Jail Bird

Nearly all of my life has been dictated on my terms, and I pretty much act and do whatever I want without consideration to the consequences of my actions. Unfortunately, I have finally been spayed and neutered. During my final year at UCSB, over winter break, instead of going snowboarding in Tahoe or getting sloshed in Vegas and buying hookers and blow, I was the lucky recipient of being sentenced to twenty-two days in the San Luis Obispo County Jail.

Throughout my entire life, neither my parents, nor teachers, nor drug counselors have been able to impart any wisdom into my complex and convoluted morality system. I am far and away the cockiest and most arrogant person I know. I am completely selfish, and until I was about 20 years old, I didn’t even realize that my actions affected other people. I loved living in this fantasy world, where no one mattered but me. Sadly, like any Shakespearean Tragedy, your protagonist must eventually meet his maker, and mine came in the form of a balding decrepit judge and an over-zealous district attorney who couldn’t find matching parts for his suit at the Goodwill.

While I was certainly not housed with the television clad stereo-type, of a 330lb. Crip gang-member, nor did Squirrel Man defend me from Nasty Nate to protect my fruit cup, I did learn how to sequester my personality and my loud mouth. This primarily meant not making off the cuff remarks about everyone’s inability to speak English with even the slightest form of proper linguistic training, or telling the guards that it would serve them well not to eat food prepared by inmates.

Although jail is supposed to be a dark, morose, and depressing place, I couldn’t help but to laugh at the absurdity of everything and one around me.

Here are some examples:

*MY NEW NOMENCLATURE*


Correctional Officer – A/K/A – C.O. (n):

This is the fat, white, doughy, douchebag that is supposed to be emulating an officer of the law. Instead, he is an obnoxious and condescending pole-smoker who wields his power over 18-25 year old kids to boost his deflated self image. Perhaps this symptom is brought about by the fact he knows his life is a complete failure, or that his obese beat-down wife of six years thinks the thought of sex is disgusting, and he is thus relegated to masturbation, after she puts the three kids to sleep. This is the guy in high school who never got laid, was overweight, ugly, and was most undoubtedly made fun of by people like me.

Karma is a bitch.


Barter (v):

An exchange of goods for another type of good or service. This occurs when you are trying to get clean clothes from out of your locker and some cholo, who is clearly gang affiliated, walks up to you and propositions you with the following:

Cholo: Ay, so wud up homez?
Ryan: Not much man.
Cholo: Ay, so lemme’ ask you sumptin.
Ryan: Yeah, what’s up?
Cholo: So you smoke cigz or wut homez?
Ryan: Yeah, why?
Cholo: So, check dis. I can get you like a tub of peenit butter like diz big so you can make some sanwhiches and shit homez. I’ll trade it to you for like 4 cigz.

I blankly stare and try to come up with a diplomatic response that will not offend him.

Ryan: No thanks man. Maybe later though
Cholo: O.K. homez, lemme know if you be needin it later though


Riding the Pine (v):

To sit outside on a group of wooden benches, all fucking day long. Of course because jail sucks, society has deemed it necessary for you to be woken up at 5:30 a.m. to eat and then be herded outside like mindless cattle to freeze on said benches. This activity is especially gruesome when either raining and/or windy. To further demoralize inmates who are ‘riding the pine’, a basketball and volleyball court are positioned right next to these benches, just to reemphasize the fact that your life sucks, because the Correctional Officer’s won’t let you play.

I contend that the benches themselves exist outside of the current mathematical model of Space-Time by Albert Einstein which states that time, gravity, and space are all unified. It is my postulation that time is so greatly warped around these benches and slowed down to such an infinitesimally small segment just so God can mock you.


Chow (n):

A form of matter. I know this because it occupies a space and has mass. I assume it is meant for human consumption, but starvation looked just as appetizing. Chalk full of sodium and got knows what else; this “gray matter” as it was affectionately referred to by some inmates, had many side effects on the healthy functioning human digestive system. The most common adverse effect was nausea. I always kept a full glass of water near me to help choke down this slop into my barren, bile-filled stomach. However this was not the worse part. This allegedly edible horseshit had the effect of eating wet cement. It quickly turned my rectum into a certifiable cinder-block, preventing any excretion from leaving my body. I normally have at least one bowel movement per day; over the twenty-two I was inside, I think I had three.


Retardation (adj.):

Typically thought of as a mental defect that is developed in the mother’s womb (through excessive drinking and methamphetamine consumption) and diagnosed in early childhood. This is wrong. The amount of verbal diarrhea that spouted from people’s mouths was more consistent than the Chicago Cubs not winning a World Series. Malapropisms and misnomers were more abundant than disease on a cheap whore. Every conversation I heard or was a part of lacked any form of critical thinking skills, let alone common sense. This disease can be observed in the inmates with overt displays of being thug or gangsta’. It also afflicts the common meth-addicted inmate, whom cannot for the life of him say or contribute anything meaningful to a conversation without relating it back to shooting up.


