Part 37 "Monroe County Florida- you've been warned"- unedited

I found myself in the Monroe County Detention Facility, where I cried for two weeks or more. They sentenced me in a Kangaroo court, giving me ninety days. I soon learned I was front-row to what goes on in the area, like how they get some of their money for the local economy, which is by keeping their jail full. 

They go to great lengths to bring people to jail. If you don’t spend enough money in a particular establishment, the place has one of their buddies on the force arrest you for anything they can get you for. If you don’t leave enough of a tip for your drinks, they will plant contra-band in your coat or cigarette pack when you go to the bathroom, and when you walk out, you will find yourself being stopped by a friendly police officer, only to surprisingly find yourself going to jail for whatever it is they claim to have found on you. If you happen to get in the way somewhere, they’ll arrest you for trespassing. You can walk out with a drink and be on the street drinking it but if they don’t like something about you, you will get arrested for open container because it’s against the law when it’s convenient for them. If you laugh it off, and go back home to Alaska, they will bring you back on the charge. Maybe you’re from Maine or Nantucket? Don’t try to duck it. They get extra federal money, in addition to their regular funding, to back them up, and they’ll bring you back in a bucket. They are getting their money at the taxpayer’s expense. It’s a license to rob people, and they use it every single chance they get. They are still, to this day, trying to get two hundred and forty eight dollars from me, that I refuse to give them, for the fine on the red light charge.

Dennis Reeves Cooper got kicked around so badly by the Key West Police Department that he started his very own newspaper where he takes great pleasure in exploiting the local absurdities. It’s called “Key West, The Blue Paper”.

Key West is sometimes referred to as Bone Island because of the human remains that wash ashore. The Keys were long ago used as sacred burial grounds by Native Americans before any Europeans arrived. It has always been a haven for criminals, that is, ever since the days of Columbus- 520 years. They used to throw up Lighthouses to coax unsuspecting sailing vessels into the shallows, where they ran aground only to find themselves being raided by thieves who came upon them in Skiffs as though they were going to help. Ships crew and Captains found themselves to be robbed and most often killed. The money in the area, originally, came from this practice.

Modern day Land Pirates now coax their prey into the area with the promise of work and good pay. Word on the streets of many states is always touting the Keys as having lots of work- a partial truth. Yes, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, just as anywhere you go. In the coastal region, where there are severe storms and hurricanes battering the shacks and businesses, as well as the constant dilapidation of extreme poverty, there is always work that needs to be done. And if you’re Cuban you get the job because they don’t really want to pay anyone from the states to do it. Between the Cuban people and the drunks, who are willing to work for whatever the pay is that’s available, things are easily dealt with. Everyone else is a sucker, becoming strapped for cash and unable to drive back home, losing their possessions to the pawn shops while being led on that tomorrow things will be different. Tomorrow everything will work out.

The tourists bring the money every other week for the numerous festivals they organize but when it’s gone they count on storm damage claims. Many people file claims that they lost a boat in the storm, to receive money from FEMA, money that does not belong to them nor did they contribute to the taxes that provide the funds to real victims. We mainlanders all pay for their claims, essentially taking the money and using it, in most cases, to buy Cocaine and other drugs, and keeping them supplied with Hurricane Lager and 305’s. They brag about how they seceded but they beg for our money. Every single festival is a beggar, and so many fools go to take part in the deviance. And when it comes to the drugs, the money is going to foreign lands that are waging their own wars against us as a country. Poisons.

Roosevelt declared the Florida Keys a national park. What happened to that, I wonder? It’s a sham and a lot of people know the truth, some of them thankful to have escaped with their lives, unwilling to relive the nightmares with revisiting the memories.  Me? I had to have a hands-on experience. It didn’t occur to me, how much trouble I was going to have. It was suppose to be “easy-peazy”.  It would have been, too, if I had not came with the fool I did or had some family with a lot of money living here or didn’t mind being robbed of all but my regrets.

