “Mitchell”. Ever. His early years had been a series of bad jokes, fights, verbal attacks and lectures from his parents, and his delight in playing with Barbie Dolls. He admitted to me that wanting to change one’s sex, or living a Gay lifestyle, was not natural and probably could be considered sinful if one looked at life that way. He also told me he simply could not live as “Mitchell” anymore - that the thoughts he had of suicide were far scarier than the process he was trying to undertake to become Misty.
I remember thinking that Misty was more like a caricature of women than how real women act or speak. So often that seems to be the case with Gay men - their assumed idiosyncrasies are far more feminine than most of us females truly are. It’s as if they see the ideal woman as a combination of Betty Boop and Mae West, and they strive to identify with that. It’s an impossible journey.
Misty finished his case in our county and eventually was extradited down to Maricopa County to face charges there. I never knew what exactly became of him but I assume he did a little prison time. I have thought about him on and off over the years, hoping he might have gone home to the farm and reconnected with his family, knowing he probably did not. He could be a woman by now, or maybe he is still prostituting himself to try and earn the fee for that change. Or maybe he is dead. I hope not. I probably will never know but I’d like to keep that lunch date one day.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
"Misty"
I want to get into an extremely touchy subject within the world of law enforcement now: Homophobia. Within the large circle of deputies I knew and worked with in the jail, the term Homo meant Homosexual, Transvestite, Transsexual, Cross-Dresser, and Female Impersonator. In their minds there was no real distinction between these types; they were all just Homos. There was such a stigma to the term that most of the deputies sort of spat it out as if the word tasted nasty and simply could not be tolerated.
I suppose I shouldn’t limit this response to deputies alone. Most of the straight men I know feel the same way and have no tolerance or understanding for any life style that doesn’t include locker rooms, girl watching, and deep-fried pork rinds. If a man has a speech impediment or walks just slightly too gracefully he is a definite threat. God forbid he might wear a pink flowered shirt or happen to enjoy Broadway musicals.
This is okay. Really, it is. I love these guys and I understand their phobias. I’m not sure they understand why they are so threatened by effeminate men, but that’s beside the point. It’s the way it has always been, is now, and forever will be. Real men are manly. Real men like to make jokes about big bosoms, eat melt-down-spicy hot wings, watch women wrestle in tubs of mud, attend movies starring Clint Eastwood and John Wayne, and drink cold beer for breakfast. Real men simply do not eat snow-cones; listen to Broadway Sound tracks; watch movies like Steel Magnolias; enjoy a good talk about personal issues, or dance (except western two-steps).
In the world of inmates the feelings seem to be pretty much the same. All jails and prisons in America keep their child molesters, sex offenders and known homosexuals and transsexuals separate from the general population because of the harm they would no doubt come to at the hands of the other inmates. It is okay to rob, cheat, steal, sell drugs (even to kids) and to kill people, but it is not okay to molest a child or rape a woman. The old expression “There is honor among thieves” does have its limits.
Well, sort of. I say this because it has been my experience that these manly men, who will kill a child molester or beat a gay man to death if there is one in the vicinity, will often be involved in raping and/or sodomizing another helpless inmate. It goes on all the time but is usually never reported because the victim is too terrified to say anything.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I am in no way condoning child molestation or abuse. It is the most heinous crime I can imagine and I cannot think of a punishment suitable enough for the men who do it. Statistics show most child molesters are Caucasian men while child abusers are men & women of all races, but the fact of the matter is that child molesters are virtually never gay men. Homosexuals, transvestites and transsexuals are typically gentle, inoffensive people who would not harm a child if their very lives depended on it. The hatred and violence enacted upon them by other inmates, and by some of society in general, is directed at their lifestyle and their personalities, not any harmful actions on their parts.
Unfortunately, in the jails and prisons they are often lumped together with the child molesters because no one knows where to place them for their own safety. Their crimes are rarely violent; usually drug or alcohol related or having to do with prostitution or theft. If left alone, they seldom cause trouble, initiate fights or break the facility rules. Violence is not a part of their makeup.
“Misty” came into the booking area on one summer evening in 1992 if memory serves me. She had long, flowing blond hair, was tall and lithe, wearing black spandex pants which left nothing to the imagination, and a lacey crop top which showed her trim midriff quite nicely. She had been arrested for prostitution and also had a warrant out of Phoenix for the same offense so we knew she would be with us for awhile.
Male officers do not generally frisk female prisoners as thoroughly as they would a male prisoner for obvious reasons. The exception to this is if the female is suspected of drugs or weapons but Misty had none of those types of charges. This being the case they left the strip search to one of the female detention officers. Not myself as I was working at the booking desk. The privilege went to Lena, a young officer who had done a lot of Reserve Deputy work for the Sheriff’s Office but had not been working in Detention for very long. Lena was pretty well-versed in the world of criminals and jails and most anything to do with law enforcement, but she was not prepared for what she was about to encounter....
I suppose I shouldn’t limit this response to deputies alone. Most of the straight men I know feel the same way and have no tolerance or understanding for any life style that doesn’t include locker rooms, girl watching, and deep-fried pork rinds. If a man has a speech impediment or walks just slightly too gracefully he is a definite threat. God forbid he might wear a pink flowered shirt or happen to enjoy Broadway musicals.
This is okay. Really, it is. I love these guys and I understand their phobias. I’m not sure they understand why they are so threatened by effeminate men, but that’s beside the point. It’s the way it has always been, is now, and forever will be. Real men are manly. Real men like to make jokes about big bosoms, eat melt-down-spicy hot wings, watch women wrestle in tubs of mud, attend movies starring Clint Eastwood and John Wayne, and drink cold beer for breakfast. Real men simply do not eat snow-cones; listen to Broadway Sound tracks; watch movies like Steel Magnolias; enjoy a good talk about personal issues, or dance (except western two-steps).
In the world of inmates the feelings seem to be pretty much the same. All jails and prisons in America keep their child molesters, sex offenders and known homosexuals and transsexuals separate from the general population because of the harm they would no doubt come to at the hands of the other inmates. It is okay to rob, cheat, steal, sell drugs (even to kids) and to kill people, but it is not okay to molest a child or rape a woman. The old expression “There is honor among thieves” does have its limits.
Well, sort of. I say this because it has been my experience that these manly men, who will kill a child molester or beat a gay man to death if there is one in the vicinity, will often be involved in raping and/or sodomizing another helpless inmate. It goes on all the time but is usually never reported because the victim is too terrified to say anything.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I am in no way condoning child molestation or abuse. It is the most heinous crime I can imagine and I cannot think of a punishment suitable enough for the men who do it. Statistics show most child molesters are Caucasian men while child abusers are men & women of all races, but the fact of the matter is that child molesters are virtually never gay men. Homosexuals, transvestites and transsexuals are typically gentle, inoffensive people who would not harm a child if their very lives depended on it. The hatred and violence enacted upon them by other inmates, and by some of society in general, is directed at their lifestyle and their personalities, not any harmful actions on their parts.
Unfortunately, in the jails and prisons they are often lumped together with the child molesters because no one knows where to place them for their own safety. Their crimes are rarely violent; usually drug or alcohol related or having to do with prostitution or theft. If left alone, they seldom cause trouble, initiate fights or break the facility rules. Violence is not a part of their makeup.
“Misty” came into the booking area on one summer evening in 1992 if memory serves me. She had long, flowing blond hair, was tall and lithe, wearing black spandex pants which left nothing to the imagination, and a lacey crop top which showed her trim midriff quite nicely. She had been arrested for prostitution and also had a warrant out of Phoenix for the same offense so we knew she would be with us for awhile.
Male officers do not generally frisk female prisoners as thoroughly as they would a male prisoner for obvious reasons. The exception to this is if the female is suspected of drugs or weapons but Misty had none of those types of charges. This being the case they left the strip search to one of the female detention officers. Not myself as I was working at the booking desk. The privilege went to Lena, a young officer who had done a lot of Reserve Deputy work for the Sheriff’s Office but had not been working in Detention for very long. Lena was pretty well-versed in the world of criminals and jails and most anything to do with law enforcement, but she was not prepared for what she was about to encounter....
Monday, August 24, 2009
Lorna and God
One of our chaplains, a really amazing man with a wicked sense of humor, used to say that he was absolutely sure God lived in the Yavapai County jail. He knew this because every inmate who came into the jail eventually found God, and every inmate who was released seemed to leave God there. Made sense to me.
Lorna seemed to have had an on-again-off-again relationship with God which was directly related to her consumption of alcohol. The more sober she was, the more she believed. After she had been in jail for a couple of weeks and had dried out sufficiently to understand how much trouble she was in, she proceeded to find her way back to religion.
Please do not misunderstand. I believe any course that leads away from lives of drugs, alcohol and crime is a good one, and if that course involves the use of religion and faith, so much the better. It’s just that I worked in the jail long enough to know that in 99 percent of all the cases, the love of drugs and alcohol, and the lifestyle that accompanies it, is just too strong to relinquish to God. We come back to that bad choices thing again, I suppose.