The Fish Tank (n):

The women’s section of a county jail. The name is derived from the rank potpourri of bad pussy and cum-laden breath of the women who are serving their debt to society. While I never personally stepped foot in this labyrinth of beaten wives and ex-girlfriends, I did occasionally see them and often was told stories of the type of girl who resided therein. To say these girls were ugly is a compliment. Most couldn’t find work as a Tijuana hooker. While nearly all of the men in jail are certainly repulsive and useless masses of human life, the woman go above and beyond this terribly true characterization. I begrudgingly went without sex or rubbing one out for twenty-two days, but whenever I found myself getting half-chub in my pants, I quickly thought of this place, and like clockwork my dick would crawl back inside like a scared turtle.


Stay up playa’ (v):

A farewell. Usually spoken from one inmate to another as one is about to be released from custody. The convict saying the farewell is a fat freckly doofus. The recipient has the social I.Q. of an untrained hamster. Naturally, both the inmate leaving custody and the one still inside are both unambiguously redneck, therefore the phrase must me enounced in an extremely ghetto inflection that persons of his culture have come to adopt. Also it is fitting when the person yelling said phrase resembles the catcher from the Sandlot (on meth).



MY NEW FRIENDS

*My Bunkmate – A/K/A – Bunkie*

This three-hundred pound gorilla looked like he recently got out of a Neo-Nazi hate camp. He had all the tell-tale signs of being a Hitler Youth, and brought up in some broken trailer park in the Midwest. The expression on his face was congruent to the guy with the bitter beer face. Tattoo’s adorned both arms from shoulder to wrist, with depictions of satanic emblems, fiery skulls, and of course the crowd favorite, the swastika. My personal favorites were the tattoos’ emblazoned across his back and the one atop that dome shaped melon of a head. The one on his back proudly stated that “Jesus Was A Pussy,” and the Iron Cross was stamped over about 30% of his head. Yes, my Bunkie was undeniably a misguided youth-turned neo-Nazi, which I could forgive, if it weren’t for his enormous lack of dedication to the white power movement.

He would constantly and enthusiastically engage in conversations with minorities, as well as use a dialect that closely mirrored 50-Cent, and not your typical Ku Klux Klansmen. I often sat and watched this stout speed freak, just to laugh at the constant contradictions of his claimed heritage/ideology to his mannerisms and character traits.

His skin was that white/pinkish pasty hue, brought about by years huddled inside a trailer cooking methamphetamine. I honestly could not tell whether this real life Shrek had psoriasis or just hundreds of skin lesions peppered across his body. He always boasted about having sex with numerous hot girls (Cue my gag reflex), yet I truly believe most people would rather contract S.A.R.S. than to have to endure such a grotesque and disfigured body form.

*The Tweakers*

This hodgepodge of maladjusted and socially inadequate inmates was far and away the most prevalent group within the jail population. Because this social group was so large and undeniably hilarious, I will describe some of the characteristics of all of them as a single entity.

Teeth were a rare commodity for most of the tweakers that I encountered. I think I met one with a full set. And they were dentures. Now personally, I have never tried meth (or at least I won’t publicly admit to it), but I do understand addiction. In just the short time I have inhabited this tiny blue planet, I would say I have at one point been legally addicted to at least three different substances. However, the meth addict is a completely different breed. I enjoy a bender as much as the next guy, taking a nice three or four day vacation from reality and immersing myself in a plethora of cocaine, ecstasy, or alcohol. But it eventually comes to a grinding halt on Sunday morning when I wake up in a puddle of my own vomit and sweat, with a headache only an eight-ball of coke and a handle of cheap vodka can produce. This group however, will do almost anything to procure this drug. At all times, and by any means necessary. I am pretty sure, had I possessed a gram of meth, I could have gotten my dick sucked by at least a handful of inmates, a dozen times each.

Tweakers wore their scars like badges of honor from Vietnam, each proudly displaying their tract marks of where their favorite spot to shoot the drug into their vein was. Another distinct characteristic of this subspecies was the incessant moving of the jaw. It was as if a puppet master were moving their ventriloquist dummy, mashing together the yellow, baked bean like teeth in a quick, jerky motion. I don’t know whether to feel bad for these people or to laugh openly in their face. I will go with the latter, mostly due to the fact I was the source of much ridicule as I was deemed “Not addicted to cigarettes” because I refused to pick butts out of the trash can and empty the discarded tobacco into cellophane so as to roll another death stick.