Tag: short-story

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Rape, Haldol, and Speech Impediments

Women’s Center

Day 62

Labor Day

Monday

September 4th, 2017

I had another dream last night about when I was a Vet Tech. I really miss the work. This afternoon I laid down, but weirdly, all I could think about was two years ago, when this whole mess started, and how the nurse at the hospital catheterized me against my will. That still really bothers me. It was like being drugged and raped. Haldol, handcuffs, and a nasty nurse with a catheter. In front of a police officer.

Horrible.

I wish I could sue that woman personally. I probably could. But what would you call it? Rape? Illegal invasion of a body cavity? Assault? I’ll have to look it up. That’ll be a fun time.

More of my book:

The curriculum for mourning includes:

  1. Undoing emotional bonds with the deceased
  2. Devising comforting ways to maintain bonds
  3. Finding meaningful activities that give life new purpose
  4. Banishing guilt
  5. Allowing pleasure to revive

“Somewhere along the line, the load get a little lighter and the sky a little brighter.”

7:30pm

Off to a meeting. Drama about who’s going and who isn’t. Luckily, I get to go–I needed some time away, and I only got to go to two meetings last week. And bonus–this one has candy! Most of the time anyway. Munchy is getting pissed off at Chantilly always being right up her ass. Also, Chantilly made a mistake and told a few residents that she and Munchy had slept together. Of course that spread like wildfire and got back to Munchy, who of course adamantly denied it.

Then Chantilly tried to act like she had never said it, but I know she did, because she said it to me. I didn’t tell anyone, but when Munchy asked me if it was true, I told her the truth. I don’t know why she does it, but Chantilly is a chronic liar and can’t be trusted. It sucks because I never know whether to believe her. 

Went to the meeting–there’s this  one guy there named Rick, and he’s a running joke with the women here because he has a speech impediment and can’t pronounce “R”’s. Like–what the fuck–the poor man can’t even pronounce his own name. So he’s relentlessly getting made fun of, anyway, and today he spoke three times at the meeting about what a hard time he was having, and even started crying once. So they all said he was drunk! Sometimes I just think that some of these people are nasty, egomaniacal shitheads. 

Then one of the women there asked me what was wrong with me after the meeting. I told her that I had lost a son, and that his birthday was coming up, so I was sad. It’s funny, she misunderstood me and thought that social services had taken him away from me, and that’s what I meant by “lost.” You can’t win, I tell ya. 

If you say that you lost a child to people outside AA, they think you had a miscarriage, and if you’re in AA, they think you had a bad run-in with social services. No one thinks they actually DIED. Ugh. I have to read more of my book–or practice the serenity prayer more. Anyway, she said she could relate, because she had lost children, but they were reunited now.

Then, when she realized that they were DEAD and not LOST she told me a bizarre story about how she, too, had lost four children at 16 years old (Is that even possible–four kids by 16??!!) AND a husband in a house fire and then spent four years in a psych ward in a catatonic state afterward. I was like–WHOA. I don’t even know how to respond to that because it is so fantastical. She told me she was married at 13, and four kids by 16?? The only one she told me an age of was six months old.

I’m beginning to think she’s got a touch Chantilly Lace’s disease. I don’t know. Hopefully that really didn’t happen to her. I just don’t know. Anyway, she told me to call her (I won’t), and to talk about it with someone I trust (I’ll try).

Time for lights out.

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Suicide, Zuko, and Chopper

Muncy State Prison

May 5th, 2024

1:35pm

According to inmate.com, the woman who attempted suicide yesterday is on life support. Very sad. Tragic, really. Daisy surmised that to the woman, death might be preferable to coming back here.

The last woman hung herself on 4/10/24. That’s two suicides in less than a month. The woman who asked me how long I’m here in the bathroom a while ago (with the 18-year min) apparently shot her girlfriend dead because she had threatened to shoot her dog. Then she stayed with the body for three days. God. Her name is Zuko. We’re often in the bathroom at the same time, for some reason. She calls us “bathroom buddies.”

