Smoking Lamp is Lit

This is another one of my jail time tales.  After I got out of the Crotch I meandered around doing this and that in different part of the world, and after a while landed up in South Florida.  Becoming a Hippy opened my eyes to a side of law enforcement officers that I had never expected to see.  I was arrested for wondering around with no particular destination in mind, for not wearing a shirt in public, being out too late, going into a store barefoot, and a lot more which will not come to mind after all these years.

I was told time and time again by the cops that they knew that I would beat the rap, but would not beat the ride.  From time to time they would put me and the other hippies that they had rounded up in the back of a paddy wagon, drive into a large mall parking lot, and have great fun making fast stops, sudden take offs with sharp turns, left and then right over and over again.  That was the ride we would not beat. 

After spending some time in lockup we would be brought in front of a judge, most of the times the charges would be dismissed for insufficient evidence, or a failure to appear by the cops who made the arrest.  But occasionally I would be found guilty and fined $10 or ten days.  Seldom having $10 on me at that time I would, by necessity, do the 10 days in the county lock up.  Which bring me to the story I want to tell.

On one of my 10 day sojourn I was locked into a two man cell with a chain smoker.  Now this cell was about 9 foot by 6 foot as I recall it with a flush toilet (much better than a honeypot) on the wall away from the door.  The double bunk bed took up most of the room with a little room between the bed and the wall, and a little more from the foot of the bed to the bared door.  We spent the whole day within this cell, they even fed us there.  It was not bread and water, but it was not much better.

No radio or TV, just conversation to occupy our time between meals and sleeping.  We either sat on the edge of the bottom bunk, and as I recall was my bed because I had been out in the cell first and claimed it, standing or walking around in the little bit of room allowed.  Now when I say a chain smoker I mean one of these smokers who starts his next cigarette with the one that he just finished from the times he wakes up until he turns in for the night, and even than would wake up and have another smoke before the morning.

My cellmate was of a goodly size and many years older, and it would have been iffy if I tried to forcible make him not smoke so much.  See, then, as now I was a non-tobacco user, not for health reason, but just because I do not care for it.  Still I want him to not put so much smoke in out small living space.  So to this end I asked him, “Don’t you know that smoking like you do is going to kill you?”

This was his response to me:

“Let me tell you a story” he said.  “a few years back I was working under a simi-truck which I had jacked up in front with two bumper jacks to give me room to work to work on the transmission.  Well son, one of the jacks started to slip when a big wind came up, and when it started to go the other jack went with it bringing the truck’s transmission hard down on my chest.”

He pause at this point to light another cigarette, put the old one out, and went on.  “There twern’t nobody around to a hear me scream ifing I could have screamed!  I lay under that truck for over two days until my wife came home and found me.  It was another half a day afore she was able to find the help to get the truck off of me.”

There was a real long pause after he said this, after starting another cigarette, he held it up in front of me and said, “If that did not kill me this is sure as hell not!”  I did not bring up his smoking again, and luckily for my comfort he was taking to court is a shortly thereafter and I never say him again.

While I have never seen this man again, and he is most likely long dead, the conversation I just related has visited me time and again.  He forced me to see something in myself that I see in lots of other people’s action as well.  I did not give a shit about his health when I tried to use it to get his to stop smoking.  It was my on comfort I was interested in.  Just how much of this anti smoking campaign has an element of that in it?

The Hole

In a recent column George Will suggests that the use of solitary confinement in American prisons is tantamount to torture, particularly when used for extended periods of time.  In it he says, “Isolation changes the way the brain works, often making individuals more impulsive, less able to control themselves. The mental pain of solitary confinement is crippling: Brain studies reveal durable impairments and abnormalities in individuals denied social interaction. Plainly put, prisoners often lose their minds.”

Brought to mind the time I was put in a county jail in Rochester, NY back in the 60s, six mounts for some miscreant deed.  This jail was used in the War Between the State to hold Confederate prisoners, and when we were locked up at night we had to carry our honey bucket with up encase we had to relieve ourselves during the night.  The jail/prison was surrounded by a farm which fed the prisoners, and many of those incarcerated worked on the farm.

I was not assigned to the farm to work for my keep; instead I was giving the task of cleaning the three very large pots in the kitchen that was used to cook our food, now these were huge 100 gallon pots. The gut from whom I was taking the job over from, who was being released from the joint in a few days, and I worked along his side until he was released.  He would fill the pots with water, put in some soap and stand there running a mop around the pots one at a time by hand for quite a while, then drain the pots and rinse with clean water and drain to wash off the soap residue.  He would finish just in time for the cooks to start preparing for the next meal.

After a few day of this he went on his way and the pots were left in my care.  I was a ferocious reader in those days, still am for that matter, and in order to make time for my reading I changed the method of cleaning pots from how I had been tough, the way it had been done since Antebellum I reckon, so I could finish it sooner.   What I did was too fill the pots about a quarter ways full, lean into the pot, and scrub it by hand with a sponge.  This way I was able to finish the cleaning about two hours faster than the way I had been tough.

Since I had worked harder in order to give myself more time to read that is just what I did.  I would go of in a corner, set down with my back up against a wall and read.  At least I did for a few days.  The hours of leisure that I had earned myself irked both prisoners and guards alike.  They made the decision that I should also mop the kitchen floor three times a day, once after each pot cleaning, in the free time that I had worked myself into.  I flat out refused to lay a mop to that fool, pointing out that I did the job I had been assigned, the same job that many men before me had done before me without having to mop the floor, and I would be dammed if I was going to mop along with cleaning the pots.

Well you guessed it, they told me that if I did not do as they wished I could dam well spend all my time in the hole, that is what they called solitary confinement in the joint, without any books at all.  I said “Fine then.”  They said, “Fine then.” And marched me foo to a cold, dark, damp cell in the basement, gave me a honey pot, and shut the door which had no opening.  And there I sat, laid, walked around, and other things which I will not mention.  The cell was a 9 foot by 5 foot I recollect, could have been smaller.

I got bread and water two times a day and a meal once a day.  Every morning as they took replaced my honey pot the hack would ask if I was ready to go back to work, and every morning I said under my terms.  At which they would slam the door and leave me to myself and my thoughts.  Over six weeks I stayed in that hole because they would not give and I would not break.  I was release with time served the day I came out of the hole.  

Many have said that i am crazy, I will let you judge if that come about before or after I spent so much time in the hole.