Every single step I took along the way, there were people asking for change and cigarettes. Forty thousand people are on a two-mile by four-mile slab of crap for an island. I am told ten thousand are thieves, ten thousand are authorities, five thousand are employed and possibly respectable, four thousand live on boats, six hundred live in the jail at any given time, and four hundred live in the shelters, mangroves, streets and rooftops. And here I am, right in the middle of it because of my failure to do some of the homework first. What a fool I was, a drunken fool.

Now, as I am wondering how the world blew up in my hands, I remember Andy and Julie discussing the Witchcraft in the area. Julie tells him that she’s a “White” Witch, and Andy say’s that he’s a “Warlock”, which must be Floridian for Iguana crap because that’s closer to what he resembles than anything. Now, I don’t know much about these sorts of things but there were many clues that the witchcraft business was a bigger piece of the Caribbean area than I could imagine. Maybe it’s because of the excessive exposure to the sun and heat, evaporating the seawater. People are delusional from something, could it be they are drinking the water by breathing the heavy salt air? Am I hallucinating any of this myself? Stranded in the Florida Keys and stranded in my mind, I was just getting started.

They say we are given great difficulties to sort through in life, as we are capable of handling them because God wouldn’t give us challenges that we couldn’t handle. Truth is, I never thought that much of myself but I was definitely being challenged. Could it be the necessary evil to help me to quit drinking? Was it Danny and the angels that were keeping me from giving up in my spirit?

For the first time in my life, I needed serious help. My baby brother, Josh, was living in St. Pete but I couldn’t get him to help. Our father, (my stepfather), had recently moved into his place, so he wouldn’t let me have the address or phone number for fear that I was harboring a violent resentment towards “dad”. Whether that was true or not, obviously, was reinforced with our history and decidedly so, I suppose. Even now, I still have no address for him, and his dad has since moved to Pennsylvania, or so I’ve been told.

It sure would have been nice to have a little moral support from a family member right then. Making attempts to reach someone from jail was hard. A phone call was managed to Bruce, who was on his way down to the Bahamas to have a stay at his family’s resort home.  He planned on coming through the keys first, shooting to the Bahamas after visiting Julie and Andy in Summerland Key. The place was fifteen miles from the Monroe County Detention Facility, where I sat in a dormitory-style cell that held sixty-four men. I hoped for a visit from him. What I hadn’t realized was that he could become negatively influenced by those people he was to visit, which is exactly what happened. He was right there, within fifteen miles of where I was drowning in an ocean of despair but came and went without responding to my distress signal. In the coming years I would discover that Andy and Julie used my identity to purchase a house and a vehicle, when I began looking into correcting my credit score.

There was a bookshelf in the dorm, thank God. It measured thirty inches by forty inches Even though they were very light from dry rotting, guys were using the books as workout equipment, filling pillow cases to lift with them or using them as a barrier between the germs on the floor and their little patties or maybe they were floor protectors... none of it made sense but then again, not much of anything I ever saw an inmate do made sense. “Another Vote to stay in school,” I thought, while trying to find a book to take to my bunk.  It was hard to find a book that wasn’t too destroyed to read, let alone a book worth taking the time to read in the first place but I found and read them as often as I could.

About once a week we were taken out to the “yard”, which was a small part of the building having no roof. It was lame but it was “outside” in the heavy humid air and sunshine. Fighter-jets shot through the air above us, adding a layer to our senses in addition to the stench of island decay.

It was such a disturbing realization, what I’d gotten myself into. I was unable to handle my state of duress. My whole, so-called, life was being yanked out from under me and I couldn’t take it. The nightmares were so bad that they had to relocate me to another part of the jail, where people didn’t have to rest before their slavery on the island. Inmates provide the clean-up labor on the streets and beaches, in their preparation for tourist season and providing the labor for festival cleanup. Most of these guys had jobs to do on the street. But the place they moved me to slowly became interesting, and after a week or two I made a few friends.

