A Friend's Bad Decision (s) Part Two

Today is Friday April Second Two Thousand Ten. I just purchased seven books for my kindle, that ought to be enough for the weekend. I am finishing up the last two books of one series and starting with five books of another. I think thats the best thing about the Kindle, being able to read serialized fiction one book after another in order. Also, people can't see what you are reading which goes both ways I guess. I get used to a certain author and tend to read everything they have written. I have certainly done that with King and I have read many of his books twice, even when I'm not in jail.

So my friend was faced with a couple of years in the federal penn. He was told bu the US Marshall service that he needed to present himself before a certain time in White Deer, PA. It was quickly decided that my friend Jimmy and I would drive him to White Deer and that we would try and make a good trip of it. After a teary goodbye in Haverhill, MA we set out on the road. That was a tough goodbye, my friend's parents were there and the last thing I remember was the father pressing a few hundred's in my hand while barely keeping it together. Tough stuff.

We made the best of it, Jimmy has a nice car and is a really funny guy and his humor was appreciated. We stopped somewhere in the Catskills and got a hotel room. We spent the last nite of my friend's freedom drinking whiskey and smoking some really good pot. I don't think we had a last supper or anything like we had planned, none of us were really hungry. We woke up early the next morning and drove the last four hours to the unpleasant town of White Deer, PA. If you look at a map of PA you will notice that White Deer isn't near anything, Scranton is a few hours away. We must have said "scrannnnton" hundreds of times with the laughter easing the reality of our mission. When I asked my friend about the drug test he was sure to take when he arrived, he asked me "What are the going to do, put me in jail?" I didn't really have a response to that, after all we were on our way to drop my best friend at the federal prison states away from his friends and family.

I will never forget the look on his face when we rounded the bend and the prison came into view. He shuddered a little and lit up a cigarette and shook his head. Jimmy mentioned something about now being the time to make a break for it, go on the lam, but the joke fell flat. This was no time for jokes, the reality of the last year came crashing down on my friend. It was time for him to willfully go to prison and there wasn't anything funny about that. Leaving Jimmy in the car, he and I walked up to the office to start the admitting process. The prison people were confused, evidently they had never encountered someone going to their front door and telling them they were expected. They asked me if I was a federal marshal and I told them that I was his friend and I was escorting him from Boston to White Deer so that he could begin his stay at their prison. I don't really remember much after that, I guess I was in some sort of shock or denial of what was happening.

I didn't hear from my friend for a few weeks and then I got a collect call from the federal prison system. It was a good thing I still had a landline because cell phones can't accept collect calls. We spoke for the eight or ten minutes that he was allowed and it was really hard to put into words how I felt about the whole thing. A few days later I was called to my boss's office and he asked me about a letter that had been sent from White Deer, PA. It had a giant stamp on it warning the recipient that the letter came from the federal prison system. I explained to my boss and to his boss that it was from a friend of mine and the first thing I would do after reading it was to send him a letter with the correct mailing address. My friend didn't know where to send me letters so he chose to send it to my work. Not the best decision for sure, but I wasn't going to call him out on it.

After six months or so we received news that he was going to be transferred to a prison thirty miles north of Boston. This was excellent news because now people could visit him without driving seven hours to see him. They transferred him for a couple of reasons; the first being his children & the second was due to his skill swinging a hammer. Evidently he had heard that they were renovating part of the prison there and paying some inmate forty cents an hour was a much better deal the bringing the union in there. So he was put to work on the renovation while attending various courses on recovery. If I still spoke to him it would be interesting to ask him about what he experienced in those courses because at the time all I cared for was his health and safety. He told me a story about how a guy he was working with flipped out and went after another inmate with a hammer, looking to brain him. My friend relieved him of the hammer and then ran to guards. One good thing about the prison he was in was that it was both a "recovery" & mental illness prison so they were able to lock the crazy guy away from the general population.

My friend did a variety of activities while in prison besides going to recovery classes and swinging a hammer. He was a wannbe cunga player before he went in and he was able to learn from a master when he was inside. He told me that he was able to play for many hours a day during the week and sometimes all day on the weekends. He also did loads of reading and I think took some educational classes but I am not totally sure about that. Before long he was able to have visitors and not knowing I thought it was as easy as showing up at the front door and asking to see him. I was wrong, there was a required background check as well as a twelve or fifteen person maximum on the list of qualified visitors. My application was accepted and that enabled me to visit on the weekends for up to six hours. Its a strange system as everyone on the list can visit at once but there were limits on how many visitors an inmate could have in a given week. I am sure that visitation varies depending on the level of the prison with the low level prisons being the easiest to visit. I visited my friend at least once a month for a few hours the entire time he was in prison.