Jesus Goes To Jail: Room with a View (Part 1/9)

Part one is a thirteen pager, mostly dialogue that took place in the Spokane County jail, where I was housed for being Jesus. And saying as much, but we'll get to all that. This is a true story, one I scratched out while bedridden last year. It was a time when I could relax my mind and drift back to 2002 when this epic joke took place.

If we talk about the glass being half empty or half full, I want to know what does the glass look like from under the table?
--Brad Thor

Part 1
Room with a View

The August sun was still up and blazing when we crossed the street. I looked up at the bleak building. Its ten story mass took up a quarter of the city block. With slits for windows, it struck me as repulsive. From below, I could see the windows couldn’t open, squeezing off not only the outside air but most of the daylight as well, but the sun was relentless as it blazed down, causing warbling heat mirages as if it were a can of gasoline distorted by fumes. I crossed my fingers, hoping for decent air conditioning. If not, I would be in for a few weeks of roasting and not the comedic kind.

To my relief, the opening of the doors was accompanied by a frigid blast of air. I squinted as my eyes slowly adjusted to a room that seemed brighter than the world outside. The white tile floor was offset by pea green bars, and everything was eerie with a dreamlike waxiness. The overall atmosphere was sterile and severe.

We were greeted by an austere woman who floated a form across her counter for me to sign. Without makeup, and quite stout, she was born for the job. She sat, formidable, perched atop a stool behind a shield of plexiglass and had been there long enough to have taken on the physical characteristics of the place. I scrawled a line in the box marked signature. After glancing up at me, she retrieved the form and dropped it in her wire basket. After a small nod of acknowledgement to the cop who had escorted me, she pressed a red button that buzzed open the bars.

Then, from one gate to the next, two goonish guards led me down the gleaming hall and into an elevator. The doors closed. When they slid open again, all was silent on the fourth floor. I had been expecting more green bars, and some hoots and hollers. Instead, it was still as a dead bug encased in amber. All the cells were shut in by thick steel doors from which no sound escaped. The corridor looked much more like a mental asylum than the jailhouse of my imagination.

Halfway down the hall, the guards stopped to unlock a cell. When the door opened, I noticed there was another inmate inside. In black jeans and a polo shirt, he looked to be around my age. I couldn’t tell if he was nervous or had just woken up, but he blinked at me as I entered. The guards uncuffed me and left without having said a word.

“Hey,” said my new roommate. I thought he sounded timid, which was much better than the opposite of timid.

“Hey,” I said.

He introduced himself as Chris. A smidgen shorter than myself, he had longish curly hair, a beak of a nose, and the slight build of the smartest guy of the geek squad. Chris had been in for a week, and said he was going stir crazy without anyone to talk to.

“A week of silence to put things in perspective,” I said. “Did you meditate or read?”

“No, and to be honest it’s just been a couple of days.” I wondered if Chris had a head cold or if his voice was always this nasally.

“Only a few days? That’s not long. But I suppose--”

Chris held up his hand. “There was a guy when I arrived, but he wasn’t exactly someone I felt comfortable talking to.”

“The silent type?”

“No, I wish. That wouldn’t have been bad, but he kept wanting to have contests.”

“Contests? Like thumb wars? It would be cool to do word games.”

“No, more like pushups and pullups.”

“Oh, like a military type of a guy.”

“More like a bully. I told him I knew that he could beat me, but he wouldn’t shut up about it until I at least tried. It wasn’t like I could walk away, so I had to.”

“That’s not nice,” I said.

“No,” Chris guffawed, and pulled at his earlobe. “He definitely was not a nice person. This whole place sucks. The food sucks. I shouldn’t even be in here.”

Chris told me about the Friday before. He’d been a designated driver, and had no idea that the people in the back of his car were drinking. The cop who pulled him over slapped him with a DUI.

