Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row (25 page)

The unfortunate feline came home with one of its back legs bitten most of the way off. She held the little guy’s leg together and bandaged it up, hoping it would miraculously grow back together. It did not. Soon the cat began to stink of rotting meat as gangrene set in. After she realized the smell was not going to get any better, she called the vet and asked for advice. The vet told her she had two choices—the cat could either be “put to sleep,” or they could amputate the leg, which would cost what amounted to a small fortune when you’re poverty-stricken.

My mother couldn’t stand the thought of having the animal put down, and she couldn’t afford the amputation, so she decided to do it herself. From old movies she had learned that ether renders people unconscious, so she figured it would work on the cat. Her first step was to buy something from an auto parts store that was in a can labeled “Ether.” Since ether isn’t something a person can just march into a corner store and buy, God only knows what the can contained. She poured the liquid into a Mason jar and held the cat’s head over it, forcing her patient to inhale the fumes. Other than causing the creature to struggle, it didn’t seem to have any effect.

She decided pills were the next-best option, and she scoured the medicine cabinet. The cat was promptly forced to swallow both a Valium and a muscle-relaxer that had been prescribed for my mother. The cat had ingested enough painkiller to fell a large adult human. After a few minutes it was no longer even moving. The only sign of life was the loud, nonstop purring that emanated from its small, inert form.

Her next step was to lay out her surgical instruments, which were limited to a garbage bag, a large pair of shears, and a small sewing kit. The garbage bag was used to cover the kitchen counter and contain the mess. The unlucky bastard was placed on the makeshift surgical table, where my mother stood with shears in hand. She realized she couldn’t bring herself to do the actual cutting “because the cat trusted me too much,” so she recruited her new husband to take part in the operation. The husband took up the shears and severed the tiny leg with one good chop while my mother held the cat’s head and gave it what comfort she could.

The stump was then washed with cold water under the kitchen faucet (“I figured the cold water would help stop the bleeding”) and the wound was drenched in hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol. After finding it impossible to sew the wound shut, she decided to experiment with a new product on the market called Liquid Skin. This stuff would normally be used in place of a Band-Aid to cement together the edges of a minor cut. My mother used it to seal off the cat’s stump.

I was doubled over and clutching my head in my hands. When I managed to sit up straight I saw my mom dusting the last of the pork skin crumbs from her hands, and Lorri looking like she was going into shock.

“So the cat’s okay?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, he’s just fine. He falls over sometimes when he loses his balance, and sometimes he forgets he doesn’t have a leg and his stump twitches when he tries to scratch his head with it, but other than that he’s hopping around just fine.” She was clearly proud of herself and beamed with pleasure.

Mothers are odd things. We’re quick to think of their nurturing aspects, but there is also some sort of strange darkness there. It tends to be much stronger in connection with sons than with daughters. It’s easy for a mother to cross an invisible line and enslave a son with kindness. There’s nothing more revolting than a man incapable of slipping his mother’s apron strings. He will always revert back to a boy in her presence. I see boys with unnatural attachments to their mothers all the time. It’s a sign of the times in which no one ever grows up. We live in soft times.

My mother’s just not capable of feeling things very deeply. Or at least not as deeply as I do. Not anger, love, hatred, or anything else. You could insult her, tell her you hated her, and she’d play off the drama of the moment, but the very next day she’d act as if nothing ever happened. My grudge is always there, and my moods are not flippant.

Twenty-four

I
am a Sagittarius, a fire sign. Sagittarians are known for their need to keep moving, exploring, learning. Much like fire, Sagittarians must be fed or they will die. What they must be fed is a constant stream of new experiences. There aren’t many journeys to be undertaken when locked in a cage. Outward motion comes to a complete standstill. You have two choices: turn inward and start your journey there, or go insane.

There is no time in prison, unless you create it for yourself. People on the outside seem to believe time passes slowly in prison, but it doesn’t. The truth is that time doesn’t pass at all. It’s an eternal vacuum, and each moment is meaningless because it has no context. Tomorrow may as well be yesterday. That’s why there’s so much stagnation inherent in prison life—because there is no momentum of any sort.

There is only one way to avoid being swallowed whole by malaise, despair, and loneliness, and that is to create a routine you stick to no matter what. A physical routine, a mental routine, and even a spiritual routine. You don’t pass time—you create it.

I began measuring time by doing thirty push-ups a day, and pushing myself until several years later I could do one thousand. I began doing ten minutes of meditation a day, and then pushed myself until I eventually reached five hours a day. It was only by becoming more disciplined, more focused, and more driven that I could prevent myself from falling into entropy and internal death.

