The first time they slammed me into Southside, I thought it was just another move in the shuffle. B5. Four letters and a number. Didn’t mean shit at the time.
But the moment that steel door locked behind me, I knew I’d stepped into a new level of their fucked-up game.
R-Pod had been a carnival compared to this. Southside was the carnival’s basement — the part they never let the public see. The place where the freaks live in cages and the clowns sharpen knives.
B5 was the first time the floor started moving under me.
At first I thought I was dizzy, like I’d stood up too fast after drinking too much whiskey. Every morning I’d swing my legs off that ADA-compliant bunk — lower than the elevated torture racks in the other cells — and stumble the five feet to the toilet.
Dizzy. Every damn morning.
It took weeks before the realization hit me.
It wasn’t me.
It was them.
Somebody had a switch. Somebody was controlling the vibration under my fucking feet.
Once I understood that, the dizziness disappeared.
What replaced it was rage with a pulse.
That’s when the Reeboks started telling the truth.
White shoes. Issued by the fake Dr. Brooks.
He had already wrecked my body with the insulin switch and the antibiotics that torched my nerves, but those shoes became the one piece of equipment that proved the game was real.
Every time the floor vibrated, the soles quivered against the concrete.
I could see it.
My nerves were already fried, my body buzzing like a live electrical wire, but now the floor itself was confirming it:
This wasn’t paranoia.
This was planned.
Southside smelled different too.
R-Pod had been clean. Stainless steel polished. Concrete spotless. Guys playing cards, laughing, passing the time like it was a weird kind of dorm.
Southside smelled like piss and mildew.
Especially when you landed in a box.
You couldn’t fake that smell. It crept into your nostrils and coated your tongue.
In the box, the toilet stench merged with piss drifting up from the drain. Trustees would shit in nearby toilets and the ventilation fans pushed the smell straight back into your cell.
Weaponized plumbing.
I started testing the vents with toilet paper. Sometimes the paper sucked inward. Sometimes it blew outward.
That wasn’t random.
That was fuckery.
Southside had a whole playbook.
They’d mess with the TVs — swap a sixty-inch screen for a thirty-six overnight, take the remote, or suddenly “forget” to fix it right when it was your one hour out of the box.
They dimmed the lights so you couldn’t see the edges of the run.
They handed cleaning supplies to everyone except you.
They left doors open so trustees could wander in and mop your floor with piss water.
Once they stole every ace out of my deck of cards.
Another time they confiscated my Bible because I was in a suicide smock and suddenly it was “contraband.”
Another time they shaved down my commissary soap with a knife.
Little fuckeries.
Endless.
Death by a thousand cuts.
The medical fuckery was worse.
Pills changing colors.
Dosages switched.
Generic pills with no numbers on them.
At one point they gave me estrogen.
I’ll say it straight.
My chest hurt like hell. My body felt wrong. My emotions were all over the place.
I couldn’t figure out what the hell was happening to me.
Another time they doubled my blood pressure medication and I nearly blacked out.
Sometimes they delayed doses for nineteen hours.
EMT Miller laughed about my release meds like it was part of the show.
EMT Hallet gave my vitals to the ISF guys like HIPAA was a joke.
“Yeah, his sugar’s this. He took X units today.”
I could hear every stat echo down the run.
They didn’t think I could.
But sound has layers in Southside.
Even with TVs blasting, I could peel voices apart.
That became my survival skill.
That and writing down every pill number I could see, memorizing them, then calling my sister on weekends to cross-check what they were supposed to be.
They tried to confuse me.
I adapted.
Then came the food.
Trustees sliding trays under the door.
Eye drops in the food.
Literal poison.
In R-Pod it had been subtle.
Constant diarrhea. Blood in my urine.
It took time before I figured it out.
In B9 it became constant.
Kidneys screaming.
Stomach twisting.
I caught Drakard handing eye drops to a trustee through the flap.
I saw it.
No doubt.
Commissary became my lifeline.
Then they cut that off too.
My mom was still paying.
Two hundred fifty dollars a month.
Seven weeks of commissary vanished.
Gaslit by Mike from commissary:
“You signed for it.”
Bullshit.
I hadn’t received a single snack, pen, or sheet of paper.
Tickets came back marked:
“Unsubstantiated.”
I called it theft.
They called it policy.
But their policy always meant the same thing.
Torture.
By the time I reached C14 I understood the pattern:
Isolate.
Test.
Poison.
Gaslight.
Repeat.
Every fuckery went into the ledger in my head.
TVs swapped.
Meds poisoned.
Commissary stolen.
Lights dimmed.
Floors vibrating.
Soap shaved.
Towels stolen.
Legal documents raided while I slept.
I numbered pages into the hundreds just to keep track.
Close to a thousand.
Because they could steal paper.
They could steal pens.
But they couldn’t steal memory.
And my favorite two rules stayed simple.
Number one:
I don’t fucking lose.
Number two:
I’m about to make sure you don’t forget it.