County
July 21, 1996 Sunday
I left my journal, the one I was writing in before this, in the cab I rode home in after I was released from the county jail. I also left Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Chandler's The High Window in that cab, and a folder full of papers I thought I was going to correct while I was in there, haha, and the entrance ticket to my class at the university. The bailiff took all of that from me, though.
They put us all in a cage in a bus, we the -ers: we beaners, we niggers, we few ragged, shaggy, Irish-looking white motherfucker crackers, the occasional oriental, packed we are in the first cage, and then they bring in a half dozen squabbin' hos, they screeching bitch-ass-ho at each other and from we men in the other cage comes the sounds of the heart of darkness, wild gibbering, the bugling of bulls, the whooping of primates, we. Dobbs and the Harley-head look on through their mirrored lenses, grinning madly. Dobbs hammers the cage with his billy, and the Harley-head fires up the bus and cranks up some old country music, and the jungle goes insane with howling, and in the mirror you see his grin get even bigger.
A WHITE COCKROACH, locked in among the usual darker ones, an albino mutant, never exposed to sunlight, like the fish in the deep ponds of deep Lecheguilla, crawling benignly it was, over the unidentifiable grime that streaked and splotched the walls of the closet-sized cell where I was locked with the transvestites in the courthouse on Hill Street. I had surrendered by the order of Judge Anthony Filosa, on 1:30 on Friday. We were escorted to a holding cell where we were stripped of our belongings, including my asthma medicine. While I waited in line with the gangbangers and hustlers, a deputy poked me in the chest with his billy club. "Where'd you get that shirt?" he barked at me. I looked down. My dad attends the annual relay of law enforcement teams in a run through the desert from Baker to Vegas. "My dad," I said. "Who's your dad?" When I told him, he freaked and cussed me hatefully and told me what a shit-head I am and asked if I was trying to get myself killed, and separted me from the general prison population for K10 special handling and cuffed me to a bench in a closet where they put she-males.
I spent the next 12 hours handcuffed to one bench after another, snot running over my lips because I couldn't lift my cuffed hands to my face. I watch a deputy walk by and he puts his hand on my throat and screams at me, "Listen you dumb fucking fish, you don't look at me! You stare straight ahead or I put your fucking head through the wall." He's about five foot five and his muscles are ballooning with roid rage and he's bellowing, but he's not squeezing hard. #13, Lazy, butthole inspection, the medical cunt, can't breathe, fucked up headache. I spent a couple days in a cell by myself. Black dude in the cell next to me read aloud from his Bible and offered me a toke from a joint that I was afraid to accept. They moved me upstairs to a psych ward and locked me in a room with a, I'm assuming, paranoid schizophrenic, who was locked up, he claimed, because he knew too much and he had been, and still was, under constant surveillance. I played along. Then came some voluble, black guy who couldn't stop laughing and talking and telling funny stories about the day he got the whole joint high, how he'd been busted for stealing $10,000 in an armed robbery, how his girlfriend stabbed him with and icepick in a typical female betrayal in Indiana. In Ventura he was in love with a dope whore. Then came a Latino dude, arms covered with tatooos, saying he was in for parking tickets, then saying he was in for a coke set up. All the while they talk, I say little, and the tripper keeps peppering the conversation with his paranoid delusions. The senior, the broom-pushing trusty, mucous, 13's salvation and love hanging ten feet away on the wall in the form of a payphone; they won't let him near, 25 days sofar.... The smell of old socks permeates the place. Butao, sherriffs, Weisenstein, Blake, fuckers all. When I finally got processed back out, and threw my blues in the hamper, I stood at a counter in my underwear in front of two giggling deputies who said my Levis and t-shirt had been lost. They gave me some gay dolphin shorts and a lavender tank top that covered only one nipple at a time and said if I didn't like it, they could book my ass back into the system while I looked for my clothes. I couldn't get my wallet or keys or money or any of that until business hours, so they put me on the street dressed like a gay hooker with no money. Some dick cabbie, Iranian I think, wouldn't let me get in his cab.
4:30 AM I finally got home. Shirelle paid the cabbie for me. We humped first thing. A few hours of sleep, then back to jail for my $dough. I ate french toast at Cocos. Napped all day.
