Stillwater

During the pandemic they ran out of beds at the St. Louis County Jail, so they tried Carlton and Pine Counties and they were full too so I ended up at Stillwater for five days with the hardcore criminals and killers, sent there for missing several court appearances which were set for me to deal with my various probation violations, which, frustratingly, had everything to do with the fact that I was homeless, utterly destitute and doing my best to stay alive in the middle of winter in Minneapolis. Once I almost burned myself alive trying to stay warm in a dumpster full of cardboard which I’d ignited for the fantasy of Warmth, but, of course, it got away from me and, I gotta say, trying to climb out of an actual Dumpster Fire with about 30 calories to burn from not eating and nerved-out on opioids and trying to carry your guitar and the rest of the shitty shit you own, including photos of your son and your family is one of the harder things to do in life. And it’s tough to go through your mail when you’re not living anywhere. And if you’re an addict you know how it is and if you’re not you don’t—that it isn’t the heroin or fentanyl or liquor or whateverthefuckelse that kills you—but the effort spent in constantly trying to acquire it—feeding the beast, a truly and deeply and never ending exhaustion, and eventually, you’re just too tired and depressed and dope starved to be careful and you end up dead; and it isn’t a lack of discipline or Will Power (whatever the fuck that is), or selfishness or lack of love for everyone but simply a fact of life, and like breathing or eating or shitting or fucking, relapse is a matter of time, not endurance. And if you’ve never relapsed then you aren’t addicted. Good for you. Count your coins. Post your success on facebook. Go drink shit-ass coffee at the meeting. Buy yourself a Mocktail. Reveal yourself for the hundredth time to those gathered about how Stuck you are on whatever Step of the Twelve you’re stuck on. You’re so strong—beating the Devil at his own game. You deserve lots of Likes. Facebook that shit, Winner.

I was terrified from the moment I set foot inside the place. It wreaked of evil and hopelessness and feral desperation. The faces were mostly blank and waxy and everyone’s eyes turned off. Cold yellow light shone down from incessantly humming bulbs like a scene from Brubaker or Shawshank Redemption.

I was sick as hell with withdrawals and I weighed about 120 lbs and hadn’t eaten much of anything except cigarettes and I looked and felt like shit. The first day was stressful, as you might imagine, getting booked into a place with all kinds of actually bad people instead of mostly just conivingly sad people and all the routines and cultural and subculturish things to learn fast, like who not to look at which was mostly everyone, and the shit-ass food and the toilet situation and how the fuck to sleep, which I did like a baby since I was alone in a cell by myself and it was the first time in my life where I’d been 12 hours without heroin and didn’t not sleep. So that morning—my second day there—I felt something resembling hopeful that I might get through it.

In the afternoon there was a sort of “recess period.” We could go outside into the walled-in yard where you could get some fresh air and move around a little. It was almost nice—better, actually, than some playgrounds I’ve seen. There was a basketball court, a volleyball net and some apparatus for doing chin-ups and stretching and so on, a couple of people played croquet and a small group of guys did jumping jacks in the sun.

I felt like I was on a movie set again.

I remember looking over the top of the wall at the pale blue sky and realizing it was the same sky, same breeze, same sunshine that everyone else was seeing and feeling—everyone outside the walls, that is. And me having to share the sunshine and blue sky and the smell of dust in the air with all the people in the world who were not locked up and stuck in the downward, tightening spiral of addiction made me feel defeated and gray inside. The tiny speck of hopefulness I’d felt earlier was gone, eclipsed by the reality that, even if I could muscle through this Stillwater stint, I still had my life to face, altogether more dangerous, hopeless and infinite than this pitstop on my journey to hell. I couldn’t help thinking about my mom and everything and all the ways I’d been a heartbreaking disappointment. I was thinking this when someone said,

“You wanna play?” The guy held a basketball under his arm and looked about 40 years old, nicely trimmed hair, graying at the temples, clean-shaven face and I immediately wondered what he did to get imprisoned, which is what everyone thinks every time they meet someone. He was about my height—5’8”. About 170 pounds I suppose. He smiled pleasantly and his teeth were straight like white mints and he reminded me of a dentist, with their overachieving straight white teeth. He was nodding at me and aiming his chin over his shoulder at the basketball court where a small group of white guys of various sizes and shapes milled about like minnows in a bird bath, waiting for the guy to come back with the ball.

“We need a guy,” he said, and, with deliberation, he bounced the ball once with his right hand and caught it up again, somewhat awkwardly cradling it under his arm against his ribs, smiling mildly. He kept nodding at me and pointing his chin over his shoulder at the group of guys now standing, hands on hips, waving him over, one of them pointing at his watch. The dentist guy looked at my face, raising his eyebrows.

“Wanna play?”

“No, I’m sorry,” is what I said back. I felt like shit and had no interest and doubted I could muster the energy to do much of anything but slowly pace the perimeter of the yard. I was nauseous and sleepy.

“I don’t feel very good.”

“Fair enough,” the dentist nodded. “Maybe tomorrow,” and he calmly walked back to the group of guys waiting for him, bouncing—not dribbling—the ball as he walked.

I exhaled a sigh of relief then—relieved the dentist didn’t push the point. He seemed to Get It that I was in no shape to play and I was thankful for that empathy. As I watched him rejoin the crew under the basket, sorting out uneven teams, something passed between me and the sunlight beaming into the yard, casting a shadow over my face, and I turned to look what it was and what it was was a shocking wolf of a man standing there bending toward me to talk.

