On the Inside

A Story by K. Miller

Kevin Miller

On the Inside

It was around noon when I was walked to the entrance through a parking lot filled with puddles and cigarette butts. At the entrance, he handed me off to a young, black jailor who took me through the door, and the police officer walked back to the parking lot- justice served. Leading me in to the building, the jailor nonchalantly asked, “You feel like your gonna kill yourself?” to which I answered, “No.” Procedure would have had me strip the laces out of my shoes, but I was wearing flip-flops. So he led me into a chain linked cage fashioned with metal poles that reached the ceiling, and I was to wait until it was my turn to scan my fingerprints. On the path led by the young jailor to the cage, we passed an ongoing fight, which had broken out between a 6’4’’ black jailor and a 5’7’’ white boy with his hands handcuffed behind his back. It did not look like much of a fight; just a struggling match between the two of them, and clearly, the massive jailor had the upper hand. With malicious excitement the massive jailor’s eyes, he smashed the struggling boys head into the wall in front of him, and the handcuffed boy responded by struggling twice as hard. “All right m**********r, you wanna know who’s bad?!” the jailor yelled as he dragged the struggling boy out of the room into the the back door.

After both had finally made it outside and I into the chain-linked cage, I took a look about my fellow cage dwellers. There were two other men in this cage: one was an old Hispanic man around the age of 45, dressed in jeans and a polo shirt with sweat-stains bleeding through all angles; the other was a Hispanic man who looked about 30 years old, dressed in a bizarre full-body plastic suit which was some-what transparent. As I observed my cage-mates, they paid no attention to me; they only gazed desperately at the group of jailors before them.

The jailors were all minorities, mostly black, and were chatting it up in a circle around the small television, which was emanating Judge Judy directly in front of us. They all sat around the TV, cracked jokes, played new age hip hop ringtones from their cell phones, and laughed about their days’ work as the inhabitants of the cage watched their every move with expressions of despondence. In unison the jailors looked up as the massive jailor burst back in through the back door. “Woo-whey! Check out my knuckles, boys!” the massive jailor celebrated, joining the jailors, huddled around Judge Judy. They all averted their eyes from Judge Judy to examine the bloodied knuckles of that enormous man. The jailors all smirked and cracked jokes about the beating for a quick minute before the massive jailor left the huddled entertainment lounge to perform other duties of a jailor.

There was no talking between the cage dwellers; we only stared with futile hope at the jailors- perhaps there was a way out. The jailors all made small talk around Judge Judy totally indifferent to the inmates. As we watched them go through the police reports of all the inmates, I overheard one black female jailor say, “This n***a sprayed his girlfriend in the eyes with Windex,” to which her jailor buddies exclaimed, “Damn, that’s fucked up!” or other responses to that degree. Suddenly, the massive, black jailor stormed through the entrance door I entered through through, dragging a 6-foot, skinny black man with a bald head, wearing a torn white tee-shirt and baggy shorts into the building; he looked around the age of 40. The skinny man seemed to be slightly resisting the massive jailor’s tugging force and was undoubtedly aggravated. He was immediately taken to the fingerprint scanning station. Although I averted my eyes from this wriggling specimen, when I heard his aggravated voice from across the room in the scanning station crack, “Come on, n***a,” presumably to the massive jailor, I looked up. The massive man in uniform swiftly turned on him from across the room, “You gonna call me a n***a?! You the reason our people are behind two hundred years! Sprayin’ Windex in a female’s eyes; what the f**k’s wrong wit’ you?!” The massive jailor was scolding him from the same spot he had smashed the white boys head before dragging him out of the back door. I heard only a muffle of a response from the skinny Windex sprayer; however, the massive jailor must have clearly heard him because he grabbed the handcuffed man and threw him into that same wall. The skinny Windex sprayer taunted the jailor with an unscathed demeanor as he was picking himself up from the floor, and when the jailor grabbed hold of him, he resisted. Wriggling under the brute force of the massive jailor, the skinny Windex sprayer was dragged towards the back door. Before the jailor had a chance to open the back door, the Windex sprayer wriggled with all his might to free himself from the jailors grip. For a moment the skinny Windex sprayer slithered free, but in an instant the massive jailor’s right arm struck, catching the skinny wriggler in a powerful stranglehold. The Windex man helplessly kept resisting, but everyone in the building knew it was hopeless. The jailor, still clutching the man’s throat, towering over the man in height and mass, swiftly smashed the Windex man’s head into the small, square window of the back door. The crack from the window had a thick sound to it because the prison glass was reinforced and while the interior part of the glass splintered, the exterior glass remained intact. The Windex man’s head was cut open, and he stopped resisting. The jailor opened the back door and threw him through the frame.

