My eyes cracked open fifteen feet below an industrial ceiling made of cement pockmarked with unfinished air pockets; I had no idea where I was.
The front lobe of my skull was pounding away, like all the booze I’d swallowed earlier was now trying to force its way out through the back of my eyeballs by punching at them.
I sucked in some icy air; it reeked of moldy cheese and piss.
The back of my throat was on fire; I tasted whiskey-soaked puke (not my favorite B&J flavor.).
Alone, I was lying on a rectangular metal bench in the middle of a rectangular metal room that was twenty by thirty feet, about the size of a four-stall bathroom.
It looked like a few decades ago someone had tried to paint everything the color of wet straw.
First painter: “Ooh, can I pick the color?”
Second painter: “Sure. It’s between pancreas brown, dead brain gray, and wet straw.”
The same shade of dirty yellow even covered the metal bars blocking the windows and doorway.
I sat up, and my head almost popped, which made me gag.
After a few seconds, I tried to stand but failed the balance test, so I sat back down and tried to piece together what might have gotten me there.
Wherever “there” was.
Random pictures flashed through my brain, an ugly slideshow of hazy bad choices.
Me in an airport bathroom sitting in a stall.
Me holding a full bottle of duty free Crown Royal, purchased earlier from the ship on which I had been telling jokes to drunken strangers for the week.
Me having realized I would not be able to carry all that expensive liquid onto my flight back home.
Me in stall four secretly taking a generous pull of my fire water to “get my money’s worth” while talking on my cellphone to my wife.
Me: “Ma itin’rary sayseye should land in Cleveland ‘round ay P.M.”
Bottoms up. Deep swallow.
Wife: “Okay, I’ll be there to pick you up.”
Gulp, gulp.
Me: “Thankssss, Gretch. Ca-way ta see you.”
Chug, chug.
Wife: “Me too.”
Blah blah blah, glug, glug, glug, then total blackness.
No clue what happened after that.
Be fun to see that airport security footage – still haven’t – but I’m guessing it went something like this.
Blacked out drunk guy takes a few more deep amber swallows from his $32.95 bottle.
His stomach finally says, “No mas!” and offers up whatever was for breakfast earlier back on the ship.
Blacked out guy falls off toilet, collapses forward against the stall door in a pile of his own puke.
Meanwhile the other men in the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport public restroom who are soberly “doing their business” notice a passed-out body curled up around the toilet in stall four.
Airport security is called.
Responding officers drag and stumble the six-foot-four inch and 200+ pound drunk guy (along with his carry-on luggage and backpack) to the nearby holding cell.
Airport security is used to handling drunk passengers, but not usually at 8am
His fellow morning travelers, sober, point at him and laugh.
“Liquid breakfast of champions,” said one of them, probably.
“He fell for the ole “duty” free trap,” says another.
“I’ll have what he’s having,” said none of them, probably.
The drunk’s vomit-covered sweater is somehow removed and hosed down, most likely by whoever would have had to mop up that holding cell afterwards.
Then later, “he” woke up as me, sitting in captivity, trapped inside a hazy, nauseous dream.
But it was as real as the cold yellow bench I was lying on somewhere deep in the bowels of Satchmo’s Airport.
What came next was confusing to me at the time since I had always imagined the handling of an airport drunk going a lot differently.
Kinder, at least.
Maybe hand him a piping hot cup of Joe and a couple of Ibu’s, give him a few hours to shake off his buzz, return his wet but cleanish sweater, and tell him to never do that again.
But this wasn’t an episode of Mad Men, the drunk didn’t get away with just a coffee and a slap on the wrist.
Instead, I found myself being led from that holding cell – cuffed now – and loaded into the back of a New Orleans squad car. They sat me next to an equally cuffed tweaker named Crank (according to his wrist tattoo) who said he’d been busted for selling crack to the man.
Allegedly.
Duty free, I wondered.
The two of us were transported from the airport across the city of New Orleans, through thick morning traffic (made up of productive members of society going to actual jobs), past the Superdome, to a jail somewhere in Jefferson Parish.
Meanwhile, the metal cuffs growled and bit my wrists while my claustrophobia delivered recurring surges of mental panic that felt like a monster truck was doing wheelies up and down my spine.
It was slowly sinking in that I was in big trouble, but I still couldn’t figure out why.
