Sweet Hell on Fire (21 page)

I awoke the next day with a hangover from hell.

Of course, it was nothing less than what I deserved for being such a sloppy bitch and doing so many horrible things to my body. My head thumped like a freight train running on nitro, my stomach was sour, and my tongue was like a llama hide that had been left on the floor of a taxi cab.

Every bone in my body ached. There were places on me that hurt that I didn’t even know had nerve endings. My muscles hurt—my stomach from puking, my arms from holding me aloft over the sea of orange puke, my legs from—hell, I didn’t know. My hip and ribs were sore from sleeping all night on the ceramic tiled floor of the bathroom.

The stench of alcohol, curdled orange juice, and urine turned my stomach again, but thankfully, there was nothing left in my belly to purge.

I remembered everything so clearly, especially that moment where I was outside my body. I half-wished I could do that again because being inside hurt like a bitch.

But I guessed it would hurt for a while—until I straightened myself out. There would be no hanging out away from myself; I had to find a way to be comfortable in my own skin. If I didn’t like who I was, I had to change it.

I peeled off my clothes, still disgusted with myself. I got the Comet and a Brillo pad to scour the tub, which was a feat of ridiculous proportions considering how hung over I was, but with every thrust of the pad against that orange ring, I got another flash of determination.

This would not be my life.

I would not be this person.

I scrubbed that tub until it gleamed. The smell of the Comet played as much hell with my stomach as the other offending scents. I was thankful to rinse it away and replace it all with the clean tang of Pine Sol when I mopped the floor.

I felt slightly crazy mopping my floor naked, but it seemed like something that had to happen. I couldn’t stand the filth for another second. Not the filth I’d brought into my home, spewed in my tub, or dribbled on the floor. It all had to go.

I got into the shower and proceeded to scrub the filth from the previous night from my body. There was something therapeutic in that, almost like I could wash everything away with the dirt.

Then I had to scrub my tub again.

It felt good to be clean.

I was scared that the rest of it wouldn’t be so easy because I wasn’t quite sure how far down the rabbit hole I’d fallen.

Was I an alcoholic? Would I be able to stop by myself? I steeled myself for that eventuality, that I would need help. Would I get sick when I didn’t drink? Would I get the shakes?

Then I shut all those questions down because it didn’t matter what the answer was to any of them because I was going to do it. I was done using the bottle to self-medicate. Whatever it took to change what I’d done to myself, I’d do.

And if it sucked sweaty donkey balls, well, that was just tough shit. That was the price I’d have to pay to get my life back on track.

I really thought it would be harder to stop drinking to get drunk. My psychiatrist friend told me that I was lucky I didn’t have an addictive personality or it would be something I’d have to fight the rest of my life. It was great she had so much confidence me because I didn’t. Not yet. I wasn’t naïve enough to think I could just decide to stop. I didn’t even know if I was an alcoholic.

That sounds stupid, but I didn’t. Was I addicted? My behavior sure seemed to indicate so.

And yet I did stop. Cold turkey.

The first week, I was tempted. Who wouldn’t need a drink after looking at the fuck-all mess I’d made of my life? But I knew that wouldn’t fix anything. Understanding I wasn’t an alcoholic made it worse. If I was an alcoholic, I’d have a reason. Not that it would excuse my behavior, but a medical condition was more forgivable than wanton fuckery.

I didn’t go out with friends at first because I didn’t trust myself. Over the course of several months, I found I could go out with friends and not drink, but I didn’t want to go out with most of them because they weren’t conducive to the changes I wanted to make in my life either. They were just as bad as the alcohol, all in the same place I’d been in: miserable and self-medicating with nothing to look forward to but more of the same. So I made different friends.

I still went out for the occasional game of pool, but those invites began to taper off and I was okay with that. They stopped calling me and I stopped calling them.

I wasn’t lonely in that same way I’d been before. There wasn’t the same empty chasm I was trying to fill with the drinking and the partying. I was still sad and alone, but I could see some daylight.

It was years before I had another drop of alcohol, before I could be sure that I was the one in charge. Sometimes I drink socially now, and I joke about how many glasses of wine I’ve had or how much it will take to get me to do karaoke (and believe me, no one wants that), but I always know where my line is and I never cross it because I will never be that person again. I will never choose to be numb no matter what life throws at me.

When I made that choice, decided that I would never choose to be numb, I still hadn’t figured out that when I made those lines in the sand that Fate or the Universe, God, whatever, would test me. That’s what those lines are for; they’re ultimatums of a sort, a big, fat dare to the powers that be.

The darkest part was still to come.

Prison was still prison. Nothing changed there.