“I told the cop to breathalyze test me,” he explained. “I didn’t even have a drink--not one drop of alcohol. The douchebag said it wouldn’t matter because I’m twenty. But he can’t do that, right?”

“You didn’t have alcohol in your system?”

“No. Like I said, I was the designated driver.”

“Dick move by the cop, but you’re friends sound like douchebags too; they should bail you out.”

“Well, they didn’t. They won’t. But anyways, just having open containers in your car is different than drunk driving. If he would have given me a ticket for that, I could understand. But it’s completely unfair, unjust, and now my car is in the impound, which costs like three hundred a day, and I’m going to have to pay a ton for insurance, if I ever want to drive again, not to mention the breathalyzer thing I’ll need to install to start the engine. Plus all the fines and classes they make you go to… I’m totally fucked. He didn’t even breathalyze me, and I didn’t have one drop. Not one fucking sip of beer.” Chris shook his head, looking the spitting image of despondency.

“Bummer, but with all that pent up angst, wouldn’t exercise be cathartic?”

“What?” he winced, his forehead crinkling up like a wad of Kleenex.

“Those contests. You know, do some pushups to blow off some steam.”

“You obviously didn’t hear me. I’m telling you that the guy before you was mental. You might like pushups, or whatever, but that other guy,” Chris leaned against the ladder of the bunkbeds, his look conspiratorial. There was no one else around to hear us, but he still whispered, “He had a swastika tattoo on his neck.” Chris nodded, his beady eyes opening wide as milk caps. Then I realized that Chris was most likely a Jew. Maybe.

“Well, that’s some shit,” I offered.

“Seriously, like something not right in his head. Who has a swastika tattoo in 2001?”

“Apparently a deranged Nazi who wants to have pushup contests.”

“But on your neck? He couldn’t even hide it with a collar, so how would he get a job?”

“Work for the KKK or the Aryan Nations. They’re around. I’m sure it wasn’t a good time for you. But then again, what else is there to do in here? Might as well get shredded, right?” I felt like making light of it.

“Please tell me you’re joking.” Chris shook his head with a look of distaste. “I don’t exercise like that. You do what you want; just leave me out of it.”

The bunk beds were solid frames, welded together so that no screws or pieces could be loosened and used as a weapon. They had thin green gym mats atop steel sheets and blankets comprised of what looked like dryer lint. It wasn’t so bad. Much more comfortable than the saggy bedsprings I’d feared. However, the food was pretty much what I expected. The sandwiches alternated between warm mystery meat and peanut butter and jelly. Both arrived limp with a light load between slices of wonderbread. Twice, breakfast was oatmeal with a honey packet, but on the third morning, something bizarre was slipped through the slot.

“Are these even eggs?” Chris asked. He was stabbing into the fluorescent flubber with his plastic spoon.

“Maybe it’s a mix of eggs and some sort of gelatinous goo,” I hypothesized. “What do you want to bet this stuff would glow in the dark? It’s probably toxic waste, but I’ll take yours if you’re not gonna eat it.”

“No, you got your own, so don’t ask for mine.”

“I can’t even ask?”

“No. I mean, please don’t. That’s how the Nazi would punish me. If I didn’t exercise, he’d eat my food.”

“That’s one hell of an incentive,” I commented.

“No dude, what’s the matter with you?” Chris was peeved. “That fucker said that if I couldn’t do a hundred pushups a day, which I can’t, he’d eat half my food.”

“Oh, my bad,” I apologized. “I’m guessing you weren’t about to tell the guards.”

“Yeah, great idea, Jasper. Just tell the guards about the demonic shithead in the room that’s listening to every word I say. Would you? No, let me rephrase that. You would have to be a complete moron to even think about telling the guards anything.”

“Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.” I decided against talking more about benefits of exercising. Chris wanted a pity party, but I couldn’t imagine not wanting to do pushups.

“Yeah, the guards wouldn’t do anything about it. They’d probably laugh. And you know what he told me once?”

“The guard?”

