The Racketeer is a great book. Really just awesome. I don’t want to talk too much about it, because I don’t want to spoil the plot, as I actually recommend you read it. Suffice to say: it’s about an African-American lawyer who gets put in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, eventually gets out, and takes revenge upon the people who put him there, with a little help from his inmate friends. I figured this would be a good book to review for my last book review from jail ever, because it is about the bitterness created by being falsely imprisoned, the jail release process, and taking care of business after getting out of jail. Also, I began reviewing books with Grisham, so this one completes the circle.
There were six people who visited me in jail: my mother, my stepfather, my two stepsisters, my godmother, and the family pastor. Visitation was exactly the way it is in the movies: you talk to your visitor through a phone line, separated by thick, wire-reinforced glass. One of my stepsisters asked me if she could get me anything to make my incarceration easier.
Having read a bunch of Grisham’s old paperbacks during the first part of my sentence, and having read about his new book in the newspaper, I asked her if she could get me his then-newest release, and she did! Unfortunately, the jail wouldn’t give it to me, because it was a hardcover book. Hardcover books are not allowed in jail, because they might possibly be used as weapons, with their sharp corners. So I had to wait until I got out to read the book.
Much adieu was made about the fact that Grisham chose to make the protagonist of this novel African American. And much of the book is about his relationships with the other inmates. I would say this paralleled my experience in jail, as there are most certainly racial tensions.
The biggest conflict was over the television. There were two televisions in jail, and generally, one was in English, and the other was tuned to the Spanish channel. But some days, there were two different sporting events being televised, so certain factions felt entitled to take over both televisions.
In Federal prison, every inmate gets his own television, just so this isn’t an issue. But not in county. I never saw the point of television squabbles, as the general cacophony of the jail prevented anyone from hearing the TVs anyway, so they were useless to me as entertainment, as I lacked glasses to see the subtitles. I came into jail with one pair of contacts, and I had to make my own solution with table salt and tap water. So I only wore them on special occasions, enduring a blurry existence for the majority of my sentence.
Now, I like to believe that most people in this day and age, even Texans, are not ideologically racist. But pragmatically, how do people of different cultures share the same resources without conflict? American society, I have found, is culture clash plus a class war.
I want to turn this pond into a park, but someone else wants to make it a bath house. I want to marry a beautiful woman, but the community wants to turn her out, cut her into little pieces so that everyone gets a slice. So we wage wars against eachother, using systemic, economic, and social powers to do so.
Of course, a captive population of a jailhouse only heightens these tensions. Maybe conflicts like this, in the free world, were the reason I had gotten thrown into this dungeon in the first place. It wasn’t just the negligence of society that had gotten me locked up, but their malevolence.
Some people of my particular race feel it necessary to join a white power gang in jail, because they are irrationally afraid of black people, who are far more physically fit than them, or perhaps other ethnic gangs, which are far more organized and well-established in the underworld. I met a few of these white power people in jail. They had swastikas, Nazi eagles, and SS lightning bolt tattoos on their arms, but very few were truly sincere about their supremacist ideology.
They just felt they needed the safety of a group of compatriots. I used to be very judgmental of these kind of people, but I’m not anymore. Most people who have not endured incarceration can’t understand white power advocates, but I am no longer among those privileged few.
Much like The Racketeer’s protagonist, Malcolm Bannister, I too was very angry about being falsely imprisoned. But there was nothing I could do besides punch a concrete wall that would break my hand before it would give. I’m not normally a violent person, but jail is such a frustrating place, and it drives people to violence sometimes.
The government, it seems, is powerless to help us, and can only hurt us. Fools get the government involved in their conflicts with the world, thinking that its seemingly sacred auspices might help, but authoritarian power structures only make things worse for everyone.
I’m pretty sure all the toilet paper in the Collin County Courthouse’s Judges’ chambers has the Bill of Rights printed on it. But that’s OK. Long ago, I accepted the fact that as long as there are narrow-minded people in the world, a group of them might get together and conspire to imprison or commit me to an asylum.
I’m a free thinker and a social critic, so isolating me from society is a strategy of containment, so my “madness” will not infect others by way of thoughtcrime. As an enlightened being, I accept this. I am a Zenmaster. I’m fucking Gandhi.
