Joliet Prison Blues

 Yesterday, when I went into work, I was told that one of the other guys who work there was in jail. Not a whole lot was known, and there's still a lot of unanswered questions about what went down, but this is what seems to have happened. Two nights ago, on the 3rd, he got in an argument with his girlfriend, and somewhere in there, the police got called, and he was arrested on domestic abuse charges.

 Now, I'm not going to claim to know what happened, but I do have a couple suppositions, based on the personalities of those involved. I don't know either one of them terribly well. The guy has only worked there for a few months, and the girlfriend only shows up a couple times a week, usually drunk. The guy, who I'll call Steve, is a pretty laid back guy. Not like pothead laid back, he's just a "grin and bear it" type. The girlfriend, as far as I can tell, is drunk most nights. I've heard rumors she spends her days hanging out at bars and getting older men to buy her drinks, but I don't know that for a fact. All I can say for myself is that she gets drunk during the week an awful lot.

 I'm not saying that he didn't hit her, I'm just saying I think it's more likely she got pissed at him and decided to call the cops on him. What I will say is that when I heard that Steve was in jail for domestic abuse, my first thought was that she had hit him in a drunken rage, and the police had arrested him because he was the guy. I've read that some States have a law saying that when responding to a domestic disturbance, they always arrest the man, even if he's the one who called the police. I don't know if Illinois is one of those States, but I wouldn't be surprised if all States respond that way regardless of what the law says.

 For some reason, my work became the information hub regarding all this. The place seems to be some kind of drama magnet. We get a lot of people who can't seem to get their act together, and for some reason when the major stuff goes down, half the time it happens at work. The other half of the time, it somehow gets dragged there. In this case, one of my co-workers suddenly became the guy to call to find out what was going on with Steve. He was just as mystified that as the rest of us, since while we all get along with Steve, I don't think any of us would consider him a friend. He's a co-worker, and while I drive him home sometimes, that's pretty much the extent of it.

 I picked up a few things from this co-worker, stuff which makes the whole thing even weirder. Steve's girlfriend was denying she called the cops, and had no idea where Steve was being held. She seems to have washed her hands of the whole affair, like she had nothing to do with it. Well, as I said a couple times at work today, somebody had to have called the cops, and the list of suspects is pretty short. But to hear her talk, the police just randomly wandered into their house and arrested him.

 My unfortunate co-worker, the one everyone was going to for information, decided to track him down, and finally found he was being held at the courthouse on California and 26th, and was awaiting bail. The amount set for bail was $750, which seems a bit high to me, but then, I have no idea how these things work. My boss, who for all his faults is pretty damn decent at heart, agreed to loan Steve the bail money, interest free.

 The only thing was, we had no way to get it down to him. So we called his sister, and got her to post bail. Her reaction was a little weird. She had been calling and calling, trying to find out what happened to her brother, but when it came time to actually help the guy out, she got reticent. Eventually, she came down to get the money. My boss even threw in a little extra just in case. She wrote and signed an IOU to keep everything on the up and up. We told her that she had until 7 p.m. to get down there and post bail. After that, he'd be sent upstate to sit in jail until his court date, and he'd be stuck there until the 16th. She looked up at the clock, and seeing it was 5 o'clock, said she'd wait about an hour so she wouldn't get stuck in traffic. That seemed a bit cold-hearted to me, but it was her brother, and her decision.

 When we spoke to Steve on the phone, we told him that his sister would be coming down with the bail money. Worried that he might do something stupid, like try and talk sense into his girlfriend, we also told him to go straight home, and call us when he got there. He lives with his sister, so that seemed pretty cut and dried to me.

 Unfortunately, that's not what happened. We got a call from the sister a couple hours later, saying that she was sitting in the back of a squad car herself. It seems that when she went to the courthouse and put her purse in the X-Ray machine, she forgot to take her pipe out of it first. So she got busted on a possession charge. The law in Illinois regarding possession has changed recently, so she got a fine instead of being arrested, but the cops refused to let her back into the courthouse to bail her brother out. So she came back to my work and returned the money.

 My boss was long gone by that time, which is fortunate for her. He's got a temper, and if he had been there, I'm sure he would have been furious. My boss' son was there at the time, and all I can say is I'm glad that I wasn't around when my boss found out what had happened. Course, as far as I know, his son still hasn't gotten around to telling him what happened. Though I imagine my boss started getting suspicious when Steve never called to say that he was safely back at home.

 Speaking of Steve, I can't imagine what's going through his mind. The last he'd heard from anyone, his sister was on the way to bail him out. Instead, he got shipped off to jail. I feel bad for the poor guy, especially since I don't know if he even deserves any of the crap he's being put through. I'll probably never know the whole story, but I do know we're gonna be short-handed at work for a while.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights