Hannibal Mammogram: Frog Gravy 10

Author’s note: Frog Gravy is a nonfiction incarceration account.

Names have been changed.

This post is from prison.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

Hannibal Mammogram is one of three Frog Gravy essays published in this anthology:

Jail art by Crane-Station/photo: Masonbennu-flickr

After I have breakfast with a woman who killed her husband, I am summonsed via intercom to the transportation section of the main building, for a mammogram. I signed up for this generous offer of a health screening, because I have never had a mammogram, although I am 48-years-old and my mother has been treated for breast cancer.

The intercom announcement is sort of a surprise because we are never told ahead of time when we will be going anywhere. For example, inmates are commonly awakened at 2 AM, told to pack and shipped to Otter Creek, the privately owned prison, without any notice or forewarning. We are told that the suddenness of such shipments and transports is for security.

In the transportation room, in a booth, a female guard watches while I strip off my clothes, including my socks.I am told to face the wall, bend over and spread my labia and ass cheeks, exposing what inmates refer to as the ‘brown eye.’I then squat and cough.

I am self-conscious because I have taken to shaving completely my pubic hair, and in the jails inmates made great fun of this. I feel the guard’s eyes examining my private areas, and she focuses not on the shaven area, but on the fact that I am not wearing any underwear. To me, State underwear are akin to adult diapers. She tells me that not wearing State underwear is a serious offense, a write-up, and time in the hole, and I tell her that my underwear are in the laundry, which is true, it is just that the same underwear have been in the laundry, unworn, since my arrival at the prison.

The guard then gives me a neon orange outfit to wear (prison clothing is tan Khaki for anyone curious) complete with an orange jacket.

Then she handcuffs me, in front.

She puts a lock-box over the handcuffs and locks it, so that I cannot move my hands.

She fits a locked belly-chain, twice wrapped, to the lock-box contraption. I cannot raise my arms or move my hands now, and I secretly pray that I do not experience a sudden itch.

She selects leg irons from a selection of chains and shackles hanging on the wall, and she shackles me in leg irons.

After this, she puts on a bullet-proof vest.

Over this, she dons a flack jacket.

Finally, she holsters a loaded gun, a .38 revolver, or some sort of large revolver.

I walk, tripping and stumbling on chains, to an awaiting van, where I am chain-locked to the seat and belted in.

At the hospital I am paraded by the passing public like a Hannibalistic circus freak, and then chain-locked to a bench to wait. The guard (they hate being called guards and I keep forgetting) -The officer has ¾-inch painted acrylic nails, and as she fingers the gun with them, I try to formulate a plan for when she accidently shoots me.

I finally decide that she is more likely to shoot herself, when she calls me to walk to the appointment. “Walk this way,” she says.

I try.

“Well COME ON,” she barks. “What in the fuck do you think you are doing anyway? We don’t have all day here!”

“I can’t,” I reply.

“What the fuck…”

“I am chained to the bench and I cannot stand up. You have locked the chain to the bench. I cannot stand or walk.”

In case I would have had to pee during my Hannibal outing, the officer has a specimen cup at-the-ready to drug test for substances that may have, per chance, diffused or otherwise virgin-birthed their way into my system.

I sit in silence on the ride back to the prison because I do not initiate conversation with anyone carrying a loaded gun anymore, until she says, “I need something.”

“Yeah, a nice lunch sounds pretty good,” I say. “Bet you are starved.”

“No,” she replies. “I wish I had a lot of money so that I would not have to do this job anymore.”

On arrival at the prison, I repeat the strip search and squat-and-cough inspection.

I keep telling myself, “The prison is in the mind.”

Frog Gravy: Meanness Among Warehoused Inmates

By Crane-Station

Note: While Fred is completing a post on expert witnesses, here is a nonfiction post on incarceration. This essay is published in an anthology along with two others. The online essays are each stand-alone, and they alternate between jail and prison in no particular order.

barn at winter by Crane-Station on flickr. jail art done at Ricky’s World.

In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer.
-Albert Camus

Frog Gravy is a nonfiction incarceration account.

Inmate names are changed.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

McCracken County Jail Cell 107, winter, 2008

Meg announces to the cell that she is on her period.

“So?” says Christie.

“So, I get out in two weeks, and I can get some dick!”

Meg lives in a motel on the outside, where she trades her body for drugs. She has nine children; many of them were born while Meg was in jail. After Meg is released and after she gets her ‘dick,’ her tenth child will be born in prison, but we do not know this yet.

She has made the comment about getting some ‘dick’ to be mean, because she knows that the rest of the cell occupants are serving lengthier sentences than she has ever had to serve, and that we will be unable to know a man’s touch or have sex, and she will.
When the announcement about dick does not elicit much of a response, Meg starts in on Christie, who, having been denied drug court and now faces 24 years for nonviolent drug-related charges, is desperately depressed. Christie stays on her bunk all the time now, crying.

One of Christie’s felonies, by the way, is for a cold check in the amount of something like one dollar and seventy-two cents, whereas Meg, who will walk out of the jail and get some dick and get pregnant two weeks from now, has a lengthy history of theft and possession charges that, for some reason, she has never had to worry much about, in terms of serving any time.

