Solitary, Time and a Pink Thumbdrive

Last winter, I started a short story: one I've tentatively titled "A Christmas Best". I got it rolling, and the blow-you-away ending came to me within the first two or three paragraphs. Then, toward the end of the mid-story, any idea of transition disappeared. That's usually no big deal. I set it aside and knew I would return to it in a week or two and finish.

Then I lost the darned thing.

I've been doing a lot of traveling, so at the time I discovered I misplaced it, I felt it might be gone for good.

Like many these days, I store my stuff on a USB thumb drive. It's pink, so I can find it when I look. But this time, I found nothing.

"It's gone," I said to myself.

I re-traced my steps from the beginning of February to almost the end of it. I went to every spot I visited except one, to no avail. So I went there. It's a place where a lot of my stuff remained stored. I needed to get all of it and move it anyway. So I did.

I went through most of it with the sole intent of finding the pink thumb drive, reasoning I dropped it when I looked through the stuff during my last visit. Instead I found a file of about four hundred handwritten pages. On these pages were stories (in rough draft) I wrote while I was in solitary confinement.

Yes, solitary confinement. I was arrested for a crime I did not commit. While awaiting trial, I was placed in a maximum security solitary cell. Why? Because as a cop or more properly, ex-cop, one who put lots of outlaws (mostly felons) in jail for such a long period of time; the Sheriff, for insurance reasons, could not allow me to be housed in the regular population. It was allegedly for my own protection.

When I found the file, it took me back to that seven month period. It's interesting to note here, time is an unusual dimension. Linear time, I guess would be a better description. In my reflections I realized my memories of those months were compressed. Compressed, as in, time compression. While I could still recall my high school and college years and get the sense of how long those years lasted, I recalled very little of my time in solitary and my sense of time thereof, seemed only moments.

Since I am somewhat ADD (is there an adult onset ADD?), I temporarily forgot my search for the pink thumb drive and my thoughts on solitary confinement. I ventured instead into thoughts about WHY I compressed those moments.

At first, I thought it was the horror of it all.

I got one hour outside the cell to shower and use the phone over an average of every thirty hours - no, not once a day like you see on television shows. This was worse. The cell block was horseshoe-shaped and had an upstairs and downstairs. I was downstairs. There was a television at the center of the cell block, but it was left on one of the music channels most of the time. The music was not the kind I found appealing, so when it was allowed to be loud, it bothered me immensely. When the Dallas Cowboys played, the channel was switched to their game, but it was never as loud as the music. Still, most of the inmates on the block cheered in unison to the ups of the game, and during the downs, taught me curse words in such a manner, I can now invent them.

At night, when the television was turned off, several inmates felt it necessary to scream invectives, condemnations, chants, rants, raps, and other communications. The tirades would not cease until breakfast, which came at five a.m. without fail.

After many sleepless nights, I learned from a fellow inmate, it is a good idea to squish up wet toilet paper into little balls, then wrap it with salvaged "Saran-wrap" used to cover meals and stuff it in my ears.

With the annoying sounds gone, I wound up reading every book in sight. I averaged two a day for about six and a half months. I adjusted to my new environment during the initial two weeks and four days of my stay. Those two hundred books kept me sane.

Notice, I mentioned the reading was an average. I ran out of reading material often so I decided to start writing. Usually between ten at night and five in the morning. I slept after breakfast. After all, it did not appear I had anything else to do. I wrote "Hogs n Hens", and "Evil Wind" while there.

I realize now the reason my time behind bars was so compressed, and the memories were minimal is ultimately because I left that cell and entered the worlds I created.

It's amazing.

Solitary confinement and it's dehumanizing effect, the treatment by cops and jail guards which ran from respectful to decent to intolerable, the advice given by rapists, serial killers and hit-men (yep those were my cell-block mates), the ear plugs, the books and the ability to talk to the woman I loved by phone a few minutes every thirty hours, helped me focus on writing.

The writing removed the horror and compressed the tough moments.

I've written a lot since then over many years. At times I find focus, but never like I found it while in solitary confinement. I wrote by hand there. I've written by keyboard thereafter. I've often wondered how much I could have produced with a keyboard during that time.

It no longer matters.

Just going back to that time has provided a new perspective.

In looking through the file which took me back to my life and times in solitary, I found several other stories, even a western. I winced as I read them. Then I read the rough drafts of "Evil Wind" and "Hogs n Hens". I winced at them too; then realized it was also me who cleaned them up.

So, I think I will take the handwritten files and use the keyboard to put those other stories on my pink thumb drive(oh, yeah...I found it, too... inside my laptop case), and clean them up as I do it.

I'll have my ear plugs in and when done, I will write the transition I need to get to the blow-you-away ending of "A Christmas Best".

Then, I will start on some of those now decompressed memories while alone in a cell for seven months. I may even get to the reason I wound up there in the first place.