My Prison Life - We Had Sex Through the Bars of Her Cage

Pussy in prison is like eating an 18-dollar steak that you just stole. This account brings a smile to my face to this day.

While I was in Washington County jail in Hillsboro, Oregon, my mom and dad returned to Scotland because my dad suffered from pre-senile dementia. It was about 1983, and I wasn’t emotionally equipped to deal with the fact that my ol’ man was dying. I descended into the oblivion of heroin addiction, super-fuelled with cocaine, to distract myself from the pain of it. On the day that I was told he had passed away, a Portland squad car belonging to a cop called "Scotty" pulled over by my side on the pavement. He just opened the door from the inside and said "Get in!" We sat there and he checked out the state I was in, while chatting away to me like an older brother with a lot of high-powered weapons and a funny hat on. His bright red hair and my own Scottish disposition reminded me of the janitor in The Simpsons. He tried to get me into a treatment center, but I wasn’t ready to give up my anesthetics, and so escaped out the window in the middle of the night in my pajamas—robbing the all-night Safeways next door for a crate of Marlboros on the way. I hitchhiked north on Interstate five back to Portland and flogged them. I was "Out the gate by eight, in the spoon by noon, fixed by six and back in the pen by ten!"

In Washington County jail there was this little Puerto Rican kid called Fernando who went by the moniker "El Gato" (The Cat).  He was really quite a little guy but he had a heart the size of a lion. When he first encountered me coming onto the "trustees crew," he said: "Hey Vairo [light-skinned one], this here is my home [meaning the jail], so don’t you fucking forget it Ese, OK?"

"El Gato" and I became great pals, and he went from letting me know the jail was his to "Mi casa es su casa" in no time. When I left (I was taken into Federal custody by an FBI marshal who thought I'd gotten tangled up in organized crime), he had taken to calling me "Pinchey Maniaco," which I think means something like "Fucking Maniac." Big, fat tears ran down his cheeks on that day, as he knew we’d never see each other again.

A person sentenced to do time in the county will always try to become a "trustee." Trustees get to work. It slays time, it keeps the mind and body occupied, it gives you a modicum of freedom and, if one is in the kitchen, access to a smoking area out back from which the street is only yards away. The grub is great: Omelettes every morning, streaky rashers of bacon, maple syrup copiously poured on pancakes, steak meat and fresh produce, yeast for alcohol, which is easily brewed, more money and last, but certainly not least, PUSSY!

The Women's Unit in Washington County jail is surrounded by U-shaped walkways. The four-person cells have bunks on either side, and they were separated from these walkways by bars leading up and across in a grid to the ceiling. If you put an upside-down mop bucket on the floor in the walkway, and the female hung onto the cell bars with her legs, then her ass would swing down perfectly at waist height when you're standing atop the mop bucket, allowing two people to have sex through the bars.

I pioneered this method after the woman in question started leaving notes for me to find after meals. In these notes, which she had drawn my attention to from her cell as I strolled with my mop and bucket along the walkway, she professed a love for me and my Scottish accent. She told me what she was in for and how long she had been sentenced to, and before I knew it, we were getting some loving three times a day. After all, it was the duty of trustees to mop the walkway after every meal. It goes without saying that if the lieutenant of the prison, Mr. Ross, had ever looked into this, he would have been perplexed as to why I was mopping the walkways with no water whatsoever. Then again, if he or anyone else had given the door leading into the walkways a good shove during these episodes, they’d have been faced with a peculiar sight. There I would be, in an orange jumpsuit, standing on a mop bucket, ass going like a fiddler's elbow. There would also be the recipient on the other side of the bars, her peach of an ass slamming against the cage that separated us, her two feet pointed west over my shoulders. The expression of concentration on my face would have spoken of triumph over the powers that be.

Andy Dufresne never proved himself capable of devising anything like this, but the moral of our stories is the same: Never abandon hope, even when you are banged up in a maximum security jail. God is, after all, good.