That big blowup we’d been expecting never happened, but sometimes, that’s just how it is.

I started thinking about school and maybe going back for a criminal justice degree. Or abnormal psychology. I had a brain, and when it wasn’t soaked in rum, it liked to be busy. I didn’t think about a journalism degree—that seemed too close to reaching for the stars, and I’d barely crawled out of the dark. I needed a safe dream that I knew I could reach for and obtain because I wouldn’t stop with the degree. I’d get ideas in my head and try to write books. Books that had one chance in a million of selling. I wasn’t ready to handle rejection yet, especially not something that was so personal, a piece of me.

Unless it was from the inmates. I still didn’t give a shit about that.

We had another new class of officers coming in, as with the high turnover rate there were new classes of trainees every few months. I never minded having them in my cell house for OJT, or On the Job Training. They had to learn sometime, and I knew a lot of officers didn’t have the patience. The thinking was that they didn’t know if these people were going to stay, so why invest in them?

At the fed, you’re lower than dog shit until you’ve done your first year. No matter where you came from, whom you’re related to, the other officers don’t want to hear anything out of your mouth until you’ve done your year. I could see the logic in that. At the state level, there was no particular time limit. Some people were never trusted, and others were trusted immediately.

But I was determined that incoming classes would learn more on OJT than I did. For a lot of the officers, especially the old-timers, training consisted of handing them the keys and showing them where the lockbox was with a quick, “Don’t get shanked and I’ll see you in eight hours.”

My first bout of employment with the prison when I was nineteen was like that. They took us to a cell house and posted each of us at different points, then left us alone with no radio, no panic button, and no officer to oversee what we did.

That sucked.

So I made sure to treat all my OJTs like they were part of the team and make myself available to offer guidance where I could.

A lot of the things they were told in training were not applicable in real life. It was one thing to act out little scenarios and read about what it was like behind the walls; it was quite another to actually experience it.

The OJT I had that day took forever to lock the guys up on her tier. Usually, when they first start, it takes a while to get a feel for the job. Plus every cell house is different because the people are different—inmates and staff.

But watching her, I realized what her problem was. It wasn’t because she was petite or young. I’d seen women smaller than her with presence like a linebacker. No, she treated the inmates as if they had the right-of-way on the tier and they were walking all over her—almost literally.

I climbed the stairs to the tier and pulled her aside. “No, that’s not how you do it.”

“Well, I don’t want to be rude, I want to build a rapport,” she said eagerly.

I was heartened by how obvious she was about wanting to do a good job, wanting to be a good officer. “You know what kind of rapport you’re building now? The bend-me-over-a-barrel-because-I’m-soft rapport. They don’t respect you and they won’t until you demand it.”

“I understand I have to earn it.”

“No, you don’t. If you want to keep it, you have to earn it, but you’re the officer. You’re the one with the keys. You control movement, they don’t. You control the tier, they don’t. There is nowhere that they have to be that takes precedence over security. Security being you.”

“They won’t move,” she said, hanging her head.

“It’s your first day. It’s okay. Listen to me, though; hold your head up. No matter what. Always meet their eyes. Looking away is an act of submission.”

“God, like they’re a pack of wolves of something.”

“Yeah, just like that.” I laughed.

“So, what if they won’t move?”

“They’ll move,” I promised her. “C’mon. Walk the run with me.”

I walked down the run with her behind me and without saying a word, every single inmate who was out for movement moved aside when he saw me coming. There were a couple catcalls and instructions for me to train the newbie right, and a few telling her not to listen to me at all because I was too much of a hard-ass, but it was all light and the cell house ran smoothly.

When we walked back to the lockbox, she said, “That was awesome. I want to be an officer just like you.”

Just like me? My first instinct had been to tell her, no, you don’t want to be anything like me. But I couldn’t help but feel proud that no matter what else I screwed up, this was something I could get right. This was something I was good at.

The inmates all knew I wasn’t ripe for the plucking, but that didn’t stop some of them from trying. I guess everyone loves a challenge.

There were some guys for whom telling them no didn’t work, but they never crossed any lines where I could write them up. Being an annoying pain in my ass wasn’t actually covered in the inmate rulebook.

In one cell house, this one guy would always find a reason to talk to me when I was posted there. He was never outright disrespectful, but he was like a fungus. Every time I turned around, he was there.

If he’d never done more than that, I probably wouldn’t have been so irritated, but I could hear in his voice and infer it from some of the things he said that he thought if he could just put in enough time with me, he’d wear me down.

