VINCE

I’m sitting in my room, watching but not listening to the football game. I don’t have a TV so I get to read subtitles because we don’t share ear buds.

I’ve been in a funk since Friday, when my Mother was denied a visit to me because of the outfit she was wearing. This blog is a bit delayed so you may have read about the ordeal already. In fact I can’t really write too much about it because there isn’t much to write about. She came wearing a shirt they deemed too low cut. I think she could have gone to Walmart to get a shirt but she may have called the CO a pervert (smile) at which point they probably told her to leave.

She left the country a few days later so I may not get to see her for a while. No visits are allowed the first two months in boot camp.

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Oddities:

On more than one occasion, I have seen people reaching into toilets between their legs…I really have no idea why.

There are no doors on the stalls for the toilets out where I work, so when I walk by there’s a chance I will get to see something strange—to wit, yesterday I saw a man without pants or underpants on (not uncommon for men, apparently) standing up to wipe his behind. But then…he sat back down, smelled the TP, then put it in the toilet from the front, definitely completing the link of genitals and feces. And that’s not even the strangest thing I saw yesterday. Ugh.

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33 days to go.

Nothing new has happened in the last week.

Three days from now, two of my very few friends are heading to boot camp themselves. As I’ve said before, I don’t associate with too many people in here. And after Wednesday, my small group will be down to two, including me.

In my last month here I need to focus on training anyhow. I’m really good at the tape now, but I still have no desire, ever to run. Unfortunately for me, they don’t take excuses like that at boot camp. So I need to figure that out quickly.

ANNE

After three weeks of long-haul flights, sleeping in five different beds, crossing borders and checkpoints where soldiers armed with Uzis scrutinized our passports, where I was the scribe in meeting after meeting where everyone chain smoked and kept switching from English to Arabic, I arrived home.

It was a great trip. I love to travel and I love coming home. In this case, “home’ was my apartment for five more days. My 16-year-old niece had come in while I was gone and packed for a couple hours, which was super helpful except she’d packed all my coffee mugs and drinking glasses. Oh well. I’d figure something out.

I savored going through my bags and re-discovering the few little baubles of ethno-bling I had bought along the way, like the camel made out of nails. I’d traded for it with a Bedouin woman; she now had my umbrella that says World Bank on it.

I turned to my pile of mail. I always enjoyed this part of coming home, even though there’s rarely anything interesting in the mail anymore. Vince had told me before I left that he had a lot of blog material that would be waiting for me when I got home. I always looked forward to his letters, but there was nothing from him.

There was, however, an envelope with a Minnesota Department of Corrections return address. That was odd…Vince’s letters had his own name on them…and here is what it was:

I was banned from visiting Vince until August. Mr. Lott had not mentioned the possibility of me being banned when we’d spoken on the phone. I had told him I’d be leaving the country the next day for three weeks. The letter was postmarked the very day I left. He must have sprinted down the hall to get it printed and mailed to ensure I wouldn’t be able to appeal within 10 days.

My post-trip afterglow was blown. Many choice words flew out of my mouth. I won’t repeat all of them here because, based on what has transpired since this day, I am concerned that the DOC is onto the blog and not happy about it.

A battle cry, “This is war!” came first, followed by a profound sense of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. I felt furious, impotent, overwhelmed, helpless. For the first time since Vince’s incarceration, I felt like giving up. Just not fighting the ban. But I’ve always been wired to pursue justice. Sounds grandiose, maybe, but I simply cannot walk away from a fight when something is just wrong. I wish I could.

Now, I just wanted to get a good night’s sleep so I could write my trip report, pack everything that remained to be packed, and deal with changing my address with my bank, the post office, Comcast, my credit card company, the electric company, the DMV, my health insurer, my employer, my magazines and newspapers, and on and on. Oh—right—and I would have to re-apply for visiting privileges with the DOC too, since my address would change.

VINCE

And my friend continues with his Coffee Monster story…

A huge man with a long white beard labored into the cell with his belongings jammed in a sack over his shoulder. Just climbing the stairs to the unit had made him out of breath and dripping wet.

He looked like Santa from hell. He even had little snowflakes all over his clothes, hair, and beard but for some reason the snow was brown! It turns out that his giant container of instant coffee crystals had burst in his sack and completely covered his clothing, bedding, hair, shoulders, shirt, pants, arms…everything… He left a trail of coffee that had mixed with his dripping sweat and made brown mushy foot prints and piles.

When he slung the bag off his shoulder and shook out his shirt, it polka dotted the whole room, including my bed and sheets, with coffee. He looked at me like he didn’t know what to do next. He asked how much longer I’d be on the toilet. Turns out he’s Russian and speaks very broken English. All I could yell was, “Let me wipe my ass!”

At that moment they delivered lunch to us; the lunch room was being used for another purpose that day. So, instead of starting to clean up, coffee monster sat down and started to eat his cold fish sandwich, one foot away from me as I am cleaning my ass.

I finally got clean, but I couldn’t really move because he was so fat, you can’t get around him in the cell. I didn’t want to get near him anyway because he was totally brown and wet. It’s in his eyebrows for feck sake. I just stood there watching him eat then asked, “Are you gonna try cleaning this up?!” He pretended not to understand and said, “I think I do clean it up.”

“No, no, you didn’t clean it the fuck up! There’s coffee hand prints on the walls! There’s piles of coffee mush on the floor. My bed is covered in coffee!”

He took some toilet paper and made one swipe across the floor, still holding his half-eaten fish sandwich. A CO walked by and I told him we needed a mop. He said he’s get us one. He didn’t. We sat there with the tension rising while the coffee and sweat dried all over the room and him.

Probably an hour passes. I’m stuck. I couldn’t sit on my bed or touch anything. He kept trying to make conversation like nothing was out of the ordinary. I kept saying, “just shut up.” Eventually a swamper came by and gave us a mop and new bedding. It took the rest of the day to clean.

Coffee Monster was 400 pounds and they gave him the top bunk. So every time he got into his bed, it was a big sweaty, moaning, breathing, flapping mess.

So he decided to spend most of the day sitting at our desk, which when you’re as fat as him, puts you 1.5 inches away from me at all times. I eventually had to hang a towel from the between our faces just to escape him. I sat on my bed, pissed off, a towel hanging 6 inches from my face, with his fat head 6 inches on the other side of the towel doing nothing. Literally just sitting there all day unable to see my TV, unable to read English books. He just sat there looking at a towel with an angry dude behind it.   About a week later, he got moved to a different unit. One without stairs, and he got a bottom bunk.