And now I have to eat my words and tell you that Lorna was that one percent inmate. Not in the beginning, mind you. In the beginning she was the Queen of Lip Service, and all the other, much younger inmates would gather around her looking for leadership and guidance. And a new and better way to style their hair at night with toilet paper rollers.
Gradually, over the course of the year and a half she was in jail waiting for trial, her entire being changed. The homemade makeup grew fainter and the audacious attitude mellowed. It was in good part due to the drying-out process, allowing her head to clear and the realization of what had happened to set in. She began keeping a journal and on several occasions showed me letters she had written and received from her family, all of whom had basically written her off as a lost cause and a point of embarrassment.
By the time her trial came around she was just “Mom” to the other girls in the dorm, and no longer the flamboyant, muddle-brained creature that had first thrust herself into the world of incarceration. She had even stopped preaching to the others. Instead she was the one who greeted the new ones and took time to listen to their worries, angers and fears. She had found her place so to speak, in the most unlikely of circumstances.
I still hear from Lorna occasionally. She writes from prison where she is serving a sentence of seventeen to twenty-five years. She teaches reading to the illiterate prisoners, works in the warden’s garden and leads Bible studies. Her letters are clear, introspective and well written. She is hopeful and even has a plan for her release. She will be seventy-two years old by then, if she is in there for 17 years, but feels she will still have something good to offer.
I agree. I’m sure she will. I hope I run into her somehow when that day comes because I would like to sit and talk with her, to have coffee and discuss the world and what has occurred in it, and to tell her I was wrong about her. She was the one percent.
Lorna seemed to have had an on-again-off-again relationship with God which was directly related to her consumption of alcohol. The more sober she was, the more she believed. After she had been in jail for a couple of weeks and had dried out sufficiently to understand how much trouble she was in, she proceeded to find her way back to religion.
Please do not misunderstand. I believe any course that leads away from lives of drugs, alcohol and crime is a good one, and if that course involves the use of religion and faith, so much the better. It’s just that I worked in the jail long enough to know that in 99 percent of all the cases, the love of drugs and alcohol, and the lifestyle that accompanies it, is just too strong to relinquish to God. We come back to that bad choices thing again, I suppose.
And now I have to eat my words and tell you that Lorna was that one percent inmate. Not in the beginning, mind you. In the beginning she was the Queen of Lip Service, and all the other, much younger inmates would gather around her looking for leadership and guidance. And a new and better way to style their hair at night with toilet paper rollers.
Gradually, over the course of the year and a half she was in jail waiting for trial, her entire being changed. The homemade makeup grew fainter and the audacious attitude mellowed. It was in good part due to the drying-out process, allowing her head to clear and the realization of what had happened to set in. She began keeping a journal and on several occasions showed me letters she had written and received from her family, all of whom had basically written her off as a lost cause and a point of embarrassment.
By the time her trial came around she was just “Mom” to the other girls in the dorm, and no longer the flamboyant, muddle-brained creature that had first thrust herself into the world of incarceration. She had even stopped preaching to the others. Instead she was the one who greeted the new ones and took time to listen to their worries, angers and fears. She had found her place so to speak, in the most unlikely of circumstances.
I still hear from Lorna occasionally. She writes from prison where she is serving a sentence of seventeen to twenty-five years. She teaches reading to the illiterate prisoners, works in the warden’s garden and leads Bible studies. Her letters are clear, introspective and well written. She is hopeful and even has a plan for her release. She will be seventy-two years old by then, if she is in there for 17 years, but feels she will still have something good to offer.
I agree. I’m sure she will. I hope I run into her somehow when that day comes because I would like to sit and talk with her, to have coffee and discuss the world and what has occurred in it, and to tell her I was wrong about her. She was the one percent.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Lorna
I remember watching some old B-grade movie once called Women in Chains. I could not tell you who the stars were nor even what the plot was about except that it involved women in prison. I do distinctly recall that the downtrodden women who wore those chains had hair and makeup to rival that of any movie star and astonishing figures that poured voluptuously from their scant prison attire. Funny, but I never met a female inmate who looked like a movie star or appeared voluptuous in her uniform. Many of them, though, were under the misguided belief that they did.
Be that as it may, inmates truly can be ingenious when they want to. It’s almost astonishing. Who needs a drug store or beauty salon when you have jail issued cosmetics right there at your disposal? Red punch can be used for lipstick and also cheek rouge. Pancake syrup, if thinned with water, acts just as effectively as hair spray or mousse, and strips of toilet paper can be twisted around the hair to set it in curls at night. You can also scrape a lead pencil against a cinder block wall to get shavings that are then mixed with butter and used for eyeliner and shadow. It works pretty well, actually, as long as you don’t mind getting lead shavings and butter in your eyes. Ah! What price beauty?
I remember one young gal who came into the jail one afternoon with bleached platinum blonde hair and went to court the next morning sporting a luscious shade of lime green. I believe it had something to do with the gelatin dessert on her supper tray. It was trendy and the flies really gathered nicely about her head, but it didn’t do much to impress the judge. He didn’t release her. Neither did he release the girl who offered to leave her purse with the court “for collateral”, nor the one who flashed the judge a lengthy view of her less-than-ample bosom. Female inmates are a hoot.
I remember Lorna because she was an expert at all of the above, from make-up to hair mousse to judge-flashing. She was not a young woman, indeed she was pushing fifty-something and didn’t have anything very interesting to flash with, but I gave her credit for trying.
Lorna had shot and killed her husband. It was never really determined who started the quarrel because they were both drunk at the time, but Lorna was the survivor with the “smoking gun”, so to speak, and she never really denied the incident. Her defense was that the shooting was “accidental”, that her husband had egged her on, shouting at her to “go ahead and shoot!”. Lorna said he would not stop yelling at her to shoot him and she got so agitated and upset that she lost control of her grip and the gun just went off. The fact that the gun went off accidentally five times was sort of damning, but what the heck? Could happen.
It seems to occur a lot, actually, women shooting their husbands or significant others. Most of them do not claim it as being “accidental” though. Most tend to say it was due to domestic abuse and many have the bruises and scars to prove it. Over the years that I worked in the Prescott Jail there were probably a dozen such lethal incidents, and in this somewhat small part of the world that’s a fairly large percentage. The instinct of someone such as myself is to wonder, Why the heck didn’t she just leave the bastard? Why send herself to prison for ten or fifteen years? Of course this question is raised by on-lookers in just about every incident of domestic violence on record and it doesn’t take long to learn it just isn’t that simple. Lorna stayed with her spouse for whatever her reasons were, just as all abused women do. Fear, poverty, co-dependency, the issues are far too complicated to delve into just now and my expertise in that area is limited. Suffice it to say most women in abusive relationships do stay, often with tragic results.
There had been a history of domestic abuse, according to Lorna, but she stated she had never reported it because “she loved him”. When we talked she told me he had sent her to the Emergency Room on several occasions but she always made up excuses as to what had caused her injuries. Besides, when he wasn’t drinking (and when she wasn’t drinking) he was such a good, kind man. They had a wonderful life together. She could not bring herself to throw it all away because of a “little” arguing.
Lorna mourned for her spouse for a while, but not very long. It was only a matter of a couple of weeks, in fact, before she began her flirtations with the Detention Officers and that was when her creativity with jail cosmetics and inappropriate exposure reached the ultimate heights. She became the Tammy Faye Bakker of the female dorm, mixing up colorful concoctions from beet juice, gelatin, punch, commissary candy and leftover coffee. The makeup parties became a regular evening event, with all the women trying to create artwork out of leftover food products. The jail staff condoned none of these activities but there was little anyone could do to prevent them and the resulting faces were as entertaining as all three of Ringling Brother’s rings.
She also found God....
Be that as it may, inmates truly can be ingenious when they want to. It’s almost astonishing. Who needs a drug store or beauty salon when you have jail issued cosmetics right there at your disposal? Red punch can be used for lipstick and also cheek rouge. Pancake syrup, if thinned with water, acts just as effectively as hair spray or mousse, and strips of toilet paper can be twisted around the hair to set it in curls at night. You can also scrape a lead pencil against a cinder block wall to get shavings that are then mixed with butter and used for eyeliner and shadow. It works pretty well, actually, as long as you don’t mind getting lead shavings and butter in your eyes. Ah! What price beauty?
I remember one young gal who came into the jail one afternoon with bleached platinum blonde hair and went to court the next morning sporting a luscious shade of lime green. I believe it had something to do with the gelatin dessert on her supper tray. It was trendy and the flies really gathered nicely about her head, but it didn’t do much to impress the judge. He didn’t release her. Neither did he release the girl who offered to leave her purse with the court “for collateral”, nor the one who flashed the judge a lengthy view of her less-than-ample bosom. Female inmates are a hoot.
