A Letter to Myself From Craig City Jail

The Derby Man, fruit stickers on the inside of the bars, The comraderie of the regulars, “kidnapped for a month in Seattle,” Walking around in public with an orange jumpsuit, texting and driving chief of police, Hungry Man, Comfy shitters but don’t flush well, Being given a copy of my “rights” as a mentally ill, The shaking hands of my counselor telling me I will be in jail another night, begging to help me in some way but receiving only my cold indifference and my back as I return to my cell. The telephone stretched taut to barely reach the edge of my cell. Holding the receiver between the bars to tell my wife what to bring to jail. “How long will you be there? Are you scared?” “Naw babe they are real nice, another inmate sent the books he liked to my cell.” AM and PM are useless constructs, what is more important is to figure out how to sleep on a 30" wide mat and not develop sores. Rotate like a properly heated Hot Pocket. Read an entire book in 18 hours. The language of my jail mates makes me rethink foul language except for special occasions. I thought the jailhouse grey paint replaced a previous red but that’s just the rust from the incessant rubbing of a jailbirds leg in his sleep and the scraping of TV Dinner trays through the slot. Where’s my fucking ball and glove like solitary in The Great Escape!? The next celly is a female but she isn’t supposed to ask where her mate is. She asks another “Dispatch” about her girlfriend and gets an earful from the other lady that told her to keep quiet about it. She comes soon enough. They are both young, cute, don’t really look like great dangers to society, but from their conversations the are veterans of misdemeanor though I doubt either are yet 21. “…tampering w/ evidence…” “We’ll leave your UA in the freezer for your parole officer.” My first day the first man gets out. It’s interesting to know the voice before the man. He is a grey-haired black man and small. He croaks when he talks and I want to name him Frog but they call him Frank and he is well-

liked by all. He goes but I wish he could stay 3 cells away with a harmonica and lead us all in Negro spirituals while I maybe go on a hunger strike like Mohandas but entirely bereft of moral authority. I said “I’m not hungry” to the jailer but I don’t have the Christ-like figure to really make it resonate. We all shit in a row. Boy- Girl/Girl- Boy/Boy. We can’t see into the other cells but with my pants around my ankles on my toilet I can see THROUGH the dispatch office to the help window where people go to ask where licenses are renewed. I didn’t shit for two days and hoped beyond hope the cluster of female dispatchers who keep the place running day and night won’t be strolling by my cell when my terribly shy and chronically overworked anus unloads a 2 day backlog. Mission Accomplished! Unfurl the banner. I didn’t even make any noise on account of the girls on the other side of the wall. Now if only it will flush. I’ll sit over it and read like a hen on her egg and by next chapter (of my second book) the shit water will magically empty. Damn, didn’t work. I got a tall fancy water bottle that dispatch put my favorite Barq’s Rootbeer I came in with in because I could shiv myself or others with the can. So blocking the camera with my body I use my tall, fancy, empty root beer water bottle to force two days worth of shit and paper through the pipes. And Quick! Giv’er a flush. Criminals are a resourcefull people. I cap my jailhouse plunger with a styrofoam cup and toss it in the paper bag adjacent to my cell. Hopefully this one gets emptied faster than the last one nearly overflowing with trays of microwaved TV Dinners. The water to the sink doesn’t run at all. There is no sanitizer. I

