During the drive we took to prison on the morning I was surrender, my father suggested to me that in some ways I might find my time as an inmate interesting.  “It will probably be like my time in Basic Training during the Korean War,” he told me.  “You’ll meet some very unusual and different people.”

He was right about that.  I met some true characters in prison.  Some were absolute scumbags who would steal from their best friends.  Some were really nice guys.  Most, as you’d expect, fell somewhere in between.  But a select group was truly unforgettable.  I’ve introduced you to a few of them, like my first roommate…but there are a few more classic individuals which deserve honorable mention, if not their very own chapters.  So my next few essays will describe them one at a time.  I call this group my Unusual Suspects.

I’ll lead off with one of the oddest people I ever met in my life.  We’ll call him Rudy Silverton.  Rudy was a career criminal, although he preferred to refer to himself as an “outlaw.”  Well into his late 50’s, he’d spent the last decade or more behind bars after enjoying the high life as one of the nation’s premier marijuana smugglers and dealers during the 70’s.  He traveled extensively, spending a good deal of time in Europe and Southeast Asia.  Rudy’s tales of living next door to Mick Jagger, and the sexual perversion of 1980’s Bangkok were legendary within the prison.

Of course, simply having been some kind of anti-establishment drug dealer would not be enough to make my list of Unusual Suspects.  Rudy had a number of other unique traits.  Most obvious were his eating habits.  Rudy was very selective about what he ate from the mess hall, preferring to gorge on things like cornbread or fish, but avoiding many of the more popular dishes like chicken.  He ate all of his meals the same way: with a wet washcloth hanging from his neck like a bib, and with a pair of chopsticks that he had managed to procure at some earlier time during his incarceration.  By the way, that wet washcloth was the same one he blew his nose into during the day.  Very appetizing, don’t you think?

Rudy’s locker was stuffed with stolen or smuggled food.  Jars of wheat germ, spices, soy sauce, and horrible-smelling additives took up most of one shelf.  It was publically known that he had all this contraband, but the facility staff never tried to confiscate it.  I have always felt they preferred to look the other way simply to avoid having to deal with his other oddities.

My first experience with Rudy was when I got up to use the restroom at 3am and found him sprawled on the hallway floor, flailing and twisting around.  In my half-asleep state I thought I was dreaming.  Then, after shaking my head, I thought he was having a seizure or a heart attack.  It wasn’t until I got close that I could see he was practicing some sort of contortionist yoga moves…at three in the morning…in the dark.  I later learned he did this every morning, after the 3am bed check.  Some of the crab-like shapes he was able to bend himself into were straight out of a circus…or a freak show.  But that wasn’t the freakiest thing about him.

Rudy had one oddity even more drastic than those.  I’d heard rumors, but I chose not to believe them until I saw it with my own eyes.  You see, we didn’t have a lot of personal space in prison.  If you were drinking coffee or water or Tang you’d carry it around with you in a large plastic mug, complete with a lid to keep it warm or cold.  Everybody had one.  If you walked into the bathroom to use the urinal, for example, you’d leave it on top of the urinal, or on the sink counter next to you, relieve yourself, and pick it up again.  Simple enough.  So seeing somebody with a mug in the bathroom was not at all uncommon and no reason for alarm.

Because prison is such a dirty, germy place, you notice things.  Maybe more so in my case, since I worked as a plumber for my first year, and I was sensitive to how people used the bathroom.  Not flushing was a real pet peeve of mine.  Why the hell wouldn’t you flush the toilet or the urinal?  So one morning Rudy used the urinal next to me, and walked away without flushing, I was about to turn around and confront him…

…until I saw there was nothing in the urinal but clean water.  And that’s when I saw Rudy had his mug in his hand, and was putting the lid onto it.  But I didn’t remember him placing it on top of the urinal before relieving himself.  At that moment, I realized the rumors were true:

Rudy drank his first urine of the morning.

I never really asked for a full explanation from Rudy.  In conversations when the topic was lightly touched upon, I inferred that he “sterilized” it my microwaving it, or by mixing it with boiling water, or something.  And that it was always just his first urine of the day – no other.  I think he felt that was the one with the nutrients in it.  Rudy tried not to talk about it, for fear that if the staff learned about this particular quirk, he’d be sent to the hole, or a psychiatric unit, or who knows where.  But that never happened.  Rudy made it through his sentence through the Drug and Alcohol program, and back out into society, where he could eat with chopsticks or do yoga or drink his urine in privacy.

His freedom didn’t last very long, however, as Rudy’s “outlaw” tendencies continued to direct his actions.  The last I heard, he had been arrested for marijuana possession.  As the story went, he’d had a quantity in a box (with his name and address printed on it) hidden inside a storage locker.  The problem was, the locker was in a building adjacent to one which housed the offices of a local drug task force.  One of the agents walked by the lockers one day and recognized the unmistakable odor, and the rest was history. 

I hope he’s doing okay, because if nothing else he was a very funny and open person.  I just like to think he’s changed his eating and drinking habits.


(Watch for the next installment of The Unusual Suspects in a week or so).