Subject: Authoritarians Use Threats
I was just threatened. Not just me. Everyone in cell block R. At 10:00pm, after head count, everyone was asked to convene downstairs for an important message. I wasn’t sure what this could be about, but I could sense tension in the room from the way the jailers were standing with their hands on their hips. The biggest jailer in the facility was pacing, poised and ready to address the crowd.
“Any of you know (I forget the name)?” He paused to look around the room.
“Silk?,” one inmate responded?
“Yes, Silk. Some of you may know him. He’s out now. There is a female employee, who, whenever she walks into this cell block, hears whispers of, “Silk, Silk”. It’s harassment, plain and simple. I won’t get into what happened, but I will tell you that if she so much as thinks she hears the name “Silk” when she comes in here again, I’m gonna put you all on lockdown. I’ll turn this place into another ‘seg’. We’ll see how you all like it after a few days of that. Okay?”
A pause. Silence throughout the room. The jacked jailer glances his eyes slowly across the room. He continued, “Anyone got anything they wanna say? Wanna question me? Tell me I’m full of shit?”
Another pause.
“Okay.”
Somehow, the way he said “okay” indicated to everyone that the message was over, and all resumed playing cards, talking, or going upstairs to bed.
A few minutes later, the only attractive nurse (and one of just two attractive women in the jail) entered the room, sheepishly, avoiding eye contact with anyone, even the jailers, as she made her way to one of the cells with some sort of portable medical device. The cat was obviously out of the bag. This situation was handled poorly, to say the least, but what else can one expect from an authoritarian? He must not know another way. The nurse’s name is Tara. I’m not one to make blanket judgments about people I don’t really know, but I do have a skill for reading people which I developed working as a fundraiser on the streets of Philadelphia, and I will say this: Tara’s kind of a bitch. Now, as a gay man, that’s not as harsh a denouncement as it may sound. “Bitch” is the kind of term most gay men use affectionately, and while I’m not being affectionate, I’m not name-calling either. I’m describing. For example:
When I first came to jail (on my most recent stay), I was brought in to see the nurse and answer a series of routine questions. Most (if not all) of these are questions already asked of me during booking, so it’s a little frustrating that I have to repeat myself when all the same information is on a computer and in their previous forms on me. Same info, every time. Date of birth? Under the influence of drugs or alcohol at this time? Do you smoke? Use any illegal drugs? Are you now, or have you ever been, suicidal? Before the inquisition began, I was sure to mention (and I always do) that I am a vegetarian, I have been for 2-3 years now, and it makes my stomach upset to eat meat. Tara, upon hearing this, nodded along as I spoke as if to shrug me off, then said, “Uh-huh. You can chose what you eat on your tray,” spoken to me like a dog expressing a preference for Purina over the store brand. It was as if to say, “You’ll eat meat, you snooty vegetarian, or you’ll starve!”
Bitch. Then she immediately began with her questions, “Can you confirm your date of birth for me?”
I was silent for a moment, expecting to hear a date which I could confirm for her, as she had asked.
“Yes,” I said. “What do you think it is?” I was not joking, but I asked with my normal happy smile (which is oddly by some construed to be arrogant). I genuinely anticipated that she would give me a date to confirm, not only because that’s how she asked the question, but also because she was looking right at my old file from one month ago and the times before that.
Tara returned my smile with a face that read, “I’m not amused, let’s get on with it.”
“June 8, 1989,” I said, still smiling, but somewhat deflated from the brick wall my positive energy was up against.
“Have you ever been here before?,” she asked.
“Really?!” I thought to myself. “You know damn well I have, bitch,” still speaking in my head. “Yes, I have, last month ¨C my file should still be here ¨C nothing has changed,” I respond matter-of-factly.
“We have to go through everything again,” Tara answered back with the kind of attitude a bureaucrat or a DMV employee uses when telling someone to “fill out the form again.”
“Are you under the influence of any drugs or alcohol?” she reads from her sheet quickly, without looking up, keeping her pen hovered over the box marked, “No”.
“No.”
“Do you smoke?”
“No.”
“Use any illicit dr…”
“No.”
“Are you now, or have you ever been…”
“No, no, no,” I said, anticipating the next two questions.
She looks up and exhales in frustration. “Let her finish the question,” Mr. Graves, the jailer present to oversee the process, instructs me. His tone seems to imply the words, “Just go along with her crap. She’s an irritable bitch.”
“She’s being rude,” I say plainly, and perhaps a bit whiningly.
At that, Tara slammed her folder shut and stood up in one motion. “That’s it. This is over.” She stormed out of the room. Mr. Graves sighed.
“What happens now?,” I asked him.
“We’ll have to try again tomorrow. You failed your medical exam,” he said almost laughing at the unusual turn of events.
“She was being rude,” I insisted.
“She was not, you should have just let her finish her questions.”
“But I knew what she was about to ask.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll try again tomorrow,” Mr. Graves said non-chalantly.
The next day I had a different nurse. The old one. She was much nicer than Tara, and even wrote the ‘J’ in my nae for me.
Okay? So that’s what I mean when I say Tara’s a bitch. For the record, I went up to Tara a few days later and apologized to her for being “snippity”. She accepted and smiled, and fortunately we haven’t been obliged to speak to one another since.
I can totally see a person like that complaining to a guard about hearing some inmates whispering “Silk”.
And by the way, doesn’t making an issue out of it just lead to everyone, even people who didn’t know Silk or know about the whispering, thinking the worst? Doesn’t it lead you, the unknowing reader, to the assumption that the two had intimate relations? Why else would simply dropping the nickname of an inmate in a person’s presence be considered harassment? How is that harassment? And if it were, shouldn’t the perpetrator be punished, not everyone in the cell block, at least some of whom (myself included) had no idea who Silk was or that this was happening?
I previously had no interest in Tara, but now, as a direct result of the jailer’s decision to threaten me and Beau and the rest of the guys in cell block R with multiple days of “lockdown”, for the actions of others, I am led to believe that the jail nurse did the dirty with a former inmate. Well done, threatening authoritarians, well done.
