Jail then Prison || 2
Six and a Wake-Up
This is the 2nd article in a series. You can read the previous one here.
Just a wake-up now!
Every morning Mark would tell me the number of days until Tuesday. And when Tuesday would arrive and we’d find ourselves in the same old jail he’d shake his head and start the count over again with, “6 and a wake-up!”
Mark was an older guy, mid-50s maybe, with a big scar across his face. Not sure how it got there, but I’m sure it’s related to the cause of his heroin addiction. Almost every addict I met had some sort of physical flaw — the type of thing you’d see on the face of a villain in a Disney movie.
Society shunned him and made him feel like an outcast. Dope welcomed him and made him feel warm.
I’ll admit that when I first met him I was intimidated. He was a big guy, a fast talker, and people seemed to respect him. But as time went on and I got to know him, I realized he was a lot like me. He liked to laugh and have a good time, even though we were in a shit-hole.
Mark and I were sentenced on the same day about 7 months prior. Inmates who were sentenced were transferred from jail to prison on Tuesdays. We weren’t supposed to know this officially, of course, but it’s not hard to spot the patterns. Tuesday was the day — we just didn’t know which Tuesday. And the fact that it was early January meant we had just gone through a bunch of Tuesdays that fell on holidays and Mark kept restarting his countdowns.
When I got to the kitchen for work that Monday morning, I was called into the supervisor’s office.
“Show Dee Tarrow how to cook today,” she ordered.
She was referring to a guy named de la Torre, but she was too obtuse to try to pronounce it correctly. De la Torre had been dutifully washing dishes for a couple of months - ever since the Starbucks incident.1
Ricky overheard the supervisor’s command and came up to me right away with an outstretched hand. “Well man, it’s been good doin’ time with you,” he said.
I grabbed his hand and clapped him on the back. “You too man. Hurry up and get sentenced so you can join me down the road.” Ricky had been in the kitchens for almost a year while he was going through the courts for his crimes. He had something like 37 felonies to deal with.
Cornwhistle overheard the exchange too and chimed in. “Ey yo, you’re goin down the road? Hell yea man, get the fuck outta here. I was sentenced about a month after you were, so I should be joinin’ you soon.”
The kitchen supervisor stormed out of the office and shouted, “nobody’s going anywhere, now get back to work!”
She was trying to keep her poker face (and her job), but by the end of the shift she called me back into the office and wished me good luck in my future. Must be hard to run a kitchen to feed a thousand people with workers coming and going, especially if you only get a day of notice and you aren’t allowed to tell anyone that it’s their last day.
Back in the pod that evening I picked up the phone and called my old lady.2
“I don’t know what the phone situation is gonna be like after today, so you might not hear from me for a few weeks,” I told her. “But I should be able to write you. Just keep an eye on the website3 and you’ll know where I am and how to write me. I’ll call you when I can.”
“I’m nervous,” she told me. “I know you’ve been looking forward to getting out of that jail, but at least you’re close to home right now. The closest prison is over an hour away.”
Mark was in my ear while I was trying to reassure her, “just a wake-up now, ahh ha ha,” his fists were in the air in his excitement. He had been to prison before and could personally vouch for it.
“Receiving is gonna suck,” he’d tell me. “The first 2 weeks you’re stuck in a cell for 24 hours a day. It’s like being in the hole except you can keep your property, at least. Any books you have, or a deck of cards or whatever. Commissary food too — but ain’t no microwaves in the cell. After receiving you get to where you’re gonna be though and it’s a new kinda freedom. A big rec yard and you can see trees in the distance. Trees man! And grass under your feet. Real grass! Fuck these concrete pads man. Oh yea, just 1 more wake-up now, ahh ha ha!”
All I could do was try to pass on Mark’s excitement through the phone for the remainder of our call until it was time to lock down for the night.
Pack your shit. You’re moving.
The knock on the cell door came at 4am and it didn’t take long for me to get my t-shirts, underwear, socks, and stationery into my laundry bag. There’s usually no warning before you get moved — especially when moving between facilities. The theory is that people could make arrangements to get help escaping if they had prior knowledge of when they were being transported. But I’m not El Chapo.
I was taken back down to booking and fed a hasty breakfast. I gave back the state-issued scrubs and was put into an orange jumpsuit before being shackled up like I was when they brought me here.4
Legs cuffed and chained together. Hands cuffed in front with a little black box over the chain forcing the insides of my wrists to face each other at all times. Another chain to go around my waist and attach to the black box and the chains between my feet. Apparently the guy who invented the little black box was a former inmate himself. Fuck that guy and his little black box — that thing is awful.
I was put into the back of a van with Mark and a couple other guys I had been doing time with for the last few months. The guy driving the van was the same guy who strip-searched me when I arrived at the jail. The woman in the passenger seat set a loaded shotgun in the mount between the front seats. The garage door lifted, and we set off.
It was the first time I’d been in a moving vehicle for 7 months. The driver was driving like he was in a racing simulator — almost certainly doing 15 or 20mph over the speed limit at times. Luckily the roads were fairly straight or I might have felt a bit of motion sickness.
When we arrived, the van drove around the new facility to the sally port at the back. Along the way, we could see hundreds of inmates through the razor wire walking around a massive rec yard. Several basketball courts, a soccer field, a softball field, a volleyball court, a weightlifting area, and dogs. At least 2 dogs running around the yard off-leash and interacting playfully with everyone.
“They got dogs here?” said Jared. “Damn, I want a dog.” In jail I shared a pod with Jared for a couple of months — and I was about to share a cell with him for the next 2 weeks. He was big, loud, brash, didn’t smile much, and had a lisp like Mike Tyson (his physical flaw). He was also full of quirks that surprised me at first, but I would later come to adopt a few of them myself.
“Don’t stand behind me, man,” he had said in the jail pod. He was sitting in a chair and I was posted up on the wall about 6 feet behind him right by the door to my cell. I had just arrived in the pod that day and didn’t really know where I wanted to be, but he told me where I couldn’t be. “I don’t like when people are behind me,” he said.
The van pulled into the sally port and stopped. We got out one at a time and were taken into a small building where we were strip searched and our laundry bags were searched and put through an x-ray machine. Then we were led down a short sidewalk to one of the smaller L-shaped buildings — the administrative housing unit. One wing of the L was the hole. The other wing was like an honors dorm. Some inmates with special jobs — like dog handlers, and grounds maintenance crews — lived here. A few cells in the honors wing were reserved for us — the new arrivals awaiting processing.
Welcome to the rock.
Said the Sergeant who could never be seen without a toothpick in his mouth as he led us down the short sidewalk. To our left, through a chain-link fence, we could see inmates at the commissary window filling up laundry bags so full of food that they had to sling them over their shoulders, the bottoms damn near dragging on the ground as they made the long walk back to their housing units.
“What, you think you’re Sean Connery or something?” said Mark.
Before the Sergeant could respond one of the guys at the commissary window yelled out, “fresh meat!”
I was caught off guard when Mark responded, “hey, fuck you! You just wait a couple weeks and I’ll be on the other side of this fence and you can say that to my face. I’ll show you some fresh meat then motherfucker.”
There’s an inmate locator website.