“Kind of overkill for a public intoxication case in New Orleans,” I thought to myself, but since the cop driving us refused to speak and my door wouldn’t open from the inside, I was forced to just sit there and tag along.
When we finally got to the jail, I stood next to Crank in the check-in area still cuffed and confused.
“Sir, could you tell me why . . .”
“Quiet,” the officer snapped.
Guess I’ll find out soon enough why I’m here.
Eventually, one of the staff sitting at the intake desk opened my suitcase and backpack and began to itemize everything I had packed for my comedy gig on the ship.
I watched her handle and account for every piece of my show clothes and casual wear; all my underwear and socks, some clean, the rest dirty; she fondled my toiletries and electric chargers; my books and cellphone and laptop; my notebooks and pens and spare change, all scrutinized and jotted down.
I heard her mutter, “Pain in my ass,” multiple times as she meticulously bullet-pointed my 150+ items, then tossed it all into a giant Tupperware bin.
After that I was fingerprinted like I had only actually seen in the movies and told to wait in line for my mugshot.
That’s when it hit me that this wasn’t a movie part – I was being arrested for something, even though nobody had actually told me that yet.
Well, they might have told the blacked-out-drunk me, but the hungover-almost-sober me still hadn’t heard a thing.
“Excuse me,” I asked the jailhouse photographer, “am I being arrested for being drunk at the airport?”
His face was dead to me.
“No idea. Turn to your left.”
I faced left, then right, as I was told, but I kept asking him questions in between poses.
“Could you please . . .”
“Stop smiling.”
“. . . tell me what it says on my paperwork?”
“Stop smiling.”
“Sorry, I’m just nervous.”
“Face front.”
After the last photo was snapped, I watched the guy scan his clipboard.
“You’re being charged with possession of Class A and Class C narcotics.”
“Wait, what?”
“Says they found Diazepam and Adderall in your luggage.”
“Are you sure that’s what it says?”
“Get back in line. Next!”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
They frisked me again and ushered me to a different section of the intake area.
That’s when I remembered the pills.
In my luggage, I had been carrying a few dozen generic Valium, or diazepam, that I had scored during our stop in Belize.
Then I remembered the three Adderall pills my wife had permanently “lent” me right before I’d left.
To help me focus.
I had taken one right before my first show.
The second pill I had lost somewhere in my cabin after fumbling it.
The third pill I had taken later that week.
I found out much later that apparently that “lost” Addy – for you grown-ups, that’s what the kids are calling Adderalls – had fallen unseen into my luggage between a fold of clothing only to be sniffed out by the airport canine while I’d been passed out.
Which is why I was now facing Class A and C felony charges.
My long run of cop-less alcohol and pill-fueled debauchery had ended.
Shit.
By the time I was finally checked in and brought to the overnight community cell and uncuffed, it must have been almost eleven o’clock in the evening.
There must have been over twenty other inmates stuffed in there with me.
My new home was painted grey, but it stayed lit from the lines of overhead neon lights so bright I had to squint as I walked through, which I hoped made me look tougher.
Because inside I was as terrified as a four-year-old separated from his family at the state fair.
Only in jail I couldn’t yell, “Help, I can’t find my mommy!” without attracting the wrong kind of “daddy.”
The two long side walls were lined with thirty or so bunk beds, most of which were occupied.
Luckily my cellmates weren’t murderers or rapists; they were that day’s DUI’s and probation failures with a few disorderly conducts thrown in, all of whom were waiting on their lovers or lawyers or sidekicks to post bail.
Speaking of which . . .
It was time to figure out how to make a phone call to my wife Gretchen to let her know what had happened to me, why I hadn’t shown up at the Cleveland airport earlier when she had no doubt arrived at 8 pm to pick me up.
In line for one of the payphones, I pictured Gretchen parked at Arrivals, waiting for her husband – the father of our baby daughter – to arrive until no more passengers emerged from the terminal, her frantic calls to my confiscated cellphone going straight to voicemail.
She must have been a wreck, which made me feel even worse than I already did.
All ‘cause I hadn’t wanted to waste a $32.95 bottle of booze.
Brilliant.
It was finally my turn to use one of the phones; it was almost midnight.
I made a collect call to my wife’s cellphone.
It only rang once then I heard her say, “Mike?”
The way her voice wavered, I could tell she’d been crying.
