I Have This Thing On My Balls

December, 2009. Day one of five. A Sunday.

A momentous event will occur at 7 am Mountain time today: I will go to jail. I know what you're all thinking: "Finally!"

At that time, I will check myself into a rundown dump called the Lawrence County Jail and there I will rot for 24 hours. Like a forgotten roast in the back of the fridge, I will fester. My talents? Wasted. My charm? Ineffective.

My one concern is how to smuggle in tobacco. Yes, TOBACCO, that vile, brutally-taxed, nearly-illegal weed. Oh, how I love thee!

I use oral tobacco, Swedish snus in fact. My first thought was to smuggle in an entire can, but several disconcerting experiments conducted in the privacy of my bathroom led me to explore other, ahem, avenues. It turns out you can't fit a square peg into a round hole, no matter how much olive oil you use.

So I filled a sandwich baggie with half a box of snus, wadded it up tightly, and taped it to my balls. I use duct tape for everything, even something like this, since I am fond of its silvery color and impressed by its determination.

Having secured my contraband, I took several tentative steps around the living room. I was bothered by the itchiness of my new package, but not too terribly. When I am processed into the jail a few hours from now, hopefully the pat-down will be cursory and the scrotum-cupping nonexistent.

There is one thing I forgot about, however. It seemed like a small oversight a little while ago, but no longer: ball hair.

Let me put it another way: BALL HAIR!!!

I am shaking a little as I type this. When the time comes for me to remove my extra baggage, I pray the jailors will ignore my screams. This is South Dakota, so it's pretty likely.

I will update you Monday. Wish me luck.

And so.

It was better than I expected. I screamed into a plastic pillow as a slow, terrible, velcro-like ripping sound filled my cell. It was so loud even the cockroaches scattered. Five minutes later, after the nausea and light-headedness subsided, I was able to enjoy tobacco in a 'tobacco-free facility'.

It was a moment I will always cherish.

The guy who processed me in was named Jake and he was pretty nice. He gave me some shit about coming to jail voluntarily, had me write my last name in black sharpie on my underwear in case I flushed them down the toilet in an attempt to flood the jail, and sent me on my way. The pat-down was cursory, in fact perfunctory, and there was no scrotum-cupping.

I met some interesting people, to say the least.

There was Bill, who violated a restraining order: "I'm not a stalker. I just want my DVDs back."

There was Otis, who smashed a car window and swiped a laptop. "It was sitting there in plain view," he told me. "I'm only human."

There was Kyle, who had turned 21 on Saturday and was now spending Sunday in jail for DUI. "This fucking sucks, man," he said, demonstrating a gift for obviousness.

There was an older guy named Dale who told me he was looking at 20 years in the pen, but wouldn't tell me what for. He seemed kind of proud of his potential sentence, though. He showed me a tattoo on his arm of a flower as seen through the bars of a jail cell. "That's me," he said and smiled. There were tears in his eyes.

Four more days to go.