On our two-week trek through the Himalayas, there would be several hours each day that we would walk in complete silence, seeing no one but ourselves and saying nothing to each other. Kimby would sometimes even turn her hearing aid off. My options then became to either share my witty musings with our SHERPA, who spoke very little English (and likely thought I was insane), or the occasional yak herder, who probably spoke even less. So, even if I did think of something clever to say, I usually just swallowed it. That’s okay, what I was thinking about barely made sense to me, and I lived through it. I can’t imagine what a Tibetan yak herder might make of the special Homosexual Unit of the Los Angeles County Correctional Facility.

************

Its funny how my brain works. Here I was in the Everest Region of Nepal, surrounded not only by peaceful silence and serenity, but also by some of the most epic and expansive vistas my eyes had ever seen. And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about the weeks I spent in Gay Jail. By comparison, it was easily one of the loudest and most claustrophobic places I’ve ever had the displeasure of being in my entire life. I’m quite positive my brain relishes in the dichotomy of extremes.

But before we begin, I need to clarify a couple things. First, I’m sure you are wondering what on earth Gay Jail is. Don’t worry, that is a normal reaction, I had never heard of it either, not until I found myself “living” there. Also, it probably doesn’t help that I have no idea what its proper name is. For as long as I can remember, I have just used the term “Gay Jail.” That is name I gave to the bizarre homosexual wing of the LA County Correctional Facility where I was incarcerated. Gay Jail. It’s short and to the point, no? Although that’s almost assuredly not what they called it. I’m sure they have/had another name for it, and I probably knew what that name was at the time, but even while I was there, it felt so very much like someone’s failed anthropology experiment, that I would be shocked if it still exists as an operational program today.

Secondly, before I begin this story in earnest, I need to clarify that up in the Himalayas, when I say I was thinking about “Gay Jail,” in all honesty, I was actually thinking about, and struggling with, something very specific; in fact, it's the same thing I am struggling with right now. Not Gay Jail itself, necessarily… but rather, whether there is a diluted way to tell this story without getting so vulgar that my grandmother would have to stop reading it. I’ve decided I’m going to give it a go, but I’m not making any promises.

This has long since been my litmus test, and the challenge I set for myself when attempting to tell a story that is, by its very nature, unsavory. How do I simultaneously maintain the truth and integrity of what happened, but without becoming unnecessarily repulsive or obscene? I call it the Grandmother Paradox.

Well, after much soul searching, and only in this one instance, all I have to say is—

Mamaw, just make it as far as you can.

This one time, I’ll understand if you don’t finish my story. Just so long as you understand, it was very hard to clean this up. Sometimes when everything people are doing is naughty and bad, I have no choice but to use naughty and bad language to describe them.

If you’re still trying to decide whether to start this story at all, let me further clarify something. If you are perhaps picturing whatever it is Martha Stewart did to her little cell, whatever fun and inventive decorations she put up while she was in prison, and that’s your quaint conception of what Gay Jail might look like, well… picture less of that, and more of whatever you imagine a hardcore gay prison pornography film might look like instead. Then, take whatever Rock Hudson-type character you’ve cast as the lead (Mamaw) and replace him with a transvestite who’s smeared Kool-Aid powder from the commissary on his mouth for lipstick and made a wig out of white cotton mattress stuffing for his hair. Then, imbue this entire nightmarish scene with bright fluorescent tube lights that cast a sickly green glow over everything and everyone, flickering spasmodically all day and all night and never, EVER get turned off and… Okay! Now I think we’re ready!

Oh, one last thing— if it’s any consolation, Mamaw, they don’t let you bring your camera with you to Gay Jail, so at least you don’t have to worry about there being any pictures.

***************

GAY JAIL. PART ONE.

“You’re not listening to me! I’m not turning down my phone call, and I’m also not saying that I want to make that call with my cell phone; you’ve made it quite clear, that’s never gonna happen. I am simply asking to SEE my cell phone, just for a second, so that I can get some phone numbers off of it. I don’t have the phone numbers memorized that I need to call, but they’re in my phone. This can’t be that unusual of a request. Who memorizes phone numbers anymore?!”

“And you’re not listening to me," the jail guard replies, "I don’t care.”

