Mike Runner is our Sunday Guest Contributor, and he brings a perspective to Wings Like Eagles that is unique and challenging.
I normally cover topics relating to the horror of having someone else bring darkness into the home. Mike covers the same topics, but from a completely different angle. He was the one who brought darkness to his family. Mike is an alcoholic.
It is my hope that the perception of what we think we know about Family Crisis is shaken up a bit. Because there is far more involved than we think. Much can be understood by examining the other side, and I deeply appreciate Mike's willingness to help us gain understanding as he shares with us the mind as it is affected by alcoholism.
He isn't just an alcoholic. He is an intelligent mind, has a bright, hopeful future, and he is my friend. And this is his story.
ON ASSIGNMENT, PART 5
Editor's Note: Mike shares experiences from County Jail, that may be offensive to some readers. I give this post a PG-13 rating.
Editor's Note: Mike shares experiences from County Jail, that may be offensive to some readers. I give this post a PG-13 rating.
on the subject of an update
To the readers who have been following this column, I have no update to share in my licensing status with the State of California. I am dealing with a government agency so an answer could come today or it could come in two months.
on the subject of new readers
To my new readers, hello, and welcome to my world. I feel fortunate when I see that my reader numbers are increasing, but because of this, I feel compelled to explain a few things about myself to newcomers.
First of all, humor is a big part of my recovery.
Warning! Heavy consumption of alcohol may lead to the belief that people are laughing with you.
I write about my life before alcoholism, the complete desperation and
hopelessness that I was in when I was enslaved by my drinking, and I write so that you know that no matter how far you have personally fallen, I
understand. I have been there.
In one of my darkest hours, something clicked
after many years of trying and failing.
I write stories of where I went, and how grateful I am to be where I am
today.
Two years ago, if someone told me
I would be writing a blog about my experiences with alcoholism and the hope and
joy I now have in my life, I would have flat out called them a liar. Yet, here I am.
For me, alcohol was always the answer as the years went on. The problem was that I could never remember
the question.
At many points in the last
ten years I was a blackout drinker. I do
not miss the long walk down the stairs on Saturday and Sunday mornings during
those periods. There is nothing more fun
than passing your wife in the hall, and having absolutely no idea what you did and said
the night before.
Sometimes things were
fine, other times they were not, to put it mildly. I’m not sure how many times I sat outside at
the table in my yard and was asked, “Don’t you remember the conversation we
had?” I would say, “Of course I do, but
can you refresh my memory on some of the details?” In reality, I had absolutely no idea what the
deep discussion had been about.
One of
the things that I miss the least about my drinking is losing many mental time
blocks in my life. There were certain
times that I had with my children that I simply can’t remember. Those are times that I will never get
back.
Through God, people, new tools,
and being willing, I am able to
remember all of the wonderful moments I have had with my kids in the past year
and a half. What a blessing for us, and
what a blessing that even the most hopeless alcoholics like myself and their
families can recover. Many, if not most
times I thought I never would.
A day after this posts, I get to show up again at jail and
get my new state issued jewelry in the form of an electronic monitoring ankle
bracelet. I imagine that it is going to
be multi-colored with pictures of puppies and unicorns on it, and I can sport it
as a fashion statement. Since my Mom is
a survivor, I am also hoping it will have the pink breast cancer ribbon on it. I
imagine and hope for a lot if things but in reality it is going to be big,
black, and ugly. So, it will be long
pants for me in public for the next six months.
I really wouldn’t mind wearing it with shorts if it said, “It’s OK, I’m
just an alcoholic” on it. But, unfortunately,
it is the same bracelet that someone would wear if they had committed a sex
crime and I really have no desire to get misclassified and subsequently beat up
by an angry mob who wants me out of their city.
Pants it shall be.
I also have
the privilege of paying $300 per month for the anklet.
now, back to jail
At 5:30am, the loud steel door closed behind me and I was in
my new home. I was in a room called the day room. There were bunks in the back of it as well as
upstairs. An annoyed voice came over the
loudspeaker (Apparently the person was not overly concerned about the sleeping inmates
getting their beauty rest) and said, “14A, upstairs!”
After I walked up the stairs, an inmate
rolled out of his bunk and asked me if I was “wood.” Thinking he was asking me if I was cool in
jail slang, I said, “Yeah, I’m wood.” Later I would learn that wood meant a white guy, so I had answered the
question correctly. He was also wood, so
he showed me around a bit in the early AM.
