Diary of Inmate 303. East Baton Rouge Parish Prison. 5/24/25 – Aidan McCahill

October 3, 2025

It was early spring just past Wednesday’s rush hour, and the sun clung lazily over a smog-filled horizon. As the 9 to fivers returned to their loving families, I deftly weaved in and out of the left-most lanes on interstate 12, dialed on Deftones and Adderall.

Generally, my circadian rhythms don’t wake me up before noon, so the hours between 6 to 8 pm were not only my bread and butter, but my make-or-break time. Contrary to what many think, delivering Doordash isn’t for the faint of heart. If I don’t capitalize on the midweek order rush, I’m usually eating ramen noodles and canned beans for the foreseeable future. So I like to imagine I’m a foraging grizzly bear on the eve of winter during these evenings, scouring the shores of an Alaskan riverbank to avoid starving to death.

I love the feeling of threading the needle of traffic, swerving between marathon commuters from New Orleans and wide-eyed soccer moms carrying snot-nosed gremlins in the back of their Suburbans. I imagine them glued to ipads, legs dangling atop Gatorade and booger stained seats on the way home from baseball practice, unaware of the terror I’ve inflicted on their maternal protector. I pull off an exit toward my next stop and quickly roll down my windows. It was the time of year when the air just starts to become so thick and oppressive it feels like you’re getting Chinese waterboarded. I glanced at the fresh pit stains on my bulky cotton shirt. I really need to fix my A/C.

“Evening ma’am. Your Panda Express has arrived. Still hot off the stainless steel!” She’s around 55 with a sunken chin and wrinkled, scabby but sober face. An ex meth monkey, I presumed, who perhaps found God, or maybe just ran out of steam. She shoots a glance, grabs the food and shuts the door without thanking me. I turn around, chin up high like an old dignified butler. Her home smells like cat litter and wet socks.

I checked my app. No tip. You can go ahead and rot in withdrawal hell with your cats, Marlene.

Marlene, like most of my customers, lives in one of the 50 or so tract housing subdivisions in Baton Rouge: a sprawling late-stage capitalist suburbia divided by upper-middle-class whites and college kids in the south, and low-income blacks to the north. Hundreds of fast-food and casual dining chains line nearly every thoroughfare, whose convenience – combined with the inability of most of us to peel themselves away from their couches – has led to my budding career in food delivery service.

I made two more stops near the cul-de-sac before speeding my lime-green Kia Sol back on the interstate, hunting for my largest order of the evening: six deluxe Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich meals and a large Hungry Howie’s pepperoni pizza. By now my car is inundated with a cornucopia of modern American cuisine, the air marinating for hours in the Louisiana heat. Sickly sweet whiffs of McGriddles and IHOP pancakes; oniony, greasy hints of shrimp po-boys and Caniac combos, and one biting, acidulated wave of curdled Chipotle sour cream that rapes my olfactory senses.

I knock on double doors under an awning buttressed by white columns, and wait several minutes. Listen to shouts muffled by a speaker blaring NBA YoungBoy. A header reads above 𝚷KA. Hate em or love em, fraternities are my most reliable, high paying customers.

I knock again before the doors swing open. A pock-marked 18-year old wearing frazzled pajama bottoms appears.

“Sup man. I got your fixins.”

“What?” He stares back at me, confused, slightly irritated, before eyeing the food. “Ohhh great! And, um what about the other thing?” he asks.

I pull out four separate, miniature Ziploc bags of white powder. He hands me two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills.

“Have fun kiddo.”

I make a few more trips near student housing before my final order of the night. He goes by Sid.

Sid is a regular customer of mine by now, though after 6 months of delivering to him I’m still not sure what his real name is. Somewhere in his early 60s, he’s tall and wiry with a thin equine face and a horseshoe hairline – like my father. He wears black, and gives the impression of Slender Man if he happened to be a Jesuit priest.

He gives me the creeps, and I dread the biweekly visit, but he forks over almost double what others pay.

Like clockwork, I receive a personal text from him at 7:45 twice a week.

“ETA?”

“5 min” I reply.

He lives in a red brick ranch style house, nothing exceptional save its location on the border of the richest area of town, at the point where broken liquor bottles and abandoned tires seem to immediately give way to colonial architecture and perfectly curated lawns.

