To my surprise, while being assigned a cell, the jailer made me watch a video on how to deal with sexual assault during my stay. This hotel was definitely a one-star rating. I asked the jailer if rape was an actual possibility on my first stay and she laughed and said, “Not likely.” Not exactly reassuring.
When I entered my cell, I met my roommate, a man with a face full of tattoos. He moved aside and let me pass, then stayed near the doorway so he could watch the TV in the distance through the sliver of a window on the door. I settled in with my bundle of items, a towel, some soap, my spork for meals, and an ample sense of displacement. I recognized immediately that my feeling as a first timer in jail differed greatly from my roommate who was doing 90 days for repeat drug and other convictions. Clearly to him, the cell and surroundings had a normalcy that I did not yet share, and with luck I wouldn’t have to learn. I settled on the top bunk (on another plastic coated mattress) without even unfolding my blanket and I stared at the ceiling.
In my pursuits and hobbies, I often sought isolation and privacy so that I could think and not be bothered, always choosing hobbies and activities solitary in nature, such as reading, drinking, woodworking, writing. Even with people present, drinking seemed more of a solitary pursuit since myself and my fellow drinkers were after the escape more than camaraderie, or perhaps through camaraderie we sought the desired escape. Now I had full isolation.
Mission accomplished?
What bothered me most was the tarnish of the crime against my otherwise good reputation, dubious as it was. My fake humility could really only be described as damaged vanity. Through years of misbehavior while drinking I had otherwise behaved and kept up appearances. I believed I was a good person, sometimes, while also hating myself. A kind of motto that I told myself was: “Self-hatred is my greatest motivator.” The meaning intended by this awful idea was that I was a capable person who could will or force tasks to completion, primarily because I believed I was not deserving of anything. Nothing in this world was owed to me, and I was no different from an ant on the sidewalk that gets his work done without expecting a reward. At the same time, I could be a real diva if anyone disrupted my personal time or bothered my sensibilities. And I wanted the attention and praise of others, kind of like can be seen in every post on social media where the implicit cry from the poster is, “Look at me! Notice me! Please, validate my existence! I want approval because I’m craving to be loved!”
I’m not sure how these notions came to be in my mind, but now I know that it was flawed, and for some time I blamed a Catholic upbringing for sourcing this lament. I knew this wasn’t entirely fair because I had spent ten years listening daily to albums like Nirvana’s Nevermind and Sublime’s 40oz. to Freedom, and assorted 90s rejectionist music. As a case in point, the song “Breed” by Nirvana, which I still love to this day, starts out with these lyrics:
“I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, Care if it’s old. I don’t mind, I don’t mind, I don’t mind, I don’t mind, Mind, don’t have a mind.”
Likewise, to reference Sublime (a band I also still love), I think of the accumulated impact of listening to “What Happened?” some ten thousand times and how this band might have altered my worldview:
“Threw a bottle at the bouncer
Didn't think that he was cool
Pissed in someone's drink
And threw a bike into a pool”
I would add some of my favorite Ice Cube and Tupac lyrics as well but surely the idea is established. Partying recklessly is what I’m hinting at here.
More likely than my church-going youth causing my self-destructive tendencies, rather, I suspect that it kept me from going full anarchist and torching the streets. The rage of youth burned fierce and I wanted to rebel. Self-destruction was so metal, so gritty and real. In reality, it was just like riding on a rollercoaster where you want the thrill of near-death adventures while buckled in with a seatbelt and shoulder harness. Rock and Rap music just presented the rebellion I was after. They were my cheerleaders.
But the fire of youth can be difficult to manage and outlets will be found, on purpose or by accident. I believe that avoiding feelings, not talking about feelings, allowed internal brooding to swell into self-loathing and self-destructive behaviors. All of that touchy-feely stuff was not part of my life. Rather, I deemed it a ridiculous outgrowth of modernity, a kind of New Age, California-way that deserved no review. Today I know better: talking is good…and California is still, well, California.
I held too many contradictions in my mind. On the one hand, modernity had the answers, on the other hand I felt its efficiencies were wearing away meaningful work. It certainly hollowed out the farms and factory jobs in my corner of the world as consolidations and outsourcing crushed the local economy. I ended up becoming a software engineer but I could never truly love my line of work since I saw blue-collar and agricultural work as more real and the people in those vocations far more interesting. The software and IT business world of sterile screens never did excite me. There exists a kind of affluent boredom in the modern office that lacks heart, because the occupations themselves only require our head.
