Anneewakee: One Boy's Journey

Chapter 2

E & O was a small room. There was no bed, no furniture of any kind, in fact. I was issued a bed roll which was sort of like a sleeping bag with a very thin pillow.

For the first thirty days I was in this very dim, almost completely dark room and was not allowed a thing. No books, nothing to write with, nothing. It was kind of ridiculous. The least they could have done would be to let me have a book to read. But I guess that was the point. They wanted you to spend all your time thinking. And I did. But I wasn't thinking about how I could "act better" or how I could make my way through the Anneewakee system, I was thinking about crazy stuff like cartoons, missing my cat, grass, and how badly I wanted to touch it. I didn't care to change who I was, I just missed my old life.

No one ever came to check on you. Days went by where you saw no one. Meals were shoved beneath the door and consisted of bland basic prison food- mashed potatoes, peas, a small piece of ham, and were served twice a day. Only lunch and dinner, I never saw breakfast. I was given a small aluminum type camping cup and I would slip it under the door after meals so it could be refilled with some nasty liquid, I guess some sort of Kool Aid, and given back to me at the next meal.

Time was a blur. I never even knew what day it was. Day might have been night, night just as well may have been day. I was never really sure.

I was allowed a shower once a day. It was only a three minute shower and that was one of the more ridiculous routines I had to go through. The way it would start is this: I would hear them outside my door, going down the line of E&O, taking each guy out of his room. I knew as the guy in the room beside me went out and then came back, that I would be next. They would open the door and say, "Evans. Shower"

And this was where the ridiculousness ensued. The door of my room would then open and I would step out into a larger room that sat between my room and the showers. There was a desk over to the side where one of the staff members would sit doing paperwork or whatever it was that they did at that desk, and there was a yellow line that went around the room, a few feet from the wall, making an inner square of the room. You had to get up quickly, without any warning and sometimes you might have been sleeping when they came to get you, or had spent the last couple of hours sitting down, and walk the perimeter of this area, to the showers. If you stumbled and crossed the line you were tackled by staff members and taken back to your room, forfeiting your shower. Walking to the showers, and staying inside the line was part of the three minutes you had for a shower so you had to walk fast. There was room to walk within this space but given the small amount of time you had to make it to the showers and not stumble over it, it could be difficult to do. Never mind that you had sea legs from spending almost all of your time sitting down.

Monday's were the worst. On weekends you weren't allowed a shower. You weren't let out of your room at all, not even to brush your teeth. So when Monday came and you had been sitting all weekend or walking in circles around this tiny space, it was damn near impossible to then jump up and walk without accidentally touching or stepping over the line.

Most times, I would trip over the line the minute I set foot outside my door and I was tossed right back into my room, making it three more days that I had to go without a shower.

Mostly through the week, though, I was able to walk within the line and when I did make it to the shower, I made the best of my three minutes. Those three minutes felt like absolute heaven.

The shower room had three stalls and I always picked the stall on the end. That one had the most steam. Another ridiculous thing was that, you had to push a button for the water to come on and then it only came out for fifteen seconds. So you had to get wet quickly, then stand without any water and lather yourself up, then push the button again to rinse off. If you pushed the button too many times, the staff members would scream at you to stop pushing it so much. Which was fucking absurd because, who cares if you're using too much water in your mere three minutes? I finally figured out that I could sneak a pen with me into the shower stall and jam it into the button so that the water would flow continuously. The staff members weren't actually in there with you so they didn't know that the water was running continuously because they only heard it go off and on.