The biweekly orders never vary. An 8 ball of Ketamine, 4 grams of Xylazine, and a tuna fish Subway footlong. Quite possibly the gnarliest combination of substances known to man. I sample a little K to quell the jitters, then shuffle up the walkway. The door seems to open itself to a crack before I get a chance to knock.

“Evening Spencer,” he says, beaming a toothy, Cheshire smile. “You’re running kind of behind today, no?”

I check my watch. I’m four fucking minutes late creepshow.

I hand him the sandwich and some tiny baggies. His pale hands are cold and clammy, and always a little too moisturized. I wonder what he does to afford his property taxes.

Then I catch a glimpse of someone inside, slumped on the couch. It’s only for about three seconds but the figure strikes me as terribly out of place. She’s brown, right on the border of criminally young. Her eyes are bright blue, though a little glazed, vacant. I squint for a better look but Sid shuts the door behind him and steps out.

“Is that your daughter?”

“Who?”

“The girl on the couch in there.”

He shoots me a queer look. “My drug dealer and daughter have no business being in the same conversation.”

“Right.” I say, studying my shoelaces like I’m cramming for an exam.

“See you next time Spencer,” he says, softly, handing me a roll of $100 bills. Then he calls me “young buck” before I dazedly walk through his lawn back to my car, feeling like a dog on a leash.

–

From as far back as I can remember, my surroundings have attempted to sculpt me into a man hellbent on making a decent name for himself. I can vividly recall my 5th-grade teacher Mrs. Birdsall, prodding me on what kind of direction I wanted to take in life, as if my 11-year-old self cared for anything more than playing Modern Warfare and scouring the web for pixelated breasts.

“How about a firefighter?” she’d asked, with that sort of condescending smile elementary school teachers seem to perfect. “Your parents would be so proud!”

Others answered football players, astronauts or the president. I remember one smart-ass telling us he was going to be a cardiothoracic surgeon, presumably something he’d overheard from his parents, and in typical fifth-grade fashion, regurgitated the next day to impress his classmates. Mrs. Birdsall was forced to look up what it meant and read it out loud for the class. I liked to call her Mrs. Birdbrain, sometimes to her face, because I thought her mind was as feeble as a hummingbird’s. Looking back the poor girl simply had a lisp and limited real-world experience, though, for ruthless fifth graders. It was enough to make the classroom her living hell.

I mostly floated through high school. Unrecognized by most of my classmates and unremarkable in most of my teachers’ eyes. I’d tried for JV football in a half-assed attempt to gain some notice from my father, although I’m still not sure why or how that would have impressed him. He was an adjunct literature professor at Louisiana State University, who maybe had a class of six or seven students on a good semester. By high school he’d left my mother for one of his male TAs. They still live in Mid-City, but I haven’t seen him in years.

I liked being a ghost, that kid from high school whose face you surprise yourself by remembering years later. But what I lacked in real-world charisma I made up for by thriving in Xbox live and Discord lobbies. The absence of awkward energy from face-to-face interactions allowed me to let myself go, freely hurling insults and slurs into my microphone and leading my teammates to victory. I was a virtual Audie Murphy with a quickscope like Chris Kyle and a vocabulary worse than a Confederate infantryman.

Now, six years after breaking free of the chains of k-12 education, I don’t need to be anyone, because I call my own shots. Last year I moved out of my mother’s apartment to a studio off of I-10, next to the Topgolf. I DoorDash during the afternoon, play video games until dawn, sleep a few hours, then repeat it all over again. Taking stimulants and scrolling TikTok helps the hours fly when the traffic is bad.

With the money I make selling drugs on the side, I’m able to afford some luxuries. The newest gaming console, a VR headset, trips to L’Auberge Casino, and an occasional escort when I get bored of my Brazzers premium membership.

–

The Saturday that it all happened, I woke up in a cold sweat, thinking about the girl I saw on Sid’s couch. I hadn’t thought of her since Wednesday, but she popped into a nightmare of mine shortly before I woke up. One of those predawn visions that make you question which side of consciousness is closer to reality. In the dream I was walking down a dirt road in some third world village, like deep in Guatemala or something, when an elderly woman approached me and began to weakly tug at my elbow. She was whining softly in Spanish, which I’ve never known how to speak.

The old woman was clearly distressed as she pulled me into her little slum house, bringing me through a dirty makeshift kitchen to a soiled cot, where a girl lay in a puddle of sweat.