Cute. 

I still don’t think she knows my name. 

This book, “Women Who Love Men Who Kill” by Sheila Isenberg isn’t written very well. She sensationalizes both the crimes committed and the women who love the men who have killed people. This book makes me think about Chopper, a man I went to high school with who allegedly shot and killed a Kane police officer. He was shot too, in the neck, and barely survived. There were two other teenagers in the car that night, and Chopper doesn’t remember the events, but I’ve always felt like the blame was pinned on him because everyone thought he was going to die. I slept with him once in the back of his mother’s car when I was 16. I ended up later working with his mother at the local veterinary clinic. She died of breast cancer years ago. Maybe I’ll look him up and write him sometime. Of course, he got a life sentence. 

6:09pm

I just got back from dinner, where a woman was talking about the lady who hung herself on J Unit yesterday. She’s on J Unit too, and she, like the last lady, was asking for help for three days and saying that she was suicidal before she hung herself. Mr. Reibsome, the Unit Manager, put her in a single cell in response to this, apparently. She said she wanted to go be with her baby that died. The woman also said that there’s going to be “people” here Monday, like inspectors or something, or investigators. When I asked her who they were, she repeated, “people.” Like–lady–we’re all in the same fucking boat. Why wouldn’t you want to share information if you knew something?!

7pm 

I talked to the boys-they were in the tub. They went to the Maple Festival today but couldn’t go into the bouncy house because it rained.

Called Motorcycle–he was excited because he got a new pair of jeans and some costume jewelry from Good Will. I told him another woman hung herself and he changed the subject to fishing.

Strange.

I messaged D. Owl, the reporter from Spotlight, PA, and told her that two women who have hung themselves here in the past two weeks. Same Unit, both asked for help, both were put in single cells by the Unit Mgr., Mr. Reibsome.

We’ll see if she responds.

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Life Uncategorized

Motorcycle, Minivans, and Man–You Don’t Even Want to Know

May 3, 2024

Muncy State Prison

11:29am

Friday

We just heard over the radio that CPR has been started on someone on J Unit. Jesus Christ. I hope it’s not another suicide. The Unit is silent, waiting to hear what happens. There’s tension in the air. Some people, like me, are eyes-wide, looking around, and others just shake their heads and put them down, as if to say, “Another one bites the dust.” Burgundy says it’s always J Unit. There are rows  of single cells, like S Unit, with automatic doors that are usually closed, only to be opened by an officer in the bubble by pressing a button on J Unit.

11:40am

Ambulance en route. It’s harder to hang yourself on an open Unit, like this one, BB. The walls between the pods only go up to chest level, so if you’re on the top tier and have a top bunk, you have a bird’s eye view of the entire Unit. People on this Unit are mad that lunch is going to be late, because they may not get to “shop” at Commissary. Someone is dying, and they’re made about coffee and e-cigarettes. It’s sad and infuriating that suicides are commonplace here.

11:52am

Ambulance en route (to the Unit?).

Book: “Women Who Love Men Who Kill: 35 True Stories of Prison Passion” by Sheila  Isenberg © 2021

P. 7 “Today, prison phone calls a $1.2 billion industry under the control of two large corporations, Securus and GlobalTel. They claim to reduce the cost os inmate calls up to 90 percent, including local, long distance, and international…Securus and GlobalTel are very profitable. They and some individual states earn huge profits on calls; many states pay legal kickbacks. For example, in 2018, Connecticut state prisoners paid $13.2 million for phone calls, of which Securus returned nearly 60 percent to the state. In 2010, the state of Hawaii profited by  $3.3 million from prisoner phone calls…But today, even our carceral society that penalizes so many, often unfairly, gives us the online revolution a place behind prison walls. The internet allows prisoners to stay in touch with families, and wives and girlfriends. According to experts, this cuts down on recidivism because of the prisoner’s ability to maintain a connection with the outside world.”

