Lost in his thoughts and having accepted the blister-to-callus process, the afternoon seemed to speed by. Before he knew it, he was back in the paddy wagon with his work mates and they were on their way back to the workhouse.
It was shower day, clean clothes day. Another new experience. No one bothered him. He had his own shower head and his own soap. He made sure not to drop it, that old bit from the movies, but even if he did, it wouldn’t have mattered.
The showers were very heavily guarded. Guards with night sticks and shotguns, not to mention sidearms and pepper spray, stood along the entire row of shower heads. Bill didn’t count, but it was about a dozen men at a time and they were given sufficient time to wash and then lounge in the hot water. Bill had no idea how many shower stations they had throughout the workhouse. In his whole time there, he would not find out. He would not see anything more than his cell, the walk to the cafeteria, the commissary, the entrance/exit and of course the barber, which he would only see that one time.
He felt great all washed and in clean clothes. He even felt perky, and maybe a touch uplifted in his spirits. Back in his cell, he hopped up on his bunk and rested. There wasn’t much time until dinner line-up and dinner, which was no surprise. More SOS, whatever it really was, more stale bread, more chocolate milk. He passed on the food, drank the milk. The milk served to fill his shrunken stomach. He was not hungry. He did not have to go to the bathroom, he had cigarettes. Life was good.
Not only was it shower day, but it was Friday and he had survived his first three days, actual time slightly less than three and a half days since arrival. He had seen the dog and pony show for the new arrivals two times and he knew now that much of what the guards did was nothing more than a show they maintained for keeping control. The guards were heavily armed, not all of them at any given time, but nothing happened without it being overseen by a heavily armed guard. So while the guard delivering the brown bombers in the morning might not have anything more than pepper spray, a night stick and a sidearm, someone was watching with a shotgun and a military rifle. Generally, guards in the perches—they were actually booths—held a shotgun and had the military rifle in a rack. No guard entered a dorm with a sidearm unless accompanied by one or two more guards with shotguns. All this despite the fact that the inmates in the workhouse, for the most part, were in for wife-beating, drunk driving and similar low-level misdemeanors. Bill’s being there for assault and battery on a police officer was unusual and made him unique. Why the tough hadn’t bothered him.
Being Friday, tomorrow was visiting day. Bill hoped Sue would be there to see him, but he hadn’t been able to speak to her yet since he didn’t have any money on account. If she came and she left him money, he could make phone calls and get to the commissary.
Being Friday, it was also being-locked-up-for-the-next-two-days day. Bill did not relish being locked up for two days. Blisters and all, he preferred work, even if he was helping the police make the bullets they used on the practice ranges.
Bill remembered.
Shortly after 10:00 PM he heard his name called out and then that magic word, bail. By 10:30 he was happily seated in the front seat of Alex’s Saab.
His bail had been set at eleven hundred dollars. Alex had to put up ten percent, in cash, and since he didn’t have that kind of money, he had to find a bail bondsman who would take a check and give him the hundred-ten dollars in cash to make the bail. As Alex told it, that was no easy feat, which was why it took so long. In fact, only one bondsman was willing to put out the money and he only did it because Alex was gainfully employed and not a kid.
Then there was the matter of understanding where Bill was and what had happened to him. Alex didn’t know Bill was arrested and only after Bill’s girlfriend Sue had phoned, concerned that Bill hadn’t come home and she hadn’t heard from him, did he start to make some calls. That was already late afternoon. The police weren’t too helpful. They were overwhelmed and not much inclined to look for Bill. Alex had to get a lawyer friend to call the police to get a definitive answer. Bill had never been given his phone call.
Alex took one look at Bill’s eye and knew Bill needed to go to the hospital. He could see his blood-soaked shirt, the blood dried now. There was blood all down the back of his shirt, so Alex looked at Bill’s head and saw Bill’s hair stiffened with dried blood.
“You need to go to the emergency room,” he said. “Don’t doze off on me.”
