Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in Man's Prison by T. Parsell (fiction novels to read .txt) 📗

Instead of returning the car back when I had finished, I drove around awhile enjoying my newfound freedom. Driving came easily to me. I'd been driving a mini-bike since I was eleven, and now driving a car was way too much fun to have to wait two or three more years till I was old enough for Driver's Ed. Down with the established order!

My sister was in summer school, so I decided to go home and pick her up. "Do you want a ride to school?" I asked, beaming. She hated taking the bus, especially on hot humid mornings, but she struggled to comprehend what I was saying.

"It belongs to the hippies," I said. "They're letting me borrow it."

It was sort of true, I thought. I was just borrowing it, and considering the way they were all passed out, they were in a sense letting me.

It was 7:30 in the morning, and they often slept till noon, but since I wasn't sure when they had crashed, I figured I had until about nine o'clock. Connie didn't have to be at school until 8:30, so we picked up her girlfriends along the way. They were fifteen, and I wished it wasn't so early, so that my friends could see me driving around with three older girls.

We were on the other side of town when I realized how much gas we'd used. I wanted to make sure there was enough in the tank so they wouldn't know I had taken it. But when I pulled into the gas station, I misjudged the right front corner of the car and the bumper caught the edge of the pump. It collapsed rather easily. Too easily, and when I put the car in reverse to back up, I stepped on the gas too hard, squealing the tires, and hit a pick-up truck behind me. Inside the wagon, the girls were screaming so loud, I couldn't hear the screeching and grinding of the ignition as I tried to re-start the engine, even though it was already running. Everyone at the station had stopped, as if frozen in place, and stared at us. I slammed the transmission into park and leapt from the car.

"I'll go call the police," I shouted and quickly ran from the scene.

Two attendants were right on my tail and caught me before I got far. When they brought me back, I noticed Connie and her girlfriends walking off through an adjacent lot.

"Connie!" I screamed. "Please don't leave me!"

"Oh yeah? " She and her friends screamed, flipping me a finger. "You left us!"

I was arrested and brought to the police station, where they took me into the back. They sat me at an empty desk and called my dad. About twenty minutes later, I heard my name mentioned in conversation out at the front desk. I strained to listen to what they were saying. The voices were low and familiar, though not my dad. I couldn't make it out at first, until I heard one of the hippies say, "No. That's OK. We don't want to press charges. He's our paperboy."

9

Prison Transfer

The black and white vans had gold emblems on the two front doors, with round stirrups on each tip of the six-pointed star. It was the official seal of the Wayne County Sheriff. PRISONER TRANSFER, KEEP BACK 500 FEET emblazoned the rear. Inside, two black padded benches ran vertically along each side, with metal hoops on the floor, for the stringing of chains. Six transports were to be filled from the secure loading dock that morning, all of them headed for the State Prison of Southern Michigan.

It felt like we were cattle being herded into separate corrals, the way they kept moving us from one bullpen to another. We were shifted three times, as they sorted out the prisoners who were going to court from those who were going to prison. I didn't notice anyone being sorted out to go home.

They returned our street clothes, and I was finally given the carton of cigarettes they took from me after sentencing. I couldn't wait to open them. It had been hours since I last took a drag off a short, and a day and half since I last smoked a whole cigarette. A short was the end of a cigarette where a puff or two remained before the fire hit the filter.

"Save me shorts?" you'd ask a fellow inmate as he lit up, but you had to ask quickly, or someone else would beat you to it.

Cigarettes were in short supply, and the deputies liked keeping it that way. It was one of the few outside luxuries we were allowed. There was no reason they couldn't have given them back to me the night I arrived from court. They hardly mattered to me now, since we couldn't smoke inside the vans. The other inmates warned that any cigarettes would be tossed out when we got to Jackson. I didn't know if I could believe them, but everyone kept hitting me up. "C'mon man, the motherfuckers are just gonna throw 'em out." After seeing one or two others do the same, I started handing them out. We chain-smoked while we waited to be called to the transport chains.

Someone said we'd get a bag of Bull Durham and some rolling papers inside our toiletry kits at Jackson. I'd read about Bull Durham, in a Louis L'Amour western, and was surprised it still existed. It was a roll-your-own tobacco that came in a drawstring pouch. "That shit is nasty," an inmate said. "It's like smokin' shit rolled in toilet paper."

After the Bull Durham, we had to wait for commissary, which could take awhile, until whatever personal money we might have had, was transferred from the county jail. I had twenty-eight dollars in my wallet the day I came in.

I was amazed at how much these guys knew about jailing. Almost more than my brother. I had only been there