The Jailhouse Diaries: Denoument

My mother is drunk again. This time she killed a twelve pack of Natural Lights in the space of an hour and half or however long the 700 Club is on in the early afternoon. She got excited when Pat Robertson started praying and sensed that "there is someone out there in the audience with back pain" and immediately called their 1-800 Prayer Line to say that she thought he was talking about her. Then, she passed out and promptly shat and pissed herself. I can see this large brownish yellow stain drying around the crotch of her stretch pants, and can smell it from across the room. I'd move her, but the bitch weighs three hundred pounds and I don't want to get any of her filth on me. It depresses me to know that twenty-four years ago, I emerged from that smelly brown stain she calls a pussy.

In the meantime, outside Mexican kids are running around and screaming profanities at each other in Spanish because their social leech parents have not bothered to teach them English. Zacatecas ice cream carts go by outside every fifteen minutes, ringing their bells and generally being a nuisance. Why does every low-rider out there have a huge system that has to be blasting Mexican accordion music at top volume. At this point, I wish they'd start playing some rap music.

Yes, my mother's house and this neighborhood truly feel like Hell. Yet though I am narrating this story from this place, I am not truly in Hell. This isn't some lame movie like American Beauty or The Sixth Sense where I've been telling you all this from the grave. In the end, for better or for worse, I survived my experience in jail and in the riot that ensued.

The third time wasn't a charm. I bit the bullet on the third pull of the trigger, which sent a .38 slug hurtling into my mouth. However, putting a gun to your head is a notoriously unreliable way to commit suicide because of the human tendency to flinch at the last second. Put a gun up to your temple, and you'll usually just end up blowing out both of your eyeballs and blinding yourself. Putting a shotgun under your chin, three times out of seven, you'll just end up blowing your jaw off and mumbling shit about how a backwards Judas Priest record caused you to do that to some church newsletter.

The blast from the gun eradicated most of my remaining teeth, the gasses literally cooking my tongue. To this day, the only tastes I have left are salty and sour, and those are muted. I could eat a sun dried dog turd now without retching. As unsteadily as I was holding the gun though, the bullet passed at such an angle that it exited at the top of my jawbone, shattering it and burning out a huge chunk of my cheek, before exiting out just under my ear.

That evil spic Armando, was not as lucky.

While holding the shank against my throat, his head was in such a position so that when the bullet exited my face, it passed right into his eye. The bullet had lost enough velocity at that point to not blow out the back of his head, but it had enough speed to ping-pong against the inside of his skull until his brains resembled gray scrambled eggs. He died almost instantly.
The trauma made me pass out, but got the rest of what happened from that child molester, Nathan.

Roughly the same time as I had inadvertently shot Armando, the SWAT teams decided to retake the cellblock. The Mexicans had gathered about five shotguns and a few pistols, but the SWAT team was loaded to bear with HK-5's, stun grenades, tear gas, AR-17's with steel jacketed rounds that could penetrate body armor etc. The prisoners had hostages, but apparently any one working or even entering our jail has to sign a waiver saying that they understand in the event of a riot, they are in a free-fire zone, and absolving the state from any liability. The only reason the SWAT team had taken so long was because the lawyers insisted they collect the forms from the hostage's files, just to be sure, before going inside.

Anyway, though Armando was out of the picture, the retaking of the cell block only sped up most of the hostages deaths. I think only two guards survived the whole ordeal, and they were quickly ferried out of state with huge settlements tied to non-disclosure clauses, so the press never heard from them again.

About twenty other prisoners were killed in the conflict too, since the SWAT team fired indiscriminately. Since I already looked dead, no rounds were expended on me. Once the jail was retaken, the entire place went into lockdown for two months while the ringleaders were removed and placed into solitary for the rest of their natural lives.

I was in the infirmary during all of that, with my jaw wired together and big piece of gauze covering the gaping hole in my cheek. The days there either felt like seconds or years depending on how much dope they pumped into my system. I feel a little more sympathetic towards junkies now, since that stuff really does feel good after awhile.

I didn't get any piece of a settlement, but the state did come with papers saying they would pay for some reconstructive surgery if I waived my right to sue them (apparently the ACLU was snooping around trying to put together a class action suit amongst the prisoners.) I could have been signing my soul away for all I knew with the amount of morphine I was jacked up on, but I did it anyway.

The plastic surgeons took me to a special clinic for the surgery. After breaking and resetting the bone, they grafted a piece of skin from my ass over the hole that was fried out of my cheek. I had to keep the bandages on for two weeks. By this time, I only had two weeks until I was to be reprocessed into the world. I was close to the end of my sentence.

I had recovered enough to be allowed back into general population for my last week. Almost all the faces seemed to have changed when I went back. The old gangs had been obliterated and new ones (that didn't have a beef with me) had emerged. There were a few old faces in the crowd, but they looked cowed, unwilling to speak of what had happened.

That week came and went, and most people were afraid of me because of the bandages all over my face. I wasn't a bitch, I was a deformed monster, an old timer who had been the only person to survive El Diablo's wrath. Most people talk about how they feel frightened to leave jail when their sentence is up; that the walls own them. That's some Shawshank Redemption horseshit. I couldn't wait to be the fuck out of that place.

I was to leave at noon on my last day in jail. That was also the first day I could take my bandages off. I woke up, ate breakfast (which was Eggo waffles and fruit cocktail that day), and went to my cell, staring at the mirror. I slowly started unwrapping the gauze from my face, gentle around the places where it had grown into the scabs.

At first, I was impressed. I was half expecting to see a completely different person in the mirror. I looked roughly the same as I had in past, though my skin was clammy and pale.
Then I noticed it. The piece of skin they had grafted from my ass conveniently was the part that Armando had tattooed COCKSOCKET onto. Only this couldn't be hidden in my pants. This was on my face for all of eternity.

I screamed. El Diablo had touched me from beyond the grave.