I spent the night in jail. Or, if it’s more to your liking: I spent the night in the slammer, in the big house, in the graybar hotel, the stoney lonesome, con college, and my all time favorite, the pokey.
I was in a holding cell. The majority of the night I spent either laughing or crying, playing the the tug-of-war game that had become my life.
The one good thing about being in jail is you get to do a lot of thinking. I was there for only one night, and I couldn’t imagine the amount of thinking to be had over a twenty to life year sentence.
The holding cell was damp and gloomy. A steel bench rode the wall from one toilet to the next. It reminded me of my softball dugout in high school. I had become very familiar with that bench, as my ability to hit the ball was as prevalent as my ability to have fun. This particular dugout was loaded with benchwarmers.
A tornado of thoughts swirled in my head as I watched a plus sized woman shitting ten feet away from me. She no stranger to her surroundings, and as obscene sounds squealed out of her ass she never once broke eye contact with me.
“How are you doing?” I said, for the lack of anything better to say. “Everything coming out all right?”
She gave no response besides a snarl of her lip.
The other women laughed. The smell of fresh fish was as noticeable as feces, and it must’ve radiated off me in thick waves. My cellmates all wore loose, dangling clothes. Some were torn, stained and begging to be burned. I must’ve missed the memo while being booked; I was still in my business suit, properly buttoned and fitted to galvanize.
I couldn’t break eye contact with the defecating woman. It was like staring into one of those magic eye paintings, where soon enough I might see something new, like her obese body would transform into a sailboat on the toilet.
“You got a problem, bitch?” the woman said.
“What? Me? No… I just…”
“Easy, Bobbi,” another woman said as she sat between Bobbi and I. “She’s just scared. Isn’t that right, sweetheart?”
I laughed hard at that one.
“Scared? There’s nothing in here that can scare me anymore.”
“Wanna bet?” Bobbi said.
And I laughed again.
“Well, okay then. Hi, I’m Joanna, you can call me Jo.”
Her pale complexion emphasized the deep lines in her smile. Her eyes, light and gray shined from the florescent lights above our heads. She was skinny—drug skinny, and every word from her mouth exhaled the scent of cigarette smoke, the same color as her short and boyish hair.
“Hey, Jo, I’m Olivia, you can call me Liv.”
We shook hands.
“What the hell are you doing in here, Liv? This doesn’t seem like it would be your kinda place. No offense and all, but you look too clean.”
“Why would I take offense to being clean?”
Jo shrugged and we both laughed. Needless to say, I liked her right away.
A loud buzzer went off and I jumped, dishearteningly contradicting my previous statement about being scared. The door opened with the mechanically; the sound of metal on metal cringed in my ears.
“Brown! You’re out on bail,” the guard yelled.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming,” Bobbi responded and stood up from the toilet without flushing, beginning her powerful walk past me.
“You’re lucky, bitch,” she said to me as her sweet goodbye.
“Take care!” I responded, then said to Jo, “Her name is Bobbi Brown?”
“Roberta, but yeah. Take one guess what she’s in here for.”
“Crack?”
She put her finger on her nose.
This time the whole cell laughed, and I felt much better about my surroundings.
There was a long night ahead of me. I gravely looked forward to the explanation I’d give to my mother, who still didn’t know about my cancer. I wondered if I’d even tell her. Besides, I already knew her response: the wails, the cries, and the demands I go for chemo. So, why make her suffer?
“You gonna answer my question?” Jo asked, and took me a second to remember what question she was referring to.
“Oh yeah, sorry. I tried to evade the cops.”
She looked at me wide-eyed. “Evade the cops? Ha-ha you really don’t belong in here, do you?”
“Evade, you know, run away, like a high-speed chase.” I explained.
“Honey, I know what evade means. But you did that, really?”
“Yup,” I said with a new sense of pride. “Well, it wasn’t much of a chase. I was speeding… more like racing, and I saw the cops lights behind me. First, my instincts had me pull over, but then something in me screamed when I saw him walking out of his car, so I threw my car into drive and peeled out. He was so confused when he ran back to his car he fell down, and I couldn’t contain myself, I started laughing my ass off and crashed the car. Now, here I am.”
They all laughed again, except for Jo, who seemed bewildered. It was my story that bothered her.
“Racing? Who were you racing? And why?”
My smile faded back to the shadows of the cell. What business of it was hers? I had my secrets and minutes earlier I was prepared to keep those secrets for as long as my short life allowed. But maybe it was in her eyes—sunken and tarnished, as if they were drowning in her face—that I saw her selfless question. She cared.
I thought about it. I don’t know these women and they don’t know me. So why the hell not tell them? It might do me some good to let it out; it might unwind that tangled ball of tension lodged in my chest.
“I was racing myself,” I said, with no other way to put it.
Jo and the gang were confused by this.
“You see, I just left from my doctor’s office, or my Oncologist’s office to be exact.” I pointed to my lungs and said, “I never smoked a day in my life, never did a single drug, I never even drank more than half a glass of wine at a time. But regardless of that, he said cancer, and said it was terminal.”
