“Coal with no flame, can still make fire in a haystack.”

CLACK CLACK, CLACK CLACK

First wake up of the day. Eat breakfast. Put spoon away. Get back on bunk, put earplugs in—

As I’m shoving in my other earplug, the speaker on the wall barks at me. “Knight, you have court this morning.”

“K.” That’s all I say.

I already know this is going to be a long day, so I pull out my pink houses. It feels like forever ago when JJ showed me how to take the pill and use my I.D. to crush the anti-depressant into powder, make a line, and snort it.

I roll up my heavily used Joker playing card to snort up the legal drugs in one motion, plug my nose, and hold my breath while the sting hits. A few seconds later, I release.

Whew! Okay, I’m awake, and any feelings I could have, are under control. I quickly make a cup of coffee and pound the whole thing before heading over to the programming room.

Three other people are already waiting to go downtown to the courthouse. One of them is Tad, who is one of the gang members I’ve been playing Pinochle with for weeks.

“What up dude?” I ask, pulling up my plastic chair next to his.

“Hopin’ this bitch of a judge gives me some good news today, but it’s Judge Shwellie and she’s been layin’ everyone down lately.” He shakes his head.

“I don’t even know who my judge is yet. Today’s my first time actually going to court.”

“That’s right, you said you still haven’t done your prelims yet, right?”

I nod.

“Your case is crazy man, I can’t believe you called the cops!” He does that one-hand-over-the-mouth laugh, a normal gesture for a guy who always over-exaggerates with his hands. Hands that don’t stop moving when he’s got cards in them either. He’s constantly fanning them open then closed, tapping them on the table, spreading every card evenly so just the number and suit show. When he has a free hand with nothing to play with, it looks like he’s trying to make alien sign language.

He gets up and knocks on the door. The CO hears him then unlocks it. Tad opens the heavy door halfway then asks the copper to change the channel to channel thirteen so we can watch the news. The copper does so without a word.

“Last night we watched Gone in Sixty Seconds! Woooo, that show gets me going!” he says, shifting invisible gears in his seat.

He’s talking about watching a movie while folding laundry. Our section hosts the four clothing trustees who work clothing exchanges every night.

Clothing exchange is one of the worst things about this very large county jail. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, the trustees go around to every section at night after the final CLACK CLACK, CLACK CLACK and offer up replacement socks or underwear. It doesn’t take long and the coppers don’t enter our cells.

Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday are knight and day different though. On those nights, the clothing trustees bring in the bins with shirts, pants, socks, underwear, and towels. Always accompanied by four to six coppers too. We all have to strip down and wrap our lower halves in a skirt made from the sheet we use to cover the mattress. When the CO pops our cell door, there’s a copper standing there checking our bundle of clothing before we throw it into the dirty laundry bin.

Then they go into the cell and shake it down. Some are chill. Some are complete dicks. They make sure you don’t have more than six books, that you’re not saving state food in bowls, that your pill packs are the right count, and that you don’t have any contraband hidden. Some of the pettiest pigs will literally check your jail number and match it with the number written on your pillow from commissary. It seems way over-the-top, and makes me wonder how different this jail is compared to others I’ve heard about.

While the coppers are swinging their dicks around in our cell, we walk single file to throw our stuff into the dirty laundry bin, then tell the laundry trustees, behind the clean laundry bins, what size we need of each item. After that, we go back to our cell to rack in. And of course, clean up the mess the pigs made.

Sundays are just sheet exchange, which works the same as socks and underwear nights.

“Did you get to choose the movie?” I ask.

“Yeah, it was between that and Transformers.”

“Laundry trustee is where it’s at. How do you get into that?”

“Well, ya see, I know a guy,” he says in a thick Italian accent, complete with a hand gesture.

I laugh. “No, really.”

“Really.”

“Okay, Al Capone.” I roll my eyes.

He snorts. “I lied. I don’t know a guy, I know the guys.” He jerks his thumb behind him toward the section. “When one of us leaves, we get to choose who replaces us.”

“Oh, that’s fuckin’ cool,” I say, surprised that I didn’t know that already.

