It’s early in the morning, mid-July. The heat continues to remain trapped inside these walls. I get up out of my bunk to take a piss. I check my watch. It reads 3:33 a.m. Still half asleep, I make my way to the prison dormitory restroom. As I enter the restroom, I see him leaning against the partition that separates the toilets, head bent over nearly touching the top of the partition wall, drool running down his chin and dripping onto his grey tee-shirt. I notice it is Jared. Jared is a young guy, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He’s serving a short prison sentence. He’s slim, has a thin mustache, and sandy blonde hair. When I walk over next to him, I spot a roach, or part of a “stick” (as it is commonly referred to in prison), that he had been smoking on. It lays atop the partition. I pick it up, stub it out, and put it inside the toilet-paper holder inside the partition. I ask him to sit down. But, of course, he doesn’t hear me. His legs begin to shake and wobble. I walk around the partition and take ahold of his arm and shoulder and shuffle him onto the commode. He looks up and mumbles something, something incoherent. Of course, by now I’m wide awake. I just shake my head.
As I mosey over to the urinal to finally relieve myself, another one of Jared’s smoking buddies comes into the bathroom. It’s Eric. Like Jared, Eric is a young guy, maybe twenty-nine or early thirties. He, too, is serving a short prison bid. He’s short, wears a buzz-cut, has hardly any facial hair, and is already missing all of his teeth-all of this because of his past drug use, I’m sure, and all of this before his thirtieth birthday.
At any rate, he walks over and enters into one of the partitioned stalls. He looks at Jared for moment. Then he looks at me and shakes his head. He doesn’t say anything. For him, it’s routine; it’s the norm. Plus, he’s not trying to hold a conversation. He’s focusing on one thing and one thing only, and that is on getting high.
He sits down onto the commode and pulls out a coffee-laden, brown paper towel and sits it upon the seat of a chair that he has slid up in front of him. He folds it over and tears it across and cuts him a piece about the width of a regular-sized 1.25 rolling paper. He puts the rest of it into his pants pocket. He then pulls out a stamp-sized piece of the latest K-2, aka “synthetic marijuana.” He begins cutting thin strips of this with his fingernail clippers. He neatly lines them across his homemade rolling paper, spacing them like tiny boxcars one behind the other. As he’s rolling this thing into what will become a prison “stick,” I look out to the control area to see what the prison guards are doing, where they are at. The one at the control desk is reading the day’s newspaper. He sits facing the dormitory near the front of the unit. His interest is in the day’s news, Covid-19 and politics, most likely. The other officer, the one assigned to this specific dormitory, is sitting between the two rear dorms with his head turned down, with his chin nearly resting on his chest. Of course, he’s taking an inevitable short siesta after having worked nearly eighty hours for the week. The excessive overtime work hours come as a result of a bigger prison-worker shortage going on statewide.
“So, what’s the police doing, Jay?” asks Eric, as I’m standing at the sink washing my hands.
“You good, man,” I say. “You good.”
Just as I turn to exit the bathroom, another “Twochie” (another prison slang name for K-2 or synthetic marijuana) head comes trailing into the restroom. I could tell he, too, is on a mission. He’s seeking a fix, no less. This guy’s name is Freddie. He’s bald-headed, mustachioed, and walks with a sideways gait. He’s a veteran in this “Twochie” game.
“Whaddup, Jay?” says Freddie, as he passes me and enters the stall next to the one Eric is in.
“What’s up,” I say.
“Watch the man for me, Jay,” says Freddie, as if I have nothing better to do.
“C’mon, dude. Y’all better tighten up.”
By now I’m wide awake, so I stand in the restroom with them for a while and look out the window to where the officer is sitting asleep in the chair. I look at my watch again. It’s 3:39 a.m. Still nothing has changed. Both officers are as they were a few minutes ago.
“Yo Freddie, you gotta strip?” asks Eric (a “strip” is a thin piece cut from a chewing gum wrapper used as a fire-starting mechanism when touched to a battery terminal, as lighters and all other smoking paraphernalia are prohibited from the prison facility).
“Naw, man,” says Freddie.
