Thus far, I’ve seen four people that I’d met at the county jail. (Crap, that reminds me, I never did write anything about trial…mental note, must try that again soon.) Thug, who will be doing two and a half years; Vanilla Slim or Shady Ice (or whatever I called him), who’ll be doing his 12 years; and two other people I never named.
It is decidedly odd to recognize people in this environment where everything is alien, and oddly comforting at the same time. For me, I guess it has to do with shared history when I was one step closer to home.
I’ve decided that it is time to rant about my cellie, because if I don’t vent, I’m going to end up beating him to death with my algebra book. (The library in the cell block is rather spartan…that, and a book on mathematicians throughout history, were the best of a bad lot.)
A little background on him: He is 27 years old, father of two, married, and has a fourth-grade education. He sounds like a bad episode of “Yo MTV Raps” (which I highly doubt anyone but me remembers) crossed with Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. He peppers his speech with enough “yo”, “wack”, and “off the chain” to fill a dozen ‘80s rap songs.
He spends all day doing two things: Spewing forth a neverending stream of self-aggrandizing lies about fights, sexual conquests, and the trailer park he lived in; and slurping down Ramen noodles, coffee, and potato chips.
His sexual conquests all involve girls (note, I did not say women) who find him irresistible, and his fighting stories all center around people trying to steal his girl or insulting her in some way, these being typically people in neighboring trailers. (Oh, and let us not forget the Alka-Seltzer/bird exploding stories that make him laugh so hard that he tears up.)
When he eats – which I mentioned is all of the time – he slurps, smacks, squelches, and (horrifyingly) continues to speak and laugh. Frequently, this sprays noodles and crumbs throughout the cell, particularly when he brays out his donkey-like laugh.
All of that I could put up with… the constant flatulence, belching, snorting, and various other unsavory habits I could ignore… but what absolutely destroys me is the fact that he considers us equals and keeps trying to tell me about his case and how he sexually molested his two young children. Ages six and five.
That I cannot deal with… when he gets that weird slack smile and starts talking about his kids and how it felt? I have to threaten murder to get him to shut the fuck up. He always looks hurt at that point, like I betrayed him by not wanting to hear about how he raped his kids.
That, my friends, is the real punishment here. Not prison itself, but being locked up with disgusting, sick freaks like him and not being able to do anything about it.