“Yeah, we all have to work together, so they just want us to get along. Hey, by the way, Brock is getting out soon and you’re gonna be here for a while. I’ll talk to the boys and see what they think about putting you on.”

I haven’t even considered a job since being here. I don’t want to be a house mouse because I like my sleep in the morning. Plus, there’s always some guy who takes the job way too seriously, like the one when I first got here, who got on my ass for sweeping crumbs onto the ground. I also don’t want to go to the kitchen and be around that nasty “food” all day. But laundry trustee would actually fit my schedule perfectly. I’m a night owl, up until two in the morning most nights anyway. Plus, Scrappy, Brock, Old man Jimbo, and Tad are already my buddies.

“Oh hell yeah, I would definitely be down for that!”

The news channel is already onto the weather and off the headlines, so I don’t have to hear if my case is on the news again. I truly hope they have already forgotten about my story.

Eventually a transport copper, dressed in black, comes to handcuff our feet together, then our wrists. They’re the kind of cuffs with a foot-long chain linking them. At least we can move our arms around a little.

After we’re cuffed up, he takes us out of the section and into the long hallways. We walk single file down the hall, picking up inmates from other sections in the C portion of the jail. We finally make it to a room full of holding cells where they cram us in like sardines. The holding cells are the same size as our regular cells, but there’s no bunk. Instead, there are two cement benches built into either side of the wall, with a toilet in the back.

Once inside the packed space, I count how many inmates are in the cell with me.

Holy hell, there are sixteen of us crammed in here! Not a second goes by without the sound of a cough, a sniff, or some audible human function. Not a fart though. If anyone has to fart, they make sure to go to the toilet and flush it.

Minutes clump together, spanning into a galaxy that’s longer than an hour and a half. Finally, a copper comes to our cell and starts calling us by last name. When we hear our name, we hand over our ID and walk single file into another room. It’s the last room before finally being escorted outside and onto a transport bus.

The bus ride is killing me! The temperature is getting warmer and warmer, worsening the motion sickness I’ve felt from the moment we started moving. I close my eyes and try to focus on something, anything, to distract myself from the overstimulation. This is the first time I’ve left the jail since I got here over four months ago. I try to picture where we might be and what road we’re taking to get there. All the while, I’m trying to tune out the sounds of three “homies” who haven’t seen each other in a while. Their way of catching up is through yelling back and forth from their seats.

“Ah Dawg, did you say Bianca? The big titted one whose brother just got popped with three kilos? What’s that dude’s name?”

“Yeah, the Feds are picking up his case without question bro. Tawny or Trawny or something weird like that.”

The rest of the ride continues with a non-stop barrage of “do you know so and so” and talk about which girls are hood rats. When we finally make it to the garage underneath the courthouse, I’m more than ready to be done with all this.

But this day has only just begun.

We shuffle out of the bus single file, get searched once we’re inside the building, then cram into a big triangle-shaped room similar to the holding cells, but three times bigger, with two toilets behind a pony wall. Once inside, I take a seat on the concrete bench lining the wall and exhale. There’s so much going on around me: conversations, coughing, toilets whooshing, chains shifting, humans shuffling, and of course hard-working officers outside our cell trying to keep the public safe by preventing our escape.

I look around and start counting to see how many of us are in here. Forty-two on my first try. Forty-three on my second. I get to thirty-something before I stop and ask myself what I’m even doing.

Who cares how many of us are in here?

There’s no clock on the wall but I can feel the passage of seconds. Over ten thousand of them drag by, and over the course of those three hours, only one inmate at a time is taken away by a transport officer every five to fifteen minutes. When they finally call my last name, the officer escorts me to an elevator. After exiting onto the fourth floor, he places me into one of two 8x10 holding cells.

Talking to the other inmates, I find out that these are the holding cells for Judge Shwannahsee. I guess that’s who my judge is. Minutes pass by while I chop it up with the other inmates and hear their unsolicited thoughts on how Judge Shwannahsee is going to treat me and my case.

I also learn more about crime in general, because their stories are full of detailed examples about their past run-ins with judgments and rulings. Of course, everyone knows someone else’s story too, which they love to share like it earns them some kind of street cred.