Posted by Ian on August 9, 2005, 3:26 am, in reply to "The day I turned myself in (Part 1)" My mom got up to answer it. I don’t remember if it was a wrong number or someone else she knew, but I remember it was nothing. I wasn’t going to take this. I couldn’t live my life in terror like that, having a nervous breakdown every time the phone rang. I made a decision. If I went down, turned myself in and did my time in jail, I could make up a story to tell my parents about where I was. I work as an archaeologist, and sometimes some of the digs we go on really do get organized rather spontaneously, and whoever can go does, and whoever can’t doesn’t. I could tell them I was going over to my friend’s house that evening to do some deciphering, as we often did, and as usual, we ended up staying up late at it, and I ended up spending the night sleeping on the couch at his house. If I had to go to jail, I could call them the next day from the jail, telling them I was calling from his house, and that a dig got suddenly organized, and I had to leave on it the next day. I could ask him and another friend to come to the jail to get the car and take it to his house, then authorize the police from inside the jail to give him my key and get it out of their parking lot, and tell my parents, “I don’t have time to bring the car home; it’s at his house.” It’s just a four- or five-hour drive on the Interstate to New York and Kennedy Airport. I could be gone and out of the country—supposedly. And after I was out of jail, it’s possible and likely a real dig would come up shortly. I could stay at my friend’s or rent a room and stay there till I was away on the real one, sending them postcards from there. (Never mind no postcards coming when I was in jail. Back then before e-mail, they were used to the mail systems in the Third-World countries.) I’ve been to jail before. There’s nothing to it. It’s just a room with a roof over your head, a bed, a warm shower whenever you want and free meals from a local restaurant nearby, better than some of the hotels I’ve stayed at in some Third World countries, more comfort than the living quarters on the field often were, often just in our sleeping bags on the ground. Just don’t plead guilty in court, though, so it doesn’t stay on your police record for the rest of your life, with anybody able to look at it whenever they want. Just tell the judge something like, “Due to the fact that I have to worry about my future, and people looking at this charge on my record and making some incorrect and unfair assumptions about my character because of it, I find it necessary to enter a plea of ‘not guilty’... though I want the court to understand that I am acknowledging that I did it.” Judges don’t like for pleas like that to be made, where in the same breath the defendant says something that contradicts the plea he just made, but since this world we live in sometimes makes it difficult for us to get through life, we’ll just have to let that be the judges’ problem and not ours. Once when I was taking court-ordered therapy sessions, and received word that a dig was coming up within a few months, I told the therapist that in order to get the money to continue these classes, I was going to need to go on the dig. He said no. He told me I should find any local job I could, even if it was some low-paying job to pay for it and continue the therapy sessions with him indefinitely. Whenever he told me something like that, he always ended the sentence with “... Or I’ll have your butt thrown in jail.” He did the same thing as the court-appointed therapists in Ed’s piece below about “naturism therapy.” He tried to warn me about big black men in the jail anal-raping me every day. First he wanted to hypnotize me, but when I wasn’t too crazy about the idea of having my life’s finances put under someone else’s power, the next thing he did was to tell me to close my eyes and concentrate as hard as I could, as if it were really happening. He said to imagine I was in jail. He imitated their accent: “Cute white boy... a little tight... gotta cutcha open wider...” then raising his voice, began, “He’s sticking the knife into your (anus)! HE’S STICKING THE KNIFE INTO YOUR (ANUS)! HE’S CUTTING YOU OPEN! IT HURTS!” This to teach me the horror of going to jail. I’ve also heard about the therapy Ed described, about the hose-up-your-nose and the strap-on-your-tap, and I’ve considered trying it, but never have. Later I learned from other sources that all that business about the jails isn’t even true anyway. Suburban jails are just rooms where you sit, the other prisoners usually just young fellows who got hauled in maybe for driving drunk or with a license suspended, or possession of marijuana or something, and they’d sit in there and play chess with you. Sometimes they were African-Americans, but when they were, they were always just as civil as anyone else. (One guy I played against, African-American, was the best chess player I ever played against; he wiped me off the board every