Taking It on the Lam by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

The Dime Jolt

I was only a day into my dime jolt in Rockford County, when this long term night screw started getting friendly with me. I know that a lot of the portly, control freaks are covert and stealthy pansies who don’t admit to seeing it that way. But after five days I was thinking that it wasn’t that. That’s just the old standard operating procedure of fat, lonely screws. No, it was something else. Something truly strange was going on. For the second night in a row, at lockup my lock was left undone.

It might have been dismissed as a testimony to the poor diligence of ding dong screws had not a bag of the duds and

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items from my pockets taken at intake were not left under my bunk bed. It was so obvious I would have been more sapped than someone taking up a petition for fairness and legality in the mob controlled government had I not smelled the rank decay of a tempting set-up. Last night I figured that I’d confound their scheme and stay there. And why not? ......... Every reason you may have imagined and worse. The judge had given me all he could, a dime, with no parole possible for a nickel. Now, someone was conspiring with the ding dong, sap screw to leave my lock unlocked and then take it on the arches. They already had me behind the eight ball and either wanted an excuse to drill me, tack on another charge, or follow me to where they hoped I’d meet up with my two partners, who were still on the loose. It must really have queered their expected game when I had copped it sweet.

With the advice of an uninterested and not very diligent public defender I declined all deals offered to co-operatively spill, and had insisted on a jury trial for the armed robbery charge.

The judge threw out my corroborated alibi of having been with Winnie at the time as a defense, and he also refused to allow my attorney to dope the jury that this would be a first offense, if it had happened. The public defender’s standardized pre-trial motion to lower the charges to aiding and abetting did little

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other than cause the judge to plant a green booger on his black gown. It wasn’t a matter of the judge being especially hard on crime. It was more a matter of compensation for the disinterested District Attorney being even less diligent than my public defender, who was seemingly totally focussed on a politically based and apparently interminable investigation of the town’s Republican business manager, who had allegedly held private and thereby illegal conversations with one applicant for the town’s garbage pick-up monopoly, in a meandering and expanding case under an umbrella the townspeople sarcastically referred to as “Jaundice vs. Jaundice; the case which makes the world go round.” That the prosecution provided no witnesses of my having had a roscoe likely made the jury see this as the common, youthful, redeemable miscounting of the trumps mistake of nothing more than having had kept some bad company which I foolishly admired, which resulted in a guilty verdict, but with a judge ignored recommendation for a light sentence.

At the time I was correctly thinking; “I’m not exactly sitting Jake right here. Up the river I will go.”

I don’t recommend County as a vacation spot, though most of the hop-heads treat it that way. Forced to be clean, they get fit enough to start their garbage back over fresh and healthy when they get out. At the same time a small County cooler stay

Taking It on the Lam