I BROUGHT A TWO-FOOT-HIGH STACK OF books with me to the Chickasaw County Jail in New Hampton, my hometown, my last obligation before I left Iowa for grad school. For my first stint in jail, in Iowa City, I hadn’t brought anything with me, so I’d had to borrow my cellmate’s only book, something by Louis L’Amour. I read that book from cover to cover, like any sane man would have if the alternative was staring at the ceiling or out the six-inch-high diamond-wire-glass window on a cold, gray October day.
This time, I made damn sure I had enough books, and I brought War and Peace as a backup. If ever there was going to be a point in my life when I had enough time to read a thousand-plus-page chunk of Russian literature, it would be while doing time in the county jail.
Marty, the county sheriff, was kind enough to let me take up a bunk in the jail for seven days near the end of the summer. Even kinder, he let me split my sentence up into two three-and-a-half-day segments so I could attend a drinking driver education class over the weekend. He was sort of familiar with my dad from around town, so we talked a little bit about football and other stuff before getting to the standard intake interview.
“Height?” he asked.
“Five ten,” I said.
“Weight?”
“One sixty-five.”
“Hair?”
“Brown.”
“Eyes?”
“Blue.”
“Scars?”
From my past experience, I decided it was easier to just show him. “One here,” I said and pointed to the two-inch scar running across my left forearm. I had run into a barbed-wire fence one time when I got drunk my senior year of high school.
“And one here,” I said, lifting up my shirt to show him the scar that ran armpit to armpit just under my nipples, another souvenir from the fence.
“Four cigarette burns on my arms—here, here, here, and here.” I never remembered how much the previous time had hurt.
“All right. Any tattoos?”
“One here.” I patted underneath my right arm. “5-31-97.” I had gotten it right next to the armpit-to-armpit scar to remember the date it happened.
“Okay.”
“And one on my lower back. ‘Too weird to live, too rare to die.’ ” I looked at the form he was filling out to see if he would misspell “weird.” It was one of those words that usually took everyone, including me, a couple of tries.
“Any others?”
“One more on my ass. It says ‘A tattoo.’ ”
“No shit?” He smiled as he wrote it down.
“Yeah. Once upon a time, it was a great party joke.”
“I’m sure it was. Have you ever tested positive for the HIV virus?”
“No.”
“Use intravenous drugs?”
“Nope.”
“Ever have a seizure?”
“Nope.”
“Homosexual?”
“Nope.”
“Ever tried to kill yourself?”
“Nope.”
“Thinkin’ about tryin’ it while you’re in here?”
“Nope.”
“Okay. This next part probably isn’t your favorite. Strip down, turn around, and face the wall.”
Up until this point, I could pretty much rationalize that I wasn’t a real criminal; I was just a guy who drove after having a little too much to drink.
“Show me the bottoms of your feet . . . Bend over and spread your cheeks . . . All right, stand up and turn around . . . Arms over your head . . . Okay, arms down. Lift up your scrotum . . . Okay, get dressed.”
When an officer looks in your ass for drugs, though, the line between you and the “real criminals” is suddenly a lot blurrier. I followed the sheriff down a steel hallway. I had always wondered what was in this building when I drove by it in high school, never really expecting to find out.
“We’ll put you down here by yourself until we need this cell,” he said. He carried my books, and I carried my rubber mattress and pillow, sheets, blanket, towel, soap, toothbrush, comb, deodorant, and plastic water cup.
Down the corridor we went. I wanted to knock on one of the walls, but my hands were full. There must have been a bolt driven into them every three inches along the seams. I wondered if the same people who built ships also built jails.
My cell door double-locked, tight enough to keep out a rush of water should the jail go under in a tsunami. Inside was a shower, sink, toilet, television, and two bunks. Steel bars on one side, steel walls on the others. Even the toilet was made of steel, with a push-button flush and no seat. You had to sit on the rim of the toilet, which most folks only do in the middle of the night when someone else has forgotten to put the lid down. You could wash your hands only one at a time, as your other hand held down the sink button that made the water run.
The bunks had one-inch holes to provide a little air under the bodyfluid-proof mattress. The holes would also ensure that any cellmate on the upper bunk who pissed his bed also pissed on the lower bunk, and me.
I threw my collection of jail-issue stuff on the bottom bunk and turned on the TV. Antenna broken off, no knobs, just a safe plastic tenkey cable box to change the channels. I walked back across the cell to my bunk. Three steps.
