It is extremely rare these days for me to experience a “prison event” behind these walls that I have not come in contact with during my stay here. This is a very good thing because new is certainly not better when it relates to prison. You want your days to run smoothly… your program to flow as planned and things to generally be similar day in and day out. When something is added to the mix… this is typically not a good thing. Which leads me to this past Thursday night… well more accurately… early Friday morning…
“Horwitz. Get up! You gotta go to the LT’s office. Meet me in the lobby now.” My eyes shoot open but my brain does not follow. “What??” I think I say but I am not completely sure that anything left my mouth. I either did actually say ‘What?’ or the perplexed look on my face said it for me because the officer repeated himself… a bit more annoyed this time… and now my brain was beginning to catch up a bit. At least enough to inform me that I was still in prison and I needed to get up out of bed. I jump down from my bunk and check my watch… 1:22am… “What the f*ck?” – I think to myself… “What could the LT (lieutenant) possibly need with me at One in the morning?” The next thought brought me back to when I was a kid and your Mom tells you to come into her room because she needs to talk to you… “What have I done wrong? Have I done anything wrong? I don’t think so but something is wrong… so what could I have done?” The questions are forming rapidly but there seem to be no answers that follow.
I throw clothes on and head out the door toward the lobby. As I get into the lobby… I see a couple other guys standing out there as well. This was honestly a relief because at least it wasn’t just something that I specifically did… and I definitely don’t have anything to do with these guys so this eases my mind a bit. “What do you think this is about?” I ask one of them. “UA”… he says to me with an eye roll. ‘UA’ means Urine Analysis aka a drug test. This is the first time that I have been drug tested in the 3 years that I have been here so this in itself seemed weird as I do not do drugs or have the reputation that I do drugs in here so not sure why I would be getting drug tested in the middle of the night… “randomly”. But… no control over any of that so off I go… in the rain… to the LT’s office with my fellow khaki suits.
The LT’s office is located on the North Yard just next to Commissary. It is simply a door that stands there… haunting us… day in and day out because you never want to have to open that door and walk up the 2 flights of stairs to whatever awaits you once you arrive at the office. There is nothing… absolutely nothing… good that comes from paying a visit to the LT’s office. The only time that I have ever been up there prior to this little experience is about 5 minutes before I was handcuffed and escorted to the SHU years ago… this is not where I want to be. But … I open the door and head up the stairs. As I get to the top… I am greeted by an officer that I have never seen before… “Third door on the right”… he says to me and I head the few steps down the hallway. The third door on the right is “The Drunk Tank” aka a beige concrete room with no windows and a massive steel door that sounds like a bank vault locking behind you as you step inside. I am then greeted by about 30 other inmates as I enter the room… mind you… 30 people do not fit inside this little room. Immediately my mind is flooded with memories of when I was first arrested and transported to holding cell after holding cell… just pure hell. But here I am.
The way ‘UA’s work is that you have 2 hours to successfully fill your cup and if you cannot or do not complete this task within those two hours… you go to the SHU. Guys are pacing in circles… complaining… sitting in the corner with their heads against the wall clearly upset with whatever this test is about to show for them… banging on the door (to no avail) trying to go to the water fountain in an attempt to fill their tank because they “can’t pee”. It is a circus.
I was standing against the wall for about an hour and twenty minutes before I was called into the bathroom next door… monitored closed by two officers as I pee’d in my little cup… initialed and signed the strip that will seal the cup and then escorted back into the circus cell because now I am stuck there through 3am count so I am not allowed to head back to the unit to get an hour of sleep before I need to be at work. Awesome.
As I was standing against the wall… looking around at the madness… my initial thought was “I need to get the hell out of prison man… this is not for me”… this was quickly followed by… “This is some bullsht… why the fck can’t I just go back to the unit and get some sleep”… which led to… “Because you are in prison… you have no control over anything so now you have a decision to make.” And that decision was how I was going to handle all of this… mentally. I cannot control that I was woken up at 1am and dragged here to spend the night standing against a cold concrete wall in a concrete room but what I can control is how I mentally frame the event. And my decision… “screw it… this is something that I can write about.” I made the decision to take the situation and use it productively and positively as opposed to dwelling on the fact that it objectively sucks.
We have this ability… the ability to control our thoughts and as I have said in the past… this is an absolute super power. Our thoughts are the catalyst to our emotions… to our moods… to the framework of our days… to our interactions with others… everything is controlled by the space between our ears. And if we are able to harness the ability to manage our thoughts in order to take any situation… literally anything… and DECIDE to figure out a way to frame it positively… our life is simply going to be better. And the lack of control that we feel when we find ourselves in uncomfortable or negative situations is combated by the absolute control that we have over the way that we mentally filter the event.
So hopefully you never find yourself in a bathroom with two officers staring at your while you fill a cup with urine… because trust me when I tell you… it takes some mental strength to re-frame that one. But outside of that… when you do find yourself in traffic… or that meeting… or stuck in that place and you feel the frustration start to creep up the back of your neck and you’re about to let the situation ruin your day… remember that you have the power to decide. You have the power to turn the negative into a positive (or at least a neutral). You and only you… so use your super power and don’t let these inevitable negative events rain on your parade out there.
Stay Healthy. Stay Active. Stay in Control.