One of the first things that both Ju San/Frankie and Gene told me was that you must turn your cell into a school and monastery. You will spend a minimum of twenty-three hours a day in that cell, all alone. After I was moved to Varner, I spent only three hours a week out of my cell, when Lorri visited. Most people can’t take being forced to come face-to-face with themselves, so they become loud and mean, like baboons looking for a shiny object to distract themselves. The number one distraction is television. Most people in prison grow fat and out of shape as they spend endless hours in front of the TV. They’ll watch football, basketball, baseball, soap operas,
The Jerry Springer Show
,
Judge Judy
, and anything else that crosses the screen. They watch TV from the moment they get up in the morning until the moment they go to bed. If I didn’t want to become a brain-dead, shuffling, obese Neanderthal, I had to nip it in the bud and not allow myself to fall into the pattern.

I moved from one area of study to another. In addition to the Theosophy texts from Gene and the Buddhist texts from Ju San, I began practicing a kind of Christian mysticism described in
A
Course in Miracles
. I was introduced to this school of thought by a gentleman named Mike. I never could figure out if the guy was a genius or a psychopath. He wasn’t actually a Death Row inmate, he was what is known as a “porter.” He was doing a life without parole sentence, and his job was to keep Death Row clean. Sweeping, mopping, washing windows, scrubbing the showers, dusting, et cetera—those were his jobs.

I awoke one morning at two because of a scritch-scritch-scritching noise. Getting up to see what it was, I saw Mike on his hands and knees scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush. When I asked him exactly what in the hell he was doing, he explained that he no longer needed sleep so he figured he might as well use his time constructively. That was a typical Mike answer. He said only the ego needs sleep. He was also prone to having visions. He once told me he was shown in a vision that if he fasted for a week, he could reward himself with ice cream. (If someone indeed sends you money for your account, the prison has a short list of things you can buy. Ice cream is one of them.) Just when you were positive he was insane, he would do something to stop you dead in your tracks with wonder.

A Course in Miracles
is a book of practices that takes you a year to complete if you follow each lesson. Its aim is to completely change the way your mind has been programmed to think since birth. You come to experience reality in an entirely different manner, in which anything is possible. It’s based on quantum physics but uses biblical terminology. It’s become rather popular in recent years, and there are study groups devoted to
A
Course in Miracles
all over the country.

Mike hung out in front of my cell every day, sitting on a five-gallon bucket. Our only topic of conversation was
A
Course in Miracles
and how it related to the Kabbalah, a book of Jewish mysticism. The Kabbalah is what we dedicated our time to learning about after finishing
Miracles
. Mike was learning from a guy in general population who was a Kabbalist, then he would come and explain things to me. You’d be amazed by how many students of various forms of mysticism you can find in prison. These prisoners are usually determined to make the most of their time and not repeat the same mistakes. These are men starving for a kind of knowledge not given in the mundane world, ready to learn and pass on what they already know. I would continue my study alone for a while after Mike was sent to another part of the prison.

Next I went on to learn about the philosophy and practice of an organization known as “The Golden Dawn.” This was a group of people who practiced metaphysical rites of passage to mark the different stages in the evolution of consciousness. It was all about the constant learning and growth process that everyone goes through, and how to speed it up. The great poet W. B. Yeats was one of the more well-known students of this school of thought. I had my nose in these books morning, noon, and night.

Many people donated money to a college fund that was set up for Jason and me, so I began taking courses from a local college here in Arkansas. At first I was interested mostly in psychology, but I mixed in a few other subjects, such as sociology and reading German, for good measure. Psychology seemed infinitely interesting to me, with all of its experiments and nature-versus-nurture debates—but I don’t think anyone’s surprised at this point to hear I became interested in psychology. . . .

I later realized psychology was not my love at all—it was history. I’ve grown to love history more than any other subject, and I have come to believe you can understand far more about the world through history than you can through psychology, especially military history. At first I delved into every aspect and every era of history, but gradually my scope narrowed as I began to realize what I was drawn to.

My love is Italian history, specifically the history of the cities of Florence and Venice, in the period between 1400 and 1800. My role model is Cosimo de’ Medici, though I also like his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent. What I love about the span of time during which the Medici were in power is the social structure and all the intrigue that accompanied it. Among aristocratic circles, life was like a chess game. You had to weigh your every word, as conversations were filled with subtlety. Social success or failure could hinge on whom you were seen making eye contact with. Not to mention the decadent styles and fashions that were all the rage. No one wore baggy jeans and backward baseball caps. These days no one makes an effort.

And yet no routine or spiritual practice in the world will dim the reality of daily life on Death Row. A normal person does not commit murder. For almost seventeen years I’ve waited for someone to walk through the door whom I could have a conversation with, but it just doesn’t happen. The people here are all mentally defective in ways that range from mild retardation to extreme schizophrenia. Others are stuck in some no-man’s-land between sanity and delusion. There are no criminal geniuses walking these halls. Most not only are culturally illiterate, but also can barely manage to express themselves in English. I have never met a prisoner with a college education, and I can count the high school graduates on one hand. Nearly all lived in absolute poverty, and most were abused in one way or another. Not a single one of them is capable of functioning normally in society, and it’s not a skill they’re likely to learn when locked in a cell among others who are as bad or worse. I’ve yet to see any sign of “rehabilitation,” or any program designed to bring about that aim. Most of the people you meet in prison have been here repeatedly. Some have been to prison three or four times before making it to Death Row. They claim to hate and despise everything about prison, but they always come back. It’s like they’re collecting frequent flyer miles in hell. They themselves can’t explain it, falling back on excuses such as “It’s hard to stay out once you’ve been in.” Why? How? It’s hard to refrain from snatching an old woman’s purse? It’s somehow difficult to prevent yourself from committing rape? Somehow you accidentally found yourself burglarizing a house and stealing a car? I don’t understand why they don’t learn their lesson the first time around. That in itself is evidence that they’ve got a couple screws loose.