“Damn. Hold this stick for a minute.” He hands it to Freddie and hustles off and returns with a
“strip” a few minutes later. He then folds it in the middle and touches one end of the strip to the positive lead of the AA battery, and the other end to the surface of the battery where he has scrapped the paint off to expose the bare metal. Meanwhile, Freddie has fashioned a wick out of toilet paper and moves it near the strip of chewing gum wrapper.
“Hold that wick still, dude,” says Eric hastily, as Freddie steadies the twisted-up piece of toilet paper atop the strip of chewing gum wrapper. After a few seconds, it catches fire. “Don’t let it go out,” growls Eric.
“I got it, man,” says Freddie. “Just chill out.”
Meanwhile, Jared is standing back up now and moving about inside the stall. He mumbles something that I can’t make out. I notice he still has drool at the corners of his mouth. I look back out the window and see that the officers are still doing the same thing. When I turn back around, Eric has the “stick” dangling from his mouth with the fire end of the wick dancing beneath the other end of it. He pulls on it and it catches fire. He takes a good drag from it and passes it to Freddie.
Eric holds it for a spell, then lets it out. Immediately, I notice his eyes light up and his head begins to sway. Freddie does the same thing. He pulls on it really good, shakes the ash loose from the end of it, and then hands it back to Eric, who continues to sway uncontrollably. Then Freddie begins to sway and lose control of his bodily movements. After a few more hits, both are floating and swaying around, and the “roach” part of their “stick” finds its way onto the bathroom floor. Soon both Freddie and Eric are crawling around on the bathroom floor. Both, too, are drooling and mumbling words I can’t make out. Without prelude, the K-2, or “k-22,” as I like to call it (because of its unpredictable effects), takes a hold of them and pushes their lives to the bottom pits of humanity. Down they go, slithering about. To me, it’s like “The Walking Dead” on steroids. I watch for a while.
Once they begin crawling around, I make my way back to my bunk bed. I lay back down and pull the covers over me. After a while I hear keys dangling. I peep out and see that the officer has awakened. He gets up and looks around and walks toward the dormitory door. I see that he is getting ready to come into the dormitory. I say “Twelve” as loudly as I can without waking anybody else up. But I know the guys in the restroom won’t hear me-and that at this point in their trip it won’t matter one way or the other. They’re stuck like chuck on homemade buck, so to speak. Down and out, to be sure. They are in for the ride of their lives.
I watch the officer first walk down the center aisle of the dormitory, turn around, and head back up. No problems. But then I see that he is on to something. He’s heard something in the direction of the restroom, and he heads that way. When he cuts the corner, I hear him say,
“Really, not again, eh?” He then gets on his radio and calls a code. I hear him as plain as day. He bellows:
“Code Five, Code Five-Unit Three, D-Wing. Code Five.” He says this quickly and quite loudly.
After a few minutes, several other officers come rustling into the dorm, radios blaring, keys jangling. They all enter the restroom where Eric, Jared, and Freddie are all at in various states of mind and positions. After another few minutes, I see an officer come down the hallway with a wheelchair. Another officer sees him and lets him know he will need another one.
“There’s two of them down,” he says, dreadfully. “We’ll need two of them.”
“Wow!” says the officer wheeling the wheelchair.
Meanwhile, I see that they now have Jared sitting in a chair in the dormitory dayroom. He’s sitting there with his head down with his hands on his lap. I can’t tell if he’s passed out or not from where I’m at. But he’s not saying anything now. By now, the officer at the control desk has turned the lights on in our dormitory. As you can imagine, everything is lit up and bright as the mid-day sun. Some of the other guys in the dormitory are also waking up now. A few minutes later I spot another officer coming up the rear with another wheelchair, breathing heavily with beads of perspiration on his forehead, beads that are sparkling against the bright lights. He wheels it into the bathroom where the other officers are congregated.
After about 10 or 15 minutes, they all come trickling out, with Eric and Freddie, who are now wheelchair-bound, leading the way. I sit up and watch them as they turn to go up the hallway, their heads leaning towards their left shoulder, hands resting haphazardly on their laps. At this point, a lot of other guys are up and stirring about, using the bathroom, and talking about the incident that just went down. Just as I laid back down and grabbed the Stuart Woods book I had been reading earlier, a dude named Dirty Gee came over and wanted to know what went on in the bathroom earlier. Of course, Dirty Gee only caught the tail-end of everything. So, I relayed everything to him.
