The Dentist, And A Bit More Frog Gravy History: Frog Gravy 44

At some point I am going to upload my entire dash-cam arrest video to YouTube (although the stop is so long I will have to break it into parts), but in the meantime, there’s this:

Frog Gravy is a nonfiction account of women’s incarceration in Kentucky jails and prison, in 2008 and 2009, and is reconstructed from my notes.

Inmate names are changed, except for my own, and for nicknames that do not reveal identity. My prison nickname was Bird Lady.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

Frog Gravy posts are gathered in one place at froggravy.wordpress.com, and, to get to older posts may take some backward scrolling through the “Older Posts” instruction.

Mountain and Stream. Jail Art by Crane-Station on flickr. Colored pencil. Drawn at Ricky’s World. I abandoned this drawing because I became frustrated with the poor quality and lack of quality control in the made-in-Indonesia colored pencil set from the jail canteen.

PeWee Valley Women’s Penitentiary (KCIW), sometime in winter, 2008-2009

I am randomly called to see the dentist, and so I am sitting in the dental clinic waiting area of the medical building with some other inmates who have also randomly been summoned.

Apparently this is some sort of a screening process that the prison does, because the inmate next to me says, to no one in particular, “Why am I at the dentist? I ain’t got no motherfuckin’ teeth.”

I am fantasizing about the prospect of dental care, which I rarely get these days on the outside. The last time I saw a dentist, I was in Ricky’s World; a veneer had come off the year prior. Only when the tooth was nearly unsalvageable did I get an appointment, which took all of five minutes and cost eighty-eight dollars, but first, forty-five dollars was extracted from my books for some sort of bogus protocol, where I went to the nurse and told her to please make me a dental appointment with an outside dentist.

Other than my fake release on parole and my actual transport to Ricky’s World, the trip to the dentist had been my only venture into the outside world. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be in the dormitory in this prison that is actually located outside the gates and outside the fences. The dormitory is like a halfway house really, and it is for minimum security, community-level custody inmates, but inmates serving sentences all the same.

Counterintuitively, there are few escape attempts from the dormitory outside the gate, although during my stay at PeWee, one inmate did just that. She took a few steps to the nearby street, got into an awaiting vehicle, and simply left the prison one day.

There was sort of a hullabaloo about this inmate who took a left turn outside the front door of her dormitory instead of a right turn, and took a few steps to freedom instead of taking a few steps the other way for the privilege of waiting in a long line of inmates waiting to be searched and then allowed to enter the confines of the razor wire and condensed madness.

They found her a couple of days later, at the mall, shoplifting Victoria’s Secret underwear, which, if you read Hannibal Mammogram you will know would be the very last place they would have found me.

At the dentist, they only count, and record, the number of rooted, viable teeth we have. I have something less than 32, I think, but to be honest, I could care less because there is nothing they would do if I had a problem with the number of teeth in my head, unless something was rotting, in which case they would pull it, stuff the bloody hole with gauze, and send me back to my job on the prison yard. Turns out though, that the prison population has a lot of rotting teeth that get pulled, and it is usually all of the teeth.

At any given time, you can see inmates walking around with mouths full of pink gauze. State dentures cost $188.00 and entail a long waiting period, so many women adjust to eating and functioning without teeth. State dentures often do not quite fit properly, and I once heard that an inmate got a tomato seed stuck in her state dentures…and it sprouted.

I am in the habit, or compulsion really, of writing everything down, and I always carry notes everywhere I go, so that at times such as this, when I am waiting for nothing to happen somewhere, I can jot things down or read and decipher. I have this note in my pocket:

The random notes are:

Spade game rules change as fast as ways to kill vampires

and

O, no you did not just play the race card

and

Butt hanging out reminds me of the trap door

and

disrespecting

and, circled, and penned in blue are the words:

frog gravy

As you may know I wrote this after overhearing some classmates in Horticulture talking about the finer points of road kill preparation one day when the conversation turned to frog legs, frog drippings (honest to God) and Frog Gravy in an iron skillet. After my release, I went to the internet because if it’s on the internet it must be true, and I saw recipes for this stuff actually.

There is also the name Jason Ison and some case identifying information, and the statement “women can’t get along so some become men.”

But there’s more.

In my pocket is another note labeled “How To Cook A Worm”

1. Go out in the yard and dig up the biggest, fattest, juiciest worm you can find.

2. Wash the worm thoroughly.

3. Filet worm.

4. Soak in meat tenderizer for approximately 30 minutes.

5. Fry in an iron skillet, and add soy sauce, and garlic salt.

6. In other pan, cook side dish of mixed vegetables fried in garlic butter.

7. When worm is done, lay worm on plate, remove vegetables from stove and lay next to worm.

8. Douse worm with A-1 steak sauce.

9. Bon Apetit!

You cannot make this stuff up, I swear to God.