I remember Lorna because she was an expert at all of the above, from make-up to hair mousse to judge-flashing. She was not a young woman, indeed she was pushing fifty-something and didn’t have anything very interesting to flash with, but I gave her credit for trying.
Lorna had shot and killed her husband. It was never really determined who started the quarrel because they were both drunk at the time, but Lorna was the survivor with the “smoking gun”, so to speak, and she never really denied the incident. Her defense was that the shooting was “accidental”, that her husband had egged her on, shouting at her to “go ahead and shoot!”. Lorna said he would not stop yelling at her to shoot him and she got so agitated and upset that she lost control of her grip and the gun just went off. The fact that the gun went off accidentally five times was sort of damning, but what the heck? Could happen.
It seems to occur a lot, actually, women shooting their husbands or significant others. Most of them do not claim it as being “accidental” though. Most tend to say it was due to domestic abuse and many have the bruises and scars to prove it. Over the years that I worked in the Prescott Jail there were probably a dozen such lethal incidents, and in this somewhat small part of the world that’s a fairly large percentage. The instinct of someone such as myself is to wonder, Why the heck didn’t she just leave the bastard? Why send herself to prison for ten or fifteen years? Of course this question is raised by on-lookers in just about every incident of domestic violence on record and it doesn’t take long to learn it just isn’t that simple. Lorna stayed with her spouse for whatever her reasons were, just as all abused women do. Fear, poverty, co-dependency, the issues are far too complicated to delve into just now and my expertise in that area is limited. Suffice it to say most women in abusive relationships do stay, often with tragic results.
There had been a history of domestic abuse, according to Lorna, but she stated she had never reported it because “she loved him”. When we talked she told me he had sent her to the Emergency Room on several occasions but she always made up excuses as to what had caused her injuries. Besides, when he wasn’t drinking (and when she wasn’t drinking) he was such a good, kind man. They had a wonderful life together. She could not bring herself to throw it all away because of a “little” arguing.
Lorna mourned for her spouse for a while, but not very long. It was only a matter of a couple of weeks, in fact, before she began her flirtations with the Detention Officers and that was when her creativity with jail cosmetics and inappropriate exposure reached the ultimate heights. She became the Tammy Faye Bakker of the female dorm, mixing up colorful concoctions from beet juice, gelatin, punch, commissary candy and leftover coffee. The makeup parties became a regular evening event, with all the women trying to create artwork out of leftover food products. The jail staff condoned none of these activities but there was little anyone could do to prevent them and the resulting faces were as entertaining as all three of Ringling Brother’s rings.
She also found God....
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Doc's escape
Doc had one other distinction during his stay in our jail, and that was his involvement in one of the two escapes from the facility over the years. He and two equally psychotic cohorts managed to wriggle out through an air vent in the ceiling of their cell one night during visitation and somehow managed to make it out through the roof of the jail to the world beyond. The problem was, none of them was from the area and they had no idea where they were or how to get away.
Since it was nighttime and thus very dark outside, the three amigos did not even know which direction was north and using the stars evidently was not in their realm of abilities. They ended up in a nearby housing development where they broke into the home of an elderly couple who proceeded to feed them bologna sandwiches, cookies and cola until the SWAT team arrived to bring them back to jail. When questioned later, the elderly couple went on and on about how polite and nice the three escapees were, just like their own grandsons. They couldn’t understand why such fine young boys were being held in jail. Surely they would not harm a single fly and wouldn’t we please check into the matter and see if a mistake hadn’t been made?
The whole episode lasted about four or five hours and Doc was slightly embarrassed at being so poorly prepared, but he spent the rest of his stay with us in the jail boasting about how he had escaped from our maximum-security facility. I suppose he had a right to boast about it, not that anyone cared very much. What seemed far more material to his peers was the fact that he and his amigos ended up right back where he started, with two more years for the crime of “escape” tacked on to whatever sentence he would eventually receive.
While I make lightly of this event, it could have turned out much differently. Of the three escapees all were in jail for homicide and one of them was even more extremely unbalanced than Doc, having committed his murder in a frenzied knife and pistol attack on a middle-aged lady who just happened to be home when he did not expect her to be there. For reasons no one really knew, Doc evidently stopped the other two from harming the elderly couple, or that’s how the story goes. It would have been easy for them to use a household knife or any other weapon and do real harm to the couple but they did not. They could have taken the couple’s car and made a dash for it, but they didn’t attempt that either.
Maybe, somewhere under the bravado and personality disorder, Doc did have one small spark of conscience. Or, more likely he just knew he wouldn’t get very far even if they did manage to evade the SWAT team because he still had no idea where they were or how to get to a highway and escape. The truth is more likely the latter. Doc was mean as a bent snake, but he was not stupid.
He finally ended up going to prison in Florence for twenty-five years to life. I heard a rumor he had been attacked in a knife fight shortly after arriving but had survived it. In the years since I’ve heard nothing more. I have no doubt, however, he is still communicating with a dozen or more love-struck women and charming his way into their souls. Doc was my first lesson on Sociopaths and just how unpredictable they can be. I can understand now why people, especially young women, fall prey to their charm and become their victims so easily.
Since it was nighttime and thus very dark outside, the three amigos did not even know which direction was north and using the stars evidently was not in their realm of abilities. They ended up in a nearby housing development where they broke into the home of an elderly couple who proceeded to feed them bologna sandwiches, cookies and cola until the SWAT team arrived to bring them back to jail. When questioned later, the elderly couple went on and on about how polite and nice the three escapees were, just like their own grandsons. They couldn’t understand why such fine young boys were being held in jail. Surely they would not harm a single fly and wouldn’t we please check into the matter and see if a mistake hadn’t been made?
The whole episode lasted about four or five hours and Doc was slightly embarrassed at being so poorly prepared, but he spent the rest of his stay with us in the jail boasting about how he had escaped from our maximum-security facility. I suppose he had a right to boast about it, not that anyone cared very much. What seemed far more material to his peers was the fact that he and his amigos ended up right back where he started, with two more years for the crime of “escape” tacked on to whatever sentence he would eventually receive.
While I make lightly of this event, it could have turned out much differently. Of the three escapees all were in jail for homicide and one of them was even more extremely unbalanced than Doc, having committed his murder in a frenzied knife and pistol attack on a middle-aged lady who just happened to be home when he did not expect her to be there. For reasons no one really knew, Doc evidently stopped the other two from harming the elderly couple, or that’s how the story goes. It would have been easy for them to use a household knife or any other weapon and do real harm to the couple but they did not. They could have taken the couple’s car and made a dash for it, but they didn’t attempt that either.
Maybe, somewhere under the bravado and personality disorder, Doc did have one small spark of conscience. Or, more likely he just knew he wouldn’t get very far even if they did manage to evade the SWAT team because he still had no idea where they were or how to get to a highway and escape. The truth is more likely the latter. Doc was mean as a bent snake, but he was not stupid.
He finally ended up going to prison in Florence for twenty-five years to life. I heard a rumor he had been attacked in a knife fight shortly after arriving but had survived it. In the years since I’ve heard nothing more. I have no doubt, however, he is still communicating with a dozen or more love-struck women and charming his way into their souls. Doc was my first lesson on Sociopaths and just how unpredictable they can be. I can understand now why people, especially young women, fall prey to their charm and become their victims so easily.
Friday, August 21, 2009
...more on Doc
His given name is unimportant but his nickname was “Doc” and he was pretty much covered with tattoos. He had been arrested for murder, a drug deal gone very bad, after which he and his girlfriend had tried hiding in the juniper woods north of town for a day or so before they were apprehended. This decision was about as bad as the rest of the decisions Doc had made in life because north of Prescott there is pretty much no food, water, or survival options, and in the winter and spring it is damned cold. To hide out there, on foot, was a very bad plan. Then again, I don’t believe he had planned anything that happened during the day of the murderous drug deal. Sociopaths often get caught without a plan.
Doc was my first murderer, my first Sociopath: a person with no conscience, a person who knows right from wrong but really does not care as long as what he is doing makes him feel good. Aside from his dirty, bloodstained fingers and clothes, his plethora of bizarre tattoos and the missing lobe of his right ear (bitten off in a prison fight) he really didn’t look like a killer. Then again, who is to say what a killer looks like?
He was a really handsome guy, in a somewhat Charlie Manson kind of way. What I mean by this is he had long hair, was slight of build and his dark eyes could pierce holes into your heart. His features were incredibly youthful, however, almost “pretty”, and his smile was quick, bright, and totally delightful. He was quite the ladies’ man and would have made a fine catch for any lovely, young lady if he hadn’t been quite so deadly.
He truly believed he was a ladies man, though. The charm oozed out of him like mustard from a hot dog bun. He could discuss almost anything, from tying your shoes to rocket science, and he seemed to know what he was talking about all the time. He even told me, as I awkwardly rolled his fingerprints, what I should do to get the best set possible. He explained his whorls and arches and how the FBI uses those to match prints and why we should always have our arrestees rub lotion into their skin before taking prints. Preferably Corn Huskers Lotion, Doc told me, rather like a father directing a child. It softens the skin and makes cleaner prints.
