Drugs, Blood and Cell Time

My ability to get high grew over time. I had maxed out my prescriptions with the doctor: he would not give me anything stronger than what I was getting. So I saved up until I had enough to get high, mixing sleeping pills with my daytime “relaxers” and the buzz often consisted of fighting the urge to sleep, and often, depending on how wacked I was, losing. But what a great way to spend your time in jail – sleep through it. Some guys would be willing to trade their daytime meds for sleeping pills in order to get a good night sleep. 

Sometimes though I would come across some valium or other more substantial pills and be able to catch a “real” buzz, but I would take what I could get. Anything that made me feel other-than-normal was fine with me.

A couple of weeks after I had arrived at the West Wing, a couple of guys were put on our range who had some ideas on how to toughen me up. Up until this point the only new additions to our “Juvenile” range had been one other teenager, increasing the population to three. But now two “adults” were added to the mix, and I got along fine with them, until they decided I was not tough enough.

Thier solution: Pin me down nearly every night and punch my chest and shoulders repeatedly until they tired of it. If I made any noise at all they would hit me harder and there was no way I could get away from them, being as small as I was. (There were two pairs of size 26 pants in the jail, and I would occasionally be lucky enough to get one of them.) This went on for a few weeks until I finally decided I was going to punch back, regardless of the consequences. Eventually they decided that is wasn’t nearly as much fun anymore, as I would totally freak out at them. It cost me a few punches in the face, but it worked – they left me alone.

I began to learn that the crazier people thought that you were, the less likely you were to be bothered by other inmates. So I became crazy, gradually, and rather enjoyed it.

“Show blood and I will give you a bail of tobacco.” Chris said, holding out a razor blade.

“Okay,” I replied, smiling. I rolled up the leg of my pants and swung the blade in a wide arch. My leg simply opened up. It gaped open like a big mouth. I could see all the layers way down into my leg. Then the blood came.

I stood staring at the gash in disbelief. I had meant to miss – I had been joking. I didn’t mean for the blade to actually come anywhere near my leg, and yet here I stood, blood gushing out of me, collecting on the grey concrete floor in a large pool.

“Holy fuck you’re crazy!” Chris exclaimed. “We have to stop the bleeding! You are going to bleed right the fuck out!”

“Yeah man, get something quick!” I said, my voice quivering. I still couldn’t believe I had actually cut myself. I was supposed to miss.

We wrapped some rags around the leg, tying them as tight as I could stand in an effort to stop the bleeding, but it wasn’t working. Within seconds the rags were saturated and the blood was still pouring.

“Your going to have to tell the guards,” someone said, Jim maybe. “The blood isn’t stopping. You need to go to the hospital!”

“They’ll think I slashed up! There’s no way they will believe this was an accident. They will put me in the hole! No fucking way! It will stop, it has to stop!” I was scared to death of going to the hole, especially for something this stupid.

Finally, with no other options in sight, I gave in and yelled down to the guard to come up to the West Wing. They weren’t coming. I was still bleeding and they were not coming up. So I yelled that I had cut myself and within seconds there were guards everywhere.

I tried telling them that I had laid on my bunk and forgotten about the razor blade that had been lying there. They didn’t believe it, but I kept insisting that it was an accident even after they had brought me back after being stitched up at the hospital.

I was labeled a slasher from that day forward.  I later lived up to the name, even tattooed “SLASH” across my left hand using acid out of a nine volt battery. But that was all a little later. For now, I was a slasher and they placed me in a cell on the Bottom Flat where I could be kept under observation. The cell didn’t have a bed or a toilet, just a mattress on the floor, but I thought, it was better than the hole. I spent two weeks on the bottom flat that time if I remember correctly. It was a long, long two weeks, but the doctor changed my prescriptions, and even there I was able to save up for a couple of days and then take a bunch at once.

I would later spend considerable time on the Bottom Flat with a guard within view 24 hours a day, even though I swore after this first time that I would never be back there again. It was a step up from the hole, but a very small step.

Just a few weeks into my stay at the Lakeview Hotel,  I took my first trip to segregation (the hole). My buddy from the boys home had begun shooting off is mouth behind my back, telling people that he suspected me of writing statements against him. In actuality, I had taken the wrap myself on a slew of charges so that he would be off the hook. In my mind, it was better for just me to get nailed on them than the two of us. So I wrote confessions and in each one specified that I acted alone, and that he did not want anything to do with breaking into these places. “But he stood lookout for you right?” the cops asked. “No, he just waited for me. We were on the run together man, so he waited for me. That’s it.”

Unfortunately the court system is slow and it was some time before he appeared in court on the charges. When he did he found they were all being dropped. But that was some three months later. Now he was making assumptions that he had no right making and it was going to land me in a world of trouble.

So we fought. 

The guards, who seemed to have a special radar when it came to fights, broke it up and off to the hole we went. 

