“Whiz!” Brring!” went the incessant chime of the defective doorbell.
My 16-year-old-self slept on as my mom’s one-level brick home was surrounded by officers and detectives from Memphis and Arkansas. They had the exits guarded, windows covered and guns drawn.
My peaceful slumber in the embrace of my favorite comforter had mutated into a nightmarish episode of “Cops.” This would-be reality show starred me as the perpetrator, with the cops as supporting cast members on what was then the worst day of my life.
Like a TV drama, every scene was routine. The chunky, grandpa-looking police captain played a good cop, sitting beside me on the couch. “Sweetie,” he said, “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, but you just have to trust me.”
There was a wiry, mustached detective out of the Arkansas boondocks. He was the bad cop. “Now you listen here,” he said. “If you don’t tell us what we wanna know, you will nevuh see your momma again, missy!” I still remember his jaw swollen with chewing tobacco.
Cops were all over the house, buzzing like worker bees in a colony.
As the day progressed, I was relocated to a high-back chair in the dining room.
Questions battered me from the opposing forces of good cop and bad cop. “Honey, who else was with you…?” “Where were you on…?” “Tell us what you did with it…?”
Suddenly one of the worker-bee cops exclaimed, “Bingo!”
I started to sweat. The secret was out!
As the cop drifted into view holding a spent shell casing in his gloved hand, my day grew immeasurably worse.
Four hundred and nineteen days later, I was still sitting in the county jail.
Languishing in jail as I waited to go to prison, flashes of past failures and regrets played on a loop in my mind. I could see every face affected by the consequences of my choices on the walls of the cell.
After more than a year of waiting, I was ripped from sleep again by a female voice shouting. “Inmate Jones, get up, pack all your property, and make sure you don’t leave nothing behind!”
A figure stood at my cell door. The disjointed frame morphed into a male guard with a booming voice. He barked directives at me in rapid fire. “Turn and face the wall, walk towards your slab, get on your knees, place your hands clasped behind your back, and don’t move!”
Dread filled me. I complied at once. Immediately, I was handcuffed — with a long chain wrapped around my waist, secured by a black box with a padlock, shackles around my ankles — then passed off to another male guard, the transportation sergeant.
We proceeded down the dim, antiseptic-scented corridor. The chains and ankle cuffs made it hard for a 17-year-old to walk.
Charged and sentenced by the courts as an adult, I was finally on the way to a maximum security facility to serve out the decades remaining on my sentence.
“Finally, I’ll see,” I thought as I shuffled down the never-ending hallway. I would see if the horrors depicted in TV prison shows were overexaggerated, fear-inducing fiction. I certainly hoped so! Or would dread be my cellmate? Would I become dehumanized by growing up in prison?
I was about to find out. I’d been repeatedly told over the last year and a half to expect this day to be the worst day of my life.
Well, to be honest, there were a handful of days that could contend for that title. They had every appearance of being detrimental, difficult and problematic. But, despite how terrifying those past occurrences were, I survived them — notwithstanding the batterings and bruises, the gasping for air.
The most important thing that I’ve learned thus far is you truly never know what a day may bring, and it’s best just to wait and see.