The movie, Catch Me If You Can, had two key characters. William Hanratty was the cop, played by Tom Hanks, and Mr. Abagnale was the guy he was after. The Abagnale character is a real person- the uncle of Jean Paul Abagnale. Jean Paul had been living in the keys for some time but was locked up, like so many others, on charges stemming from Cocaine and alcohol. William Hanratty was in his late fifties or early sixties, who was also a Veteran from the Philadelphia area. He was a musician, and like so many others, was playing his guitar on the street for the tourists. He was living on retirement and Veterans benefits and had a mental condition residual from the military and alcoholism.

There were shiploads of musicians, artists, performers and treasure hunters and the like, locked up. It seemed like they all had been associated, in one way or another, with cocaine. There were witches, heathens, and once in a while a normal person- all victims of a struggling economy. Now, I was among them but only until my scheduled release.

When I walked out of jail, a day or two after Christmas, my olfactory senses became filled with the stale smell of cigarettes in the breeze. It was as if I was wearing an ashtray for a respirator. As I left Stock Island, all I could think about was how badly I wanted a cigarette, so that I could have a fresh stink in my nose, while walking along the road leading away from the jail, dressed in litter and filth. Tobacco packages, butts and alcohol containers were like the leaves of fall on the ground.

Crossing the channel was the only road to Key West. This was known as Cow Key Bridge, home to whomever could keep from being arrested, Cow Key being Stock Island. They called it this because it was the shipping port for receiving meat in the lower Keys.

There was a tattered American Flag jury rigged on a stick that was flapping in the winds. It was attached to the side of the guardrail that secured the roadway across the bridge. Looking around, I spotted a man below. I approached, explaining my circumstances and asking for a cigarette. It wasn’t hard to tell that he was another Veteran of the Armed Forces.

Bill Hanratty had told me, but now I saw, that there were lots of vets on the streets in the Keys. Rolling me a cigarette, the man filled me in on many key points to being on the street in the Keys, especially Key West. These were: don’t walk around with a backpack or a duffle bag, stay away from people with them, don’t stop and talk to anyone on a bike or drinking, keep away from the beaches, don’t try to hitchhike, and if you have no place to sleep you need to go to the Safe Zone. The cops cannot touch you at the Safe Zone but between seven a.m. and eight p.m. you have to watch out because if you get stopped, and you have too little money on you for a hotel or a restaurant, they will arrest you for whatever they dream up. There are all kinds of things from disorderly conduct and vagrancy to trespassing. It doesn’t matter if you are clean and legal. And if you try to take it to trial you will sit there while they file for numerous continuances until they give you time served.

Time served means you get out of jail but it also means you are guilty of whatever they say you did. If you try to go to trial, they will get a Psyche evaluation that says you are not fit for trial, which gets them the conviction too. You will not win. Come, spend the money you have and get the hell out. They will take you off of the street if they don’t want you there. You will find no work and if you do, the money will be so small that it will just barely fill your daily needs. Money is your only ticket to freedom, and you need lots of it or just enough to get out on a bus. If you can get some from a family member go to the bus station with it right away- GET OUT.

When I listened to him, part of me was concerned but another part of me was not willing to take his warnings as reality, figuring he was another alcoholic with some type of weird mental condition. Thanking him for his time, the cigarette and his advice, I left for Sean’s.

My walk back to Sean and his girlfriend’s apartment gave me time to think about the words from the Prophet of Cow Key Bridge. It also gave me plenty of things to observe along the way. My hope was for some contrast but I observed much to support what I had just been told. Even still, I had the mindset that I could find work to make the money I came for, and then some. If nothing else, I would be able to sell what tools I now had here to buy a bus ticket home since Julie did me such a huge favor by bringing me a bunch of crap that should never have been brought. The stuff she dropped off at Sean’s was just about every single thing I possessed, things like Danny’s guitar, Four Track recorder, my prototypes of the Dice sculptures I had made for a desktop pencil caddy, air compressor and all sorts of tools and things that I needed a truck to cart around. God bless her pointed little head.