That was the next zoo. The ER people were working overtime. Case after case of tear gas irritation and assorted bruises were being worked on and stitches were being sewn everywhere. There was a long line and a long wait. There was no room to sit, hardly any room to stand. More than half an hour passed before they even took Bill’s information. But they did look at him, determining that he could wait.
As he waited, they rolled in a policeman laid out on a gurney. He wasn’t a city cop. He was highway patrol, State police. As it worked out, he was situated right next to where Bill stood waiting. When he saw Bill and Bill saw him, their eyes met. Obviously in severe pain, he turned his head more toward Bill. Bill saw one whole side of his face was collapsed and the outline of a brick could be seen it.
“What’s it all for?” the patrolman asked.
Bill’s heart fell. He reached down and touched the man on his wrist, a gentle touch of empathy. “I don’t know,” Bill said.
“They declared martial law,” Alex said. “They imposed a 10 PM curfew and they’re arresting anyone who breaks it.”
Bill watched as they rolled the patrolman off. He and Alex stood waiting.
When they finally got back to Alex’s house, a small group of Alex’s friends were there. They were sitting around discussing the day’s events. Bill learned the details of all that had happened. Over six hundred were arrested. He was the very first.
Lies, lies and more lies: that is the way of our times. It’s not new. It’s just more pronounced. With the media being what it is, one might think the people would get the truth. That’s not the case. The reality is that our leaders and the media have spent their time and craftiness developing ways to circumvent and/or obfuscate it.
Harry Reid, of all people, best articulated the current complete disregard for the truth seemingly endemic to our times. Not only did he lie outright about Mitt Romney and his taxes, but later, when asked about it, Reid said he was glad he did it since Romney didn’t get elected. The inference is that lying as a tactic is now quite all right, even acceptable. After all, the Senate Minority Leader and former Majority Leader sanctioned it, even proudly defended it.
Shoot forward and there’s Susan Rice out on all the Sunday talk shows blatantly lying about what happened in Benghazi. That lying was concurrent, we now know, with Hillary Clinton lying to the parents of those killed in Benghazi while simultaneously emailing her daughter Chelsea that they knew it was a planned terrorist act. Susan Rice, despite lying outright and being exposed for it, was almost promoted to a high cabinet post, but since that didn’t go over too well, she was promoted to Ambassador to the UN. Within the last two week or so, she is purported to have accompanied John Kerry in a meeting with the Palestinians which Kerry says never took place but which internal government sources allege is documented. That meeting precedes the US not blocking the anti-Israel resolution just passed in the UN that Israel claims the US secretly initiated, helped draft and pressed for. Israel claims it has incontrovertible proof of what it claims. Obama holds to what may very well be another blatant lie.
This last one regarding Israel represents the issue. By the time the people get the truth, Obama will have sworn to his lie (if it is a lie) so many times many people will simply accept it’s veracity, real or not. The media, NY Slimes, Washington Compost, Clinton Network News and all the NBCs, the ones admittedly in the tank for Obama and his cronies, will have sworn to his lie so many times that it will simply be accepted.
This is ominous stuff. Consider! Obama announced sanctions on Putin and the Russians for interfering in the recent election. First he announced that seventeen intelligence agencies concurred. He called for a major investigation to be completed before he leaves office, but that investigation is maybe ongoing, maybe not. Then there was some push back from the FBI. Then the FBI acquiesced. Obama said they have proof but no one has ever shown any proof. So as far as anyone not in his loop knows, the claims he’s been making and intelligence report conjectures thus far are just that: conjectures, inferences.
Now, the media reports the intelligence agency conjectures as fact. It refers to Obama’s claims about Trump imploring Putin to hack in and help him as fact. It reports as fact that Putin knew and personally directed the hacking. The most the media has is that Obama said nothing happens in Russia without Putin knowing.
