Sweet Hell on Fire (11 page)

There was an “incident” on day shift. A fight in one of the cell houses had spilled out into the street. A few friends of mine were hurt. Nothing severe; everyone walked away from the encounter, but it drove the point home how fast things could change, and “what if” was on everyone’s mind.

Corrections officers have to ask that question a hundred times a day in as many different incarnations.

What if this inmate…

What if this officer…

What if I screw up and another officer doesn’t go home?

What if
I
don’t go home?

We have to imagine every possible answer to those questions and plan for every contingency.

Then we have to act like the answers to those questions don’t matter so we can do our jobs. So when we go home, we can leave the remnants of the prison at the gate behind us, and our loved ones can forget we ask ourselves those questions so they don’t have to ask them either.

I was the sickest I’d even been in my life.

I’d felt like crap the night before, but I’d still gone out with everyone. I’d read that somebody used Jaeger as cough syrup. So I drank eight Jaeger Bombs, and that sore throat I’d been nursing felt fantastic.

The next day? Not so much.

I was sitting at Exit/Entry, the point in the Maximum unit where staff would come in and out of the prison, and every time I coughed, it felt like someone was scraping out the inside of my chest with a sharp rock. I was burning up, sweating like a whore in church, then I was cold, shivering. But Exit/Entry was by the front door. People kept coming and going out. I had a space heater on my feet. So I didn’t think I had a fever until the tiles on the floor started moving on their own.

Once, when I’d been sick like that before, I’d been watching a documentary on the Valentine’s Day Massacre. When the reenactment started and the report of the tommy guns echoed through the speakers, I hit the deck because I thought I was actually being shot at. Prison and hallucinations weren’t a good mix, so I knew I had to go home.

Just as I was going to call the Captain, I saw another officer leaving. He winked at me and said he was going home sick. Bastard. He wasn’t sick.

I coughed again, sounding like a barking dog, and I couldn’t stop. One of the special teams guys took one look at me coming through the entry point and said he was going to get the Captain.

The Captain cocked his head to one side to look at me sprawled halfway on the desk and asked if I was going to make it. By that point, I couldn’t even answer him. They called my husband to come and get me.

I had to go to the doctor to get cleared to return to work. Which I didn’t get for a week. I had strep. I’d thought I was just being a pussy about seasonal allergies.

I flew to Portland for Sunshine’s wedding and ended up losing my driver’s license on the concourse. That meant I wasn’t able to rent a car, so I had to call my friend to come pick me up from the airport. I was embarrassed to have to inflict myself on her when she had so much going on.

But she came to get me with a smile, and even though she hadn’t planned on me staying with her, she and her husband-to-be happily made a place for me in their home.

I didn’t sleep that night; I was worried how I was going to get home. Back when I worked for an airline, if you lost your ID, you were fucked. You weren’t flying anywhere. I tried not to focus on it, to remember this weekend wasn’t about me, but my friend, and her wedding and beautiful family.

Yet again, I had to call my husband and ask him to help me. He was on the phone with people all day trying to figure out how to get me on that plane or if he was going to have to drive up to get me.

Sunshine got married outside in this beautiful park and the reception was a campout. I’d never camped out before, and I still haven’t. I ended up leaving before the campout began because I had no way to get back to the airport in time for my flight the next day. The bride’s mom let me hitch a ride with her back to her hotel and I got a room there so I could take the shuttle to the airport.

The bride was beautiful, radiant. I know they always talk about glowing, but she did. She does. I was so happy for her and her husband. They just fit together perfectly like two puzzle pieces.

The beer was provided by the groom, handcrafted. It may have been the best beer I’ve ever had, but it was lost on me because I kept drinking until my face went numb. I danced for hours, jamming with the DJ. At one point, I realized I was up dancing by myself and I didn’t care. It felt so good and I felt free.

I’m surprised I didn’t puke my free all over the place and embarrass myself further, but I wasn’t the only one who’d indulged in more than they should have.

But for all of that, there was a serenity to that place that spoke to me, and I fell in love with Portland, with the clear water, the majestic trees, and the people. The people there were so open, warm, and kind. All but the security guard who wouldn’t go back on the concourse and grab my ID for me when I could see it through the gate. Who also couldn’t be bothered to tell me I didn’t need my ID to fly. All I had to do was walk through something they called “the sniffer.”

The sniffer posed its own set of problems because it analyzed your hair and skin, sniffing out whatever chemicals you’d been exposed to, and then you’d be processed accordingly. I knew I hadn’t been in contact with any—oh. Right.

I had gunpowder residue on my hands from the firing range. CS gas. Who knew what else from the contraband I’d handled before I left?

When the screener asked what I’d been exposed to, I gave him a list of known culprits. As he was reading down the piece of paper I’d handed him, I’d watched the expression on his face shifting from bored to holy-shit-it’s-a-live-one.

He was crestfallen when I told him it was for my job. They actually called the human resources department at the prison to verify I was employed with them and had been exposed to these chemicals within the scope of my duties.

