Nate Schweber Writes Home

Missoula Jail is More Fun Than New York Jail

By Nate Schweber, Unfiltered 9-01-05

I’ve spent three nights in jail in my lifetime, two of which were in Missoula and one of which was in New York City last weekend. Boy howdy can I tell you, spending the night in jail in Missoula is way more fun than spending the night in jail in Manhattan.

The first night I spent in jail was completely of my own choosing. Upon opening the new county jail out by Reserve Street, the Missoula Sheriff’s department put out an open invitation to the community offering a bed behind bars to anyone who wanted to find out what a night in the poke felt like. I figured it would make a great story for the UM newspaper, the Montana Kaimin, so I signed up. I went with a friend who thought it would be gonzo to smuggle in a wad of psychedelic drugs (“Acid with Grateful Dead skulls on it,� he told me), eat them, and then freak out in a jail cell while surrounded by cops. In the middle of the night I heard him screeching and honking on a harmonica in a distant cell, no doubt as out of his brain as any mortal could get. The one time I nodded off, I was awakened by a tap on my cell door. It was a dude I graduated from high school with who now wears a police uniform. “I always knew I’d see you in here one day Nate,� he said.

The second night I spent in jail was more traditional. I was stopped by cops on University Avenue while walking home, singing along to the Rolling Stones on my walkman, after a late deadline at the Kaimin. The cops were looking for neighborhood vandal and though I wasn’t him, their scan of my I.D. revealed that I had an unpaid $20 ticket for riding my bike on the sidewalk the summer before. The cops gave me a choice, either pay the $20 ticket via check or cash then and there (they even offered to drive me to an ATM machine), or they would take me to jail. Feeling punky and in the mood for another Kaimin article, I lied and said I didn’t have any checks or bank cards on me. I was handcuffed and hauled out to jail.

The cops fingerprinted and photographed me, then they locked me in a single cell with a telephone from which I could make unlimited calls. This was fun. First I called the college radio station, KBGA, where I worked as a DJ. “Hi this is Nate Schweber and I’m in jail!� I shouted over the airwaves. “And I wanna’ hear ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ by Johnny Cash!� My next call was to a journalism professor whose class I had in six short hours. “Hi it’s Nate. Sorry to wake you but I won’t be in class this morning. You see, I’M IN JAIL!� Next I called my editor at the Kaimin and gleefully retold my story. My long suffering editor called a buddy of ours named Casey and asked him to swing by the jail on his way home from the paper and bail my ass out. Casey did, despite my protests that I’d never seen him before in my life and how could the cops turn me over to just anybody and, “What if he is a mob hit-man hired to come get me and kill me?!�

As Casey drove me home, bleary and exhausted, I could hardly contain my disappointment at being robbed of the full jailhouse experience.

“Man Casey,� I told him. “Just because you did this if you ever get locked in jail I’m going to come bail you out and you can see how it feels!�

I wish I could tell you, dear reader, that I went into the slam in New York for fist-fighting, or for protesting the Iraq war, or for streaking across Yankee stadium with my middle fingers raised to George Steinbrenner. Instead it was an unpaid fine on a traffic ticket for talking on my cell phone that did me in. Capone went down for tax evasion.

The cops pulled me over in Spanish Harlem for making a right turn from the center lane. I was on my way to pick up a friend to see legendary blues guitarist Hubert Sumlin at a small club in Connecticut. I’d seen the Rolling Stones up in Connecticut the night before, and rumors abounded that Keith Richards might make a surprise appearance with Sumlin. Judging by the way the cop menaced me by shouting, “Where do I know you from? Why do you look so familiar?� I had a hunch that I wouldn’t be catching the show. My hunch proved all too true when he slapped a pair of cuffs on my wrists, to the amusement of dozens of folks out on 2nd Avenue, and stuffed me in the back of his squadcar. Unbeknownst to me, the New York DMV suspended my license.

After I was fingerprinted and photographed at the 25th Police Precinct, the cops drove me to a holding cell not far away. There I was put into a tiny metal room, probably five feet by nine feet, with a wooden bench and a filthy, stinking, toilet. I promptly went to work carving my name into the dirty-beige wallpaint with a quarter. Soon I was joined by a man who snored and drooled on himself for the next 20 hours and a hilarious and brilliant economist on vacation from Italy. Giuseppe had also been busted for making an illegal right turn and he was thrown in jail for not paying a ticket he got while riding a scooter around Brooklyn in 1988 when he was a student at NYU.

