Practical Jokes James Bauhaus

Ordinarily, I don't play practical jokes. They tend to cause a lot of social trouble when not carefully planned. When the victim is a very good-natured friend, however, a joke can provide amusement for everyone, even the victim. One such person was Ted, who is both good-natured and a bit gullible, which is another essential quality for victimization by practical joke. Ted gave me an opportunity to play a mild practical joke on him when we were in the prison garment factory. In this factory, then is no possibility of any privacy, what with all the captives running loose with scissors. Ninety people work there, and their "restroom" is five crappers in a row surrounded by a four-foot high wall for "privacy". Ted had a mouthful of snuff and was talking to a friend. His mouth was so full of saliva and tobacco juice that had to tilt his head backward to prevent it from dribbling down his chin. It was almost like he was gargling as he spoke. Little black specks of Copenhagen and a fine mist of brown spit flicked out his mouth as he talked. His listener noticed this end backed up a step, disgust on his face. Ted responded to this cue by leaning over to empty his load of juice into the nearby toilet. It sounded like a running faucet splattering into a cesspool. Ted attempted to resume his conversation with his friend, but I loudly interrupted, saying incredulously, "Wow-ee! Did you see that?" My friends, seeing nothing, asked, "What?" "Oh man!" I elaborated at a volume that carried over half the building. "That was the nastiest, and the funniest thing I've seen all week! When Ted leaned over and spit all that snuff juice into the crapper, the stream of jizz went down, touched the rim of the toilet, then the last sticky thread pulled back up and went into his mouth! That's the same as licking the toilet! Hyuck- hyuck!"

Soon as Ted heard his name, he turned to listen. Soon as he heard my fictional account, his face twisted into a mask of horror. As the crowd broke up into laugher, he rushed over to a sink and began hawking, spitting and rinsing out his mouth. The whole idea that a thread of saliva could stretch four feet down, then haul back up the same distance was completely ridiculous. Even so, it was plausible to Ted, and this is the Mayberry- Andy Griffith quality about him that made him such a delightful person to know.

That garment factory was the setting for unintentional practical jokes too. Every morning, soon as it opened, there would be a rush for the best seat on that line of crappers. At least 3 of them were occupied every morning at opening, and sometimes all five of them would have their own line of patient lurkers waiting for their turn, depending on how sorry or poisonous had been last nights "food". This ritual occurred every morning, but it didn't stop the prisoncrats bringing in a tour of school kids one morning. Usually they only bring in a pack of guardtrainees to see how their slave-labor hoods function, but this time a stupid tour guide brought some middle school students in for some scared-straight nonsense. When it's guard- trainees, the men act as if they are watching nothing more remarkable than dogs shitting on lawns, or cattle flopping while they graze. The women turn their heads as soon as they realize that they are intruding on the most basic reason for privacy, but otherwise pretend like the men that they should stay and enjoy the tour.

The school kids, however, were a different story. Unlike the trainees, the students were not subdued in their reaction by want of a job. Less inhibition let them gasp at the audacity of their adult tour-guide leading them to a row of fellow humans trying desperately to defecate in peace. The tour-guide, a hard-drinking alcohol addict and a closet sadist who liked to be called "Colonel Crisp", was the warden. He had no idea that he was stupidly bringing children to watch prison restroom pornography, and didn't give a good goddamn about it when he finally figures it out. He could not care less, because he was king of the prison and everything in it, inmate and school kids alike.

The boys' reaction was surprise and disgust. They lurched backward a step upon noticing the seated men with scowling faces. The little girls were lagging behind the boys. The sudden reversal of motion caused confusion, and a slight delay in reaction. Some were actually leaning against the four foot wall as their attention shifted from Colonel Crisp's droning monologue to the shitting men only ten feet away. One girl shrieked in alarm. The entire group of girls recoiled in horror. A cacophony of gasps, eeks and oh no's erupted before they turned as a group and ran back toward the exit. A piteous, whining noise rose high enough to interrupt Crisp's sonorous droning. He used his "command" voice to demand someone tell him what was the problem. Thanks to these girls' reactions, the tour was cut short, to the relief of everyone except the prisoncrats.

Prisoncrat practical jokes extend to construction and waste of taxpayer dollars too. While working in their kitchen at McAuschwitz, I once watched them take out all the bricks that they had used to block out a door to the "outside". Then they built a roofed corridor to a concrete pad they had constructed. Then they set up half of a snaptogether walk-in freezer before concluding their hard work by tearing everything down and re-bricking-up the door that they had un-bricked only 3 months before.

Another hilarious practical joke that the prisoncrats used to pull frequently is to force dozens of captives into the dead end hallway that used to lead to the "new" cell house at McAuschwitz. They would leave us trapped in there all day, waiting for our turn to see their "120 Day Review" board. This was a farce, forced upon them by law, to make it less obvious to us captive-victims that we were nothing more than forgotten; walking dead until our sentence expired, if we were lucky enough to have a sentence with an expiration date that we could live to see.

The practical joke part was that there were no chairs, no toilet, and no getting out except for one reason; to go directly to see the board of 8 or so guards who wasted an inordinate amount of time to decide to do trivial paper pushy type things about our living conditions.

