I was a trustee at Rankin County Jail in Brandon for about 10 months in 2016-2017. The first month of that I spent in a big 40 man dorm filled with around 55 dudes. All of us were addicts of some sort; all of us were clean. Few were clean by choice. It was awesome.
The bathrooms were at the front of the dorm, no covers, no partitions, just me and these guys l.i.v.i.n. It was weird; I developed a complex. I didn’t go #2 after 3 pm for over a month. I told you, a complex. I’ll explain.
I wasn’t intentionally watching these dudes poop. I swear I wasn’t. It was like they were on a stage in the Staples Center; you could not miss it from my vantage point, which was anywhere in the dorm. I noticed these guys would poop and clean themselves in one fell swoop. I’m talking about 5 plies of toilet paper, a wipe, then they were pulling their pants up. What the heck?
That was not gonna clean me. I was gonna be miserable. I already didn’t feel good about pooping in front of these strangers. Now I was gonna hold the dorm’s record for most swipes with the T.P.? I was 31 years old and thought that I had been doing one of life’s staples wrong this whole time. No wonder I was locked up. I’m an animal. What’s worst is I didn’t know how on earth I was gonna teach myself to do something new after all this time that didn’t even seem
possible. Nope, wasn’t gonna do it.
I was out working for the county from the hours of 6am to about 3 pm everyday. This meant if I could train myself to only poop during these hours, then I would not have to worry about being the only person who had not learned in 3 decades how to properly clean himself. This helped my body but not psyche. I really was destroyed and confused.
During my time as a trustee I became friends with several of the CO’s. I also couldn’t stand several, but that is a different story. One of my favorites was J-40. He and I see many of the same colors when we look at the world. We became good friends as we were both responsible for making sure the other’s day wasn’t boring.
Thank God for him. I eventually moved to a place where I had my own bathroom, but I was still becoming unhinged because somehow I had fallen through on the evolutionary tree and was actually devolving. I thought I was an efficient person before being locked up, only to now think that I had wasted so much time because I wasn’t taught how to properly clean myself. Thanks mom and dad.
I couldn’t ask anyone in my family about this. I didn’t want to destroy their world the way mine had been shattered. After about 6 months, I felt like I knew J-40 well enough bring this up. You guys do not even understand how much sleep I loss over this conversation. I was so nervous; I felt like I was going to an interview and my childhood was on the line.
I asked J-40 if he had ever heard of such a thing and if it was possible to be clean after such little work. J-40 told me that what I was describing sounded disgusting, and that I should definitely not pick up everything these other convicts were putting down.
I finally felt normal again!!!!! This is how recovery really begins.
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