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The Diaries

Two months in -- swimming laps in the government cellpool

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Good evening, everyone. After another long day working at the Turnip Truck (an organic grocery store in east Nashville that is my new employer), I wanted to take a few minutes to catch all y’all up on life in the belly of the beast. It has been two months since my last submission, and I want all of you to know that I remain alive and well – and unbroken so far (despite the efforts of some to accomplish that task.)

As I’ve said before, everyone should wait tables at least once to learn how (and why) to tip. And everyone working in the social services, law and/or criminal justice fields should be locked up to know what life is really like for their clients. I have learned more about the reality of trying to get (and stay) clean and sober while in the system from my “roomies” than I have ever learned while working to set up drug courts and detox centers. Hopefully (one day), I will again get the chance to apply that knowledge on the other side of the fence.

Now for a quick summary of life for the last two months. After a noisy (and restless) three weeks sharing a bedroom with 23 other loud roommates – five of whom could win, place or show in the snorers’ Olympics -- I was moved to a smaller (and much quieter) dorm, with only nine others (and only one snorer – though he’s trying to compensate as best as he can.) That shift was a god-send, and has made my life and health much better. Of course, things are still not like the solitude of my farm. I still have roommates who insist on staying up (and keeping the lights on) until the house is closed (at 11:00 pm), and some who come in from work at 4:00 am and don’t mind waking the rest of us up when they do. But I have become accustomed to sleeping with a dark T-shirt over my eyes (my favorite is the one from the Police Officers for Drug Policy Reform – dark blue with a peace sign on it). And the noise is much more muted, as I have learned to go back to sleep (at least most early mornings).

Most of my fellow inmates (I refuse to call us “residents”, the halfway house staff’s term for us) are not bad people. There is a wide range of ages (20 somethngs to 70+), a wide range of prison experiences, and an unknown breadth of criminal histories. I have learned that when someone asks you what you’re in for, it’s how long you’ve been sentenced here, not for what crime. So I am pretty clueless about what brought most folks to this shared existence. It is clear that most of the folks here have been well socialized by prior prison life. So there is no violence, and rarely even the threat of it. (More on that later). But there is clearly a subculture that honors and thrives on violence (and sex). Many of the DVDs that the inmates get sent it are violence-themed, including films from the gangster world that include dog fights and other cheery sights. We also get the latest in boot-leg films, including the new “King Kong” (obviously pirated on a camera in a movie house, with the camera going constantly out of focus and the pirates talking in the background).

The accommodations themselves are very Spartan. Meals are barely edible – lunch sandwiches taste as if they are three days old and dinners often include pasty instant mashed potatoes as the faux vegetable. My favorite, though, is breakfast. When the house runs out of milk, they don’t go buy more. They simply serve us dry cereal with red Kool-aid to wet it down. No wonder I am losing weight – over 30 pounds in the last two months. So working in an organic grocery store (that serves two hot soups a day) is really a life-saver. I have stopped eating meals at the house, except for those times when I am not scheduled to work and thus have no choice.

To remedy that, I am working a 40+ hour shift at the grocery and have moved my computer there to take on a special assignment for the store (to help it become the first organically certified store in Tennessee and to help promote that fact). The assignment will not only allow me to earn some extra money but also will allow me to work on a project for a treatment center in Farmington, NM that is still mine to pursue. That consulting project will help me earn more money in six weeks than I will earn stocking groceries in the next year. But more importantly, it will allow me to continue to be of service to the Navajo and to keep my hand (and my head) in the field of substance abuse epidemiology, the field I hope to return to someday.

Speaking of substance abuse, it is ironic (and counterproductive) to be in a half-way house filled with people who landed in prison because of their alcohol and drug abuse problems (many of whom have come to the halfway house directly from a 90 day stay at a treatment center), only to find that they are not allowed to attend 12-STEP meetings. Not only that, the halfway house had never had 12-STEP meetings inside. Until, that is, your favorite felon arrived. After six weeks of pushing, we now are allowed to hold one 12-STEP meeting a week. We have now had three meetings, and attendance has doubled at each meeting. But the staff still can’t seem to get with the program (literally) and seem to resent our efforts to achieve and maintain sobriety. The last two meetings have been interrupted by staff in one way or the other and I have been “written up” (received a disciplinary report) for having too many books in my locker – all of them 12-STEP literature. Oh well, anything you have to work hard for is worth that much more. And clinging to the concept, traditions and steps of 12-STEP is clearly a lifeline at this time in my life.

