Nature Never Knows When to Call
My true story of having the craziest prison job at Club Fed
Even federal inmates sometimes have to use the restroom. Yes, it’s true.
Whenever we were at Club 44 — in the morning when the bus dropped us off; an hour at lunch; and at the end of the day waiting for the bus to pick us up — we had access to a pair of port-a-potties. This might sound surprising, but it was actually quite nice. Inmates are ferocious about keeping everything clean, so they were immaculate; and being able to go in there and close the door for 10 minutes was the only time — EVER — that I got to be alone.
But for 90% of the day, we were not at 44. We were out in the field working. Vandenberg was basically a small town, and small towns don’t have public bathrooms out on the street. If we had to go, we had to come up with creative solutions — every one of which could easily get us into serious trouble.
For myself, I only ever found one safe place to do what I had to do, and we only went there once a week. One day a week, I drove my mower around some dorm buildings, and in a field outside, there were some cinder block walls around a dumpster or two. Nobody was around, and it was possible to go in there, not be seen by anyone, and take care of business. Yes, it’s gross, and it’s not the way I would roll in normal life… but the alternative was bursting my bladder.
One of the other guys on another route had a better solution. Jay mowed around the hospital. He could park, go inside, and use a public bathroom just down the hall. The people who work at the hospital were, like everyone on base, accustomed to seeing us in our red jumpsuits with FEDERAL INMATE poorly stenciled on them, so Jay never had a problem. Jay was a really straight-up guy; he had no interest in rocking the boat or causing trouble, and just wanted to keep his nose clean and get out of there as soon as possible. He’d been a bank loan officer, who sold loans he was hired to sell. There were a lot of guys like Jay there as a result of the S&L scandal. They never prosecuted the people at the top who designed these crappy loans; they prosecuted the low men on the totem pole who did only what they were told to do. Anyway, I digress. The point is Jay is not someone who would cause trouble.
Yet, one day, back at 44, Jay did not return. Kenny told us that some people at the hospital had complained that one of our guys had been swaggering around the hospital, being rude and sexually harassing the women. And technically we were not allowed in the hospital, or any other buildings, ever, at all. Jay had been driven back to the prison. We learned later he’d been sent to the SHU for 30 days. This cost him his good time (the default 15% off every federal inmate’s sentence).
Kenny questioned all of us about what we knew. He knew, as I did (and very few others) that Jay was gay, and knowing his intelligent character, the complaint did not make any sense at all. Whatever happened is not what was reported.
Well, I can tell you exactly what happened. Every once in a while there would be someone on base — often a family member of a serviceperson — who was terrified of us. The base newspaper always carried stories of how we were discussed in town hall meetings, and how unsafe it was to have hardened criminals — “rapists and murderers” — running amok all over the place. Just to be clear, there could never be a rapist or murderer among us. We came from the camp, not from the penitentiary. We had no walls, fences, or even locked doors. We were the lowest security inmates possible. Nobody with any history of violence, of any kind, could ever be in the camp.
But FEDERAL INMATE stenciled on a red jumpsuit is scary. People were ignorant, and sometimes they would make a false report like this. Jay paid the price. I think his sentence was two years, so losing that 15% was 3½ more months that he was kept away from his family.
So I don’t really have a joke or a punchline to wrap this one up. Please don’t ever assume that anyone is a bad person, simply because you think you know one single bad thing about them.
I did inherit Jay’s nice straw sunhat, though.