"He'd Be Dead and I'd Be Free"
A Story About Escaping from Jail
This is the 4th article in a series. You can read the previous one here.
We weren’t in disciplinary segregation, but it sure felt like it. Locked in our cells for 23 hours a day. In the 24th hour the size of our confinement grew to include a hallway. We would awake each morning at 6am to the sound of a whistle blowing — forcing us to get up out of our bunks and stand with two feet on the floor while two officers walked the length of the hallway, looked into each window, and counted us. We’d go back to sleep for another hour until the tray slots in the doors would slam open and we’d get our hot delicious breakfast. Another hour of sleep after that before the cells would unlock and we could roam the hallway.
At least the hallway had phones and hot showers.
I had developed a routine for my hour out, starting with a 20 minute phone call to home. There were only 2 phones in the hall so they had to be shared. At first I worried that I wouldn’t be able to get a turn, but it seemed like I was the only person interested in the phone.
The door popped open and Jared — my cellie — took his chair from the cell out to the hallway. He set it down just outside the door of the cell and plopped into it, arms crossed while people from other cells did the same.
“Damn, those fried eggs were good,” someone said.
Followed by, “I can’t believe they bake fresh bread for every meal.”
“Wonder how many days we got left here in receiving.”
“I heard it’s fast, like a week or two.”
“Well it’s already been a week. What do they have to do anyway?”
“Paperwork.”
Instead of joining in the small talk, I went to the phone.
Do they envy me that I have someone to call?
When I first went to jail I felt like the people on the inside were interesting. Nearly every one of them had some wild story about how they were arrested. When I’d get on the phone I’d relate these stories from the inside out — from the people I didn’t have relationships with to the people I did have relationships with. But as time went on, the strangers on the inside became more familiar to me — but no less strange.
I only had an hour outside of my cell, and I chose to spend 20 minutes of it tethered to a wall. I ended the call with an, “I love you,” or an, “I miss you,” and filled with longing for a place that I wouldn’t see for another few years. I put the receiver back on the hook and made my way back to the group of people sitting in their chairs.
They were all roaring with laughter. “Man that’s wild!” said Jared.
…I missed something.
The laughter faded a little, leaving me standing there, feeling left out.
Do I envy them that they don’t have someone to call?
Every day was more or less the same that week, until Tuesday when more inmates arrived from different jails across the state.
Fat Terry was in one of the van loads — a guy from the same jail Jared and I came from. He was a body builder in a former life. A lifestyle that demanded a lot of calories. But at some point he stopped lifting weights, and now he was a massive 400 pounds. He worked in the jail kitchen for about a month before he was kicked out and given a new job. The rumor was that the jail had to double its usual order of peanut butter that month.
He had a gray vinyl mattress in his hands.
A new mattress was about 4 inches thick, but after a week of sleeping on it the foam would collapse to half that size. It wasn’t uncommon for people to steal a second mattress from another cell when someone moved out, but they’d get caught quickly and be forced to give them back.
Much later in my sentence I met a guy who had the means to combine the stuffing from two mattresses into a single vinyl cover. Making 4 inch thick mattresses that stayed 4 inches thick. That was luxury.
Fat Terry found his cell and tossed the mattress inside before joining us in the hallway.
“Don’t that cell already have a mattress, Terry?” asked Jared.
“Yea, well now it has two,” he answered.
“How you get two mattresses?”
“One ain’t enough for my back. I make ‘em give me two,” Terry said. “You get your weight up and they might give you a second one too.”
Jared laughed, “alright then, let me get your lunch tray when it comes.”
Terry gave him a wide-eyed look when he said, “hell no you ain’t gettin’ my lunch tray.”
Some days later I decided to join a hallway banter session instead of hop on the phone.
A long haired stranger limped over to join our conversation. “So what's this receiving all about anyway?”
“We sit in these cells for two weeks while they figure out where to put us,” said Jared.
“I hope they keep me here,” said the stranger. “I’m pretty close to home here.”
“This is a level 2 facility,” Jared continued. “Most people stay here, but if you got more than 10 years or anything violent you’ll go to a higher level.”
“Oh yea, I got 14 years,” said the stranger.
The hallway went silent for a moment while people waited for him to volunteer more information. Everybody wanted to know, but nobody wanted to ask. And if he didn’t tell, then the general assumption would be that he was a child molester or a rapist and he would no longer be welcome in the hallway banter sessions.
So he continued. “I was serving 12 months for possession, but I couldn’t stay there. So I jumped off the top tier, landed hard on one of those metal tables below, and busted my ankle pretty bad. They put me in a van to take me to the hospital and on the way there I started messing with the door handle on the sly, just trying to make it look like an accident.”
He paused, a glint of pride in his eye. “I didn’t think the handle would actually work, but it slid right open. The guard driving noticed when we were coming up to a red light in town near Main Street. Only, instead of stopping he slammed on the gas, hoping to spook me. But I wasn’t spooked. The second we hit the intersection, I just dove. Did a tuck-and-roll, bruised up bad, but I was moving before they even knew what was happening.”
Everyone was staring at him with wide eyes. Not daring to interrupt. He continued.
“I knew this maintenance shed nearby — I’d done some work there before. They kept the keys in the trucks there. I was able to run on one leg fast enough to get in one of them and I was gone before they could turn around.”
Jared blinked in disbelief. "How’d they catch you?”
“Well it was my own damn fault really. I was willing to do anything to stay out — I didn’t care who I had to kill. So I tried to buy a gun from a pawn shop for protection and there was an off-duty cop in there who tackled me on the spot. He recognized me. If I had the gun before he recognized me, he’d be dead and I’d be free.”
Everyone stared at the floor for a bit, trying to think of how to respond. It’s hard to excuse yourself from a conversation when you’re locked in a hallway together.
Jared broke the silence. “If you got an escape charge you definitely won’t stay here. You’ll probably go to a level 4.” He then stood up and found his excuse, “Welp, I need to take a shower before we lock down.”
Shortly after we were back in our cells Jared said to me. “Damn, am I glad I got you as a cellie and not someone like that motherfucker. Anyone who says he’d kill someone to stay free is crazy. I wouldn’t be able to sleep in a cell with him.”
Moments later we heard a deep, low rumbling sound.
“Is that thunder?” I asked. “It’s January. Weird time of year for thunder.”
“Sounds like thunder,” said Jared.
The rumbling continued in rhythmic intervals for the next few minutes before Jared figured it out.
“That’s Terry!” he said. “He’s over there snoring. Jesus Christ, you can’t hear someone yelling at the top of their lungs through these cinderblock walls but you can hear that motherfucker snoring. Damn am I glad I’m not in a cell with him either.”