One Ticket Out

“...one necktie, one black leather belt, one pencil, broken in half, and one pocket sized notebook, empty.” The guard was flipping through the pages, enjoying his last moments of power over Inmate K04111. “Hell, that is one empty notebook. All that time, bet you really could’ve filled this thing up, huh Inmate?” Joseph finished buckling his belt and took the book from the guard. “Outmate.” he said. “The hell outta here, anyway. As soon as I get the money I had when y’all put me in here, that is.”

This farewell dance with paroled inmates was the only part of the guard’s job that he enjoyed, and he always took his time doing it. He liked them to know that he was the one giving them their life back. The power of the thing made him feel big. “We are not a bank, Inmate. You forfeited your accounts the day you got dragged through that door.”

“Listen,” Joseph said, “when I came in here, I had thirty dollars in these jeans. Thirty dollars’ a whole lot to me right now.”

The guard, for the love of the game, made a show of titling his cap back and scratching his head. “Thirty dollars, hmmm...Thirty dollars. That just does not ring a bell. How long you been in here? Must be over three years now. You’d think I’d remember a wad of cash like that. Well gosh, Inmate, I can’t seem to recall it. We take awful good care of our patrons’ belongings here at the Calhoun State Inn. I wouldn’t want a customer to leave unhappy, no sir. No. Not on my watch.” The guard took a step back and reached into a bin of loose clothes, taken from the day’s bookings, and grabbed a bulky black hoodie from it. “Tell you what, why don’t you take this… it’s worth at least thirty to the man who put it on this morning, I’m sure.” With a chest pass, he threw the hoodie at Joseph’s head. The wet smell of it called his hands up quickly, and as he pulled it off of his face, one thought rose above the rest in his mind: Time to get out of here, fast and forever. The guard was laughing through his nose as Joseph turned and walked out the open door of Calhoun State Prison and into the new cell of a world that had no place from him.

Half an hour later, he was sitting on the lawn of Dusty’s Garlic Cove, eyeing down the trash bin in the back with the knowledge that any food in there would be gourmet fare compared to the reconstituted slush he’d been shoveling down these past few years. The sun was down before he got hungry enough to pursue his prey. A box full of egg rolls was near the top, and the styrofoam border that kept them safe from the rest of the trash was the first thing he felt thankful for in one thousand and sixty eight days. He devoured them instantly and sat up against the building. The trash smell was thick and it masked the smell of the hoodie he had carried with him from Calhoun. “Man, why I still have this thing?” he asked his only friend in the world. His stomach full and his mind exhausted, he sat next to the trash, unwilling to move even to get away from the smell.

As the evening temperature dropped and the smell of the trash permeated his mind, it was easier to put on the rank hoodie. He pulled the drawstrings of the hood tight around his face. When his hands went into the front pocket, it took him a moment to register the feel of the envelope’s paper on his skin. He handled it blindly, closing his fingers around it and squeezing a few times while his brain caught up with what his hands were feeling. Once it was out of his pocket and in front of his face, he knew what was inside - he had seen plenty of cash drop envelopes in his young life. Parried by exhaustion, he struggled to open it and did so without enthusiasm. He wouldn’t begin to understand that this moment had really happened until he counted the money four times over. Twenty thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars sat in his lap for two hours as he stayed still in wonder, breathing in the smell of restaurant refuse. His thoughts a blur, unable to sleep, he took out his notebook and put his half-pencil to the task his brain couldn’t handle.

“Almost twenty grand in my hand. Almost double what got me held up. And now I got no friends no family. Just one last piece of somebody else's bad luck. To me it's twenty grand but to the man who owned this hoodie its his last thirty dollars that the world aint giving back. Whatever you got on you, that's what the world cost. That's the only lesson we get. The only way to lose all your money is to try and get it and then try and keep it. The only way to lose yourself is to try and keep yourself. To believe all the things they tell you when you wake up in this world for the first time. You try to grow up a little bit and they tell you that aint you, stay down. And if you don't listen, if you try to get something for your own self to have they go head and put you down themself. They don't want you having nothing they didn't give you. And they didn't give me this twenty grand but boy they sure like to see me try to keep it. That way they can go on owning me and they can track me down and take me back in for keeping something that aint mine and when they do I'll meet a man who lost a hoodie with the last of his money in it and I’ll have a story for him that he won’t like hearing. All I ever did was take the step that was in front of me. And now this cash lands in my lap and life just wants me to put it back in my pocket like I’m supposed to believe it’s some sorta karma rebate. But I know what it costs to get out. And they don’t try to put you in until you have what it costs to get out and that’s everything.”

And that was everything. He pulled thirty dollars from the envelope and folded it into his notebook, closed it, and pocketed it. The rest of the money he left in the envelope that he tossed into the trash bin, “as payment,” he thought. Payment made on one ticket out.