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Bad Night In The Holding Cell: Fact or Fiction


My novella, Bad Night In The Holding Cell, is based on a night I spent in the Cincinnati Justice Center back in 1987. The internal description of the Justice Center is exactly how I remember it. You could smoke in jail then, so if you had cigarettes, you could be a popular man in the holding cell. This was a no frills jail for sure, and if you had to take a dump, you had to do it in public where the jailers and everyone in the holding cell could share your adventure. A bare toilet with one of those torpedo tube sounding flushers, and where you were the main act, could constipate even hardened criminals.

I was used to going in public because in Marine Corps Boot Camp, we had to use lines of bare toilets with no walls in between them for privacy. When I was in Vietnam, the Vietnamese dropped their pants and went where ever they happened to be standing. But for an American at home, public toilets with an audience was not the normal life event.

The prisoners in the story existed, but their names and crimes are fiction. Two had been arrested for being drunk and the other for child support. I ran with it from there. I really didn't know what happened to them after I was released the next day. I never saw any of them again. The jailer staff are all characters I made up, based on what I saw that night. The two funeral home incidents, where a body sits up on a slab and the other where a man wasn't embalmed and woke up in his coffin, actually happened to people I've met over the years. My father had been involved in the funeral home slab incident. My version of the coffin incident is fiction based on what I was told by a witness.

The secret program to develop bio-weapons is fiction in my version, but I'm sure such programs exist under different names and locations. I did have a felony warrant that night because my landlord was also a lawyer and wanted to mess with me after I let a check bounce when he wouldn't fix the electric. I did have a good friend who was an excellent lawyer. I got an OR bond the next day, and the charge was dropped before I even had to go back to court.

I moved out of the building not long after the night in jail. Turns out the landlord had someone waiting who was willing to pay much higher rent and wanted me out after I had rehabbed my apartment into a nice living space. Payback is one of my favorite words, but that's another story...

found out about a month ago that my former landlord died from a heart attack, so that part of the story has closed.  The script for Bad Night in still with the producer waiting for financial backers for the film company. I will hear what is going on with it this week, whether they want to extend the option or release the script.

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