Sweet Hell on Fire (15 page)

Several days ago, I’d found an inmate passing a book around from the Law Library. It hadn’t been checked out to anyone in the cell house. I confiscated it and sent it back to the library. The inmate who’d been in possession of the book got very angry that I’d taken it. He told me I’d be sorry. So he riled up his little fangirl bitches who were on the block with him to find things to grieve me for. The first few weren’t a big deal and didn’t even make it past the first stage of complaint, meaning I didn’t have to answer them. They wrote up their complaints and filed them with the administration, but they didn’t make it past the Grievance Officer and were thrown out.

This grievance was different.

There was going to be questioning and, depending on my answers, possibly an investigation.

When I came into work, the relief OIC pulled me aside and kicked everyone out of the office before she sat me down and looked at me for a long time.

“What the fuck?” I knew she was about to lay something huge on me. This woman had no qualms about speaking her mind and suddenly she had to think about what she was saying? It couldn’t be good.

“God, Sara.” She sighed heavily. “I don’t want to do this. But you should know, this happens to all of us. Especially those of us who are really good at our jobs.” She shoved a paper at me and as I read, my knuckles whitened on the arm of the chair and if I could have shot fire from my eyes, I would have. It made me so nauseous, I promptly threw up. I scrambled to the bathroom and didn’t even manage to close the door before I spewed my lunch.

Which was so noted by my commanding officer.

It was more disgusting than anything I’d come into contact with in the prison thus far. It was a horror far beyond swarms of roaches, rats the size of cats, and brain juice splattered all over me.

A knobby-kneed, buck-toothed, meth-faced, cock-sucking, illiterate motherfucker had accused me of approaching him for sex.

I didn’t even know how to respond. I wondered if I could just puke on the page, scrape it into that little box where I was supposed to compose my answer, and send it back to him—hot and steamy with my disgust. Yes, this is my response to that. Have a nice day.

“Sara, you know they just did it to get under your skin and piss you off. Take some time before you respond. Then copy your response to all the brass so you’re completely transparent on all of this.”

I knew this guy belonged to the one who was angry with me over the book; he was one of his bitches. Literally. So I turned it off. I flipped the switch and detached myself from the situation and I reread the complaint. After I punched my fist into the wall a few times.

First, in his complaint he claimed I stopped by his cell multiple times the day previous. And I had gone by his cell, walked right past it, and I never stopped. Lucky for me it had been on camera. We’d been recording for the Force Cell Move with the guy who’d threatened to shank me, and never once did I stop at this inmate’s cell.

Secondly, the things he claimed I said would never come out of my mouth in a million years. He said I asked to “conversate” with him. I hate that word more than explosive diarrhea. It’s thug slang. You may converse. You may have a conversation, but you can’t conversate because it’s not a goddamn word. Thug is not my native language, although I will admit to using enough profanity to strip the hide off a trucker. Yet, even in my use of the profane, I do it correctly.

So I sat down to compose my response using as many fifty-dollar words as could be considered reasonable. I pointed out that I was on camera, his depictions of what was said, and how completely unlike my speech patterns they were, the incident about the book, and that I would never invite anyone into my body who didn’t know the difference between “they’re, their, and there.”

A week later, I received a copy of the grievance back with all of my fifty-dollar words highlighted as well as a few others with the inmate’s request to define them because he didn’t understand my response.

Which was exactly what I intended. I made it clear the things he claimed I said were obviously not my words and I embarrassed him the way he embarrassed me. All of his buddies knew he’d filed the grievance and they would all want to see the response. So, not only was his grievance dismissed, but I made him look stupid to his friends as well.

He admitted later that he’d made it up, but in corrections, reputation is everything. Luckily, mine was solid enough with both inmates and staff to withstand this.

I loved my job in Seg, but I wanted more. I needed more money and I was ready for more responsibility. At work, anyway. A Sergeant position had come open and I’d filled out the sheet in human resources to interview for the promotion.

It consisted of a panel interview, so there were three people asking me questions, but I wasn’t nervous because I knew all of the answers.

I knew I’d aced it when I got a call on shift right after my interview to ask me which of the Sergeant posts I wanted. Sometimes promotions involved a move to another shift, depending on how many slots were available. The applicant who scored the highest got first choice.

That was me!

I was elated that I’d been doing something right.

I chose a five-day open position rather than one where I knew I’d be assigned to a specific post every day. On the one hand, it sucked never knowing where I was going to be assigned from day to day, but also, if a post sucked, most likely I wouldn’t be there again the next day. And being open would mean I’d get experience all over the institution and be available for more training and extra responsibilities so I could keep promoting.

Although, the higher up the ladder I promoted, the harder it would be to go to day shift. Day was a coveted shift because those people managed a semblance of a regular life. The waiting list to go to days could be long. It wouldn’t necessarily be a schedule I count on either because every time I promoted, it was likely I’d get knocked back to second or third shift and back on a waiting list again.

But I didn’t necessarily even want to go to days. Getting up at 4:00 a.m. does not a happy Amazon make. Day shift would mean more time with my kids, but I’d lose my shift differential, the extra pay I got for being on what was considered an “off shift.”

