VINCE

I got a letter from my friend who essentially adopted my dog. He’s doing just fine. From my mother I was under the impression that he was on his death bed. Sometimes I think she says things just to make me feel bad. And sometimes it works.

I would like to clear a couple things up for the record. First, I have never in my life touched heroin. I don’t know if it’s because it is generally associated with needles and I’m deathly afraid of needles, or if it’s because I just don’t like downers, but I have never used it. Also I have not used cocaine for over a decade, so when my mom randomly accuses me of having been charged with four felonies of possessing all sorts of shit, I get a little annoyed.

I was only charged with one count of 1^st degree – sale – 10 grams or more – cocaine or heroin or meth. Mine was meth. I plead guilty to, and was convicted of, possession – 6 grams or more – 2^nd degree – cocaine or heroin or meth. In the hotel, they found 52 grams @ 86% purity, of meth. For my first drug charge, realistically I was looking at 84 months. I do not know where her 11-year figure comes from.

Second: Yes, there was a bake sale. Prison industry consists of many things. They strive to educate us during our stay. From construction to baking. We have the opportunity every couple of months to buy homemade cookies. I mean giant cookies. All proceeds go to the cost of confinement. In fact, every penny we make, spend, and receive while we are locked up is “taxed” and the cost of our living, as a burden to society, is reduced.

Just in the last fiscal quarter, in this prison alone, the phone calls we made (not collect) contributed over $250,000 to our housing, meals, wages, and clothing. The guards are state employees, so the tax payers foot that bill.

On a much smaller note, in my first post I made a joke about my hard-to-spell-and-pronounce last name. But she omitted the last name and kept my joke so it looks like I’m an idiot. My mother is not dumb. But she lacks common sense. I had sent her a list of changes, explanations, and side notes, but it looks like she chose a different route. I hope this makes it to print.

Mom, I love you dearly. If anybody else put you though what I have put you through, I would not hesitate to torture them…Dear God…twice now, a different person has stopped by my cell, stared at me until I looked back at them and I shit you not, they both said, “What you doin’? Writin’ letters?” and then they proceeded to do this little weasel laugh. You know like “heh, heh, heh.” I didn’t get the joke if there was one.

This is my last piece of paper. I will try to find more but it may be a few weeks until I can write again.

VINCE

I heard kind of a funny joke today from a CO, of all people. He stops me and says, “So, Jeffrey Dahmer asks his mother over for lunch, and she’s eating and says, ‘Jeffrey, I don’t like your friends.’” And he says, “Well then, just east the vegetables.” Ha!

For two days I went without my meds for RLS and as it turns out, I need them. My prescription had expired and the doctor upped my dosage, but the new pills didn’t get here in time. Now I’m on .25 mg and I finally slept. I had only been able to sleep in 40 minute increments for the last two nights. Just before REM sleep is when my legs start to go crazy.

It didn’t help that they woke us up at 1:30 for a stand-up head count. We will never know the reason for that. The guards just do what they’re told. Is it too cliché to say that the Nazis also did what they were told? I guess there’s no comparison of the two. But it makes me feel better knowing that they will read this.

Prison is really nice as long as you close your eyes and think of someplace else. There are many places I have been that will never be seen by most. Where the people care not for family or career or dignity but only their high. I’ve been there, and I’ve been them. Those. They. As I sit at my desk I try to think of those places, instead of where I want to be, where I should be. All of the things I should have accomplished by now. My wife and kids that don’t exist. The home I don’t own. Fuck. Either way it’s depressing. It makes me want to get high.

Drugs: The cause of, and solution to, all of my problems.

Januaryish, 2001. I don’t know how long I had been drifting from curb to couch. Homeless in nearly every definition of the word. I didn’t spend every night out in the cold. And most of the nights I did, I stayed awake, looking for opportunity. There was one of the most desperate times of my life. I was addicted to crack, and I really didn’t care about much else.

I resorted mostly to stealing things out of garages and pawning them to get what I needed. Stealing food was sometimes necessary but one of the benefits of smoking crack is that it’s really not all that necessary to eat very often.

True story: One time I spent 15 minutes smoking $20 worth of crack, and the next 12 hours with a torch trying to get another hit out of a pipe I made out of a pop can. In the end I had actually smoked about 10% of the aluminum can itself.

“I have come to the conclusion that my subjective account of my own motivation is largely mythical on almost all occasions. I don’t know why I do things.”   J.B.S. Haldane

VINCE

2006.  I had just come back from my cruise and had begun drinking regularly. It was easy to get away with it because I was in Rochester, and my family had never come to visit me there. I could simply not answer my phone when I was drunk and call back when I wasn’t. It was easy until I started using meth.