I started to answer, but a mechanical voice interrupted.
“This is the Jefferson Parish jailhouse,” the automated operator announced, “with a collect call from (pause) **Mike Lukas** (my recorded voice) … will you accept the charges?”
I heard my wife say, “Yes,” on the other end, and then, “Mike?”
“Hey Gretch.”
“Oh my god, I thought you were dead.”
She sounded half relieved and half angry, like when you talk to your dog right after it escapes its leash and almost gets hit by a car.
“Aw Gretch, I’m sorry. Not dead. I got arrested.”
She laugh-cried, making a noise like I’d stepped on her foot the way she had when we danced together at our wedding..
“I know that now, but at first, I thought you were dead. I’ve been calling all the hospitals in New Orleans looking for you, but nobody knew where you were.”
God, I was such a loser.
“I’m sorry, I had no way to contact you until now.”
“Some cop finally called me about an hour ago. What happened?”
It was my first time in jail, but I knew from watching television and movies that the call was being monitored and recorded so I didn’t admit to anything.
“They’re accusing me of having Class A and C narcotics.”
“What? Not weed?”
For the first time that day, I laughed. “No. Not weed.”
An avid pot smoker, we always figured that’s how’d I’d finally get busted.
I said, “I can’t talk about that on the phone.”
“Oh. Got it.”
I turned my head slightly and noticed the large man waiting for the phone behind me was getting visually restless.
“Gretch, I need you to figure out how to bail me out of here.”
“I’m working on it,” she said. “But it’s too late to call anyone, and I don’t even know who to call.”
“Me either,” I said.
Then the phone disconnected, my allotted time apparently up.
The guy behind me yanked the phone out of my hand so I said, “It’s all yours,” and wandered back to my bunk.
I couldn’t sleep from all the noise.
Throughout the night, jailers shouted out the names of the guys getting bailed out, while other prisoners kept joining us for the party, the metal doorway constantly crashing behind them.
Plus, those bright overhead lights never dimmed throughout the evening.
Those jailhouse movies I’d watched had me believing that one of these degenerates would make a move on me during the night.
(I’d say no, and then they’d probably say, “Looks like what we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”)
Finally, I must have dozed off, but I snapped awake as our breakfast was being served.
“One at a time, line up to my left.”
We did that, then each of us was handed a plastic grade-school lunch tray stacked with the Jefferson Parrish jail breakfast.
It consisted of a tiny bowl of cold oatmeal, two pieces of cold, soggy toast, what I think might have been some type of pastry, a tiny apple, and a small carton of room temperature milk.
On the plus side, no bugs or stray hairs were served.
I ate what I could and handed the rest back to the jailer through the slot on the barred doorway.
An hour later, I was made to stand in line with a dozen other inmates in a hallway. We were shackled together by the ankles while still cuffed at the wrist in front of our torsos.
We were told to walk slowly forward, so we did, stumbling as the ankle chains yanked us front and back, this being the first time we had moved together as a chain gang.
Filed into a locker room, we were unchained and outfitted for jail.
Like at the start of boot camp, we each got handed our uniform: a traffic-cone orange jumpsuit with “Jefferson Parish Jail” stamped in black across the back, a gray t-shirt, gray boxer shorts, and a pair of gray socks, plus a pair of orange flip flops that kept wanting to fall off my feet as I walked.
We quickly dressed, then packed our street clothes in a brown paper bag that we left at our feet to be collected after we left. My chain gang shuffled back to our holding cell where we were unchained. Then a few hours of bunk time later, we were shackled and cuffed again and guided down another long gray hallway.
My orange clad chain gang was loaded into an eight-by-eight-foot cage made out of metal bars that sat at the back of a courtroom, where we were told to wait quietly for the judge to appear.
Packed into that cage for a half hour made me realize that some of my fellow inmates, me included, could have used a mint.
(I filed that recommendation away in case I ever ran for Parish jail warden.)
Only 28 hours earlier I was talking to my wife on the phone…now I was in a shark cage waiting for bail.
When the Saturday judge finally showed up (did I mention this was on a weekend?) we were each read our charges and then our bail was set.
I was told that my bail for the Class A and Class C felonies would be $10,000.
Gulp.
We were led back to the bunkhouse and told that soon we would be placed into the general population.
Double gulp.