“No, weren’t you listening? I didn’t say one word to any of the guards. I’m talking about the Nazi. Do you know want to know what he said?”

“What?”

“He said the only way he’d ever beat someone up in here is with body shots. A black eye is a dead giveaway, but nobody would have to know about bloody piss from a pulverized kidney. Isn’t that sick?” He was whispering again.

“Damn Chris, he didn’t do… anything?” As I studied his expression, I wondered if he’d break down and confess acts much worse than pushups. I thought about the holocaust.

“No, he didn’t do… that kind of stuff,” he assured me, looking down. “But, you see what they give you to eat. It’s not nearly enough, as is, so I was starving.” Chris took a bite of the questionable egg-like substance. “Who knows? Maybe we’ll get powers like the ninja turtles. I could use some of those.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “This stuff does look radioactive.”

“Oh, score!” Chris exclaimed. “Look! The tray came with three napkins. They’re stuck together.” He peeled the three napkins apart, and held them up like winning raffle tickets. He was beaming, and I started to laugh.

“What?” he asked. “This is awesome, right?”

“Yes, it is awesome. It’s just the look on your face when you discovered extra napkins. I don’t know, man. Priceless. It makes me think that life isn’t so bad. Even in here.”

“This place is shit,” Chris said, his appreciation for the two extra napkins waning.

“Oh don’t get me wrong,” I said. “Unlike you, it’ll probably be community service for me. Maybe time served, if I’m lucky. The state won’t tax my car or bank account. Not that I have either of those, but I laughed because as far as the day to day in here, it’s not bad. I’m trying to look on the bright side. Even though we’re starving, you seem like an alright guy to kick it with.”

“Huh,” he said, glum. “Thanks, but my life feels over.”

“Hey, it could be worse. They could have given you one napkin, and I could have been another pushup Nazi.”

“It could always be worse,” Chris huffed. His flip flopped from elation to dejection and was now edging toward distress. “Is that really the point? I mean, even if you’re being kicked in the balls, someone could always be be ripping your fingernails off at the same time.”

“Hey Chris, it’s really not that gruesome, is it?”

He walked over to the window, fidgeting, flustered and said, “Technically, yes, my life could be worse. Thank you for clearing that up.”

“Wow, pissy much?”

“Just do some fucking pushups or something.” Chris hopped up on his top bunk to pout at the ceiling.

“Yes sir,” I saluted. “For you Chris, I will do a hundred today.”

“That’s not funny,” he muttered.

“But it’s true,” I sang out. “And if I can’t, I will bequeath you my sustenance. Well, maybe just half my sandwich. Somehow that seems appropriate, agreed?”

“No. Not interested.”

“Come on, that’s a challenge for me. Normally, it would be easy, but I already told you what the cop did to my shoulder. My whole right arm is numb, but I won’t cheat. Trust me, it’ll hurt worse than it should. But, for you, I will try to endure the--”

“Jesus Christ! Shut the fuck up already. I’ll eat half your sandwich; just do what you’re going to do. I don’t really care.” He told me to count quietly, and I went about the pushups as if there were a grimacing Nazi standing over me.

The stainless steel toilet and sink were next to one another. Chris told me to plug my ears and look away, embarrassed of the noises he produced on the throne. We didn’t have toothbrushes, or anything to wash ourselves with except for some powdered soap in a dispenser above the sink. There was toilet paper, most of the time. We always saved our napkins, just in case.

That afternoon, Chris instructed me to face the wall so he could give himself a sponge bath with his socks.

“Oh?” I asked. “And on the ninth day, Chris needs to rub down with his dirty socks. If you got to, but it must be bad.”

“Bad enough, so could you please look away? This place is inhumane. My balls itch.”

“So wash. I won’t watch, but why can’t you just exfoliate with a dry rub?”

“I need water. Water and soap. I need a shower, but all we have is the goddam sink, so could you please look away now?”

“Dude, chill.”

