I know what you’re thinking. I should feel elated, or at the least some mild joy. The air should be cleaner or taste better, something like that. I should feel different. But I don’t. It shouldn’t bother me that it is the coldest day in weeks and raining. I should want to run carefree, maybe naked, through the forest. My sister has driven from Buffalo, New York to East Bumblefuck Carlisle, Indiana to pick me up. She has left her boyfriend and beloved dogs behind, and, through the miracle of modern transportation, arrived in under ten hours. I’m still not happy. Nothing looks any different. I don’t feel different, not that I have any recollection of how I used to feel. Was it really any different? And if being incarcerated changed me, it stands to reason that I should revert back now that I am leaving prison. Or maybe it was a gradual thing that will reverse itself in increments as the days of freedom go by. I don’t know. I know that at this point I am a nervous wreck, not a Super Happy Fun Ball.
I stood in the sally-port. Me and the sergeant who was escorting me out. Both getting rained on. The prison buildings were in the process of being fitted with new roofs, and the sally-port spent several hours a day backed up with construction vehicles entering and leaving. Each vehicle going in or coming out of the facility has to be vacated, searched, and scanned with a heartbeat detector. The longer we stood there, the more pissed off the sergeant became, and the more nervous I became. It started to rain with greater intensity. The sky darkened. Omen? I hope not. We made small talk, the weather, how long I had been down, would I stay out this time, shit like that. I felt like throwing up. My stomach had been a bubbling cauldron for a month. My tolerance for Tums was so high that I could no longer confine my habit to the one package a week you are allowed to order through the prison’s commissary.
The other side of the sally-port cleared and the officer who was in control of the gate (and my leaving) entered the guard shack. The officer slid the window open. The sergeant told him my name and that I was a release, which was fairly obvious by the Buffalo Sabres t-shirt and Columbia pants my sister had dropped off, and I was wearing in place of the khaki jumpsuit I would have had on if I was an inmate who was staying. The officer asked y Department of Corrections number. I was insulted. I was a free man. Why the fuck was I still a number? I didn’t want to rock the boat. I told him 133667, a number I will never forget. He asked for my photo identification and I gave it to him. A little less insulting. Everything checked out.
The gate started to roll. About twenty feet of fence topped with several rolls of razor wire. Water dripped from the sharp coils. The stadium lights around the prison were on and flashed off the deadly surface if the wire making it look benign, almost beautiful. This is where I thought the big moment would come. I had played this exact second over in my mind hundreds of times on sleepless nights. This must be the point where it hits you. This is when you cross the threshold from convict to free man, number to name. I imagined the weight lifting from me, the sadness evaporating, my shoulders rising to greet my destiny. Of course, none of this happened. I can’t even tell you what I was thinking at moment my feet crossed the invisible boundary underneath the spot the rolling gate had just occupied. I wish I could, if not for your entertainment, for my own enlightenment. I want to remember it. I should remember it. Night after night I had told myself to stop and look around at that junction of space and time, to savor it, to commit it to memory. Such an important juncture in an endless stream of mostly repetitious life. I had told myself this was it for me, a new life would begin. Happiness. Sunshine. I had paid my debt and could move on. What I got instead of happiness and sunshine was rain, coldness, guilt, sadness, and shame. So much for my big moment.
The problem was reality, and reality was on the other side of that invisible line. For five years and three months I had been in the unreality of the prison system. I had spent nine months in the Monroe County Jail waiting for my sentence, two weeks at the Reception and Diagnostics Center in Plainfield, Indiana, over four years at the Branchville Correctional Facility in Tell City, Indiana, and the last three months of my sentence at a minimum security camp outside the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in Carlisle, Indiana. I can tell you first hand that reality resides in none of those places. Prison life if more surreal than pictures of fish floating through the air or melting clocks. Prison convinces you that all this fucked up shit going on around you is acceptable. Someone is getting the life beat out of them in the dinning hall with a padlock on a sting, just keep eating until the pepper spray becomes unbearable. A semi-illiterate guard is explaining his backwoods, bigoted, rightwing worldview to you, just nod and smile. People hide smuggled cellphones in their assholes, no biggie. A guy is jacking off in the shower across from you, rinse off and leave. You see and hear things on a daily basis that would make any normal person question their sanity. And, after all the insanity of prison life, I now had reality to face.
My sister was across that line. She would be my first encounter with anything not institutionalized in years. Most people who work in the prison system are institutionalized in their own ways. Most of them just deny it.
My sister. I have done many awful things to her over the years. I have lied to her, stole from her, broke her heart on several occasions. This a pattern many of the people in my life know well. A person will do things for drugs, with complete disregard for anything else, that they wouldn’t do to achieve any rational goal. And I have done all of them. And now I had to face them, starting with my sister, without the numbing aid of heroin.
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