I continue, “When our forefathers wrote that we were each guaranteed a phone call from jail as our God-given right as an American citizens…”

Even I’m zoning in and out of what I’m talking about, or screaming about, rather, to the guard on duty. He's sitting far away, down the hall, and this is probably the 100th iteration of my little diatribe. My reasonings are all logical, of course, but mixed with a generous helping of legalese and whatever pseudo-legal sounding bullshit I can think of to try and make my argument seem more scholarly. It’s also possible I’m still drunk.

“…that was during the time of our forefathers when phone numbers were like 4 digits long and everyone had tons of phone numbers memorized! In today’s time," I continue rambling, "giving someone a telephone but not access to their contacts list is…. not in accordance with the spirit in which the telephone law was written! I’m pretty sure it’s downright illegal to deprive me of the very thing that would make the phone call worthwhile, the phone NUMBERS! Without the proper number, the telephone itself is useless!”

“So, are you forfeiting your place in line then? You are declining your useless phone call?”

“Ughhhhhhhhhhhhh! You know that’s not what I meant!”

“Honey, I don’t have any idea what you’ve been saying. You have four fathers?”

My head is pounding. Not just because I’ve been yelling about logical fallacies for the last several hours, but because it’s near impossible to get rid of a hangover and get your head right when they won’t let you sleep. If you’ve never been to jail, then you wouldn’t know this, but during certain portions of the intake process, they don’t let you sleep. Not out of cruelty, or for some punitive reason, no, it’s that they want you awake and paying attention. I understand this. If everyone in the holding cell was asleep and had to be woken up every time the guards needed to summon someone, well… everything would take even longer than the eternity it already takes, and they’d never get anything done.

However, just because I understood the reason why they didn’t want us sleeping didn’t make the reality of it suck any less. Especially when my head was pounding and especially when several of the guards always treated the "No Sleeping" rule like an amusing game— and one they clearly loved enforcing in fun and creative ways. You couldn’t even close your eyes for more than a minute without one of the asshole Sleep Nazis getting on your case. Once, I watched a guard throw some liquid on a person to wake him up, but I don’t think that behavior was technically allowed, and it never happened again. I think that guard might have been reprimanded? It was hard to get a grasp on what exactly the guards could and couldn’t do, because that seemed to change depending on who was working and what time of day it was. Some shifts simply had a better quality of guards, collectively, than others. I couldn’t say which shift was which, though, not with any real certainty, because jail is a bleak, confusing place where time stands still.

Also, it’s not like you could get any real sleep anyways, since during the course of the multi-day intake process, you are constantly on the move. You are constantly being asked to line up, walk down hallways, change rooms, fill out forms, answer questions, walk down more hallways… There’s finger printing and urine analysis and blood work and so many more rooms that they will shove you in to wait (but not sleep!) when all you want to do is pass out and sleep off the drugs and alcohol that are trying to work their way through your system. It’s exhausting.

By the time that you finally get to talk to a public defender, someone who can get your cell phone from holding (with your actual lawyer’s phone number in it), you won’t have showered in days and you’ll be sleep deprived. I can see how some people might easily be tricked into taking whatever horrible deal they are offered by their assigned legal clown, if they were simply led to believe it might just get them closer to a shower and a bed.

I was already atheist at this point, but I have always believed in cosmic irony and been hyper aware that The Universe sometimes f*cks with people in clever, almost poetic, ways. So when it finally came time to meet my public defender, the irony was not lost on me that, even through the tiny holes in the plexiglass window, my public defender had breath that reeked of alcohol. Fantastic.

It’s probably time for me to stop here and explain that throughout my life, any and all legal troubles I’ve ever had have somehow involved drugs or alcohol. In many ways, this is a blessing, because it means I have never had to go through all the indignities of incarceration or the humiliating intake processes sober. If I had, I would probably be more emotionally scarred by having to spread my butt cheeks wide open while a certified sleaze-ball looked inside my asshole, or having to defecate in a toilet located in the center of a room, while about 20 other people watched. (Mamaw, stay with me…) And for the record, I don’t think all of these inmates were also sleaze-ball perverts; no, it's just that when you are confined to a small cell for days on end, there’s simply nothing else to watch.

If your bail has not been posted, then the intake process could take several days, as they wind you around the maze-like hallways and corridors, deeper and deeper into the bowels of the correctional facility. Sometimes you get to sleep on the filthy floor of a hallway, other times, as I mentioned, they don’t allow you to sleep at all. They take away your phone, but they leave you with whatever amount of cash you originally had on you. This is presumably so you can participate in the jailhouse commerce of cigarettes and other small favors. It seemed they’d thought of everything, as each little bundle of cigarettes came with a small piece of strike pad and a match for each smoke. How thoughtful! Yet no amount of logic or persuasion seemed to be able to get anyone to grant me access to my cell phone.