Imprisonment, deprivation, torture, financial penalization- these things mean nothing to me. I exist solely to defy. I can think of no nobler purpose against which to throw my weight. After all, I have nothing better to live for.
I was released on Christmas day in the year 2012. For the previous weeks, me and the Chicano guy in the next cell over had been singing ‘The Final Countdown’ by Europe, because we both had releases coming up. According to popular folklore, the world was supposed to have ended four days before my release.
I’m sure everyone had a big party on the winter solstice without me. Fuckers. A wise person once told me, “It’s always safer to bet that the world won’t end, because even if it did, there would be no one around to collect.”
But wouldn’t that have been Hell if it did? I would have been like that guy in The Stand, locked in a cell, everyone around me dead, eating rats to survive. But with no Randall Flagg to spring me. Or maybe I’m Randall Flagg in that situation.
Actually, I had done my time in a minimum security pod, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. No cell doors means you can walk around in the common area, but it also means nothing is stopping the other inmates from messing with you. You could even go outside in the open air at times, but you were still surrounded by a cage above your head, brick walls to the side, and concrete beneath you.
We were actually on the top floor of a large tower, a featureless, concrete slab, with slit windows that showed how thick the walls are, and it was the most depressing architecture I had ever seen. Sometimes, there was a basketball, but for much of my sentence, either the hoop was broken, or the ball was popped. The guards loved to take exercise yard privileges away as punishment for rampant inmate bad behavior en mass.
I was terrible at basketball anyway, and too depressed to work out most of the time. 7PM was medication time in jail, but I had no prescriptions for anything, so I had to go cold turkey while all the other inmates got their SSRI’s and their Xanax. For the first few days, residual intoxicants in my body fat had kept me in a stupor, but once that was gone, nothing but cold, hard sobriety.
But none of that concerned me any more after the stroke of midnight on Christmas eve. The guards came and roused me from my bed, and lead me down a long white hall to freedom. They gave me back my clothes, the same clothes I had been booked in with.
This brought me all the way back to the beginning of my jail experience. Before they had booked me in, I was stuck in a waiting room with the other 50 or so inmates who had been arrested that day. I had to wait for 16 hours to get booked in, in these uncomfortable plastic chairs, surrounded by criminal psychos. I remembered chatting it up with the guy next to me:
“Why is it taking so long to get booked?” I asked.
“This place is fuckin’ packed,” said the skinny black guy with gold teeth, “Why you in here, anyway?”
“Contempt of court.”
“What did you do, cuss out the judge?”
“I called him a senile, corporate whore,” I grimaced, “But I’m mostly here for defaming someone.”
“Cuz you was on that ice, right?” he said knowingly.
“No,” I responded, “I don’t do ice. I had a problem with weed and pills, but that’s behind me now.”
“Then why was you talkin’ shit then?”
“I was upset. I think I had a nervous breakdown. My whole life had fallen apart on me. No one was there to catch me. No one gave a fuck. You might say, ‘there was a general lack of caring’…”
It’s just like I had said earlier: in Texas, problems are not solved, they are exploited. By negligent, lassiez-faire Randroid hillbillies.
“Because they was on that ice, right?”
“No, my friends don’t do ice,” I insisted, “They mostly just smoke and drink.”
“So dem hos you put on blast, was they on that ice?”
“No, nobody I know is on that ice.”
“Look,” he said, shifting his eyes to look around, “You can be straight with me, bro… Where you be gettin’ that ice?”
When they had finally booked me in, they put a plastic ID bracelet on my arm, complete with photo and a bar code, a county-issued bauble that couldn’t come off without scissors, and when they processed me out, they clipped it. It felt so good to have that hunk of plastic off my wrist for the first time in 3 months. And to wear normal clothes instead of a one-piece jumper, which was supposed to prevent rape. My hair and goatee had grown long and thin. I had gained weight from shitty, high-carb jail food. I had dark circles under my eyes, and flaky skin from showering in toxic, polluted jail water.
Weird memories randomly floated back into my mind. Speculating about which inmates had ‘The HIV’ (pronounced as one word, in a WASP/Harvard accent), and also who was ‘on that ice’, with one of my pod-mates.
Crazy, self-righteous, hypocritical Jesus freaks telling me I was Hell-bound, even though they had committed far worse crimes, and were probably worse people in general.
Obnoxious, hipster Beardos who refused to shave in jail.
