How art saved my ass in jail

A Social Distortion classic from the early days.

I got arrested, and spent three days in jail, for buying donuts.  Seriously.  Hey, it was in North Carolina, and let's face it, The South is still The South.

In the summer of 2017, unable to find any job, I made a little money selling my Sharpie drawings online.  I left the toxic environment where I lived with my mom, in the small town of Kernersville, NC, and went to live in a tent, in the woods, in nearby Winston-Salem.  They had a cool little art scene there, centered on Trade Street, downtown.  I planned to become a part of that scene.

Why was I living with my mom, in North Carolina, at age 51?  Because of an incredible amaount of pressure from hundreds of undercover federal agents, police officers, and many intelligence agency pysops teams, over 16 1/2 years, to fuck up my life that much.  The pressure started when my bank account was suddenly closed, for no apparent reason, about three weeks after 9/11, back in 2001.  It felt like I was fighting ghosts, that's the best way to describe it.  When 9/11 happened, I was on somebody's list, for some reason, I still don't know why.  The most recent story is that I have the highest legitimately documented IQ in the U.S., a score of 216 (from 1985), roughly 198 in today's world.  I find that story really, really hard to believe.  If that's somehow true, someone, somewhere, thinks I'm obligated to work for their agenda.  I disagree. 

Anyhow, it was a struggle to simply survive, as I had pressure from many levels come down on me, I scraped by as a taxi driver for some years, with undercover cops/agents taking rides every couple of weeks, asking if I did drugs, sold drugs, got people hookers, and every other possible criminal activity, including being a terrorist.  I don't do any of those things.  I stopped keeping a running count of the number of these undercover people at about 600.  That was in maybe 2006 or so.  The total number is at least double that. There were hundreds of uniform officers, from many agencies, tasked with giving me a hard time, as well. 

This is real.  This happened.  Yeah, I may be crazy, I mean, no truly sane person would be a taxi driver.  But this happened, none-the-less.  And this is why I haven't made a decent living for two decades.  The pressure on me was always pushing me to the political far right, not today's far right, but the George W. Bush era, NeoCon type of political Far Right.  I also had a ridiculous amount of evangelical "Christians" come into my life, trying to recruit me to one of their churches in SoCal, in those early years, 2002-2007.  It became very apparent that the Christian Right power structure, a lot of members of the U.S. intelligence agencies, and someone who could get police to put pressure on people in SoCal, were all closely tied together.  I never had an undercover say, "Hey, you're smart, you should join Greenpeace," or, "How about that Rachel Maddow show last night?"  All the pressure on me was towards evangelical Christianity, and far Right Republican ideology.  Yes, I know this statement will rile up many of you, including several friends.  But I'm tired of pretending this didn't happen, and tired of not being able to explain why I've struggled to escape homelessness for so many years.  This is what happened. 

About 2003, I started getting random people in the taxi trying to push me to move to North Carolina
where my parents, and my sister and brother-in-law wound up living.  At that time, I was a taxi driver, a Has Been BMX freestyler/skateboard industry guy, living in (my cab) in the Huntington Beach area.

When you live in Southern California, North Carolina is not a place you think of moving to.  North Carolina is a place smart, creative, and talented people ESCAPE.  Ask artist Shephard Fairey, who grew up in South Carolina.  The pressure finally got to the point, after taxi driving died, my health got really bad, and after living a year on the streets, that I accepted my family's offer to fly to NC to stay for a bit.  That was mid-November 2008.  Remember that time?  Not a good time to find a job in a new town.  Or anywhere, kind of like now.  I got trapped there, and couldn't make enough money to come back to SoCal.  So in late 2017, I was living with my mom, in a very toxic environment.  I left, and wound up living in a tent in the woods, in Winston-Salem.

The only thing that made me any money then, were my Sharpie drawings, which I sold online.  So I would draw at McDonald's, or the library, most of each day.  For food money, I went to one of the two Aldi grocery stores in Winston.  At Aldi's, you have to put a quarter in a slot to unchain the shopping cart from the rest of them.  OK, they call shopping carts "buggies" in NC.  When you unload your groceries into your car, you have to push the cart back, click it into the line of carts, and you get your quarter back.  That way Aldi's doesn't have to pay a person to push carts.  Pretty ingenious.

So I would walk up to people unloading their groceries into their cars, and say, "I'm out of work, can I push your cart back and keep the quarter?"  Technically, that's not panhandling.  Loitering, maybe, but not panhandling.  Most people were happy to let me do that.  I'd push carts for 45 minutes or an hour, every couple of days, and get $5-6 for food and bus fare.  I spent the rest of my time drawing my Sharpie drawings, planning to work into the Winston-Salem art scene, and to sell my drawings online.  That's exactly what happened in the next few months.

Both Aldi stores in Winston had off duty, uniformed police officers, working security.  Most of the officers let me push carts for an hour, and occasionally would say, "OK, 'bout time to move on," and I'd leave.  But one officer just didn't like me, and he told me to leave the property one afternoon. I was just starting to sell my artwork, and it looked like I might not have to push carts anymore, which was good, from my point of view.

But I ran out of money a couple of weeks later, and went back to push carts.  I pushed one cart, got a quarter, and the officer saw me.  He got all mad, and told me to leave the property.  So I did.  I walked a little ways down the road and assessed my situation.  I had a quarter.  I was hungry.  I had an EBT (food stamp) card.  It was about 95 degrees out, 300% humidity (give of take), and I didn't have bus fare.  It was a 2 1/2 or 3 mile walk to my campsite.

