September 13, 2024. Two o’clock in the afternoon.
That’s the exact moment I told them I wanted protective custody. The same fucking request I’d already made back in January — fifteen minutes after first stepping into Williamson County Jail — when Sgt. Young looked me dead in the eye and told me protective custody was “reserved for judges and celebrities.”
Judges and celebrities.
Like I was supposed to nod and go wherever he told me.
He told me I’d be “among my peers.”
That word — peers — was his slip.
He knew exactly who I was.
That was the first tell I was an HVT — a high-value target.
By September I’d had enough.
I’d been spit on. Threatened.
I wasn’t staying in open bars anymore.
I told him, fuck it, I’ll take anything — a closet, a broom locker, a dog cage.
That’s when they slid me into B9.
My first box.
Out of three total in Southside.
This one would become my classroom in hell.
THE BOX
B9 sat on the third floor, buried deep in Southside Second South — the last row of runs, first box on the right.
Walk in and you hit it like a wall.
Piss.
Thick, gagging, ammonia-burn piss.
The smell was baked into the concrete.
The first thing I did was grab rags and start wiping. I already knew their mop trick from B5 — mop buckets laced with piss water. They thought it was funny.
They thought I wouldn’t notice.
Joke’s on them.
I notice everything.
The cell was twelve feet by fifteen.
Steel-blue walls. Light-blue paint.
Toilet paper plastered everywhere like some lunatic’s wallpaper job — stuffed in vents, stuck to walls, hanging in strips.
Then there was the smear.
Black streak across one wall, like someone had used a one-inch paintbrush and scrawled graffiti.
Total bullshit.
Where the fuck would an inmate get a paintbrush in solitary?
Answer: they wouldn’t.
It was staged.
Like everything else.
The bunk was an elevated steel slab.
ADA-illegal as hell.
They knew I was disabled — the white Reeboks proved it. White shoes meant medical classification.
You didn’t get them unless medical signed off.
Velcro straps instead of laces.
Everybody in that jail knew white shoes meant disabled.
Yet they still stuck me in a box where a five-foot fall off the bunk could split my skull on concrete.
The toilet worked.
Small miracle.
The sink barely had pressure — it spit water like a dying fountain.
If you wanted a drink you had to catch it in a bowl.
The hot tap?
Lukewarm.
The shower was stainless steel, push-button plate.
Cleaner than most — but still a cage.
Everything in that place reminded you that you weren’t human.
Above the desk sat a light that didn’t work.
The overhead light?
That fucker never turned off.
That’s when I learned the rule of the box:
You don’t get night.
You get buzzing fluorescent daylight twenty-four hours a day.
Sometimes a faint strobe flickered through the wall.
At first I thought it was a bad bulb.
Later — after seeing the exact same flicker in different cells — I realized it was orchestrated.
SURVEILLANCE
There was a visible camera above the steel slot on the door.
Across the hall, the dayroom TV lined up perfectly with my cell.
Inside the vents were hidden cameras.
When guards shined their flashlights, the lenses glinted.
They thought I couldn’t see them.
I could.
Every conversation in the officer station leaked through the duct above my bunk.
I could even smell Sgt. Bullock’s perfume when she was in the office.
I never heard her speak.
But the perfume overpowered the piss smell.
They laughed about the piss.
Laughed about me scrubbing the floor.
They didn’t realize I heard every word.
Outside each cell sat little red RFID boxes.
Supposedly for fifteen-minute checks.
Guards scanned them with handheld readers.
But the checks were random — sometimes hours apart.
The red light flashed inward.
Those weren’t just trackers.
They recorded.
Audio.
Video.
Southside wasn’t a jail.
It was a lab.
And I was the experiment.
But experiments sometimes bite back.