I miss my beautiful Zen dolls. Thin. Flawless skin. Tight butts. Nice racks. Blonde glam chicks, Latina firecrackers, Asian dewdrops. It's all over now, out of business. Zen is gone.

I'm sitting in the slammer with three felonies hanging over my head. I've always believed in the old chestnut, if you do the crime, you do the time. But I also believe people should be able to screw for money and do drugs if they choose. I should do the time not because of the crime, but my own disastrous stupidity. I'm not being railroaded. I'm getting what I deserve. Christ, I'm running an escort service and I leave speed and pot around my office right out in the open.

Even though I was breaking the law, I refused to believe the cops would come after me. Why bother? I wasn't doing the pimp/ho thing on the stroll--"Hey, bitch, I don't care if it's pouring buckets, get yo' bootie out there and walk between the raindrops"--and I wasn't making tons of money which could be confiscated for the city coffers. But I didn't attempt to hide out, so I was an easy target. Just like when I was a child playing hide-and-seek. The person who was it always found me before the others.

I'm also terribly embarrassed and ashamed that in a city which properly recognizes and cultivates vice, sodomy, infantilism and the marvels of multicultural perversions, I got taken down for orchestrating the hopelessly simple pleasures offered by a straight escort service.

Behind bars I'm sweating fear. A triple felony. It's my first offense, but why did I have to make such a splash? What the fuck will the authorities do to me? Probation? Thirty days? Ninety days? A year in jail? More than a year means prison. Will the judge send me into a darkened pit as an old white chicken for some young, butt-fucking Crip? Probably not, and unlikely the Crip would want his chicken to be 57 years old...but you never know.

The first night, hunched over in a holding cell, surrounded by junkies,
wife-beaters, public urinators, stick-up boys and confidence men, cold terror
runs through my veins, replaying my stupidity over and over. Why didn't I hide the dope? Why have so much around? I simply like having a good supply on
hand in case my dealer, who eats, snorts and shoots gobs of speed, either
disappears or OD's.

After the first 24 hours replaying the whole thing out in my mind, wallowing in my own pity, thinking about my life as a series of monumental failures, and getting no sleep, I decide this is getting me nowhere and then discover the second, third, and fourth days and nights are carbon copies of the first. The initial terror finally recedes, but being locked up is compounded by another matter. No paper. No pens or pencils. Only three books: a romance novel, Kissinger by Walter Isaacson, and Checklist for a Perfect Bar Mitzvah.

I'm in a 16-man cell. I found the three books under a stack of toilet paper next to the shower. I have no idea how they got there, but I know more about Henry Kissinger now than I did when he was on the scene conducting bombing runs
over Hanoi.

My favorite factoid in Isaacson's book wasn't on Nixon's Machiavelli, but the American statesman during the Cold War, Henry Stimson, who, when asked why America should not set up a spy agency, replied: "Gentlemen do not read other people's mail." Why can't vice cops with search warrants catch on to this?

As a general rule, I'll read whatever is around, but I draw the line at bodice-ripping potboilers, so I passed on the romance novel. With regard to the third book, I could throw a dynamite Bar Mitzvah when I get out of jail.

I ask a couple of guards (Deputy Doodogs) for something to write with and they decline. Finally, one Deputy tosses me a pencil about two inches long. I have one piece of paper, a duplicate copy of my "property record," an itemized list of the clothing taken when I was processed into the jail. I take down a few notes in tiny handwriting on the property record and on the inside cover of the Bar Mitzvah book. This is thrilling, pretending to be a prisoner like Solzhenitsyn facing the annihilator in the Gulag.

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