I really wasn’t listening all that much. I was shaking too hard and was determined to get the fingerprints right the first time. It wasn’t easy, what with the Sergeant standing over my shoulder and the blood stains on Doc’s hands, not to mention that two days in the woods had added another unique and interesting aroma to his entire being. I also kept wondering what the headless woman tattooed on his shoulder meant (was he afraid of headless women?), who was the person who had bitten off his ear lobe, and what had prompted the fight that caused it. And why had he been in prison that time?
Curiously, Doc did not seem too concerned about the whole procedure. He was very amicable and informative, including his interesting play-by-play report on how the shooting went down and how he could see right through the guy; the hole was so big! Of course, all of that was way more information than any of us officers cared to know. No one wants to hear a suspect rambling on about the killing he committed three days earlier, not that it wasn’t extremely interesting, but being privy to such chatter will inevitably wind you up in the witness chair at his trial. Doc was rather proud of his recent notoriety and how it had taken two whole days for the cops to find them and all he had really done was rid the world of one more drug dealer, after all. He should get an award, not a prison term. The fact that his drug dealer victim was a 70-year-old man didn’t seem to make much difference to him.
Looking back, I believe Doc had the distinction of spending the longest time in the Yavapai County jail waiting to go to trial of anyone I can recall. It was almost two and a half years. His girlfriend was in a separate part of the jail and spent her days trying desperately to contact him. Meanwhile Doc was keeping up a running correspondence with half a dozen women on the outside, swearing to each of them his undying love, faithfulness, and the desire to father their children. After his mug shot was published in the local paper as part of the news story, several lovesick girls began to write him and it mushroomed from there. Doc was the only guy I ever knew in the jail whose mug shot came out looking really good. Most people, no matter how minor their crime may be, look like insane serial killers in their mug shots, including the officers and civilian employees who have to be photographed for their files. Anyway, on the front page of the newspaper Doc looked almost heroic. He was a combination of Johnny Depp and Batman with a little Psycho thrown in for good measure. As I mentioned earlier, Doc was a good-looking guy and for some young women and girls the excitement of his bad-boy image was just too much to pass up.
It got to the point, finally, when two or three of his “women” on the outside showed up at the same time for visitation. The fur began to fly. It happened on several occasions during the time he was in our jail but it didn’t worry Doc at all. The women always seemed to forgive him and continue to stay in contact. Even his girlfriend in the female dorm (who eventually knew about all of it) found it in her heart to forgive him and to stand by her man. For Doc there were always more women on the string, so if he lost one or two along the way to a jealous rage, what did it matter? For the life of me I still do not know how he kept finding so many girls to fall at his jail-bound feet! I believe he really enjoyed the catfights and squabbles; they made him feel special, in a sociopathic kind of way.
Doc was my first murderer, my first Sociopath: a person with no conscience, a person who knows right from wrong but really does not care as long as what he is doing makes him feel good. Aside from his dirty, bloodstained fingers and clothes, his plethora of bizarre tattoos and the missing lobe of his right ear (bitten off in a prison fight) he really didn’t look like a killer. Then again, who is to say what a killer looks like?
He was a really handsome guy, in a somewhat Charlie Manson kind of way. What I mean by this is he had long hair, was slight of build and his dark eyes could pierce holes into your heart. His features were incredibly youthful, however, almost “pretty”, and his smile was quick, bright, and totally delightful. He was quite the ladies’ man and would have made a fine catch for any lovely, young lady if he hadn’t been quite so deadly.
He truly believed he was a ladies man, though. The charm oozed out of him like mustard from a hot dog bun. He could discuss almost anything, from tying your shoes to rocket science, and he seemed to know what he was talking about all the time. He even told me, as I awkwardly rolled his fingerprints, what I should do to get the best set possible. He explained his whorls and arches and how the FBI uses those to match prints and why we should always have our arrestees rub lotion into their skin before taking prints. Preferably Corn Huskers Lotion, Doc told me, rather like a father directing a child. It softens the skin and makes cleaner prints.
I really wasn’t listening all that much. I was shaking too hard and was determined to get the fingerprints right the first time. It wasn’t easy, what with the Sergeant standing over my shoulder and the blood stains on Doc’s hands, not to mention that two days in the woods had added another unique and interesting aroma to his entire being. I also kept wondering what the headless woman tattooed on his shoulder meant (was he afraid of headless women?), who was the person who had bitten off his ear lobe, and what had prompted the fight that caused it. And why had he been in prison that time?
Curiously, Doc did not seem too concerned about the whole procedure. He was very amicable and informative, including his interesting play-by-play report on how the shooting went down and how he could see right through the guy; the hole was so big! Of course, all of that was way more information than any of us officers cared to know. No one wants to hear a suspect rambling on about the killing he committed three days earlier, not that it wasn’t extremely interesting, but being privy to such chatter will inevitably wind you up in the witness chair at his trial. Doc was rather proud of his recent notoriety and how it had taken two whole days for the cops to find them and all he had really done was rid the world of one more drug dealer, after all. He should get an award, not a prison term. The fact that his drug dealer victim was a 70-year-old man didn’t seem to make much difference to him.
Looking back, I believe Doc had the distinction of spending the longest time in the Yavapai County jail waiting to go to trial of anyone I can recall. It was almost two and a half years. His girlfriend was in a separate part of the jail and spent her days trying desperately to contact him. Meanwhile Doc was keeping up a running correspondence with half a dozen women on the outside, swearing to each of them his undying love, faithfulness, and the desire to father their children. After his mug shot was published in the local paper as part of the news story, several lovesick girls began to write him and it mushroomed from there. Doc was the only guy I ever knew in the jail whose mug shot came out looking really good. Most people, no matter how minor their crime may be, look like insane serial killers in their mug shots, including the officers and civilian employees who have to be photographed for their files. Anyway, on the front page of the newspaper Doc looked almost heroic. He was a combination of Johnny Depp and Batman with a little Psycho thrown in for good measure. As I mentioned earlier, Doc was a good-looking guy and for some young women and girls the excitement of his bad-boy image was just too much to pass up.
It got to the point, finally, when two or three of his “women” on the outside showed up at the same time for visitation. The fur began to fly. It happened on several occasions during the time he was in our jail but it didn’t worry Doc at all. The women always seemed to forgive him and continue to stay in contact. Even his girlfriend in the female dorm (who eventually knew about all of it) found it in her heart to forgive him and to stand by her man. For Doc there were always more women on the string, so if he lost one or two along the way to a jealous rage, what did it matter? For the life of me I still do not know how he kept finding so many girls to fall at his jail-bound feet! I believe he really enjoyed the catfights and squabbles; they made him feel special, in a sociopathic kind of way.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
"Doc"
I am not a big fan of tattoos. It has always seemed to me that after a mother spends nine months of her life doing everything possible to assure her newborn baby will be healthy and perfect in every way, that baby has no right to grow up and destroy his or her perfect skin with a bunch of ink and graven images. I feel the same about most unusual body piercings, too, but those will fade away in time if the person takes out the metal object, unless it is a hole the size of a carrot in his or her ear lobe. Tattoos, on the other hand, are there to stay without extensive laser surgery or the removal of the body part where the tattoo exists.
I read an article written by a psychiatrist that said people get tattoos of things they are basically afraid of: Grim Reapers, skulls, daggers, etc. I’m not sure if I agree with this because my own son had a tattoo of a buxom cowgirl on his chest and knowing him as I did, he was not the least bit fearful of buxom cowgirls. But I digress. The point I was beginning to make was that there must be some great inner obsession for anyone to endure having a needle pounded into one’s flesh over and over just to express his or her desire to communicate something to the world. Wouldn’t it be easier to take out an ad in the newspaper or have a tee shirt printed with the same picture or slogan?
Well, maybe not. There are very few inmates that I ever came across, maybe two percent, who did not have tattoos. It’s like the jail smells, it seems to go with criminal activity. However, you would inevitably find a six foot four inch, 350 pound fellow, covered from head to toe with tattoos and piercings, his forearm dotted with dozens of needle marks and scars from the various concoctions he injected into himself, who would then faint at the sight of the tiny needle we used to test for TB exposure. Go figure.
Some of the tattoos really are works of art, though. I’ll admit that. Not the ones that come out of prison. Usually those are done with sharpened paperclips and ink from a ballpoint pen or Kool-Aid and tend to be fuzzy and resemble the artwork my five-year-old grandson brings home from kindergarten. But the tattoos that are professionally done can be honestly amazing in detail and color. One fellow had an entire scene from The Hobbit etched across his back in fairyland colors so detailed you could see the hair on Frodo’s toes. On the other end of the spectrum, though, was the jovial, aged biker who sported Give Me Head Until I’m Dead engraved around his bald forehead in fading black ink. To each their own and if the truth be known, the biker’s message was easier to decipher than that of the man with Frodo on his back.
