Lockdown can come at any time. The tank will be its usual mix of babble, walkers, slamming cards, and water moving through pipes when a CO will appear outta nowhere to announce a Lockdown. Right NOOWW, gentle-menn.

We had two today. They move Robert Yates to court in the morning. So of course the entire jail went on Lockdown status going and coming. We will read in the paper tomorrow how he pled guilty to the murders of 13 women. By pleading (and agreeing to lead investigators to body sites) he managed to avoid the death penalty and assure himself of life with P.C. (Protective Custody).

I have yet to see him even though I was in the same unit as he for 10 days back in August -- 6 East. Everyone was crazy there.

6 East is where they put you when you're a trouble-maker or waiting for a bid to open up or in danger from other inmates. Mr. Yates appears to be two of the three.

An enigma. He is something like 48 years old, a former Viet Nam helicopter pilot and is waaay too old to be a serial killer. Most are in their 20's or 30's. This guy may end up attending appeals sporting a classy aluminum walker, mainlining Geritol.

He is crazy, of course. He, like so many others, found Jesus in here --Jailhouse Jesus -- as his father says. Mr. Yates is filled with contrition, remorse. He is "cooperative".

I have no idea what inner demons drive a man like that. I do not wish to see him die anymore than I would approve the killing of a cougar or an elephant who happened to prevail in some unexpected human encounter.

Yet I think I would be fascinated by Mr. Yates. Just as I am inordinately fascinated by my cellmate, Stanely Pietrzak. "Stannibal, the Cannibal." According to rumor, Stanley made up a soup of his victim, carrying the rage to recycle to its ad absurdam conclusion.

Of course he didn't do that at all. He couldn't keep his mouth shut when he drank and he ended up digging a very deep hole for himself by exaggerating.

He is a large man with a beak like a penguin. Indeed I sometimes see him as a big, friendly penguin lost on an ice floe of self more than a little puzzled at his predicament.

He goes in for sentencing tomorrow and the prosecutor is asking for an exceptional sentence of 60 years. "Hell, Stanley," I tell him. "That's only 40 with good time. You'll only be 86 by then."

"That's assuming I get all my good time," he sez. Stanley is a pessimist or realist. In here optimism is deadly. It is that silly radioactive glow-in-the-dark hope a man sleeps with and wakes up with and romances and feeds until a reality check in the person of a wife filing for divorce or a judge handing down a sentence or the letters that slow to a trickle, then stop suddenly, oh so rudely...intrudes. And that rococco house of cards falls apart. Love hurts, so does hope.

Stanley insists he is innocent of murder! "Manslaughter, yes," he admits. After all, he provided the pills that somehow got into the victim's system. And of course when Stanley found her dead body lying next to him, it only made sense to cut off her head and hands to prevent identification, right?

I nod, following that line of reasoning perfectly. He would have called the police, durn it, but there was that deal of few years ago when he woke up and his wife was lying there next to him the next morning as dead as Martha Washington and about as responsive.

He did call the cops on that one, yes, and the forensics weren't all that great in those days, and well, yes he thought cremation was the way to go. (Just in case. Cough.)

"She'd have wanted it that way," he explains. Of course.

The cell door is locked and I am going nowhere. He is 260+ lbs to my 145. I nod sympathetically. Very sympathetically. Perhaps I will see if I can trade my soup tomorrow for a sandwich. If not...give it away?

He's somewhat concerned about them opening up another investigation.

Another? I ask.

He was just trying to help this woman he met and she was staying with him when all of a sudden she --

"Turned up unresponsive to your good morning endearments." No, he says. He frowns, puzzled. This one just...disappeared. No body, I ask? Nope, he says. He sighs. There are times when I feel that Stanley is not alone on that ice floe, that as it melts and diminishes he and I are drawn ever closer to each other.

Enforced intimacy.

He is something of a genius at origami. For literally hours a day he is at the one little table we share theoretically in common..folding, folding, folding. Lately he's taken to muttering.

I have sent Cait a sampling of his work, but if I were to send one creation out with each letter, I could not possibley keep up. He autographs each one.

Last week he invented a pig and was so taken with it that he began feverishly putting together this-little-piggy-went-to-market and the one that built the brick house and then Wilbur and of course Wilbur needed a spider. I now cower in the corner whilst Wilbur and Charlotte and the herd of swine that the unclean spirits Chez Legion...It's a freakin' zoo, folks. Some pig, eh?

They say there are 8 million stories in the Naked City and I'm sure if I hang around long enough I'll hear them all. And I would hope to do so with a bit of grace, wit, and savoir faire-to-partly cloudy.

I know that I must write about what is happening to me - inside me - all that incredible twisting torsion of those gawd-awful teutonic plates of the interior.

But like Nick Adams in those old and wonderful Hemingway stories, I'm not ready to fish that dark part of the river just yet. Not yet.

Pretrial arguments lie ahead on October 26th. Plea is on November 6th. And sentencing perhaps...January or February?

Christmas in Spokane?

Eventually, I will be transported on a "chain" to some Destination Prison within the federal system. There I will either survive..or I won't. I wonder..will Rebecca still write? Cait? Cathy? The others?

Unlike so many of the other inmates I have no hope. My attorney shrugs his shoulders and mumbles apologies. I shrug back. A dialogue of shrugs.

This is a monastery, I tell anyone who'll listen. This is where I finally get to read the Russians, learn Koine Greek, and get my degrees in theology and philosophy.

Hell, man, I've even quit smoking!!

Most of the time I am in some kind of hypnogogic acceptance. This is it, babee, the dance, the trance....

Today is the first day of the rest of your bum trip. Heh, heh. No today is the youngest day of the rest of your life. Get your head put on properly and you can have a helluva good life in here, in here, in here...

I am 56 years old. Plus...3 days. I have no remorse whatsoever. I am not a criminal.

Christ, my attorney sez "Don't tell the judge that." Shrug

write to dickens at this address: eugene dickens 1100 W. Mallon Spokane, Washington 99260

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