Shortly after breakfast, Bear pokes his snout through the bars and says, “Rokuban, bath in five minutes. Get ready.”
Bath? What a relief!
My hair is a greasy, disheveled mop. My scalp itches like a son of a bitch. And, after sweating in this muggy kennel all night, I smell like I’ve been carrying on sexual relations with farm animals.
I’m not sure what Bear means by “get ready”, though. I can only hope it doesn’t entail stripping down to my birthday suit and sashaying butt-naked along the corridor, dingdong flapping with each step and the cell block echoing with lusty catcalls.
Below the sink is a plastic washbasin, the kind you see Japanese totting under their arms when they pop into their neighborhood public bathhouse. I toss everything imaginable into it—half bars of soap, two hand towels, a fresh pair of regulation skivvies and a clean t-shirt. Then, I kneel down before the cell door, and wait my turn.
“Rokuban,” Bear says, sliding the door open. “Your turn.”
Pointing to the far end of the cell block where another guard is standing, Bear tells me that the bath is the second to last door on the left.
“Digger”, my well-upholstered neighbor, has also been let out of his cell and is halfway down the corridor, strutting with the air of a sumō wrestler about to step into the dohyō ring.
I hope they don’t expect the two of us to bathe together . . .
Clichéd images of prison showers cloud my thoughts: a fumbled bar of soap and an unwelcomed visitor barging through the backdoor without so much as a how-d’ye-do as the guard looks the other way.