Hunger strikes don’t do justice to creative cooking

Lunchtime Friday found me inside that crowded North Spokane dining spot by the river.

No, not Clinkerdagger.

I’m talking about the Clink-and-Shanker. Otherwise known as the Spokane County Jail.

You should have seen the look of puzzlement on the jailhouse receptionist when I sauntered up to the front counter and announced with a straight face:

“Mr. Clark is here for his lunch reservation.”

The Handcuff Hotel is not actually on my list of grazing grounds.

My noon meal normally consists of a banana or a bagel from the newspaper cafeteria. On those days when my stomach is yammering for something more substantial, I’ll head down the street for a Domini’s meatwich.

But earlier in the week, I read our front-page story about Charles Robert McNabb. The 50-year-old inmate was then on Day 123 of a hunger strike at the jail. Now weighing less than 100 pounds, if McNabb continues his madness he’ll surely die.

Before passing judgment on this clown, I figured I had to rule out food quality as a primary cause.

Hey, don’t laugh. I remember some hot lunches back in high school that would have put a gator on a hunger strike.

After the receptionist got over his shock, he made a telephone call. Soon Lt. Mike Rohrscheib and I were sitting in his office, reaching into the brown sacks that contained the hoosegow’s grub du jour.

Rohrscheib stared at the inner sides of his opened bread in disbelief.

“There’s no meat in my sandwich,” he said.

It was true. It looked like the officer’s tuna salad had made a break for it, leaving behind just four lonely looking flecks of evidential lettuce.

Rohrscheib’s disappointments continued. Although it was chocolate milk day, some fiend had slipped him a carton of the regular old 1 percent white stuff.

“I got stiffed,” he lamented.

There’ll be a jail full of felons laughing when they read this.

My own lunch came out the way the jail’s kitchen director, Rich Yudt, promised: Tuna salad sandwiches. Red apple. Chocolate milk. A bowl of some kind of bland red soup that tasted suspiciously like watered-down spaghetti sauce.

Con appetite!

“Check the menu,” said Rohrscheib. “I’ll bet we had spaghetti last night and they turned what was left into soup.”

I did what he said. Mike was wrong. Spaghetti was the dinner entree on Wednesday, not Thursday.

Now I know from personal experience. Our jailhouse cuisine won’t be up to Martha Stewart’s standards if she ever does her time here.

But it’s edible.

So it’s definitely not the food keeping McNabb from chowing down. Charged with setting his estranged wife’s house on fire and seriously burning his teenage stepdaughter in the process, McNabb is just trying to take the coward’s way out.

Starving himself to death is apparently the punishment he has imposed upon himself out of remorse.

But shed no tears for Charles McNabb. If he were truly remorseful, he would suck it up and swallow his medicine in court.

And act like a man.

Whether you check yourself out of this world quickly or do it on the McNabb installment plan, suicide is invariably the gutless act of a self-centered person.

McNabb may tell his jailers that wasting away to nothing is payback for the pain his stepdaughter endured.

But all this guy is really doing is giving out more pain. And not only to the girl. Everyone connected to McNabb’s slow, sickening self-destruction – his guards, his lawyer, the prosecutors, his family – will be haunted to some degree.

Suicide always has an emotional ripple effect on the living.

“I find myself thinking about him at home,” admitted Rohrscheib, who has spent time with McNabb. “There’s no doubt in my mind that he wants to die.”

It may be too late. McNabb may be too far gone to save himself even if he wanted to. If not, if there’s any flicker of common sense and compassion for others left in him, he’ll stop his hunger strike and do what he can to get stronger. Then he can go to court and let justice take its course. That’s what the victim’s family wants.

Maybe someday he’ll be glad to get a tunaless sandwich and bland bowl of spaghetti soup.