A hulking prizefighter ironically nick-named ‘Junior’, who was thankfully segregated during the first week of my sentence, for fighting.
A hick with the letters R-E-D-N-E-C-K tattooed on his knuckles.
Trying to do yoga in jail, and being warned by the guard not to bend over like that around the other inmates. I couldn’t believe this whole experience was almost behind me.
My mother and stepfather were there waiting for me in the jail’s lobby. We embraced and then loaded into the car. It was cold outside, the dead of winter. I was glad I still wore my commissary-purchased thermal underwear, with my inmate ID number etched in pen on the tag. When I had gone in, it was still warm from the dying embers of summer. I had missed a whole season in jail. My favorite season, actually: Fall.
I was privileged enough to have someone to pick me up from jail. But there is most certainly a threat to public safety in that the county will just turn criminals loose at midnight when their sentence is up, with no money in their pockets, in the cold, on the edge of town. Most likely with nowhere to go. And having been warped by the experience of jail in addition to however messed up they already were in the first place.
That night, I slept on a real bed for the first time in three months. In jail, the mattress is less than 2 inches thick. The lights never go out completely, and the AC blows cold air on you all night. People got sick from it all the time.
That’s why you HAD to buy thermal underwear, or freeze to death and catch pneumonia. The bed is so narrow, it is impossible to sleep in a position that won’t result in cutting off circulation to your extremities. I always feared waking up to a gangrenous limb that required amputation due to stagnant blood gone septic.
Sometimes, upon waking up, it took several minutes to get the feeling back in my fingers. I’m an amateur guitarist. Uncool. That first night out of jail was the first real sleep I had gotten in three months.
But the ordeal wasn’t over. At Christmas dinner the next day, I was offered wine, but I had to turn it down, because I was still on probation. You can’t drink on probation. In fact, you can’t even hang out in a bar, or with anyone “of questionable character”, which pretty much means everyone, due the deliberate ambiguity of the probationary terms.
‘Sorry Mr. Obama, I can’t have dinner at the White House this Friday, because I’m on probation.’
There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance and social alienation involved with this process, and it doesn’t really help anything. You can’t be yourself, and you can only hang out with people with whom you fundamentally disagree about everything. This is supposed to change you, but instead, it only makes you hate the establishment more for trying to mold you with force and implied threats of imprisonment. A gun in my back might be effective in changing my behavior, but only rationality and the facts can change my mind, and the State has neither on its side.
But I was determined not to screw up my probation, otherwise I would have to go back and do the other half of my suspended sentence. Collin County is notorious for violating probationers. It’s really a terrible legal position in which to be.
One of my fellow inmates, a hulking white guy reminiscent of Bruce Willis, whose surname was Priest, but whom I always referred to as ‘SuperFly’, had told me a story of Collin County deputies traveling all the way to Hawaii just to apprehend a probation jumper. They had handcuffed him on the beach, and stuck him on an overseas flight right back to Texas. ‘Collin County will come get your ass, man,’ he warned.
After a tearful Christmas with my mother’s family, I hopped back into my piece of shit car and drove back to Austin. Alone except for my cat. My friend had taken care of my place while I was gone. The bills were on auto-pay, but there had been a problem with the landlord. Apparently, they had caught wind of my legal problems, and had decided to terminate my lease. I was actually on month-to-month, so they had the right to terminate my residency at any time.
I called the leasing manager and begged him to let me stay. I loved that apartment. It had hardwood floors, and a great view of the treetops. It was in a hip neighborhood. When I talked to the landlord, I couldn’t help but notice his gay accent.
‘Look, man,’ I said, ‘I know I have legal problems, and maybe you don’t agree with my lifestyle… But you know, there was a time when your lifestyle was illegal, and landlords might have kicked you out even though you had paid your rent. So don’t you think that doing the same to me now is kind of a dick move?’
No sympathy from the faggot rent collector. And this was a sign of things to come: the hardships I faced as a recently released criminal. Upon my release from jail, I felt abandoned by the liberal community.
Supposedly, liberals are soft on criminals. A criminal is said to be so because he is ‘sick’. He ‘needs help’. And yet no one is willing to help you. Even the liberal community stigmatizes you. They tell you to see a shrink as a means of writing you off, because they don’t want to deal with you. But the shrink can’t fix a broken society, or give you your rights and your friends back. All he can do is help you accept your fate.
