To continue with Jail Week, let’s talk about the other inmates. The caliber of people in the Salt Lake County Jail were pretty much just as you would expect them to be; maybe a little less “Oz”, and a little more “Taxicab Confessions.” The majority of them were there for drug-related crimes, and more than half of them were coming down off of some illegal substance at the beginning of their little jailhouse adventure.

I was constantly asked, “What drug were you on?” and then I had to explain that oh, no, I just did it–no drugs involved, and they were all, “THAT’S FUCKED UP.” When that comes from someone that has armed robbery charges, you know that you’ve hit an all-time low.

As it seemed that I was meeting every one of those Homies characters in real life, I tried to imagine how I could market them after I got out, in the event that I chose not to prostitute. I had several smellmates, most good, and some mediocre at best. The first one that I had was at RCF (in Philly), while I was awaiting extradition. She had one of those conglomeration names where you take two boring names, combine them, and create an even more boring name–something like Taren. She preferred to be called “Suge”, and enjoyed cleaning at 4:00 in the morning, though she herself smelled like mothballs and old cheese. Suge was big, loud, black, and loud; though despite looking like a linebacker Ludacris she was relatively nice, and I didn’t have to worry about being stabbed with a shiv too often. She had an affinity for wandering around in her underwear (at the RCF we were able to do that, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing), and had one of her minions slather Jergen’s all over her, on the regular. Suge had a propensity to call me “child,” as in “ooo, child you don’t even know,” which made me think of her as Mrs. Butterworth with a doo-rag. As a Homies figurine, she’d be the one dressed in rags huffing Clorox.

To appropriately describe how fucked up this situation was; when I told them that I was being extradited to Utah, I had one girl ask if that was “across the border” and another one interrupt saying, “No, stupid, that’s in the UK.” I was asked if I had my green card no less than fifteen times, and was also asked if I was being extradited to Chinatown. I wish I was kidding.

Anyway, after Suge, I was moved into a cell with one of the only white girls in the pod (which, by the way, I was classified as), named Shannon. She was in jail to kick a mighty heroin addiction, and to battle a couple of possession charges. Though by the time I met her, she had been clean for months. We had dance parties (in Philly you were able to have radios–something that Salt Lake wouldn’t even consider), on the regular, and talked about classic rock. Shannon was probably the only one there that knew that the man Lynyrd Skynyrd was referring to in “Sweet Home Alabama” is Neil Young; and the only reason I know that is because Shannon told me about forty times a day. That was the thing about her, though she was full of interesting facts, she only had about five of them. At the time, we had three people shoved into a cell, and the other girl had a name like an overpriced piece of modern furniture, and smelled like an underage girl’s snatch after race day. Also, she never laughed. We had a few issues with her using (I guess I should say misusing, because she commonly spread something that was meant for her top pair of lips frighteningly close to her bottom pair) our things, which led to my first jail confrontation. For the sake of a good story I’ll pretend that there were death threats, bricks thrown, and poisoned drinks–but in reality, she just moved cells, and everything was fine from there. Shannon would be the White Homies if that exists, and Modern Furniture would be the deformed one, after a day of being ground into the sidewalk. That bitch.

My first Salt Lake City cellmate was a sweet older woman (by “older” I mean “older than me”) who had all, or most of, her teeth. Which, you will find is a hot commodity around those parts. There’s not much to say about her, because it’s all good, and no one wants to hear about that. SL Cellmate #2 was Mehelet, who liked to be called “Sugar”; I really don’t know what it is, but criminals really like their fucking sucrose. Sugar was nice, if not a complete hot mess. She had a mess of charges, and was constantly worrying about them–bursting into tears at the most random of times, asking “So, what do you think is going to happen to me?” Let me tell you something, it is hard being confined to a closet with someone who is always having a Garden of Gethsemane moment. Eventually she got a little better, and we passed our time playing a ghetto-rigged version of Battleship (you have paper, and you write on it, the end). Once when I was writing a letter, she interrupted by saying, “My brother…my brother is so hot,” and then proceeded to tell me what about him made him so hot–and I’ll agree, according to her description, boy is an Adonis. Sugar, the Homies with the permanently affixed tear under her eye, was eventually shipped off to the good ol’ state prison.

Okay, so, I could talk about these people forever, but that would make for an even longer, even more boring article–so for your sake I’ll split it up, and continue on tomorrow. Stay tuned, because we’ll hit Downs-Chewbacca, steamy lesbian sex (or the closest I came to it), and how everything anyone knows about Asians must have been learned from Jackie Chan movies dubbed in Spanish.