My husband took me out to lunch when I came back. We didn’t talk about anything but work. It was the only safe topic.

I decided to get a new tattoo.

A large raven on my bicep with its head turned to watch my back.

The raven had come to be representative of so many things to me that it just felt right. The raven has many meanings throughout world religions, from Odinism and Asatru to Native American beliefs, Celtic mythologies, Islam, and even Christianity.

For me, I felt a special kinship with the Celtic representation and the Morrigan—the goddess of battle, strife, and fertility. Essentially, hearth and war. The duality of her dominion I felt was very representative of me. The two people I had to be—one behind the walls and the one outside.

Some stories portray her as a triplicate goddess, like the fates, and the maiden, the mother, and the crone. I like that too. The third option, the person who I could grow into who didn’t have to be hearth or war, but could be both. The other two will always be part of me, but I don’t have to be one or the other.

One of the aspects of the Morrigan’s realm is rebirth. That was my goal. To be me again. To find myself and not to ever lose me again. To be reborn strong and whole.

The Morrigan is one hell of a wingman to be watching your back.

I spent three hours in the chair and every time the needle pierced my skin, I reminded myself why I wanted this tattoo. What it meant to me and the person I wanted to be—and I guess it was only fitting that after marking myself as a warrior woman that I was put to the test.

I had to earn my mark.

A quiet day in Seg—the showers had just been painted, so no one would be coming out of their cells.

And obviously, we then had too much time on our hands.

The officers in Seg had always been big with the pranking or outright fuckery. It was our coping mechanism. I had one uniform shirt I never wore anywhere but Seg because I’d been sprayed with bleach so many times. There were a few of us who had those same streaked shirts. We’d have bleach wars, sneaking up on one another with the spray bottles of bleach. It was like prison paintball.

One of the guys almost got divorced because I wrote my name on the back of his neck with a red Sharpie and squirted him with my flowery scented hand sanitizer. I really thought he’d notice me writing on him while he was on the phone, but he was oblivious. That’s what he got for hiding my lunch box.

Once, I made the mistake of leaving my radio on the desk when I went to the bathroom. I was wrong to leave it on the desk, and my coworkers showed me just how wrong by taking it apart and hiding the pieces all over the office.

But none of these compared to the day we took an industrial roll of plastic wrap and bound one of the corporals to a pillar just inside the entrance. Of course, we had contingency plans. If something had popped off, we had a multitool we could have used to slice him free in about a minute. And where we’d bound him, no inmates could see him.

The officer was a willing participant.

Just like the one we’d tied into The Chair the week before. The Chair was a restraint tool used to calm inmates when they won’t settle down. Since we can’t shoot them up with Thorazine like they did in the old days, we strap them in a special chair where their hands and feet are bound and they can’t move, and that’s where they stay until they stop fighting, spitting, throwing shit (literally), or being a general danger to themselves or the facility. Some dipshit in Illinois didn’t follow proper procedure and killed an inmate with The Chair, though, so the administration didn’t let us use it often. Which pissed me off. Watching shows like
Lock
Up
and
Jail
, you see a guy start popping off—acting like he doesn’t want to comply, mouthing off, spitting, or other combative behavior—and they slap his ass in The Chair. They’d gain compliance in a couple hours. I think it’s good risk reduction when done properly and humanely.

Anyway, our First Sergeant sat down in it to teach us how to do the restraints in accordance with policy. He actually had us tie him up. He should have known better. When we had the last restraint in place, the three of us looked at each other and grinned. Suddenly, the First Sergeant knew where he’d fucked up. But this guy was the king of the prank. He was the one who would throw rocks at the sensors on the fence so it would set off an alarm and patrol would have to come investigate it. His employee file was probably six inches thick with only the things he’d been caught doing. His exploits were legendary. We knew he’d appreciate it on a certain level if we left him there…

So we did.

We left him secured in The Chair in the storage room/bathroom, laughing like hyenas the whole time. Only for about a half an hour, though. The inmates would know otherwise.

I was elected to let him out because the rest of the crew knew he wouldn’t lay into me like he would them because we were good friends outside of work. But he was laughing when I released the restraints.

The officer we’d bound to the pillar, now, we left him there longer than a half an hour. It had taken at least that long to bind him properly, so we had to get our investment back and make a profit, right? We only ended up leaving him there for an hour, though, because we had other things to do. We decided since no one was coming out for a shower, we’d go ahead and pull a few guys out and toss their houses looking for contraband. Nothing interesting was found, but not for lack of trying.

I actually liked searching cells. I thought it was like a game of hide-and-seek. They tried to hide things from me and I had to seek it. If I didn’t find it, they won, but if I did, I won.

By the end of the day, even with that, I was actually bored. So I started cleaning out the drawers in the desk and organizing the office. I found the night shift’s pack of playing cards so I cut out the part in the employee handbook about playing cards, reading magazines, etc., and I taped it on the front of the pack and put it back where I found it.