P.8

“First, there is JPay, ‘aiming to become the Apple of the U.S. penal system…’ Founded in 2006, JPay’s app can be downloaded on Apple’s App Store or on Google Play. It partners with institutions on all levels–federal, state, and county–in thirty-five states. A million and a half ‘offenders [prisoners],’ parolees, and probationers’ use it for money transfers, emails, and video visitation.”

p.8

“Since 2009, federal prison inmates have been able to send and receive emails through a system used by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons: TRULINCS (Trust Fund Limited Inmate Computer System). TRULINCS is operated by CORRLINK, a privately owned company that is a subsidiary of Advanced Technologies Group.”

12:15pm 

Count is clear.

12:40pm

Lunch.

1:15pm 

It was Sharon M. who hung herself. No one knows if she’s dead or alive. 

I didn’t go to lunch and called Motorcycle instead. He got my letter and said that he was upset that I think he doesn’t believe I’ll be faithful. He said he believes me. And that, “I love you very much, Jess.”

Sweet.

He also told me that he’s never said that he would “bend his knee” for anyone before, ever. I meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen…he was married once, but whatever. I’ll take it. I love him very much too. I wrote him a letter:

5/3/24

Motorcycle, 

I talked to you earlier today. You were so sweet. I love it when you’re all romantic with me. I mess spending time with you too, and crawling into your lap when I need a break from work. And cooking and eating together. Everything, really. I miss normal things. Shopping and driving around together. Just spending time together. I miss everything. I hate this. I hate being away from you, and not knowing what’s going to happen. I hate not knowing where I’m going live when this is all over.

Ugh.

Anyway, I love you very much too, and I can’t imagine my life without you. 

In other news, another woman here hung herself today. It’s so sad that it’s so normal here that no one really cares. People are just mad that we’re locked down, or they can’t go to Commissary or whatever. 

Terrible.

My worst fear is dying in prison. I haven’t gotten any letters or correspondence from Paul, so I stopped writing him. I give up. If he doesn’t want to be friends anymore, that’s fine. I can’t do anything about it anyway. I talked to Gem this morning. Nothing new with her except for the rumor about the DA and the Judge being under investigation. I sent the letter today to the Public Defender asking him why there was a conflict with the last case and not this one. I also sent a letter to Tabby. She writes huge long messages on the kiosk and I can only write her back a line or two. My mother told me the Maple Festival is this weekend and she’s taking the kids. Stryder has messaged me a few times with jealous bullshit about me choosing you over him. This after he didn’t speak to me for five months. Whatever. I didn’t respond. I can do without his drama just fine. 

Anyway, I love you very, very much and I miss you like crazy.

Love Always, 

Justine

5:47pm 

I have one piece of yellow paper left for writing letters. I’m going to call the boys at 6:30pm. I keep wondering if I should write Tiger. I don’t see why I would. She won’t care anyway, but I think about her a lot. 

Bambi, the Vietnamese lady next door, wants me to ghost write the story of her life for her. Daisy got colored pencils today on Commissary, so she’s happily coloring.

Burgundy asked the young Black lady next door yesterday what her charges were, her name is Momo, and she said that someone put some drug in her drink and she went nuts and stabbed her young daughter. Her daughter survived, but she’s not allowed to have any contact with her. She said she called her mom, where her kids live, and her daughter (the victim) insisted on talking to her She said, “I still love you, Mommy!”

So sad.

She got 6-16 years for felony child endangerment. She’s been down four years so far. I wonder if she’ll get paroled. I would think not. 

In other news, I got a yoga packet from some Activities person I wrote. Daisy says we’ll start tomorrow. I didn’t eat lunch today because it was fish. Dinner was spaghetti, so I ate it. Burgundy is working on an 1,000 piece puzzle. No thank you. I guess I’ll read. Library Monday, thank God.

6:33pm

Lockdown again. I was in the middle of my phone call with King. Jesus God. There’s no telling how long this will take. “Secure your Unit” over the radio. Henry sprained his ankle during soccer. Hopefully I’ll get to talk to Superman tonight. 

Who knows what happened this time.

6:40pm

“Compound is clear” over radio.