“Please? Would you please just--”

“Turning, I’m turning.” And I faced a cinder block wall the color of hospital scrubs. I had the Bible propped up and was halfway through the book of Job. As Chris splashed, shivered and sloshed his socks over himself, I read about how God and the devil had made a wager. Like a kid with a magnifying glass, they slow roasted poor Job, torturing him. After his trials, Job gets it all back, and then some. But despite new offspring, health and wealth, I couldn’t understand how he could be happy. All those black holes of death, his wife telling him to curse God and die, then dieing herself--all that, just to entertain God and the devil.

“Job must have seen the drop in his cup as being more than half full to go through hell, and not embrace victim mentality. I couldn’t do it.” Chris was still sploshing about as I gave him a synopsis of Job’s story.

“Maybe he turned into a better person afterwards,” Chris said. “It’s just a story, but I get it. He probably ended up a compassionate man, or he’s an example to let us know that when your life is fucked, it could always be worse. Are you telling me about him because you think I’m weak and should be hardcore like Job?”

“Wow, is that what you think I’m doing? I’m just reading. Thought I’d share the story. But it’s not about you. I wish I could be more like Job. Get all festering with sores and still see that the universe is perfect. Tough one. Imagine cancer? Ugh, I’d want to throw in the towel, but not Job. Seeing his whole family die, and all because God and the devil are playing a game. It’s a case for the concept of freewill, I guess. Everyone dead, and he’s a puss ridden lamenter, wearing sackcloth and covered in ashes, but he’s gonna keep truckin, like a real--”

“Stop dude. Your babbling. My skin is itching. This fucking soap sucks, so I don’t want to hear about suffering. It’s like caked on my skin.”

“Sock bath not working out for you?”

“It’s just going to take a lot longer than I thought. I should have used less soap.”

Without Chris, I may have been bored, but we made the best of it. He couldn’t always overcome his snarky bitch mode, but he was an alright guy when he wasn’t spiraling. With not much in common, we still swapped stories and played hangman on the napkins with a pencil stub.

“I wish we had a deck of cards,” Chris said.

He’d completed his sock bath, and I was on the lower bunk still reading the Bible.

“Yeah, or a chess set,” I offered.

“I don’t play chess.”

“No chess, no workouts, you don’t read--damn Chris.”

“Even if I could read, the Bible is pure bullshit.”

“Yes Chris. I understand. For you, everything in life is bullshit. My pattern recognition detector has caught onto a predictable sequence, and I think I understand your worldview. It’s all bullshit.”

“Not everything is bullshit, just any power tripping book of rules,” he clarified. “But, just let me be depressed. Please. I have a right to that, especially right now.”

“Free country, but speaking of bullshit,” I said, ignoring his self indulgent moping, “Ezekiel 4:15 talks about preparing bread over cow manure.”

“I’ve heard of that. It’s not really that big of a deal,” Chris muttered, disinterested.

I read him the verse, and he said, “People in the untouchable caste in India have used cow manure to cook with for generations. It’s actually sterile and burns hot and cleanly.”

“Oh, well you might be able to burn a dried cow dung,” I said. “But it doesn’t say ‘cook’ in the King James version; it says prepare. Could be a huge difference, and not simply semantics. I’m thinking Ezekiel might have known a thing or two about where to find psychedelic mushrooms. He says to weigh the “bread” before you eat it, and then you’re going to be astonished. At least he was astonished, whatever that means.”

“Those old testament geezers were schizophrenic. They might have been tripping their faces off, so who knows?” Chris allowed.

“It’s not really important to weigh and measure bread, is it? I’m thinking there might be something in the bread that goes to the head if you’re gonna be astonished. Maybe, if Ezekiel shroomed, he contacted the wizard behind the curtain.”