Less than a month after nearly a five-year period of sobriety, I started hitting the hard stuff. I skipped the usual, “only on weekends” routine and got myself into a good daily habit. My job at the ice cream plant paid well. I had thousands at my disposal, but I knew that wouldn’t be enough. I made the decision to start selling.

When you are a dealer, the drug is always on hand. It has to be in order to have any level of success. I was able to be on the clock 24/7 with little naps here and there. For my own benefit I cannot get into detail about any specific sales.

During what would become my last weeks at the plant, I decided to take a week off for my birthday. I had been up for seven straight days when my birthday arrived. I had a sudden feeling that something was wrong. I looked around and everything was sterile-white and there was a huge pile-up on Line Two at the plant. I ran toward it and began removing smashed boxes of ice cream and throwing them on the floor, trying to get at the main problem which appeared to be a reflector covered in ice cream. Suddenly there was a horn, and the light shrunk down to two headlights staring me down in the night. It was 4am and I was out in the middle of 6th Avenue, across from Soldiers Field. I can only imagine the look on my face. I casually walked back to the sidewalk, and the car drove away. I decided it was time to sleep.

I slept through the entire weekend. I don’t remember having any dreams.

VINCE

I haven’t written any blog posts in nearly a week. My job keeps me busy, and I’ll say that there is a little more effort involved in the actual writing vs. typing a blog, from my point of view, anyway.

My co-blogger, aka Mom, came to visit me today. Like everybody else, she had a good laugh at my prison-issue glasses. But then we sat down and talked for two hours. We could have talked for two more and time would have flown by just as quickly. It was really nice to see a familiar face. We spoke on topics ranging from family health to sign-language-interpreting gorillas. It will probably be my only visit during my whole tenure as a prisoner, and it was a good one.

—

Last night I started reading Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. I only made it through 40 pages and I had to get to sleep but so far I’m interested. I’m sure once I leave prison I’ll go back to reading zero books. My mind is impossible to control so I’m easily distracted. Sometimes I can’t get through a page without daydreaming. I’ll catch myself. And do it again minutes later. Brain. Bad brain.

—

I haven’t been sick in years. Years! I am in the middle of a terrible cold, and I don’t like it. I have been told several times over the years that, despite my claims, I am not a doctor. Even if I were, there’s little I can do to suppress the effects of the virus. So I’ll do the standard: rest, drink plenty of fluids, and complain.

—

I’m not at all religious but I went to a Christmas program for something to do, and I had a blast. There were six or seven musicians, all in their 70s or 80s, from some denomination whose name I cannot recall. Each played a different instrument ranging from accordion to piano to guitar. They had 50 grown men, drug dealers, pimps, and armed robbers, singing Twelve Days of Christmas and even doing the chicken dance. That was the best. We were all laughing. And we all needed that.

I think it may have been the first time in a while that some of the guys smiled.  Which will usually, unfortunately, later, lead to crying.  Quietly, so your cellmate doesn’t hear.  We will be thinking of our friends, families, and why we can’t be with them this holiday season.  I am one of the lucky ones.  I won’t be locked up next year.  Some will.  Some will be forever.  And although they are here permanently for a reason, it will still hurt.  They may not show it, but they will surely feel it.

ANNE

So what did Vince and I talk about during our visit?

I told him about my sister’s cancer, my mom’s frailty. We discussed whether drug dealing is a victimless crime or not. He detailed the timeline for being moved to another facility. He talked about chomos (child molesters)—is all the talk about them a way for him to not focus on himself? There was talk of Narcotics Anonymous vs. Alcoholics Anonymous. Vince feels that AA is useless to him since he’s a drug addict, not an alcoholic. I felt that AA was better than nothing, and that addiction is addiction. Vince asked me to try to get whatever money was sitting in his unemployment account on a Mega Bank (not its real name) card he no longer had. We wondered if he really has bipolar disorder, as he had been diagnosed by Hazelden during his third round of chemical dependency treatment. We agreed he probably doesn’t.

I updated him on news of the world, since he didn’t get any news until he had his radio. I told him about the protests over the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri and a viral video taken by a black man in St. Paul who was bullied by the police. “Maybe that explains why there’s so much tension lately,” he said.

It occurred to me to ask how prisoners with TVs get reception. I have to pay for cable because the government in its wisdom has decided to make it almost impossible for anyone to get broadcast TV, which has been free since television was invented. He thought they got cable, and that the prison was tapping into that illegally. I thought that sounded far-fetched but if you’re reading this, Comcast, go get ‘em.

