Okay, once again I’ve been gone for a while, but I have two excellent excuses. First, I had to travel to Virginia to visit my grandmother’s deathbed; and second, I got arrested and spent some time in jail. If those aren’t good enough to excuse me, I don’t know what’s gonna be.
The trouble was that the bus driver (I went Greyhound) and I weren’t getting along. That was okay, as far as it went; until he decided that he was gonna put me off the bus after a particular stop. This freaked me out, because I was hurrying to see Gramma before she died. I’ve been under a lot of pressure recently, and I guess this pushed me over the edge; I suppose I was a little unreasonable, though not violent. Anyway, the driver called the cops, and they came and locked me up.
I don’t know how many of you have spent time in Virginia, but it is a police state. The cops in Virginia are essentially above the law; there is no accountability in any town in the Commonwealth. I grew up in Richmond, of course, so I already knew this. But Richmond cops, dangerous as they are (and I have personally witnessed the shooting of an unarmed man by the Richmond PD) have real crimes to worry about, so as long as you aren’t too crazy they’ll mostly let you alone. They’ve got more important things to deal with.
This isn’t true in the smaller towns, especially out west. Cops there don’t have a lot to occupy their time when they aren’t setting speed traps, so anything remotely like a crime really gets their blood flowing; and if they decide they don’t like you, you’re in real trouble.
The cops who arrested me definitely weren’t feeling too warmly towards me. They roughed me up a bit (not a Rodney King thing, but it did hurt), and by the time I got into my cell I was covered with bruises and thought my left wrist was fractured. However, the bruises have faded and the wrist, though stiff and sore, seems to be working okay, so I guess all’s well.
It wasn’t so much getting beat up as just the way they took me to the jail. They carted me around for a while in chains, which was fun. The chains have a belt, and your hands are cuffed to chains attached to this belt which allow just enough play for your fingers barely to touch (and the cuffs, incidentally, were applied bone-crushingly tight). Then there’s another chain rising from the belt which goes around your neck and prevents you from standing or sitting up straight. Finally, there’s another chain which falls between your feet and connects your ankles so that you can only take extremely short steps and can’t straighten your legs out.
In other words, you walk hunched over for a few hours like Mr. Johnson’s butler in Arthur, taking very small steps and unable to catch yourself if you should fall. This happens a lot if, say, the cop escorting you decides it would be fun to give you a playful shove. When that happens, you just gotta kinda roll as you fall so as to land on your shoulder instead of your face. I did manage to go head first into an outside corner, which opened a cut on my scalp, but really my shoulders were bruised worse than anything but my wrists. Of course, when you ride in the back of a van in this getup, chained by your wrists (which are now behind your back) to the cage in the van, off and on for three hours, along rough back-country roads with no way to stabilize yourself, so that you're constantly being thrown against the cuffs and your wrists are supporting all of your weight, you can expect some bruises, cuts, and fractures.
Actually, the cell itself was worse than the beating and the transport. They didn’t leave me at the local jail; instead, they took me to regional so they could lock me in an isolation chamber. This is a particularly ugly fate, even if it doesn’t last very long; and it’s usually reserved only for very dangerous prisoners or those who are charged with particularly vicious crimes. Neither of these was true in my case, but as I say, the arresting officers didn’t seem to be terribly fond of me. I’ve always had good luck with judges and bad luck with cops.
Anyway, some of you may never have been in an isolation cell (it's different from and worse than any other experience you have in jail, and I've been in lots of 'em), so let me tell you about it. The cell is tiny, about the size of the bathroom in my little efficiency apartment. There’s a combination toilet/water fountain, which is charming; and there’s no hot water and no soap. You just straight up don’t get to bathe, or even wash your hands before you eat or after you shit.
The only other thing in the room is a mortared cinderblock pile in the corner, about two and a half feet high and probably three feet to a side on top, covered with some kind of tile. This functions as a table, a chair, and a bed. It is, of course, too small to stretch out on, or for that matter to curl up on. You could, I suppose, sleep on the floor between the toilet and the furniture (there was just enough room to stretch out if you did it diagonally), but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was extremely dirty in general and (as you might expect) a bit wet immediately around the toilet; and you couldn’t get far enough away from the toilet because of the size of the room. Anyway, it’s a cement floor, offering neither comfort nor warmth.