And believe me, there are plenty of opportunities for service in my home away from home. Besides setting up the 12-STEP meetings, I have become the “go to” guy for other inmates who need to obtain a birth certificate before they can obtain other ID and seek employment and housing (all prerequisites for being released from the halfway house). Ironically, the first person I helped was the fellow who scared me the most when I first arrived. “Spider” (or “Spidey” to his friends) has been in state and federal prison for 17 years, during which time he has tattooed his skull as a spider web and his face with a series of crawling bugs, 666s and other charming embellishments. After the halfway house staff dicked Spider around for two months promising to help him get his birth certificate, I got on the phone and in an hour I found and enlisted a sympathetic fellow public health person in New Jersey to help get the paperwork walked through to completion. After that, I got my new church (St. Ann’s Episcopal) to arrange for a notary public to visit the house to witness the necessary signatures. And in one week, Spider was the proud recipient of his birth certificate. And of the knowledge that he had been misspelling his own middle name all his life (and that his mother was 17 and his father 19 when he came into the world).

After Spider, there was Larry -- a slightly befuddled 60+ year old with a slight case of Tourette’s and a big case of insecurity, who had just done two years on a marijuana charge (getting busted two months after staring an indoor grow operation in a rental house). His paperwork has just gone to Detroit, and I’m hopeful that he too will be “legit” within a week. I’m told that there is another newbie in another dorm who will be seeking me out soon. Glad to know that I’m developing a reputation for service, even though it is another irritant to the staff who are getting paid to do the work I am donating. Oh well, being of service and irritating authority at the same time – a pleasant two-fer if I have ever experienced one.

There’s lots more to tell, but I don’t want to wear you folks out. A few tidbits:

1) I have to pay 40% of my earnings to the halfway house for the privilege of being locked up there. And since I don’t eat there and they have provided clean linen only about half the time I’ve been there (I get back from work too late to get clean sheets when they are handed out), I guess they are making a profit on me.

2) I received a 12 hour pass to go to my farm on Christmas Day, only to walk in to find broken pipes filling my kitchen with water. However, I ate two good meals, loved on my two dogs, took a long sweat in the sauna and rinsed off in the cold creek while I was there. And lay down to take a nap, but couldn’t for fear of over-sleeping (and because it was just too quiet.) As nice as that 12 hour visit was, it is the last time I will be allowed home until Thanksgiving of next year. In fact, if I do my entire time at the halfway house, I am eligible for only two more 12 hour passes over the next 16 months.

3) I had a dust-up with the loudest, biggest, most aggressive (and most immature) Black dorm-mate after he sprayed our sleeping area with air “freshener” that made the place smell like a $2 cat-house (after I and other dormies had asked him to stop doing that.) When I got in his face, he picked up a folding metal chair to hit me over the head, but other inmates restrained him (as did my unwillingness to back down from his bullshit.) He has now calmed down some and other dormies are more comfortable calling him on his antics when he starts acting up. And my nicknames in-house now include “Big House”, “Big Man”, “Boss Man” and “Pops”. (I wonder what the names are when I’m not around.)

4) My friend, Marlene Bruce (with an assist from Dub Campbell), has completed work on the web-site created to help me try to save my farm. Visit www.saveberniesfarm.com and read more about my case, take a virtual tour of the farm and watch the six video clips that will give you a taste of the farm in the late fall. I really appreciate Marlene’s and Dub’s help, and hope that all of you will have time to visit the site and share it with others who need to know how fragile life can be when the feds have you in their sights.

Well, that’s enough for now. I do have to get back to the house before too long, to shower, to get my paperwork done in order to be able to leave again tomorrow, to read a while and then to cover my eyes with a dark T-shirt and sleep the sleep of the temporarily inconvenienced. I miss good food; I miss the ability to go, do and say whatever I please; I miss my weekly non-bootlegged bouts of fantasy in dark movie houses; I miss my regular 12-STEP meetings in Franklin; I miss the love of my dogs and the solitude of my farm. But mostly, I miss all of you. Keep on keeping on – work with whatever you are given and make the most of it. Draw some useful knowledge from my experiences so that my time will have greater value to all of us. Know that my moments are often filled with pleasant memories of all of you – and of the life we all have left to live.

Let me hear from you when you can. Come visit when you can – visitation at the halfway house is Wednesday from 6-7:30 pm and Saturday from noon-2:00 pm (808 Lea Avenue, Nashville). Or stop by the Turnip Truck (970 Woodland Street, Nashville) – I work there most afternoons. Come admire the 12' X 24' demonstration garden that I’m creating outside the store, to keep good earth under my fingernails and to teach the young kids (and jaded “Generation Whatevers”) who live in east Nashville where their food comes from.

Folks, it is all good, if we allow it to be so. My love to you and yours.

Your favorite felon, Bernie (BOP Number 16502-075)

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