Sam Paul - Why I Committed Suicide

…and a few more hours. To amuse myself I decided to see if this was an actual suicide prevention cell and I wanted to see how closely they were monitoring me, so I pretended like I had a broken neck and lay down on the floor in a crooked death-pose. When nothing happened after about twenty minutes I got bored and used some wet toilet paper to cover up the lens of the camera instead.

About thirty minutes later a huge black man came running down the hall and when he saw through the plexiglass that I was sitting there, still alive, he got pissed and yelled at me to take the toilet paper off the “goddamn camera.” I do. It’s so cold that I keep trying to stuff wet toilet paper into the air conditioning vent and block it off, but the toilet paper quickly dries out and won’t stick to the ceiling. So I decide to cover the camera again instead.

This time an hour passes before the guy comes down to yell at me, a steroid-abusing white guard with a marine haircut and veins bulging from his forehead. I tell him to let me the hell out of this meat locker and I’ll stop covering the camera. He tells me they are working on it and goes away again. I give him about 30 minutes before I cover up the camera again.

There must have been a shift change because the next time anyone comes by, it’s only to give me a bologna sandwich and a cup of their evil juice. A couple of guards with extra stripes on their shoulders walk down a bit later and tell me I need to uncover the camera. I explain to them that if I wanted to commit suicide and they were really monitoring me to prevent it, then I would already be dead. I try and compromise by asking them to put me in general population and inquiring what the basis is for keeping me under “observation” when they are clearly not observing me. That’s when I officially found out about my mom’s call.

Many, many cold hours later I eventually just stretched out trying to preserve my body heat in the most economical way possible. My lips were blue and I’d long since tired of fucking with the guards.

Sometime in the middle of the next morning I got another bologna sandwich and some coffee and then a crew of guards came to escort me to the second floor, which had a funny smell to it. They took away every scrap of clothes I had, except my boxer shorts, and tossed me in a single cell similar to the solitary cell I had in Denton. The difference is that this one looks like it’s straight out of a sixties mental institution. From what I can see, I’m lucky that I got to keep my boxer shorts. Most of the people in here are buckass naked which I originally thought was their mentally unstable personal choice, but apparently the standard procedure is to remove ALL clothing from potential suicides. Perhaps it’s just in case we decide to eat our county jail uniforms and freeze to death. This floor is fucking killing me already. The people I see around me are the people I see as reflections of myself. The previous tenant of my room felt the need to write on the walls with his feces. I guess that was a while ago, but human shit is kind of like cat pee, once you are committed to decorating the walls of your room with feces there really is no Martha Stewart jailhouse solution to getting it all off. They must have hosed out the room or something but there are still nasty little remnants stuck in the grout between the tiles.

Still, feces and all, it might not be so bad if I had clothes. They strip you of all socks, shoes, clothes, mattress and blanket and put you in a plexiglas cell to “observe” just in case you invent some magical way to hurt yourself with absolutely nothing. The thick plexiglas is covered with a layer of gunk or God-knows what (He said I wouldn’t want to know), but it’s there so whatever mental help they have on staff can stare at you and make notes without having to get too close. My cell has got the standard toilet/sink and a raised section of crumbling tile and concrete that is where the mattress and bed are supposed to go. After I wiped the dirt, shit and old toilet paper off of that little area as best I could, I lay down on the cold tile to try and get some form of sleep even though there were big bugs making noise around me everywhere. And take it from me, there’s not much worse than sitting on an ice cold metal toilet seat and having a giant water roach run out from under the lip of the toilet and across your balls. Yeech.

I woke up a little later and there was a tray of food shoved under my door with no utensils. Macaroni mush of some sort, pineapple from a giant jumbo can and a cup of that awful red juice with the chemicals in it to make your sex drive decrease. I still can’t do the juice; I would rather drink out of the toilet/sink than be part of their experiment. Most of the retarded and crazy people love the crap they serve and I shoved most of my food back under the slot in the door for whoever wants it. A little while later the guards and trustees come through to pick up the trays. None of the other prisoners will look at any of us in our single cells. Not because most of us are naked, it’s just that the 2n floor has a prevailing sense of wrongness to it.

I met with the girl who was assigned to do my psychological evaluation pretty early the next morning. She looked up and down at my mostly naked body disdainfully, as if it was my choice to live like a savage. She was even younger than me and obviously still in training or else she just had no idea about any kind of psychology whatsoever since I could see right through her. She barely looked up and asked if I hear voices in my head. That’s her big evaluation. “Do you hear voices?” I ponder for a second, wondering whether I should say “yes, in fact I just talked to God yesterday” thinking maybe they could get me on some kick-ass reality distorting meds, but my need for clothing and warmth prevailed over my plot to haze out the next couple of months. I am definitely going to be spending some time in here and I would rather not do it in the same nasty cell. I try to joke with her and say “I heard some voices yelling at me to put some damn clothes on,” but she was too plutocratic or jaded to respond. It was as if she didn’t, or couldn’t, even see me as a human being any longer. I finally tell her, “Look, something got messed up and I know I am on suicide watch and I would PLEASE like some form of clothing since its damn near 50 degrees in here.” I even managed to say this nicely without the least bit of sarcasm in my voice, realizing she has the power to deprive me of clothing for a very long time. That’s about it. With my psyche summed up in a three minute conversation, she gets the guards to at least let me have my Dallas County jumper back but I’m still on sock and shoe probation for a week. I feel like slightly less of an animal now, but its creepy walking around my area knowing there could be poop particles clingingto my feet. I guess the idea is to prove my sanity by not going crazy on them for doing all this mental torture and other bullshit to me.

It’s ok. I can wait. If there’s always been the one thing I could do, it is waiting. Not like I have much of a choice anyway. My problem is that the voices DO talk to me. I feel better and know now that most voices are merely some form of the voice of God. But what if they are not? The voices tell me to do some pretty crazy things. Nothing particularly bad but I know that everything is subtle where head-voices are involved.

I made friends with the guy next door to me. Like solitary in Denton, they let everyone out to exercise in the dayroom once a day for about a half hour. It’s a measly ten foot space but you can change the channel on the only TV in the place and all the naked freaks in their cells can’t do anything except yell behind their glass and gesture lewdly. I’m pretty desensitized to that kind of crap by now. I like to put it on NOVA and educate them against their will.