Still, it was something to think about.

My husband took me out to lunch at a new restaurant in the city. He was proud of me and wanted to celebrate.

But this was not one of the good days. Things devolved into an ugly mess within minutes. I ended up throwing my plate at him, the waitress got in my face, and I told her she was going to get hers if she didn’t get the fuck out of our business. Yeah, I was a real class act. I am now and forever banned from every location of this restaurant on the planet. I suppose I’m lucky I didn’t go to jail.

The hard part for me was after stomping out of there, I still had to ride home with him. I wanted to disappear with my rage and chew on it for a while, but that would have meant walking home. Twenty-five miles.

Which, stubborn as I am, I seriously considered. In boots with three-inch heels.

I didn’t actually
hit
him
with the plate, by the way. He ducked.

Once we were in the car, he made me laugh, but that pissed me off even more because it didn’t solve anything. Sure, I’d laughed, but I was still angry with him. Once I’d laughed, he always thought it was okay.

I told him I was still pissed and he said that I was always pissed.

And he was right.

It shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but it was. Now that I thought about it, I’d been pissed off for eight years. The whole time we’d been together. Why was I so angry?

Then he looked at me and said, “I know. When it hits you, it’s really a surprise, but you keep thinking it shouldn’t be.” I just gaped at him and he continued. “Remember when you kicked me out of the house? You told me that I treated the inmates better than I did my own family. That stayed with me, you know. It sucked to realize it was true.” Then he dropped another bomb on me.

“Anger is tied to expectation,” he said.

Such a simple sentence, but it rang like a gong of truth. No, not pretty little bells, or some angelic choir of epiphany—a freaking gong. Loud, obnoxious, startling.

I realized that everything that had ever made me angry had been because I expected something different and maybe, just maybe, my expectations weren’t reasonable. That was a nasty slap in the face. I had my first inkling that I expected more from everyone else than I did from myself—that I had a huge chip on my shoulder thinking the world owed me something.

It did owe me something, didn’t it? After all the pain I’d already been through, all the sadness and heartbreak, why didn’t it owe me some joy? It came back to me then, clear as the blue sky, what my friend had said about choosing to be happy.

We rode in silence the rest of the way home and we stopped at 7-Eleven for hot dogs since I’d spread our dinner all over the wall.

It was something to think about and I did think about it. A lot.

I didn’t want to be angry anymore.

I used to be able to hold a grudge like no one else. I had no problem doing the proverbial slicing off my nose to spite my face. If crossed, I was something to fear. There was no amount of energy or resources I was unwilling to dedicate to the utter destruction of someone who’d crossed me.

But I realized something. I didn’t want to be who I was.

But I hadn’t quite gotten to the part where I realized I wanted to be happy. It seems like such a small step from realizing that you don’t want to be unhappy to realizing that you want happiness. You’d think it would be a given, but it wasn’t.

Happiness and unhappiness are active choices. We can choose to be happy. Things happen, we can’t control everything, but we can control how we react to them. On a logical level, I knew that. But it hadn’t clicked yet that I was choosing to be miserable.

I worked in the Medium as a Corporal because we were overstaffed on Sergeants, and the body alarms started malfunctioning. Body alarms, the buttons we carried and pushed when there was an emergency and we needed the cavalry, demand no small amount of exertion. Ten alarms sounded before five o’clock that evening, and we had to respond to each alarm and treat it as an emergency regardless of whether we thought it was false. Our legs felt like mint jelly from all the running.

The communications guy tried to fix the malfunction, and we thought he had it locked and cocked, finally. That’s why everyone hauled ass with both hands when the emergency tones for another alarm came over the radio during open yard time after chow. The Control officer announced that the alarm was in the clinic.

The yard officer I was running with dropped her radio.

We couldn’t leave it lying there because we didn’t want an inmate to get hold of it, making him privy to private operational communications, nor did we want to make an officer wait if someone was really in trouble. I mistakenly thought I could bend over and scoop it up as I ran.

I bent over, but instead of rising up out of the bend, I skidded across the cement of the track on the yard in front of more than three hundred inmates. I think they heard the laughter on Mars.

Hurt like a motherfucker, I skinned the palms of my hands, my knees, and my cheek. I flipped them all the bird and got up and continued responding to the alarm. It was called false just as I went flying through the clinic door.

The Lieutenant thought I’d been fighting on the way. I had to tell her it was just a battle with my fat ass not wanting to do what I told it. We had a laugh and I was headed back to my post when the nurse on duty took one look at my face and hauled me back into the business part of the clinic by my ear. She insisted on cleaning up all my cuts and slathering them in Bactine. I didn’t complain. I didn’t fancy walking around that festering hole with open sores on my body.

Later, the Lieutenant offered to put a note of commendation in my file because I’d fallen and hurt myself but continued responding. I declined, but thanked her for the offer. I didn’t consider a skinned knee hurting myself. Stabbed in the face maybe. I just did my job. It wasn’t above or beyond the call of duty.

The call of duty was to get to the officer who may be in trouble and render whatever aid necessary. I did that. Period. I did just what I would want someone to do if they were responding to my alarm.