I learned about the toilet system, I learned that when someone yells,
“Radio” it means that a deputy is about to come in, and to shut up. I learned that when someone yells “respect,”
to someone else, it means that the other person has crossed a line and that
they are running the risk of suffering some physical consequences if they
didn’t knock it off. I would learn other
terminology as well, and I was fluent within a few days.
The 21 year-old who helped me out that
morning would become my closest friend in the unit.
I asked my new friend when breakfast was. We were whispering so as not to be yelled
at. He said that I had missed it and
that it was at 4:30am every morning.
4:30am? Really?!? I was never able to get a good answer on why
breakfast was at 4:30am, lunch was at 10:30am, and dinner was at 4:30pm. The good thing about it was it was a set
routine which was the only way I was able to get a consistent sense of time in
a dorm with no windows.
So the loudspeaker woke us up at daily at 4:20am
with a loud, “CHOW” which was spoken by what sounded like the same ticked off
woman every day. In reality, it seems
that they had hired a slew of angry women to yell at us over the loudspeaker. We would get up, line up for the deputy who
came in, eat in a daze, and then go back to sleep until lunch at 10:30.
Fortunately, when I came in I was exhausted from being awake
in holding cells and court for the prior 22 hours so I fell to sleep until the
next chow shriek.
I have heard very high numbers on how much California spends
per prisoner, per day, in the jail systems.
It is most certainly not spent on the food.
For my first lunch, I received two dry pieces
of bread, some canned vegetable stuff, a yellow orange, and a single piece of
luncheon meat. I think it was meat. Imagine a piece of bologna that was not
sliced properly… thicker on one end than the other with meat gelatin hanging,
sometimes dripping, off the sides. Now,
imagine putting that piece of faux bologna in the sun for a few hours. It would turn a dark brown and get more
chewy… almost rubbery. Then imagine that
one half of it normally had rather a green tint to it. That would be my lunch for every day other
than one day when they gave us the same thing but with a little tube of peanut
butter instead of the dark brown mystery meat.
For breakfast, we would get some greenish, watery malt-o-mealish stuff
and powdered eggs or potatoes.
I lost about five pounds that week which was a
positive, I suppose.
After lunch it is back to your bunks while inmates clean for
about an hour. It was Hispanic cleaning
day when I arrived so I just sat there and quietly talked to others around
me. My friend told me that he had
tobacco (which could be rolled up in newspaper) that we could smoke when we got
outside time. There is no smoking in
jail so I asked him the logical question, “How did you get the tobacco?”
He kept it hidden in hole he had made in his bedroll. He reminded me that we go through a metal
detector but that they do not check body orifices. He made the quick point of saying, “There is nothing
gay about it...it is simply practical.”
Pens, matches, tobacco, a crack pipe, and other interesting things were
hidden in and around inmates' beds. One
guy had a playboy magazine. I didn’t
ask. Practical.
After things were cleaned, the day room opened up. The day room was the same place where we ate our meals. There were decks of cards,
dominoes, and a small TV. The ethnic group that
cleaned for the day also got TV rights for the day (remember, the jail system isn't color blind). On Hispanic day, they would normally put on
Mexican stations just to mess with us, so TV wasn’t of much use and you couldn’t
hear it anyway.
OK, Mike, I thought to myself, you said you would get
through this by being of service to God, and by helping other people, so let’s do
it.
I began talking to a
man who was probably around 70 and he immediately told me his story. He had been using crystal meth quite heavily
when he checked into a hotel room and decided that he was Norman Bates from the
movie Psycho and he was the owner of the Bates Motel. He told me that he had a grey wig and a nightgown
so he could go back and forth from being Norman and Mother. He was not sure why,
but the police showed up at the hotel door which they eventually had to break
down. They came in to find a man
standing in a nightgown, wearing a woman’s wig and wielding a large kitchen knife. He said that the police didn’t do anything
until he ran at them, the knife grasped with both hands above his head, and
tried to stab them. That was the end of
that, as he claimed that he was shot in the chest.
Of course I was thinking that the guy was a nutball and
making this all up. He then lifted up
his shirt to reveal a big hole in his chest with a drip back hanging down that
was full of blood and fluid. Then he
told me that he had castrated himself when he was twenty-one. I told him that his stories were quite
interesting as I politely and slowly backed away from him and thought to
myself, I think they put me in the loony bin by mistake. Or maybe they thought I was a loon as well
and put me in the psyche ward on purpose?
Highly possible.
Within a couple
of days I had figured out that I was just in jail, and that jail is not
necessarily a great place to do a case study on the mental health of the
average American.
Next week (life permitting):
Starting fires with reading
glasses, guilty until proven innocent, dropping the soap, and “rolling it up,”
and going home at midnight.
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