In jail you had to masturbate.

Just imagine a toothless old pervert. Beard growing in very ugly. Patchy. Chipped front tooth, missing like three in a row on the other side. Maybe a small open wound in his ear. Emitting yellow stuff and blood. Cross eyed, or missing an eye. Hard to tell because you never look him in the eyes. He’s got the type of gut like you’d see in a cartoon where a snake swallows some object you can see in the shape of their form.

Now picture him casually jacking off.

That’s prison. Just a bunch of foul creatures jerking on their dicks. Everywhere. 24 hours a day. Some men get entirely naked and lay in their bunk and wait for someone to walk by. Some men go to the toilet 5,6 times a day. A mere commercial with a mammary sales tactic could serve as inspiration. Some tuck away in the corner of the shower and make sure to rinse their business down the drain. I was that variety. It seemed like the most polite way to handle it. Some men did it while other guys were in the room. Some went out to the yard and laid in the grass and put their hands down their pants. Some did it on visits with their girlfriends or wives, some family. Some did it during parole hearings. Some men played with themselves while they were at the pay phone. Some jacked off at the chow hall. Some men went to the library to jack off and some men went to the library to watch men jack off. Some men gave their hearts to christ or allah and had to stop jacking off. Some men gave their hearts to christ and then jacked off in the church service.

Prison is for the heathen. I’m saying this with a foolish and true heart. The rare civilized person makes it there, but many are not. A majority of men, did jack off in private. But a very large amount did not.

One of my favorite things I ever heard was this story. A man was going to the toilet with a roll of toilet paper and a bottle of lotion. Just casually strolling. Whistling even. An older black gentleman. Not a nutcase or anything like that. My buddy put him on blast.

“You’re just going to go hit a lick? Just like that?”
“Nah man, this is for my asshole.”

What?! Hahaha.

This is what prison is. Men lubricating their assholes. Jacking off non stop. We had a lot of time. We had enough time to ask for more details.

“Wait you’re going to lotion your asshole?” my buddy asked.
“Yeah, your asshole skin is made out of the same stuff as your lips. You put chapstick on your lips right?”
“Well sure,” my buddy said.
“So I got a chapped ass. I gotta lotion it up.”

Naturally my friend borrowed some lotion and lubricated his asshole a little bit. This whole story was delivered to us while we were playing hacky sack. He was making some strange movements. The kind of movements you might make if you weren’t used to a very slippery feeling in your root chakra. We all laughed.

We all had our dicks in our hands laughing away at the wind. That’s all you could do. They didn’t give us pockets in our pants. A lot of men would walk laps around the baseball diamond with their hands down the front of their pants. Some guards would yell at them for that. If they didn’t like you they would write a sexual misconduct ticket. Especially if a female guard was around. But they didn’t give you clothing with pockets. They were glorified pajamas.

Your main outfit in prison is pajamas and your number one goal was to jack off. Prison was great in that sense. I say this now as I’m writing from a position of being in society. One must show up for work, in a suit sometimes. Or dressed for whatever type of job you are doing. Pajama’s never acceptable. Goal of jacking off for the day, never acceptable. Well, shouldn’t be if one has real aims. But there in prison, all bets are off. All is… aimless.

Press your bunk. That was said a lot. Instead of laying down. Press your bunk is active. Everything is active there. Well, truly everything is passive. We are all just captive’s passing the time. So we do our best to chase balls around the yard, jack off, read books, anything we can do that is active.

Writing Poems for Prisoners

Everyone has a hustle in Jail. One of my hustles was writing. A lot of people in jail are illiterate or borderline illiterate. So they need help writing letters to their loved ones or their lawyer. Sometimes even the judge. They despise bad handwriting. I had this weird thing when I was young. I saw that doctors had bad hand writing and they were smart and rich. So I deliberately practiced having bad hand writing. The prisoners didn’t much like my words either. They thought I sounded too smart and sometimes condescending. To them or to their loved ones or their lawyers or judge. At times I may have been without even noticing it. But other times I was certainly earnest. Very earnest and wanting to help.

One of my favorite clients this man named Chop. Chop was 18 or 20, kinda pudgy, shorter than me. Hispanic kid. We were doing time in the 2 man dorm. A long corridor with just bricks. Little two men cells with their own doors up and down the hall. Two bunks and a shitter in every room. It was paradise as far as privacy goes. Chop was short for chopper. As in “hit em with the chopper” like a machine gun. He thought he was a pretty cool kid. I liked him just fine.

He didn’t want to eat his breakfast sausage on pancake day. We called those poodle dicks. He thought they were disgusting. I was eating anything I could get my hands on during that stint. We regularly made jokes that if you didn’t finish your monkey brains you’d be back in jail. So he arranged a deal with me that he would give me his poodle dick sausages every time they came through and in return I would write him some poems for his girlfriend. I enjoyed the mental exercise.

Once I got going writing him poems, he said they had to be sexier and they had to rhyme. Prisoners love rhyming poems. I wrote poems that didn’t rhyme but sometimes had hidden internal rhymes and they just didn’t take. Their eyes glazed over.

**Note, that today as i write this, I have been sucked into years of social media addiction and my brain doesn’t work great. So I’m reading In The Slipstream: An FC2 Reader (opening story is about writing for people in the army) – a journal from the late 90s, early 2000s that was publishing interstitial works and strange stuff. And my eyes are glazing over at some of the writing in there. I get it. Sometimes, it’s just a bit much.

Anyhow I must’ve wrote dozens of poems for this guy. Each time getting a little bit nastier and nastier. Chop kept asking for them that way and his girl must’ve like them. I was writing limerick style pieces for most of them, 5, 8 lines at most. And that would do. I have a tough time remembering all of them. At one point I handed him a poem that said:

Hey babe I sure have missed ya
When I get home I’m bangin you and ya sista.

And he thought that was so funny and he sent it to her. I truly couldn’t believe it. He really thought that was gold. I bet she didn’t even have a sister. The other guys would have me write things for their girls, often just writing down what they dictated. Not poems, but simply letters. Just messages to keep hope alive for themselves.

When you sit down to write someone from in jail it can go a couple different ways. One is a hurry. A hurried message, a plea if you will. Something fast to the lawyer, written from anger. Or maybe a plea to a judge for mercy. You spend a lot of time thinking in there. About how you could finagle some grace from someone. Know that I’m on the outside I know just how little people out here think of you in there. Which is, very little. We have bills to pay, bosses to subdue, women to please. Ain’t no way were thinking of you.

The other way to write a letter and the more common way, is to take time with it. Write all day long. Make it take the whole entire day. Put the notepad away during mealtime and bring it back out after the meal is done. It is a way to spend time with a loved one who isn’t there. A day or two or hell, even three could be a way to be with your lover. It could be excruciating too. For me, it was always rather heartbreaking. I had pretty deep acceptance that the world went on without me. When I did my Two and a half year stint, I knew that there was no one out there waiting for me. Nobody pining for me. Life moved on. The women moved on. Hell, by the time of my last trip my whole family moved on.

But I did it. I would take my time and feel the pain. Think about all the problems I caused. Try to reason it out. I didn’t write poems that I sent out. But i wrote many poems. I wrote all sorts of stuff in jail. I wrote a lot of raps. I didn’t do them verbally very often. People thought I was crazy when I rapped. Look at the white boy rapping…..