Tuesday, July 31, 2007 Niñal: I danced in prison too By Lorenzo P. Niñal Insoymada
BIG issues are boring, those that involve millions of the people’s money.
Even more boring are big names in the news, people who consider involvement in controversies as an assurance of their place in society.
I go for the trivial, the “unimportant,” the “insignificant” details behind the big news. Give me the CICC controversy, and I’ll research how many times in a day the governor checks herself in the mirror, or why whistleblowers speak bad Cebuano. I am a sidebar boy, a sucker for the interestingly human and the humanly interesting.
I missed being on field when the dancing Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC) inmates made the news. The “Thriller” dance was one telling detail of life in jail. I’d prefer it anytime to whatever more important event CPDRC was celebrating that day. “Zombies” walk every day inside the jail.
The CPDRC was my favorite source of news when I was still a reporter. Its old building along M.J. Cuenco Ave. never ran out of stories to tell. But you didn’t get them from the jail officials or from the guards. You got them from under the inmates’ bunks, from the pictures they kept in their wallets, from the songs they sang, from the prayers they said before going to bed.
And sometimes, you got them from the cracks in the walls — literally.
One of the jail stories that earned me the elusive byline was about two lovers who communicated with each other through a hole in the wall about three feet thick that separated the male and the female cells. The hole, not more than an inch in diameter, was part of a piping system that had been abandoned through years of repair.
The lovers exchanged sweet nothings by speaking into a hose they inserted in the hole. At night, when everyone was asleep, they had “phone sex.”
I felt guilty when jail officials covered the hole after reading my story the next day. I thought that under the circumstances, it was a small, harmless pleasure that shouldn’t have been denied to jail lovers. Then I learned that more than just love notes passed through the hole — drugs, too.
There was also the story of an inmate who kept a rat for a pet and mourned for a year after the jail was flooded and his little friend drowned, trapped in its cage.
Then there was that inmate who refused to go home after his acquittal because after years inside, his cellmates were the only family he got.
But my all-time favorite jail story is one that includes me in the list of characters. When I was a seminarian, the CPDRC was my mission area. I’d spend weekends there just to be with the prisoners.
One weekend when the jail was celebrating its fiesta, my inmate friends invited me to a party going on inside one of the cells. As I was ushered in, I knew why the party was being whispered around: There were plenty of liquor and weed.
It was already dark and I was already wasted when my drinking buddies finally allowed me to leave. At the gate, the guards wouldn’t let me out. They were new in their assignment and had to call the seminary first to verify my identity. It was way past the visiting hours and they wanted to make sure I wasn’t one of the inmates.
But I wasn’t worried. I was never a stranger to life in prison.