At 3 a.m. the cops took 35 dudes from their holding cells and we were all handcuffed to a long chain about 75 feet long. We were put into the back of a paddy wagon, which was like a blue and white UPS van; metal and boxy with no ventilation, no lights, no seats for those (like me) unlucky enough to be at the back of the chain and nothing to hold on to for support. The ride to the central booking cells downtown was a nightmare of breathing oven-like air while straining at every stop and start not to fall onto shadowy strangers.

At central booking, a.k.a. “The Tombs,� I was crammed along with 40 other men into a chilly holding cell about the size of a classroom. The walls were painted green like mint ice cream and there was an aluminum bench running around the perimeter. I was one of the lucky ones to get a seat. Some dudes had to lie down on the filthy, cold floor, tucking their arms inside their t-shirts for warmth and using their shoes and boots as pillows. The price of having a seat on the bench was never leaving it, otherwise someone would take it, and never sleeping, because it was so uncomfortable. Somehow the snoring drooler from my holding cell not only managed to again secure the seat next to me, but to remain unconscious. He then added snot blowing and flatulence to his already formidable list of personal charms.

I never imagined, before I started exploring jail cells, how much time changes behind bars. Time doesn’t just slow down in jail. Time. Stops. Meanwhile the combination of extreme boredom and adrenaline makes ones mind race like a beam of light. The police did not help my anxiety one bit, never giving a concrete answer as to when I might see a judge and be released. Some said 6 a.m. Sunday, others 6 a.m. Tuesday. At least the cops were kinder to me than they were to others. In the neighboring holding cell a man who was arrested for drug possession was so scared of facing the state’s draconian Rockefeller laws that he began defecating on himself. The police responded by taking everyone but him to another holding cell, and then letting the man rot in his own filth all night despite his pleas to go to the hospital.

In the 24 hours I spent in jail, I was fed exactly four pieces of stale white bread with a strange, gray film on them that the police claimed was “peanut butter and jelly.� By the time I met with my public defender nearly 23 hours after my arrest, I was on the verge of insanity due to the lack of sleep, food and heat.

Before seeing the judge I was put in yet another holding cell. There I was joined by men who had been sent back into the cell after the judge set their bail. Several of these dudes were from the neighborhood I used to live in up in Harlem. One was particularly desperate to call someone to bail him out, and was getting pushy trying to hustle a quarter to use the pay phone. He threatened me when he suspected I was using a calling card to phone my roommate. I told the dude I was calling collect. Then the dude reached around and tried to snatch my wallet -- which the cops let us keep to present identification to the judge -- out of the front pocket of my jeans. I slammed the phone down and barked an impromptu lie.

“Listen, I’m in here for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and if you touch me with that hand again you’re gonna’ lose it!�

The guy squinted his eyes and bobbed his head, but he left me alone after that. I like to think that David Allen Coe would be proud.

Finally, I saw hookers. After years of watching “real crime� TV documentaries about ladies of the night on seemingly every street corner in New York, I have to confess that I’ve never seen a single hooker on the streets. Jail, however, is full of them. While the jail cells are sex segregated, the courtroom benches where perpetrators sit before seeing the judge are very co-ed. I was seated in between a Hispanic woman in a bosom-popping purple mini-dress, and another in a leather miniskirt and a pink top that strained around two enormous breasts. The dude who tried to pinch my wallet volleyed for the woman in pink’s attention.

“Yo bitch,� he said. “I pimp hos like you.�

The woman turned her head revealing thick 5-o’clock shadow and said in a deep, baritone voice.

“I guarantee that you do not pimp hos like me.�

The hookers all laughed and the dude shut up.

In the end I was sentenced to restore my driving privileges in New York State by paying the $105 in late fees I owed on my ticket, as well as $125 to the court.

I was released literally five minutes before I was scheduled to take the stage at a New York club and play on a bill entitled “Honkytonk Heroes and Heroines.� I thought that taking a cab straight from jail to a gig was the most honkytonk thing I’d ever done. I played the set, accidentally smashed a guitar, went home, and slept deep into the next afternoon.

Which brings me back to Missoula. Six years after the new jail was built, it’s overcrowded again. This week the Independent carried a story about the alleged bad top-down management of the jail from the Sheriff’s department. I can’t say I’m anxious to get back inside the Missoula County Jail and see what it’s like these days myself, but I’ll bet you $100 that it’s still way more fun than the one in New York.

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