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.