Well, I just got to Lebanon, and boy, is my ass sore. Actually, if I’m being honest, all of the rest of me is sore, while my ass has reached some sort of critical mass of pain heretofore unexperienced by mankind. I am gummy, smelly, and possibly in a mild state of shock. Everything seems distant and third-person at the moment. But enough about now, let us move on into the past, where the funny stuff lives….
The day started out at zero four-thirty with a skinny, evil, weasel-faced CO named Buzzard shaking my bunk and glowering at me, consequently shattering and grinding into the dust a dream of such awesome potential, I can only say here that it contained Jessica Alba and Drew Barrymore dressed as cowboys while monkeys in ninja suits and riding armored dogs warred against each other. We marched quickly past the awesome breakfast of PB&J and a lump of frozen pineapple juice, to the 3-Man Squat and Cough event. After then playing “Who’s Hiding Stuff in Their Butt”, things slowed down a bit as we stepped into our one-piece, nut-crushing DRC jumpsuits and slapped on our shackles, cuffs, and belly chains to wait on the bus, and by 7 a.m. we were on the road to CMC.
The trip to CMC – Correctional Medical Center or Central Medical Center, depending on whom you ask – wasn’t long, at least in subjective time, due to the fact that I kinda blanked out as we drove past the field where I used to take Rooster to soccer practice, and I didn’t pay much attention to the rest of that trip until they started yelling to get off of the bus. Shuffling off of the bus, we trudged into the weird prison hospital and were separated into different cells, based on where we were eventually going. Rick Ross, who was off to Mansfield, and Justice, who was off to Chillicothe, shrugged goodbye at me as they were herded into their respective cells… and they were never seen again.
I and my fellow Lebanonese, Lebanonites, Lebanonians…yes, Lebanonians, were shoved into a claustrophobia-inducing cell that, as it so happens, is also a portal to another dimension that I like to call George. In the George dimension, your ass and your feet are alternatingly subjected to Extreme Mild Discomfort, which is mild discomfort taken right up to but not quite crossing over into pain. You see, first you sit until your ass feels like it has magically transformed into a chunk of wood that somehow manages to throb disconcertingly. So you stand until your feet – clad in orange slippers – begin to ache and throb most annoyingly. This is where the horrible cycle begins in earnest, for when you sit and rest your feet you find that your poor abused backside has figured out the game, and in an amazingly short time its litany of complaints starts all over again, which of course causes you to stand on your not-even-close-to-recovered-yet feet…and the cycle shortens again.
Eventually, you try balancing on one cheek and one foot, only to find that in addition to looking like a jackass when you switch cheeks you’ve also started up an infinitely-reducing cycle of spastic discomfort. This is when the second major property of the George dimension comes into play, the increasingly mind-boggling ridiculousness of the conversations that the other Lebanonians were initiating. Of course, the initial conversations were about the usual stuff, killin’, robbin’, usin’, and fuckin’, but slowly and gradually mutated into serious conversations about the most awesomely ridiculous stuff evar.
For example, the guy everyone called Preacher Man and I called “Kill Whitey” stated flat out that all black folk hate hospitals because white doctors have been stealing their organs and selling them on the black market. Apparently, you go into the hospital with nothing wrong and then when you come out you’ve got missing organs that you aren’t even aware of until it’s too late. I tried pointing out that you shouldn’t go to the hospital if there’s nothing wrong, but that was an apparent non-starter. This conspiracy has, by all accounts, been going on since the beginning of slavery – which, incidentally, only started when some white guys from America discovered Africa and started stealing black babies and women for the slave trade… seriously, I’m not making this shit up. You know, back in the 1800s, when there was a thriving market for stolen livers, kidneys, and (my fave) ground-up African penises, which were used as an aphrodisiac by the rich white folk, since because of the size you know (again…totally not making this up) they had to be more potent and virile than the tiny white man penises. This led to a considerable amount of white guy bashing, which I gleefully joined, and thick-ass white girl praising, which I also joined. Then, out of the blue, we jumped into Government Conspiracies and Personal Freedoms.
Did you know, for instance, that the moon landings were actually faked? Yup, I have proof! A guy who knows this other Lebanonian’s great-great-grandfather who worked on the sound stage where they faked all of that space stuff so we could beat the Chinese and the Russians into space. “Buzz Armstrong” was not the first man on the moon, because we haven’t been there yet, and they can’t even be sure that the Earth isn’t flat because (and this almost induced a fatal giggle) have you ever seen a map of the Earth? How can they make a flat map of a round thing? Seriously man, all this shit is true. These dudes said so!