time.) When the judge announced “incarceration as per the recommendation of the court-appointed therapist,” I asked the counsel if we could request a few days first so I could move my things into storage. “How much time do you need?” the judge asked me. I had to think carefully. If I asked for too much, he might think it was unreasonable and deny me any time at all. On the spot, I had to think, how long would it really take me to get it done? “Four days?” I asked him. “All right,” he said, “I’ll give you till Friday.” (That was four days.) “If you don’t show up, you understand how serious it will be....” I assured him I would be there. Except that on the way over, when I was changing buses, one of them was delayed an hour, so I called the jail and explained why I was going to get there late. They said it was all right. I brought a bunch of my hardback reference books with me in a backpack, and at the police station, the sergeant held them upside-down, fluttering through the pages, looking for anything hidden in them, and went through my manila envelopes full of photocopies of ancient inscriptions, and National Geographic magazines I had also brought for leisure reading when I got tired of studying, then let me take it all in (except the backpack). When he looked at the inscriptions, he shook his head and said, “Can you understand those squiggle-marks?” “It takes some deciphering, but yes.” “That’s interesting.” “I shouldn’t call it deciphering, actually, since it isn’t in code, it’s just translating, but that’s what my friend and I call it when we work at translating it.” “Where’d you learn to do that?” “Studying it a few years in college. You have to figure on at least two years for each language you learn—two at the very least—except when you’re dealing with dialects that have a lot of similarities—and then you have to maintain your knowledge of them or you forget.” “Must be hard work.” I shrugged. “Isn’t any career?” He shook his head again, then led me to the cells, with my things. The other prisoners in the cells asked me what I was in for. “Driving with license suspended,” I said. “Second offense.” “What’d you get it suspended for?” “Tried to outrun a cop.” (It’s just what you tell them when you’re in there. If you don’t answer the question, they start guessing, and indecent exposure usually comes up the second or third guess, if not the first. And then they start disdaining you and ostracizing you... as if you were some kind of... pervert or something.) There were three little cells and a big one. After a week or two when they moved me into the big one, the other prisoner there, a Norwegian guy, said, “Hey, I should have some say about who comes in here with me. I’ve been here longer. I’ve got seniority around here.” He called it the “penthouse.” What a clown that guy was. (I tried asking him some things about Norwegian, but he didn’t know a word of it, except his first name and last name.) After he was gone and I was there alone and could concentrate, I started to work (when he and those crazy guys weren’t there singing the theme song to “Gilligan’s Island” or something—complete with the sound effects of the thunderbolts, “The weather started getting rough....”) It was great to have all this free time to study, not coming home from work in the evening every day, all beat and wanting to go to bed. I got a lot done in there. I established a good theory about a link between two ancient tribes in India separated by a large geographical distance, got an article written about it and published, which I wouldn’t have gotten done if I hadn’t been in there. Okay, I figured, so I might be going to jail again now. I was ready. Maybe I could get some more work done, some work I really needed to get done. I had spent a month and a half the last time, so this time it would probably be between two and three months (including time off for good behavior in the jail.) I don’t usually keep a backpack all filled with the things I’d need on a dig in the trunk all ready to go, but if I did this time, and told my parents I always did, would they have any way of knowing it wasn’t true? I went and loaded a backpack with all the essentials, got my passport and everything I’d need, packed it in the trunk of the car as if I always kept it there (took my books too, this time), and called my friend to see if he wanted to study that evening. He did. Neither of us worked the next day. I couldn’t say anything to him about it over the phone, because my parents were within hearing range, so I decided I’d just tell him later. I told my parents I was going to his house and was going to spend the night there. All this just because I couldn’t keep my zipper shut in the car with the girl. (Continued)
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Message modified by board administrator August 9, 2005, 3:34 am
(Originally posted February 7, 2001, 2:16 pm)
As we sat in the living room watching TV, the phone rang again. I froze again.
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