Above the toilet, there was a video camera, which would give whoever was on the other end of the closed circuit a full-frontal shot every time I urinated.
I moved my books from the bed to the floor, flipped through the television channels, and settled in. The mattress was lumpy and hard, and the pillow was little more than a waterproof bag of loose stuffing. It was like being quarantined in my college dorm room for a week straight, but with even crappier food and no interaction. I wanted to tell the sheriff I had changed my mind about doing my sentence just then.
I had the whole first day to myself. They fed me through a slot in the door at exactly noon and again at exactly 5 p.m. I watched TV until I got bored, when I picked up a random book and read with the TV sounding in the background. Time moves very slowly when you can’t stop thinking about the next three days.
I slept surprisingly well for a guy who’d spent the entire day lying in bed. Until midnight, anyway, when I got two roommates. They were both intoxicated and loud, but I couldn’t hold it against them. Anything is loud in a room made of steel. One of the guys jumped up to the top bunk, and the other dropped his mattress onto the floor. I pretended to be asleep, because I didn’t know what to say. Hi, I’m Brendan. I’m actually serving a seven-day sentence right now. How about you guys? DUI, I assume? Eventually, they stopped talking, and I fell back asleep.
Three days passed, and at the end, my brother, Chad, came and got me. We had arranged it so my mother didn’t have to drop me off or pick me up from jail. My dad and my brother took care of it. Chad brought me a pack of Camel Lights, and I lit one as soon as I got in the car. We went to McDonald’s, then home, where I got to do the things I had been fantasizing about for three days: use a clean toilet—seat intact—eat nonjail food, and take a private shower.
My mother and I left that afternoon for Cedar Rapids, where I attended drinking driver education school for the second time. The content of the class was the exact same as the one I had taken the previous summer—twelve hours of information about how many people are killed each year by drunk drivers just like me and the twenty other people in the room. I had obviously not learned anything my first time around.
Saturday night, we drove back home. At 10 p.m. Dad dropped me off at the jail to finish the last three days of my sentence.
This time, I got my own cell for the first night. The next morning, they moved me in with the rest of the guys in the eight-man cell. Everyone glanced up when I walked in, then went back to watching TV.
Nobody introduced themselves, but I picked up enough about them from their conversations and our brief exchanges.
Paul was two months away from release, serving six months for possession of crystal meth. He had a few missing teeth and a black mullet. Paul liked to talk about anything, but mostly what was on TV at the time.
Todd was a few days away from finishing a four-month sentence for something he never mentioned. He had a blond mullet and didn’t talk except to affirm anything Paul had said.
Jeremiah and Abe were awaiting trial on burglary charges. They had been caught breaking into a car-wash office the previous weekend and had so many priors that they were looking at a minimum of five years in the state penitentiary. They spent a lot of time fantasizing about cigarettes, hatching plans to have one of their mothers bring them a smoke on the day of their trial. Maybe they’d have time to suck it down during the hundred-yard walk from the jail across the street to the courthouse. I couldn’t believe that was all they were worried about. I also couldn’t wait to have a cigarette, but I didn’t have to consider a looming prison sentence. They were going to do a large amount of time in a very bad place because they jacked about a hundred bucks worth of quarters from a car wash.
Jimmy was sweating out a few more weeks until his trial for five counts of statutory rape. He didn’t look like he was more than eighteen or nineteen years old, and I felt sorry for him. If no one else noticed the irony when Jimmy said, “Jesus, she’s hot,” about a seventeen-year-old Avril Lavigne on TV, I did.
Out of the six of us, I got dealt the best hand. Hell, two weeks after I got out of jail, I’d be in Montana, going to graduate school. Jimmy, Jeremiah, and Abe could all be behind bars for at least a few years. Todd was getting out in a few days, but not to a very posh life. You don’t get a lot of great job offers after you’ve done four months in the county jail, especially in a county that small. Same for Paul. I hoped I’d be applying for jobs where my prospective employer didn’t do a criminal background check on me, and if they did, they’d let me explain my situation. But that was way off in the future.
I didn’t fit in. Well, I fit in because I was a criminal like the rest of them and we were all wearing the same jumpsuits, but I wasn’t going back to the same life everyone else was. I didn’t say much about myself at all, other than that I was there because of a second DUI and that I’d graduated from New Hampton High School in 1997 (go, Chickasaws). I definitely didn’t mention grad school. I felt a little guilty about my secret, but more so I just wished the time would pass faster. I wanted to somehow fall asleep for seventy-two hours and wake up when my brother showed up again.