Those prison movies had me believing that it was in “gen pop” that I would get shiv-ed or raped by one of the other inmates.
Thankfully, I knew at the first sign of trouble, I could draw on my previous Taekwondo training. My yellow belt level of knowledge was just enough to ensure I’d be able to scream like a scared child for the guards. (“Heeya-help!”)After another hour or so, we were cuffed and shackled and led through another maze of dead-brain-gray hallways.
We were moving like a unit now, and I pictured us competing against the other jailhouse chain gangs for prizes from the commissary. (second stump speech idea I’d bring up running for Jefferson Parish warden.)
A few left and right turns later, we were told to stand silently in front of two high security entrance ways, and one by one we were sent through either doorway.
Doorway #1 led to where all the younger prisoners were being held and it also seemed to hold the same energy as the opposing team’s locker room.
Through Doorway #2 were the older prisoners who probably just wanted to do their time.
I wished I could wear some kind of “jail sorting hat” that came alive and told the jailers that despite my young age, I belonged with what looked like the elderly group of detainees.
However it looked like the choice for either doorway was random.
When it was my turn, one jailer led me towards door #1 and I felt my southern end pucker. Then at the last second a different officer pushed me towards door #2, and that’s when I officially entered the Jefferson Parish jailhouse.
Later that same second jailer told me that the younger population would have eaten me alive, and it was only out of the goodness of his heart that he threw me in with the older prisoners.
I thanked him the way you do after someone gives you a successful Heimlich.
As I made my way to my assigned bed, most of the residing inmates, all in similar orange jumpsuits, stared at me and the other “fish.”
I did my best to put on my toughest face, but later one of them who I had befriended told me when I got there, I looked like a frightened baby otter. I guess the 6’ 4” kind.
The room gave off public high school gymnasium vibes, maybe a hundred yards square, with a high ceiling that held lines of neon lights like the ones in the other bunkhouse.
A giant circle of side-by-side beds formed a perimeter around a flat rubber track that some inmates were using to get exercise, some walking in groups, some by themselves.
In the center of the track were long lines of tables where the prisoners ate.
At the far end behind a privacy wall were the bathrooms and the showers.
I’d been given a small bar of soap, a baby tube of toothpaste, a toothbrush, and some generic shampoo and conditioner, so I stacked those items on a part of the shelf next to my bed.
The prisoner next to me introduced himself as Eddie and told me he was awaiting a transfer to prison for violating his probation.
“Tomorrow I’m on a bus to Indiana,” Eddie told me.
“You sound happy,” I said, because he did.
“Oh yeah, their prison beats the one down here any day.”
“Cool. Congrats.”
What else do you say to that?
During the second day in jail, my nerves and muscles were automatically set to defensive mode, ready to fight off the brutal shiv attack that was no doubt in my future.
“Any man turns his spoon into a shiv spends a night in the box.”
I had lunch and dinner. Then I read a random Jehovah’s Witness brochure that another prisoner had handed me. I talked again with Eddie, but I avoided the bathroom and the showers just in case.
At one point, the biggest prisoner in the room named Tank, pointed at me and waved me over.
Oh boy. Was I about to meet my new pimp daddy?
I took a few steps toward him and pretended I was brave.
“You’re new here,” Tank said. His voice was deep, and loud enough to trigger a major earthquake.
“Yeah, just got here this afternoon.”
I’ve never been to jail, but I knew that in order to survive, they say you have to punch the biggest guy there in the jaw to prove you weren’t to be messed with, so I made two fists and got ready to pounce.
Tank didn’t flinch. But neither did I.
We both stood tall, staring at each other, waiting for the other guy to make the first move.
Finally, Tank said, “I wanted to invite you to our prayer circle. It starts at 8:00 pm sharp.”
I heard that and unclenched more than my two fists.
“Oh, wow, thanks, I’ll definitely be there.”
“Good.”
Then Tank shook my hand – well, crushed it – and went back to the book he was reading.
After the prayer circle broke up later, I went to bed and fell asleep just after eleven pm, a mere 41 hours after I’d been first put in cuffs. There was enough snoring in that room to trigger nearby car alarms.
Then around four am I felt a nudge on my shoulder.
My body tensed and I spun around with both fists raised, ready to fight to keep that version of my virginity.
