Free Dark Star: Confessions of a Rock Idol by Creston Mapes Page B

number?”
    “Bayliss. B-A-Y-L-I-S-S. Karen Bayliss.”
    Waiting.
    “The number is 785-433-8179.”
    After scribbling the number down on the letter from Karen, I flipped the phone shut and sat there.
    My heart was drumming.
    The crooked wall clock showed 5:45. It would be two or three hours earlier in Kansas. She probably wouldn’t be home anyway.
    I opened the phone, punched in the numbers, and hit send.
    One ring, two rings, three rings.
    “Hello,” came the lively voice.
    My eyes darted about the dressing room.
    “Hellooooo.”
    I clapped the phone shut and threw it in the bag.

    Like most days of this trial, when today’s session adjourned I was escorted by two sheriff’s deputies through double wood doors out of the courtroom and into a stark white holding area. Members of the press strained their rubber necks to find out what goes on back here. But it was plain and simple.
    There’s a cramped locker room that smells like bleach, where I change from the street clothes I wear at trial into a bright orange prison jumpsuit, which has my prisoner number stenciled in black on the left breast and on the back. It’s up to my attorney or family to bring a change of clothes for the next day’s trial. One officer is with me at all times when I change.
    Once back into the holding area, the deputies, wearing ugly orange-and-brown uniforms, locked leg irons to my ankles. They wrapped a heavy belly chain around my waist and attached its handcuffs to my wrists. Once I was locked down, the two deputies, assigned solely to me, walked me down one flight of stairs in a dark, hollow stairwell lit only by red EXIT signs. Once through a large metal door and down a dingy basement hallway, we entered the eye-watering Miami sun, still burning bright toward evening.
    The humidity hit me like a microwave, but I relished it. Who once said that we need at least twenty minutes of fresh air and sunshine every day to keep our spirits up? Liza Moon? I’ve come to think she was right.
    In an effort to cut down on media attention, the Miami-Dade County police department usually set up at least two or three decoy cars around the Justice & Administration Center. However, a number of TV trucks with antennas fifty feet high and good-looking reporters were usually camped all over the cobblestone plaza that we drove past to make our exit for the local detention center.
    Some people followed our squad car in their vehicles, just to get a glimpse of the rock star on trial for murder. After we made the five-mile trek to the Miami-Dade detention center, numerous reporters, photographers, and onlookers gathered there as well. They jockeyed for position and yelled for comments, but I only smiled as I was escorted into the building.
    The detention center was a sprawling gray concrete structure surrounded by a large parking lot, lawns, and a fifteen-foot-high chain-link fence, which encircled the entire perimeter of the maximum security prison and was topped by rolls of razor sharp concertina wire. The only windows in the complex were narrow, one-yard-wide slits that ran horizontally too few and far between.
    After being unlocked and directed through two different metal detectors, I was frisked and taken by a large, heavy-breathing guard to my cell, which is located on the ground floor of the four-story prison.
    The cell was designed for one man. It was ten feet wide by ten feet deep with a sink, toilet, and a bed attached to the wall. Nothing else.
    I felt lucky I didn’t have a cell mate, considering that most of the cells were only slightly bigger than mine, yet housed two bunk beds and two men. Later I was told that the reason they put me alone was because I was such a “high profile” prisoner. Some were even surprised that I hadn’t been housed in solitary.
    By the time I got back from court, dinner had already been served. Now it’s leisure time, which means one hour of gathering around TVs, reading magazines, playing cards, talking on pay