I asked him what he thought the purpose of boot camp was, and he said, “punishment.” And yet he spoke animatedly about it and was clearly looking forward to it.

—

It wasn’t until I was driving to St. Cloud that I realized I hadn’t seen Vince for a year and a half. It had been spring, and I went to see him because he’d lost yet another job. This one , cooking at a place called the Bent Wrench, had lasted for a couple years.

One thing I will say for Vince is, he will take responsibility and doesn’t ask for anything from me when he’s down and out. “I fucked up, again,” was his explanation for losing the job. I drove to Lanesboro and rented a side-by-side tandem reclining bike. It was a beautiful spring day and I had brought a cooler with some Strong Bow cider. Vince and I biked along the paths to a rock quarry, then got out and hunted for agates and had a cider.

Then we peddled back to town and I offered to splurge and get us dinner at the best restaurant, the Riverside. When we walked in, the owner asked Vince how things were, Vince said he was between jobs, and the owner offered him a cooking job on the spot, starting the next day. The guy had clearly had his eye on Vince but didn’t want to poach him since it’s a very small world down there. The Riverside had been Vince’s dream place to work. We had a great meal and I thought, wasn’t it great when things just worked out like that?

I had just a few texts from him over the ensuing summer and fall. He was super busy, he said, but loved the job. It wouldn’t be good for me to come visit, because he was working so much that he couldn’t spend time with me. Now, in prison, he told me he had been working six days a week at the Riverside, but he’d also been dealing drugs all night, every night.

ANNE

The visiting room was similar to the waiting room, a mash up of Victorian pillars, graceful arched doorways, bars and bars and more bars, and mauve and teal furniture. The best of the 1880s and 1980s. There was a raised platform with a guards’ desk on it with a very bored, very fat guard, and a box of Kleenex.

Chairs were arranged in rows facing each other, about four feet apart. One side was for children, the other for everyone else. There was probably capacity for 100 pairs of prisoners/visitors.

Vince was already seated, and in addition to his new glasses he had narrow sideburns down to his chin. I eventually noticed that most of the guys in the room had facial hair that, well, you don’t see every day on the outside. One result of them not having much else to do, and those crappy Bob Barker razors. They were all wearing white T-shirts, faux jeans with elastic waists, and denim long-sleeved shirts. “We joke at breakfast, ‘Hey, you wore the same outfit as me!’” Vince said.

This was his opener after we had our one allowable five-second hug and sat down.

The room wasn’t full; we had the whole row to ourselves except for one other pair about five seats down. This was what caused me to choke up the second time. The visitor was an elderly lady who reminded me of my mom—well dressed, frail. Her son looked like any middle aged guy who works in your tech support office—balding, slightly paunchy, outdated (but not Instant Weirdo) glasses.

As I was gazing at them, wondering if she was my future, Vince was telling me how prisoners were strip searched before and after each visit. That got my attention and I noticed a line of guys going one-by-one into a room with a guard, who was wearing blue latex gloves.

“Strip searched?” I asked in shock. You mean ….

“No, mom, a strip search. You lift your balls, bend over and cough. It’s not a body-cavity search”

He made it sound like a strip search was no big deal, while a body-cavity search was something only real losers had to put up with.

I looked down at the elderly lady again, then looked Vince in the eye. “Don’t make me do that when I’m old,” I said. He gave a kind of non-response and I knew it would be up to me to decide whether or not to visit him when I was elderly, if he landed in prison again.

I was really surprised, and then disappointed, that a photographer was available to take pictures of prisoners and their visitors, but I hadn’t know that, and Vince was short 50 cents credit so we couldn’t buy a ticket to have it done. He told me he wasn’t allowed to communicate with other prisoners in the visiting room, otherwise he could easily borrow some credit. He asked the guard if he could do that, but the guy shook his head sympathetically, no. Apparently I could have bought credit out in the waiting area. It was all very confusing, and I have a master’s degree. But maybe I’m not very street wise.

I could see a young couple across the room posing for photos. Vince told me there were four allowable poses. Three were non-contact and the fourth allowed people to hold hands, but they had to stand at least a foot apart.

ANNE

The officer told me that Vince would have to eat and shower before being allowed to come to the visiting room. Eating and showering would take me at least an hour and a half, but I figured they didn’t linger over such things here. I found the lockers and deposited my car key.

I exhaled and was finally able to take in my surroundings. The visiting room was “decorated” in 80s colors—oak furniture with teal and mauve upholstery and grey carpet. All very run down. Not skanky, quite, but shabby. I looked around for interesting details I could write about in the blog but there were none. The only reading material was a rack with brochures about support groups for children whose parents are incarcerated.