There was also a young man who, when being booked in, was asked the usual question of “Do you have any scars, marks or tattoos?” He proceeded to proudly display his penis to everyone in the booking area and explained “It gets really cool when I get a hard-on!” He was speaking of the cobra tattoo on his penis, a truly amazing work of colorful art that must have taken hours of excruciating pain to complete. None of us knew quite what to say. I still wouldn’t know, even after all these years. As far as I know, none of us ever got to see it in its fully-intended glory. I was curious but not driven.
The first truly amazing array of tattoos I got really close to came when I had been working at the jail about a week and my shift sergeant decided I was ready to learn to take fingerprints. Trust me here, folks, taking fingerprints is not as simple as it looks on TV. The process of taking fingerprints is something akin to performing frontal lobe surgery, they have to be clear enough for the Feds to read without error and it’s very difficult to get a set of un-smudged fingerprints when you’re nervous and sweating and trying to print bloodied fingers! But I digress once again. It was not the lesson on finger printing that sticks in my mind, it was the first inmate I ever had to print.....
I read an article written by a psychiatrist that said people get tattoos of things they are basically afraid of: Grim Reapers, skulls, daggers, etc. I’m not sure if I agree with this because my own son had a tattoo of a buxom cowgirl on his chest and knowing him as I did, he was not the least bit fearful of buxom cowgirls. But I digress. The point I was beginning to make was that there must be some great inner obsession for anyone to endure having a needle pounded into one’s flesh over and over just to express his or her desire to communicate something to the world. Wouldn’t it be easier to take out an ad in the newspaper or have a tee shirt printed with the same picture or slogan?
Well, maybe not. There are very few inmates that I ever came across, maybe two percent, who did not have tattoos. It’s like the jail smells, it seems to go with criminal activity. However, you would inevitably find a six foot four inch, 350 pound fellow, covered from head to toe with tattoos and piercings, his forearm dotted with dozens of needle marks and scars from the various concoctions he injected into himself, who would then faint at the sight of the tiny needle we used to test for TB exposure. Go figure.
Some of the tattoos really are works of art, though. I’ll admit that. Not the ones that come out of prison. Usually those are done with sharpened paperclips and ink from a ballpoint pen or Kool-Aid and tend to be fuzzy and resemble the artwork my five-year-old grandson brings home from kindergarten. But the tattoos that are professionally done can be honestly amazing in detail and color. One fellow had an entire scene from The Hobbit etched across his back in fairyland colors so detailed you could see the hair on Frodo’s toes. On the other end of the spectrum, though, was the jovial, aged biker who sported Give Me Head Until I’m Dead engraved around his bald forehead in fading black ink. To each their own and if the truth be known, the biker’s message was easier to decipher than that of the man with Frodo on his back.
There was also a young man who, when being booked in, was asked the usual question of “Do you have any scars, marks or tattoos?” He proceeded to proudly display his penis to everyone in the booking area and explained “It gets really cool when I get a hard-on!” He was speaking of the cobra tattoo on his penis, a truly amazing work of colorful art that must have taken hours of excruciating pain to complete. None of us knew quite what to say. I still wouldn’t know, even after all these years. As far as I know, none of us ever got to see it in its fully-intended glory. I was curious but not driven.
The first truly amazing array of tattoos I got really close to came when I had been working at the jail about a week and my shift sergeant decided I was ready to learn to take fingerprints. Trust me here, folks, taking fingerprints is not as simple as it looks on TV. The process of taking fingerprints is something akin to performing frontal lobe surgery, they have to be clear enough for the Feds to read without error and it’s very difficult to get a set of un-smudged fingerprints when you’re nervous and sweating and trying to print bloodied fingers! But I digress once again. It was not the lesson on finger printing that sticks in my mind, it was the first inmate I ever had to print.....
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Ernie
One of the first things I ever learned about my new job was that there is something uniquely unappetizing about the aroma of a jail. A fellow officer aptly described the smell of the jail as something akin to Ass Soup. It was a colorful description but it really fit perfectly. If you take toe jam, sweat, bad teeth, alcohol and greasy hair, then add the aroma of partially digested jailhouse beans and stir in some day-old tuna sandwiches and you’ve just about got it. I’ve never quite understood the connection between crime and bad hygiene but it really seems to go together. The cells had perfectly good showers and the inmates all had soap, shampoo, razors, toothbrushes and paste, but the whole place still smelled constantly like a mix of locker room and sewer. It’s one of those Unsolved Mysteries, something like Crop Circles and UFO’s. The sad part is that after a while you kind of get accustomed to the aroma. I’m not sure if this is good or bad, it just happens, like working at a landfill.
The women are not quite as bad as the men. The female shower is constantly going and they tend to know what a toothbrush is used for. Actually the men know, too. They sharpen the plastic handles and use them for weapons. Women also seem more likely to cover themselves when wandering about the cell, unless there is a good looking male deputy nearby and then it’s a no-holds-barred kind of event.
The first morning on the job I was assigned to serving coffee to the men at the 0600 wake-up. Inmates came straggling and stumbling from their cells to the bean chutes with cups in hand, hair in eyes, wearing nothing but jail issued boxer shorts, which did nothing to disguise the early morning “boners” and breath that would gag a maggot and peel the paint off the cinder block walls. It always reminded me of a scene from The Night of the Living Dead, although it might have been a toss-up as to what smelled worse, the inmate’s lack of dental hygiene or the Living Dead themselves.
This is what first brought Ernie to my attention. He was a young man, thin to the point of being nearly gaunt, and dotted with some very fierce, angry tattoos, but I never saw him when he was not freshly showered and his long hair clean and combed back into a neat braid or ponytail. He stood out, so to speak, simply because he tried his best to stay clean. While he was no genius, Ernie did know how to read and spell and his conversation was only spattered ever so slightly with jailhouse lingo, at least in my presence. He was soft-spoken and did not cause any undue amount of trouble and he was the first inmate I ever really had the opportunity to get to know.
Our initial conversation started over a tattoo on his left bicep, which I noticed while doing a clothing exchange. It was a pink heart with butterflies around it and the name “Gina” tattooed inside. Compared to the rest of his body art, this was impossibly out of place. Ernie had decorated himself with a few skulls and swastikas and demons and the Grim Reaper, not to mention a few snakes, spiders and fuck the worlds thrown in with a plethora of knife scars for good measure. It was all pretty typical of most of the body art and scarring that passed through the jail, but the pink heart with the butterflies and Gina did not seem to fit so I asked him about it.
“Gina’s my kid,” Ernie softly replied. “I haven’t seen her in six years but I carry her with me all the time.”
I asked him where she was.
“Dead,” Ernie stated without batting an eye. “Her and my old lady both was killed in a car wreck. Some dude on crack hit’em.”
It occurred to me at that point I might have an idea why Ernie sported so many scars and such angry tattoos.
“I never been all that much, ya’ know? But we had us a real good family back then,” Ernie told me thoughtfully. “I dunno what Bev seen in me but we was real good together. I was workin’ as a mechanic down in San Diego and my old lady worked doin’ house cleanin’. Wasn’t much but she could keep Gina with her so that was good. No babysitters, I mean. I was smokin’ a little pot back then but Bev never did no drugs at all. She was a good mother. She wanted lots of kids. So did I.”
I had no comments for him at that point because what can you say? Ernie went on to explain he just gave up after he lost his wife and little girl. No excuses at all, he just didn’t care anymore. It was easier to hide in a fog of cocaine and narcotics and alcohol than to deal with the life he had left.
Six years later Ernie had been in and out of prison twice for burglary and possession of narcotics and now he was looking at a third sentence. This time it was for selling Methamphetamines. He figured he would pull a term of twelve to fifteen years but he wasn’t worried about it. He had “family” in the joint and besides, he wouldn’t last the sentence anyway.
“Why?” I asked.
“I got AIDS”, Ernie shrugged.
Our conversation ended at that point but it was not our final chat by any means. During the following months before Ernie was tried and sentenced to the prison in Florence we had quite a few talks and I got to know him fairly well. His earliest childhood memories were from age five or six, sitting around the coffee table with his father and mother in their house “somewhere in LA”, drinking beer and sharing a “joint”. It struck me as somewhat unbelievable. My own earliest memories were of Christmas trees, birthday parties and Disneyland. Smoking a joint with ones’ parents as a first memory was just completely over the top for me. But remember, I was raised by Ozzie and Harriet.
According to Ernie, it was pretty much downhill from early childhood on. He admitted his choices in life were his own and not his parent’s fault, so I had to give him credit for that. Ninety nine percent of the inmates I ever came across would never take responsibility for their actions. It was always someone else’s fault; their parents, their teachers, their friends or the system in general. I remember one guy, in jail for beating his wife half to death, who told me, “Yeah, I punched the bitch! But she asked for it! She knew I was in a bad mood ‘cuz the Rams lost! She should’a kept her mouth shut!”