It’s not like Goodfellas, where people respect you for not snitching, and help you re-integrate with society. The cute girls don’t return your calls anymore. People de-friend you on Facebook. You have a record that makes it hard to get a job. Your bank account is drained. You have been evicted. You have to come back up, from nothing, with hardly any help. Just your own strength to get you by.
Another of my friends had been given access to my apartment while I was in jail. He was supposed to pawn some of my stuff to put money on my books. Instead, he took the gems of my comic book collection to keep for his own. He basically robbed me while I was in jail.
I told him off. He told me he had fucked my ex while I was in jail. He suggested various ways I kill myself. Whatever. Fuck both of them. Fuck everyone.
My friends are a bunch of psychos, especially relative to me myself. They had let me slip through the cracks in the first place, so why would I expect them to help me once I got out? Shitty friends are consistently shitty. Why would I expect a change? Why would I expect reciprocation for all I had done for them, and the times I had helped them in their darkest hours? That’s just naive.
I put all my worldly possessions in storage. The last night in my bachelor pad, my sobs echoed through the empty rooms. Even though it was haunted by a bad relationship and a police ransacking, I was going to miss it.
A third friend of mine had just gotten out of the military, and had invited me to stay in his new apartment’s extra room. If not for him and his wife’s hospitality, I would have been out on the streets. The city of Austin had largely abandoned me, not that we had ever been close to begin with. I remember running into an acquaintance at a laser tag joint on New Year’s Eve. They were having an EDM party. I told him I had just gotten out of jail, and my story. He winced and walked away.
People in Austin are too cool to be friends with Gandhi. Gandhi wears homespun clothing. Gandhi rides third class. Gandhi stinks like a jail cell. But despite everything they did to him, he was free in his heart, and that was more beautiful to me than any back-stabbing whore or fair-weather friend.
When I was still incarcerated, they had called me ‘the happiest person in jail’. I played this off as having done too much acid in the 90’s. Or sometimes when they asked me what was so funny I would just snicker and mumble: ‘Fucking stank hos.’
I can be happy in just about any situation. But who cares about society? Something I had never once been a part of, anyway.
Employers had kicked me around, parents had washed their hands, scenes and communities had dicked me over, so-called ‘friends’ had exploited me, and past lovers had abandoned me. Before I got locked up, I was considered a pretentious pussy by those who didn’t really know me, and dismissed. Now, I was ‘white trash’, possibly dangerous in the minds of those same people.
You just can’t win with most people. Even those of supposed anti-establishment bent were wary of hanging out with me, or extending me any help. Nobody gave a shit before, and they certainly didn’t now. Fucking posers. Unappreciative bitches.
The liberal community had lost faith in me, and I in them. Who cares if I was isolated? Austin had never welcomed me in the first place, in fact, it was my rejection from the cliquey locals which had probably lead to the conditions that caused my legal problems, but no one wanted to admit that, they would rather just label me as ‘personally defective’ than take any kind of social responsibility whatsoever, a whole town full of exploiters posing as liberals, hiding behind social justice causes, and using liberal rhetoric to rationalize their disgusting selfishness and negligence.
But still, Zilker Park was there, for me to commune with the nature therein. It felt so good just to take a walk outside. To eat what I wanted, when I wanted. To not be chained to a schedule.
My favorite restaurants were mostly still there. Free Week on 6th street gifted me with some great punk and metal shows. Even if home wasn’t very hospitable, I was happy to be back. I cashed out my 401k, so I wasn’t totally destitute. And I still had my cat, at the very least, despite multiple conspiracies concocted by her previous co-owner to catnap her.
Over the next few months, I rebuilt my life. I got a new job in the same field I had always worked, software. Determined to stay clean and make it work this time. Don’t go off the deep end.
For three months, I had been deprived of my guitar, but forced sobriety had cleared my head a bit. Once I got my own place again, after enduring the madness of living with a sometimes feuding couple, I started playing music once more. I think my sobriety really improved my playing. The job I had was working out.
Then one day, I started reading my hand-written journals from jail. I wanted to do something with them. Blogging had gotten me in trouble before, but I was determined not to be suppressed by good old-fashioned Southern repression. Internalizing the thought police.
Fuck that. I tell it like it is. I keeps it real. Talk hard. Steal the air.
The End
Book Reviews from Jail 