If you are wondering why I was ever in jail so long to begin with, for something so minor as an intoxication violation, this is why. Without the numbers stored in my phone, I was as helpless as a newborn baby. I did not even know the phone number of the guy I’d been dating for over a year. I entered it into my phone way back when Christopher and I first met, and ever since, I just pulled up his name on speed dial when I needed to call him. When Christopher originally gave me his number, I remember thinking that the first three digits weren’t recognizable, so it definitely wasn’t a Los Angeles area code… and then I never thought much about it ever again. Great lot of good that tiny sliver of information did me now. I could say with complete confidence that I knew my boyfriend’s number to be … wait for it… not local. That’s all I knew. F*ck. Did I ever even bother to ask him where he was originally from? Maybe he told me while we were drinking, but I forgot.

I found out early on, when first given access to a phone, that the Jail People will understandably only allow a person to punch random, wrong, numbers into the jail’s courtesy phone for so long. My thinking was that perhaps a few phone numbers were buried deep in my subconscious, (maybe even Christopher’s number?) and they would eventually, magically, come back to me via muscle memory, if I was just given enough time. But there was always a huge list of people waiting to use the phone, so the Jail People shut that plan down almost immediately. They told me next time I was brought to a phone, I needed to know the numbers I’d be calling with a little more certainty.

I told them for the umpteenth time how that could easily be achieved, and again, they told me no, I could not have access to my cell phone. Not until meeting with my public defender— he’s the one who would get it for me.

Well, over a week later, that “he” turned out to be a “she”-- a she who smelled like alcohol and who brought me a completely dead cell phone but no charger. I quickly decided this woman was all but useless, and my plans from that point forward only involved her for the most meaningless of tasks.

She told me it might take her several days to make it back over to the building where my belongings were housed, but that she would get my charger just as soon as she could and bring it to me. I offered to just give her money to buy me a new charger, on her way home from work or something, then bring it the following day, and she seemed to actually consider this.

“Do you have the money on you? In cash?”

The smell was sweet. Rum, if I wasn’t mistaken. Interesting. But damn! I’d spent what little money I had on stupid cigarettes.

I said, “No, but there are tons of credit cards in my wallet, I give you permission to use them. Any of them, it doesn’t matter which one. Buy yourself a charger too.” Or another bottle of rum, I considered adding…

“That’s very considerate, but unfortunately your wallet is over in the same building as your phone charger. I’ll get over there as soon as possible, I promise.”

“Here’s an idea, can I just borrow your charger? Just long enough to charge my phone?”

“As you can see, I have a Blackberry. Not an iPhone. Everyone here has Blackberries.”

I found that very hard to believe.

“I find that very hard to believe,” I said.

“Well I find it very hard to believe that you can’t remember a single phone number.”

And with that, she finished packing up her things and was gone. Useless, totally useless.

At the last moment, she looped back. My hopes rose slightly, perhaps she suddenly realized it was preposterous to tell me there wasn’t one iPhone charger to be found in this entire building of hundreds of employees. Or maybe she felt guilty at having basically just accused me of lying, or maybe it was just overall guilt at how generally bad she was at her job. But instead, she simply added, “You know, every few hours they’ll let you have access to a phone again. I’d keep trying if I were you, maybe something will 'come to you.’” She said this last part knowingly, like we were coconspirators.

Ugh, never mind. She’s still not being helpful, she’s still totally useless, but even worse, now it’s definitely clear she thinks I’m lying about not being able to remember phone numbers! Well, join the club, Lady. Why does everyone find this so hard to believe? I was too tired to explain it to her all over again, how smartphones had completely negated the need to memorize phone numbers, so I just sat there silently, gave her my fakest smile, and willed her to leave. She did.