“So, they’s must got some different ‘Twochie’ in, Jay,” he says.
“I guess so, man, I don’t know,” I say,
“That stuff they got is the monster, man,” says Dirty Gee, smiling.
“Yeah, I guess so, man.”
“Yo-old Eric was looking bad, man,” continued Dirty Gee, then laughed.
“Yeah, that’s crazy, right.”
“Yeah, them boys are off the chain, man.”
“No doubt, dude. No doubt.”
“Alright, man, I’ll let you get back to reading, Jay.”
“Alright, dude, I’ll catch you later,” I say, as he heads towards the dormitory dayroom.
Meanwhile, about the same time I picked up and began reading my novel, the intercom comes on and blares: “Code-five is now Clear, Code-five is now Clear.”
Then, shortly after this, the lights go back off. I drop my Woods novel beside the bed and doze off to sleep. I guess it was around 4:30 a.m. when things calmed back down again, and sleep overtook me. But around 5:45 a.m., I was awakened again when Eric and Freddie were let back into the dormitory. Both came ambling in with dejected looks across their faces. I don’t say anything to them as they walk past my bunk and head down to the other end of the dormitory. I could tell that what they were feeling wasn’t where they wanted to be, however.
After a few minutes, the lights snap back on. Everything turned bright again, white-light bright. The officer-in-charge comes across the intercom and announces: “Count time, count time. Code-two, code-two.” After this announcement, a lot of guys begin waking up, rustling about, getting dressed, going to the bathroom, making coffee. I, too, get on up. I go brush my teeth, wash my face, shave. After the officers come through and conduct the morning count, I make a coffee and catch a little of the morning news. I watch and see that Covid-19 and the wildfires out west continue to dominate the news cycle. After about 15 minutes of the morning news, I go back to my bunk to read and meditate some.
As I cut the corner, I spot Eric sitting on his bunk lighting another “stick.” He has it in his mouth with a wick of fire underneath it. Like before, he pulls the toxic smoke into his lungs, holds it in for several seconds, then lets it back out. He stares up toward the ceiling for about a minute before his head sags to his chest again. I watch him for a little while. I see now that his bunkmate is trying to talk to him. Like before, I see his lips move; he mumbles something. Then, in a matter of seconds, his head arches back, then forward as he begins vomiting onto the floor between his and his neighbor’s bunk. Once, and then again. It streams onto the floor. Soon he, too, is down on the floor in the vomit, sliding around, moaning, groaning. None of what he’s saying makes any sense. Unintelligible stuff, really. His bunkmate quickly goes and gets him a trashcan. But, by now, he’s no longer vomiting though he is still on the floor, still in his own vomit. He’s on another ride, though, another trip to somewhere he has not planned for. Slowly, he moves his legs. Slowly, he moves his arms. Slowly, his head moves back and forth. And slowly, he swims about in his own regurgitated fluids. In his mind, he is chasing something he really doesn’t know exists. He chases it throughout the day, dusk till dawn. It’s a long ride, a long trip. But the trip seems never-ending for him.
I look back down towards his bunk area. His bunkmate and another guy are trying to pick him up off the floor. After a few attempts, they manage to get him onto his bed. He lays back onto his pillow, his eyes stretched open looking into the bright lights. He moans something. The other guys move away from him, go back into the dormitory dayroom.
After about five minutes, the dormitory officer makes a round through the dormitory. He stops for a few minutes and looks at Eric. He shakes his head. But then he moves on up the dormitory, keys dangling and jangling. He doesn’t say anything, though Eric continues to lay semi-conscious atop his rumpled bed, wrestling with his demons, as he takes another lonely ride.
Quickly, though, his life fades from him. His head sways to one side of his pillow. His eyelids slowly pull shut. For a little while, his life and dreams turn grey for him. They turn grey for him like shadows in the morning sun. In his mind, though, they go from him from one hour to the next, from one moment to another. He doesn’t recognize the effects and impacts that this terrible drug is having on him. But it’s nonetheless pulling him down like quicksand. And his life, as he used to live, is leaving him—one stick at a time.
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