A young man is in the bathroom tripping on K2, this man, this kid really, who was high not two days ago and observed wiping his ass with his dirty sock. He lies now on the bathroom floor, his body clenching and unclenching like a giant fist. I watch him from the doorway, and what I’m thinking isn’t that I should help him up or make sure his thrashing head doesn’t hit the concrete lip of the shower’s threshold. I’m thinking instead about the kid’s shorts, which, in the tussle, have hiked themselves down to partially expose his ass. I’m thinking it’s strange, sinister possibly, that I should find the sight of this arrested and vulnerable boy vaguely arousing.

Until prison I had never witnessed drug use. I had friends in high school who smoked weed, but I never participated. In grade school a visiting D.A.R.E. officer asked our class to name off some drugs we might have heard of. One student answered "marijuana," after which I raised my hand and countered with "pot." The officer blinked at me, said they were the same thing. I mention this not to exult any virtue but to point out how naive I was before my incarceration.

When I came to prison I was surprised that one could procure from behind these fences any vice he wishes—drugs, sex, pornography, tobacco, alcohol. I recall the first time I was offered a sip of hooch. It tasted of warm saltwater and grapefruit peel.

I recall too a former cellmate lying on his belly and exhaling pot smoke into our cell’s air vent. With later cellmates I recall syringes, tourniquets, lines of white powder, simmering spoons. Rod once showed me how he was able to tuck his antidepressant so discreetly and so thoroughly in his cheek that the pill line nurse couldn’t spot it, even with his mouth wide open. He ground so many pills on the table in our cell that the finish had gone hazy in one corner.

Back in the bathroom two white guys, two peckerwoods, come to fetch the kid from the floor. One man takes the seizing boy’s shoulders, the other his feet. Together they haul him away like a rolled up heavy carpet, kinked in the middle.

I wonder what my addiction to pornography might have looked like to an outsider.