I had suspected on Day One, that without my cell phone, I was pretty much f*cked. And after being brought to the courtesy phone every few hours to “try again,” it was official, I was f*cked. Here’s what I had come to learn about my memory— that most fickle of faculties— and about my situation overall:

1. My brain had retained the phone number of exactly two elementary school friends from my childhood in Dallas, Texas.

Who even knows if their parents still lived at those addresses? Plus, hardly anyone kept a landline anymore, so they were likely disconnected anyways. By this time, most people had already made the switch to a cell phone-only existence. Woohoo, so modern and freeing, except this posed yet another problem— cell phones were unlisted. Or, they were in the 2010s, anyways. That meant even if Captain Morgan suddenly decided she wanted to start being a better lawyer and actually help me, she’d have no easy way of actually doing so; at least, not insofar as cell phone numbers were concerned.

2. I could Call 267 8433 (Because the next best thing to do, is Dal-Worth Clean!) and I could also call 1-800-588-2300 (Empire, Today!)

These were both popular television jingles from my childhood and… wait for it… they were both for local Dallas carpet cleaners. Ugh. Of all things. The small irony was not lost on me that there is absolutely no carpet anywhere in jail (but if there was, you can bet your ass it would definitely need cleaning…), and again, just like the landline numbers from my childhood, these numbers were totally useless. Thanks, Ridiculous Memory, that's 0 for 2!

3. Next, my favorite, I could call a number that every single person who grew up in the 80s knows by heart, I could call the fictitious Jenny, at 867-5309.

Yes, you heard me correctly, that’s eight six seven five three oh niii-eeee-iiine.

I remembered my mom telling me in the 80s that ever since that song came out, no one could be assigned that phone number ever again, due to people randomly calling the number at all times of the day and night, asking for Jenny. I wondered if this was still the case, all these years later? Because I’m pretty sure he never sings Jenny’s area code…

So, I would sit in my crowded holding cell, with the song by Tommy Tutone (and the jingle of two different carpet cleaning services) playing in my head, over and over again, on repeat. I had even gotten to the point of trying to figure out how one of these numbers might actually prove useful to me. (Jenny, Jenny, who can I turn to?) Maybe I could call one of the carpet cleaners, and have them look up Christopher’s number on their computer, and then….

4. And lastly, none of this mattered anyways, since the jail phone’s ability to dial long distance numbers had been disabled.

If I could have called Dallas, I wouldn’t have called the parents of childhood friends or carpet cleaners or fictitious Jenny, I would have just called my parents, and all of this could have been over and done with days ago! But there wasn’t a single person in Los Angeles whose number I had ever taken the time to memorize.

****************************

Throughout the multi-day intake process, by necessity, you end up making… acquaintances. I wouldn’t call them friends, exactly, nor would the “necessity” I’m referring to be what you are likely thinking. If your only point of reference is having watched a few television prison dramas, keep in mind, I was in jail, not prison, and I wasn’t even really in jail, not yet. Therefore, I wasn’t in need of any “protection,” or someone to “watch my back...” The main thing you find yourself needing at this point in the process is someone to talk to, and hopefully someone who has more information about how things work than you do. The guards tell you next to nothing about what’s going on, so you are dependent on the other inmates to fill you in on what’s happening -- and why. I quickly discovered that the guys who knew more than I did about jail included ALMOST EVERY SINGLE MAN IN THERE, so I decided I could afford to be a little bit choosier with my conversation partners then I originally thought.

Not only had most of the men in my holding cell been to jail before, but many of the guys had also even been to this jail before. They all seemed to know it quite well, they agreed on most things, and they gave the same basic advice; and without fail, every last person I spoke to seemed baffled, if not downright horrified, that I would ever “come to jail” without any important local phone numbers memorized. This was apparently Newbie Mistake Numero Uno, followed closely by “coming to jail” in flip flops and a tank top. “Why would you come to jail dressed like that?” I was repeatedly asked, as if I got dressed for the day and then drove myself there.

“Christopher, dear? Do you think this cardigan will be nice for jail because it’s versatile and has pockets? Or do you think I’ll get too hot…?”

Another common theme, present 100% of the time and with 100% of the people I met, was that not one person’s story about why they were in jail made one iota of sense. Everyone I met was innocent. Very rarely would someone admit they were guilty, and if you asked anyone why they were there, it was as if they would suddenly start rehearsing/performing the speech they planned to give in front of a grand jury. It went way beyond them simply professing their innocence, these were bonafide performances, and if passion were pardons, each one of them would have been set free. However, even with all this performative innocence, I was almost never able to get a straight answer from anyone about why there were there, or even what they were charged with.

“I get that you’re innocent,” I’d say, “but of what exactly, sir?”