On Death Row we used to have television sets that were in stands about five feet in front of the cells. The guards were supposed to make security checks every half-hour, at which time they could change the channel if you wanted them to, but that never happened. I’ve seen up to eight hours pass without a single guard coming by. A convict once lay dead on the floor all night long after having a heart attack, and the guards didn’t find him until after breakfast.

With no guards around we had to devise a way of changing the channel on the television for ourselves, so someone invented what quickly became known as the “channel checker.” A channel checker is made with construction paper, pencils, and bits of pilfered tape. You’d be surprised at what a sturdy spear you can make out of these materials, and in essence that’s what a channel checker is—a spear. With it you can reach through the bars of your cell and change the channel on the TV set.

In the spirit of escalating warfare, a convict known as Chuckles and another known as “the hobo” modified their channel checkers in order to cause maximum damage. They used empty soda cans to fashion sharp metal tips, and then proceeded to stab each other in the face through the bars. They kept at it for at least an hour and both had shed blood before they finally tired. When someone asked what had started the whole thing, Chuckles pointed at the hobo and said, “He was trying to derogatize me.” No one knew quite what that meant, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. Usually no one cared enough about Chuckles’s conversation to try to follow along anyway.

I applied that moniker to him myself and it stuck. Soon the entire population of Death Row recognized him as such, and he even began to refer to himself by that name. It just seemed to suit him perfectly. Chuckles is about five and a half feet tall, of average build, and looks exactly like a possum. In fact, his alias is “Kid Possum.” He has only one tooth left in his mouth, and it’s situated right in front. He claims that drugs rotted his teeth, though I’m more inclined to believe it was the simple lack of good oral hygiene. I say this because Chuckles has the breath of a baby dragon and has never been seen in the presence of a toothbrush. I once tried to use the phone after him and the smell he left on the mouthpiece made me gag. I washed it for several minutes with soap and water, but the smell remained. In the end I had to pour cheap cologne over it. He was overheard making the statement “I don’t drink coffee because it will stain my tooth.”

It’s not only his mouth that stinks, as Chuckles chronically avoids all forms of cleanliness. He’s the only person on earth who smells worse when he gets out of the shower than he did before he got in. He doesn’t actually wash himself, he just sort of splashes around while trying to talk to other people. The guards argue about who has to escort him, because no one wants to get close.

Chuckles arrived on Death Row after he was convicted of chopping two old ladies to death with a hatchet. Other inmates used to drive him into a frenzy by tormenting him with hatchets made out of construction paper. While making chopping motions they would imitate an old lady’s voice and cry, “No, Chuckles! Please don’t kill me! You’ll catch a capital murder charge!” Chuckles would go insane with rage and threaten to kill everyone in sight.

Chuckles and the hobo had more than one altercation over the years, and most involved throwing either feces or urine at each other. I once witnessed the hobo dash a coffee cup of urine in Chuckles’s face, after which Chuckles didn’t even bother to wash up. He simply dried his face with a towel and went back to business.

Men who cultivate filth are a regular occurrence in prison. They justify it by saying, “I’m not going anywhere soon, so why bother?” They’re referred to as either barbarians or Vikings. Although those called Vikings are crude, those considered to be barbarians have given up any pretense of civilized humanity.

Each day men are selected to work in the fields. They swing a hoe from daybreak to suppertime, and when they come back inside they are sweaty, filthy, and mud-caked. A Viking will strip off his clothes and go to bed without even showering. A barbarian, though—well, a barbarian will crawl straight into bed without even taking off his mud-encrusted boots. You can smell a barbarian from the next cell. I know from firsthand experience. I once lived in the cell next to a barbarian for about three months. I couldn’t even sit at the door to watch television without holding a washcloth over my nose and mouth. This particular barbarian even had his teeth pulled so he could avoid the formality of brushing them. Dentures would save him the effort. The thing that struck me as being the most odd was the barbarian’s insistence that he did not stink despite everyone in the barracks telling him otherwise.

I also had the misfortune of living next to another barbarian whom everyone called “Big Blue.” This name was in reference to the fact that he wore the same pair of underwear every single day until they turned a dingy bluish-gray color. In truth it wasn’t even underwear, but long johns that he had cut the legs off of. After about a year they were nothing but a tattered rag filled with holes and dangling fringe. Unlike Chuckles or the barbarian, Big Blue had a valid excuse—he was stark raving mad.