When I got back to the apartment, Sean’s girlfriend explained that she and Sean had broken up. She was moving to the mainland near Jacksonville but I could stay there until she moved out. Sean had come home in the wee hours of the morning with a white crust in his nostrils. Assuming he had been screwing around after the bars shut down, with another woman and drugs, she threw him out. Her generosity included buying me a cell phone to use while trying to find a job- a means of receiving communication from any prospective employers, since mine was now lost in the shuffle.

In the meantime, I had been dragging my tools and air compressor all over the island hoping to be able to sell them to a pawn shop but the pawn shops were filled to the gills, revealing the history of people who spent what little they had to come to the Keys with, hoping to find work. They left what little they had left in life there in order to go back to where they had come from. And those are just the people who were lucky enough to make it out with their lives. It sounds like a bit of an exaggeration, I know, and wish it were, but I swear on the lives of everyone I share love with that it’s the truth. I witnessed it and almost lost my life as well. I was beside myself in shock that Julie had dumped me to be with a junkie. I was enraged that I fell into Andy’s scheme, and that I failed to remember he was no good. How could one man be so stupid, so consistently, as I had been?

My brain worked rationally long enough to realize my wisest decision would be to find a Community Mental Health office.  By now, Sean’s ex-girlfriend had moved out. I was sleeping in Sean’s Oldsmobile that was left in the parking lot at the apartment complex. Before she moved out, I set up an account on an Internet social network. It was my hope to make some friends in the area that could help me. It made sense to use every avenue I could to find a solution. What I found only added to the problem, which happened to be three women who were friends of Julie and Casey- area witches who were always in communication by computer with them.

When they had me over for dinner, which was everything mushrooms, a lot of hints came out in the open. Everyone who knew me knew that I couldn’t eat mushrooms. They added comments about “other” people, conveying things that went on in the past with Julie and Casey. They suddenly vanished shortly after we started hanging out, removing all traces of our “friendship” on the computer.

My days were now being spent getting to know the area. Internet access was found at a K-Mart and the local public library. The K-Mart thing was new, an effort to help bring in a larger customer base but when they found the boat people and homeless to be the ones using the computers the most, they began organizing “technical difficulties”. There was a huge war on the island between the haves and have-nots. The majority are individuals suffering from addiction and poverty, casualties in the game of consumerism- the scrambling to give us an income, only to target us to take the money back. Consumerism makes us work more to have more to spend, making us need and want more of everything, while what we really need becomes neglected and unimportant. Eventually these people become unheard of or from.

Among my thoughts about what I was seeing, I remembered Danny saying that we’d live on a boat. “Yeah, that’s what I’ll do”, I thought. Having a boat to hide on would be better than having to keep walking around for fear of being arrested for vagrancy, and I could find someone else who’s been trapped here that can sail the vessel. With a Captain, we’ll make our way up the coast, up the Saint Lawrence River, into the Great Lakes and up the Grand River- RIGHT BACK HOME! It’s “easy-peazy”, as Danny would say. Now all I had to do was find a boat. And since a hurricane was just through the area, there should be sailboats all over for free or next to nothing. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. It has to float, that’s all. Hoping for a break, I put my ear to the vine.

My feet found the local CMH office, where I was reunited with my medications that I had been prescribed back home. The guy I spoke with seemed genuine, giving me a camouflage Velcro wallet that he had just picked up at a flea market, after I mentioned how I lost my wallet in the process of the moped being impounded. He directed me to some shelters in the area that also served hot meals, explaining that one was a men’s shelter where I might find a room to get back on my feet. All I needed to do was find a job within two weeks. He also gave me the address of an employment center that housed the Department of Human Services, suggesting that I apply for assistance and build a resume for the talent bank. All of these bits of information were uplifting. My confidence in him soon built to what felt like a comfortable level of trust and friendship. With a smile and a renewed spring in my step, I set off for these locations.

