As you might have guessed from the title, you really need to read GAY JAIL. PART ONE first, for this story to make any sense. And even then, it still might not make much sense. I've had over a decade to ruminate on my experiences, and sometimes I have a hard time believing that all of this was really allowed to happen under the supervision of the Los Angeles County Correctional Facility.

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As we trekked across the Himalayas, often across cold, barren, and isolated terrain, I had a lot of time to think about how I was going to tell my story of being in Gay Jail. I also thought a lot about how frequently I seem to find myself in situations where everything is foreign and new, and I have to learn a completely new set of societal rules. Whether it's Gay Jail, the African savanna, the Nepali Himalayas... I have a way of ending up in places where I have no clue what's going on and am constantly trying to piece things together using only context clues and a few tiny slivers of (possibly dubious) information.

I would sometimes get FRUSTRATED WITH OUR SHERPA, and shamefully wish that we had been given a guide that spoke just a tad more English. But then I'd remember to PUT MYSELF IN HIS SHOES. He was probably feeling like he drew the shortest straw of them all. Other Sherpas would pass us, leading their normal, athletic, well-behaved, wards quietly up the mountain, and here he was paired with a gay recovering drug addict who talked incessantly and moved at a snail's pace, and a deaf lesbian that had to stop every 30 minutes and PUMP BREAST MILK. More than I ever realized at the time, our sherpa could probably relate all too well with a story about being trapped in a very special type of prison and being subjected to some very unusual forms of punishment.

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GAY JAIL. PART TWO

We were still in a general holding cell, and one of my (many) cellmates had just finished telling the thoroughly captivating but completely implausible story of why he was arrested for attempted murder. He'd managed to do something I previously thought was impossible, which is to get everyone around me, both inmates and guards, to shut the hell up and be quiet for an extended period of time. You could hear a pin drop.

I broke the silence by saying, “So… Josh. I don’t believe for one second that a Vitamin Water killed this man.”

After his harrowing yarn, I had come to learn several disturbing things about Josh, and suspected I had previously let his cute facade distract me from what an idiotic prick he was. No thanks to any of his actual words (which I believed to all be half-truths or just outright lies), by the end of his story I was certain of a few upsetting things. Before getting thrown in jail, Josh surrounded himself with bigots, racists, and homophobes, and he was possibly all three of those things himself. I was pretty sure the only reason he was even still talking to me now was because he thought I could help him get into Gay Jail. Two things I did learn from him, however, and had no reason to doubt, were that:

1. His attempted murder charge had eventually been reduced to attempted manslaughter. So… that was good, I guess.

2. There were people in the world, possibly in the general population of this very jail, that would very much like to see Josh dead.

Hmm. That’s not so good, but after listening to his ridiculous story for the last hour, it was something I could very easily believe. Josh possessed the most dangerous combination of traits -- he was simultaneously both ignorant and charismatic. In short, I found him irritating and exhausting; but now I was invested.

Every time he told his story, or I questioned him too closely on any specific detail, Josh’s story would change. Or more accurately, new information would be revealed, and frequently that new information would completely contradict some of his previously established old information, thusly rendering everything that came out of his mouth implausible, incomprehensible, or just plain impossible.

It was an interesting phenomenon, but everyone I met, throughout my time in jail, acted as if their trial had already begun. Everyone behaved as if what they were saying to the guards, to other inmates, even just out loud, was being recorded and could somehow bolster their case. Or, God forbid, could somehow come back to haunt them. I so desperately wanted to make everyone understand that this wasn’t how things worked, that no one cared and no one was listening. Certainly no one with any real authority, anyway. Do you guys really think those barely conscious guards and the underpaid clerical staff could give a flying f*ck about the details of your case or why your probation violation was all just a misunderstanding? They don’t care, but furthermore, they will never be called as witnesses to reveal something incriminating that they heard you say while in lockup. Again, that’s inadmissible heresy and just not how things work.

But you try telling that to people in jail. They are constantly pleading their cases to anyone who will listen, and it’s almost always to people with no authority or jurisdiction whatsoever over their sentencing.

