As I sat at this bar one night and listened to Bull and Ray wax philosophical about the meaning of life, I gazed over at the dusty and sticky TV suspended above the bar and I looked at the images flowing through the screen and realized that this life is not meaningful. Commercials just flashing across the screen, buy this, buy that, bigger cocks, bigger houses, bigger cars, bigger budgets, harder jobs, and it is all meaningless. Televised sports, unbelievable dramas, news reports of theft and death, we don’t
need this. I reflected back upon the life I had been living for the past two years and realized I had been washed up into all of this. I remembered a time when none of these things had ever mattered to me when I was idealistic and pure. However, there was a point when I wanted to throw it all away and become a machine of this modern society, to fit in, become one of them. Why you ask, because the law had brought me down for my free-living ways, and the only option if I had if I continued was the penitentiary.
It all began one night when I had been sitting in Central Bookings Jail in
New York City after yet another marijuana charge. As I sat there sizing up my surroundings and being all to used to this current situation, I began to look at the faces of my fellow cellmates. I really started to see the lives and troubles of these men, they were broken down by the law, they had lost their freedom, they had lost their way. I started to think to myself that if I continued along my path that I would soon become one of them. I would lose my freedom. And this was a thing I cherished more than anything at this time. I was a man who liked to do anything he wanted to at any given time and not be bothered about it. To me that was right, that was what
America was supposed to mean,
freedom. Well that is why we rebelled against the British, we wanted to live our lives in whatever fashion we chose to do so. Choice of religion, being able to speak our minds in public without repercussions, a chance to pursue the careers we liked, and free to enjoy the simple pleasures in life. Nevertheless, over the years it has all become warped slowly but surely, we have become encompassed by the laws we had once rebelled against. And for what? Protection from imaginary troubles and enemies that vaguely exist.
Anyway, I had decided at this point that I would not become one of these men, that I should just sell out and buy in, keep my head down while marching to and from capitalistic metropolises to horde my dollars and live a life of security. I still had several trials pending against me in my home state of
New Jersey, but I would turn over a new leaf and go to school to receive that piece of paper that proved I was a robot. All I had to do now was wait. Mark and I were waiting in this den of thieves for days only to emerge back onto the city streets. What a dismal scene this place was, haggard old thieves, narcotic driven party kids of the
New York streets, bummed out potheads, and even a minor who didn’t belong there but was lumped in with us anyway. This was very different from our previous holding cell in the sixth precinct where it had been a party.
To explain better, we were at the Annual Marijuana Legalization march that was usually held in
Washington Square Park, although this particular year when we arrived the park was dead. Uniformed police were everywhere. Moreover, no rally was taking place. We ran into our friend Jessica who told us that everyone had moved down to Battery Park instead, so we hit the street. As we tromped downtown, we saw more and more people heading to the park, we were on the right track. When we had arrived, there were many people, drum circles, live bands and everyone was toking up. It felt good to be in the heart of law-ridden
America, but in a sanctuary of freedom, where we could do whatever we wanted to and did. We found a nice spot under a tree and stood in a circle, that consisted of me (by the way my name is Xavier), Mark, Bull, and Bull’s older brother Jeremy. We had this nice pouch of Backwoods cigars emptied out and rerolled with gear. We broke a few out and started to breathe them in gently in the sweet spring air. Everything felt right, we were free to do as we wished and it felt liberating. Surrounded by people doing as we were, and dancing ravers in the drum circles, and a band playing with the front man covered in blue paint. But our harmonious vibe was broken. I looked over and saw men with dark sunglasses starting to penetrate the crowd, two approached our circle and grabbed Mark and I, we were thrown down, and cold steel grappled our wrists. Before anybody knew it, half the crowd had been whisked away into boiling hot paddy wagons on the
New York streets. We sat there for hours sweltering in this ridiculous heat. My nose started to bleed, for what reason I will never know. During this first stage of incarceration, chants kept coming from the park of “Let them go! Let them go!” it was nice to know that people were behind us, not like the machines of corporate
America who would look blindly upon a woman being raped in an alley. After all of this we were taken down to the nearest precinct and all thrown into a cell the size of a basement. Five hundred potheads all lumped into together, some not searched as well as others. Contraband was leaked in and a party ensued, we may have been in jail but we were still smoking joints, selling cigarettes and other miscellaneous items. In fact, out of all my stints in jail, this was by far my favorite. But all good things must come to an end.
