brown noise

When I was about 25 when my Dad died in an accident in our home.  We were real close.  Daddy’s girl type stuff.  Mostly, we shared the same temperament:  angry.  Shortly after he had died I found myself in jail for drinking and driving which was bound to happen in my live fast die young give a shit world where I had started shooting up at the age of seventeen.  Anyway, landed myself in jail and that’s where it all started…

When you arrive in booking, a few different things can happen.  So, you get arrested which can happen fast or slowly depending on the charge.  My experience was mainly performing drunk Olympics like a baby giraffe in high heels on the side of the road before eventually blowing (there wasn’t this big refusal trend back then) and joking with the arresting officers about what I might blow.  All fun and games until the drunk tank.

Booking is the general area in the jail where you wait to see about placement.  There are usually a wide smattering of folks and on this night in Campbell County Detention Center the mix was meth heads, drunks, and a few immigrants.  This was before the immigrant crisis and Gillette had a sizable jail population compared to Laramie where I had just completed another stint in jail.  This was my second DUI arrest and they needed to put me in the general area of the substance use issues.

The placement usually starts in an innocuous cell (unless you are in special management if that was the case you probably wouldn’t be reading this) where they hold you for a few reasons.  They like to say its to be sure you aren’t a danger to yourself or others and to monitor the general population but I’ll tell you a secret:  you are in booking as long as they want you to be.  Press that call button one too many times and you might be in booking limbo, a purgatory of screaming, yelling, and in case you haven’t lost all humanity yet:  the lights never come off.

That’s how some of the most trying days of life started—in a booking cell with lights that never turned off.  The first night, they had stuck me in a cell with another woman who was clearly experiencing some kind of crisis (meth?) and wouldn’t stop scratching her arms and screaming, screaming, yelling, screaming, SCREECHING about how she needed a nurse, needed a call.  These ones are the most annoying because folks still think they have a choice at this time and it takes them a few hours to realize that you are screeching into the void.

This is probably where the toilet paper started.  There’s not much amenities in jail and so I used to bunch up as much toilet paper as I could stand and shove into my ears and sacrifice feet warmth to be able to pull the blanket up over my head.  Because I was locked up on a second offense I was staring down a longer sentence:  about 6 months and I had yet to be sentenced in another county so this was truly the beginning of the journey after being arrested at home feebly calling out to my mother for my glasses who wouldn’t give them to me.  By the end of the sentence, the bunched up cheap one ply had started to make my ears bleed.

The complainer in my cell was finally removed by morning and I took my chances asking a passing guard if I was headed to general population.  I had no idea at the time, especially just from looking around, but they had busted a huge meth ring the same night they found me and ended up inditing about 29 people.  When I read the article upon my release that first night made so much more sense and that toilet paper was my barrier between drunk and methed out.  Hope and compete disrepair.

First night knocked out and they dragged me out of my cell to fill out the gen pop form where I mentioned my zero gang affiliations and zero dietary restrictions.  Later on, I learned that lots of prisoners would use the ol vegetarian trick to get better food.  Sadly enough, I would often get jealous of the pregnant offenders because they would get more food and two milks.  They would often barter for candy.

After filling out my form and feeling hopeful that I might finally get the fuck out of booking and the constant screaming and 24 hour light I was placed in another cell for holding.  This time, there were four of us in the cell. During this time, Campbell County had started work on the detention center and they hadn’t finished the booking side.  The plumbing was not functional in every cell and ours was half functioning.

Four women shitting across four days is a fucking putrid smell.  The second day wasn’t bad because these women were more lucid than the mether of the previous evening and they let us have copies of the newspaper and we chatted and folded paper.  We took turns sleeping in various areas of the cell but you could never really get away from the smell.  The cell was so small that no matter where you sat, laid, stood, your head would always remain about 6 feet from the toilet.

On the third day we were all becoming restless.  We slept a bit that first night but the fluorescent lights seemed to posses a special type of psycholical warfare voodoo and the glare was slightly blue in this jail, orange in the Wheatland jail.  Another inmate and I decided to take the newspaper and whatever we had to put it over the lights.  Within the hour a guard was in our cell ripping it down.  No rest for the wicked.

The fourth day was the test.  I hadn’t slept in days, food wasn’t always served on time or just not served at all and whatever was on the plate had to have been dog food.  I wish it were something I could describe in a Proustian way but it was slop.  Literal brown slop from tray to toilet where it couldn’t be properly flushed.  After the guards had knocked down our feaux sleep system I felt the panic.  Pain in my chest, tears stinging my eyes. I felt the edges of my brain wondering how could any human do this how could anyone be humanely piled into a cell with no plumbing and no food and come out the other side?  Well, baby, that’s the gen pop way—if you don’t hurt yourself or others during these four days you are free and clear to be housed in detention for as long as you make trouble for yourself.

For the next day the task wasn’t to entertain ourselves it was to maintain some level of sanity so that we could all get the fuck out of this cell.  Slowly, one by one, like cattle in the feed lot headed to slaughter we were given our jumpsuits.  Blue for felons.  Orange for misdemeanors.  Stripes for trustees. I pulled the orange jump suit up over my legs and asked for a XXL mainly to have the suit long enough to pull over my limbs.  I looked like a giant loose noodle in a used car parking lot legs and hair flailing in deperation:  zero percent financing c’mon in today except what was being sold was our souls.

I seriously doubt there was much oversight or complex manuvering to make our lives hell.  These were just people performing a job in a shitty system and I felt shame seep into my face when I would see a guard I went to high school with watching in silence as they patrolled the pod wondering how the fuck my life got so off course.  One morning, after working night shift in laundry we decided to move some chairs around in defiance of the felon fucks that wouldn’t let us sleep during the day.  Damn near got the unit shut down but this was a turning point where I no longer feared the blue suit felons and their cans of copenhangen snuck in through body parts.

I ended up staying about 30 days in the Gillette detention and even could see some benefits:  we would get commisery twice a week and there was actually women in jail.  Around 30 of us in jail most for drugs, then child support, then a few who had gotten so fed up with their abusive husbands they shot them.  I asked my cell mate about her murder and she described the antique pistol she had grabbed from the mantel right before she shot in him in the stomach. 

I remember thinking at the time that she didn’t look like a murderer. She looked like somebody’s aunt, hair pinned back, hands folded in her lap, the kind of woman who probably kept a clean house and paid her bills on time. She had never been in trouble a day in her life until that one moment when she reached for the dusty pistol that she said she didn’t even think would work.

That stuck with me longer than the smell of the cell or the lights that never turned off. The idea that a life can change in the span of a few seconds. One bad decision. One flash of anger. One moment where the line gets crossed and there is no stepping back. One moment where the pain and suffering of an entire life distills into a tiny flash that forever marks the person.

Years later I would find myself standing in an empty apartment holding a notice in my hand saying my lease would not be renewed, realizing I had done the same thing in my own way. Not with a gun. Not with blood. But with a choice that landed just as hard. One small moment and she killed a man. One small moment and I killed my housing.

The brown noise never really stopped after jail. It just changed shape. A low steady hum in the background reminding me how thin the line can be between a normal day and a life turned sideways. That girl in the jail cell never left. She is still here, listening, waiting, trying to keep the volume low enough to get through another day without breaking something I can’t put back together.