My new home was a
nightmare. I was put in a one-man cell. The small cramped space was dimly lit
and the paint was peeling from every inch of the walls and ceiling. There was a
brown paper sack full of trash left in one corner; and, when I picked it up, a wave
of cockroaches swarmed out. The room stunk of rotten food. When the first meal
was brought to my cell, the food made my stomach roll, not just from the
disgusting food but from the stench filling the room as well. Sitting down to
eat, I realized I had no spoon or fork to eat the disgusting food, so I was
forced to use my laminated identification card as a makeshift eating utensil.
The case manager
for the building came to my cell door for an interview after I had been there
for a few days, and he explained I was in lock-down for an evaluation period. I
asked him how long this would last, and he said the usual length was ten
percent of the total sentence. I asked what ten percent of life without parle
was exactly. The stunning answer was about eight years. I was dumbfounded. I
was not sure how I was going to survive in these conditions for such a long
period of time.
Despite by faith
being rocked at the sentencing, I was still trusting in God. I continued to
study the Bible which was easy because there was nothing else to do. The prison
library services were suspended at Unit 32 because of the inmates were burning
the books. Fires, I quickly learned, were a regular occurrence. Often, I would
wake up in the middle of the night to a chorus of screaming voices, smoke
filling the room and water flooding the floors. The inmates would stop up the
toilets and flush them over and over, rip their mattresses apart and set all of
their bedding on fire. Often time, they did it out of boredom rather than for a
real complaint. Once, while I was praying during a riot, “God please make these
people shut up and go to bed”, I watched a burning pillow float past my doorway
and down the hallway like a ship pillaged and set ablaze by pirates. Living
life in Parchman’s Unit 32 was becoming unbearable.
Eventually, it
broke me.
In the back of my
mind, I believed if I was good enough God would release me from prison. I would
have never spoken those words out loud to another soul, but the thought was
always there in a corner of my mind. When the judge sentenced me to life
without parole, it had shaken my misplaced faith; but it was my first meeting
with my case manager in his office which caused me to completely lose faith.
Stepping into his
office, he asked me to sit down very politely with a smile. Then, he went full
blown Twilight Zone on me.
He said, “I know
who you are.”
I assumed he meant
he had heard about my case in the news. I was wrong. As he pulled a huge wooden
crucifix from a desk drawer and thrust it towards me as if I was a vampire, he
said with a maniacal smile filing his face, “Your father is the devil!” He went
on to describe how God had sent him a dream and was told that I was a child of
the devil and that he was to never let me out of lockdown. This was the man who
had the power to let me out of Unit 32 and he was obviously insane. When I was
escorted back to my cell, I could feel myself sliding down in the cold grasp of
depression. While I was certain the case manager was having some sort of mental
breakdown, there was a whisper of doubt filling my thoughts. Maybe his dream
was from God. What if I was a child of the devil and God had never and would
never forgive me? The more I thought about it, the more I began to see myself
as foolish for believing God, or anyone else, could ever love me.
I placed my Bible
in a box and didn’t’ open it again for nearly four years. I tried to tell
myself I didn’t need God, and questioned if He was even real. Had I just fooled
myself into believing in a fantasy while I was at a low point? I was done with
Christianity and wanted to prove to myself I could live a life of peace and
happiness apart for Christianity and a God who didn’t love me. For a while, it
seemed I could.
Eventually, I was
released from Unit 32 and placed in the general population. Of course, this was
only after the cross-wielding case manager was fired and replaced by someone
else. My search for happiness and peace
in prison was a struggle and only lasted for a short time before I couldn’t
deny that I was miserable. I felt like I was right back to how I felt before my
arrest—struggling to just make it through the day. I could barely sleep at
night and often found myself staring at the walls which seemed to press closer
and closer around me. I wanted desperately to find some way out of the
nightmare I was living, but there was no way out. I knew I would have to do
something, because life was becoming unbearable. Life was pointless, I felt. At
the time, I was working at a food processing plant doing mind-numbing, mindless
work. I was doing pretty much the exact same thing every day which served no real
purpose. I felt like my entire life consisted of just breathing until I died.
My faith had never recovered from the sentencing combined with the miserable
living conditions and this had brought me to the point of believing God could
not and would not love me.
Something would
have to change because I could not see myself continuing on in the state of
mind I was in, so I decided to make a plan. I had always heard that to be
successful, one needed a life plan and goals to achieve. I did this in the most
macabre way possible. My plan was this. Since I had already caused my mother
enough grief, I would pretend everything was fine and well until the day she
died. When this happened, I would kill myself. I didn’t want to die, but I
couldn’t imagine spending year after pointless year in prison.
From that day on,
I played the role of the well-adjusted inmate making the best of a bad
situation never letting my fellow inmates or staff know what I was planning to
do. I smiled, laughed and joked around thought the days, but I was dead inside.
No one ever suspected what was going on in my mind except one person who
managed to see through the façade. One day a guy named Mark mentioned he
thought I was “emotionally void” and he was exactly right. While I pretended to
be happy, my smile was merely a mask, and he had seen through it. I was truly
emotionally void and empty, and I wondered how long I would last.
I wondered why I
had always felt so broken inside—when I had stopped feeling. I could barely
remember a time when I wasn’t pretending everything on the outside was fine
while life felt like a dark shadow shrouding my every step. I had never felt
okay ever. I had spent so much time trying to hide who I was and how I felt, I
had forgotten who I really was.
Looking back, I
could distinctly remember the last time I felt okay was when I was in the
second grade. I was a kid, just like everyone else. Sure, my family was poor;
but, at that age, I didn’t even know it. School was a grand adventure, and I
tried to outdo all the other kids. My friend Michael and I would race each
other to see who could memorize the multiplication charts first. He would just
narrowly edge me out most of the time, but we both blew the rest of the class
away. I had lots of friends and the
teachers like me. Why did it change?
