Feeding Time at the Zoo
The mattress she woke on was covered in bright blue vinyl. It was hard and very uncomfortable. It was made by UNICOR prison industries. Her blanket, towel and two sheets were all UNICOR products. They didn't let her have a pillow.
The bunk itself was welded to the floor and to the wall. There were two half circle loops of metal about three inches across welded at each end of the bunk and two more loops welded at each side. She understood that two were to strap down your feet and two were to hold down your wrists but she couldn't figure out what the two at the top were for. Somehow she didn't want to find out.
Her cell consisted of four walls. Three of the walls and the floor were made of steel and one wall was bars. Every bit of it was painted orange. Her jump suit, her socks, her slippers and underwear were also the same shade of orange. She even knew what the shade was – Blaze Orange. It was that same hideous color as a traffic cone or a safety vest but there was nothing safe in these walls.
There was a long fluorescent light-box in the ceiling with two light tubes in it. It was still early morning so the fluorescent light was off but there was a light bulb on the ceiling that they kept on day and night. It made it very difficult for her to sleep.
Catherine had been told this is a "boxcar" cell. It was smaller than her walk in closet in her condo in Miami. She would be in this boxcar perhaps 150 hours out of 168 hours a week. It had two doors. The first door was made of bars like one expected a jail cell to have. Three feet beyond that was a second door. She felt it was like the inside of a gas chamber, monstrously thick and made of solid steel. She had wondered at times if Zyklon B would eventually pour out of the sink and toilet. The door had a food tray slot that the guards kept locked from the outside. There is also a small window in it that they were supposed to use every fifteen minutes to check on her welfare but they never did. She could see through it to the cell across from her. A new woman was across the way. She was some kind of foreigner. She spoke a little English but not often or very much.
She heard the clink of the electronic lock. Against her will, she had become trained to respond to that clink. Everything of interest in the whole cell block started with that clink. She knew what this one was, feeding time at the zoo. The guard opened the meal slot and tossed a white paper bag in and then slammed the door closed.
She knew exactly what the zoo meal contained. A bologna sandwich, some carrots and celery, a couple of processed cheese food sticks, an apple or an orange and if she was very lucky there might be a couple of fruit bars. It didn't sound that disgusting unless you smelled it. The bread often had green specks on it that she would have to pinch off and the bologna was gross. She had heard that prisoners were fed on three dollars a day. She believed it but she'd learned the hard way to not protest at the food.
She ate all of it she could stomach. She knew lunch and dinner would be no better.
The cell looked and smelled of rotting food and human feces, but she sat down on the floor anyway and dropped a crumb of her green bread on the ground. A horde of ants climbed out of a nearby crack and carried it away. She gave them another crumb and they took that too, and then another one after that.
She wasn't sure whether it was Sunday or Monday. Time had begun to blur all into one. If it was Monday she'd get out to the exercise yard. She'd tried exercising in her cell. Three steps forward and three steps back. That's all she could do. It didn't take her long until she gave up on exercising in the cell. It was supposed to be good for your nerves but she didn't care.
She crawled onto her bunk and read. She could only have four books a week so she got the biggest books she could so they would last.
The woman across the way began yelling and screaming. She watched as a guard went up and put a piece of cardboard over her window and just walked away. The guard caught her staring at him and slapped cardboard over her window too.
She decided to make the best of the situation and took a "bird bath" in the sink. This way at least she wouldn't have to worry about the male guards peeking at her.
She went back to reading a fat Stephen King book after that but she couldn't focus. It wasn't just the noise across the hall. She felt like her mind and sanity were being sucked out of her. She kept forgetting where she had just read or even what she had read. It had begun to be a little frightening at times. Little bits of waking dreams invaded her life. A car battery had been on the toilet for several minutes but it was gone now. It was their fault she knew. She would be fine if she weren't locked in such an insane place and if they'd let her have her psych meds. She'd screamed and begged and pleaded to keep her psych med when they took them away. She saw how insanely they had all acted and what her hopeless attempt had cost her.
How had she, Catherine Alice Roth Martin, come to this?
There was another click of the lock. Like one of Pavlov's dogs, her ears perked up. Was it lunch? No, she could tell by the quick way they walked through that it was the psychologist who had come to look at the woman across the hall. He barely stopped and said only a few words to her before leaving.
They kept her alive but in conditions that would drive any normal human being completely insane. The whole place was the exact opposite of a mental hospital. Here they deliberately drove mentally healthy people into insanity.
She was literally being treated like an animal. Every time she left her cage they tied a pillow case over her head like a raptor bird and put a leash on her. They had another word for it but it was a set of hand cuffs with a leash on them that they led her by. She could feel herself becoming more and more like a mouse in a cage. She was utterly dependent upon the guards for her food, for her exercise time in the yard, for everything. She would starve to death if they didn't feed her and that made her depressed.
She tried to go back to her reading but unfortunately her neighbor across the way had added banging her cell bars to her screaming. She was growing used to screams, shouts, banging and cursing at all hours of the day and night.
She watched as a guard opened the cardboard over her neighbor's window and received a massive pelting of poop. Exactly like an angry chimp at a zoo, the woman had struck back at her keepers with what she had available. What caged ape wouldn't?
Unfortunately Catherine's keepers weren't humane zoo keepers who cared about their trusts. She knew what she had gotten when she called them what they were, which was a bunch of perverted Nazis, and had fought them when one had groped her as she was being herded to the showers. She waited watched and soon it came. Half a dozen of the guards in SS Deaths Head black tactical uniforms with full body armor stormed her cell and tasered her into unconsciousness. Then they ripped her clothes off and dragged her off into the isolation cell.
Catherine had learned the hard way that there was a Hell that was even worse than Solitary. Three days of complete and utter confinement in a freezing cold and pitch black cell, stark naked without a sheet or a blanket or a mattress, pummeled night and day by the distorted guitar blasts, explosive drumming and growling, shrieking vocals of the grindcore heavy metal group Napalm Death's hit album, Scum. Except for meals flung in at feeding time there wouldn't be another sign of a human being was still on the planet.
After three days of torture, she would be returned to her cell where she would be told that her actions had shown that she was not safe to return to the general prison population and would have to be kept in solitary. Catherine said she would appeal but was told that there would be up to 90 days until her case would even be heard.
It was hopeless. The prison held all the cards and she knew it. One guard had told her as she was hauled into the isolation cell that he wondered if she'd ever get out of Solitary. Was he right? She sincerely wondered and then began to cry.
There was another click of the lock. She turned to the door, salivating just a little. Another white sack was tossed into her cage. She took it and ate the sandwich, tossing the greenish bits to her ants one by one, watching them take the crumbs away before giving them another one. She understood now why she fed her ants. They were the last living things on Earth that cared whether she was dead or alive.