When I came out of the building, I had food stamps, Medicaid, and a resume in the Talent Bank that I also submitted to several employment prospects. Finding a bench, I sat down to get my head together, deciding on what to do next. A man was already sitting there smoking a cigarette while waiting for his wife. He gave me one, and we talked about how we both played the Harmonica.

This man and his wife were both homeless, living in a van that was parked somewhere. There was work on Stock Island, at the crab shacks and on fishing boats. He told me I would find some work there. There was also a place called Anchors Away, an A.A. meeting place. The only problem is that you have to walk by every bar, liquor store, drug addict and dope house to get to it. Little did I know, he and his wife were both Crack addicted, and I found myself right in the middle of some kind of drug transaction that I wanted nothing to do with.

I started going to Anchors Away that night for the six-thirty meeting, and then attended every night, hoping someone would see me in my struggle to do good for myself, that would help me to get back home somehow. So many people had ulterior motives that I couldn’t blame any of the A.A. patrons for shutting strangers out. It was not as fruitful as I had hoped, and I never received much by the way of an opportunity but I did receive a kind word and a few dollars.

The men’s shelter served a mid-day meal, so I made it a point to find my way there to get acquainted with how things worked, and whether there was an opportunity for a place to stay there. Eventually, I got to speak with the man who ran the shelter. He reminded me of Danny in so many ways. He was a musician with lots of equipment and guitars. A Golden Retriever named Bailey was his companion, the two of them making for a jovial pair. The fact that he was so unintimidating in appearance and nature, made me at ease. He took me in with requisites that I get a job and stay clean of drugs, alcohol and filth. This provided a huge relief for me.

Soon after moving in, I found that he and the man from the CMH office were friends. One night I was called into the end of the building that he was occupying. There was some paperwork that I needed to fill out, along with some further interviewing questions about my background that he thought of. Oddly enough, a television was on in the room where they were watching Porn together at the time. I thought that it was strange that two men would be watching porn together but didn’t really take interest in what they had going on or why.

The next day, I received my general scope of responsibilities, which was to police the grounds for trash every day, and to mop the bathroom and laundry area. The day I began my duties, the facilitator decided that it was a good time for him to shower, coming in and stripping down as he tried to engage me in a seemingly innocent conversation while I worked. Quickly, I became uncomfortable but continued mopping, while minimizing my interaction, and avoiding his insistence to impede upon my ocular sense. When I refused to glance his way, he became hostile and short- no pun intended. It started to sink in, after awhile, and I realized it was weird, that he pointed out where his bed was, and how he made references to Cheetos stains on his penis from snacking and masturbating. It finally dawned on me that I had been selected as a playmate, preying on my situation and my medical history.  Shocked that I had been set up to be victimized by the guy from the CMH office, the images of the two of them running some kind of freak show became more real. The shelter started to show that it was nothing more than a roach motel. Well, I was definitely checking out as soon as possible.

It happened to be Sunday when I decided to check out Stock Island for work but I don’t think I knew that, since I rarely know what day it is. The island environment has that affect on a person. The choice was to wander around to find work or stay in the trap. Anyway, the fishing doesn’t stop until the season does, unlike regular employment that generally doesn’t work on that day or so I told myself. The fish houses were open but I was told that there was no work and sent to another place where I might find a job. It wasn’t long before I had been all over the place, coming up with nothing but another dead end. Stopping a High-Low driver, he sent me to a salvage yard where boats were scrapped, saying that there are always people working on boats. My feet couldn’t get me there fast enough. The day was nearing six pm. After going into the office of the yard, I was sent to the end of the lot to see if there might be a boat owner around who may need help. I doubted anyone was going to be around or willing to get off of a few dollars but I made a last stitch effort to fulfill my mission for the day. When I got to the end of the yard full of boats in dry dock, I found an expensive looking vehicle parked next to an old Shrimp boat and a very large tourist fishing cruiser.