Now I know, at this point, that Martha Stewart is about to release her prison memoir, but I guarantee she does not have this recipe in it.

Prison Life: Frog Gravy 42

My sister’s cocker spaniel Roxi by Crane-Station on flickr. Jail art, colored pencil. My sister is a champion at the precise art of weaving, hence, “Weave-On.” A fellow inmate, who was a dog groomer, sat with me and described some of the finer points of cocker spaniels to me, so that I could do this drawing. Hence, the great big feet and the long, pretty ears. Roxi is very sweet. She is also a hot mess! Very wound up.Drawn in Ricky’s World.

Music for this post post is CEBU dancing inmates:

Frog Gravy is a nonfiction account of women’s incarceration in Kentucky jails and prison, in 2008 and 2009, and is reconstructed from my notes.

Inmate names are changed, except for my own, and for nicknames that do not reveal identity. My prison nickname was Bird Lady.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

Frog Gravy posts are gathered in one place at froggravy.wordpress.com, and, to get to older posts may take some backward scrolling through the “Older Posts” instruction.

PeWee Valley Women’s Penitentiary, KCIW, Spring, 2009.

At five-forty-five every morning, the fluorescent lights buzz and snap on throughout the penitentiary, and we are awakened with the cheery overhead announcement, “Goood morning KCIW, this is your five-forty-five AM wake-up call,” that sounds exactly like “Gooood morning Viet Nam,” only with different words.

My roommate, Miss Pat, a kind black lady who loves her grandchildren, and I get ready for school. Breakfast is served in the dining hall at around 6 AM, but I usually skip it and study, because early morning has always been my best study time.

I have designed a rather nice imaginary greenhouse for Horticulture, if I may say so myself, for about $34,000. It is a 28′ x 96′ “Quonst”-style, plastic (polyethlylene) covered house, with fan-and-pad cooling, nice heaters, fans and lights, and a bit of high-tech environmental control.

I chose sub-irrigation. The benches are fitted for ebb-and-flow. Water is pumped into the benches, the pots take up what they need, and then the benches drain. I even chose this irrigation method for propagation (germination) over misting, because I think misting can invite fungus problems.

I’ve read that Europe, which is eons ahead of us in horticulture, has switched to nearly 80% ebb-and-flow. In fact, what is growing (so to speak) in popularity over there is flood floors, floor benches, where the whole thing is flooded and then drained. Fertilizer and insecticide can be delivered in this way.

Mealtimes in the prison are very busy, and the dining hall is always crowded. Dormitories are called at staggered time intervals to address the crowding, but often, inmates linger after the next dorm is called in. One chair in the dining hall is elevated and cushioned and it has a sign on it that says, “Reserved for Jackie.”

I am going to burn in Hell like a twig for writing this, but when I see Jackie for the first time, I cannot take my eyes away, because she has no arms, and is eating with her feet. But I can’t help it, I am mesmerized. She can do things with her toes that I cannot do with my hands, let alone my feet. In fact, she does everything with her feet and even does unassisted outdoor work in the yard with strength and precision. Her adaptation makes me feel like a clumsy klutz.

At some point, I ask Christie (who was initially sent here after her drug court denial) why Jackie is here, and Christie tells me that she was convicted of shaking her baby to death on the outside, a case of shaken baby syndrome. At some point, in my room, when no one is around, I try to get my feet to within range of my face and I cannot do it.

I have written to the Kentucky Innocence Project and requested DNA testing for the inside and the outside of the “baggie” in my case, but my request is rejected, because I am not on death row, I suppose.

Back at school, my greenhouse is a production operation, so the benches run the length-of-house. There are five benches, three movable (rolling), so the aisle is ‘floating,’ and the aisle is just wide enough for carts- this maximizes the growing area.

After school, I am picked, for no reason whatsoever, to be the subject of guard/officer Ogletree’s (who I call “Ogre,”) torment-a-white-inmate game. She prods and insults me all the way to main laundry, and forces me to change into clothing fit for a child. Fortunately, I have spare clothing, but I am in tears all of the sudden, because for some reason, this humiliation gets to me. I speak to Officer Kennedy, a kind officer, trained in negotiation, who will go on, I believe, to be Assistant Warden at a different prison after my release. Kennedy is very helpful, and I am able to return to the dorm, to walk through the inmate insult lines and laughs, all the way back to my room.

As I said before, it would not surprise me if Ogletree spoke backward or neighed like a horse, or spoke in a combination of previously untranslated ancient languages, because she is at the least, an egregious human being.

