You What?

It is New Years Eve with only minutes to go before my shift ends. Time for the final inmate count. If we get this done quick, we will all be out of here and home for the ball to drop. This Unit is special we count every 2 hours, as we house inmates in solitary confinement. They must be visualized to assure they have not hurt themselves.

I am getting to the end of the line. Four more doors to view, a total of 62 inmates.

Instead of opening the door we bend down and look through the feed slot. It is the perfect viewbox straight to their cot. They know to leave the slot open, so this can be a quick bend look, count and move on.

I am really getting into the perfect count, bend find the inmate, check him off the list and move on to the next one. Sort of like an aerobics class. I am moving so fast tonight my thighs are starting to burn.
56 check next, 57 check next, 58 Ch..e..ck ... what the f---?!

I yell, "Open 58, call a yellow light!" I can't believe my eyes. In fact, I don't quite know what I am actually looking at. This guy seems to be levatating, somehow. He is about 3 feet up in the air, suspended with his arms out, head flopping back, sort of bobbing. With each bob, he hits the back of his head on the concrete floor.

My fellow officers come running, the metal door clicks to unlock and automatically slides open. We are all dumb founded. This guy has hung himself, from of all things, his penis and testicles. Needless to say, things are very stretched out, and his testicles look as if they may explode.

The pain must have knocked him unconscious and that is how we found him, like a puppet conected to the ceiling by some type of aparatus I had never seen before.

We cut him down, as he hit the floor he started moaning. Now how do you write up this report? Is this an attempted suicide, or is this guy just plain nuts?

Of course this called for a visit immediately to the psych doctor. Now if the event wasn't strange enough, I really didn't know what to make of this guy. I felt like I was on candid camera. He looked like Columbo from an old TV program. He was very hard to understand, due to his heavy sort of Spanish-Italian accent. A small man. He looked like a psych patient himself, with a trenchcoat on and of all things smoking a cigar.

He sits there with his cigar looking over the report. Smoke circles up around his head as he squints at the paper. His face contorts into a mix between confusion and disbelief. He looks up at the inmate. Then he looks at me, then back at the inmate. He asks the inmate, "Are you a crazy? You don kill a you self from hanging you penis and balls, you choke a the neck with the rope! The inmate just raised his eyebrow as if to say, "You got a point." He then stands up taking the cigar out of his mouth, "I see if you a crazy. Here taka this cigar and stick it, in a you eye!" The inmate looked at him like he was nuts. He then yelled, "Take him away, He NO crazy, He justa stupid!"

We returned the inmate to his cell, he didn't seem to be nuts, just embaraced. This definetely gave a new meaning to any mention of a Ball on New Years Eve.