I left my journal, the one I was writing in before this, in the cab I rode home in after I was released from the county jail. I also left Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Chandler's The High Window in that cab, and a folder full of papers I thought I was going to correct while I was in there, haha, and the entrance ticket to my class at the university. The bailiff took all of that from me, though.
They put us all in a cage in a bus, we the -ers: we beaners, we niggers, we few ragged, shaggy, Irish-looking white motherfucker crackers, the occasional oriental, packed we are in the first cage, and then they bring in a half dozen squabbin' hos, they screeching bitch-ass-ho at each other and from we men in the other cage comes the sounds of the heart of darkness, wild gibbering, the bugling of bulls, the whooping of primates, we. Dobbs and the Harley-head look on through their mirrored lenses, grinning madly. Dobbs hammers the cage with his billy, and the Harley-head fires up the bus and cranks up some old country music, and the jungle goes insane with howling, and in the mirror you see his grin get even bigger.
A WHITE COCKROACH, locked in among the usual darker ones, an albino mutant, never exposed to sunlight, like the fish in the deep ponds of deep Lecheguilla, crawling benignly it was, over the unidentifiable grime that streaked and splotched the walls of the closet-sized cell where I was locked with the transvestites in the courthouse on Hill Street. I had surrendered by the order of Judge Anthony Filosa, on 1:30 on Friday. We were escorted to a holding cell where we were stripped of our belongings, including my asthma medicine. While I waited in line with the gangbangers and hustlers, a deputy poked me in the chest with his billy club. "Where'd you get that shirt?" he barked at me. I looked down. My dad attends the annual relay of law enforcement teams in a run through the desert from Baker to Vegas. "My dad," I said. "Who's your dad?" When I told him, he freaked and cussed me hatefully and told me what a shit-head I am and asked if I was trying to get myself killed, and separted me from the general prison population for K10 special handling and cuffed me to a bench in a closet where they put she-males.
I spent the next 12 hours handcuffed to one bench after another, snot running over my lips because I couldn't lift my cuffed hands to my face. I watch a deputy walk by and he puts his hand on my throat and screams at me, "Listen you dumb fucking fish, you don't look at me! You stare straight ahead or I put your fucking head through the wall." He's about five foot five and his muscles are ballooning with roid rage and he's bellowing, but he's not squeezing hard. #13, Lazy, butthole inspection, the medical cunt, can't breathe, fucked up headache. I spent a couple days in a cell by myself. Black dude in the cell next to me read aloud from his Bible and offered me a toke from a joint that I was afraid to accept. They moved me upstairs to a psych ward and locked me in a room with a, I'm assuming, paranoid schizophrenic, who was locked up, he claimed, because he knew too much and he had been, and still was, under constant surveillance. I played along. Then came some voluble, black guy who couldn't stop laughing and talking and telling funny stories about the day he got the whole joint high, how he'd been busted for stealing $10,000 in an armed robbery, how his girlfriend stabbed him with and icepick in a typical female betrayal in Indiana. In Ventura he was in love with a dope whore. Then came a Latino dude, arms covered with tatooos, saying he was in for parking tickets, then saying he was in for a coke set up. All the while they talk, I say little, and the tripper keeps peppering the conversation with his paranoid delusions. The senior, the broom-pushing trusty, mucous, 13's salvation and love hanging ten feet away on the wall in the form of a payphone; they won't let him near, 25 days sofar.... The smell of old socks permeates the place. Butao, sherriffs, Weisenstein, Blake, fuckers all. When I finally got processed back out, and threw my blues in the hamper, I stood at a counter in my underwear in front of two giggling deputies who said my Levis and t-shirt had been lost. They gave me some gay dolphin shorts and a lavender tank top that covered only one nipple at a time and said if I didn't like it, they could book my ass back into the system while I looked for my clothes. I couldn't get my wallet or keys or money or any of that until business hours, so they put me on the street dressed like a gay hooker with no money. Some dick cabbie, Iranian I think, wouldn't let me get in his cab.
4:30 AM I finally got home. Shirelle paid the cabbie for me. We humped first thing. A few hours of sleep, then back to jail for my $dough. I ate french toast at Cocos. Napped all day.
posted by johnz at 6:14 AM
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