The older woman was pointing at the figure with tears flowing down her wrinkles. I looked into the girl’s eyes. They were the same, dead bloodshot blue eyes I saw on the couch. I couldn’t have glimpsed at her for more than a second before her lips curled into something sinister. Then I shot awake.

I briefly lay in bed, feeling like my brain had been taken out of my skull, sterilized, then placed back in. What kind of sick white savior shit was going through my mind? I hurriedly dressed, pacing over my strewn clothes. I searched for the usual phone, wallet and keys before stumbling out into suffocating humidity.

Saturdays were for re-upping my supply and I wasn’t going to let some demon girl derail my day. I hopped in the Kia and sped to an apartment complex near campus, already beginning to sweat.

A short, dark, baby-faced man-child opened the door, wearing coke-bottle glasses and a toothy grin.

I smiled, already feeling better. “Carlos! My man.”

Carlos is a Honduran and 3rd-year vet school student here on a visa. What prevents him from being the typical hard working, mild-mannered Central American transplant is that he came from a well off family in Honduras, but somehow still feels the need to steal drugs from the Large Animal Clinic he works at. It’s a routine he’s perfected over the past three years.

When I first met him online playing Apex Legends, I was mildly high and couldn’t stop laughing at his vernacular, which seemed like some schizophrenic actor trying out for a role in Sicario.

“When I saw that first vial of ketamine I jus took it mane, hit that lick. Next thing you know my eyes jus light up like so many possibilities man. Like we actually gettin out this mug fo real.”

At the time, I assumed his family had ties to the cartel or something.

“It’s in your DNA man, you’ll never be able to escape it.” I’d say.

It was only later on he revealed his father was the personal doctor for the Honduran president, and one of the cleanest, uncorrupt men in government. But Carlos seemed to like the mythos, and he could tolerate, even enjoy, my casual racism.

“Spencer! Ese, come join us for a game of dominoes!”

“Maybe later, Cholo, I have to grind today,” I said.

It was a lie. The only thing I’d scheduled was a date with Xanax and Brazzers, but hanging out with people in person generally wasn’t my thing. Usually Carlos was something of an exception. Despite the veneer, he was intelligent, and we’d spend hours rotting on the couch, riffing off internet humor, sometimes delving into the CIA’s involvement in Latin American regime changes. But today he had guests, whose gazes were already making me feel uneasy.

I walked in and stood impatiently. His apartment was furnished head to toe with cheap Chinese furniture, the drywall covered with posters of Ronaldo, Messi, Balotelli. Two or three disheveled looking students were hunched around the kitchen table on plastic chairs, sorting dominoes and guzzling kratom – a green smoothie-looking substance sold at gas stations that feels like a shittier version of hydrocodone.

My eyes were struggling to adjust to the dingy room as I walked halfway into a heated conversation.

“She was always getting drunk and going off without anybody. Probably tried to walk home alone from Tigerland.”

“Typical victim blaming! Campus police haven’t said anything yet. For all we know it could’ve been a gang initiation thing. Remember what happened to the girl a few years ago on the train tracks? They shot her point blank.”

I hesitated to join in, but my curiosity got the best of me.

“What happened at Tigerland?” I asked, referring to the parking lot full of ramshackle bars at the center of LSU’s drinking culture.

The victim blamer, a skinny-fat bearded boy named Parker, turned and looked at me like I’d just walked in on him taking a shit.

“Some freshman girl went missing last week,” he said, a hint of enjoyment in his tone. “She was a Kappa and everyone on campus is going nuts.”

“Definitely a gang initiation thing. Probably shot point blank.” The girl across from him was one of those alternative skinny types, probably feigning daddy issues I thought. She had black bangs, nose ring, and patch tattoos of flowers and bugs down all over her arms. The perfect Tumblr veterinarian girl.

“What does she look like?”

“Like me,” Carlos said, before whipping his phone out. He showed an Instagram post on the Kappa Delta Sorority’s account. It was a professional looking senior photo. A Hispanic girl in a white dress.

Holy fuck it’s her. I struggled to hold in a gasp.

But her eyes were different, an electric blue, alive, bright. From the caption I learned her name was Sophia, a freshman volleyball player from Puerto Rico. She hadn’t been seen in over a week and the FBI was supposedly involved. Her vigil would be held Tuesday night on the main LSU quad.