And there are plenty of them, if this waiting room was any indication. In the half hour I waited, five kids under the age of three or so waited with their mothers. Four of them were black. Was it good that they were too young to understand? Or by bringing them to visit daddy in prison at such a young age, where they being conditioned to think this was normal and acceptable?

There was an elderly couple. They looked like they were straight off a farm. I wondered who they were here to visit—their son, grandson? Their name was called and he had to clutch his pants to hold them up while they went through the metal detector, since he had to remove his suspenders and place them in a tray to the side.

I felt a strong urge to stand up and yell, “I’m not one of you!”

I know this about myself: One of my defenses when my life feels like a pressure cooker is to adopt a smug, superior attitude to everyone around me. But I keep it inside my head.

It was quitting time, and a stream of employees came out as I waited, scanning their badges, waiting as the bars slowly rolled open, then skirting the metal detector and vamoosing for the weekend. Five or six attractive women came out and I wondered what they did here and why they would work here.

There was a bank of security monitors along one wall. In black and white, hundreds of men inside streamed from point A to point B. The perspective was from above them, and tilted at an angle. It reminded me of leaf cutter ants I had seen in Costa Rica, marching along blindly, down one tree, across a path, and down a hill into a hole.

My last name—Vince’s last name—was called over a loudspeaker, mispronounced as usual, and I shot up to walk through the metal detector. The wall of bars slid back and I was inside a sally port—a controlled entry way with glass guard booths on either side and sliding walls of bars on either end. The guard told me to put my hand under a black light so he could see the number stamped on my hand.   He escorted me through two more doors of bars, then I was in.

ANNE

Hello, I’m back from my travels and eager to write about my visit with Vince from a few weeks ago.

First, this photo is not Vince. It’s a photo I plucked off the internet of some guy wearing “Instant Weirdo Glasses,” a gag gift I have bought myself to give to nieces and nephews. But it does look very much like Vince with his prison-issue glasses, and I laughed out loud at my first sight of him, thinking it was a joke, then realized they wouldn’t sell Instant Weirdo Glasses in a prison commissary, caught myself and felt guilty.

Being taken aback by his appearance after not seeing him for a long time is kind of a pattern. I remember after his relapse after five years of being clean, when he had been MIA for months using meth somewhere, I found him in Lanesboro and was thoroughly alarmed by how black and bottomless his eyes were. Another time, I came home from Kenya to find he had lost his job and everything he owned, including his apartment and all his clothes, and he was wearing an old tattered snowmobile suit and boots with no socks or, presumably, underwear. At least the glasses were good for a laugh. At least he can see.

—

I had assumed I would cry all the way to St. Cloud, so I’d stolen a box of Kleenex from work and thrown it in the Mini. I left from work to save time, and yet it was still a six-hour undertaking. Two-hours up, a half-hour wait, two hours with Vince, then an hour and a half drive back home.

But it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it would be. I didn’t cry at all. I choked up twice but I didn’t cry.

The first choke up was when I caught my first look at the prison. Picture the grimmest, bleakest, most Dickensian-style prison you can imagine, and that’s it. Granite is grey, after all. You see the wall first.

There are no signs telling you where to go but you can’t miss the main building. Yes, there are bars on all the windows. I had read and re-read the visiting instructions, so I left everything but 50 cents and my car key in the car, hoping my purse would be safe in a prison parking lot. The 50 cents was to pay for a locker in which I would put my car key, because I couldn’t bring anything into the visiting room, not even a Kleenex. Although I’m sure other people smuggle all sorts of stuff in, I wasn’t going to drive two hours and then get busted for trying to smuggle in a Kleenex.

I felt uncertain walking up to the foreboding main doors but with no signage it was my best guess. I was anxious that I wouldn’t be let in, even though I’d been approved, according to Vince. Visitors don’t get any notification from the prison saying they’ve been approved; they leave that up to the inmates. Not the most reliable communicators.

I climbed two flights of stairs and found the reception area. Before I could even think about what I needed to do next, another woman visitor asked me, “First time?” How did she know? She waved me over to a desk where I filled out a form, which I then slid into a drawer with my ID to an officer sitting in a glass booth. He did something on his computer. My anxiety spiked, thinking he’d turn to me and say, “We have no record of your visitor form being received.” But he asked me to put my fist into the drawer so he could stamp it with something invisible. Why invisible ink? One of many “whys?” I will not bother to investigate. All that mattered was that I was in.