“God? Are you suggesting that Ezekiel was communicating with God? I can tell you for a fact that there was no one listening to anyone but their egos. They were mentally ill. Even if they took a Ouija board to get in touch with some spirit, whatever it was that they contacted was completely tyrannical.” Chris sounded pained by my ignorance. He annunciated clearly as he listed grievances. “The church tortured people, burned innocent women at the stake, and convinced poor people they’d go to hell unless they donated all their money. So God? No. I don’t think so. Whether you’re talking about the pope or prophets, no one was in touch with God. Unless God is evil, which he, she, or it could be, but then what’s the point of talking about it? There is no God.”

“Evil people do evil shit, for sure, but that doesn’t mean bullshit isn’t holy shit.”

“Funny.”

“Thanks.”

“If you really want to know the truth about mushrooms, you should read Terence Mckenna’s theory on human evolution,” Chris said.

“I might, someday, but there’s now way I’d trust anyone with the name Terence.”

“You’d like him. He’s all about psilocybin mushrooms.”

“Oh, that’s my jam.”

“You should read Food of the Gods. It’s all about archaeological evidence, and not your Christianity pseudoscience. I hate to burst your bubble, but the world is more than 6,000 years old.”

“Hey now, we’re not all close minded. For instance, I know that the earth is flat and located in the center of the universe, but dinosaurs might have walked around in Eden.”

“I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

“Joking?” I tried to sound put off, but Chris was used to my deadpan sarcasm.

“Anyways, Mckenna did a lot of research and found that when Africa was drying up, and humans started walking around on the ground instead of being up in the trees, our brains got bigger.”

“Are you talking about homoerectus, neanderthal or cro magnun man?”

“Do you know the difference?”

“No, but it sounds cool to say the name neanderthal. Cro magnon makes me think of metal, and homoerectus is probably not someone you’d want to creep into your bed at night.”

“Very mature. What are you, twelve?”

“Well, maybe I’m just not as evolved as you.”

“Whatever their name was, when prehistoric man foraged around on the ground, there was one specific mammal that was always around. Any time they found the bones of our ancestors, another mammal’s bones were in the same region. Can you guess which one’s?”

“Elephant or maybe wooly mammoths?”

“Close. Cows.”

“Aha!”

“Yeah, you’ve gotta check out Food of the Gods. You’d love it. Terence Mckenna's claim that humans would have had to come across the occasional cow pie as they foraged is pretty undeniable.”

“Holy shit! I never thought about it, but of course our ancestors harvested psilocybin mushrooms. Hunters and gatherers--how couldn’t they have found mushrooms growing out of bullshit?”

“Stropharia cubensis is what grows in the cow pies, and then our brains got bigger and we developed language. The way our brains light up on PET scans, under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms, is a tell-tell sign that we could have made an unprecedented leap of evolution when we were foragers. Mckenna is a huge proponent of the power language. He thinks that the mushrooms sped up the development of the speech centers in our ancestor’s brains, and has a shit ton of evidence to backup his claims.”

“Literally a shit ton, but I bet it’s all bullshit.”

“Haha, but stop. That joke is getting old. You should read all Mckenna’s books, and maybe you could get your head out of religion. Who gives a fuck about what some douchebags wrote about mushrooms in the Bible?”

“Sorry Chris, but I can’t help it. What you said about language makes me think of the first line in the book of John: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’ If mushrooms were responsible for our ability to communicate verbally, then you could say that the mushroom is the word. You feel me? The word was God and the word is a mushroom!”

“Fuck man, you and religion. Let it go, we’re in jail.”

“Forget jail. You’ll be out soon enough, but then what? What are you going to do? Shouldn’t we find a way to get the word out? If human language developed because our ancestors ate mushrooms growing out of a cow pie, shouldn’t we let people know? We got to set the record straight and get people to continue to evolve.”

“We have to? I don’t have to do jack, but you should start a cult. Don’t let me stop you. You could convince some idiots that you’re a mushroom prophet and have sex with all their wives.”

“Is that the goal?”

