Heroin Detox in Prison
It’s hard to endure the first day in a prison, even for someone with over sixteen years in. You don’t know where anything is, no one knows who you are, you’re hungry and grungy from travel, and it’ll be a couple of weeks before you establish a routine that helps slide the time. However, going from the free world to county jail as a twenty-three-year old was the hardest transition.
While waiting to be booked on murder charges, I was leg-chained to bars in the jail’s lobby during shift change. With each passing minute, my body — violently craving the methadone I had been given during seven days of heroin detox — grew hotter, sweatier, achier. The air was thick with dust and body odor and industrial-grade cleaning products. I fought the urge to vomit up the runny nose I’d been snuffling back.
The guards had fun slamming a metal gate near to where I was chained, watching me jump. The guard assigned to watch me amused himself with a latex glove he’d inflated. (I later learned that this friendly young guard was trying to distract me from the machinations of his gate-slamming coworkers.) To ease my muscles, which, on account of the withdrawal, felt like they wanted to rip themselves in shreds, I lay on the cold floor, comfy as could be, tethered to a wall. There were no windows and, having surrendered my watch, I had difficulty convincing myself that time was progressing. As a sergeant walked past, he said to the guard, “Get him the fuck up.” So I crawled back into the plastic chair, which now seemed even more uncomfortable. Quietly, I asked the guard how long before I got put into a cell.
“I dunno,” he said, not unkindly.
My eyes, warm and wet for want of methadone, glazed over and looked on my future: I would spend the rest of my life chained to that wall. However, there was one thing, and one thing only that I was thankful for: no longer did I have to spend all day, as I had for sixteen months, scrambling for money, hustling, lying to and stealing from loved ones, all to get the hundreds of dollars it took to feed my habit every eight hours.
By evening I’d made my way into a cell, and several hours after that — courtesy of my attorney, who wanted to keep me safe, he’d later explain — I was placed on suicide watch. In the small hours of my first night in a cell, I was awakened by a guard and escorted to the infirmary. He stood in the doorway as I sat on a cold examination table, taking in my surroundings. The walls were faux-wood paneling, the room chilly and quiet, and the fluorescents bothered me. The nurse wasn’t warm and pleasant with me as had been the case with nurses and dental assistants from my life before. Thus, the system drew its boundaries, and pronounced me no longer worthy of the special attention I’d taken as my birthright. She addressed me in clipped monotone, as one would an intelligent animal. Lift your shirt. The stethoscope’s smooth, cold head on my chest gave me goosebumps. Deep breaths. Her hand swept across my back, and I warmed from the human contact. She cinched a blood pressure cuff around my biceps and stuck a thermometer in my mouth.
The guard tried small talk with her while the machines took their measure of me. The nurse had short blond hair, wind-swept with gel. Her lips were pink and glossy. Moby’s “Natural Blues” played from a radio in the anteroom, a haunting melancholy. The last time I heard it, I was driving home from the city, a bundle of heroin and syringes under my seat. The song gave me chills and I felt like crying.
Instead, I waited till the thermometer was out of my mouth and asked for something to ease the pain. For the first time the nurse gave me a smile and said: Yeah, right. The guard escorted me back to my cell.
Suicide watch was more commonly called one-on-one, and meant literally that, a pair of eyes on me around the clock. I inhabited a small, windowless tank containing three six-by-nine cells, a three-foot walkway serving as a front porch. Welded to the cell was a wooden bench too narrow for my “mattress,” so I moved that, and myself, to the cold, dusty floor. The soundtrack to domestic life — random mumbling, toilet flushing, and shuffling feet — let me know that the two cells to my right were occupied.
A small desk had been brought in, along with an old cushioned desk chair, and placed in front of my cell. Every eight hours a new guard parked his or her ass in that chair and read the paper.
I got to know the guards and they got to know me. Some better than others. There were a few hard asses who wanted nothing to do with me, and spent their shift reading and avoiding any human exchange. But most were decent and many weren’t much older than I. We seemed to strike an unspoken, mutually beneficial arrangement: I’d keep them awake and entertained, and they’d treat me like a human being, occasionally giving me some of their lunch. Already, I was relying on Willy Loman’s mantra: Be liked and you will never want.
On my second night, a big woman had watch. I’d become adept at surreptitiously reading their tiny nametags, “Hi, Miss Haynes.”
She was standoffish. But, with eight hours together, her chair three feet from the bars, we spoke and became comfortable with the other’s presence. At some point, I lost myself in silent contemplation. The withdrawal had me feeling particularly nauseated and gross. At seemingly random moments, the guilt of what I’d done would pierce the veil of shock, flash across my mind, flood the inner recesses of my being. I would cringe and whimper. Fear, loathing, self-pity? Sure, there was some of that.
In my piddle of misty despond, I reached up from the floor and asked Haynes to hold my hand. I couldn’t believe that I asked, or that she actually obliged me. (After sixteen years inside, this scene feels even more surreal and unbelievable.) She extended several fingers, which I held through the bars. Sobbing, I thanked her, and curled into a ball before drifting off to a fitful sleep. In those days, I still entertained the hope that I would wake up with a contented sigh and find that this was all a bad dream. The magical thinking was, Maybe if I wanted it bad enough, I would wake up at home, clean and no longer withdrawing, my victims alive, families made whole, my future still bright.
But one can never go home again, and besides, for twenty-five-years-to-life, this is my home. I’d like to think I’ve done a few nice things in this place.
This is an excerpt from “Concrete Carnival”, which is due out in September, from Permanent Press.
Danner Darcleight is serving a 25 year to life sentence in an American prison. His memoir, “Concrete Carnival” is set for release in September. If you liked this story, please recommend it and share on social media. Please follow him atwww.facebook.com/Danner.Darcleight
