"Are you HIV positive?" The booking officer couldn't have looked more bored when he asked me that question, so I decided to brighten up his day.

"Oh, yes. Crawling with the virus," I said, coughing in his general direction.

He backed up a step.

"Oops, sorry," I said, smiling sweetly.

"What's your T-cell count?"

"A T-cell?" I asked, faking another cough. "Jeez, it's been such a long time since I've seen one..."

He started checking little boxes on his clipboard.

"Are you on any medication?"

"Besides DDT? I mean, excuse me, AZT?"

He nodded and checked another box.

"Let me see. Bactrim. ddI. ddC. I've had ADC, CMV, HPV, HSV, ITP, KS, MAC, OHL, PCP, PGL, and TB."

His eyes couldn't have been wider.

"Oh, yeah. Add Prozac to that, too."

He started to stammer. "Y-you're depressed?"

"This is a wonderful jail!" I cried. "I'm not depressed, at all! Suicidal, yes. Depressed? Nah!"

*****

My smart-ass attitude didn't go over quite as well as I hoped it would.

After stripping me of my belt and shoe laces, they stuck me in a solitary suicide watch cell.

*****

Have you ever seen the prison movie "Papillon" with Steve McQueen?

It wasn't quite that bad in the Los Angeles County jail, but I might as well have been on Devil's Island.

I sure didn't have cigarettes or a paperback book hidden up my ass to help pass the time though.

*****

For dinner, they served us sandwiches made from some kind of pimento/olive lunch meat on white bread.

The prisoners who'd been in the cell before me had the right idea--the toilet was filled with soggy slices of bread and the lunch meat had been flipped up onto the ceiling.

The browning circles of meat stuck there, the corners starting to curl from the heat.

I pinched my nose and ate it anyway, waiting for Kurt or Steve to rescue me.