I decided that if I went back into Aldi, and just bought something to eat on my card, and walked straight off the property, I wouldn't be breaking any laws.  The cop wouldn't like it, but I'd buy something to eat, eat it at a nearby bus stop, and then see if I could panhandle bus fare or something.  So I walked back into the store, the officer saw me, and started to follow me, then walked away.  He wound up standing right by the front door, and watched me stand in line, buy a box of 12 donuts, and I walked past him out the door, heading off the property.  As I left the front door (where there were no security cameras), he grabbed my shoulder from behind, swung me around, and screamed "You're under arrest!"  On instinct, I swung my arm up, and twisted away from him.  He grabbed me again, and I realized he was actually going to arrest me, so I let him do it.  He threw the donuts on the ground, cuffed me (way too tight, of course), and put me in the back of his police car, and hauled ass to Forsyth County jail, in downtown Winston.

I had no criminal record, at all, at age 51.  I got taken into jail and spent a couple hours in a holding cell once, in California, on a traffic ticket warrant that I didn't realize I had.  That was my only experience in jail.  So I got processed in, and put in a cell.  For whatever reason, we were in a 23 and 1 lock down, the whole pod.  23 hours in the cell, alone in my case, and one hour out to take a shower, watch TV, or make phone calls, in the common area.

I was on depression medication at the time, and they didn't give me my psych meds.  There's a reason you're not supposed to quit depression meds cold turkey, you go into a detox mode, and get really freaked out and edgy.  So that didn't help.  I started killing time by playing word games with the jail graffiti.  I sat there figuring out how many words I could spell with the letters in "Free Jizzle" or the other tags on the wall.  I paced back and forth in the small cell for half and hour or so at a time.  I did push-ups against the wall.  I was about 325 pounds, I think, way too fat for real push-ups.

But I'm a highly creative, motivated person, and like to keep busy doing something creative, art and writing, mostly.  I had no pen, no pencil, no paper.  But I had a stack of old, styrofoam dixie cups, plus a new one from each meal.  I soon figured out that I could take my tiny toothpaste tube, and use the sharp corner to carve lines in the dixie cups.  So I started doing Sharpie-style doodle art, carving lines in the dixie cups.  It would take 45 minutes to an hour to do a full cup, and that became my main way to pass the time, as I sat alone in my cell.  I did that the first two days.

 Here's one of my recent Sharpie doodle art drawings.  the designs I was carving into the dixie cups were something like this. 

I had no money to bail myself out, and neither did my mom, or the one friend I talked to in that area.  So I didn't call anyone.  No one knew I'd been arrested.  By the end of my second evening in Forsyth County Jail, I had 10 or 11 dixie cups carved with different designs.  I had a video court appearance that day, and they dropped the bullshit "resisting" charge.  Even the lawyer said it was simply a reflex action, after watching the cops bodycam footage (which the public is NEVER allowed to see in that area).  So I had one charge of 2nd degree trespassing," and it looked like I'd be released on my own O.R. the next day, most likely.

That evening, my cell door suddenly opened, and a young black guy, maybe 25 or so, was pushed into my cell.  He was really pissed off about something, and started yelling out the cell door as soon as it shut.  His buddy was put in the next cell, and he was trying to get the guards to put them together, because they had the same court date, and similar charges. I sat quietly on the bottom bunk as he yelled and thrashed around the cell, thinking to myself, "Well... this could end badly."

The guy ranted and yelled for maybe 20 or 30 minutes, and finally realized he was stuck with some old, fat, sketchy looking white dude as a cell mate.  He finally calmed down a little, and then started asking jail questions I didn't know the answers to.  "When can we make phone calls?"  When do we get canteen?"  I told him we were all in the cells for 23 hours a day, and he got pretty mad and ranted a bit more. He told me he'd been in s holding cell all day, had half a sandwich for lunch, and was headed back to federal prison on what he considered a bullshit parole violation.

I finally did what seemed to be the dumbest thing you can do in jail.  I said, "Look, I've never been in jail before, I can't answer your questions, but we're in here 23 hours a day and won't get our hour out until about 10:00 am tomorrow morning."  He wasn't happy to hear that, but he calmed down a bit.  He seemed to at least appreciate I was being straight with him.

"What the hell you been doin' for two days?" he asked. 
"Drawing designs on dixie cups, mostly," I answered.
"Wait... what?"  I repeated it.
"Show me one," he asked.

Now you can draw your own conclusions on why a young black man, who turned out to be heading back into federal prison on a parole violation, was thrown  in my cell, a goofy, old white dude and first timer in jail.  My guess is that someone wanted to "teach me a lesson."  But who knows?

I grabbed one of the dixie cups with the designs, and handed it up to him, on the top bunk. 
"Damn, that's tight!" he replied, after checking out the dixie cup.  "Show me another one."  So I handed him another one, then about five more.  Me, the fat, middle aged, artistic white dude, and the young black ex-con, headed back to a year or two in federal prison, started talking about art.  I told him about how I invented Sharpie scribble style, and drew pictures of people like Cam Newton, and rock stars.  We wound up talking about all kinds of stuff, for the next hour and a half, or two.

The guy calmed down, the conversation faded, and we fell asleep.  By then I was pretty damn sure I wasn't going to have any trouble with him.  We got along pretty well once we got talking.  So that's how art, designs on dixie cups,saved my ass in jail.  I did sleep with my butt against the wall, though, just in case.  But things were cool.  He actually apologized the next morning, and thanked me for being cool and talking him down when he had been "feelin' some kinda way."

The next morning, a guard came to take me to another video court appearance.  I'm pretty sure they expected to find a pool of blood, and pieces of me strewn about the cell.  The guard looked surprised when he opened the cell, I walked over, and my cellmate fist bumped me and said, "Keep doin' that art man, and stay outta trouble."  I never got the guy's name.  I got the OK for release, and they put me in another cell, alone, for the hour or two until the paper work was done and I headed out.