“Exactly! I’m innocent, and she’s a liar! She’s a lying bitch!”

“She’s lying about what, though?”

“About everything! Weren’t you listening?”

“I was, but you have to understand, all of you, that I don’t know why any of you are here, or what you allegedly did. That’s not common knowledge, you realize that, right? It’s like I’m arriving late to a movie or missing the first 10 minutes of a Law & Order episode, the part where the actual crime is committed. And now your closing arguments are being thrust upon me, but I have no clue what you’re talking about. I don’t even know who ‘she’ is!”

It was either this little speech of mine, or a similar one like it, that won me my first jail “friend,” and my first truly worrisome piece of advice. It was from a heretofore quiet white guy, a guy that, I’ll admit, I had previously dubbed in my mind as the “cutest guy in jail.”

He saddled up to me and said, “This is obviously your first time here, right? You’re the guy that came with no phone numbers?”

“I didn’t exactly “come here,” that makes it sound like I picked out a cardigan and then drove myself here, but yes, that’s me, I’m Ryan.”

He introduced himself as Josh, and said, “What’s a cardigan?”

I didn’t answer, so he continued. “From what I’ve seen of you, you’re going to have a really hard time, especially with where they’ll be taking us next. My advice to you is do what I’m doing. It sounds cowardly but trust me, it’s for the best. You’ll thank me later. You should try to get yourself taken to Gay Jail. Maybe we can help each other out.”

“Oh, because I’m gay?”

“Sure buddy, that’s the spirit, but it’s not that easy.”

“No, I really am gay.”

“Sure you are. But seriously dude, they’re gonna make you prove it.”

“Oh god! On who?!”

“That’s really funny. You’re funny. But no seriously, they ask you a bunch of questions and stuff. And if you don’t know the right gay answers, then they throw you back in with the general population. And trust me, it’s not a place guys like us want to be.”

Guys like us. I wasn’t sure what that meant. He clearly wasn’t gay, and didn’t believe me to be either, so maybe he meant…white? That part was unclear. In fact, everything was suddenly unclear. I was so confused now, I wasn’t even sure where to start.

Is this true? I had options of where I’d be going next? GAY options? It was a relief that they weren’t going to make me prove my gayness with a blow job (or worse) on some guard... but I’d have to answer some “gay questions”? That sounded absurd. And what kind of questions? And how exactly did he think we were going to help each other? Maybe he wanted to cheat off me and copy my “gay answers?” That was the only thing I could think of.

And what exactly was this Gay Jail, anyways? And why did he want to go there so badly? Did I want to go there too? Was Gay Jail even a real place? That’s the thought trumped everything else running through my head— that Gay Jail was nonsense, and this was all just more jail bullshit. As you can imagine when you gather up a whole bunch of liars, cheaters, and criminals, there’s a good deal of misinformation and bullshit that gets circulated around a jail cell.

So before getting my hopes up and quizzing Josh any more about Gay jail, I decided to see if I could at least get him to tell me the truth about why he was in here.

“Do you mind telling me what you did to get thrown in here, Josh?” I asked.

"Sure thing! I don’t have any secrets, Man, I’m innocent!”

Of course he was, everyone was. But sadly, this is where all my hopes that Gay Jail might actually be a real place plummeted, and all my faith in Josh ceased to exist. Because the story he told me next was easily the worst, most convoluted, most preposterous one I’d heard yet. And I’d heard a lot of crazy stories up to this point. His stories put them all to shame. It made such little sense and was so full of blatant lies that I don’t even know where to begin. Josh was clearly just as dumb as he was hot, that much was apparent. Or alternately, he might just be completely full of shit. But if I understood him correctly (and chose to believe what I was understanding), then it sounded like Josh here was being charged with attempted murder.

*******************************

Now we were just sitting there in silence. He had finished his story and was waiting for me to say something.

I finally said, “A cardigan is a versatile knitted sweater that has long sleeves and an opening down the front. It can have either buttons or a zipper. Kurt Cobain wore them, for example.”

“Dude! You really are gay!”

“Cardigans aren’t necessarily gay. Neither was Curt Cobain and neither is just knowing what something is... but yes. I told you I was gay days ago. And I’ll help you be gay too. I don’t exactly believe your story, but I do believe it’s not safe for you anywhere else.

Josh, I’ll help you get into Gay Jail.”

***************

You're in luck! Gay Jail Part Two is now available HERE!