I wanted to say to her, “Bitch, I did not invent slaves. My ancestors were poor. They farmed their own land until they lost everything.” But it would not do any good. She uses her badge to berate, belittle, and humiliate, and grievances go nowhere.

Sometimes I think I am wasting my time with God, and maybe I should just throw in the towel and worship Satan. He is winning, anyway. Why try so hard to search for God, look for the good in people, seek truths, stand up for something, and try to be a better person, when it is so easy to just join in with the Father Of Lies?

The Tops Of A Few Trees: Frog Gravy 34

Swan. Jail art by Crane-Station on flickr. ink, magazine ink, colored pencil.

The music for this post is for Chebetts. (I have always loved this- Dickey and Duane, right?)

Frog Gravy is a nonfiction incarceration account reconstructed from my notes.

Inmate names are changed.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

Also posted at Firedoglake.com.

McCracken County Jail, sometime in March, 2008.

In the outdoor recreation cage, a room about the size of a garage with thirty-foot-high walls, a spider walks along the cement floor, exploring. The spider searches for the best place to set up camp, and it somehow knows which corners of the cage deliver small insects to its web.

Here is a tuft of human hair. The spider moves past it. There is a breeze. It is seventy-two degrees.

Inside Cell 107, I sit, with a towel on my head and take notes. We talk. We wait, but for nothing. There is nothing to wait for, nothing to look forward to, and nothing to do. In the beginning, I got up early in the mornings and did some standing-in-place exercises, but I do not do this any more. There is nothing to get up for. In more than two months’ time, we have been to the outside recreation cage exactly once.

In this cell we exist but we do not live, and we react but we rarely act. We gain weight because there is no real exercise and nothing to do but lie motionless and wait for the next tray. Mail is a big daily event, although no one really gets much, or maybe we do, but the jail takes it. One time, I wrote myself a letter.

Christie started taking antidepressants when she was denied drug court and sentenced to twenty-four years for drug offenses and cold checks. She stays in bed and cries all the time. The jail increases her dose. Christie says, “This bigger dose is gonna make me coma-toasted.”

Christie is 35, with two children (a third child was murdered). She has spent nearly eight years of her adult life locked up for non-violent drug offenses, and she has never received treatment. She has been in this jail cell for nearly eight months. She has seen her mother three times, her daughter once, and her son not at all. They all live in town.

We talk about how prolonged, purposeless warehousing in cement changes us.

Tina says, “I am not the same person I was when I came in here.”

“Neither am I,” I say. I’m getting mean and bitter.”

“You have to be, to survive,” says Christie. “I used to be kind hearted but I’m not anymore.”

“How broken do we have to be before they are finished,” I ask.

YaYa says, “I told them to come check on me. I gots cystises, lapsoscopic. Den, dey tells me I gots mental pause. I ain’t gots no mental pause! I’m only 41 years old! I ain’t gots no mental paws!”

YaYa’s untreated paranoid schizophrenia is often quite pronounced. She talks, laughs and sings to herself. She has violent outbursts. She fake sneezes, coughs and complains about a variety of emergency health problems.

I decide that when I die I do not want to be buried. I never want to be in a coffin again.

I review my notes from church. They tell us that we are sinners, and that we deserve what we are getting. If we want to fail, we will ride this jailhouse religion to the door and no further. We must get saved, or there is no hope. A city in the sky will be built out of gold and the saved will be raptured. Humans will be screened for the mark of the beast. A man who was homosexual was cured by reading Revelation 5:12. Young people nowadays lie, cheat and steal. People offend judges everywhere, and growing numbers of people are locked up because they are disrespectful sinners.

A woman in church shared that when her father would come home, he would whip all four children, just to make sure he got the right one.

At the end of each service, inmates come forward to join a circle, to be saved.

The steel door opens, and, for the first time in more than two months, we are offered recreation in the outside cage.

The walls are thirty feet high, and the cage ceiling is fencing material. The sun hurts my eyes. There is a breeze. I walk to the corner and stand on tip toes. I can see the tops of a few trees. I wait. Maybe I will see a bird.

I begin to pace in laps. On one wall an artist has penned a gigantic, wall-spanning erect penis, with anatomically correct, pendulous balls.

“Homies rumble, crackers crumble,” says some graffiti. There are many notes on the walls, from men to women and from women to men, and quite a few from women to women.

I see a spider. What a blessing. What a beautiful, living creature, I think. My heart skips.

The breeze seems to be from heaven. I can hear birds.

Then, YaYa says, “Hey Rachel. There’s a spider.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Kill it.”

“What?”

“Kill it.”