We lived in a little
white ramshackle house outside of the city limits of Ada, Oklahoma. It was the
first place I can remember living, and it was a magical place for young boys to
be raised. At the time, I was the baby of the family and I idolized my two
older brothers, Jeremy and Malan. Since there were no neighbors around, we were
pretty much suck with each other for playmates so, I was included in all of
their adventures for the most part. They might have wished for other kids their
own age, but I thought it was fantastic. At Christmas, we would record
ourselves singing Christmas songs and preform skits we would make up on a tape
recorder. Without fail, we would include a reading for our Christmas list to
make sure our parents heard them. Years later, my mother found one of these
tapes and would play it every year during the holidays to embarrass us all. She
thought it was sweet; but, after it was played every single year, we were ready
for it to disappear. The family seemed really happy from my young perspective,
but looking back I can now see the dysfunction I was too young to understand
then.
My father,
Charlie, was cool. He had long hair and was the drummer in a
country-and-western band. While they were somewhat popular in the local area,
his sons thought he was a superstar. Sometimes he would show up at home with
something unbelievable to young boys like go-carts, a mini-bike or take us out
to shoot real guns. Sometimes, he wouldn’t show up at all.
Unknown to me at
the time, he was a severe alcoholic and had trouble holding down a job. He
wasn’t the best husband or father either, and there were times when my mother,
Debra, would tell us to be very quiet in the mornings because daddy didn’t feel
well. He was most likely hung over and my mother didn’t want to anger him. A
constant occurrence of my childhood was hearing them fighting behind closed
doors, but not understanding what was happening. While my mother was usually
the target of his wrath, there were times his three sons were the victims of
his angry shouts.
I still remember
so clearly the day the food burned. My mother was working nights and my dad had
passed out on the couch. When the food he was cooking started to burn, Jeremy
woke him up to tell him. Instead of saving the food, he screamed at all of us
telling us to never bother him for anything while he was sleeping. Eventually,
instead of idolizing my father, I began to be afraid of him.
One day while he
was at work and the three children were at school, my mom packed up all of our belongings
and secretly moved to another house inside the city limits. I don’t know if my
mother actually told us we were hiding from our dad, but that was the feeling I
had. Still, as young as I was, it mostly seemed exciting because we were moving
into town.
It was calm for a
while after that, but it didn’t last long. Quickly, he found our new phone
number and the fighting started again. Even before we were unpacked, the nightly
shouting matches resumed. The only difference was, now it was over the phone.
One night, while sleeping on the floor of the living room because my bed wasn’t
assembled yet, the phone rang and the yelling, screaming and crying began. Lying
on the floor, I wanted to cry but didn’t. I thought if I pretended it wasn’t
happening, the screaming would all just magically go away. Just like the old
game of peek-a-boo, if I squeezed my eyes shut tight enough it, maybe it would
be gone when I opened them up. I didn’t cry and tried to hold as still as I
could, pretending to be asleep. Still, it didn’t go away. It became worse, so I
continued to withdraw deeper within myself where it felt a little bit safer.
Of course, there
were consequences. All the bottled-up emotions would rear their ugly heads time
and time again throughout my life causing countless problems. Where I had once
loved school, I started skipping class in the third grade. The elementary
school I attended burned down, and classes were being held at the First Baptist
Church of Ada a few blocks from our house until the school was repaired. I
don’t know why, but I decided I didn’t want to go. While walking to school with
my brother, Malan, I just turned around and snuck back into the house and hid
in my room. Eventually, my mother discovered my hiding spot and attempted to
force me to go to school. I exploded. I screamed myself horse; and when that
didn’t work, I pulled a knife on my mother. That got her attention. She
realized something was seriously wrong and made arrangements for me to see a
counselor.
The counselor was a waste of time, thought. I
learned quickly that if I just agreed with whatever he said, it would seem like
progress was being made. I also learned to never admit to how I really felt
thinking that I would just get into more trouble. After a few months, the
sessions with the counselor ended; but nothing had changed. If anything, I was
worse. There would be other attempts to get me help over the years, including a
few months in a lockup mental health hospital, but I was never completely
honest about how I felt and never got the help I needed.
After some time,
my father moved back in with us, and the fighting and drinking continued as
before. This would turn into a familiar pattern for our family. Mom and dad
would reconcile, there would be a time of peace, the fighting would start
again, we would move away from our father, and repeat. Two more members of the
family had been added, Rachel and Zachary, but it seemed the three older boys
were affected the most. We understood, to some extent, exactly what was
happening. Jeremy began running away from home early on after moving to Ada;
and, when he was sixteen, he moved out of the house only returning for brief
stays over the years. Malan avoided home as much as possible, staying with
friends and finding escape in the bottle. Like Jeremy, I began running away
from home at an early age, and moved in with a girlfriend’s family when I was
sixteen for a few months.
Over the years, my
mother did try to help me; but I would only withdraw further. I put on a false
front for the world to hide how horrible I felt and how embarrassed I was of my
family’s situation. I grew my hair long and acted like a mad man most of the
time. In truth, I was a hurting little boy who could no longer express true
feelings except anger and wanted more than anything to just have a normal
family.
My withdraw into
myself and my inability to connect emotionally with others only worsened by
going to prison. I was in a place that encourages you to have no emotions
except hate and anger. Those two emotions are just fine. I was at the point
where I no longer knew who I really was. I had worn the mask for so long, I had
lost the little boy from the ancient past.
