Most Frequently Asked Question

One question almost everyone asks me is, "What's jail like?"

Well, it's nothing like what you see on TV. Not where I was at anyway. Sure there's gay guys or guys that turned gay in there, but in low security and camps (camps have the lowest security, there's not even a fence surrounding the complex), rape isn't a common thing.

So what is jail like? Fucking boring. Day in and day out, you have nothing to look forward to. Only thing that keeps inmates going are letters, and our fifteen minute phone calls.

When I first got sent to the low security prison in Allenwood, PA, the first thing that came to mind was that it looked like a college campus. Except for the multiple fences, guard towers, and razorwire lol. But besides that, the grass was nicely manicured, there were four units with a few hundred inmates in each.

Despite the appearances though, there were some major differences with life on the outside.

The way phone calls work there is, you get fifteen minutes at a time, every hour. Each call, if it's long distance (which all of mine were), costs a little over $3. Do the math, goddamn I missed my cell phone.

Commissary is our own little private store. How lucky. You can spend a total of $220 a month max. Every inmate has an account that people in the real world deposit money into.

What's interesting is that mackerels (in plastic packages) cost $1.05, and these macks were used as currency amongst the inmates. Or anything of value. Bartering was the norm. For the less fortunate inmates who didn't have money in their commissary account, they found money in other ways, by doing chores for people, gambling, drawing, etc. And they got paid generally with macks.

You can also buy a glorified ink cartridge at commissary for use as a pen. It was literally an ink cartridge with some rubber around it, which made it flexible. Do you know how fucking hard it is to write with that shit?? So what a lot of inmates did was take a shaver, break off the razor part, then the remainding handle has some space on the back where you can lodge the "pen" in and use that. A huge improvement, but after hours of writing, the calluses I ended up with were huge as well.

The TV room was an area I avoided. It's a room with about 7-8 TV sets, and you use your Walkman to tune in to the proper one to listen. Chairs were available to place wherever you wanted to sit. Now, the catch is, I was told that some people, having been there for many years, have their designated "seats." And they would come up to you and tell you to move. It's a lose-lose situation. You fight (whether you win the fight or not), you get sent to the hole (solitary) and your security level goes up and off to the medium you go. You change seats and you're a bitch. So I just didn't watch a lot of TV.

The entire prison complex is on lockdown all day long. It opens up for ten minutes every hour for inmates to move between buildings. But you can only be in certain areas if you have a pass, or you'll be considered out of bounds. This took a little bit to get used to, because if you missed it, you were stuck wherever you were for another hour.

We slept in 9x9 cubes, shared by three people. All of my belongings fit in a 4ft tall dresser, the most fashionable clothing we had was what we could buy from commissary. Sweat pants, sweatshirt, and surprisingly, Nike Air Force Ones (or New Balance sneakers) lol. I bought a pair to wear out, that I still have lol.

Microwaves were used to cook. And man, people can get creative. Spaghetti with macks, cheese and some seasoning thrown into the microwave, that shit was actually pretty damn good. Okay I admit, relatively good.

Speaking of food, I've been told from various sources who worked kitchen detail, that the meat they served us was usually expired. By years. Whenever I changed facilities, my stomach had to readjust and I couldn't hold my food for a couple weeks until it did. The same happened when I came back to NYC, eating good, clean food lol.

Some inmates went on dates with Fifi. Who's Fifi you ask? No, not another inmate, but it's some MacGuyver type of shit. They would take a towel, roll it up in a cylinder shape, take a surgical glove and shove it into one of the sides, and secure the glove on the outside by flipping it over. Some baby oil, and voila, you have a night with Fifi. Or however many minutes they took lol.

It's very race oriented. My first day there, every asian person I saw told me that if I needed anything to let them know. Extra clothes, newer stuff, anything that they would have spares of since they're already settled in.

Gambling is illegal, so most card games are played for pushups. There is a gambling ring in there anyway, employing other inmates who could fight as its collectors.

Every inmate had to work. Most of the work there is bullshit, except for one job which pays $70 a month, and that was community work that I'm pretty sure the prison got paid for. My job (which consisted of cleaning the recreation area at the end of each shift) paid a little over $5 a month. Yeah. A month.

For the most part, shit is just boring though. Wake up, go work, eat lunch, workout, work, eat dinner, write letters, hopefully read letters, make some calls, talk to a couple people, cook something in a microwave, talk or draw or write some more, read, play cards... that's about it. If we get bored enough we sometimes make up games too lol.

That's it in a nutshell. Oh yeah some guy went by the name of Precious. He walked, talked, and had all the mannerisms of a ghetto hoodrat lol.

Much better than MDC Brooklyn, boot camp, or solitary, but it still sucked. Oh well, nothing beats being free lol =)

Temporary Split Personality

I don't exactly remember how this day started. To be honest, it probably doesn't matter in the slightest, it's not like anything important happened during those times anyway. Or anything different for that matter from a day-to-day basis.

Wake up, get high, hang out, get high, go out, sometimes eat (usually not), get higher, sleep (usually not), rinse and repeat.

And peppered throughout this stream of meaningless highs, this day managed to stand out from the rest. Why? Because I had the genius idea of taking four different drugs at the same time. Actually, I'm not even sure if this was a conscious idea that formed in my head, or if it kind of... just happened.

The latter sounds a lot more probable. Anyhow, between coke, K, ecstasy and weed, two were uppers and two were downers.

My body was never more confused. When the uppers kicked in, I was bouncing off the walls, wanting to go out, talking at the speed of light, jittery like a crackhead... and literally 30ish seconds later, the downers kicked in, I would crash to the ground or the nearest couch, an inch away from being comatose. I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me I drooled.

