VINCE

Four calendar months since I walked into court, knowing that I would not leave without hand cuffs. There were a million reasons and excuses I could have made up so I wouldn’t have to go. But I did it. Making the transition from absolute freedom to ultimate restriction in just a few minutes was tough. But I’m strong. Here’s how it went down.

I woke up at 11am in Chatfield, Minnesota, 25 minutes away from the Rochester Courthouse. I had to check in by 12:55pm. All I really wanted was a good meal and to chain smoke cigarettes and meth until I got there. I was successful. I checked in, grabbed a seat just in time for the judge to make an entrance. I was playing Angry Birds on my cell phone so I didn’t stand up, and the court officer yelled at me and I shot back with a nice, “Go fuck yourself.” So I had to sit in the hallway and wait for my name to be called which was ok by me because the first part of Rochester court is all in Spanish. At 1:40pm they called my name.

Since I already had the terms of my plea agreement in place, I was at the desk in front of the judge for less than three minutes. She pronounced my sentence and the court administrator told me I could stand up at which point I shook my lawyer’s hand and was promptly handcuffed. There was no banging of the gavel.

From my chair, I was led through the door that I’m sure exists in every courtroom that nobody wants to go through. To my surprise, once the guard and I were through he took one cuff off and put my hands in front, and we walked down a long hallway to booking. After that was the standard pictures and fingerprints and waiting. I believe I have described the rest of the journey from there.

Right now I am listening to a Pink Floyd song that I have never heard before. It is amazing. Oh. The Boy in the Forest is actually by Andy Jackson. OK anyone would confuse that with Floyd. He was Pink Floyd’s producer for many albums.

—

If anybody out there happened to see the story on the news about the 125^th anniversary of St. Cloud State Prison, you got to see my living unit, B House, and more importantly, my front door.

They shot the footage of the living unit from in front of cell 143 which is two doors down from me in 145. I, however, was actually inside the broom closet at the time because the camera crew caught us off guard and I had to hide. We were cleaning and I was just finishing up when they came in. The warden didn’t want any offenders on tape. I had a half a mind to take off my pants and streak down the main drag but I thought better of it.

The camera should pan down from the beautiful arched ceiling and end up pointing down the flag (the main drag I wanted to run down) and look for cell 145. That’s my apartment.

[ANNE: The story is actually about how Minnesota has the lowest imprisonment rate for drug offenders in the nation. Maine has the lowest rate. Still, there are nearly 10,000 people in prison in Minnesota, the Land of 10,000 Lakes, and we pay about a half billion $$ a year to feed and house them.]

VINCE

Today is the 36^th anniversary of the most important day in the history of my life, my birth.

Although I have spent many holidays in lockup, this is my first birthday. Not at all surprising to me is that nobody here cares. I was excited yesterday, however, to discover that I had money on my account. Most likely from my dear Mother. Thank you, mom.

So far today, I have read 150 pages of Wild Fire, a novel by my most recent favorite author, Nelson DeMille. And my plan for the rest of the day is to continue reading until and after lunch, and until work at 2:30. It’s just another day.

Little changes.

As house crew, I have developed a rapport with the guards. We share a few laughs. Some of them are going to be assholes for the rest of their lives but most of them seem to enjoy having my sense of humor added to their daily routine.

I remarked the other day when we were trying to figure out why certain cells have such a horrible odor to them, “Maybe it’s because they hold the spray bottles sideways, and nothing comes out.” This is in reference to the way modern black gangsters are known to hold their guns, and sadly, the way, more often than not, they either refuse to clean, or try to cover up odor, with air freshener. Anyhow, it got quite a laugh.

Also, I noticed that the names I hear over the PA are becoming less familiar, and the OID numbers are getting higher as people cycle in and out. Today I heard a number that is just under 1,000 over mine. This means that, since I arrived three months ago, nearly a thousand others have come and gone. Maybe a hundred would be women going to Shakopee, but still big numbers. And that does not include repeat offenders. I couldn’t even estimate how many of them have come back, in ratio to newbies.

—

One thing many offenders have in common is that they spent too many years avoiding the dentist. I have one broken tooth, but that can be repaired when I get out. A good number of my fellow felons have no teeth at all. It is comical to me. And gross. They don’t use any kind of mouth cleansing products. Dry, sticky, clicking mouths full of rancid breath all around while I eat. Their noses nearly touch their chins. And I have trouble keeping a straight face in the chow hall when they’re mashing their mixed veggies in their gross mouths. I picture them in clown makeup. But I sit near them. Not all meals here belong to nursing homes, and every now and then I score something crunchy and delicious. Ahhh, what a birthday.

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.