This is an excerpt from my memoir, Officer Banfield — the honest story of my years as a corrections and police officer, hitting bottom in alcoholism, and the long road to recovery.
They rotated me around a few of the units and they ended up sticking me in with the one other white guy that was there. He was a trucker, probably about 40 years old, and he had been kind of a veteran of being through different life situations.
They put us in what was kind of the pervert unit in the mind of the people who made the assignments there. They put me in with the rapists and the sexual deviants. The kids were in there because they had raped someone or molested someone, and probably had been raped or molested first, and that's what all of them had done.
So, they put all of us together in this little out-of-the-way unit. The other white officer and I, we had a good time in that unit.
They didn't put as many kids into that unit because of the nature of it. That was a smaller unit and that actually was perfect for me at the time. It
was easier to manage, but a lot of those kids were really on edge in that unit.
Those were kind of the kids who were on the edge of moving into the solitary unit, and in fact, one of the kids that was in that unit, I still remember his name, but I won't drop it for saving his anonymity, I remember him and I were getting into it one day.
He wouldn't make his bed or something, and he was acting tough with me. I was feeling like a real piece of shit and I was ready to just have it out with him.
"Let's just both beat the shit out of each other!"
He ended up beating the shit out of another corrections officer and going to the solitary confinement unit while I was on sick leave.
We haven't got to "sick leave" yet so let's work our way into that.
While I had my mono go away after training was wrapping up, my mono started to come back in the beginning of 2007 as my entire mental, emotional, spiritual and physical state, all deteriorated at corrections.
The initial hope I had gone into training with and the initial ease of that first solitary unit quickly faded as the daily reality of eight hours in the sexual deviant unit got to be pretty rough.
One of the funny things that stands out is I used to go and the kids would all try to shake my hand. They would say, "Hey, good morning. How are you?" and they would shake my hand.
Then, my white partner said something. You can picture him as kind of a trucker with not like a long beard, but you know, he would shave sometimes, he wouldn't shave others. He was pretty heavy set, but not
super fat, and he was pretty reliable as a partner.
He told me one day, "What do you think those kids do all day in here? Their hands are filthy."
He asked, "Why do you shake those kids' hands? Do you really think they keep their hands clean in here?"
I said, "Oh, God. I've been shaking these kids’ hands this whole time!"
So, we went to fist bumps after that.
Also, if you shook the kids' hands, lots of times they would do that. They would try to get you in the habit of shaking their hands because once you shake someone's hand, you have got their hand in a grip.
The idea is to shake hands with you often and frequently, then whenever the time is right, they shake hands with you one day and all of a sudden, they have got you by the hand. Now, they can yank you into a room and jump you in the room.
Thankfully, I stopped shaking hands before any of that went on. I'm grateful that my partner pointed that out.
I remember that as I live a very clean life today, and I see people talking about how you have to wash your hands all the time. I think back at the Department of Juvenile Justice, where I shook all those kids' filthy hands all day, and I didn't get anything from it.
God knows what they had. I didn't get anything from shaking any of their hands, although I was pretty strict about washing my hands before I ate and not touching my face.
I didn't get anything from shaking all their nasty hands.
So props to my body, and props to the kids for not being that dirty, right?
"This is a whole disgusting part of this, Jerry."
I hope to communicate to you, it was a disgusting environment being in
DJJ.
I'm pretty sure the water there had lead in it.
I heard other officers say not to drink the water because it had lead in it, after figuring this out the hard way myself.
I started to notice if I drank any water out of the water fountain, it had kind of this property of salt water, that the more I drank, the more I would have to keep drinking because whatever I was taking in from the water was producing more thirst than the water itself was satisfying.
After a few months of just drinking out of the water fountain, thinking they were all full of shit, and then realizing that if I took one drink out of the water fountain, kind of like alcohol, I would be taking more and more the whole rest of the night and pissing a whole bunch, and still be even thirstier by the end of the shift.
Finally, I just started bringing my own water in like some of the other officers did. I also went through a phase at this time where I was incredibly cheap. I had this huge mad at the world resentment. Here I was risking my life going through this filthy work situation, which I chose.
I certainly could have begged my parents and moved home. I certainly could have mooched off a friend and lived with a friend without having a job. I chose to put myself in as a correction officer at the Department of Juvenile Justice. I could have quit anytime I wanted to. I could have applied
to a thousand other jobs.
Now, at the time, I didn't consider that.
All I had was this resentment. I was mad at the world that I was risking my life for $20,000 a year and I did have health insurance too, which was nice.
Today I have my own self-employed business. Health insurance is
$1,200 a month for my family. That is the cheapest plan, which has a
$6,000 deductible.
So, I don't take it for granted having health insurance today. That's more than I make from all my books combined right now in sales every month, even though I have 17 books published.
Anyway, I digress again, you might say.
I had this huge resentment, I was mad as hell at the world that I could be risking my life for $20,000, and there were people like waiters and waitresses who were earning more.
Here's how I would put it at that time.