And another few seconds or a minute later, I'm running around like a chicken with its head cut off. This kept up for awhile, I'm not sure how long in terms of actual time, but I know I had these spastic mood swings several times.

Needless to say, I was in no condition to step out the door, and luckily my friends were aware of that and didn't instigate.

By the time I was sober enough to stay in one high state, I was drained. Empty. In retrospect, I found it to be an interesting experience, but would I recommend it or do it again? Hell no lol.

But I guess that's the closest I'll ever come to having split personality or some light form of schizophrenia. I'm pretty sure I would have been considered legally insane by a medical professional that night.

And thinking back, why would I have done that to myself? Did I really think it'd be a good idea? Did I think it wouldn't have too bad of an effect on me? I can't quite figure out if I was consciously being destructive, subconsciously thought I was invincible, or if I really just didn't give a fuck as long as I would get high.

I find it hard to reminisce. It almost feels like I lack the analytical skills required to do so, but that's not true because I do have that skillset when it comes to other areas of life. A self-defense mechanism to prevent myself from uncovering the truth about myself? Denial has served me well (and poorly I must add), but a in small doses, it can go a long way.

Afterall, hope is but denial with a facelift.

Twists of Fate?

So it was my boy Sean's 21st birthday, but times were rough so the "celebration" basically consisted of the two of us. We went to Walker's, near my mom's place, he ordered a few drinks for the both of us, surprisingly they didn't seem to really care that I was never carded.

I had one of the nastiest drinks that night. A rusty nail, which was four different dark liquors, and a splash of coke. Disgusting.

Anyhow, that isn't the point of the story. We ended up getting kind of drunk, wandered about, almost got into a stupid fight (by now you should have figured that Sean tended to do that a lot when he drank), but the night ended without anything too crazy happening.

Actually, on a side note, while drunk, we also wanted some weed but since we were out, we started asking every single person on the street if they had any for sale. Stupid I know.

We parted ways, and I started walking home. It was about a fifteen block walk, headphones on, minding my own business, when some guy on the street seemed to be talking to me.

I took off an earphone.

"You got kicked out too?" he asked.

He had a fitted hat on, a leather jacket, kind of stocky, Hispanic in his late 20s.

"Kicked out? Nah. From where?"

"From Roxy, they just kicked me out for some bullshit."

Some more small talk, and I'm not exactly sure how the subject was brought up, but it came up.

"You smoke?" he asked.

"Trees? Yeah, you got?"

I couldn't believe my luck, after resorting to asking random people, I bump into someone who actually smokes, on my way home.

We ended up smoking on my rooftop, he sold me a dub, and then gave me two pills.

"Here, take these, it's on me."

"Nah I'm good, I don't drop," I said, and started handing them back.

"Then give them to your friends or something. It's yours."

Rarely one to argue against something free, I pocketed them. I didn't actually take pills during this time yet, and I did give them to a friend.

But this is how I met Will, my future dealer from Forest Hills, the one I got the two jars of K from the night before 9/11 (http://nycmemory.blogspot.com/2009/10/unexpected-end_15.html), who also started fronting me pills for me to start selling.

Completely random. Is this the working of fate? Oddly enough, I also met my co-defendant randomly on the street as well. It's very weird to think that something as simple as me having crossed the street when walking home, or not having been outside of that bar that one night I met Jules (my co-defendant), would have literally changed the entire course of my life.

Granted, most likely if it didn't happen through them, it would have happened in many other ways, but we still can't deny a slight change in situation in both of those nights would have had a long-lasting and serious impact on my life.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not regretting. I find it hard to regret many things in my past, regardless if I was wrong or not, not because I'm remorseless, but rather, in the end I'm still happy with myself and who I've become. And obviously, changing anything in my past would inadvertently change the core of who I am today, my values, my experiences, my thoughts, my opinions, my morals.

And those, I will trade for nothing in the world. Because this is the life that I chose to live.

Eight Year "Anniversary"

Just a quick post to point out that it's been eight years since my arrest. Exactly eight years ago, I was sitting in a cell, wondering what the fuck was going to happen to me.

I've come to realize that, regardless of anything, time flies, not just when you're having fun, but in retrospect.

Odd enough to say, as boring as it was, as much as it sucked not being free, time in jail still flew. Yeah on an everyday basis, midnight couldn't come fast enough, but when looking back, I was still amazed that ten months, eighteen months, thirty months had passed.

So much has happened in these past eight years. I went from being a drug addict, to a convicted felon, to working dead-end jobs, to building my career and living in the middle of Manhattan. I reconnected with, then lost for a second time an old love; I've rebuilt family bonds (with my nuclear family at least); I've gotten back in touch with my biological father after twenty plus years only to tell him to fuck off.

I've put myself in debt, been promised an inheritance, worked two jobs at seventy hours a week, wasted money, made some... I've basically been finally allowed to live in the past few years.

And it feels great.

As much as life sucks, I still think it's beautiful. As much as people are backstabbing assholes, I still give them the benefit of the doubt, although I have learned from my past mistakes. And as much as it's damn near impossible these days to build a fortune without compromising your morals, I will still try, why? Because regardless of anything, it's the ability to choose that empowers us.

And so this date has marked the beginning of a new personal era. I still see it as a blessing in disguise, because if it weren't for this arrest, I might have overdosed, been shot, or arrested for a much larger quantity, and the power of choice still wouldn't have returned to me yet.

So thanks Big Brother but no thanks >.<