6:43pm

“Keep compound secure”

Showers and phone calls only. I’m not going to call Superman for two minutes. Inmate.com says that they found contraband in a shower. Daisy and I were talking about dating Black men, and I recounted a story about the first Black man I dated, when I was 19. He had the whitest name ever–Robert–and he sold a magazine where I worked as a bookstore clerk. He would buy me Boone’s Farm drinks and I would get drunk at his apartment, where there was black shag carpet and an entirely glass coffee table. When I broke up with him, he couldn’t believe it. He looked at me, aghast, and said incredulously, “But I licked your asshole!”

I had no idea that asshole lickery had bonded us for life.

Silly me. 

When Daisy dated her first Black man, they went to see the Exorcist in the theater, and to hear her tell it, the theater was so cold that her nipples were hard, so she tried to cuddle up to this guy, but she couldn’t get too close because his breath was so bad. “He had a turd in his cheek!!” she shrieked, and then fell over on her bed laughing. “NEVER AGAIN,” she said. She saw him later at a party and he said, “What happened to you?” She was like, “What happened to YOU, man?? Like, why would your breath smell that bad?!

Next, my first husband apparently thought I wasn’t very good at blow jobs, because he bought some DVD when I was 20 to teach me the ABCs of giving head. It featured real couples and also featured the least sexy sex I had ever seen. Some of those couples had to be 60 years old, with mom-bods and beer guts galore. “Oh, that’s hot,” I thought, and proceeded to never give him a blow job again. 

Daisy then told me about some porn she saw where a woman had a ton of sex toys up her vagina. She was like, “She had the Mary Poppins of pussies! Like–just when you thought she was done, there comes another one!”

Then she asked her boyfriend, Wizard, to look up Urban Sex Positions for entertainment while she was incarcerated, and he came back with “the minivan.” Sooo….you’ve heard of “the shocker,” right? Two in the pink and one in the stink? Okay, so this one is two in the front and FIVE in the back, like a freakin’ minivan. “What, so you just punch them in the butthole?” I asked, mouth agape. She shrugged and said nonchalantly, “Some people like being fisted.”

Ew.

Then we got into a conversation about men on meth who want to fuck for six hours straight with their “al dente” dicks and do butt stuff, but never get off.

Boy, do I NOT miss those days.

*sigh* 

Good times.

Daisy says that in her county jail, Somerset (not Fayette, it turns out I was wrong), five people have hung themselves in the past five years, and four of them died.

They also make the inmates paint over the black mold before inspections by the state and there are no counselors. Inmates have been known to eat dentures, shoes, and pens, or stick razors up their rectums in order to get a trip to the hospital and get out of the jail for a while. The woman here who hung herself earlier today apparently “did it wrong,” according to the blue shirts in the kitchen, because she lived. Now she has to come back here.

Dear God.

Also, in Somerset County jail, they don’t let ambulances or the coroner into the building, so nobody actually is pronounced dead until they’re in the alley. This way, I’m assuming, they don’t have to count the death as in the prison. How nice of them. I’m sure this skews the statistics of suicides in the Somerset County Jail in their favor.

8:50pm

The women here are discussing how much they get paid. Most of them will get around $30/month. Some of them work six hours per day in the kitchen or doing maintenance for this amount. And that’s IF they don’t get 25% taken out for fines. None of them seem to know or care that this is legal slavery.

There is a Sergeant walking by who is training a new CO with very tight pants on. While they walked by our cell, he told her, “When you leave this place, leave it here. Don’t take it home with you.”

Must be nice.

“We’re going down, down in an earlier round,

And sugar, we’re goin’ down swingin’

I’ll be your number one with the bullet, 

A loaded gun complex

Cock it and pull it.”

“I’ll tell you what you want to hear

Keep my sunglasses on while I shed a tear

It’s never the right time…

I’m unstoppable…

I’m a Porsche with no brakes…”

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Life

About Suicide in Prison

April 17th, 2024

Wednesday

3:30pm

I felt like shit all day. They finally gave me back my thyroid medication yesterday. I wrote Motorcycle wondering if this shit is just going to keep happening to me. 