“What I don’t get…” said the Tumblr girl, her name was Lucy.

Oh boy here it comes, I thought.

“…Is why everytime a black boy gets shot in Baton Rouge or anywhere for that matter, the local media reports, maybe one or two paragraphs and then we never hear from them again. But every time someone from a zip code with a median income over 50k dies, the media is like, well, sharks with their blood in the water, and the entire town cries wolf!”

“Wow Lucy I didn’t know you were such a deep thinker,” Parker snorted, “did you ever consider getting an MFA to write about all the cats you plan to put down?? What’s next, the sky is blue?”

For whatever reason, maybe it was my intellectual predispositions to the macabre, I was enjoying the conversation, and began to clear my throat.

“Look” Parker said, he was pointing at me like some zoo animal, “The Uber driver is weighing in!”

Being a graduate of Baton Rouge public schools, I had developed a hard shelled veneer for skinny fat, bearded assholes; maybe the most valuable takeaway from my years of tax-payer funded schooling.

Most everything else I learned was from my father’s library, in my elementary years, before I had access to the internet. It wasn’t much, just a few book shelves filled with the kind of classics you’d assign a highschooler or freshman undergraduate. Strewn across his Ikea desk were tattered remnants of failure: term papers, family photos, and copies of his unpublished short stories. But the shoebox room was covered with windows, and while other kids were teepeeing old ladies’s houses, I’d spend most summer afternoons curled up in my father’s office chair, basking in the setting sun and immersed in the worlds of Hemingway and Dickens.

“I’m just curious–” I start. “Imagine you were the parents in the immediate aftermath of losing the single most important gift that life can give you, would you rather grieve in peace? Or find yourself in the inescapable prison that is national media attention?”

My mind was running on two parallel tracks – on one, I saw Sophia sitting dead eyed on the couch, helpless as pale white hands closely closed around her neck. On the other track, was a cold condescension towards the veterinary community.

“I’d rather feel the outpouring of support from a community that actually cares.” Lucy said. “Even if that comes with unwanted attention.”

“Oh so the black community doesn’t care about losing one of their own?” I ask.

“They care, they just don’t receive the same attention they deserve from the white patriarchy. It’s obviously only when there is a victim within the power structure that there’s motivation for change.” said Lucy.

“Look,” I start. “The mainstream media and any financially driven social media account doesn’t care about either community. Any well-bred white girl that gets raped, some former jock killed in a hazing ritual, an innocent old veteran robbed at a corner store. Take your pick. The common thread through all of them is that a picture of them in the paper, on Facebook, Twitter, gets clicks. Their stories are a form of voyeuristic escapism for us. It’s fun, if only for a second, to imagine the horror that takes place while also feeling sympathy for all those involved. Putting ourselves in the shoes of their families can take us away from the monotony of our meaningless lives, to say if only for a second, ‘that poor mother! I can’t imagine what she is going through.’ But we do imagine, and we briefly take pleasure in letting our minds picture the horror they go through.
Then we refresh ourselves with the fact that it didn’t happen to us. At the end of the day, the public can’t do that with a truant 14 year old caught up in gun violence. That was in vogue for a hot second, but usually it’s just a few paragraphs. It’s not a race thing, it’s a poverty thing. But the masses are desensitized, completely over the way these things are unless they’re related to the price of milk. Humans need variation and this Puerto Rican volleyball player satisfies those cravings.”

They kind of shifted awkwardly for a few seconds, before Carlos broke the silence.

“Spencer you sick fuck!” he said, grinning.

–

I drove home in silence, feeling the sweat return, and the dope burning a hole in my pocket. Then I spent the rest of the day lying on the couch, my eyes in a back and forth ping-pong match between the ceiling and Instagram reels, as I tried to distract myself from her eyes. Glassy cerulean orbs of passivity. I stared out the window as the sun began to crest below the Top Golf nets outside, thinking of my father’s library. I studied a heavyset man on the range dressed in camouflage. It looked like he might have brought his own clubs. After pouring half a pint of miller light and a handful of nachos down his gullet, he chopped at the dimpled sphere like a toddler in his first year of tee ball.

I felt like the empty shell of a hermit crab, a relic of something cowardly, now completely devoid of substance. It had been that way since my father left us, a feeling I’d chosen to numb for nearly a decade with cheap dopamine. He’d created a void that only seemed to grow during the hours of silent TV dinners spent with my mother, who also grew quieter, emptier. I began to squirm.

