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February 26, 2008

TOO LATE Week Eleven! Plus Commentary!

I'm looking for four artists to work with for a series of vignettes that will explore the Unbroken Circle world a little more. These stories will appear on the AIV after Too Late has wrapped to give me time to work on the sequel, Too Soon. I'm open to all styles. I want four artists who can deliver six pages a month for four months. There is pay involved, which I will be happy to elaborate on to the folks who inquire. Please email me at robschamberger at gmail dot com with a link to examples of your sequential work. The more you have to show me the better! I'm really looking forward to hearing from all of my fellow artists who are interested in having their work appear on the best webcomics collective on the world wide web!

Click the link above to read this week's installment, and the link below to read the archive at Wowio, then come on back to read the commentary below the cut!

I've been in jail three times. The first was for about half an hour and I had myself bailed out. No big deal.

The second time I was in for about fifteen hours. This was a slightly bigger deal, especially since it was Wyandotte County lock-up. I started out in holding, watching some dude puking up blood and seeing the guards not give a flying fuck, had a cop try to intimidate me and then get enraged when I laughed at him for doing so, and made a lot of the observations that Eddie Mann is making in this installment. Things went for the worse when I got transfered to G Pop (that's General Population for those of you not up on the slang). My cellmate in holding was an old dude who looked like Snoop Dogg's grandpa. We'd gotten pretty chummy, telling stories about fuckin' bitches and gettin' away with crimes. The guy told me he'd never had a mortgage or a lease in his whole life. He'd just party as hard as he could until he'd get locked up, do his time, wash, lather, rinse, repeat. His whole life. The guy looked like an old man, but shit, he could have been my age with a lifestyle like that.

So, we go up to G Pop, and all of the guys sitting at a table know Snoop Dogg's Grandpa, and we sit down with them and start telling war stories. It's a while before I realize I'm the only white guy sitting at the table, which is a real non-issue to me, but I'm forgetting how all sorts of classifications come up when you're on the inside. They start asking me more and more personal information, and I'm not feeling too comfortable so I make my way over to sit and read a book. I think it was an Orson Scott Card book. Yeah, I was desperate. So I sense someone sit down next to me. Right next to me. I look over and it's a white dude with a giant ass swastika tatted on his neck and a tear-drop tat below his ear.

Great.

He leans in close to me and looks me square in the eyes, and says, no shit, "You'd be smart if you stick to your own race, boy." Fuck me runnin', I was scared beyond all compare. Here I am in the orange jump suit and it all starts crashing in on me: I don't belong here. I politely let the guy know that I'll heed his advice and go back to reading my shitty sci-fi novel.

Finally, 'lights out' is called. I used quote marks for that because they don't actually turn out the lights. You just have to lay down on your cot in this big ass gymnasium. I'm laying there, ON MY BACK BECAUSE MY ASS AIN'T GETTIN' RAPED, and I feel a kicking at the end of my cot. Son of a bitch. I open my eyes and there's that Aryan Race motherfucker staring down at me.

"Get up, it's time." Get the fuck out of here, this can't really be happening. But it is.

I look over at the guard and he just nods and says, "You better get up." Damn it.

I look over at Snoop Dogg's Grandpa who's in the cot next to me, and all he says is "Give me your toothpaste and shampoo. You ain't gonna be needin' it no more." I reluctantly hand it over to him and get up to face the man who I'm sure is going to show me why prison is called The Pokey.

He claps me on the shoulder and says, "Good luck, brother."

"Uh, yeah, uhm, you too, bro." The guard opens the door to me and I walk into this overly bright hallway. The door closes behind me and I can't see where it was anymore. It's like I'm in the white room from 'A Clockwork Orange'. I'm bedazzled and don't know what to do. I just stand there, slackjawed, until a voice stirs me to action.

"Step into the door," a piped-in voice tells me.

"What door?" I ask.

Then a door opens in the wall in front of me, sliding open.

"Fuck you, I ain't getting in."

"Just get in the damn door, Schamberger." I step in and realize that it's the elevator which brought me up to G-Pop. I realize my bail had been raised and they're processing me to get me out. I was never so happy to see my mom and stepfather, but I don't think they were overly thrilled to see me at eleven PM that night.

My third time was also in WyCo lock-up, but was not nearly as bad. I got picked up on a Saturday morning after the cops had raided a crackhouse and had done a drunk stop outside of Westport, so all of the cells were full. They put me in the waiting room with cushy chairs and satellite TV. For my third time in jail, I watched Braveheart, The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Last Action Hero (which was punishment, I'll give 'em that), and Conan the Barbarian. Then my folks got me sprung again.

I decided that was enough for a lifetime and haven't gone back since, nor knowingly done anything illegal since to put me back in.

Posted by Schamberger at February 26, 2008 09:23 PM