Sam Paul - Why I Committed Suicide

Anyway I found out the kid next door to me got busted trying to walk out of a hospital in a stolen lab coat with two multi-gallon jugs of formaldehyde. You lace that in a joint and it fucks you up the same as PCP. Black people call it “water” or “wack.” It’s the poor man’s angel dust and it totally fucks your brain into stupidity. The kid isn’t too bright. They tagged him before he even got out the door of morgue, classified him as “fucked in the head” and he ended up on the second floor mental ward with me. I guess he’s been here for a while since he’s one of the only other residents wearing clothing. He’s even got shower shoes. Better off than I am.

No one will look you in the eyes up here except the psychos. There’s even an AIDS section on this floor. One hallway is nothing but entire rooms full of AIDS patients waiting to die. They do a lot to separate the folks that are closer to dying, but the couple of times I’ve walked by the places where they keep the infected people it looks a lot like a hospital from a civil war battlefield. There’s some really creepy shit to see in there and getting stuck in jail with the AIDS patients is high up on my list of crappy ways to die. I guess you have to experience all the sensations of isolation and the smell that emanates from their bodies as they decay behind a plexiglas zoo cage to really get that eerie prickly neck hair feeling I get when I’m near their tanks.

There are so many people in my life that will never see or comprehend the shit that is going on right now. People pay good money to law enforcement and jails to keep the stuff of nightmares away from their doorstep. This is not America; itis someplace in between heaven and hell. Winston Churchill once said “When you’re going through hell, keep going.” That’s all I’m trying to do right now, keep going.

Thankfully I convinced some of the more able-minded shrinks to let me go and be a trustee. I think it was my multiple written grievances regarding a medical complaint about a sore on my ass-cheek that finally got them to get me down to tank 2E in the basement. While I was on the medical wing, the doctors or old lady nurses had to look at my ass every time I wrote a complaint about it, and having them have to look at my ass every once in a while was about the only bonus that went along with the being in with the crazies. Other than the benefit of just being able to act loony-tune crazy of course. But you know, when you are around enough people that are actually crazy and they can out-crazy you before they even wake up for breakfast, it’s quite a fucking reality check. It’s not the “mama’s-boy-needs-an-antidepressant-and-nice-soothing-therapy-because-he-brought-home-a-’C’-in-chemistry” crazy. Some of those guys really need serious help in a sad sort of way and they’re stuck in nothing more than a modern day dungeon. If anything, being around them cheered me up as much as God’s saving grace on the day I killed myself. They helped remind me that I’m functional and that I can control most of my urges and that it’s wrong to throw shit on people (at least in public) or decorate your walls with it.

When I was being led out of there, after I made trustee, I saw a guy come in that was nailed to a cross and freaking out on some sort of PCP. He wasn’t nailed to an actual cross of course, but the County has this giant wooden “X” with feet and hand restraints and this guy was flipped out on the worst bad acid-trip from hell. Being in jail, naked, immobilized, and left in a pool of urine while having a mental breakdown as people ignore and step around me is close to my idea of hell. The young kid was gnashing his teeth and trying to bite off pieces of himself he was flipping out so bad. Mental health is a nasty business sometimes. The cross was just a cute reminder of that.

“Tripping is the like having a dream while you are more wide awake and aware than you have ever been in your life…the thing is that while most dreams are pleasant, some can become nightmares without warning. The bad thing about having a nightmare while you are awake is that there is no waking up with a sigh of relief and instantly knowing everything is all-better because it wasn’t real. Things can get so very real sometimes.”

Tank 2E is cool. It’s mostly full of black guys and they are all Crips or people who are cool with the Crips. I guess after enough fights the guards quickly figure out who’s with which gang and try and keep the peace by keeping them all together. I know there is a tank of Bloods on the same floor and once when one of them did something to piss off a cop or a guard they tossed him in here with us. He looked around and after a few minutes he started banging on the walls and screaming to the guards to get him out of there. The guys had a good laugh watching him beg to get taken back out to his old cell. The guards laughed at him too but were smart enough to pull him out before anything serious happened.

Nobody wants to lose their trustee status down here, especially since we get to go by the kitchen sometimes. Being able to go to the kitchen and eat a piece of bread or get some water with ice is worth its weight in gold. Fighting your fellow man over the colors he wears while we are all in white jumpsuits is stupid and can wait until freedom comes, or at least until the lights go out, whichever comes first. I guess being tossed in with the gang members was supposed to be my punishment for the psych-ward ass trick, but I’ve gotten along great with all these guys so far. If you piss off the wrong cop during processing you can get assigned to an “agg” tank (Agg=Aggravated=Highly Pissed Off=Your’ White Ass Is Dead). This was the best they could come up with.

I’ve said it before, white guys are the minority in here and I’m always outnumbered 5-1 at the very least. If some guard wanted to get back at me he could throw me in any tank, casually toss in just a hint of racist tendencies about me or my name, then watch me get beaten on camera, tape it and take it home for personal enjoyment. The guys in 2E are cool though. They’ve taught me how to flash authentic gang signs and write graffiti and even explained what it means and where it came from. It’s actually fascinating to get the inside scoop and to be accepted by a hidden culture inside America’s culture with its own rules, territories and definition of “kin-folk”. If they ever stick me in the Government Building (that’s where the serial killers, serious murders and aggravated assault guys go) I might have a chance if I get thrown in with the right set. If not, I fight anyway.

There’s a Monopoly board in here that the brothers have taught me how to kick ass on. There’s nothing better than holding a fistful of gold five hundreds and telling someone, “Nigger, get your skanky ho’s the fuck off my property ‘fore I cornhole your ass!” Monopoly can get to be a contact sport sometimes, but it’s all in fun. I’m just doing time till I get this probation and then get sent back.

Yes, sent back, did you expect apologetic reform? God tells me I have to come back again. He certainly didn’t promise it would be easy, he made that point quite clear in the mental ward, but he’s there, I know it and as a believer I can tell the world to fuck off. Put that in the Sunday motivational pamphlet. God told me to tell you to “fuck off and pull your heads out of your asses.”

My bunkmate is this young African-looking kid that is one dumb motherfucker. He calls himself (or “hiself’ as he pronounces it) Tuddy-Mac (Tuddy rhymes with moody for some reason), which is his Crip gang name. Not a wannabe gang member but the genuine don’t fuck around and wear the wrong color violent gang member. His head is a deep dark oblong shape, creating the illusion of angular ebony. For being a gangbanger and a little thick-headed he’s not too stupid even for a dumb motherfucker. It’s just that some of his priorities are way out of whack. Let me see if I can write that out a little better just in case he finds this and manages to decipher my normal English usages without every plural word having a “Z” on the end.