Four years ago, my buddy Bird’s wife ran off with another man. She had her reasons, or so she says. Of course Bird’s relationship troubles are none of my business. But the way I see it, there’s nothing better than having an errant and troublesome wife run away from home on her own accord.
Bird’s problems of late aren’t limited to his ex running off. Once she was gone, she got fixated on collecting money from Bird, whether he had any money or not. Understand, Bird’s a self-employed guy who does esoteric work, so there are days when his phone rings and days that it doesn’t. That means there are days that he has money and days when he doesn’t. On days when he doesn’t, I buy him a California roll.
Anyhow, some weeks back, Bird didn’t have much cash on hand, so he was four days late with his child-support payment. Bird was summoned to the courthouse, where the judge hit him with a contempt charge and told him he had to spend five weekends in jail. Ironically, Bird couldn’t take his cell phone into the jailhouse, so he couldn’t book any esoteric work. Given this treadmill situation, it’s likely that he’ll be late with his check again, and that will probably get him thrown in jail again.
Even with all these troubles, Bird manned up, went to the jailhouse and surrendered himself for a weekend. A few minutes after he surrendered, my phone rang.
“Wally, I was rejected from jail! They don’t have my paperwork. They won’t let me in.”
“That’s a good problem to have,” I responded. “I say go back home and see what happens.”
Bird went home. Nothing happened. The following weekend, he reported to the jailhouse again and called me again. “They still won’t take me,” Bird said. “I’m not good enough for ’em. How can my life suck so much that I can’t even get into jail?”
“Go back home,” I offered. “Maybe they’ll forget about you altogether. The government’s great at losing stuff.”
Well, don’t you know, on his third try to serve his time, Bird finally made the jailhouse fraternity. The guards waved him through and checked him in. First thing, he had to show the contents of his paper sack, which consisted of sweatpants. Next stop was the men’s room, where a guard made Bird drop his pants. The guard took hold of Bird’s nutsack, then made him squat and cough. “They have several guards,” Bird told me, “but only one has the courage to handle another man’s balls. They call him Sergeant Scrotum.”
“That,” I said, “is when I would’ve shot my way out.”
Bird landed in Cell Block B, with the other contempt cases. He moved into a cell with two work-release guys. Those men were Bird’s “cellies.” They referred to the cell as their “house.”
Since Bird was new to the jailhouse, his cellies decided to coach him up on criminal activity. They started with this: “If you want to knock a woman out,” celly explained, “all you got to do is put two drops of Visine in her Coke.”
Now that Bird knew how to knock a woman out, his cellies decided to teach him how to whip up jailhouse snacks. “You buy a pack of ramen noodles out of the vending machine,” celly told Bird, “then mash the noodles into dust, then put ’em in a round shape on a stack of about five or six paper towels. Then wet the noodles with water. That’s your crust. Then, you buy a pack of Doritos and mash them up. Sprinkle that on the noodles. When you’re done sprinklin’, get a Slim Jim and chop it up. That’s your pepperoni. Microwave it for three or four minutes, and you’ve got the best pizza in the world.”
Then Bird learned about purple cake. Purple cake starts out as the dessert that’s served with jailhouse lunch. The inmates, with the exception of the repeat offender they call R.O., won’t eat purple cake. They say it makes them constipated.
“R.O. would take that cake,” Bird said, “and drown it in grape Kool-Aid. I don’t know where he got the Kool-Aid; I was too busy checking him for Visine. He’d eat eight or nine pieces. Most people just threw their food out, especially the baloney that looked like it was made out of sawdust and corn meal.”
Bird’s next instructor was Fred, another unfortunate divorcee. Fred got thrown in jail for forty weekends. His crime: sending 80 nasty text messages to his ex. Or so he says. Anyhow, Fred taught Bird how to smuggle in a bottle of Tabasco—to spice up the baloney-like substance—as well as a super-thin cell phone that could fit in a man’s wallet.
After finishing his tenth day in the slammer, Bird got educated on how to prepare himself if he ever had to come back to the jailhouse.
“The cellies told me to show up early, bring a paper sack with a change of clothes and $20 in quarters. That way, I could buy 20 bucks’ worth of vending-machine food before the other inmates got to the machines.”
On his way out, Bird picked his sleeping mat up off the floor and took possession of his complimentary Bob Barker hygiene kit: toothpaste, a bar of soap and a ketchup-pack-sized container of toothpaste.
“It’s not The Price Is Right Bob Barker,” Bird told me. “Bob Barker is an outfit in North Carolina. They sell everything a person needs in the jailhouse—clothes, shoes and personal care packages. You name it, they’ve got it.”
Before he left, Bird gave away all the treasures he’d accumulated in jail. If he ever goes back, he wants the inmates to remember him warmly.
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