Memoir of a Madman

It’s December 2017, before CoVid, before Black Lives Matter, before the Trump administration was plagued by the worst of its scandals, and I’m in my cell in solitary confinement.

Solitary. Colloquial for administrative segregation, or prison housing for inmates who are having difficulty conducting themselves in a way that does not endanger their own or another prisoner’s safety or imperil institutional security. It’s Christmas, or near Christmas, and I’m expecting a visit. If things go as planned, I will meet with my mother—who has visited me every month for the past 36 months—in the visitation room, where, every weekend, about thirty inmates meet with their loved ones to share food from vending machines, memories ensconced in synapses, and hopes that, for many, seem unlikely in their remoteness.

Prison seems like a lifetime ago. As crazy as it may sound, I made it to the penitentiary because I wanted to be there. I spent three years at New Folsom near Sacramento, California, as a result of a year-long stay at Atascadero State Hospital that was marked by constant misconduct. I did everything I could do to graduate from the department of state hospitals to a higher security environment. This included sharing chocolate with other patients and spitting shit at staff. Yes, I said “sharing chocolate” and “spitting shit.”

You see, Unit 4 at Atascadero was a unit for problem patients, mentally ill men who had a difficult time adjusting to the environment of a lockdown psychiatric institution and resorted to physical aggression as a coping mechanism. I had been transferred to Atascadero from Patton State Hospital for not behaving while confined to a seclusion room at the latter institution. I was on 1-to-1 observation during my last two months at Patton. I was placed on this extremely patronizing form of supervision because I had gotten into an altercation with a psychiatric technician who had not allowed me to change the television in the dayroom—even after I had taken a vote asking all the patients present whether a channel change was okay and they had agreed that, yes, in fact, it was. 

The psychiatric technician, whose name I forget, but whose physical appearance and ethnicity I do not—he was tall, black, bespectacled and African—did not accept the results of the vote and demanded that the television stay on a channel broadcasting sports. According to a rule that was not official and was not written unofficially anywhere in ink, the PT—contemporary acronym for “orderly”—explained that only athletic events could be watched on the dayroom TV. My request for the channel check was apparently out of order. I became even more disorderly in response to what I perceived to be institutional imbecility: I stood up, walked over to a 32-gallon plastic trash can, removed its lid, emptied the trash can onto the floor, then, when he approached me, hit the African staff with the plastic lid. 

Psych techs get training in how to take volatile patients down, so it didn’t take long before I hit the floor, head first. Before I could say Happy Kwanzaa in Swahili, a gang of other psych techs and assorted hospital staff were in the dayroom restraining me, and I was quickly escorted to a seclusion room where I was put in five-point restraints: ankles, wrists and upper torso bound to a metal-framed bed. A spit mask was placed over my head as well, since I wanted to keep fighting despite being restrained and the only possible way to do so was to expectorate at anyone within spitting distance.

Shortly before this episode, a patient I considered a friend back then asked me to hold a pack of Kool cigarettes and a sock full of change for him while we were out on our daily yard break. Even though Patton is a lockdown psychiatric facility, contraband, like cigarettes, illegal drugs, and liquor, finds its way in. Often, it’s the same staff that observes you on a 1-to-1, or checks your mouth to make sure you’ve swallowed your pills during med pass, that brings the contraband into the facility. “How,” you ask, “does that happen?” The simple and unsatisfactory answer is that some patients just have a way with words, and some staff have a difficult time saying no to money, even if it comes in the form of socks full of quarters normally used for hospital vending machines. Other staff are just pushovers who can’t say no to madmen who are handsome, flirtatious, or sometimes, both. 

After the contraband and quarters were discovered on my person, it was assumed that they were mine and the supervisor of the unit I was on told me I had just extended my stay at Patton for at least another year as a result of this most egregious infraction against hospital rules.  Since I had previously been told by my doctor that I could expect to be out within a month, I lost my shit and started acting out. The sorry excuse for an attack on the African psych tech supervising the day room who hadn’t allowed me to change the television channel marked the beginning of a long string of incidents that got me transferred from Patton to Atascadero where I ended up on the notorious Unit 4, a unit run in a draconian fashion for purposes of correcting unruly patients of their impertinent ways.

One of the rules on Unit 4 (Unit Inferno as I now term it) was that the sixteen patients couldn’t turn around in their seats in the small dayroom to address or talk to each other. Another was that patients couldn’t let their pants sag. Sharing food, even giving away your hospital meal or coffee if you didn’t want it, was likewise prohibited. 

Having gone from the relatively relaxed Patton frying pan to the rigid Atascadero fire, I quickly grew tired of Unit 4’s disciplinarian ways. One afternoon after having ordered a Hershey's bar from the hospital canteen, I decided I would give the rules against sharing and its enforcers the stiff middle finger, and after receiving my canteen order, took the chocolate bar, broke pieces off and shared with every patient on Unit Inferno.  

My nefarious deed was discovered and I was asked to stand against a wall to be frisked for what little remained of the chocolate. When I began resisting, I was forcibly tackled, then taken to a seclusion room and put in restraints. This incident marked the beginning of a personal war that I waged against all of the disciplinary and some of the treatment staff working Unit Inferno. 

Conventional fighting availed me of little. I was always outnumbered and outmatched by psych techs and hospital police officers, and what should have been a three month stay became a year-long ordeal during which I repeatedly demanded to be sent to prison and was placed in restraints more times than I care to remember, once for a continuous fourteen days—complete with diaper and catheter.

My agonizing frustration at the situation culminated when I did the unimaginable, even by most crazy person standards, and took a piece of my own shit, put it in my mouth, went to the dayroom and proceeded to spit it at one of the attending staff. Needless to say, I was put in restraints again, but my threats to keep doing the inhuman deed, particularly against the attending psychiatrist, convinced the treatment team to grant me my wish of going to the penitentiary. 

So, there you have it: how I went from sharing chocolate to spitting shit, and to getting to California’s Department of Corrections from the state hospital system.

Prison seems like a lifetime ago and on that Christmas or close to Christmas morning in 2017, before I saw my mother, which was also before CoVid, before Black Lives Matter and before the worst scandal of the Trump presidency, I did a Buddhist prayer in my cell, a prayer in four parts, including reclining, kneeling, sitting, and walking meditations, where I asked the divine creator of all prophets, wise men, saints and saviors, including Buddha, King Solomon, Jesus, Mohammad, and Pema Chodron to grant me an acceptable reincarnation, one where in my next life I’d be given joys I had been denied in this one, a life in which I’d not spend a single day locked up in a forensic hospital, jail, or prison, a life where I'd dutifully serve friends and family, like my mother had served me in this incarnation.

Shalom Aleichem, All life matters, Allah u Akbar, and Namasté.