“Yeah I’m not apart of this” my cellmate said, raising his hands in an attempt to make it clear that this wasn’t scheduled. Two blacks were fighting and I wanted to shower. Showers for exactly 50 days represented a kind of spa treatment. Sure, there wasn’t the cucumbers on the eyes, the massage with your SO, nor the choice of an exacted privacy but in jail you learn to cope with what you get.
So, I had been woken up and unable to fall back asleep, this was often the case near 7am when the cell doors opened. Depending on the day, that rough morning wake up meant that I was going to take my first luxurious morning shower. Again, the dirty hot water attacking the skin was the only set of time that felt earned, it felt like you could breath in the water as if you were Aquaman, a foreigner to this land, rediscovering his powers to talk to fish and other fascinating aquatic animals. As I grabbed my towels, time literally slowed down. I’m just playing, as this sort of hyper violence (violence as a means to solve disputes) was expected by then; time felt normal, consistent, and I just had this irritation inside me. Seeing two people fight wasn’t normal but it wasn’t abnormal and, if meaning could be extrapolated, it was melancholic. Not due to some moral quandary or even a sense of empathy but watching a botched guillotine being transformed into a shove was just plainly pathetic. As if everybody had been thinking that, since the desensitization to violence is so typical among inmates that no one cared in the immediate sense, the dreary common complaining most men feel a right to assert only started upon learning that this meant we’d have to stay in our cells for 11 hours straight. That was the abnormal part, THAT was the biggest tragedy, your life had just been directly affected by others lamely fighting.
“You know the real prisoners are out there” the Honduran guy said as we briefly saw the outside world through what felt like church windows we passed on our way to some type of judgement. Not for me though, this was a brief meeting with my lawyer. This was a sort of welcome meeting as I had been calling him only to land on his monotonous voicemail that almost made you beg for a callback. The callback would be a face to face meeting, which only lasted five minutes.
Indeed, the Honduran had a point but it was just days later from being unable to take a shower due to a stinky guy, who got told that he stunk and just before burning 4 hours for the shortest legal talk of my life. It was beautiful, to be honest, and my brain immediately made the connection as if to remind me of the curse & blessing of being able to remember last week. As if to imply that this negative experience (thus negative experiences as a whole) can be compensated with an innumerable amount of stories and direct proofs of the bizarre yet sublime nature of consciousness.
But after all that (48 hours) I had just interpreted this seemingly meaningless statement as: showers are nice when uninterrupted.
Picking up
I had just fumbled a model. Well, it was either before or after, I can’t remember.
I was working at my first “boutique” hotel and the clientele was different in that they were fancier. Unlike guests from the Residence Inn, they actually wanted to stay there, whereas the miserable businessmen would stay for weeks on end because they had to. Oftentimes asking for the best prostitutes in the city, long-stay hotel guests were exhausting as they constantly tried to build an artificial rapport with the staff.
Much to my surprise, the model was instantly game. That’s to say, she approached me in a coquettish manner possibly due to the abundance of men usually too scared to even say a word to her. I, with a naturally-bred professionalism, refused to reciprocate this flirtatious yet intriguing style. Not because of a prudish upbringing rather with a mixture of naivete, ego, and perceived rudeness I used the line, “I’m not nice.” This was in response to her handing out her personal number claiming it would be nicer for her to wake up with a call.
I was working and had learned to separate my services from personal life as you don’t typically “shit where you eat.” I often recall that Curb your Enthusiasm episode when primal lust, possessed by every person, creeps up. Larry David foolishly asks out the waitress from his favorite restaurant only for the show to end in the classic title card and theme song.
The thing is, the meme still happened despite my pirated motto and creed.
No one wanted to pick it up. At the end of my night shift, the morning staff came in to tell me about the nice surprise waiting at one of the entrances. A homeless man had dropped his load right at the side door and what followed was a furious debate on how it was nobody’s job to clean it up. They had a point but you can’t just leave something like that for the “high-class” guests to see. Thinking it would just be like my husky’s poop, I heroically volunteered to clean up the mess by taking two trash bags, doubling up in gloves, and filling a bucket of water to rinse out the human litter.
It was the texture that got me. As I reached out and felt the feces, I gagged and nearly puked. Meanwhile, everyone else came crawling back only to view my visible disgust and overall dissatisfaction at the deplorable working-man’s condition. As if they hadn’t been arguing 20 minutes earlier, they feigned help by pouring the bucket of water in a way that made me wish I was wealthy and didn’t need to buy $200 textbooks, often written by professors in an elaborate get-rich-quick scheme developed by the whole of academia. It felt like they couldn’t even let me win this one. Despite my professionalism and willingness to do the dirty work,
I didn’t get the girl or the credit.
Categories, stories, & epics. 