Employee of the Year

Chapter 29 - Cell Mates

The Twin Towers Jail was on the edge of downtown, east of Chinatown and Union Station. It was an enormous pink fortress where they held the most dangerous offenders in the LA County jail system. When I entered the second tower, they checked my keys, wallet, and clothes into a safety box. They took me through DNA collection and the other procedures. Then they made me change into blue scrubs. That was one nice thing you could say about the LA County jail system: They didn't make you wear the standard orange jumpsuit.

We went up an elevator to the top floor. The guards led me down a corridor past a gallery of deranged, angry men. I made eye contact with some of them and avoided it with others. It was all about fear inside here. You needed to figure out who you could scare and who you couldn't. You needed to figure out how to avoid some people at all costs.

They led me down the corridor to my cell. We stopped momentarily to make way for two guards carrying an inmate on a stretcher. The prisoner was lying flat, coughing up blood. His arms were strapped to the side so he couldn't cover his mouth. The blood sprayed in the air like a geyser.

I noticed that the cell blocks were assigned by race and gang affiliation. The black guys from South Central were concentrated in one section of the floor. White bikers from the trailer parks up near Palmdale were located in another patch. The second half of my corridor was mainly Latino, sporting constellations of tattoos representing the gangs from the East Side. Most people saw I was mixed, so it was a tossup where to send me.

            I was relieved when we stopped in front of an empty cell at the very end of the hallway. The room had bunk beds for four people but I was by myself. A recess cut into the far wall held a sink and toilet.

The guard brought my cellmates in an hour later. I could see they were bangers, both apparently from the same crew. Tattoos were peeking out from the collars of their scrubs. One guy was named Carlo. He was wide and rectangular, built like a Humvee and layered with thick muscle. The other guy, Ernie, was slimmer but still had a rock solid chest and biceps rippling under his prison clothes.

            "What you in for?" Ernie asked me.

            "Murder," I said.

            "Sweet."

They stayed on the opposite end of the room, crowding the other bunk, whispering in Spanish. I obviously wasn't from a gang, so they had no reason to care about me. No sunshine was coming through the windows at the end of the corridor. Night had fallen. I had roughly twelve more hours before my arraignment the next morning. It was going to be a quiet night in my cell. I just had to wait it out and maybe get a few hours sleep.

 A new guard came on for the night shift. He brought us meal trays. I wasn't sure exactly what kind of food it was supposed to be. It seemed to be some sort of slop with ground meat and potatoes mixed together. I took a spoonful and then set the rest of it aside.

            "You going to eat that, slick?" The Humvee-shaped Carlo inquired, reaching out for my tray.

            "No," I said. "Go for it."

            He shoveled the slop into his mouth with rapid-fire movements.

            The guard came again, and this time he was leading a prisoner, the fourth inmate to fill our cell. The lights in the corridor were dim. It wasn't until the guard brought him up to my bunk that I realized who it was.

            It was Marcus, dressed in the same blue scrubs as me, Carlo, and Ernie. I remembered Alan's promise in front of the TV cameras that the CEO of Passion would be treated like everyone else, locked up in the Twin Towers with suspected felons from the 'hood and the barrios and the trailer parks.