Now it was my turn to scan my fingerprints for them. I was led out of the chain linked cage to the scanning room where I placed my fingers on machines that resembled the kiosks you print your boarding passes in airports. After my prints were recorded into the machine, the young jailor led me into an adjacent chain linked cage with telephones inside. Looking at the telephones, the dreadful humility of my situation really sunk in.

I was going to have to call my father to bail me out of prison. Time and time again he had told me not to smoke pot in the car, “You’ll get arrested,” I could hear him saying in my mind’s ear. I guess I never believed him, or rather, my ego thought I was too smooth for the law. Despite one of my closest friends arrest for possession of marijuana, which was a result of “blunt-cruising” (smoking pot while driving), I kept cruising around, smoking my weed. I had been caught smoking pot by my parents several times, mostly because their cars I borrowed smelled like marijuana after I drove them. If my biggest problem between my dad and me wasn’t smoking marijuana, it was smoking marijuana in their cars. And now, I had to ask him to put down a $500 dollar bail bond to get me out of jail.

I dialed my home phone first. No answer. Hopefully chance would have it that my mom had her cell phone near her, and she didn’t. Plunging into deeper realms of humility, I called my dad. “State your name at the beep,” the machine’s voice said.

Disgraced, I pathetically grumbled, “Kevin Miller.”

“-Is an inmate at the Harris County Downtown Jail. Would you like to accept the charges to speak to him?” said the machine.

“Yes,” came a disappointed voice on the other end.

There was an extended silence.

Apparently, to purchase speaking time, you had to go online and buy the minutes with a credit card. My dad is not good with computers, and there was no way of him knowing that that is what he had to do. He’d never had to bail my two older siblings out of jail, and the line shut off after the operator’s voice asked him to accept the charges. I tried him a couple more times only to grumble my pitiful name and here his disappointed “yes” and the silence that followed. I gave up after the first four or five times attempts.

I waited in that chain linked cage with the telephones for about an hour then we were lined up. More people had been brought in and placed in my first chain-linked cage, and now, we were placed single file by the back door with the semi-shattered window. We were told to watch out for the glass that no one had bothered to pick up.

We took an elevator nine at a time up to a hallway. From the hallway we were taken to a room with red bars and a counter. On the way to the red room, we passed the medical room where I caught a glimpse of the skinny Windex wriggler. A doctor was tending to the visible gash running down his baldhead. In the red barred room there was a counter with clerks behind reinforced glass, all minorities, and as you walked in there were several burly black jailors with clubs. We were lined up in single file to sign our names at the counter. There were five clerks and five lines. One of the guards looked intently at the man in the full body plastic suit and curiously asked, “You kill somebody, mane?” The man in the fully body plastic suit muttered something in Spanish back to him.

“He doesn’t speak English,” a young Hispanic said to the guard.

The guard muttered something of an OK, and looked from the plastic to his guard buddy.

I signed my prison papers, and they put us behind more red bars. All of us waited here for maybe an hour, maybe three; there was no way of knowing the time.

Now it was feeding time. We were all led to another group holding cell, this time white bars, with picnic tables. The inmates from the cells adjacent joined us shortly. There were more plastic body suits. We all sat down, and they gave each of us two slices of white bread with a slice of ham and a plethora of mayonnaise in between and a paper carton of fruit punch. I wasn’t thirsty, but I opened up my carton and had a couple small sips. Getting nauseas having that sandwich near me, I picked up my meal and made for the trashcan. “You don’t want yo’ sa’mich, homeboy?” a voice rung out behind me. The words came from a skinny black man with short dreadlocks who had already finished his sandwich.

“No,” I said handing him the sandwich. “You can have this too,” I carelessly said, handing him the fruit punch carton.