would complain but my father and my father’s father and every WASP father up and down the line don’t never complain about shit, ever. And the dispatch girls are nice enough. I thought maybe I would have to worry about a tattoed, 300 pound, bald white guy like in the shows, but the only one that looks like that is me, and I’m so disgusted right now with the human form and its bodily functions that I probably won’t violently rape myself for at least a month. Another guy left the second day. He was the jailhouse lawyer. From the voice I got a young, skinny punk but he is got the baldness of middle age, and dresses well, under his arm is two self-help books and the bible. He speaks in the vernacular of his culture but the learned wisdom of errors is on him. And a simple profound goodness shines through. He says goodbye to his collegues and promises to bring snacks to the jail later. I’m too shy and out-of-place to look him the eye to say goodbye. But I say it now good stranger, good bye. It was good of you to choose shows on the TV that is too far away and at an angle and through bars to make you sick to watch. But I can listen, and how kitsch is it for people in jail to be watching Law and Order and arguing the finer points of our justice system and how great it would be to legalize all drugs. (It would be, and I never use drugs except the ones peddled by the VA) But he left. He was really positive and was helping his cell mate going through heroin withdrawals. I salute you, unamed. And wish you well. To be never arrested of a crime my whole life (I don’t count my current incarceration as I didn’t know mental illness was illegal in Alaska; had I known, I never would have done it.) I naturally thought myself superior to the ilk that find themselves in jail. But despite how odd and surreal this is, I am most awed by how normal these people are. They have norms and values and seek to support one another. They need love as we all need love. They need a

Hungry Man meal and orange juice at least twice a day just like all of us, um, hopefully, get to eat something a little better (And I’ve spent worse nights in the army than I have in jail. MREs will give you ass cancer faster than Hungry Man’s and the abstentions of the starving dog in Iraq is all the field testing I need). In short, and with ever shallowing digressions, People is People. We all shit in some kind of a row. when viewed from space so don’t look your nose down at people and think your shit don’t stink. Because when trapped together in a windowless room, I assure you, it does! The girls next door have interesting conversations. One made the observation that guys are gay more now and girls aren’t getting fucked in the ass as much. I don’t know where I fall in that debate. I’m sure there are solid arguments either way. Then later one of them was having a private conversation with her mom. They argued a lot [GASP] and I wanted to give her advice on interpersonal communication skills, mindfulness, and maybe offering her a copy of The Four Agreements, but then I stop and remind myself that I’m the ASSHOLE IN THE NEXT CELL OVER so maybe I should keep my opinion to myself. These last 6 years this is how my Dad has lived. In and out of jail cells and BH holds. He writes a lot. And each year his writing became further and further detached from reality. I wonder if this writing I write now from my orange jumpsuit draped belly from the floor of my single 9x9, I wonder if it is at all valuable now in some open permanent form. And not in the art therapy, what a pretty tree

sort of a way, but in a way that means something to a few hundred fresh-eyed strangers. I know it isn’t a Letter Written from a Birmingham Jail by MLK, but maybe it will fall somewhere between that and the ravings of a fallen community leader like my father. Does this have value? Is it worth being hunched over with my buttcrack showing so the pen is down and the gravity is feeding the ink to the page. Is it worth the pain in my back and knees? Can what I learn and taste and experience and suffer with be transcendent enough to float out of these bars and not die of indifference. Do I matter? Do I matter beyond the standard platitudes of our perfunctory loved ones? As Alex Dumbass said in the best novel ever written: All we can do is wait and hope. Wait. And. Hope.

Now for a brief explanation of how I ended up in jail. Last fall one of my closest students was accidentally shot to death by another one of my closest students. I ran into the house right after he died. I saw his body. I saw his father holding him. I hugged, cried, and comforted his mother. I hugged his brother and had a beer. I spoke at his memorial and at graveside. And I dug his grave. I would do ANYTHING for my kids. I treat them more like nieces and nephews than students. I would die for them. But the administration didn’t renew my teaching contract. I started having serious suicidal ideations that were drifting into planning. I called my therapist and asked if I could get an emergency appointment in person. When I came to the appointment instead of therapy I was placed in an involuntary hold and was immediately taken to jail. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to my wife. So I spent three days in jail and treated no differently than the people who were in there for committing crimes. Then I was sent to a behavioral health inpatient clinic in Juneau where I finally received treatment. But those three days isolated in a cell with no bunk while severely depressed already and feeling and looking like I did something morally wrong I would not call therapeutic. It’s what reinforces the stigma of mental illness. It’s a reflection of why Alaska consistently has one of the highest suicide rates in the country. But I feel very blessed to have been in jail. I learned a lot and developed more empathy for the incarcerated.