Oh! Oh! I forgot! Area 51 is way totally real and has alien ships that have crash landed on Earth over the years, because aliens who fly many hundreds or thousands of light years across interstellar space safely are going to be totally screwed up by some weather and crash – and this is what we used to get into space and to the moon. I sincerely wish that I could hold such monumentally contradicting views in my head, because…. wow… it has got to get entertaining as hell in there. Anyway, the alien technology we captured at Roswell has also allowed us to build ships, like the Blackbird, that go to the speed of light. Now here, my inner geek had some sort of psychotic episode, and before I could stop him, he started a lecture on light speed, friction, and the sound barrier that might as well have been a lecture on chartered accounting for all the blank stares directed my way. But I was unable to stop the geeky tirade, and so began the great “air doesn’t have friction only solids have friction” debate of 2009. Thankfully, the details have been mostly blocked from my mind by automatic “don’t go crazy and stab these guys” defenses, but it was painfully, abundantly clear that:
1. The speed of light is instant, which is why you don’t see it coming.
2. Sound can’t be broken because it is a wave, and waves don’t have speed.
3. Dogs can’t look up.
This debate went on for several decades… or until around 4:30 p.m., when we were herded back onto the bus for the final leg of our epic journey. We arrived at 6:30 p.m. feeling gummy, sweaty, tired, and with our bladders bursting at a Real By God Prison that may very well have been used to model a Half-Life map at one point. Once inside, the vibe changed from old school HL to a more Fallout-y type, so much that I constantly expect to see Pip Boys and supermutants everwhere.
The loading dock or storage area where we were eventually unloaded was full of packing crates and chains, and could have easily been used to film a horror movie (or a bondage film), but instead was used to inspect our anal cavities for contraband… which, now that I think about it, resembles German bondage porn of the homosexual variety. After we were dressed, we were given the “Me badass, you inmate, me put you in hole” speech by a CO who looked barely old enough to cross the street by himself, and then we were marched off to a dinner consisting of pig slop and rancid-smelling Kool-Aid.
Once our hearty dinner was dumped in the trash can, we proceeded to the infirmary for our obligatory “Are you crazy or suicidal?” questionnaire. It was there that I heard yet another awesomely weird conversation in a day already full of weirdness, that being the conversation about the dog in the trashcan. I present to you “The Dog In The Trashcan”:
Rasta Inmate, or RI: Did they finally get the dead dog out of the trash?
CO: Yup. It was weird though. Did you hear what they found?
RI: Naw, I’s surprised they say they gonna get it.
CO: Yup, found it all stitched up with a chunk out of it. Guess what they found when they picked it up.
RI: Knife? I dunno.
CO: The stomach fell out when they picked it up, bag of candy in it like one of them Mexican things.
RI: The fuck?
CO: Yup, bag of candy, dog didn’t eat it neither, was put in.
RI: The fuck?
CO: Yup, someone done some fucked up shit after that dog died. Tail’s missin’ too, looked bit off.
RI: The fuck.
At that point it was my turn with the doc, so I missed the rest, but that has to be the weirdest damn thing ever. So after assuring the cute nurses and the angry-looking Indian doctor that I am not, in fact, suicidal or homicidal, they marched us down to our new blocks. I live in K block, Cell 46, upper bunk. My cellie (or bunkie) is a skinny little Latino dude who kinda looks like Ceraun if he smoked weed.
For those of you wondering, I am now in a prison that looks like a prison. Each block has three levels, or ranges, and was constructed during the days when the prison architects were only capable of building tiny, cramped, narrow things on a very large scale. The “day room” is maybe fifteen feet wide, and though several hundred in length, it has only enough tables for twenty inmates at a time. The cells, 48 on range 1 and 50 on 2 and 3, each house two inmates and are approximately two feet longer and one foot narrower than a king-sized mattress. The showers, which I can see from my cell, operate under the 3 in/3 out policy, which means I’m either showering with 2 other dudes or I’m waiting outside the shower with 2 other dudes. No shower stalls, you’re right next to the alarmingly large dude soaping his balls and grinning at you just to see if you’ll freak (I grinned back, mentioned that I’ve got way too much time to be playing games and that he’d best mind his bidness and point that thing elsewhere. Incidentally, that worked…he laughed and went back to his shower.) or carrying on mock boxing matches with the dude at the other shower nozzle.