"Bringing fucking food out to my table and making twice what I am in cash without having to pay tax on it. Total bullshit man."
That's what I would have told you 12 years ago and I rationalized that as a reason not to leave tips when I went out to eat anymore.
So, you see, it was nothing personal about the waiter or their service. I ended up just stiffing and not leaving tips almost everywhere I went for being mad at my own situation.
I did that once, I went out with my girlfriend at the time, and then there
was a beautiful waitress too. She looked a lot like my ex-wife does today. She did a great job waiting on us, it was a nice restaurant. The bill must have been like $90 and I still had this $20,000 a year job, but never mind that I decided to take my girlfriend out to a $90 dinner in Charleston or wherever the hell it was.
I then left no tip on that dinner. No reflection on the waitress’s service, just my thing like, "Fuck her. You know she's making more money than me waiting tables in here. It's bullshit. I'm not giving her any more money. So what? She brought out my food, I don't care. She gets enough money from everyone else."
I then, on top of that, had the audacity after leaving no tip to go back to the restaurant and use the bathroom while my girlfriend waited outside. I had a feeling what I was doing was wrong. Not wrong globally, like wrong according to God or anything, but wrong according to my own heart and my own conscience, not for going to the bathroom, but for not leaving a tip.
I then walked back in to go to the bathroom. On the way out of the bathroom, the waitress and I walked right by each other and she gave me this really hurt look like I had betrayed her somehow, and it reminded me a lot of the last look the dispatcher had given me the last time she saw me.
As a matter of fact, thinking about it, this waitress looked a lot like the
dispatcher as well.
And man, I got the point after this, that if you are going to go out to eat, you can't just be mad at the world and take it out on everyone else. You need to consider everyone else's feelings, and after that, I could not go along not leaving tips without feeling like I might as well have kept my ass home.
"If it wasn't that important to save money, I should have bought the
cheap shit at the grocery store and stayed my ass home, that if someone's going to wait on me and bring my food for me, it might be nice to give them a little something, especially since they don't even earn minimum wage.
They only get tips and they might have had a shitty day from all the other customers being stuck up pricks like you and not have given them shit."
That was my logic and thinking at the time. I put it in the language I used to use it in because that's real.
Now, that sticks out to me at my time at corrections. You can really get a hold of the mind state I was in, of scarcity, of fear, of struggle and competition, and just feeling like I was an awful person.
That state manifests a lot of ugly stuff and it manifested for me, in addition to an uncomfortable work environment, more unhealthy behaviors.
I started drinking before work, while before this and at the beginning of corrections, I had mostly stuck to drinking after work. I would get off work at about 8:30 and by one in the afternoon you would find me drunk, and then passing out, or I would just stick to drinking on the nights I was off.
I started drinking on nights before I even came into work because one night, a Friday or Saturday night, one of my coworkers I noticed was most inebriated coming into work smelling like liquor and beer from not even that far away, but not that close either.
I often started to notice that on Friday and Saturday night very often when you came into work, the whole squad room where all the officers met up before going out to the individual units, it often smelled like alcohol.
There were usually several officers who were drinking especially on weekends before they came into work, and then would kind of sober up during the night nap, sleep it off sometimes, and I started doing that too.
I said, "You know what? If other people are going to come in drinking there's no reason I can't have a few beers before work."
My God, that was miserable.
If you want to add on to an already difficult and stressful job, try drinking five beers before you come in and driving over the legal limit getting into work, and then sobering up.
The worst thing for an alcoholic is sobering up. Sitting there in a unit for eight hours not being able to have any more to drink was just miserable, and thankfully it got so miserable that I couldn't keep doing it. And often I also had hangovers so bad from whatever my night off was, that I couldn't drink the next day.
I remember at the time, my mode of operation got to be, I would wake up at about 6 p.m. and I would have something to eat. I would start drinking beer and I would play the "Scarface" video game. It was kind of like "Grand Theft Auto," I would drink beers and sit there to play my Scarface game, then I would try to limit my beers, not to have more than one an hour before I went in.
I would end up arriving in after a few beers, and then sobering up during the shift, going home and passing out. Or I would go home, and then get drunk afterward.
The main thing I thought that was getting me through this tough period was drinking. But meanwhile, my body was starting to get mono again. My girlfriend at the time had suggested that I take these pills that she said had worked for one of her family members who had herpes to get rid of herpes.
She said that mono was kind of like herpes, that once you had it you always had it and if you had these pills maybe you could get rid of it
forever.
So, I took these pills and what they produced was essentially a relapse on mono where all of it flared up again, and after a couple of weeks taking the pills, I had worse mono than I had had before in November when I had first came down with it.
I imagine I must have got it from her because she had had it before and I hadn't. I got mono really bad to the point where my entire abdomen was swollen and where I knew that if someone as much as punched me in the stomach, I might have some kind of eruption.
I think my spleen was swollen up to some size. It was swollen up so much that when you put the seat belt over it, it hurt. I remember going into work realizing that if I got into a physical altercation with these kids and someone punched me in the stomach, I might bleed to death internally because of it.
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