Then I called him and he was bizarrely happy, singing and talking a lot. He says it’s going to rain for three days so he’s going to take CBD gummies and relax. 

Must be nice.

Will I ever be free?

I prayed to God for Him to get me out of here and said that I didn’t know how much more of this I could take. I have a pretty high pain tolerance, but I’m pretty sure I’ve reached my limit.

I’m reaching the place of no hope for the future.

What do I really have to look forward to?

Nothing.

To the Girl Down the Hall 

Concrete and hatred

She said

To describe the prison at San Quentin

But she forgot

Despair

Childlessness

Hopelessness

Bitterness

And a huge amount of emotional pain

And suffering

That are also held in the 

Cages in this prison

How will the light ever get in 

When there is so much darkness?

How can there be hope 

In a place that God forgot about?

This place doesn’t just strip you

Of all your rights

In this “free” country

It also strips you

Of your very personhood

Your humanity

I wonder what the woman 

Down the hall thought about 

Last

Before the darkness

Consumed her?

When the noose she fashioned

Tightened around

Her neck

Was she relieved

That the suffering

Would be over soon?

No more concrete and hatred

For her

Maybe she was

Finally free.

–To Ashley Hernandez

6:10pm 

So, I’ve been wallowing all day, and then a lady named Zuko asked me in the bathroom how long I’m here. I said I didn’t know, but my max is next year. Zuko said her minimum is in 18 years.

I wouldn’t be able to do it.

I have no idea how people do this.

How do people do this??!

I especially don’t know how people know they’re going to die here and stay alive anyway.

6:50pm I called the boys and King stayed home today with a stomach bug and Superman was having a sugar rush from all of the Gatorade he drank.

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Life

Regret, resistance, and rape

I braced my feet at the bottom of the staircase in front of me and sat against the back of the door. The cops started screaming at me to open the door and bashing on it. The twins started shrieking in terror, and I started screaming back at the cops that what they were doing was illegal.

They didn’t stop.

Pretty soon, my father, why they had apparently called, showed up. He, too, started telling me to open the door.

The cops had no warrant.

I knew in my bones that this was illegal and wrong. They can’t just come into your house and take your kids for no reason.

This is America.

The bashing and screaming went on for about 20 minutes, but seemed much, much longer. Both of the boys had scooted over on my lap, so every time they pounded on the door, they were basically pounding on all of us.

I started screaming, “You’re hurting us!!!” because screaming that this was illegal was no deterrent for these people with guns and a battering ram that were terrorizing me and my children.

This finally stopped the pounding.

Their solution to this was to have my father climb a ladder to the upstairs bedroom, come down the stairs, and unlock the door for the police.

They all blasted in, at least six deep, and ripped my screaming children out of my arms. I would remember the feeling–the terror/horror–years later. It’s a feeling I would never forget–to see the looks in their eyes–all three of us sobbing and in immense pain. 

The trauma of it all.

That stays with you for eternity.

Then they tackled me, cuffed and shackled me. One of the cops feebly suggested, “Don’t hurt her…” while they wrestled me to the ground and nearly broke my arms twisting them around my back with my knees and face on the floor.

My father took the boys and left.

I had screamed so much that I was hoarse for two weeks. My vocal chords never recovered from that night.

I used to be a beautiful singer.

Never again.

The cops shoved me in a truck and took me to the hospital for a drug test. I was so dehydrated that I couldn’t urinate.

So they held me down and forcibly catheterized me.

It was like being raped.

Of course I tested positive for that one Percocet and the tiny amount of weed I had smoked, but negative for alcohol, which is what the cops were banking on.

I heard Copperhead exclaim loudly to the ER doctor, “Well, if she’s not drunk, she’s CRAZY!” as if that were a diagnosis.

It was.

They then started the paperwork to 302 me (commit me against my will) to a psychiatric hospital.

Off to Clarion Psych I went.

Again.