The Clink, part 2: Rude Awakening
He reached over and felt the bracelets that gripped his arms to the bars he could only feel. His eyes still didn’t work, not that they didn’t open, but he heard the doctors speak about contusions, brain trauma, and partial blindness. Jules, coughed and it startled the doctors. A nurse rushed to his side and starting asking questions a mile a minute, but he could only barely hear her.
“Stop,” he pushed a struggling voice passed his lips.
“What, honey?”
The nurse was little more than a haze of yellow hair and peach colored hue. The mixture of blues and greens and the oddest purple dots on whatever she wore, it almost hangs from her shoulders like curtains too big for a window. “Talk to us, tell us you’re okay.”
The focus becomes softer, but he still can’t see much of anything. “Rest, now.” She says to him. “We’ll be here in the morning and we’ll make everything alright.”
As she finishes, something cold touches the skin of his hand. The touch is familiar; the feel of the pewter that touches his skin is the medallion his mother gave. A tear flows down his cheek as the realization hits him, and the sharp edges prick his fingers and he tightens his fist around the metal. The pain is intense at first, shooting up his arm like a voltage warm enough to sear the hair on his arms. A warmth crawls over him, starting in his arm and crossing through his chest and flooding him.
Jules opened his eyes to see the smiling nurse in all her padded glory. Black eyes rendered no color in her irises and she just smiled down on him as though he might miss the second chin hanging below her face. He mused to himself, he hadn’t been in prison long enough to be that desperate, but when next might another opportunity present itself?
“Don’t flatter yourself Inmate Perrish. If I wanted to waste my time with a loser, I’d at least be smart enough to use one that I could take home.”
She spoke with a condescending tone but never cleaned the smile from her face. She bent down laying her larger than D breasts over his face, and with cuffed hands there was little he could do about it. The nurse took the medallion from his hand and cleaned off the small amount of blood that one of the sharp edges pricked loose from a finger. All the while, smiling that same smile of hers as though nothing in life surprised her or even tore her away from what reality she lived. She never spoke of her name, never introduced herself, but simply slid the strands of the necklace under his neck and clasped it tight. “Next time, try harder not to lose this. Your mother would never understand.”
“Ma’am? The nursing station is asking for you.”
The man in blue, wearing his dull badge that would never see a shine again, took a seat and commanded the remote control away from the inmate he had been sent to watch over. A mostly futile situation as Inmate Perrish was wearing full restraints and was only due to stay overnight for observation, the grumpy officer flipped through the channels faster than his wife might bitch, moan, or complain about his lack of pay or the time he spent away from home.
“Hey C/O, how long are you going to watch nothing?”
“As long as it takes.”
Perrish sighed and resigned to staring up at the ceiling, his appointment with the case worker and classification officer was surely put off by this incident, now. He turned his head to fight to reach the straw with his lips and get some water past his lips, disappointed that it had long ago reached the temperature of the room. “What’s the deal, C/O?
He also sighed, he was likely one of those officers that thought he might’ve been a cop one day, working the street and making a real difference, but stuck in a world where people like Inmate Perrish were sent to disappear from the world at large. “You assaulted one of your cellmates and the second was provoked into violence by your actions, he claims he was protecting himself from you. You were beaten unconscious by illegal contraband found by searching the belongings of the roommate you didn’t beat into unconsciousness and the three of you are set to spend the next several months in segregation custody at the reformatory across town.”
Perrish interrupted, “My classification date is tomorrow.”
“’Afraid not, your classification date is postponed until a time where you are released from segregated custody.” The Corrections officer spoke in his best monotone voice and never took his eyes off the television which continually transitioned between one commercial to the next, “besides, what do you care, the adjustment committee will just take pity on your hospital stay and let you off with a warning anyway.”
“Whatever, so long as I don’t have to go back there.”
The television went black and all the noise in the room was quickly replaced by the sound of a metal chair scraping against the waxed tile floor. “Listen to me, son. You might think this shit is like what they show you on TV. But I’m going to give you a piece of advice, take it or leave it; I don’t really give two shits. You want to watch yourself in Seg, boy. You keep to the program, do your time quietly and you might just stay at the reformatory and get some good time to knock your sentence in half. You don’t want to go to the full on penitentiary, if you think the classification center gave you a hard time, you won’t last a year.”
“What the fuck do you care?”
“I told you, I don’t. Dumb shits like you come and go every day, but the way I see it if I can knock some sense into you now it might sink in and you might not be totally worthless when you get out of here. But believe me, I’m not about to waste my time and think like I’m some ‘hug-a-thug’ idiot that believes he can make a difference in your life.”
“Yeah,” the inmate spoke through his teeth and turned his head so that he could spare himself from looking directly at the officer. “So what’s so hard about Segregation anyway?”
“I wouldn’t know I never had to live in prison. I just work there.”
Looking forward to what manner of hell the reformatory will bring Jules.
With a name like “Perrish,” this certainly can’t end well for him.
It ain’t easy, being Jules, that’s for damn sure.