Sometimes the prison walls and barbed wire fences squeeze you a little tighter than you can bear — or it feels that way.
There are days when call after call goes to voicemail directly because friends assume calls from “Washington DC” are spam (Store 202-499-3650 as ‘BOP Prison Call’ so you know if a friend calls with an exciting change of location!), and days when mail is delayed for weeks, emails for hours, and you’re left to sit on your bed (“We’ll find a chair for you, soon! Promise!”) at 5am, unable to fall back to sleep among the cacophany of coughing and sneezing and farting (epic, juicy, illegal border-crossing farts that put the entire Disney sound effects department to shame), and shaking (Ice! Who shakes cups of a ice at 5am!!?? Cubby 3, that’s who!) , and knocking (don’t ask, don’t look), and flushing (not the same guys as the farters! Dubious!), and slamming (metal locker doors into metal bed frames!), and the shhhsssishhing of the shower, and arguing (Two older black men shouting at each other who is less gay, who can’t be gay because he’s gotten many women pregnant, and how despite getting many women pregnant he’s ‘got a picture of a tranny in yo locker’ and ‘want to suck dick.’ Good morning, everyone!) reading and contemplating whether, as God tells Noah, mankind is truly evil in its heart.
Maybe mankind is just tired because we’re all packed into a tight space and sometimes it smells funny.
In this week’s Parsha God says he’ll destroy Sodom and Amora, and tradition tells us one of their hallmarks was they were unwelcoming to guests — but maybe they let a new guy in and he just farted all through the night while adjusting to the new diet. (Not that that happened to me! ;)) Of course, there’s the Midrashic sources that tell us Sodomites kept trannies in their lockers and wanted to suck dick. Listen, you can find God anywhere in prison, and these men read the bible religiously in between their verbal accounting of every vulgar word invented and improvised in the history of the English language, and some Spanish.
I mean, I guess you gotta defer to God on this. Heck of a way to start the Bible, God. But I know a few nice folks.
Maybe God spent too much time in Long Island.
I got kicked out of class in Yeshiva a lot for this kind of thinking. But the farting situation in an all boys Yeshiva isn’t much better, so you could call it taking a breather.
“Everybody has there days. For me, I have a portion of the day that’s worse than others. You just have to keep pushing to see what happens,” says my buddy Jose, a really smart and sociable guy, a bright spot in a gray cell block. He’s been trying for weeks to get medical care.
He keeps a positive attitude, as we all do to each other, but glimmers of heartbreak and despair slip in.
Sometimes we vent to one another, and the other guys hold us up. Joe was heartbroken that his girlfriend, the mother of his baby daughter, didn’t show up to visit. In Prison, there’s no way to instantly text with someone to find out what happened. You might not learn for a day or more about a sudden change or emergency. The walls and fences squeeze tight on those days. The support of your friends inside encourage you to “keep pushing to see what happens.” We give this advice to Joe, and we tell it too ourselves.
Of course, so do the guys farting.
So anyway, please pick up the phone when I call. You don’t want to miss these farts!
Love you all.
Ari