Ernie had accepted the consequences of his actions, at least to a point, and did not complain about his past or future, but he still carried a simmering, visible anger over the loss of his wife and daughter. Bev and Gina had helped him make better decisions for a while, but after that driver, stoned on crack cocaine, took their lives….well…
There were things about Ernie that few people ever knew. He wrote great poetry, for instance, mainly about angels and dragons and things that were not of this world. And he could sing like Pavarotti. What a voice that young man had! Some nights when I was on graveyard shift Ernie’s voice would echo out of the dorm, often accompanied by a few fellow inmates, and all of us on duty would listen. I, myself, wondered why that voice and that poetic soul ended up in the Yavapai County jail, dying of AIDS? Would Ernie’s life, his choices, have been different if he had had a different childhood? I have wondered similar things about similar inmates over the years and have never come to any real conclusions because in each instance there were always as many differences as there were similarities in the inmates. But it was at this point, meeting and getting to know Ernie, I began to pay attention and make mental notes to myself to try and find out, if only for my own satisfaction. In some way, Ernie was the beginning of this memoir and I thank him for that.
I heard Ernie died in prison two years after our last conversation. He was thirty years old. AIDS took another victim. He was the first person I ever knew who died from AIDS. Unfortunately, he would not be the last.
The women are not quite as bad as the men. The female shower is constantly going and they tend to know what a toothbrush is used for. Actually the men know, too. They sharpen the plastic handles and use them for weapons. Women also seem more likely to cover themselves when wandering about the cell, unless there is a good looking male deputy nearby and then it’s a no-holds-barred kind of event.
The first morning on the job I was assigned to serving coffee to the men at the 0600 wake-up. Inmates came straggling and stumbling from their cells to the bean chutes with cups in hand, hair in eyes, wearing nothing but jail issued boxer shorts, which did nothing to disguise the early morning “boners” and breath that would gag a maggot and peel the paint off the cinder block walls. It always reminded me of a scene from The Night of the Living Dead, although it might have been a toss-up as to what smelled worse, the inmate’s lack of dental hygiene or the Living Dead themselves.
This is what first brought Ernie to my attention. He was a young man, thin to the point of being nearly gaunt, and dotted with some very fierce, angry tattoos, but I never saw him when he was not freshly showered and his long hair clean and combed back into a neat braid or ponytail. He stood out, so to speak, simply because he tried his best to stay clean. While he was no genius, Ernie did know how to read and spell and his conversation was only spattered ever so slightly with jailhouse lingo, at least in my presence. He was soft-spoken and did not cause any undue amount of trouble and he was the first inmate I ever really had the opportunity to get to know.
Our initial conversation started over a tattoo on his left bicep, which I noticed while doing a clothing exchange. It was a pink heart with butterflies around it and the name “Gina” tattooed inside. Compared to the rest of his body art, this was impossibly out of place. Ernie had decorated himself with a few skulls and swastikas and demons and the Grim Reaper, not to mention a few snakes, spiders and fuck the worlds thrown in with a plethora of knife scars for good measure. It was all pretty typical of most of the body art and scarring that passed through the jail, but the pink heart with the butterflies and Gina did not seem to fit so I asked him about it.
“Gina’s my kid,” Ernie softly replied. “I haven’t seen her in six years but I carry her with me all the time.”
I asked him where she was.
“Dead,” Ernie stated without batting an eye. “Her and my old lady both was killed in a car wreck. Some dude on crack hit’em.”
It occurred to me at that point I might have an idea why Ernie sported so many scars and such angry tattoos.
“I never been all that much, ya’ know? But we had us a real good family back then,” Ernie told me thoughtfully. “I dunno what Bev seen in me but we was real good together. I was workin’ as a mechanic down in San Diego and my old lady worked doin’ house cleanin’. Wasn’t much but she could keep Gina with her so that was good. No babysitters, I mean. I was smokin’ a little pot back then but Bev never did no drugs at all. She was a good mother. She wanted lots of kids. So did I.”
I had no comments for him at that point because what can you say? Ernie went on to explain he just gave up after he lost his wife and little girl. No excuses at all, he just didn’t care anymore. It was easier to hide in a fog of cocaine and narcotics and alcohol than to deal with the life he had left.
Six years later Ernie had been in and out of prison twice for burglary and possession of narcotics and now he was looking at a third sentence. This time it was for selling Methamphetamines. He figured he would pull a term of twelve to fifteen years but he wasn’t worried about it. He had “family” in the joint and besides, he wouldn’t last the sentence anyway.
“Why?” I asked.
“I got AIDS”, Ernie shrugged.
Our conversation ended at that point but it was not our final chat by any means. During the following months before Ernie was tried and sentenced to the prison in Florence we had quite a few talks and I got to know him fairly well. His earliest childhood memories were from age five or six, sitting around the coffee table with his father and mother in their house “somewhere in LA”, drinking beer and sharing a “joint”. It struck me as somewhat unbelievable. My own earliest memories were of Christmas trees, birthday parties and Disneyland. Smoking a joint with ones’ parents as a first memory was just completely over the top for me. But remember, I was raised by Ozzie and Harriet.
According to Ernie, it was pretty much downhill from early childhood on. He admitted his choices in life were his own and not his parent’s fault, so I had to give him credit for that. Ninety nine percent of the inmates I ever came across would never take responsibility for their actions. It was always someone else’s fault; their parents, their teachers, their friends or the system in general. I remember one guy, in jail for beating his wife half to death, who told me, “Yeah, I punched the bitch! But she asked for it! She knew I was in a bad mood ‘cuz the Rams lost! She should’a kept her mouth shut!”
Ernie had accepted the consequences of his actions, at least to a point, and did not complain about his past or future, but he still carried a simmering, visible anger over the loss of his wife and daughter. Bev and Gina had helped him make better decisions for a while, but after that driver, stoned on crack cocaine, took their lives….well…
There were things about Ernie that few people ever knew. He wrote great poetry, for instance, mainly about angels and dragons and things that were not of this world. And he could sing like Pavarotti. What a voice that young man had! Some nights when I was on graveyard shift Ernie’s voice would echo out of the dorm, often accompanied by a few fellow inmates, and all of us on duty would listen. I, myself, wondered why that voice and that poetic soul ended up in the Yavapai County jail, dying of AIDS? Would Ernie’s life, his choices, have been different if he had had a different childhood? I have wondered similar things about similar inmates over the years and have never come to any real conclusions because in each instance there were always as many differences as there were similarities in the inmates. But it was at this point, meeting and getting to know Ernie, I began to pay attention and make mental notes to myself to try and find out, if only for my own satisfaction. In some way, Ernie was the beginning of this memoir and I thank him for that.
I heard Ernie died in prison two years after our last conversation. He was thirty years old. AIDS took another victim. He was the first person I ever knew who died from AIDS. Unfortunately, he would not be the last.
Not Mayberry
After all the testing was done I had nothing to do but sit back and wait. It was about three weeks later when, out of the blue, I received a phone call asking me if I wanted to go to work. The question was rather dumb, I thought. Why on earth would anyone go through such an extensive hiring process, including the dread polygraph, if they did not want to go to work? But I replied in a friendly, nonplussed tone, “Yes, please”. The voice on the telephone went on, “And since you have a degree in art, would you be interested in working as a forensic and composite artist as well? It would not be often, but when we need you?”
I explained that I had never done a composite drawing in my life, although portraits were one of my greatest interests. The voice on the phone didn’t sound like he had heard me. He simply said, “That’s okay, we’ll teach you!” (I was sent to school for a certificate in Composite/Forensic Drawing the second year of my employment.) I was also told to report to the jail the following Monday morning at 0800 hours sharp!
Yavapai County jail was an old jail, even back then. If one creates a mental image of what a jail is like, the old Yavapai County jail would fit that description to a tee. The cell floors were cement, the whole building was cinderblock and steel, the passageways back by the cells were narrow and somewhat dark, badly in need of paint and some sort of ambience, and there were iron bars and metal mesh screens between the inmates and the officers. Nowadays the new jails are well lit and have replaced metal bars and screens with heavy duty, non-breakable plastic. The floors are still cement and the bunks and furnishing are still metal but even that will be improved upon with time, I suppose.
There have been no changes in the inmates, however, and I doubt there ever will be. I was a girl from an upper-middle class family, raised by educated, mannerly parents (like I mentioned earlier; Ozzie & Harriet), who had never even heard most of the words that now flew around me in a constant barrage. Not at me, mind you. I don’t believe in all my years in the jail I ever had an inmate actually curse at me, but to say their every day language was colorful would be a tremendous understatement. Most inmates have about a fifth grade education and it really made itself clear in their conversations. It took some adjusting on my part. A lot of things would take some adjusting on my part over the next several years. Not the least of which were the inmates in general.
