Sunday 11 July 2010

The Gaylord Redemption

I am a free man (barring the obvious restraining orders in place throughout England) but this has not always been the case. In December 1989 I had the profound misfortune of not only being arrested for going on a spree of opportunistic public molestation, but actually being tried and sentenced to a year in prison for the ‘crime’. Between New Year’s Day 1990 and New Year’s Day 1991 I found myself the reluctant inmate of California’s most brutal maximum security prison, simply known throughout the penal system as ‘The Citadel of Sodomy’. Surrendering my rights as a citizen, and with tears of fearful anticipation in my eyes, I donned a paper suit and began my year behind bars.

If I can give you one fact that indicates the hell I went through during those long, dark days, it is this: within three hours of entering that place my paper suit had been cruelly ripped from my body, and I was forced to spend the rest of my incarceration in a state of vulnerable nudity because the prison wardens quickly realised that it wasn’t worth giving someone like me clothes.
Life inside was tough. My cellmate was a charming but volatile neo-Nazi called Flint, who would end each night by kissing me hard on the mouth and whispering tender thoughts into my ear. The toilet arrangements were, frankly, despicable; there was a five minute window between the hours of 5am 5.05am when Flint wasn’t on or somehow using the toilet, and I had to frantically expel a day’s waste in full sight of the braying guards and pray that the smell wouldn’t wake the other inmates and spark a full-scale riot. Going to the showers (the wardens laughingly called it a ‘conjugal visit’) was even more humiliating: for one hour we would stand under high-pressure torrents of boiling water whilst I was raped, on average, 45 times. In an effort to stem this anal blitzkrieg, I ‘married’ the biggest, hardest man I could find; for one merciful week, I went untouched by any other inmate but him. Little did I know, however, that he was due for release, and no sooner had our wedded bliss began than he re-entered society and I was left alone and more desirable than ever.

Towards the end of my stay, I got a job blessing the holy water in the prison chapel, which offered some welcome moments of solace from the daily horrors of prison life. Even that glimmer of peace was ruined, however: during one particularly sexy service I began eking one out beneath my cassock, moaning loudly as I did so, until my screaming climax sent the congregation mental and a white supremacist gang ritually crucified a wonderful, charming black man called Baron Samedi.

Justice was eventually served, however, when 364 days into my sentence it was proved conclusively that I was completely innocent of all charges and I was immediately released from prison with a full Presidential pardon. I look back on the whole thing now as a rather jolly excursion, although my continuing trouble in passing solids and a pathological fear of soap point to the psychological demons that are still roused every time I watch my box set of ‘America’s Most Bastard Prisons’.