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GA: When we got back to our cells, being incarcerated so long, my muscles and my legs are so weak, that I was just wobbly when I got back and I just crawled into one of those bunks and laid down and fell asleep for a few hours. It's amazing how a body will deteriorate, and during that six-month incarceration, we didn't do much but just walk to and fro from the mess, mess room and eat, and that's about all we did so we didn't get our regular exercise, so we were really weak. The, it was really cool up there, up on the top floor. They'd keep the windows open during the daytime, but they don't close it at night, and you know how it is in the desert air, it gets hot during the daytime and the nighttime it cools down, then you get the wind blowing. And the bars, the cells that we were in were like six feet away from the door so there's no way we can reach out to close the doors, with, so during the nighttime it'd be cold. We'd keep everything we had on and whatever we can get to keep ourselves warm. Oh, incidentally, we did have, wound up with ticks, otherwise known as bed bugs. Didn't know what they were until I wound up being in the County Jail when we first got in there, started getting bites all over and it'd be a string of bites and we found out they were bed bugs. We'd lift up the mattress and you see those little bed bugs, they looked like watermelons all filled up with our blood. They're crawling all over the place, and it was weeks and weeks and weeks of combating to get rid of the bed bugs. That was my first encounter with a bed bug. So I guess you would chalk that off as experience, too.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.