Home Is Where The HeartLess

I hold the power button on my clear tablet until the screen flickers. It takes a second to boot up. It's time I get something, anything, onto a page. Sitting in my cell, crossed legged on my iron bunk, my withered state issued blanket, folded under me. Specks of white lint from my socks pepper the midnight blue blanket.

Starry night.

If I stretch out I can touch both walls at the same time. Head and feet. The front of my cell is made of hardened steel bars; the way movies make prison cells look. The back of my cell is the same, except no door. Dust, from the catwalk behind my cell, is in perpetual movement to take over the surfaces of my cell.

This space would be a perfect rectangle if it wasn't for the angled corner where the toilet lunges from the wall. A sink crafted in the same heartless forge as the toilet hangs from the bars at the back of my cell. Two steel nipples flank the nozzle where water trickles out. One for cold water, one for hot. At least that was the plan. If you lean hard enough against a button with your thumb you can coax water out of the faucet. But the moment you let go the water stops. You have to wash one hand at a time. Luckily you can reach through the bars to the mechanisms controlling the sink. The best I've come up with is a folded piece of paper wedged against a button in the back of the sink activated by the button in the front. It keeps the water flowing long enough to wash my hands or my face.

Every Thursday a block of bright green state soap, the size of the soap wrapped in paper you find at cheap hotels, shows up on my bars. A gift. I use an old protein scoop as a soap dish. We're not allowed to keep anything on the sink. No one knows why. I keep my toiletries stacked on the toilet.

Fitting.

Each cell comes with its own waste basket; too small for a kitchen, too big for a cell. My desk is old enough to collect social security. The innumerable layers of every drab and spirit numbing color this place could find have rendered the desk more paint than metal. If the cell is my house the desk is my entertainment center...and my library...and my dresser...and my kitchen table...and, of course, my desk. Life in such cramped quarters makes organization nearly impossible. A few books are tucked in the corner created where the locker buts up against the desk. My institutionally approved clear-ish fan, book ends the books.

My clear, 13 inch, flat-screen TV hops around the room depending on what I'm doing. Sometimes it'll find its way onto the desk. Prison TVs don't have speakers. The cord to my earbuds makes for a dangerous snare, always threatening to lasso my foot and destroy my most valuable piece of property. I can't do another four months without commissary (food) to order a new one. That's why, once I'm in for the night, I pull my prison-approved footlocker out from under my bed as a place to rest my tube. It could survive the fall. Right now it's on the toilet. A homemade toilet seat. Reclaimed cardboard plastered with pages of tattoo magazines. It feels more sanitary and it keeps the TV from falling in.

A cable cord of indeterminate length winds in from the unseen abyss of the catwalk behind my cell. I hang clothes from it to dry.

Bolted to the wall above the McCarthy-era desk is a monstrosity of utilitarian design, otherwise know as an institutional cork board. I haven't decided if it's called a cork board in earnest or irony. I'm convinced this contraption was crafted by capturing all the hopes and dreams that ever bled into the ether from this cell and somehow pressed into a solid caustic substance and wrapped in something akin to polyester outdoor carpet. With excess staples and acquired tacks I've hung up a calendar, a homemade, half-done, thirty-day menu, a cloth printing of Millarepa where my Buddhist mala also hangs precariously from a bent tac, a collage of Monica and Cassius, and a schedule of our laundry and yard times. And partially wedged behind the board are loose sheets of scrap paper and a punch card of my migraine medicine. I've stabbed a pencil deep enough through the top of the board to hold up my hat. And when my little coffee cup isn't full of prison cocaine, I've fashioned a piece of Velcro that allows me to stick it to the board.

The locker in here is something you'd see on a high-school movie set. Though much older and much more damaged. It's as tall as I am, and as relatively empty inside as well. A single shelf gives me about eight inches of storage space at the top of the locker. There is a single rod just under the lone shelf. Which, considering we're not allowed hangers, seems rather pointless. A stack of books serves as a protective barrier between my clothes and the rusty metal at the bottom of the locker. Like most of us in here, the rest is empty.

Every cell is supposed to have a chair. I guess to accompany the desk.Though the bed is so close you couldn't fit one in there if you wanted to. When I got here my cell had no chair. It took me three weeks before someone rode out before I could snag one from the gallery above me. Survival of the fittest. I keep it at the end of my bed to hold my going-out clothes for the day.

The whole spot is illuminated by two fluorescent lights; two headache inducing florescent lights. There are two buttons on the light fixture. One, I'm assuming to allow us the option of illuminating a single bulb for reasonable lighting. Or two, in case the need to preform open-heart surgery in the cramped cell should ever arise and we'd need both bulbs. Only the dual-light instant-headache button works. The light fixture is also our only source of power. Two electrical outlets sit at one end of the light. On the ceiling! My extension cord is velcro'd up, nice and neat for presentation, and tucked behind the board, where it winds against the wall until it protrudes from the bottom of the cork board like a herniated testicle. Various cords protrude from the extension cord like exposed electrical-grade entrails.

And that's about it I guess. Every cell is different. Mine is by no means standard. I do a lot of extra stuff to give myself at least the believable illusion of comfort. The problem is, I don't think it's working. Even with so little, I feel like I have too much. I'd trade every piece of property I've accumulated over the years for internet connection. But a part of me knows even that wouldn't adequately fill the void left by a lack of freedom. There is no intended message or meaning behind this piece, other than to document what my house consists of, and get a few words committed to pen or screen. If you can find anything in here to help you appreciate what you have, then so be it. And if not, then that's fine too.

They say that home is where the heart is. But what if your home has rendered you heartless? Then where do you belong?

Till next time, your friendly neighborhood convict, Bobby C