I still recall the humiliation I felt as the guards told me to strip, turn around and bend over, and then step into the tiny cell. The cells in the old hole were in the very oldest part of the jail. They were only inches longer than I was tall and must not have been more than four feet wide. The ceiling was arched and everything was grey and dirty. I don’t remember how long I was in the hole that first time, but suspect it would have been about five days. I do remember promising myself that I would never be back there again.

Another promise that I broke many, many times.

As I laid on the cold concrete floor, I quickly sank into depression. I actually cried because I had no way to kill myself. I prayed for death and then cursed god for not answering my prayers. Time crawled by at the slowest pace imaginable. If only I had a cigarette. If only I had my clothes. If only I had a blanket. If only I was back in the West Wing…

Eventually I began to daydream, going on trips away from here much like I did back at the group home.

I finally figured out that when you went to the hole you could pretty much sleep away the first two days. After that sleep became more difficult, and so I would pace back and forth, three steps one way, three steps back, for hours at a time. I would also do push-ups in order to burn off energy and hope to be able to sleep again. 

I perfected the art of daydreaming. I would lie for hours taking myself on trips in the woods, being careful to pay attention to every little detail. The wind, the way it smelled. The sound of the water. The clouds and sunshine. Every detail in order to go deeper and deeper into the dream as I lay on the concrete. I counted silverfish at night as there were an abundance of them. I would look forward to meal time and then be disappointed after inhaling it and having nothing left to look forward to until breakfast. The hole was a head trip. All you had was your mind to occupy yourself with.

Each time I got out of it I swore was the last. It never was. 

Back in the West Wing life became pretty much as it had been before, with one major exception: They no longer worried about who they placed on the rage with us juveniles. 

It was bound to happen eventually; I mean we had both escaped from detention and every other place we had ever done time, so Jim and I decided there had to be a way we could escape the pen. We ran over options again and again for days, but kept coming back to the same place – these old bars in our range. These windows faced out towards the lake, the back of the building, and there was a chain link fence down in the corner of the wall. There was a door in the wall down there, and the fance sourounded it. We thought that the corner of that fence would be a great place to climb to get over the wall. We should be able to throw coats over the razor wire and then just step onto the top of the wall. The only way down on the outside would be to jump, but we were more than willing to risk it. We could take blankets to hang off of the wire to shorten the distance to the ground.

So the only thing between us and that fence in the corner was the bars on the window. We longed for a hack saw blade, but would have to do it without one. We started testing the bars with butter knives – sawing at them for just a minute or two as a test. The iron seemed very soft. We beat the teeth of two knives together, making a better cutting edge and tested that. It worked much better. This seemed to be more than possible.

We could never cut enough of the bars away to get out. That was never the plan. What we wanted to do was cut through the corners of the squares that made up the overall grid pattern of the bars, weakening the whole thing enough that with some force the top sections that were not cut would snap. Perhaps they would only bend, but we were betting on more than that. And if it bent, we would keep it bending until we made enough room to get out though, dropping to the ground from bed sheets we would hang from the window.  The required force was available via the heavy cell doors which were  just a few feet away from the windows. We would connect the bars to the cell door with twisted bed sheets.  A couple of wrapped bedsheets could take a lot of stress. Enough to do the job we were certain.

We had other issues to consider though. The guards break room was directly below our range and so we would have to cut the bars only when we could be fairly certain that there was no one in that room. It also meant cutting only a little at a time so as not to increase the chances of getting caught. We would have to be totally sure that room was empty when it came time to break the bars. 

And so we had a plan, and something to focus on besides our daily grind. It helped to lift our spirits and we were not at each other’s throats anymore. We were on a mission. We were going to escape from the pen.

It took a lot of self control to cut the bars just a few strokes at a time. When we knew the coast was clear down below we worked frantically for several minutes at a time but tried to never push our luck. The cutting noise travelled loudly through the concrete wall.  Over a period of days we had made visible progress, and had a couple of the X’s in the bars cut nearly all the way though. We were hours away from being ready to attempt to break the bars. I was so excited I could barely contain myself. I had no doubt that this was going to happen. What we would do once we were on the other side of the wall with half the world looking for us, well… that I didn’t know. But it didn’t matter. Escaping was all that mattered. If only for a day, just to succeed. 

I was on my knees on the metal table, cutting away at the bars, thinking about how I had to land when I jumped off of the wall in order to save my legs. We would be hanging from blankets which we would take over the razor wire with us, so the drop would be cut by a few feet. 

Derm was keeping six at the gate (watching for guards) and I was focused intently on the task at hand. Just a couple more minutes and then I would stop. Then I heard “Veinotte, what are you doing in there?”

So much for Derm keeping six. A guard had walked up to the gate right in front of him and Derm hadn’t made a sound. I must have looked pretty stupid kneeling on the table, butter knife in hand, staring back at the guard with utter horror etched in my face. 

Before I knew it, the place was full of guards and I was on my way back to the hole, promising myself that Derm was going to pay for this. 

Back to dear old cell number two. Three steps that way, three steps back.

The incident did turn out well for some contractor – the entire old section of the penitentiary had new bars installed. Must have cost a few dollars.