“Thank you, man,” said the dreadlocked man earnestly, accepting my gifts with utmost appreciation. “So what are you in here for?” he inquired as I sat back down.

“Possession of marijuana”

“Damn, you would think in this day and age…”

Then he told me told me how he got there. It was something about trespassing. As we sat there at the picnic tables, I observed my neighbors. It was a pretty culturally diverse population, and I examined a fair number of characters. There was an enormous Hispanic man with a tattoo of a scar that ran from above his right eyebrow down to the top of his right cheekbone; almost everyone had tattoos representing Houston some way or another, mostly Astros stars; a particular one, I remember, was tattooed to the back of a bald Hispanic’s head. One of the men wearing a plastic suit sat diagonally across from me on the picnic table. He was a burly white man, clearly a Southerner, who looked fifty years old. He had no visible tattoos, but he had the most deplorable demeanor, lifeless, like Michael[1] from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre with his flesh mask on. Further down my side of the picnic table, there were two black crack heads sitting together. I know they were crack heads not because they were both unnaturally skinny and twitchy but because they were talking about crack. “Yeah, lawman caught me with three rocks,” the skinnier of the two quickly spurted to the other with a tic in his neck and wide, sunken eyes. I kept to myself but was still forced to listen to absurd conversations between the inmates. The general picnic talk concerned the county jail: “When you think they’ll take us?” and, “The s**t I’ve seen in county…”

We were split into groups of four and led into cells. Mine smelled like piss. There were two sets of bunk beds with a pillow and a blanket, and there was a filthy, rimless toilet. I took the top bunk and closed my eyes for a long time. It was probably evening, though I had no way of knowing because there were no clocks and no windows. I stayed here for one, maybe five hours.

An older black jailor walked from cell to cell, reading the inmates their charges. I after I was read mine, I was led to a small room, with five others, with a reinforced glass window and a telephone, which we used to speak to the female clerk on the other side. When we all sat down in this little office, the more veteran inmates made it clear that this was the group that would be traveling together to the county jail after we spoke with the clerk. Sitting next to me was a middle-aged black man in a plastic body suit with a scar that ran vertically down his face from right below his eye socket. Each one in the little room spoke to the clerk through the telephone for a few minutes. When it was my turn to speak to her, I picked of the phone and told her my name.

“Kevin Miller.”

After scanning her computer, her eyes narrowed and slowed. “Your $500 bail bond was paid. You won’t be going to county,” she dispassionately informed me.

“OK,” I stoically replied before hanging up the phone.

“That was quick, homeboy,” said the man in the plastic suit.

“Yeah,” I replied monosyllabically.

The older jailor led us out of the little office of the clerk into a barred hallway. We were lined up single file down the stretch of hallway and waited for further instruction. After about ten minutes of standing there, the group was divided, and we were taken to our particular destination.

The group I was divided into was taken into a room with a counter, reinforced glass, and a clock, which read midnight. One by one people were called up to the counter to stand before the reinforced glass. When at the counter, each person was given their belongings, which were confiscated when they were taken in. Then they signed some paperwork and left the room. The levity of this room’s atmosphere was a polar opposite change of pace from every other room and conversation became light. “I can probably still make work,” a young black teenager said, receiving general, genuine laughter from those around him eagerly awaiting their impending freedom.

It was my turn to go up to the counter. I signed my release form and they handed me my cell phone, keys, wallet, and bracelet. I walked out of the room into a much larger room filled with adults, many with their kids, waiting to receive their friends or family members. My parents were not among them, and I walked outside and called my mom. She answered and said she was on her way.

After sitting on the steps of the prison exterior for about ten minutes, I saw the unmistakable lights of our BMW pull onto the street and into the parking lot. For a moment, relief surfaced. My mom was by herself driving. By the time she parked, I had already cut the distance between us in half. She still got out of the car and walked towards me. When she reached me she embraced me in a big hug and said, “Let’s just go home.” If any words for response were ascending within me, they didn’t make it past my throat. We both stepped into the car and drove home in silence; if there was any residue of relief left, it was incinerated by the fiery swelling of humility that would remain in my subconscious forever.

[1] Michael was the main character in the film Texas Chainsaw Massacre who tore the faces from his victims and stitched them into a mask, which we always wore.