The blank faces stared at me with self-reflecting eyes. Some had smirks arched at the corner of their mouths, and some didn’t register what I said at all; they were too busy sweating and burning in the depths of withdrawal.
Jo reached out and placed her hand on top of mine.
“That’s life, ain’t it?” she said and gave a gentle laugh. “It gives no shits about your plans. You do everything right, but still life decides to say, ‘fuck you’ then continues to pour it on.”
I know how it sounds, but at the time it was very poetic.
“How long?” Jo asked bluntly as if she were asking for the time. I suppose she was in a way.
“A year and a half, give or take. The doctor said I might be able to extend it with aggressive treatment, but I’d have to start right away, and the odds of being cured are far less than likely. It’s funny, I lived my whole life playing it safe, you know? And now, confronted with death, playing it safe seems like the riskiest play of all.”
My cellmates sat quietly as they put themselves in my shoes, walking around the cage in them. There wasn’t much room, and those shoes must’ve been blisteringly tight, but they walked regardless, and it seemed they came to the same resounding notion.
“Fuck that!” a latin girl protested in the corner.
“That’s right, girl,” her friend next to her stated.
“Uh-huh!”
“That’s right!”
I felt like I was on Jerry Springer and the crowd just found out I’m carrying Death’s lovechild. Soon he’d be swinging his sickle at the angry mob of baby momma convicts.
“You know what the worst way to die is, Liv?” Jo asked, and brought the searing crowd to a simmer.
“I don’t know, lung cancer’s pretty bad,” I said.
“That’s not what I mean. I’ve seen it first hand with family. First with my grandmother—slowly dying on her death bed from natural causes, like the elderly tend to do. You see, it’s always the same story. They’ll take your hand and tell you their regrets, because when you’re about to crossover that’s all you can think about. All the shit you’ve never done, all the chances you never took, they add up to a life you never lived. My grandma told me how she never traveled, how she never got to see the world. She lived in her hometown since she was five-years-old and stayed there until the day she died at ninety-one. She’d go to Florida here and there, and that was it.”
The similarity to what my father had said to me years before was down right eerie.
“She’d tell me how she wished she knew what a tropical breeze felt like, or what a beer tasted like at a pub in Ireland. She told me how she’d never been on an airplane, and never felt what it’s like to fly. She told me how the only lover she ever had was my grandpa. God bless the man, but one lover in a lifetime is sad as shit. What I’m trying to tell you is she lived ninety-one years, but barely lived at all. And the saddest part is when she was dying she knew it. It was the fear of the unknown that made her past feel like wasted time.”
Jo held my hand the whole time she talked, and kept eye contact. In that jailhouse, I was a prisoner inside of her gray, unblinking eyes. It was like being lost in a storm.
“What did that do for you?” I managed to ask.
“For me?” she said joyously. “It made me live… much to the chagrin of my family.”
“They didn’t understand, did they?” I asked with the floating image of my mother in my head.
“When I dropped out of college, no, they certainly didn’t.”
“You dropped out? To do what?”
“I did me,” she said deliberately. “I left home, I left Wisconsin, I left the country.”
“Wisconsin? Huh, wouldn’t have guessed that.”
“Well when you travel the world like me, accents and any other defining idiosyncrasies become lost, even to yourself. Listen, I’ve lived the life of a thousand women in a thousand places. I’ve been every where worth being, I’ve tripped on acid under the skies of the aurora borealis. I’ve stood on the tip of a volcano and burned my eyes by looking down. I’ve had orgies, once with three men outside in a rainstorm, once with three women inside of a hostile. I’ve had drinks with the greatest minds of the world, and arguments with the worst. I ran with the bulls, swam with the sharks, and walked with my head up high… not to be verbose. I’ve had cuisines in every culture, from Italy to France, from Singaporean to Afghani. I’ve even eaten relief aid rice packages in East African villages.”
“I’ve died once,” Jo said precisely, and continued before I could react. “For a minute and thirteen-seconds, pronounced dead and all. But life wasn’t done with me yet, and I wasn’t done with it, I came back again, and again… much to the chagrin of my family,” she laughed.
“How’d you die?”
“That my friend is another story for another time. The point is: here I am now, locked up in a small town in New York, on some bogus weed possession. Mind you, I’ve been to real prison overseas after being used as a drug mule. This is Four Seasons compared to that.”
“Liv,” she said, capturing my undying attention, “there’s nothing that I regret in my life, and I can undoubtedly say that with the upmost honesty. If I make it to my elder years, I will lay in my bed, covered in sores and bruises from a life lived to the fullest. I’ll go out with a smile drawn on by a child. Even right now, I’m forty-four, and if I died tomorrow, I’ll die fulfilled.”
She stopped and looked at me, somehow deeper. With an inclination that I could feel it coming, she asked me the one question that changed it all, “How about you?”
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