Except it was the jailer with a flashlight telling me that my bail had been posted and that I should gather my things. (My prayers from Tank’s circle had been answered.)
I made a mental note to stop watching all those prison movies.
I left my toiletry items for Eddie and followed the flashlight beam to the front door.
Then, in what I figure was a power move, the jailer delayed my leaving for almost thirty minutes for a bullshitting session with one of the other jailers.
Why? Because he could.
Then he finally walked me out of jailhouse #2 to an enclosed area where I was given the brown bag that contained my street clothes.
I changed into them and returned my orange jumpsuit and the other clothing items.
At the reception area, I was given back my luggage and backpack, but I was told my cell phone and wallet with all my credit cards and cash were still locked up in the general safe until the next morning, which was a Sunday.
So, in lieu of wandering the dark streets of Jefferson Parish, I found a hidden spot in the jailhouse entrance hallway just out of sight from the woman at the check-in window and fell asleep on the cold linoleum floor.
As I lay on the ground shivering for hours, I thought of Eddie and Tank and the other guys from my prayer circle and pictured them inside the jail, all snug under their warm blankets on their comfy cots.
Then it occurred to me that any one of them would have traded places with me in a heartbeat since I was free and going home soon.
When the eight o’clock shift finally arrived and the woman whose job it was to open the safe showed up for work, she returned my cellphone but told me that she wasn’t allowed to give me my wallet until Monday morning.
“Sorry, regulations.”
“But ma’am, I’m not from here, I’m from Ohio. Without my wallet I have no way to get home or to pay for a hotel. Please can’t you get me my wallet? Otherwise I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Big sigh from her.
“Hang on.”
I stood there for fifteen minutes as this lady made some phone calls.
She disappeared into the back and finally returned with my wallet.
“You can have this, but not the cash. That has to stay in the vault until tomorrow and there is nothing I can do about that.”
“Thanks,” I said, seeing that at least now I had my ATM card and a credit card.
In front of the jailhouse, I called a cab to take me to the airport – for you kids, a “cab” is like an Uber that smells like piss – and on the way used my credit card to book an overpriced one-way flight to Cleveland, then called my wife and told her the plan.
She said, “The lawyer I finally hired from New Orleans is so expensive. But he told me how to post bail, and the bail bondsman was actually a woman who was super helpful.”
My wife. My hero.
“Thanks so much for doing all that,” I said. “I’ll see you in four hours.”
“You better show up this time,” she said, laugh-crying all over again.
“I will, I promise.”
And I did.
But I had to make two return trips to New Orleans, once to meet with my lawyer to set up a court date, a second time to show up for court.
Through a legal technicality that I can’t get into until the statute of limitations runs out, I was able to avoid prosecution, though I was issued a hefty fine.
All in all, my little drunken adventure cost me well over $15,000 in “legal donations,” but you have to subtract from that the almost sixteen dollars I saved from chugging that half bottle of duty free Crown Royal.
Oh, and I still have that arrest on my record to this day.
That said . . .
Everyone should go to jail at least once.
It’s the best way to avoid ever going back.
Jail’s the best place in the world to reassess your life choices.
Jail’s the perfect place and time to make a better plan for your life.
And it’s thanks to jail that I don’t drink or take pills anymore.
Jail also made me appreciate my wife and kids and lawyer, my unshackled freedom, and cold milk and hot oatmeal and crispy toast, and my God-given right to repaint my bedroom whenever I want, whatever non-dirty-yellow color I desire.
I will never go back to jail, but I have much more empathy for some who do, knowing that there are Tanks and Eddies locked up, rough men on broken paths still kind enough to help me get through the two of the scariest nights of my life.
As John Bradford once whispered, “but for the grace of God goes I,” and in my case there I went – donning an orange jump suit with “Jefferson Parish Jail” stamped in black across the back.
My arrest is still on my permanent record and will be until I pay to have it expunged.
Except a part of me doesn’t want to do that, since it’d be like removing a tattoo that I’m oddly proud of since it reminds me of how easy it is to trip and fall and land staring up at an industrial ceiling made of air-pocked cement.
Of course, I’d still love to see that airport security footage
Bet that performance would get a few laughs from my jailhouse gang.
Hm. I survived jail time. Guess I can survive anything.
Time to rewatch Cool Hand Luke.
Figuring out why a joke didn’t work and trying again is what makes you funnier.
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