In those college and early adulthood days, I pretty much sought moral anarchy. Yet I also wanted order and rules, with a yearning to do the right thing. On one hand I wanted education and on the other I thought ignorance was bliss. Basically, let me try to be honest, since that’s the point of writing this: I just wanted it my way depending on how I felt at the time. I felt that truth was malleable to my current state. My worldview morphed constantly and made no sense to me, and eventually I threw up my hands and found drinking and disdain to be a good corner to hide in while I progressed through time on this planet. I had all the answers, but no conviction. I could not articulate anything and therefore thrashed about like Ahab, wanting the answer to surface next to me so I could name it, kill it, and mount it on the wall.
This drifting way of life, eventually, brought me to my weekend in jail, for which I am now most grateful.
When I woke up in jail, I was flushed out of my cell to breakfast, I realized how much like a fish tank the common area was, where people watch the new person, where furtive eyes peek constantly. Sitting at a table by myself I suddenly had three men join me and start asking questions about why I was there, how long I was staying, and finally, to the point, if they could have any of my food, my leftover soap, and any extra phone card minutes when I departed the jail. Remaining quiet for the most part, I observed the comfort with which the regulars roamed the jail versus the corners where others sat quietly.
As I was being brought before the judge, they strung five of us together in conjoined handcuffs and led us to a holding cell. In the cell we conversed and I learned that two of those with me were booked on heroin charges, and to my surprise, they were discussing how to get one of their mothers to post bail in order to be released…so that they could go buy more heroin right away and get high again. The poor woman, I thought. Addiction this strong seemed impossible to overcome, yet I heard them scheming a plan that would likely financially obliterate this mother. Another man had a drunk driving charge, too, but he had been driving with a child in his car. He looked wounded and I could see his pain because he had a face bearing misfortune. He just looked unlucky, and I began to realize how lucky and fortunate I had been, always, always, in my trip through this world. But one thing seemed certain - none of them in there but me seemed to be thriving in life, at least not in what our culture deems as success. I didn’t get the impression that they had grown up in houses that took pride in good grades and ate home cooked meals every night.
Honestly, I thought of them mostly as knuckleheads and wanted to get away from them. I did not love them as neighbors or equals. The experience reminded me of days spent in a military barracks, where many of the same character types seemed present. Imagining that jail to be an Army barracks did not seem much of a stretch. After all, we all wore the same uniforms. I felt I was made of better stuff than most of them, that I was morally better in some way. Yet alongside this notion, I also saw myself as this lowly blight on society. Again my thoughts made no sense in their contradictions. Was I good or bad? My measurement of worth came only by achievements rather than something intrinsic. The “work hard, play hard” principal: I imagined achievements like money and honor was the purpose, with pleasure and escape as the reward. The movement toward a goal was righteous, and missing the mark was bad. And clearly these people in jail, I thought, had failed in life, worse than I had.
My notions of altruism and equality, I realized, were shadows and projections from my reading and my books. My empathy and caring was best kept fresh in isolation, not in interacting with actual people with real flaws. For if I really believed in people and saw the good, I would have applied it here in jail, but I only saw the shortcomings and wanted to flee from these ne’er-do-wells, even though I simultaneously considered myself one of these screw-ups, but to a lesser degree. Somehow I flip-flopped between seeing myself as a good person and a degenerate, as if I had all three of Dostoyevsky’s Karamazov brothers, Dmitri and Alyosha and Ivan, all rolled into me. I was a good intellectual degenerate jerk. A drunken idiot atheist with a heart of gold.
In a way, I was right. From that list of attributes, I carried some with me daily, and set others down, and picked up different ones to play with. In talking with the other jailbirds, they too played with these toys of personality and behavior in making their way each day. In fact, I could see that their flaws and mine mirrored one another, depending on the hour. Yet I still thought I was not like them. All of them. My aim exceeded theirs, my thoughts went deeper, my personhood was somehow imbued with specialness. My life meant more and they were fools.
Yet I was in the same place as all of them.