It was hard to keep my attention on the words in my books when there were five other people talking in the small room, plus a TV. I’d read for a while, then try to sleep. Of course, when there’s nothing to do but sleep, you can’t sleep.
I sighed, I itched, I changed positions on the bed, then repeated. I looked forward to my trips to the toilet, because they broke up the monotony. I forced myself to drink water so I could get out of my bunk and pee more often.
I looked at the clock and counted the hours until my release, working the numbers over and over in my head, trying to make them seem shorter by breaking them up differently. Okay, it’s two in the afternoon, and I get out at eight on Wednesday morning. It’s Sunday. That’s two days and eighteen hours. Or sixty-six hours. Sixty-six hours. I’ll be sleeping three more nights here, so maybe eight hours a night. If I’m lucky, that’s twenty-four hours of sleep. So, really, I only have forty-two more hours of awake time. That’s 2,520 minutes. Sixty seconds in a minute times 2,520 minutes—what is that? Like 150,000 seconds. If I try to count to 150,000, by the time I’m done they’ll be calling my name to tell me I can go home. Or, I could count to 50,000 every day. That might work better. One . . . two . . . three . . .
I usually counted to about eighty before losing concentration.
The other guys would go outside in the yard every afternoon, but I stayed in. I didn’t want anyone in my hometown to see me in a jumpsuit, playing basketball at the county jail. It was a small town, but as far as I knew, no one I went to high school with had learned I was a big failure. I wanted to keep it that way.
War and Peace plus Jimmy, Paul, Todd, Jeremiah, and Abe was an exercise in futility.
And it was indeed only for a few steps that he ran alone. One soldier started after him, then another, until the whole battalion with a shout of ‘Hurrah’ had dashed forward and overtaken him. A sergeant of the battalion darted up and grasped the standard which was swaying from its weight in Prince Andrei’s hands, but he was immediately shot down. Prince Andrei snatched up—
“Look at this fucking lady.”
“What?”
“This lady on Springer. Check out them shoes.”
“Oh, yeah. Those are fucked-up.”
Prince Andrei snatched up the standard again and dragging it along by the staff ran up with the battalion.
I wonder what time it is.
In front he saw our artillerymen, some of whom were fighting, while others had deserted their guns and were running towards him.
Maybe it’s 2:30. I should look at the clock. No, I shouldn’t. The longer I read without looking at the clock, the better.
He also saw French infantry pouncing on the artillery horses and reversing the field-pieces. Prince Andrei and the battalion were now within twenty paces of the cannon.
It’s probably 2:30 by now. It sounds like that TV show is almost over. I don’t even need to look at the clock. I’ll just listen for the closing and opening music of these shows and I’ll be able to guess by that.
He heard the incessant whizz of bullets overhead, and to right and left of him soldiers continually groaned and dropped. But he did not look at them: he kept his eyes fixed on what was going on in front of him—on the battery.
2:21. Shit. That’s why I shouldn’t look at the clock. I’m too optimistic about how fast time is passing. I’m not going to look at the clock again until I read fifty more pages . . . Okay, maybe twenty-five more pages.
That’s how it went, for three days.
On day two, everyone else went outside to the yard, and it was just me and a guy who had just arrived. I didn’t know his name.
I nodded and said, “How ya doing?”
“I gotta talk to my lawyer,” he said. “I can’t do this.”
Really? What the fuck do you mean you “can’t do this”? This whole system is built around making you do this. You can’t just call your mom to pick you up because you’re not having fun, or sneak out in the middle of the night and end up with a dishonorable discharge. You have to do it. It sucks. That’s why they send you here when you do something bad.
There is no feeling in the world like having your freedom taken away, for a few days or months or years. I will never forget it.
I woke up early on my last day. I didn’t sleep much the night before. Once the clock said 5 a.m., I got up and packed up my mattress and pillow. My brother would be there to pick me up at eight.
Breakfast came at seven, and I let Paul eat mine. He said thanks, and I think it was the first time I had looked him in the eye. I tried to watch TV but ended up checking the clock every minute.
At eight, nothing happened. Obviously, the guards weren’t as excited about my departure as I was. Finally, after four minutes that felt like forty, the door opened. The guard carried my books, and I squeezed out the door with the rest of my stuff. No one looked up from the TV to say good-bye, but in my head, I wished them all luck.