There was one major flaw to their seat-less, toiletless, all-day lockup practical joke however, that made it much less mirthful than it could have been. Their hallway trap sloped downward. When everyone trapped there finally gave up trying to get out to go piss or shit, they would have no choice but to piss or shit, or both, in the hallway. The piss would simply dribble down to the lowest point, which was a 12-by-12 square foot landing 40 feet from the the only exit. On one record-setting day, the pool of piss in this area rose to the astounding height of four inches! I would have thought the stuff would find a crack and slowly dribble away after a while, but the place was evidently waterproof. In a normal place, some janitor would mop it up each night, but, of course, prison is an extremely abnormal place, made much worse by the intense hatred of each captive in the amount of piss that they caused to accumulate in their hallway. Four inches deep in a 12-by-12 foot pit is a whopping 359 gallons! Consider how many bladders this involves! Even Superman's bladder is limited to less than 16 ounces. That's a minimum of 44 full bladders per day! We felt quite lucky to be spared having to stand in this pool of waste while awaiting the prisoncrat's leisure for hours at a time. And this doesn't account for the several neat piles of feces that accumulated on the shores of Lake Whizz. I never saw this problem solved or the mess cleaned up, but it persisted for years. Every time my 4-month evaluation came up, Lake Piss and the shit peak range were either gone or diminished from last time, yet growing or beginning anew. I imagine that eventually they just moved the problem to a new location and walled-off sewer corridor until time came to put more cages in this space.

Ancient prisoner lore is a rich repository of practical jokes. You can't tell if they are true, but they are certainly outrageous as they are entertaining. I've heard this same story from so many different, unconnected people that it could, possibly, be true. It is certain that they all want you to believe it: in the days before murdering large numbers of people with slow death prisons became a sadistic science, there used to be room enough for a cat and mouse game to occur. Now that the prisoncrats have everyone jam-packed into thousands of tiny pod-prisons, it is impossible, but decades ago, clever captives used to hide containers of rotting fruit all over the comparatively large areas we once had. They would let the crap rot for a few days, then come back and drink it, trying to get drunk, which is often the same condition they were in when they caused their trip to prison.

The opposite side of this game of hiding rotting garbage front the guards is the guard's constant efforts to find it. They had learned the hard way that drunken inmates are the commonest way that the guards get chased off and their slow death camps get burned down and destroyed. These snooping guards were not normal: they had a vicious, sadistic sneak, which they loved to enjoy. When they did find the stashes of rotting fruit, they didn't just throw them in the garbage, as would rational, sane persons. No. They would, it is said, piss in them and leave the stuff for the unsuspecting inmate-alcoholics to drink. The inmate alcoholics were very afraid of drinking guard-piss. I know, because they once tried to dupe me into tasting their crap for them, Lucky for me, 1'm not an alcohol freak, and I am very picky about what I put in my mouth. These sly mutates would always hold back on drinking their ghettobrew until the stupider members of their crew took a slug. "How is it man? Good? Taste ok?"

If the stuff had pig piss in it, I imagine that the dupe would answer by wretching, since urea is a foul poison. A paranoid schizophrenic friend of mine once confided in me, "shit is not too bad, but piss tastes awful!" 1 never saw any of them grimace or spew from drinking piss-flavored rotten fruit, but then, I never cared to look for it. I know that the smarter ones feared being the first taster, end the older ones all agreed on one additional part of the ancient lore; that the guards would wait a week, then post information sheets on which brew-cache they had found. Apparently this was for inmate alcoholics who had unintentionally developed a taste for guard piss.

One of the newest practical jokes that the prisoncrats have pulled involves replacing these two-inch thick sleeping pads with air mattresses of unknown quality. All we know is the price: $130 each, plus any hidden fees that they inevitably attached (they secretly decided to charge you for the old, worn-out, many-times recycled jail pad you are currently sleeping on). At $130-plus each, I can only assume they are made of the finest silk brocade, imported from China, hand woven by the most beautiful virgins in the land. I ordered two of them: one to shit on, and another to cover it up.

Another recent practical joke just tacked to the bulletin board is a notice informing us of a new rate that they just concocted after many nights of lying awake, intensely scheming on yet another way they could administer their inmate targets the big screw. Exploiting their pariah class is taxing work, but very rewarding. This latest effort purports to improve "security (as is the premise of nearly all the previous rules) by proclaiming their right and intention to steal our personal TV (if we own one), should any guard decide to declare a "Class X" conviction to have occurred. They make this type of financial attack appear justified by the first pretending that their phony "court" system is not the complete farce that it is. The mere accusation is all the "proof” they need. Conviction is guaranteed (to see how prisoncrats make prison "convictions" simply appear in their prison record on you, see www.jamesbauhaus.org/ParoleReq.htm). Clever guards long ago learned how to secretly turn their targeted captives into dopies or label us "violent' without any way for us to track down which of them inserted these lies into their records or why. This is great fun for them, and it increases their job security as it extends our sentences and wrecks parole chances.

Scribbling out an "X" conviction is easy, and stealing their victim's TV is easy too. They cleverly make it look less like theft by forcing us to mail it away somewhere; "home", if we have one. Since we're forcibly unemployed, we often have no postage, so the TV is stolen after 90 days storage. Once they force you to mail it away somewhere, it can never come back, and you are forced to buy a NEW TV from them, and half the price you pay ($240 for a $l00 TV) goes to the guard (plus inmate) "fund" for guard use. Yes prison is just one deliriously funny practical joke after another. Everyone should experience this never-ending mirth!