All Complaints Great and small

“I just wanted to let you know, I’m sick.”

His face looks like it’s drifting apart.

Close-up it looks like a child’s drawing of a face – eyes lopsided and distantly spaced.

This cartoon face, swollen, red and full of snotty sickness.

Individual teeth with varying articulation and space between them.

                                      
                       I call him, Picasso face.

 One bulging ostritch eye, the other like pinched dough around a creepy doll’s eye.

The thing that inhabits the bunk above me – the weekender.

A face only a mother could smother.

Because mother’s are practical and instinctive. 
He must be adopted. 
It’s possible the mother died at birth. 
Shell shock can literally break a heart.

The thing continues, “That’s why I was snoring. I’m sick. I noticed you hitting my bunk last weekend.”

This is true. I was punching the underside of his bunk above me to startle and stop the snoring. 

The god damn snoring.

 I wanted him to notice. I was hoping (hope is the wrong term here) he’d sling his JohnMerrick over the edge and ask me why because I had a whole entire stinging explanation of why.

So I say, “Yeah, that’s what I do to my wife when she snores, I punch her. She rolls over, stops snoring for a while and then I have to punch her again. “

Then I turn and walk away.

Then I think, thanks for bringing your sickness in here you fucking weekender. 

The weekend guys come in and fuck everything up. 

This one tends to kiss up to the other guys and volunteers to mop and is a total goofy fucking yes man – he makes me sick just by his personality. 

Now he’s coughing and hacking and snoring right above me. 
I hope he dies before next weekend.
 I know how terrible that sounds and I don’t care.

Woke up to this the other morning:

"Kiss my dick!"

"Shut up, grampa! I'll fuck you up."

"Kiss my dick"

(I think he means 'suck my dick' or he's about to unleash 'mother sucker' and 'son of a dyke')

"Kiss my fucking dick"

"Go back to bed, grampa. I'd knock you out without even trying."

"Kiss my mother fucking dick"

(Oh, the drama. what's going to happen?

 If you ever spent a year in grade school, you know what's going to happen. I am laughing.)

"Hey,You guys wanna go over to the real jail? Because that's what's happening next with this shit."

And with that, the playground monitor has ended the 'fight'.

A Softer Hell


Previously dorms A&B were combined which was how Picasso Face ended up above my bunk. 

So for some reason Sling Blade thinks he's under surveillance by craven females with a desire to see his 50 something white dumpy body in "the nakeds" as he so slingbladianly put it.
He claims there are two that park outside of the work release in hopes of catching some nakedness.

 Dorm A has 5 windows facing the parking lot, tinted, but you can see in when the lights are on. But the shower is all the way in the back. The shower itself is approximately 4 x 7, whatever it is - plenty of room to turn off the water, reach for your towel that's slung on a chair outside and next to the shower and towel off completely in private.
The point I'm trying to make is that it's not really necessary to walk around naked at any time for any reason. 

I tell this to Sling B but there's no talking to him, he's a yeah-buts guy. "Yeah but what if yous towlin off to put yuh skivvies on."
I don't know, if you can't figure how not to expose yourself to the work release parking lot, which is not a hub of a lot of come and go traffic, then I can't help you.

A few days later SB is ramping up the rhetoric. His lacky, his yes man, what some might call a "piss boy" Picasso Face, AKA John - has written a letter, whoa wait, his MOTHER has written a letter to complain about her son's possible exposure of flesh to the alleged voyeurs, voyeurs so sick and depraved and you'd have to assume, mentally ill, that they drive out to the county jail for a little community theater.

I throw up my hands, literally, and say "Everyone in here IS fucking retarded."

Now, a week later we're all still in Dorm A. Everything is ,ah, fine.
I come back from work, my belongings are searched and I get the non-TSA strength pat down as usual.
Then the jailer says to me, "Lipski, roll up your mattress and empty out your locker."

Two probabilities suddenly pop in my head - I'm being released? I'm going to jail,jail?
No, I'm going over to Dorm B. 
It just so happens, a coincidence for fools only, that 'some lady' saw some naked inmate and immediately reported this to the desk officer.

Dorm B is just like Dorm A minus a couple hundred square feet. It faces inward on the jail out on the brick and razor wire, away from any chance of public viewing. Dorm B also has an uncontrollable HVAC system. 
What I mean is that Dorm B hovers around a very dry 88degrees -The exact temperature of hell's waiting room. The reason for this is unclear.

Maintenance is either inept or indifferent but nothing changes. It's like a furnace blasting into a shoe box.

And all thanks to the moron Picasso Face that is now my bunk mate. 
Sling Blade tries to cover for his pet Picasso, it was some random complaint, not the letter his mommy wrote, he tells me.
 I'm sure while SB and PF were having the conversation about how SB would so cleverly cover for PF, he said to PF, "leave it to me, I got you covered" and they both snickered like idiots because idiots, true idiots, do not know they're idiots and assume that they are on the same intelligence level or even a notch above everyone else.

 When I look at Picasso Face I try to focus hard enough to cause Sudden Cranial Detonation. 

Each Sunday night I move his mattress over to another bunk. Each Friday night he is back. 

This whole thing could blow up in my face but I'm making plans.


EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE (but not as bad as a Tom Hanks movie)

And now we get to my full time friend. 
The most obnoxious snore in the house, "Hank".  

Because of the smaller sqft of Dorm B, Hanks is two and one half feet away from me. Less than an arms length from me.

The other night, Hank rolls over and begins snoring in my direction. I'm reading the paper before I go to sleep. A nightly tradition that reminds me of home, reading until the text gets blurry and then going to sleep. 

I begin tearing off pieces of the newspaper's corners and making spit wads that I at first begin tossing at Hank's face but gradually I'm putting my upper body into it. To the point I can hear the spit balls hit his face.

I know, "Isn't it way more offensive and disgusting to chuck spit balls on a guy's face just because he's snoring?" 

No. 
Why?
I just brushed my teeth and I don't eat dairy. 
My saliva is the equivalent of warm tap water.
Also, the percolating snot in his nostrils is wet and loud and without any kind of rhythm you can get used to. 

I look over and his head is decorated in spit balls with nothing achieved but a slight smirk on myself.

It gets to the point where you think, people don't really snore this loud and obnoxiously and live to this age very often. I barely know him and I'm staring at his extra pillow imagining its soft face-silencer in my hands.

I don't like the idea of having to wear ear plugs to bed. 

(and now for something completely disturbing - he begins (last night I notice out of the corner of my eye) rubbing his arm that's raised out of the bunk over his head , stroking it, running his fingers up and down his arm like a girl in a provocative music video but this is like Homer Simpson here. Completely asleep and still snoring. This is not cool. This is happening TWO AND A HALF FUCKING FEET FROM ME)

I tried swatting my flip flops on the locker just above his head (lockers at each end support the bunk frames)
I tried frantically fanning the newspaper in front of his face. Throwing the excess of his blanket up over his face, rolling up the newspaper and poking his shoulder, saying to him fairly loud, "Hank, Hank - wake up". Nothing.

These guys get on the Tylenol PM and it's like an 8hr coma.
He's lucky I'm not a homosexual rapist who gets off on mucus gurgling and self-petting because this guy would be seriously fucked and I could totally get away with it.