There were two older gentlemen working on the keel of the Shrimp boat with some body filler and fiberglass. One of them asked me if I knew how to work with the body filler, asking me to prove it by mixing some up and applying it, which I promptly did. They hired me on the spot and I worked the rest of the day. They laughed at my sales pitch, saying that I was willing to work for the first week at no charge.

The job was cash, and I was tickled- elated. Now, I was getting to do something I had never done, and I was filled with hope that I would recover from my mission at getting the money I came to the area to get. The first money I received was taken to a bank where I immediately started an account.

Eventually, I found out that these guys were all ex-cons, and the boats were distressed vessels that had been sunk. They had no value what-so ever but these guys were making them look like they were safe by patching them up in any way they could, asking me if I had ever seen M.A.S.H.- mentioning the phrase “meatball surgery”. They were brokering the junk for the scrap yard to sell to people who wanted to use them “one last time”. It didn’t matter all that much to me, I had my own problems to handle. Their con job was a bit alarming but meant little to me, that is, until two strangers started snooping around.

Instincts told me they were investigators, and when the guys came around that I worked for, they also said that they were detectives. That’s when they brought in a third man, also an ex-con, who put me to work on his Dive boat, a Manta, once the boats we had been working on were done. This was another D.V. that he intended on taking across the gulf to Honduras. He mentioned that I could go with him, illustrating the scenario of the adventure with all the seductive trimmings.

The idea was that the boat was going to be turned into a dwelling that he would use to go take his son from a Honduran woman he had been married to, and then disappear with his son, who would live on the boat with him. Lots of red flags went up in my head. I played along with him, seeming to entertain the idea for myself in order to keep the money flowing until I was to be done with him. Soon it was revealed to me that he was another person in the grip of cocaine addiction. Now it made sense when I recalled the guys I worked for talking about their associate getting hung up on the rocks. I thought that they meant with his boat.

 A short while later I was told, by the original guy that hired me, the company was being “run out of the area”, and that I could meet up with them in Alabama to continue working. There was no way I was going to take them up on that. I had eight or nine hundred dollars saved up, and that was enough to get me out of there and back to Michigan. It was short of my goal but what was I going to do? The day they left the area, I had them take me to the bank at lunch to close my account and cash the last check. They paid me for the rest of the day before they left to head back to the mainland at two o’clock. My work was to last until six p.m. that day.

When I returned to the yard, I had all my money in my wallet. The plan was to finish the day, get paid from the Manta job, and go to the bus station in the morning, cutting my losses.

About sunset, I headed for the shelter to pack up what little I had left of my possessions. Passing by a small road through the mangroves that had been blockaded with a pile of broken concrete, I was stopped by a young woman who asked me for a light. This was a place where I had seen and avoided people who hung out there drinking, and who knows what else. Subconsciously, I could feel fear of the area but today, with a pocket full of money, and filled with the joy that I was getting out of the Keys, I decided to be friendly- giving her a lighter to use. “Keep it.” I said to her.

She asked me a series of questions typical of acquainting one’s self, which I was happy to answer. And since I was starving for attention, I soaked it up. Then she asked me if I had any dope, to which I answered no but that I was leaving in the morning and would love to have a puff. Pulling a brass pipe from her pocket, and holding it to my lips, she lit it and I smoked from it. The taste was strange, like vanilla.

The next thing I knew, I was sitting in the mud without my pants. My red duffle bag that held my meds and personal belongings was missing and so was my wallet. It was pitch black out and Mangroves surrounded me. In a panic, I stumbled around looking for my things- my pants, anything. The Moonlight penetrated the thick overhead vegetation in few spots but I made out a trail, stumbling franticly through the Mangroves, muck and trash.