And warmth is a serious concern. It would be very difficult to sleep in these cells anyway, even if there was a cot. They keep them freezing cold, and blankets aren’t allowed (nor pillows, but I can live without those); the jailor told me they never give blankets out to people on that block, because the inmates might use them to attempt suicide. Of course, there’s nothing in the cell to loop the blanket around, but that doesn’t seem to have occurred to them.
The young woman around the way from me did manage to do some damage to herself, but that was by hitting herself and slamming herself into the walls of her cell. I couldn’t see any of this; the cell has no windows and doesn’t allow a view of any kind. But I could hear it, and I heard the officers talking about it after. Isolation cellblocks, of course, can be co-ed, because you have no access to the other prisoners. You can’t even see them, as I mentioned.
Anyway, they led me to this room, and I went in thinking it was an interview room or a holding cell. They showed me in (A11, the room number was) and slammed the door behind me, and that was when I realized where I was. And there I stayed; the door didn’t open again for twenty-four hours. I didn’t know that at the time, of course. There was no clock. When they let me out to do my paperwork preparatory to my release, they led me to room that had a clock. It said 8:00. I asked, “AM or PM?” and then followed up with, “Of which day?” I genuinely had no idea.
In a room with no natural light and no clock, and absolutely nothing to do, it is almost impossible to keep track of time. But a bigger concern was that I wasn’t allowed a phone call or a lawyer. They just threw me in that hole and left me there. No one on Earth knew what had happened to me or where I was, and there was really no way for them to find out (this happened halfway to Gramma’s, in a little town in western Virginia). I had, to all intents and purposes, vanished. It occurred to me after I’d been there a few hours that, really, they didn’t have to ever let me out.
Anyway, they did let me out at 8:00 to do my paperwork, and the nice lady at the front desk told me they’d have me out and back at the bus stop by noon. Then they locked me back in the cell. They didn’t actually let me out again ‘til 12:30, but that was still okay. They only needed to do a little paperwork on the stuff I’d had on me when I was arrested, and do the same thing for a couple of other people, and then I could go.
But, my goodness, I’ve never seen any people in any line of work do anything more slowly or inefficiently than those deputies getting us ready to go. And in the end it turned out that only one other guy was actually being released with me; they were just doing all the paperwork for everyone at once. All in all, I had the definite feeling I was being taught a lesson, which would have been okay under other circumstances, but every minute was precious, ‘cause Gramma was fading fast. They managed to take three hours to get me out, though (all told I was in isolation for about 30 hours), and I ended up missing my bus by fifteen minutes. The next one was two hours late; and I missed seeing Gramma alive by about four hours; if I’d caught the early bus I would’ve made it.
And of course, since I hadn’t been allowed to use a phone, a lot of people were worried about me. I’d gotten on a bus in Huntington at 7:25 and was supposed to get off another one at 6:30 in Lynchburg, which is as close as Greyhound goes to Gramma’s house in Appomattox. When I didn’t show up, no one had any idea what had happened to me, and once they realized I wasn’t answering my cell phone, folks got a little frantic. Greyhound was no help, incidentally; they told my mom when she called that I’d never even gotten on the bus, which is kinda bizarre, but reinforces my point that, if the cops had decided to keep me, no one would ever have known what became of me. I had a whole lot of progressively more anxious messages on my voicemail when I finally got out.
Speaking of which, I do want to thank Christy and Beth Anne for their concern while all this was going on, along with various family members. It’s always good to know that you’re loved and that people worry about you when you aren’t around.
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I was gonna write a bit about my Gramma when I got back, not about her death but as a celebration of her life; but I didn’t like to put those good memories in the same post with all this complaining. Anyway, I’d like to clarify what I want to say in my head for one more night. I just wrote this 1) to bitch for a bit, and 2) so you wouldn’t think I’d died, or forgotten all of you. Ciao; will write more tomorrow.
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