“What’d he say to you?” the man said.

I was terrified and my voice caught in my throat.

“What?” I managed.

“What’d he say?” he asked again. The man was not large, but monstrous. His head was shaved, adorned by a red-tattooed crown of thorns. Streams of tattooed blood ran down his face and around his neck was a tattooed swastika necklace. He wore no shirt and his chest and arms were like knotted ropes wrapped in blue and red tattooed skin, his musculature and vascularity visible like through tightly wrapped cellophane. A large blue portrait of a laughing Jesus spread across his chest like a mural and smaller tattoos surrounded the portrait like satellites—various, seemingly non-random icons, numeric arrangements, symbols and patterns covered his entire torso and his left shoulder held the likeness of a woman’s finely featured face encircled by a wreath of language foreign to me and he noticed me staring.

“Hey.” He said, his patience waning, his lips narrowly peeled back, hissing. I noticed his teeth were filed to small points like a lizard’s. “What the fuck did he say to you?” he asked again and I felt I’d better fucking say something.

“Just if I wanted to play basketball.”

He looked at me. It seemed he felt I was lying.

“Just if I wanted to play basketball,” I said again. “That’s it and I told him No I didn’t feel good.”

He kept looking at me and then abruptly turned and walked directly toward where two guys were nonchalantly tapping croquet balls through a small circuit of those little wire gates stabbed into the dirt. He crouched to one knee and plucked one of the wooden balls from an assortment of them sitting idly on the ground with the remaining mallets lying there like kindling wood.

As he rose from his crouch, he casually tossed the ball into the air and caught it again, deftly, softly almost. He moved slowly, sort of stealthily, with a certain athletic grace, the physical confidence you see in athletes and racehorses, that manifestation of bodily aptitude like a stalking tiger—a barely harnessed kinetic energy of poise and violence. It occurred to me this fantastically intimidating individual might have played sports at some point in his past. Somewhere there was a photograph of this man as a child, wearing a baseball uniform and grinning confidently into the camera a million lifetimes and a trillion decisions ago.

He tossed and caught the ball again as he walked with some intention toward the basketball area where the dentist and his crew were rather pathetically attempting a game, the ball clanking off the bare rim and bouncing and rolling uncooperatively away from them off the court toward where the tattooed man with the croquet ball was walking.

As the dentist bent to pick up the basketball, the man with the croquet ball closed the distance with his final strides and leaned back, like a major league baseball pitcher winding up, and, like a trebuchet, launched-punched the croquet ball directly into the face of the dentist, exploding his occipital bone and burying the ball deep into the left eye socket where it made a sound like wet meat followed immediately by the sound of the dentist’s body, having been lifted off the ground by the force of the blow, landing like mixed cement on the ground, the basketball’s ebbing bounce replaced by the sound of it rolling, the rest of the scene silent as midnight.

No one said or did anything and the dentist’s body lay face up, legs spasming and his arms at his sides, bent at the elbows, forearms and hands pointed skyward, absently groping like daisies in the breeze, or typing on an invisible lying-down typewriter. The croquet ball was embedded—half-deep—into the dentist’s face and the man that would become his murderer 90 minutes later when the dentist’s heart finally stopped, slowly leaned over him, carefully removing the ball from its resting place half inside the man’s skull.

The ball came out of his face with a predictable suck-sound and the man that held it was amused, his lips pulled back in a riotous smile, revealing his hacksawblade teeth. He rotated the ball in his hand, showing it to everyone who stood watching, silent, horrified, staring. I was slack-jawed and head-empty.

“It’s his fucking eyeball!” He screamed, laughing uproariously. He held out the croquet ball at arm’s length, like Show and Tell.

“See!” he shouted, “His fucking eyeball! Stuck on it!”

Then he thought of something and bent down to the man that I thought had looked like a dentist lying on the ground, bloody and mostly dead, but making noise like a mewling calf. The killer leaned over him, holding the croquet ball an inch from his crushed, ground meat face, shouting, “See, Mutherfucker! It’s your fucking eyeball! See it? See your eyeball, you Fuck!”

I stood, wavering on shaking legs, my bowels trembling in a simmer. My head spun and my mouth filled with cold saliva from the glands in my cheeks and then bile bubbled up my throat and I vomited a sudsy acidic puddle of yellow streaked with blood. Another guy across the yard vomited too, hands on his knees, his stomach clenching and unclenching like a fist.

Within seconds, the giggling killer was corralled by guard personnel and he went with no struggle and no fight, his hands quick-zipped behind him with a black, racheted cord as they marched him away, within two feet of where I stood, coughing and spitting cold vomit.

“Kids?” the killer man said as he passed, armed escorts on each elbow, his voice almost jaunty, the pretty face of the tattooed woman on his left shoulder smiling like a Croatian princess from another world.

“What?” I asked, barely audible, head still spinning.

“Kids?” he said again. “Got any anywhere?”

Before I could answer and just before they led him around the corner and out of view, I heard him say:

“Pedophile,” was what he yelled from around the corner. “Fucking pedophile.”

I looked at the guy on the ground then and he lay there, unmoving, flat on his back, the left side of his face caved in and surprisingly little blood, his tidy haircut still tidy, his elbows pinned to the dirt, forearms and hands still pegged skyward, as if waiting for someone to help pull him to his feet or maybe someone about to pray for something.