And so without the American people seeing one iota of actual factual evidence, Obama has slurred the President-Elect, purposefully attempting, perhaps, to delegitimize his election and cast doubt on his presidency before it starts while sanctioning Russia, starting stuff he won’t be there to finish, handcuffing the new president purposefully.
Lies, lies and more lies. When it’s all said and done, regarding selling out Israel, sanctioning Russia and casting aspersions on the legitimacy of the incoming administration, Obama will have achieved his ends without presenting one concrete piece of evidence such that the truth is inconsequential, not important.
Lies, lies and more lies. Obama isn’t the first president to lie or the only one or the only leader to be selling some pretty big whoppers. But he and his cronies and his people have perfected the art. But then, as Hillary said, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
All afternoon he remembered.
Bill could lose himself in his thoughts as he worked since this work required no brain power and only perfunctory concentration. That was one of the things he would like about working in kitchens, that and a certain satisfaction to be found from the physical labor.
The pain in his blistered hands lessened. His hands dried where the calluses were about to form and he accepted the pain more as he understood it more. He understood it as a process now, and he thought he might hasten the process by not babying himself.
He was not hungry any longer. He had not eaten in three full days and had no prospects for eating in the near future, at least as he could see it. One benefit was that he was losing weight. He didn’t need to lose weight, but… A second benefit was he didn’t have to take a crap. Not for nothing, but he didn’t relish the idea of using those toilets in that dorm-like cell sealed by bars.
The first morning a guard had come around and called out “Brown Bombers.” Bill hadn’t asked, but he’d come to understand that brown bombers were extremely potent laxative pills. The men who needed them went up to the front gate and got them. Columbus didn’t have a backed up system.
He remembered being bailed out some ten hours after his arrest. His headache never went away. That undercover had been let go quickly, the first one to get out. Bill would never have known he was undercover except for the pot encounter, and altogether, so far as Bill knew, his cover was never blown. If Bill had any doubt about how set up he’d been, that encounter erased it forever. Of course it wasn’t him who was set up. It was whichever nameless, faceless stooge happened to fall into the trap.
His eye had scabbed and stopped bleeding. His head, where he’d been hit from behind with handcuffs wrapped around the knuckles of the FBI agent who’d hit him, an unidentified plain clothes agent who didn’t identify himself, had stopped bleeding too, so it must have scabbed also.
By the time of the gassing incident the cells were all occupied. After the first few deliveries of prisoners from the riot, a freakish circus atmosphere overtook the holding cells. Noise ratcheted up. Those who were unhurt were jovial, laughing and goofing around. Each new set of arrivals was greeted with cheers and loud applause. Each new prisoner told what was going on at the school. Campus was closed down. Classes cancelled. Police and demonstrators were clashing constantly, the police using tear gas to scatter the crowds. Instead of relenting, the demonstrators were digging in, fighting back, hurling rocks and whatever else they could find.
The release of the gas through the ventilation system was met with loud objection despite the coughing and covering of faces. They were told to shut up, get still, stay quiet. But they didn’t and the noise and gas only worsened Bill’s headache. That headache–he had a severe concussion–would stay with Bill for days.
As the afternoon wore on, Bill could see darkness settling in outside. These cells, this lockup, was on the top floor of the main police station in downtown Columbus. It was one long row of cells across from which were the windows. Outside the window Bill could see through were upper floors of several taller buildings. As darkness overtook the outside, a row of single light bulbs set in into the wall between the windows came on as did one single light in bulb each cell. Each cell, like the one Bill was in, was dimly lit, as was the entire room.
Also as the evening came prisoners began being bailed out. A name would be called. Then “Bail,” a voice would say over the PA. Then a policeman would come in, call out the name again and wait to hear the prisoner say “over here.” In the workhouse they called out a name then announced “Roll ’em up.”
Bailing out of prisoners increased in rapidity as night came on. Bill sat, got up, sat down again, got up, paced the small cell, the very small cell, sat back down again. He had no hopes for bail. He didn’t know anyone. No one knew him. He had no idea as to how long he would be in lock up.