First, I tried laying it out for him. I told him that even if I wasn’t married to another officer, I would never endanger my career or my coworkers that way. And all that aside, there was the fact that my father was a retired federal corrections officer, and he’d bury me in the basement with a ton of lime if he thought for one second I’d taken up with an inmate. He was also warned that if he pushed the issue he’d go to Seg. Well, he was one of those who liked to “winter” in Seg. As if it was some kind of vacation destination. He didn’t mind it down there and he still had a lot of time left to do. So the usual motivators didn’t apply.

I finally realized that I had to make him not like me.

But that was tricky too because I’d worked hard for my reputation. If I treated him badly, or any different than any other inmate, I wouldn’t be a good officer.

I was talking to my second officer one day when he approached. She had brought me a root beer. He slid up to us, neat as a pin, and inserted himself right into the middle of the conversation as if we were at the food court at the mall instead of in a prison.

She looked at me and I looked at her—and some unspoken knowledge passed between us. She smiled and took a long gulp of root beer. Probably half the can. I did the same thing. He was still talking, the look on his face confident and his posture tall. He really thought he was getting somewhere.

He turned to say something else to me, and I burped. The biggest, loudest, lumberjackiest burp I could manage. If I’d been down in Seg, they would have given me a cookie and a that-a-girl slap on the back.

I think it may have actually
deactivated
the relaxer on his hair. He blinked against the onslaught and swallowed hard, obviously struggling. I had to give him credit, though, for not giving up. He turned to say something to my second officer as if my burp had never happened. I didn’t offer an excuse me, a pardon me, nothing.

Then she responded in kind.

And hers was louder. In fact, I was pretty sure I could tell she’d had Chinese for lunch. Sweet and sour chicken and crab rangoon.

Not be daunted, he turned back to me and I took another long pull off my root beer. Upended the can.

“You might wanna take that a little bit slow, Sarge.”

I smiled and burped again. I almost hurled because I had to dig deep for it.

“Aww, now you got somethin’ somethin’ too?” He turned back to my second officer.

She smiled again and lifted her leg. The eruption from her hind parts was so loud, I was sure that she’d shit her pants.

“You bitches is nasty,” he said, shaking his head and stalking back down the run to his cell.

I laughed again, but then I was
sure
she’d had crab rangoon. We couldn’t go back into the office for two hours.

It was worth it, though, because he never bothered me again.

There was another guy who I knew was jacking off every time I was in his cell house. That in itself isn’t a big deal. It’s prison. They’re men. They’re going to jack off, jerk the monkey, choke the chicken, burp the nephew, walk the purple-headed womb ferret, whatever. But this one would do it where he could watch me. He was a porter, and if he didn’t watch me from his cell, he’d hide in supply closets. He’d stop when I’d walked by, so I had no reason to write him a disciplinary report. In prison, there are even rules about self-love and where and when it can occur. They have to be in their cells with a sheet over their bodies and no expectation of being viewed. So if he wasn’t doing it when I was in front of his cell, he could argue that he had no expectation of being viewed.

If his constant onanism hadn’t been aimed in my general direction, I wouldn’t have fucked with him about it, but he was compulsive with it. I could tell just by the way he looked at me and every other female officer that he was a sex offender.

Yep. Three counts of rape.

So I decided I was going to break him of this habit.

What years of therapy couldn’t do, humiliation would.

I put my plan in motion when I was in his cell house up on the second tier, helping the OJT officer lock up her inmates. They were running all over her like a parking lot. It was ridiculous.

I saw that the door to the supply/laundry room had been left open just a crack, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see this inmate inside. He was watching me.

And beating his meat.

So, when one inmate stopped to ask me something, I kept him there talking for a minute. Asked him about his day. I did that to get a feel for what was going on in the cell house. Other inmates saw this and wanted to talk too. So I waited until I had about ten inmates there waiting to ask me questions and then I flung the door open wide.

The offending inmate was standing there with his dick in his hand and about half a jar of Blue Magic hair pomade on his dick.

They all started laughing and pointing while he scrambled to pull up his boxers, slinging Blue Magic everywhere. A couple made comments about Smurfs jacking off and the laughter reached heights of hysterical.

“You’re fucked up, Sarge,” one of the inmates said to me.

“Why is that?”

“You knew what he was doing.”

“I’m fucked up? I’m not the one with my dick in my hand,” I snorted.

“If you don’t want to see a man taking care of his business, you shouldn’t work in a prison,” he admonished.

“You don’t want to be told when and where to take care of your business, you shouldn’t come to prison.”

“You got me there, Sarge. Yes, you do.”

The inmate never bothered me again, and neither did any of the guys who were there for his humiliation.