It was dark by the time I looked up and glanced at my coffee table. There was a scale, next to ziploc bags full of white powder. It wasn’t out of the ordinary to offer my clients first dibs after a new “shipment” arrived, so I sent the text.

“Bulk shipment going fast. You in?”

Five minutes later, “Yes. 8 pm.”

I sent Carlos my location. “Meet me here in 30 min. Need backup if this deal goes wrong.”

“Word mano (brown fist emoji)”

I sped down Airline highway so fast the vacant office buildings began to meld into one concrete blur. A Long John Silver’s next to a busted street light triggered a wave of something familiar, a calm sense of deja vu that seemed to slowly wash over me. It was like something from a dream or a vision or a past life though which one I wasn’t sure of. All I knew is that once I’d driven down the same strip listening to the same Deftones lyrics.

The waves suck you in then you drown
If like, you’d just stay down with me
I’ll swim down with you
Is that what you want?
You
Is that what you want?

Then the feeling passed as quickly as it came, the sense of familiarity quickly replaced by thoughts of utter insignificance. My hands trembled, tense with the uncertainty of the events about to unfold.

There weren’t any lights on in Sid’s house when I parked my Kia beside the curb. In the same way I’d done every week for the past year, I shuffled up the mundane, cement walkway.

I timidly thumped my knuckles against the hardwood. The door swung almost immediately open.

“Spencer, what a surprise,” he says. “You’re right on time.”

I stand there silent, like an incontinent dog, paralyzed not with embarrassment or fear, just with the multitude of choices. Then I feel a shuffle underneath me. There’s more than one muffled voice coming from below.

The question comes out of me before I have a chance to think about it. I’m inside now, the choice seems to have already been made for me.

“Who is that?”

I look around, the foyer is sleek and sterile. Like a hospital, I feel an overpowering sense of institutionalized death. I don’t know why I came here without a plan. I think I was just curious, maybe just wanting to double check that it was really her. Then I would safely return to my car and call the cops. I turn back to Sid. He’s wielding a long barreled dart gun.

Fooooommpp!!

There’s something cold and metallic in my neck. I look up and see the same menacing lips on Sophia that shot me awake that morning – only now they’re on Sid and I’m beginning to rapidly fade.

“No need to ask silly questions.” he replied, “We’re just getting started.”

His icy right hand is on my wrist now, and he’s leading me down a long white hall. The same dazed feeling from Wednesday is becoming overpowering, like the photons surrounding Sid’s body have a magnetic, trance-like effect. I was in a nightmare now, but unable to move my legs.

“Sophia!?” I manage to yelp.

Soon I float outside my body. From a bird’s eye view, I see a wiry black figure drag me down the hallway. He works methodically, no quick movements, like a well oiled machine. I see him round the corner of the hall to a door, it opens to a stairwell, though I can’t see further down.

3 months later.

I’m in a holding cell in the Parish jail awaiting trial on multiple drug and human trafficking charges. I feel like I’m in high school again, straining to remain unnoticed.

Soon after Sid dragged me down into his basement, Carlos had barged recklessly through the front door. A neighbor had seen it and called the cops, telling the dispatcher a homeless migrant had broken in next door. That morning, before more details emerged, the papers reported it was the home of Sidney Landry, an influential immigration judge. Meanwhile, the DA was building evidence about a local drug dealer and Honduran migrant involved in a human trafficking ring. They rescued three missing women in the process. Two from Texas, and the other, a Puerto Rican national, last seen walking home alone from Tigerland.

I learned from my public defender Carlos is at an ICE processing center in Pine Prairie, Louisiana. The poor guy actually came through and saved my life. Maybe his vernacular will come in handy after all.

I spend most of my time in the jail’s library where no one bothers me. During afternoons, warm columns of light pierce through the massive windows. It’s during these fleeting moments I remember my father’s sun room – and sometimes, the same feeling of tranquility returns.

Today I spoke with my old man behind a plexiglass divider. He told me to write about what happened, mentioning something about how the only way I’d be able to convey the truth, my truth, was to put those thoughts on paper. I don’t know about all that, or him for that matter. But maybe these entries might help me fill whatever I’ve been missing. I guess now I’ll have plenty of time to find out.