What is a Place?
I was arrested in January of 2007 on a probation violation and I was held in the Greene County Jail on a warrant for failure to appear at my probation office. I was technically on the run from the law and now my mistakes had finally caught up with me and the law had me pinned down. This was not the first time I had been arrested but it would be the last but I just hadn’t made that choice for myself yet. Sure, I had said on more than one occasion that I was tired of feeling like I wasn’t in complete control of my life and that I was tired of being subjected to the will of other men but nothing had ever changed. I had gone in front of the judge before and made him all sorts of promises in order to keep my hind end out of the penitentiary but now I had returned because I did not keep my end of the bargain and so he was upset with me to say the least. Normally, when you are arrested on a warrant you will go in front of the judge at the next earliest convenience, somewhere in the neighborhood of one or two days depending on what day you got arrested. In my case I was held for five full weeks before I saw anybody wearing a full length black robe.
Allow me to back up a bit and tell you what it is like to be arrested and then I will take you through the process of being put into the county jail. I have already informed you that I have been arrested on more than one occasion and I will add that my life until this point has been a domino effect of chains and heartache. At any rate, I was arrested in January right after Christmas. I had the day off from work and I had picked up my check and was on my way to the bank and I guess you could say that the day started off as if it was going to be beautiful. I was stopped on the street by a police officer at about 1:30 in the afternoon and I made no issues about stopping and answering his question. I had been questioned before for what I like to call, (DWB) driving while black, and so to me it was just an inconvenience that would take up anywhere between 5 to 10 minutes of my time. Yes, I was a bit annoyed but it was just a part of being me at the time. Sometimes you get pulled over and sometimes you went to jail and that was just the chance you take. I saw my life in a very dim light and I lived everyday in the moment, and somehow I considered the way I lived to be much richer and fuller than those who simply accepted the mundane and scheduled lives they led. The officer ran my name and the rest is history, I went to jail, but not quietly. I put up a big huff and puff show and before you knew it the officers were wrestling me to the ground and people were driving by in the cars, breaking their necks to get a good look at the show in the street. I wasn’t ashamed of myself or anything like that, I was just angry.
I arrived at the jailhouse and was led into an area, known as the pit. It is a holding area where you just wait until it’s your turn to be booked. There are four steps leading down into the shallow pit and about five rows of six blue plastic chairs. In the middle of the pit there is a dividing wall to separate the men from the women and on the wall there are phones that can be used, that is if anyone will accept. From the moment I walked into the jail until the moment I was taken to the pit I still had not really had the dose of reality I so dreadfully needed. I smelled the overpowering smell of household cleaners in high concentration and I heard nothing. I had so many thoughts going through my head that it was as if I had gone deaf to the outside world. I was so consumed with my own thoughts that nothing else mattered. I sank down as deep as I could into those unforgiving blue chairs and managed to fall asleep. When I woke I had been in the pit for about six hours and now I still hadn’t been allowed to make my non collect phone call. So I started to complain to the officer in charge and after about another half an hour I was finally able to call my girlfriend and let her know that I would not be home for dinner and why. I was still under the assumption that this whole ordeal would be over shortly and when I got off of the phone I was reassured that things would be taken care of.
Then the booking process started and it is a cycle to say the least. I was asked to step out of the pit and up to the guard station and then I was bombarded with a battery of questions by some slightly attractive lady cop. Questions regarding demographics and some related to mental health like, “have you ever attempted suicide Mr. Moller?” After initial questioning I was photographed and then fingerprinted and asked to return to my seat. It was going on eight hours now and I still hadn’t made it past the first few checkpoints, but all I kept thinking about was how good it would feel to make it to my cell so I could fall asleep and see the judge the next day. Still before long I made it to the last step in the process of being booked in and that is changing your clothes and putting on my new Greene County issued Bob Barker jumpsuit. An office led me to a changing area where I was asked to strip out of all of my clothes and follow all instructions. I stepped into the room and it was only as big as a man’s closet with a little open window so that the guard can watch my every move. I dropped my pants and lost my shirt along with all my other undergarments and I waited to be handed my change of clothes while the officer bagged and tagged my personal things. In this jail they give you a half a bar of soap and a Dixie cup full of some kind of generic lice treatment that everyone must use before entering the jail. You must take a shower as well but I knew from experience that the water would be ice cold. I wanted to get everything over with as soon as possible and just get to my cell but things would not be that easy. I reached for my new clothing from the officer but he demanded that I go through the whole rigmarole of proving that I was not smuggling anything into the jail and that is when things got a little dicey. I told him very flatly that I would do no such thing. I was never forced into doing anything so degrading before and I wasn’t going to start today at his request. He asked me again to lift my scrotum for him and I again met his request with a firm, hell no. He asked me just wasn’t any way that I was going to do that. I think that he wanted to press the issue even more but then he caved in, apparently not wanting to deal with another belligerent individual that evening. He called me a few unsavory names and told me to hurry and get dressed and so I did. The showers in booking are stainless steel and about the size of a double wide coffin, just big enough to turn around in. When I emerged from the shower, I felt a few degrees colder but I was ready to end my night and go to sleep. I slipped into the hunter green jumpsuit that night and into the only thing I would wind up wearing for the next six and a half months. It was the beginning of a long overdue process that would leave me forever changed. It was the end of everything I knew about living and the beginning of things that my grandmother had prayed for me all those years ago. I entered cell block D as 140932 and I left a shell of a man waiting to be filled.