http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/05/01/wormwood_scrubs/At her majesty's pleasure
After a nightmare flight from New York to London, I was thrown into a Victorian hellhole of a prison alongside drug smugglers and rapists. This is my story.By Peter Kurth
May 1, 2007 | The following diary is excerpted from a journal I kept while incarcerated in December 2006 and January 2007 at Her Majesty's Prison at Wormwood Scrubs, London. Until December, I had never before been in a prison of any kind, for any reason, let alone such a filthy, decrepit, Victorian heap of stone and sadism as the Scrubs. That I found myself there at all may be put down to a collision of intractable forces -- first, my own loudmouth pigheadedness, which has landed me in trouble before; second, a humorless and probably exhausted flight attendant; and, third, the heightened tension now common to air travel, thanks to real and imagined threats to public safety resulting from the worldwide "war on terror." What follows is my story alone, though I have no reason to suspect that under like circumstances, other hapless saps would not find themselves in similar straits. And so, I offer my reflections on the experience here more or less as a cautionary tale.
On Dec. 6 of last year, I boarded a British Airways flight from JFK in New York on what was meant to be a four-day research trip to London, to examine documents recently released by Scotland Yard relating to a book I'm writing. I left the states on the spur of the moment, after I noticed that I had only seven days left on my passport before it expired. That's why I went when I did -- to take advantage of the time remaining. I expected to be back home in Vermont within a week -- not knowing, or having forgotten, about a law in Britain that demands that you have at least six months' time on your passport in order to be admitted into the country. This law has been on the books for ages, apparently, but, to my knowledge, it was rarely enforced. No longer: Travel documents and other identification papers are now screened in Britain with all the watchfulness of the doomed.
My flight was delayed by a couple of hours; it was nearly midnight when we boarded. By that time, I'd had a couple of scotches and a full dinner at one of the airport's generic bars, but I can state for sure that I was not "intoxicated." I certainly wasn't "plainly intoxicated," as the airline staff later told the courts, because if I had been, they wouldn't have let me on board. (I also feel safe in assuming that they wouldn't have offered me free bottles of wine after we took off: The last time I'd flown from London to New York, "security" actually canvassed people in the bars at Heathrow, interrogating passengers to see if they were "fit to fly.") Everything might have worked out fine if a) I hadn't discovered that my laptop was missing after about an hour in the air; and b) I'd been given a seat that wasn't tailor-made to form blood clots in my legs. I've been HIV-positive since the AIDS epidemic began -- I'm what they call a long-term survivor -- and I've got peripheral neuropathy in both my legs: It's impossible for me to sit shoved up against a wall for six hours, unable to move or lean back while the person in front of me reclines.
I should have told the airline upfront about the HIV situation, my "no longer invariably fatal but still miserably complicated chronic manageable disease." Indeed, when interrogated later by the police, I was asked why I hadn't done this, and could only reply that I'm not accustomed to blaring the news around in public. It's one thing to be "out" about your HIV status. It's quite another to trumpet the news openly before 400 people who are already in a state of anxiety. So I didn't explain that part of things when it might have helped. Neither did I bear in mind (since I was plenty anxious myself) that one of the medications I'm on -- ritonavir, which has especially terrible side effects -- is administered as part of the AIDS cocktail precisely because of its ability to inhibit a metabolic pathway and help the front-line antivirals circulate longer in the bloodstream.
Unfortunately, ritonavir has -- or can have, depending on who you ask -- the same effect with alcohol, so that "a couple of scotches" at the bar and a bottle of wine at 35,000 feet might easily send you to Cloud Cuckoo Land before you can say, "Fasten your seat belts." I mention this not as an excuse, but as a possible explanation for the fact that I completely lost my mind on that plane. I hadn't conceivably had enough alcohol to account for the reaction that ultimately led me to the clink.
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