Rather, during her frequent yet brief accomodations in the McCracken County Jail, she busies herself with the passive-aggressive practices of constant manipulation and torment of fellow inmates who will be serving lengthy sentences entombed in cement with no hope. Each time, Meg leaves, and gets some dick, among other things.

Meg says to Christie, “I think you are overreacting.”

“I can’t help it,” says Christie. “I’m not overreacting. I feel really, really, really bad inside. People notice that there is something wrong. I can’t quit crying. I don’t mean to be such a bitch about it. I just don’t know what to do about it. I sleep 15 hours a day now. I can’t handle this.”

“It’ll be all right,” says Meg, who, two weeks from now will be having sex.

“You don’t know that,” says Christie.” I’m sorry. This isn’t me, but I just don’t know what to do.”

Christie cries.

Down the hall, Harry yells from his isolation cell, “HELLLLP! PLEEEEASE! Somebody! Let me out! Helpme helpmehelpme helpmehelpme Helllllpp…”

Sally is on the phone, calling her mother “a fucking whore.”

Sally calls her mother every five minutes or so, and treats her like a disobedient child. She says, at maximum volume, “I love you! Shut your fucking mouth, you’re nuthin’ but a lazy whore.”

Sally’s mother shouts back. Sally also screams at her 17-year-old son on the phone. She holds the receiver and says to us, “He ain’t got his books for home school yet. Can you believe that shit? My mother ain’t even got his books! She ain’t nuthin’ but a useless whore, don’t do nuthin’ but lay on her back all day.”

Because Sally is currently a guest in the jail, her son is supposed to be homeschooled by Sally’s mother, who is addicted to Vicodin and who never completed the eighth grade.

The son is also apparently very sick, with some kind of severe illness that Sally cannot define. Munchausen by Proxy I think to myself, although I never say it. I think this to myself privately because Sally also self-reports severe, undefined illness in herself, and the mother is dysfunctional, and there is too much collective severe-yet-undefined illness in a young group of closely connected people. Sally looks healthy and robust. It is Christie, crying on her bunk, unable to get up, that I worry about.

I like Sally, and we get along well. I do not agree with how she speaks to her mother or her son, but Sally is amicable to fellow inmates, and she has a delightful sense of humor.

Meanwhile, Meg has come back to the cell from a brief visit to the jail library. The library is a jail cell with mostly paperback romance novels and religious materials, and a remarkable dearth of literature. Meg sets an arm load of romance novels onto the steel table, and then starts gossiping about YaYa, who was in the library, gossiping about Amy. YaYa is not here to defend herself.

Meg says, “I just wanted to hit her.”

I say, “She’s pretty big. Maybe that is not such a good idea. You know, hitting her.”

“The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

Meg taps on the wall to the cell next door, to arrange for her delivery of drugs for the evening, in the form of the inmate-next-door’s psych meds. Everything went okay for her first delivery, and I secretly hope that everything will continue to go okay, because when Meg is on someone else’s psych meds, she usually shuts up.

They make some arrangement.

Later, I am doing exercises on the floor next to the steel door when the steel door flies open, nearly hitting me, and there stands Tiffany, the sergeant, and she is irate. She says, “Who got the note from Carter!?”

“Who’s Carter?” I say.

“Who got that note from Carter!?”

Just then, we realize that Meg’s drug arrangement has not gone as planned. Carter, the inmate next door who was on psych medication, had wrapped two pills in paper and ‘fished’ them underneath her cell door and into our cell, under the door. But it did not work, because the note got stuck.

Tiffany leaves. Meg goes off on Carter. “Dumb bitch, she shoulda knocked.”

We watch while guards come to the cell next door, remove Carter, and take her to the hole.

Meg smiles, giggles, and laughs, as though she had nothing whatsoever to do with the note or the pills in the note. She dismisses the whole incident, and gets on the phone to make arrangements with someone on the outside to smuggle cigarettes into the jail. Later, she tries to get me to make an appointment with the nurse and lie about some ailment, so that Meg can get Tylenol pills, or any pills. I refuse.

When I refuse, she makes fun of me, of my trial, of my conviction, of my lengthy sentence, and of the fact that she will be getting dick two weeks from now and I will not be getting any dick until it is too late for me to have sex, because I am too old.

In my mind I try to come up with reasons for meanness and lack of empathy among warehoused humans in the same predicament, and I wonder if people in the train cars during the holocaust were mean to each other. What is it, exactly, that brings out such hate? Perhaps it is overcrowding or demeaning, dehumanizing treatment, or lost confidence in ‘the system,’ or female jealousy, mental illness, lack of stimulus, or hormones, or frustration and separation from love, touch and family. Maybe it is a combination of everything.

I fold my cranes out of scavenged paper. I move them around. I adjust the towel on my head. I go into the bathroom and climb onto the steel toilet and look through the slit to the dumpsters outside.

I return to the steel table. I put the tiny cranes with the big cranes.

I stay silent.