” Lunch is your only warm meal every day, and it generally consists of some type of unidentifiable meat chunks in gravy, two pieces of white bread, overcooked vegetables, milk, and a piece of fruit.” Five days a week for up to an hour and a half, you have the option to go out to rec, though the exact time slot varies. The fenced-in yard is a blacktop square—about fifty feet by thirty feet—with a basketball hoop, but no ball or net.
Since I was not exactly a star athlete anymore, achieving my daily four-mile goal was a time-consuming undertaking that ate up most of my mornings. Afternoons, meanwhile, were for writing letters, and evenings were for journaling, recording in detail every nuance of my new life in a fishbowl. The skins I shed were angry, or grateful. Insightful, full of bold self-deception. I’d be full of hope one day and wishing for death the next. Convinced I had finally found God in one sentence, and ranting about cellblock drama two lines later. At the time, I detailed it all with delight and snark—it seemed safe to laugh at the jailhouse disputes that I took for nothing more than low-stakes spectacles. Looking back, I see they were not. Behind bars, the stakes are almost never low.
“Brandy,” I whispered, “I think you mean Jezebel. Gizabel isn’t a word. Jezebel is a biblical whore.”She grinned conspiratorially, and we all watched Blackburn continue to flip out in the hallway. In the dreary world of jail, this was high entertainment—and Brandy was willing to provide it almost every day, with delightfully colorful language.
It seemed that there was nothing for me to like about him— and yet I did. He was smart and understood both my drug jokes and my Shakespeare references. But most of all there was this: He treated me like a person, not an object of pity or the walking bundle of fuck-ups that I so clearly was. I have no recollection of requesting his presence. I assume I must have filled out paperwork to be appointed an attorney.