“No. I don’t kill spiders. I don’t kill anything.”

As YaYa is killing the spider, I try to find a bird to focus on. I look for the tops of the trees.

I carry the new pain back to the cell and sit with it. There is nothing else to do.

Underground Education: Frog Gravy 23 [with jail art]

Barn during storm by Crane-Station on flickr. Jail art, magazine ink, ink and colored pencil.

Author’s note: Frog Gravy is a depiction of daily life during incarceration in Kentucky, in 2008 and 2009, and is reconstructed from my notes.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

Names are changed, except for mine, which is clear in the documents below, and the social worker’s, also clear.

PeWee Valley Women’s Penitentiary, near Louisville, KY, 3-18-09, with a note about some animals on the grounds, penned on various dates and consolidated.

Before I enrolled in school, I worked recycle, breaking down cardboard boxes from the prison commissary, with a very shy woman named Roxi, who had the misfortune of being present in a home, when her boyfriend decapitated someone.

From our work area, we can see the large dining hall and the back entrance to the kitchen.

One day at work, I noticed a large, well-fed possum wander out of the kitchen area, where there is also a sewer, weave his way drunkenly led by pink snout, to the dumpster.

“You see Bob?” said Roxi.

“Who?”

“We done named him Bob. The possum.”

“Oh! He is so cute!”

“Yup. And we done fed him. A hot dog and a bologna sandwich.”

I look at Bob and think, well I’ll bet he never wants for anything.

If this weren’t real, it would be funny.

There were also a couple of prison calico cats that the inmates loved to feed and take care of, even though this was technically not allowed.

And then there was the baby bird that I was keeping warm and nursing back to health.

At the time I did not know any of this, but the prison staff would eventually kill Bob as well as the cats. They would ship Roxi, without notice to Otter Creek the private women’s prison, in Eastern Kentucky, a place where, according to some, “Lizards don’t even live in the yard.”

A guard will stomp my baby bird to death in front of me and then wipe the gore onto the pavement next to me, laughing.

If there is a place in hell…

Underground Education

I enroll in the Horticulture program, and immediately involve myself in the business of tutoring others, not in Horticulture, but in math, English, and Biology. I enjoy teaching because it is rewarding and sort of akin to clinical psychology.

Cricket never learned her times tables, but she wants to prepare for her GED, and so she asks for my help She is a mother of three small children, and when she got convicted, her hair fell out. She shows me some ‘before’ pictures. She does not have cancer, and doctors say it is not true alopecia either, because she still has eyebrows. Other inmates that live with her vouch that she is not pulling her own hair out.

Inmates are not allowed to teach.

My path crosses another inmate, Daffy, who also loves to teach, albeit under threat of the hole (or cell block, as it is called here) and we discuss strategy. My contraband teaching is difficult to prosecute, because, hey we were just studying together, right?

Daffy, however, who has a Master’s in Theology, has a following of inmates that are interested in learning more about Catholicism.

Daffy’s mother was Jewish, but she was raised Pentecostal, and later converted to Catholicism on her own. Her grandmother raised her on English literature.

We discuss our dilemma on the ball field.

Daffy says, “If someone just happens to find themselves out here on the ball field during recreation, say Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and they wish to join a few others…”

“For a discussion,” I add, “What’s to stop them? I mean they can discuss anything they want to, right?”

Contraband teaching. The truth is stranger than fiction.

One day, it all ends.

Cricket comes to me, in tears, and says, “I don’t need your help any more. They’ve done eliminated the GED classes.”

Others report the same thing. I make an appointment with my case worker and ‘out’ myself.

“What in the god damn,” I say. Some of the people I tutor are telling me that classes have been eliminated.”

“Thant’s right. The jails are complaining that they are not getting enough money because you guys are taking it all. Class D education is being eliminated; looks like inmates will be shipped back to the jails. I just wiped out an entire Life Without a Crutch class.”

My caseworker examines his computer screen.

“But Life Without a Crutch is a drug treatment class,” I say. “A good one, and most Class D’s are non-violent drug offenders.”

“I know.”

“There aren’t any educational programs at all in the jails, unless it is SAP (Substance Abuse Program) and you have to be a Class C (serving ten years or more for crimes such as trafficking and not simple possession) to even get into SAP!”

“I know.”

And so it goes. Inmates that were trying to do something, anything, to improve things with education and treatment were kicked out of school and out of treatment, in the name of money.

No educational materials allowed. This is a jail kite to the social worker in the McCracken County jail, requesting educational books. The request is denied.

A second request for educational materials is also denied by the social worker.

Author’s end note: I do not know the status of the programs today.

Frog Gravy posts are also at Firedoglakecom in the MyFDL diaries.