The Ding Tank

I looked across the holding cell for the day’s trip to the Van Nuys Municipal Court. It was packed with sixty or so pissed off criminals who were, they hoped, going to see the judge today so they might get one step closer to actually getting out, or at least finally being sentenced. It usually takes a while to get a case resolved. For those who can’t make bail, that means sitting in jail for weeks, even months, before their journeys through the court system are over, and either freedom or prison awaits. Some people spend years waiting in jail fighting their cases before they lose and get sent to up river, to a real prison. Me, I’d been in for only two weeks—I’d end up staying there three—but I was kicking a nasty heroin habit. For the first week, I hardly slept—partly from going cold turkey, partly from being scared shitless.

My mom had called the jail and told them I was suicidal, so they put me in the “ding tank,” reserved for prisoners with mental or emotional problems. Being in the ding tank had its good and its bad side. On the good side, I was in a cell by myself and didn’t have to deal with a cellmate, or with being in the general prison population, otherwise known as “mainline.” It was 1987. I was twenty-two, a rock ’n’ roll pretty boy who weighed only about a hundred and twenty pounds; I was five feet ten, with long musician’s hair and a constant look of fear on my face, a look I couldn’t hide. Whenever I walked close to the general pop, I was whistled at, taunted, and threatened in any number of ways. If I had been thrown in with them, I would have been attacked, beaten, and probably sexually assaulted. Since I couldn’t fight my way out of a potato chip bag, being in the ding tank was a definite benefit.

The down side was you were locked in your little cell all day long and didn’t get to walk around or talk or play cards or dominoes with the other inmates. Not that I was dying to socialize with the surrounding company, but the time went by at a snail’s pace and the jail didn’t give me anything to deal with withdrawal symptoms. I would yell for the deputies, just to have someone to talk to, but they didn’t have any sympathy for a “dirty gutter hype,” as they called people like me. Oh, there were one or two nice deputies who’d recite the obligatory, “You’re a smart young man and you don’t belong here, but you need to lay off the dope or you’re gonna come back. Again and again. I’ve seen it a thousand times. Now stop crying and act like a man . . . blah, blah, blah.” That kind of thing.

I never really listened. I mean, I was just starting to listen, and little cracks opened up here and there along my great wall of denial, but I never took their advice to heart because I never really understood it. It would be another year or so before I’d have the clarity to see what an awful mess my life had become, and the humility to admit that Mexican black tar heroin was destroying me. In spite of the damage the needle had done, right then I just wanted to get in front of a judge, be released, and go downtown to cop a nice little balloon of the only thing that seemed to make life tolerable. But before any of that could happen, I was about to have one of those “scared straight” experiences that might’ve/could’ve/should’ve—but didn’t—make me put down the smack for good. Not yet.

This particular morning, I was awakened at 4:30 by another inmate whose assigned task it was to make everyone up who had a court date get up. You took a two-minute shower, and breakfast...