I went to visit a childhood friend this past weekend. I was about ten minutes late, the result of a ridiculously long drive through a few Mayberry-looking towns before entering his one-horse village. I had to pull over to rest my eyes at one point. He was waiting on me when I arrived. The guy that let me in said my friend had joked that I probably got lost but that he wasn’t worried. We both grew up in country, rural Alabama, and he knew as well as me that I wasn’t going to stay lost too long in that environment.

Even though I was late, I still had to take my shoes off at the door. The guy he had joked with grabbed up both shoes and stuffed his hands into each of them. Eww (Don’t get me wrong, these were newer dress shoes and I take care of my feet. I’m just not a “foot” guy.). Then the guy gave me a quick pat down. “Alright,” he said, but not to me. A huge metal door in front of us slowly began opening and he ushered me into a short hallway where I was met with another similarly huge, equally metal door. The first door, behind us now, finally opened all of the way. I knew better than to expect the door in front of me to open anytime soon as the door behind us began it’s slow crawl back to its secure position.

“How’s he been?” I asked the guy. “Oh, he does pretty good. He messed up here recently, but he understands where he messed up.” A few seconds of awkward silence, and then the guy repeated under his breath, “yup… he does pretty good.” The back door finally shut with a clank, the electricity buzzing loudly through its frames broke off and made b-line to the circuit for the door ahead. And just as slowly as the one closed, this one began to creep open.

About a minute later, I walked across the threshold, and the guy ushered me through one of a couple of narrow, grey metal doors to my left. There sat my friend, head down, wrist shackled to wrist shackled to ankles. The guy shut the door behind me. The metal latch slid against a metal strike plate before lodging itself into its catch. Almost immediately, I realized that there was no handle on our side. There was no crevice in the frame for me to stick my fingers into. I scanned the walls of our small room. The size reminded me of the first room I remember having to myself as a child, a little six-by-six trailer-park bedroom. But that bedroom’s walls were barely held together by old, rotted and dilapidated wood paneling. This room was walled off with cinder blocks cemented atop cinder blocks, reinforced by a steel mesh and more cement (Andy Dufrain would’ve been pissed). My old room had a sheet for a doorway…