Sam Paul - Why I Committed Suicide

I spent another two weeks in solitary, getting to know the other guys as they moved in and out after serving their own disciplinary time. One guy in the cell next to me stabbed another guy in a fight over a candy bar and got only one week in solitary. He got one week for a stabbing and I’m doing three weeks for a letter!? After that psycho left, another kid got put in his cell for a week for giving another guy in his Unit a swirly (head in the toilet, flush-flush, that kind of thing) on his birthday. It turned out that the kid had been in County Jail for over a year awaiting trial for a murder charge that sounded like he actually didn’t commit, but get this, he had the same court appointed attorney as I did and since I hadn’t received a response from my lawyer or even heard from him at all, he told me that he would talk to him for me since he has to see him a lot for his trial. That gave me a little hope.

I passed the time by singing to myself a lot and shouting back and forth to the other guys in there, swapping stories, learning who did what. Everyone pretty much agreed that what I did was dumb but also acknowledged that I got a raw deal with the extra time. I did whatever it took to keep from going crazy. Since I was alone I jacked off a lot thinking about faceless bikini-clad women on far away beaches and I worked out the formula for breaking down pure heroin into street heroin and calculated the percentages of the profit margin. One guy wrote the titles to every Led Zeppelin song on the walls of his cell one day and we had a hard time coming up with more than just the popular tunes. It was hard to survive having absolutely nothing to do but exist alone with my thoughts. The nightmares got worse and not having any daylight threw my sleep schedule off so that I slept a lot more than usual and when I dreamt it was one fucked-up thing after another.

Jail is mindless toil. I’ve decided that after this there will be no point below which I will sink in the depths of my anger towards this fucked-up system. I feel like an animal since I’ve been living like an animal, funny how it only took three weeks alone in a moldy cell to strip me of all resolve and completely destroy my spirit and ego. We are given so few moments on this Earth, yet I’ve spent so many days impatiently awaiting their passing. Carpamus dulcia; post enim mortem cinis et fabula fies . [6] Let us seize sweet things; for, indeed, after death you will become ashes and a story. —Persius

After my three weeks (plus a few days, who’s counting if nobody cares?) in solitary I finally got placed in another area. My new cell is a duplicate 6 x 6 cell like the one I just came from in solitary only it has a TV at the end of the open room that I can sort of see with one eye if I sit on the floor and rest my head on the bars in just the right spot. Not much of an improvement but a better class of convict and sweet merciful distracting TV. I also get to have visitors again (none yet though) and I get to attend church services and get out for a bit. I’m one of the last ones they bring into the room for church and I’m one of the only guys wearing ankle cuffs so I imagine with the beauty regime I’ve just been through I must look about as crazy as I feel to the regular jail population. People don’t talk to you if you look crazy, especially if you have the metal cuffs on you to prove it, but I enjoy the church services even though there’s usually a fight and they have to clear the room before it’s finished. If the fight gets too out of hand they seal the doors and pump in tear gas through pipes in the ceiling just like a Nazi death camp, but that’s only happened to me once. I just kept my head down and got my back against a wall until the cons and cops finished bashing in their own heads. It’s really morbidly fascinating and it gets so fucking real sometimes. Lesson for the week: don’t fuck with teargas. It’s nasty, vile shit.

Being in here is like driving during rush hour. Everyone is in a hurry to get somewhere and nobody is moving at all. Things move in slow motion. People speed to the top of the hills and then slam on their brakes when they see the sea of cars spilled out in front of them. You get to the peak and are confronted by your own mortality. You see the futility and that everyone is in the same boat as you and accept that the brakes need to be applied and that you will be going very slowly for quite a long time. Then it’s just a matter of keeping yourself occupied while time passes. and passes. and passes.

The State of Texas dropped Denton County’s heroin charge! I always thought they would since I knew there wasn’t any to begin with, but it’s still nice to get the official papers after all the shit I’ve been through. It only took three and a half months to clear up and that’s pretty fast for Denton County so I should be thankful. It’s hard to be deemed innocent after giving up three months of your life to prove it. I’ve figured out that “innocent until proven guilty” shit only applies to people with money.

Now I’m in Dallas County jail serving out a probation violation because of that misdemeanor charge I got for stealing the watch when I was at the mall with my sister an eternity ago. Dallas is quick about handling their business. I’ve already seen the judge who gave me 30 days, which means I’ll get out in 10 since they’ve made me a trustee. Apparently Dallas doesn’t give a fuck about some trumped up County escape charge which is good news for me since it means I might have a date with freedom coming up soon!

There are a lot of anomalies to what I expected this place would be like. I am not in a cushy Unit or a moldy cell this time. I’m now in a jail that’s actually just a converted tractor manufacturing plant. The name of the facility is New Holland, which used to be the type of farm tractor that was constructed here at one point before the land and building were modified to hold prisoners. You can see where heavy machinery was mounted to the floor in some places because the thick steel brackets are still deeply imbedded in the concrete. There are also areas with faded yellow lines that mark off old safety zones close to the places where the heavy equipment probably once stood. Dallas County came in and gutted the entire building leaving just the rust stained, hollowed out framework made of cheaply constructed corrugated steel pieces.

Along one wall is a pantheon of windows covered with brown grime leftover from years of industrial pollutants and neglect. Many of these windows are broken out in a delightfully random pattern, similar to something children might do when finding windows intact in the ruins of an abandoned building.

In the center of this arena of empty filth, the City of Dallas has constructed what I can only describe as zoo cages. Imagine an entire building filled with 40 cubes of square solid steel bars about 15 feet tall and 50 feet in width and length. Each cube has one side that is an actual solid wall and this is where the two toilets and a shower have been added. There are 20 bunk beds per cell and the coveted bed to get is the bottom bunk for reasons I will explain later. As far as I can see in any direction are more cube cells with the same features and dimensions. The only variations to each cube are the people inside it and the more attention I pay to the people the more I realize even that variation is not much of a distinguishing characteristic.

The factory ceiling is about three times as high as the barred top of the cages, so we have a clear view of the space between us and the roof. If it rains, the tin ceiling thunders and quakes. When the giant air circulation ducts turn on the entire complex rattles and shakes, making me thankful for the bars above us in case pieces of the dilapidated roof decide to come crashing down. Those top bars above us are coated with inches of accumulated dust that has remained mostly undisturbed since the inception of the complex. Above the dust-coated bars are old frayed wires, reams of cobwebs and pieces of ceiling and equipment that hang in no particular pattern.