When I was just a baby, my mama told me, 'Son, always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns,' but I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. And when I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and I cry.
The first thing I remember was waking up in the dark, in the back of an SUV. Bars seperated me and the driver, but I could barely make them out. Blacked out again. I woke up sitting down on a cold metal bench, there were 2 or 3 other people in there with me at the time. I was wearing rubber sandals and the garb of a prisoner, a standard issue striped jumpsuit held together with metal buttons. One of the men was a hispanic gentleman on a possession of marijuana charge, he paced around and kept trying to use one of the pay phones connected to the walls. I caught glimpses of his conversation, he was trying to call his girlfriend. Someone else was standing up to use the toilet, a hunk of cheap metal with a sink attached and a confusing assortment of buttons. When he went to sit back down, the man who was on the pay phone got rather angry with him for not flushing, said he acted like he'd never been to jail before. Ah, so that's where I was. It didn't click until then.
I had to use the bathroom myself but I decided to hold it. After that, the waiting game began. I couldn't remember a thing. The holding cell I found myself in slowly but surely got more occupants. A couple black guys and a couple more white guys, but half the cell was hispanic. They switched back and forth between speaking to one another in English and in Spanish. I couldn't understand a word of it. I remember saying that I only spoke French and the other guys laughed. I noticed my body was in pain and I had a few scrapes on my arms and a bump on my head, and then I remembered that the last thing I was doing was stumbling around in a parking lot trying to make my way back to the apartment. Few of the guys in there started talking about how they found themselves in there tonight, one was driving with either unpaid tickets or a suspended license, one said he already had a warrant out for his arrest. I was sitting between a couple white guys, one of them looked rather old and his arms were covered in tattoos of swarms of skeletons and the screaming faces of black demons with glassy eyes. He noticed my self-harm scars and gestured with his arm to ask if I did them myself, I merely nodded in agreement. In my drunken state, I thought the white guy with long hair was a fellow metalhead so I asked him if he listened to metal. It was a short conversation, he didn't seem to be in the mood to talk.
Thankfully, I wasn't the only one there spending their first night in a jail cell, courtesy of the man driving with a suspended license. Looking around, I saw other guys doing their best to try to get some sleep, by laying on the concrete floor with their head underneath the seat of the two benches we were all sitting on. The lights were always on and the AC was very cold so I doubt anyone, myself included, was able to do anything more than lay there and shut their eyes. At some point the doors were opened again, they were bringing us plastic trays of food. The scrambled eggs were too salty. The rest of the meal was lukewarm grits that I ate with a couple flour tortillas. I remember someone asking if they could have something from my tray and I merely kept eating and ignored them. I drank what tasted like water with lemon juice from a small styrofoam cup and it took me a while to put my tray done with the others. Someone asked what I was still doing with it. I think I had to piss and I just didn't want to get up to try to figure out the toilet. I was still drunk. At some point I started coughing my typical smoker's cough and unintentionally I coughed out some bright red vomit that I had to spit onto the floor. The same guy as before got angry with me as well, but I think he noticed that I was too far gone to have any sort of reason talked into me so I just got up and spit the rest out into the toilet. I couldn't figure out how to flush it so I just used water from the sink to clean up the area.
Eventually the cell got a bit too full so they opened up a second one for us. Thankfully, this toilet was pretty easy to use. The only downside is that by the time I finished pissing, everyone had already claimed a seat on the benches so I had to sit in the middle of the concrete floor with the older man from earlier. This time he was trying to sleep, curled up in a fetal position on the concrete. The walls were a bit more yellow this time around. Someone in the other room was making quite a bit of noise, screaming all night and banging on the walls. All you could hear from the room was his screams and occasional dull thuds. The others joked that he sounded like he should be in a band. Crazy motherfucker,
someone called him. A lot of jokes were passed around that night, usually at the expense of others. All were directed outside of the cell, at various employees and others walking around in differently colored jumpsuits. A couple of the jokes did manage to get a couple genuine laughs out of me. Someone else mentioned something about one of the guys in there reading a One Piece manga that he brought with him that I guess he was allowed to hold onto. Someone else was reading a Bible, he said it only had the New Testament. They all started talked about reading the book of Revelations. Funnily enough, I ran into someone that I went to high school with. We were in the same graduating class. When you live in a small town it's hard to get away from people you grew up with, even in spots like these.
Very late into the night a guard would come into our cell and ask for four last names, it took a couple of rounds before mine was called. I had no idea what it was for but I went along with them. I first had to go up to a desk where they asked about various information on my ID and questions about where I was living. The guard was a woman with a ponytail who almost looked like one of my old coworkers. Even as drunk as I was I managed to give them all correct information so I was told to go down the hall to another room where someone there was waiting to scan my fingerprints into a machine. He asked me what I got picked up for and I told him the story of what I remembered and he said, oh, that's nothing. Just a misdemeanor, you should be out of here by the morning and all you'll have to do is pay a fine.
Finally some good news. After that, following more waiting around in the cell again I was told to go through the big door that said Releases
over it in big, black letters. The others and I sat down on benches that reminded me of the kind you'd find in the playground at recess, except they were made of metal and had curved bars that seperated all the seats so you couldn't lay down on it. Eventually I had a few papers to sign, not only with the pen they provided, but my fingerprints as well. Then, we got our clothes back. We all had to get undressed by each other and put our old clothes back in the big plastic bag. We wouldn't get the rest of our possessions until we had finally been released.
There were a few more halls to walk down until we were let out, each one looked slightly more welcoming than the last, which was brown and covered in wood paneling. When we were all finally out, someone had a pack of black Marlboro menthols on him and I asked him for a dart. He obliged. The three other men I was with all walked together towards another road and that was the last I saw of them. I got my phone back in a plastic bag along with my wallet and keys, I remember the plastic being difficult to open. So, I called my brother and he picked me up within 20 minutes, and I was gone.