I am now going to distill what I learned from several confusing and contradictory conversations with Josh into one conflicted retelling—a Mega Confusion, if you will— as I came to understand it:

Josh was driving his car, and minding his own business, when he accidentally (but also quite forcefully?) threw a full bottle of Vitamin Water out of his car window. It was no big deal, the most he was guilty of was just littering. Except unfortunately, this full bottle of liquid hit a black man in the head. He used a different word when referring to this black man, who it turns out, was the sole source of all Josh’s legal trouble. Because, you see, Josh’s accidental piece of litter— the Vitamin Water bottle— was the reason this black man was now in the hospital, in a coma.

Initially, Josh maintained that this was just someone who happened to be walking by on the street, minding his own business, a stranger. Josh claimed to have never met this person before, but throughout our many conversations, it became clear that he knew an overwhelming amount of personal information about this individual. Furthermore, it was quite apparent to anyone with eyes or ears that Josh deeply hated this person. He became almost frothy with anger when speaking about him. It wasn’t going to require Sherlock Holmes to conclude that Josh was lying, a jury of parakeets would be able to see that Josh clearly knew this person. They would also be able to see that, by extension, the stray bottle of liquid that accidentally (but forcefully) flew out of his car window might not have been so “stray” after all.

This was the gist of Josh’s story, but the details were fluid and changed with such regularity that I was always on the lookout for him to slip up and finally say something like “gun bullet” in place of the implausible, coma-inducing “Vitamin Water bottle,” but surprisingly, this is one detail that always remained unchanged. Seriously, almost every other aspect of Josh’s story would change and get revised over the course of our acquaintanceship, but never the water bottle. As unlikely as it seems, to this day, as far as I know, it really was somehow a bottle of Vitamin Water that put his victim into a coma.

Much like a summer camp or study abroad roommate, or any other scenario where a new, previously unknown person is suddenly thrust upon you -- and all of a sudden you find yourself not only living with them, but also spending almost every waking moment talking to them -- jail can act like a friendship incubator. Josh and I started the intake process on the very same night, and so by the time we got to where we were going inside the prison facility, it seemed like Josh was my best (and only) friend in the entire world. Which I think is why it irritated me so much that he wouldn’t be honest with me about knowing the black man (Clive Robinson I would eventually learn was his name) prior to putting him into a coma.

He would go on huge diatribes about how much he hated this Clive, espousing all sorts of intimate details that only a close friend or brother would know, and then when I’d call him out on it, he’d clam up and say the exact same sentence every single time. Like a programmed robot, he’d simply state, “I have never met Clive Robinson before in my life.”

It was as if he’d had some very strange but very persuasive legal counsel, and that counsel had pounded two things very forcefully down Josh's throat. One, that for his defense to work, he simply had to claim he’d never met Clive Robinson before in his entire life (“Josh, your whole case depends on it!”), and Two, that he simply had to get to Gay Jail at all costs. (Because, again, “The very continuation of your existence depends on it, Josh! Remember: you don’t know Clive Robinson and get to Gay Jail!”).

Why did he think his life so desperately depend on getting to Gay Jail, you might ask? Well, this answer he’d gladly tell to anyone who would listen, and for once, I believed it to mostly be the truth. Even though Josh continued to maintain that what he did was an accident, he did acknowledge that Clive Robinson had friends, and that those friends did not believe what he did was accidental. Furthermore, he claimed to know with absolute certainty that those friends were in the general population of this very jail, and that once he, Josh, arrived, they were almost certainly planning to kill him.

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Josh was exhausting, and I had told myself I was going to try and spend less time listening to his constant lies and bullshit... but that’s like showing up to summer camp and swearing you’re not going to make a key chain. Then three days later, not only are you making a key chain, it's like your 5th one. Jail is boring. Josh was not.

In jail, the minutes turn into hours turn into days, and it dawned on me at one point that the guards were mostly just as bored as everyone else. They might pretend otherwise, but these guards were ready to talk. Really, they were ready for anything to help them pass the time, and they happened to have a whole band of entertainers trapped and ready to perform, right here at their disposal. If they got bored listening to one person’s story, they could even do the jail equivalent of changing channels. They’d just tell that person to shut up and be quiet, and then move on to the next guy. It was like channel surfing, and I think most of us were in agreement we wanted to stay tuned on Josh’s channel, the guards included.