“What makes you think that you’d be any different from all the other cult leaders? That’s what happens in like every single cult in human history.”

“Chris, there is just no debating religion with you, is there? But you might be right about the cult leaders.”

“Tell me about it. Despite the goodwill of any new system’s tenets or sacraments, cults are gonna devolve into either a tainted form of fundamentalism or hierarchical harems. Eventually, the guy at the top is sticking his prick in whomever he deems worthy.”

Chris got down from the top bunk and looked outside. Most of the window was translucent but not transparent. It had either been sandblasted or fogged over with some sort of plastic film. The distortion prevented the inmates from appreciating any view of the world beyond the walls. But Chris had found a fissure, a thin line of clear glass which butted against the cinderblock wall.

“See anyone down there?” I asked.

“No,” he sighed. Cupping his hand to his temple, to cut off the glare of the light in the room, he peered out with an OCD frequency. Every fifteen minutes, or so, Chris was drawn to this chink in the room’s otherwise hermetic-like confinement.

I knew about the stop sign. Occasionally, someone would walk over the three foot strip of sidewalk that Chris was compelled to observe. When he’d first pointed out the sliver of a view, he was thrilled to recount the memory of a girl he’d once seen below. Chris spoke fondly as he recalled the vision of her high heeled shoes and gold leather purse. As he talked, I watched his eyes gloss over. Unlike me, Chris was a libidinous lech with a paraphilia fetish for red fingernail polish and gaudy accessories. He really enjoyed all sorts of flare, the more outlandish, the better. While his face lit up, as he went on to praise his former girlfriends, and all the accoutrements he’d lavished them with, I could only stand to listen to him extol their cosmetic affectations a few minutes before I could no longer maintain a poker face. After I burst into laughter, he fell silent, all despondent again. I noted how easily he could fall back and mope, or dive into full on bitch mode, if I wasn’t careful. All I needed to do was say one more word, and he’d take the plunge.

Unfortunately, Chris was dyslexic. I offered to read out loud, but the Bible was the only book in the room, and he told me to spare him. Watching the patch of sidewalk was as good as it got for him. I figured the chances of seeing anyone worth the effort of looking were as slim as the view itself. But Chris was ever watchful. Even if his habit seemed like a desperate one, I concluded that it was a better way to pass the time than more wet sock rub downs. The poor guy hadn’t stopped itching.

He was pressed against the window, when triumphant, I declared, “I just did my hundred push-ups. No extra food for you.”

“Oh joy. Congratulations.” He couldn’t have sounded less enthused. He’d been in a funk since his sock bath, and was prone to lash out and say that it was his right to do so. He said that word a lot: right. He had the right to whine, his rights had been violated, and it wasn’t right.

“Right,” I had replied.

“I feel sick,” he said.

“Me too,” I said. “My stomach is in knots, like some gnarly twisting going on in there.”

“It was those eggs,” Chris groaned. His forehead was resting on the metal grate in front of the window.

“It wasn’t the eggs,” I objected. “It was whatever made that stuff as bright as Nerf. But I could still eat. How about you?”

“No, I feel all bloated and gassy.”

“Me too, but I also did a hundred pushups. It’s strange. Am I bloated? Yes, but I also feel hungry. Those eggs are messing with me, man!”

“I am definitely not eating anything. You can eat my nasty ass sandwich.”

“Well, when you put it that way.”

That evening, just after the mystery meat sandwiches arrived, the guard cuffed me up and told me to follow. Chris’s forehead scrunched up as he looked at me with a wordless question. I shrugged, having no idea what was happening. We were both puzzled. He should be getting out before me.

I decided against taking his sandwich and didn’t think I’d be eating mine. I carried it down the hall for later. Something inside of me was brewing, and it wasn’t gonna come out pretty.

There was a bench in the front office that I was instructed to occupy. I sat and waited, my stomach roiling. With my head held between cuffed hands, I thought about my last supper as a free man.