Struggling for what seemed like forever, I found another pile of concrete near the edge of a road. Exhausted, I sat on the cement pile to catch my breath and think. At some point I looked around the pile, my eyes catching a spot where the moonlight glowed on the rubble. There, on the broken concrete, was my Camo wallet. Happiness was but for a moment when I realized that the money was gone. Of course it was. In tears, I searched through the pockets inside, hoping to see a stash of cash through my watering eyes but all I could find were business cards and some receipts that I had been accumulating to tell a story of their own. As I pulled them out, sadly lamenting the loss, I found a Bill enfolded in the receipts- a One-Hundred Dollar Bill. This single bill made me so happy that I forget I am sitting there in my underwear, or that my bag, filled with some very important things, is gone.

Determined to find this girl to get my stuff back, I set off down the road- a road I was not familiar with at all. A group of four or five young men are walking toward me on the road, commenting: “Nice pants.” as they pass by. It’s then that I realize I am now walking around in my underwear and a t-shirt in public but I am so mad that I insist on passing it off as swim wear. They, of course, have no idea who I am asking about.

It seemed like I had been walking for miles and miles, and maybe I had ,by the time I found my way back to where it all started. My bike was the first thing I found to have disappeared. Going in to the Mangroves, I was happy to find my bag. Further in, I located my pants. The losses were: one bike, one phone, my dignity, and all the money but for the hundred bucks. It was an absolute travesty. It’s so cliché to say, “I’ve never been more humiliated,” but I hadn’t ever been more humiliated. And the strange thing is, just when you think that, you discover that you can be more humiliated, which I was about to find out.

Still, determined to find this woman, I stomp off down the road of fools to find a group of guys in front of a two-story house but I am so angry that I storm right past them. They were asking something that I assumed to be an attempt to sell dope, so I ignored them. Then it dawns on me that they may know, or have seen, this girl.

Turning around to go back and ask them was somewhat pointless. They weren’t going to tell me anything I wanted to know but I tried anyway. As I am standing there with them to make my inquiry, flashlights, assault rifles and a whole squad of goons grabbed me and rolled me up in a wad. They cuffed me, taking my wallet and removing the last bank note I had been lucky enough to retain, threw me in the back of a paddy wagon with two other guys, and then hauled us off to jail.

The officer had commented on his keeping my money, and they would be charging me with soliciting to sell cocaine. Certain I was going to be found innocent, I worried little about it. In a while I would see a judge, explain the whole incident, and I’d be on my way to Michigan.

Several “continuances” later, I demanded to speak directly to the judge. My “Public Defender” said it was a pretty gutsy move on my part, explaining that it was a Felony charge, and that there was digital video evidence. Well, conveniently enough, all the evidence against me had been lost. My council did nothing to provide a rigorous pursuit of defense. He did not motion to have the case dismissed.

When I went to court to be heard, the judge said how he couldn’t believe that I was in such denial of my drug problem, sentencing me right then and there to a day short of a year in jail, which stuck me with a year of probation that wasn’t transferable. This kept me in their little system, which made it extremely unlikely that I would get out. The routine was to violate people just before it was over- another part of the scam on the funding for programs. One way or another, I was going to pay for my time spent in the Keys. This shattered me.

The one thing that helped me to stay sane was, writing. The other thing that helped was working in the kitchen. Ideally, you try to get into the kitchen, so you can eat a little bit more than what they normally serve. It was all garbage but you get a bit more of it. Eventually, I was fired for my antics and practical jokes. There was a Log Book that we had to sign but the page was left empty and wasted, to me. I took it upon myself to enter actual log entries akin to a Ships Log, entering things that portrayed the actual goings on only in metaphorical illustrations. The guys I worked with got a big kick out of it, and a star was born. Now I was invited into the mop closet to smoke cigarettes that we got from the kitchen employees.