This was when we shipped off to Central Bookings for a few days. After the usual processing of mug shots, fingerprinting, searching, and booking questions we were thrown into the regular mix of night and day criminals of the greater
New York area. I remember one scared sixteen-year-old boy who kept puking in the sink. My friend Mark went over to the C.O. and said, “Hey man, this kid keeps getting sick in the sink, and he doesn’t even belong in here.” Only to get a simple reply of “I don’t give a shit.” After a while, the natives got restless and punished this young boy for puking in there drinking water. This one large black guy who had been sitting next to me for a day, talking about his thieving on the streets; had gotten up when the boy went to puke again, grabbed him by the back of his hair and starting slamming his face into the steel sink. Whap! Whap! Whap! The young boy screamed “PLEASE… STOP!” You could hear his voice gurgling as the blood flowed out of his mouth. The large thief replied “Fuck you, you little cracka, you been dirtyin’ up our sink all day and I ain’t gonna stand for it no more, somebody got to teach you a lesson.” BANG! BANG! He just kept going. After a minute of this he let go of his blonde locks and the kid dropped to the floor while a crimson puddle began to encircle his head, but only to have the man’s partner join in by kicking him in the ribs and saying “Die you little punk, DIE!” When the C.O.’s caught wind of all this they rushed in and sprayed shots of mace into their eyes, as these two black thieves of the night lay flailing and screaming on the floor one C.O. unsheathed his billy club and laid this one pristine hit right across the big one’s mouth unleashing an eruption of blood and teeth across the jail room floor. After that, they dragged the two men off kicking and screaming to some unseen torture outside of the view of us common inmates. Then they picked up the kid from by the sink, when they raised him up he looked like rotten piece of fruit with blood saturating his face and clothes. When it was all done, there was a trail like a river of blood in the middle of cell from where these men and the kid had been dragged out. Mark and I went back to our shifts of one us sleeping and the other one flicking the cockroaches off the sleeping one’s body.
After a few days of changing cells and listening to the stories of these devout criminals of the
New York underworld, we were taken up out of the basement network of cells and onto the ground floor. It was into a final one-man holding cell before court so we could talk to our public defender. The walls in this cell were covered with the scribbling of its previous inhabitants. How many men did this bureaucratic collective elite of American power hold down? Too many, there was so much writing on the walls that the phrases covered each other and created a sanctuary of jumbled letters. In walked the public defender; through the chicken wire laced glass partition he explained to me that the case would be dismissed, he said ”Mayor Giuliani just wants to teach you punks a lesson, that this type of behavior will no longer be tolerated in our great city of New York”
This behavior? What do you rich old white men hiding in your gated communities know about how the majority of the American public should behave? I can’t smoke a natural growing plant of this infinitely old earth, but you can be consumed by greed and fascism, and trample over the backs of poorer men to get whatever you want.
So we were released onto the steps of the Central Bookings courthouse where we ran into these two hippies pleading “Sign this petition man, we’re trying to get all of you to sign and send city hall a message.” All I said was “No, I don’t wanna fuck with my case.” So Mark and I start walking uptown along
Varrick St. to get to the sixth Precinct. They had confiscated all of Mark’s belongings, but left mine on me. After a quick bite and some Gatorade’s (all we had in jail was Kool-Aid with no sugar and green bologna sandwiches) we arrived at the sixth. We walked in and saw a guy and his girl pleading to the cops to get there stuff back. He kept saying “But I need to get my key so I can get into my place, I live in
Pennsylvania, and I ain’t coming back.” Then Mark tried to get his stuff back too, but to no avail. It seemed as if they had confiscated everybody’s stuff and it was now property of the state. After all that nonsense, we jumped on the subway and went to Penn station where we took the transit back to Matawan in
New Jersey near our homes. Upon arrival we called Bull from a pay phone at the 7-11 near the station and told him he needed to pick us up, shortly afterward we sitting in Bull’s garage smoking a nice fat blunt of kind bud.
The rangers had a homecoming in Harlem late last night
