the misfit west

Category: Uncategorized

  • 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.

  • death feelings

    The gloves smell like old water.

    I don’t notice it right away. I’m already up to my elbows in the sink, hot water running hard enough to turn the room to fog, a narrow winter sun flattening itself against the kitchen window. The gloves are a cloudy blue, rubber gone soft and thin at the fingertips. I bought them after the skin on my hands split open from the dry air and the heat and the soap. Little red mouths along my knuckles. So now I slide into these damp sleeves that hold the memory of every other sink of dishes I’ve washed in this house. The inside smell is stale and sour and faintly sweet, like a mop bucket forgotten in the corner of a church basement.

    I turn the plate under the stream until the last streak of oil dissolves. The sound of the water swallows everything—the wind outside, the heater kicking on, the small elastic pop of my dog’s joints as she shifts on her bed behind me.

    This is usually when it starts.

    I look at the plate, then at the rest of the sink: the chipped mug, the spoon with yogurt clinging to the bowl, the glass that held last night’s Advil. Then I look past the dishes to the counter, to the mail stacked in its half-hearted tower, to the notebook splayed open with a pen bleeding through the page, to the bowl of shriveled limes I keep forgetting to throw out. My eyes keep moving, hooking on each object: the bookshelf, the crooked lamp, the blanket slumped over the arm of the chair, the dog’s toys, the stack of folders with my uncle’s name printed in careful black letters at the top.

    I picture all of it without me.

    Will it be easy to get rid of? That’s the question that runs underneath the hot water, under the smell of rubber and detergent. Has it always been this easy to clear me out? A few boxes. A phone call. An estate sale on a Saturday.

    When my uncle died, it took less time than I expected. I kept waiting for a secret to emerge—some hidden compartment, a false bottom, a letter taped under a drawer. He had spent his whole life guarding things, smoothing the surface, protecting the story. When I walked through his house after they carried him out, the carpet smelled like dust and old coffee and a man who had tried very hard not to leave a mess. The blue-green of it was already fading in the high-traffic places. The trash cans were mostly empty. The bathroom cabinet held three half-used bottles of aftershave and the razor he’d used that morning. His closet looked like a store display: shirts organized, shoes paired by the door. I remember standing there, thinking: That’s all. That’s really it.

    And then my sister took charge and whatever he’d been trying to keep contained blew wide open. Bank accounts, loans, mortgages he’d kept current by some quiet miracle. The money he’d stacked with the same care he used to fold his shirts, now shuffling out of the accounts like it had been waiting for her hand. It wasn’t the spending itself that made me dizzy—it was the echo of my mother in it, the old QVC boxes piling up on the porch, the way she would buy and buy and then sit us down and lecture us about how we never had anything. We were always broke, she assured us, as a new package arrived. It is a particular form of madness, being told you are poor by someone who will not stop consuming.

    I rinse the plate until my fingers go numb inside the gloves. Outside, a gust of wind slaps the siding, a hollow sound, like a hand hitting a bare back.

    I think about death most days. It’s not dramatic; it’s logistical. Each cough, for example. I feel the rasp in my throat and immediately picture a shadow on an X-ray, the white smear of something that will not respond to treatment. On days when my lungs behave, my brain rewrites the script: early-onset dementia, little holes in the gray matter that will quietly empty me out until nothing is left but reflex. I misplace a word and feel the edge of it—the possibility that this is the beginning of the end and I will never again trust my own sentences.

    They say there’s a name for this—the way the mind circles death after enough blows, rehearsing it, tracing the routes by which you might leave. Someone wrote that people who have watched a parent die, or disappear, often live with death seated just offstage. Not a fear, exactly. An assumption. A constant readiness.

    I call mine the death feelings, but lately it feels more honest to call it being awake.