It occurred to me that even though they were on the other side of the bars, they were in jail, too. It’s not like it was posh and lovely on the other side, it was dark and gross and smelly over there on that side as well, and this is where they willingly drove themselves each day. They really were getting dressed each day for jail, and I thought a lot about what type of person might find this appealing. Did it get around by word of mouth, in certain circles, that a work position existed where you could not only do next to nothing for your entire shift, but simultaneously, you could be just as mean and hateful as you wanted?

Hey, friend, you should apply for a job down at the local jail! It's a job where you are allowed to basically just blow off steam for 8 hours. Yep, you can talk as condescendingly and belligerently to the inmates as you want, and no one is going to fault you for it. You can show up and behave just as spitefully and heinously as your heart desires, and not only will they pay you to do this, hell, they might even promote you for it! (I contemplate jail employees more HERE, if you're interested).

Do entitled white people piss you off and do you wish you could talk to them in a way that you never could in the outside world? Maybe it’s Mexicans or gays that you hate, and that’s fine too! For the low low price of just driving yourself to the most toxic and miserable place on earth each and every day, all this can be yours!

When you phrase the position like this, I feel like there are people in the world that would jump at the opportunity to behave in this way. I even believe that with the right marketing, there are people who would even pay the jail to let them come and behave like this for a day. The jail could auction it off as a special package, an alternative to a staycation.

"Do you have very little power or authority in your own life? Are you tired of being bullied by your boss, maybe even the world? Come be a security guard for a day and see how great it feels to finally get to bully someone else! It’s very therapeutic! Take out all your insecurities on these inmates, these subhuman people…!"

I don’t know how much these guards are paid, but for many it seemed the true boon of the job was getting to behave in this unchecked way. They loved the artificial imbalance of power and reveled in every opportunity to exercise it. This got old very quickly, and so did having to repeatedly explain the situation to Josh.

“I would cool it with all your racial slurs, buddy. Have you not noticed who has all the power in here? Newsflash, it isn’t you. You need to be nice to these guards, they’re in control here.”

“I thought you said they have no power over my sentencing?”

“And I maintain that to be true. However, they have absolute power over how pleasant your time is while you’re in here, and that includes where you get to go next. I get the feeling all these guys talk to each other. There appears to be very little else for them to do, so they get involved -- I'd say mostly out of boredom. And I don't think they like you very much right now.”

And that’s when it dawned on me. Pygmalion. Scrooge. The Game (David Fincher).

“That’s how I’m going to help you get into gay jail, Josh! Not by teaching you to be gay, but by teaching you to be less of a raging asshole. What you need is a good, old-fashioned make over.

The one thing you have going for you is that your story, albeit confusing, is interesting. But right now, if we were watching this on tv, you are not who we want to win in the end. If this were a Law & Order episode, it starts with Clive getting hit in the head with a bottle, and it ends with your character's confession, and everyone is happy.”

"So you’re going to teach me to be less of an asshole, huh? But I thought you fags liked assholes!”

He laughed heartily at his own joke, and reluctantly, I did too. Josh sometimes had a kind of endearing frat boy quality about him. I decided I’d start with some basics.

“So first off, lesson number one, if you want to get into Gay Jail, you’re gonna need to stop saying ‘fag'.”

“Oh, I’m sorry man! I thought it was sorta like the N-word, don’t you guys call each other that? Fag?”

“Less than you might think, Josh. And actually, scratch that, lesson number one has just changed, you’re also going to need to stop saying the N-Word. In fact, I think lesson number one is going to look more like a list. A list of words you’re going to try not to say anymore, especially in front of a judge or jury.”

"I thought you were already making a list and this was number one? I’m so confused. Is this like a list within the list?”

“Exactly Josh! We want people to like you. I’m going to explain to you the Grandmother Paradox, and it involves telling your awful story in a way that is still honest and true, but also in a way that your grandmother could hear without feinting.”

“My grandmother was f*cking cunt, bro!”

“Okay, this is good, there’s two more words for the list, Josh; I’m starting to think we might be staying on Number One for a quite a while..."

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Stay Tuned! Gay Jail Part Three coming soon!!!

In the mean time, you can read about my eventual release, out onto the streets of LA, in a super practical OUTFIT MADE OF PAPER.