The Officer I turned myself in to
eventually came to the holding cell and told me the Chandler jail was
full and he was going to have to take me somewhere else. Since I
seemed like a nice fella, he said he was going to take me to Mesa
instead of Phoenix, because it would be more comfortable. I thanked
him, and on the way to Mesa he cautioned me on how to behave when I got there.
He said they were lazy in Mesa, and
shipped people off to the Phoenix Matrix at the drop of a hat if they
thought there might be hassles. He said if I had a cold or back ache
or broken limb, just to keep it to myself because any malady was
reason to send people into the Matrix. He told me to keep my eyes
down and not speak unless spoken to. He didn't even cuff me until he
was taking me out of the car in Mesa.
Once inside, he handed me over to some
police academy dropouts and they deposited me in the drunk tank
without ceremony or anal probe. The room was ten feet deep and twenty
feet long with a full length window along the front. It was
uninhabited except for a bread sack with an orange peel in it on the
concrete bench along the back wall. I sat, presumably waiting to be
processed into the general population. I was hungry and tired. There
was no water or toilet, so I hoped not to be there long.
An eternity or an hour later, I heard
voices down the hall and wondered if they were finally booking me in.
by smashing the right side of my face against the glass, I thought I
could see movement in the next room. Soon after, they brought in
another prisoner. It was the doctor who had operated on my arm at St
Luke's. Small world. He had beaten his wife.
There must've been a crime wave,
because ten minutes later they brought in a couple of young Mexican
guys and we could hear them yelling at another prisoner, just out of
sight. Then we heard the unmistakable sound of said prisoner getting
his ass kicked. It got quiet for a minute, then a guard unlocked our
cage and stepped in, threatening to mace us if we didn't move to the
far corner. He stepped back out and two others threw the beaten man
in and slammed the door. He was a chubby little guy and his
appearance didn't seem to warrant the ruckus we had been
eavesdropping on. He sat on the bench and behaved. We all did.
There was another interminable wait.
The smell of the orange rind had my stomach growling. I figured once
their lunch rush was over, they would come process me in. There
hadn't been a sound from the guard room, save an episode of the Jerry
Springer Show on their black and white T.V. Before I could hear what
was on next they came and got the other four and told them the wagon
was there to take them to the Matrix. As the guard started to shut
the cell, I sneezed and he told me I'd better come too.
They lined us up along a tall counter
and frisked us, afterward conducting interviews about our general
health. They handcuffed the chubby little guy to a stool in the back
of the room. I was standing next to one of the Mexican kids. He was
pretty fancy. He was wearing shiny pointy toed boots, a huge belt
buckle, and a shirt with silver tips on the collar and about thirty
pearl buttons down the front.
While the interviews were going on, a
flunky walked behind us and dropped manacles, cuffs, and chains at
our feet. Once he did that, he went behind the counter and got a pair
of scissors and returned, obviously waiting for something. The guy
sitting behind the bar called my name and told me to lift my shirt up
to my chest and look away. The flunky came over, stuck four fingers
of his left hand down the front of my pants and cut the button off.
Then he sealed it in an evidence bag and gave it to his superior. He
returned the scissors to their drawer, without mutilating anybody
else's haberdashery.
How the fuck was I supposed to keep my
pants up? They already took my belt in Chandler.
I remembered I wasn't supposed to ask
questions, but I assumed my hay fever had already condemned me to
Phoenix, if not Devil's Island. While holding my shorts up with one
hand, I posited the natural query: “What was that for”? The
pimply flatfoot just looked at me like I was stupid and told me my
button could be fashioned into a weapon. He said if I got to the
Matrix with that button I would be arrested for smuggling a deadly
weapon into a penal institution. Then he turned to the set to catch
the next segment of Maury Povich.
I told the Mexican guy with the fancy
shirt that he was probably going to get ten years for that shit. He
either didn't speak English, or had no sense of humor. It was pretty
much a humorless bunch on both sides of the law in Mesa. Jails bad
enough. Why not make the best of a bad situation?
The flunky ran chain under my armpits
and around my chest and cuffed my hands to it. Then he manacled my
ankles. Once he had done this to all but the chubby guy (Bryan), he
returned us to the cell (except for Bryan) to wait for our driver to
finish doing paperwork or taking a shit or whatever was holding him
up.
I had to frog walk back to the cell to
keep my pants from falling down, and once there, the orange smell
made me hungry all over again. But it gave me an idea. I dumped the
orange peels out and set about tying my front belt loops together to
keep my britches on. This was harder than it sounded. My hands were
trussed up to my chest like a tyrannosaurus, and I could only get
within eight inches of my waist.
I had to twist the bag up as tight as
I could and thread it through the loops at a distance. It was nearly
impossible, and led to more than a few side cramps. Once it was
through both loops, I still had to tie it tight. How the hell could I
do that from eight inches away? I nearly gave up, then realized with
a slipknot I could tie it within reach then pull it tight. The other
criminals heckled me through this whole contortionist ordeal, warning
me that I was probably going to be arrested. I reckoned I'd rather be
arrested than pantless in a crowded jail cell. I hid my wonderbread
belt with my shirt tail.
The flunky returned an eternity or two
later and added waist chains in his bid for a B&D merit badge,
linking us together with about a foot and a half of length between.
Then he marched us, Cool Hand Luke style, out to our Paddy Wagon. He
opened the back and we saw Bryan was already loaded up into his own
private cage toward the front. They had some kind of fencing mask on
him, I guess they didn't want him making faces and disrupting class.
The next acrobatic trick they had us
perform was getting into the back of the truck. The first step was
about a foot and a half high and we only had a foot of chain between
our feet. So we had to turn and kind of hop sideways to get up there.
If that sounds hard, remember I was also chained to jailbirds both in
front and behind. One bad move and we were all going down in a heap.
The guy in front of me started to go down and I shouldered him up and
in and dove behind him onto my belly, dragging the guy behind me
along for the ride. He wasn't happy, but he was all trussed up and
couldn't do anything about it. At least I kept my pants on.
The ride wasn't so bad. It took
forever. We stopped at several other jails and even the woman’s
prison before reaching the Matrix. Everybody else was bitching about
the wait, but I figured where I was going, I wasn't going to get any
car rides for a couple of decades or so, so I made the best of it.
I'm a creative guy, but still haven't
figured out how to make a deadly weapon from the button on a pair of
cargo shorts. I just wasn't cut out for prison.
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