    I scrub the fork, working the sponge between the tines. The motion is small but aggressive. My hands ache inside the gloves. The eczema—or whatever it is—has left my skin thin and itchy. The gloves let me turn the water up hotter than is strictly necessary. I like the burn. I like the way it makes my fingers feel separate from the rest of my body, like I could peel them off and set them on the counter when they get too loud.

    My mother used to stand at the sink, too. I can see her there if I close my eyes: cigarette balanced in the corner of her mouth, ash growing too long over the basin, late-night infomercials chattering from the living room. The counter behind her was often lined with cardboard boxes—beauty kits, vacuum-sealed containers, a sequined top she’d ordered at three in the morning. She would tear into them with an eagerness that embarrassed me, then stack the contents neatly while complaining about how we never had anything. We were always broke, she reminded us, as if the evidence on the counter were proof of our ingratitude.

    She hated being seen, my mother. She hated her own reflection, the way the overhead light made her skin look sallow. She hated her body, her marriage, the town, herself. I know these things because she made sure I knew. I also know what it looks like when someone cannot metabolize their suffering, when it curdles and pours out sideways onto the nearest person. I know how it feels to have a parent who would rather die than admit she was hurting.

    I turn off the water. The house exhales with me.

    The quiet is a physical thing. It lays across my shoulders, settles over the dog, seeps into the cracks along the windowsill. There is no radio. No one calling to ask how I’m holding up. The phone, when it rings, usually brings obligation, not comfort. I have become careful about what I share with the people who are left. I have learned that certain sentences trigger a kind of arms race of suffering: I say, “I’m having a hard time,” and someone responds, “You think you have it bad?” I say, “I’m scared,” and someone answers with a catalogue of their own emergencies. By the end of the call, I’m apologizing for opening my mouth.

    I read once that there’s a term for this, too—the way some people respond to another’s pain by immediately asserting their own. It’s not evil. It’s a learned survival strategy. A way of saying, “Don’t forget me. I hurt, too.” In families like mine, where violence and scarcity were the wallpaper, it became a reflex. Whoever bled loudest got the bandages.

    I never did learn to bleed loudly enough.

    Instead, I wrote.

    At first, I did what I was supposed to: framed my pain with quotes from other, more acceptable women. I lined the pages with Toni and Maya and Margaret and Annie, letting their words rinse mine until the whole thing felt more palatable. I wanted their sentences to bless my own, to make them less embarrassing, less ugly. I wanted to be the kind of person whose suffering made her wise.

    But the more I wrote, the less that approach worked. The quotations began to feel like apologies. Like I was saying, “Don’t worry, I know my life is too much; here’s someone more important to make it go down easier.” I began to resent the way my paragraphs yearned toward a lesson. It felt like lying. There is no moral to having your mother’s voice in your head telling you you’re ungrateful from beyond the grave. There is no clean takeaway to realizing your uncle—the one person who loved you without trying to reshape you—saved every penny only for it to be siphoned away into someone else’s account.

    He used to say my stories were dark. “So dark,” he’d say, half admiring, half uneasy, his mouth tugging to the side in that way it did when he was trying to be gentle. I didn’t know how to explain that darkness was the only honest tone I had. That I wasn’t writing to shock anyone. I was writing to keep myself from disappearing. There are people whose families frame their work on the walls, put clippings on the fridge. Mine reads and looks away, then tells me I have the wrong idea about what happened.

    I pull the plug. The water circles the drain, taking foam and crumbs and the last heat with it. The gloves drip on the edge of the sink, little pale hands empty of bones.

    This is where the death feelings settle, once the task is done: in the space between the routine and the void. I picture my belongings being sorted: notebooks opened then closed, dog toys tossed into a bag, the lamp unplugged, the books divided into keep and donate. My writing reduced to a stack of paper someone will skim at most. I picture the ease with which someone could erase me—how quickly the narrative could tighten around the absence.

    Nothing resolves. No lesson arrives. The death feelings settle back into their usual place behind my ribs, an extra organ, humming.