I grew up watching Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Hawaii Five-0, and The Fugitive, which gave me a somewhat unrealistic view of the world of crime. There were Good Guys and there were Bad Guys and it was very easy to distinguish between the two because the good guys were smart and witty and clean-shaven, while the bad guys smoked cigarettes, needed to shave, talked nasty, wore dark clothing and ended up in jail. It never occurred to me when I was a kid, that people who ended up in jail might not all be Bad Guys, that is, in some instances they were relatively good guys who made very bad decisions and choices in their lives. It took my working in the Yavapai County Jail to bring that realization to light for me, and while this education was taking hold, I ran into quite a few fascinating people along the way. People who wore orange uniforms and occasionally handcuffs on their wrists. People known as Inmates.
I explained that I had never done a composite drawing in my life, although portraits were one of my greatest interests. The voice on the phone didn’t sound like he had heard me. He simply said, “That’s okay, we’ll teach you!” (I was sent to school for a certificate in Composite/Forensic Drawing the second year of my employment.) I was also told to report to the jail the following Monday morning at 0800 hours sharp!
Yavapai County jail was an old jail, even back then. If one creates a mental image of what a jail is like, the old Yavapai County jail would fit that description to a tee. The cell floors were cement, the whole building was cinderblock and steel, the passageways back by the cells were narrow and somewhat dark, badly in need of paint and some sort of ambience, and there were iron bars and metal mesh screens between the inmates and the officers. Nowadays the new jails are well lit and have replaced metal bars and screens with heavy duty, non-breakable plastic. The floors are still cement and the bunks and furnishing are still metal but even that will be improved upon with time, I suppose.
There have been no changes in the inmates, however, and I doubt there ever will be. I was a girl from an upper-middle class family, raised by educated, mannerly parents (like I mentioned earlier; Ozzie & Harriet), who had never even heard most of the words that now flew around me in a constant barrage. Not at me, mind you. I don’t believe in all my years in the jail I ever had an inmate actually curse at me, but to say their every day language was colorful would be a tremendous understatement. Most inmates have about a fifth grade education and it really made itself clear in their conversations. It took some adjusting on my part. A lot of things would take some adjusting on my part over the next several years. Not the least of which were the inmates in general.
I grew up watching Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Hawaii Five-0, and The Fugitive, which gave me a somewhat unrealistic view of the world of crime. There were Good Guys and there were Bad Guys and it was very easy to distinguish between the two because the good guys were smart and witty and clean-shaven, while the bad guys smoked cigarettes, needed to shave, talked nasty, wore dark clothing and ended up in jail. It never occurred to me when I was a kid, that people who ended up in jail might not all be Bad Guys, that is, in some instances they were relatively good guys who made very bad decisions and choices in their lives. It took my working in the Yavapai County Jail to bring that realization to light for me, and while this education was taking hold, I ran into quite a few fascinating people along the way. People who wore orange uniforms and occasionally handcuffs on their wrists. People known as Inmates.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Truth or consequences
The dreaded polygraph begins....
*Now have always considered myself to be a rather decent person. I have never robbed a bank, killed my neighbor or set cats on fire, and if anyone were to be asked about my ethics I would probably earn an A-minus. None of this matters when you are strapped into a big, leather and wood chair that resembles Ol’ Sparky in the movie The Green Mile with bands and sensors hooked to various areas of your body. Instantly your blood pressure rises and as the polygraph examiner stoically tells you not to think about all the little things you have done in your life that is exactly what you think about. There was the quarter I stole from the collection plate in Sunday School at age six, the lipstick I shoplifted from the neighborhood drug store at age eleven, and the four hundred and six pencils, paperclips and personal copies I have unthinkingly pilfered from my employers over the past thirty years all began to tumble through my brain. That’s just how it is; someone tells you not to think about a purple elephant and immediately you envision a two hundred pound, toe-dancing, lavender pachyderm in your mind. No way around it.
It occurred to me after it was all over that the polygraph examiner probably knows and expects you to think about all your transgressions. It’s part of having a conscience and that is really what they are looking for. So when he throws questions out such as: have you ever had sex with an animal? Or have you ever consciously caused bodily harm to another person? He probably already knows the answers and would only be shocked if the needle leapt off the page. At the time that is not apparent, though, and my mind was racing. Does he mean a literal animal or does he mean the crazy idiot I dated briefly last year? It was not a fun experience and caused me a lot of soul searching but I doubt the polygraph examiner cared about that. He just kept jotting down little notes and nodding and making mmm-mmm sounds while the needle kept moving along.
An interesting point about a polygraph, at least the polygraph they administered in my case, was that they asked five basic questions, each one of them in a hundred different ways. Do you use, produce or sell drugs? Are you a thief? Do you abuse kids or enjoy kinky sex? Are you a bully? Are you whacko? (Whacko is a legitimate medical term I picked up from one of the psychologists at the jail, and I trusted that he would know ). They have so many ways of asking the same five questions it is really amazing, and you don’t realize they are asking those same five questions until the whole thing is over.
I happened to go to a private art college about a mile or so from the University of California at Berkeley in 1965-66, just the time when all the anti-war, love, peace and drugs-for-all culture was at its peak. It was extremely interesting to me and I watched with amazement all the sit-ins, lay-downs, marches, fights and such, while reading the underground newspapers with an insatiable appetite. I even watched in horror as a young girl, under the influence of a very good LSD trip, tried to fly off one of the quad buildings and ended up by killing herself - something I have never gotten out of my mind’s eye to this day.
I attended a few parties where the air was so thick with the sweet smell of burning hemp it almost gagged you, and I watched students dancing in merry abandon after consuming some innocent looking homemade brownies, all the while thinking to myself that my Ozzie & Harriet parents would be aghast if they knew the world I was experiencing. I had been brought up differently. I loved and respected my country and would never protest a war, I got my high from surfing and did not need drugs, while rules and laws were there for the good of mankind and were never to be broken. Challenged, perhaps, but never blatantly broken. My parents had no idea what was going on around me in my safe, private little art school.
I have never, in spite of all my experiences before and since, ever tried drugs. Not even marijuana. In fact, I never have even tried a cigarette. It had nothing to do with being a good girl or respecting the laws. It was because I just wasn’t interested. I had a lot of fun just being me, and the goofy things my friends and I did (like running through the old graveyard above the college at midnight) were plenty exciting enough to keep my adrenalin up and pumping. I didn’t particularly care about what was “cool” and it seemed to me that the kids who kept themselves high spent most of their time staring at their fingers or flopping around on the grass. I had better things to do.
The point I am getting to is that the polygraph examiner must have asked me the drugs question a gazillion ways and times, each time enunciating the question a bit more carefully, as if I had not heard him correctly. Finally, after trying to catch me in a fib about my assumed drug use, he paused and asked me: “Do you mean to tell me you went to college up at Berkeley in 1966 and you have never tried a drug?”
I think I shrugged and gave him my best look of annoyance, “Does the machine say I am lying?” I asked.
The polygraph examiner made one of those sounds like he had an avocado seed stuck in his throat and marked something on the exam strip, “No!” he mumbled, and then went on. Whether or not he was convinced I had never tried an illegal drug is still unknown to me. He must have, though, because he passed me on the polygraph. Of course, it’s possible he just assumed I was a pathological liar.
stay tuned.....
*Now have always considered myself to be a rather decent person. I have never robbed a bank, killed my neighbor or set cats on fire, and if anyone were to be asked about my ethics I would probably earn an A-minus. None of this matters when you are strapped into a big, leather and wood chair that resembles Ol’ Sparky in the movie The Green Mile with bands and sensors hooked to various areas of your body. Instantly your blood pressure rises and as the polygraph examiner stoically tells you not to think about all the little things you have done in your life that is exactly what you think about. There was the quarter I stole from the collection plate in Sunday School at age six, the lipstick I shoplifted from the neighborhood drug store at age eleven, and the four hundred and six pencils, paperclips and personal copies I have unthinkingly pilfered from my employers over the past thirty years all began to tumble through my brain. That’s just how it is; someone tells you not to think about a purple elephant and immediately you envision a two hundred pound, toe-dancing, lavender pachyderm in your mind. No way around it.
It occurred to me after it was all over that the polygraph examiner probably knows and expects you to think about all your transgressions. It’s part of having a conscience and that is really what they are looking for. So when he throws questions out such as: have you ever had sex with an animal? Or have you ever consciously caused bodily harm to another person? He probably already knows the answers and would only be shocked if the needle leapt off the page. At the time that is not apparent, though, and my mind was racing. Does he mean a literal animal or does he mean the crazy idiot I dated briefly last year? It was not a fun experience and caused me a lot of soul searching but I doubt the polygraph examiner cared about that. He just kept jotting down little notes and nodding and making mmm-mmm sounds while the needle kept moving along.