The cameras were located in many places, especially on the mop closet entry. It was always comical to think of the guy manning the surveillance monitors, who would see us coming out of the closet like a bunch of clowns getting out of a V.W. Beetle at a circus. Fifteen guys coming out of the room one by one, carrying a broom or mop or dustpan- whatever they could carry out, like it was normal routine activity. As if the guard didn’t know what was going on. It always cracked me up when they did that, wondering why the surveillance system didn’t have audio as well.

One day, I was fired from the kitchen. It wasn’t for the butter that I put on the backside of the cooler door handle, or the baking grease I smeared on the mop handles, or for the balled up cake residue left in the pan- that I placed on the floor near the bathroom as if someone crapped their pants. It wasn’t for switching the contents of the barrels that held the powdered sugar and the Corn Starch or for smuggling salt and pepper back to the dorm or for being caught smoking. And I didn’t get fired for playing the pots and pans like percussion instruments or for doing unflattering impersonations of Mrs. Alverez, the kitchen lady, or for eating an entire roast beef that I took from the O.R. cooler. And It wasn’t because they found twenty containers of peanut butter while doing a routine search of my stuff or for putting jelly in someone shoes before they got up to go to work. I was fired because an English chap, that started working with us, decided to try getting in on the fun by urinating in a cup he had been drinking lemonade from, which he placed in the O.R. cooler after trying to offer us “lemon tea”. Someone had taken the cup from the cooler thinking that it was actual lemon juice because of the seeds that were in it, and either drank from it or added it to a batch of tea. They took me directly to the disciplinary wing called, Alpha, telling me that I was on thirty days confinement for pissing in the tea. What could I do?

The cell they put me in was on the upper tier. A young guy was already in there, so I was glad to have company… for about two days. He had very long hair, like I did before I cut it to work in the kitchen. Noticing the dirty nails and scratching made me suspect that he had a hygiene problem. The problem was that the dirt turned out to be blood.  It didn’t take long to talk him into cutting his hair a bit, so he asked me to help him with it. I agreed and we went to the officer’s desk, while we were out for our one-hour a day to shower and what not, asking to use the clippers.

When I dove into his hair with the clippers, dozens of Nits were easily seen. I freaked out because I was dealing with lice and didn’t want to be. They sent us to Medical to be seen and we were sent back with some chemical solution to treat with. We both had to stand naked in the shower area for almost and hour with the stuff on us. After we finished I was relieved to have gotten past it. There was no more sleep disturbing scratching going on after that but my sleep was disturbed anyway, when a ruckus two cells down made me jump out of bed.

Looking out the window of the door, I could see the clock that said three thirty, as well as, a guard on the floor below, watching the cell doors to see if anyone was up looking that way. There was a guard standing at the door of the cell with the commotion, and some muffled shouting. Then there was a bunch of thumping and screaming, and a loud crash as the person being beaten was slammed into a stainless steel cart on the catwalk, that for some strange reason was in front of his cell. Blood was everywhere. I will never forget the faces of the officer’s that did it. One kept his head shaved and had a nasty scar on his head from a bullet wound that he received in Desert Storm. Later, I found out that this was retaliation for filing a complaint and suing the officer. Whether that’s true or not, I cannot say. What I do know is that they attacked and nearly killed him. Four officers were involved.

The very next morning, in what I understood as an attempt to keep any lawyers from trying to find a witness, our cell door windows were completely covered with a plastic coating that prevented us from seeing out. A recipe file card was taped over a small hole they left in the center to peek in at us with. When they delivered breakfast, I asked the trustee what went on. All he could tell me was that a trail of blood two feet wide was left on the floor that led all the way to the medical office.

Just before my thirty days were up, I started scratching at night. I thought I was going mad. After putting in a kite to see a nurse, I was told that it was Scabies. They gave me some cream to apply to the areas. Here I was, fearing that I would get lice from the kid.