An interesting point about a polygraph, at least the polygraph they administered in my case, was that they asked five basic questions, each one of them in a hundred different ways. Do you use, produce or sell drugs? Are you a thief? Do you abuse kids or enjoy kinky sex? Are you a bully? Are you whacko? (Whacko is a legitimate medical term I picked up from one of the psychologists at the jail, and I trusted that he would know ). They have so many ways of asking the same five questions it is really amazing, and you don’t realize they are asking those same five questions until the whole thing is over.
I happened to go to a private art college about a mile or so from the University of California at Berkeley in 1965-66, just the time when all the anti-war, love, peace and drugs-for-all culture was at its peak. It was extremely interesting to me and I watched with amazement all the sit-ins, lay-downs, marches, fights and such, while reading the underground newspapers with an insatiable appetite. I even watched in horror as a young girl, under the influence of a very good LSD trip, tried to fly off one of the quad buildings and ended up by killing herself - something I have never gotten out of my mind’s eye to this day.
I attended a few parties where the air was so thick with the sweet smell of burning hemp it almost gagged you, and I watched students dancing in merry abandon after consuming some innocent looking homemade brownies, all the while thinking to myself that my Ozzie & Harriet parents would be aghast if they knew the world I was experiencing. I had been brought up differently. I loved and respected my country and would never protest a war, I got my high from surfing and did not need drugs, while rules and laws were there for the good of mankind and were never to be broken. Challenged, perhaps, but never blatantly broken. My parents had no idea what was going on around me in my safe, private little art school.
I have never, in spite of all my experiences before and since, ever tried drugs. Not even marijuana. In fact, I never have even tried a cigarette. It had nothing to do with being a good girl or respecting the laws. It was because I just wasn’t interested. I had a lot of fun just being me, and the goofy things my friends and I did (like running through the old graveyard above the college at midnight) were plenty exciting enough to keep my adrenalin up and pumping. I didn’t particularly care about what was “cool” and it seemed to me that the kids who kept themselves high spent most of their time staring at their fingers or flopping around on the grass. I had better things to do.
The point I am getting to is that the polygraph examiner must have asked me the drugs question a gazillion ways and times, each time enunciating the question a bit more carefully, as if I had not heard him correctly. Finally, after trying to catch me in a fib about my assumed drug use, he paused and asked me: “Do you mean to tell me you went to college up at Berkeley in 1966 and you have never tried a drug?”
I think I shrugged and gave him my best look of annoyance, “Does the machine say I am lying?” I asked.
The polygraph examiner made one of those sounds like he had an avocado seed stuck in his throat and marked something on the exam strip, “No!” he mumbled, and then went on. Whether or not he was convinced I had never tried an illegal drug is still unknown to me. He must have, though, because he passed me on the polygraph. Of course, it’s possible he just assumed I was a pathological liar.
stay tuned.....
Sunday, August 16, 2009
In the beginning
About three years before I retired I began to read back over hundreds of pages of notes I had kept during my career, thinking about the people I had known and worked with and around, chuckling at some of the memories, shedding tears at others. All the events in my memories are true, but all the names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty. After all, you know who you are...right?
The inmate kite was rumpled, stained with something brown (coffee, I hoped) and lying on the floor next to the Sergeant’s desk. The handwriting resembled that of my four-year-old grandson’s and it read: “Need to see psike havng flashis and exploshuns in my brane.” It was not the first inmate kite (request form) I had ever read and certainly not the most interesting, but there was a moment’s hesitation when I wondered if I should call out the bomb squad. It made me pause in my day’s duties to think back on all the multitudes of requests from all the hundreds of inmates I have mused over during the past fourteen years. Everything from explosions in their brains, phone calls to the Governor and marriage proposals, it has run the gamut. I have met and worked with literally every type of human being with every known mental and personality disorder, addiction, phobia, paranoia and just plain rotten luck that could be imagined. To date I have been pretty much unscathed by it all and don’t regret a single day of my career, but if someone were to ask me, on the day of the Exploding Brain kite, why I had become a Detention Officer and what I got from it, I would have had trouble explaining.
I was forty two years old the winter it began, newly divorced and freshly relocated from the suburbs of Southern California to the mountains of Prescott, Arizona, without a clue on earth as to what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I had taken a job at one of the small, local newspapers doing graphic art and designing advertising just to pay my living expenses. My background, education and degree were all in the arts after all, and I had so far managed to keep my head above water doing newspaper ads. It was poverty level living, but respectable work. The problem was there was no future in it, no benefits and no real security, plus the fact that doing advertising layouts day after day tended to take the creative edge off of my spirit. I really was tired of it.
That was when I read the ad in the “other” local paper: “Detention Officers needed. Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office. No experience necessary. $17,350 yr. Full benefits. Women & minorities urged to apply.” That was what got me at first: women urged to apply! I could do that. I was a woman. And I fit the second requirement, as well; I had no experience whatsoever. That was two of the criteria without even trying! The third qualification I had was that I really could use $17,350 a year in wages, plus benefits. I was making a whopping $6.00 an hour at the paper which amounted to $12,480 a year if I took no sick days or vacations. It was not a big decision to make. I had nothing to lose. I applied.
Back in those days (1989) the hiring process for a Detention Officer was not really all that complicated: background questionnaire, note from a doctor saying you had a heart beat and some level of blood pressure, and an oral board of assorted people from the jail itself who wanted to know why I thought I would make a good Detention Officer. I really had no idea how to answer that question because I did not even know what a Detention Officer did, but I was always good at bluffing. I loved essay tests in school because I could write pages on a subject without ever saying anything incriminating. It seemed to me that telling this oral board my real qualifications - that I needed the pay and the benefits - would not sit well with them so I bluffed. I told them how I wanted to have a career with some meaning, to do something for the community, yada, yada, yada. It must have worked because they bought it. Years later I came to find out my bluffing tactics were totally unnecessary. Most of the people who applied to work in the jail were after the same thing: pay and benefits. At any rate, they evidently saw some redeeming feature in me because they told me I had passed the oral boards and now came the last step of the hiring process: the dreaded Polygraph.
** Hang onto your seats...more to follow!**
The inmate kite was rumpled, stained with something brown (coffee, I hoped) and lying on the floor next to the Sergeant’s desk. The handwriting resembled that of my four-year-old grandson’s and it read: “Need to see psike havng flashis and exploshuns in my brane.” It was not the first inmate kite (request form) I had ever read and certainly not the most interesting, but there was a moment’s hesitation when I wondered if I should call out the bomb squad. It made me pause in my day’s duties to think back on all the multitudes of requests from all the hundreds of inmates I have mused over during the past fourteen years. Everything from explosions in their brains, phone calls to the Governor and marriage proposals, it has run the gamut. I have met and worked with literally every type of human being with every known mental and personality disorder, addiction, phobia, paranoia and just plain rotten luck that could be imagined. To date I have been pretty much unscathed by it all and don’t regret a single day of my career, but if someone were to ask me, on the day of the Exploding Brain kite, why I had become a Detention Officer and what I got from it, I would have had trouble explaining.
I was forty two years old the winter it began, newly divorced and freshly relocated from the suburbs of Southern California to the mountains of Prescott, Arizona, without a clue on earth as to what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I had taken a job at one of the small, local newspapers doing graphic art and designing advertising just to pay my living expenses. My background, education and degree were all in the arts after all, and I had so far managed to keep my head above water doing newspaper ads. It was poverty level living, but respectable work. The problem was there was no future in it, no benefits and no real security, plus the fact that doing advertising layouts day after day tended to take the creative edge off of my spirit. I really was tired of it.
That was when I read the ad in the “other” local paper: “Detention Officers needed. Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office. No experience necessary. $17,350 yr. Full benefits. Women & minorities urged to apply.” That was what got me at first: women urged to apply! I could do that. I was a woman. And I fit the second requirement, as well; I had no experience whatsoever. That was two of the criteria without even trying! The third qualification I had was that I really could use $17,350 a year in wages, plus benefits. I was making a whopping $6.00 an hour at the paper which amounted to $12,480 a year if I took no sick days or vacations. It was not a big decision to make. I had nothing to lose. I applied.
Back in those days (1989) the hiring process for a Detention Officer was not really all that complicated: background questionnaire, note from a doctor saying you had a heart beat and some level of blood pressure, and an oral board of assorted people from the jail itself who wanted to know why I thought I would make a good Detention Officer. I really had no idea how to answer that question because I did not even know what a Detention Officer did, but I was always good at bluffing. I loved essay tests in school because I could write pages on a subject without ever saying anything incriminating. It seemed to me that telling this oral board my real qualifications - that I needed the pay and the benefits - would not sit well with them so I bluffed. I told them how I wanted to have a career with some meaning, to do something for the community, yada, yada, yada. It must have worked because they bought it. Years later I came to find out my bluffing tactics were totally unnecessary. Most of the people who applied to work in the jail were after the same thing: pay and benefits. At any rate, they evidently saw some redeeming feature in me because they told me I had passed the oral boards and now came the last step of the hiring process: the dreaded Polygraph.
** Hang onto your seats...more to follow!**
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
