When I arrive, a cop in Receiving & Discharge says, “We’re not going to have any trouble with you and any of our female staff, are we Douglas?” They’ve asked me this everywhere, since the MDC proposition. I have another fourteen months of solitary remaining in my sanctions, and I’m taken straight to the SHU, where the cell is even smaller than usual.
Books have become my security blanket. Each time I come to a new place, I’m anxious without them. As long as I have my books, I feel okay. A few days after I arrive at Loretto, a guard tells me that the prison has confiscated some books that arrived in my mail. “We don’t let inmates in the SHU receive books from the outside,” he explains.
“That’s not right,” I say.
He shrugs.
“You’re telling me I can’t try to better myself? You want me to go crazy?”
He says I’ll have to wait for the book cart, which comes around once a week, and walks away. This is a disaster. Books have given me purpose and let me feel I’m being productive during this waste of years. When the cart comes, it’s all religious tracts and ’hood novels and makes the one back at MCC look like the Great Library of Alexandria on wheels.
* * *
—
I’m lonely in solitary, but not as lonely as when I’m surrounded by sociopaths who exude hostility and dark looks, who shun me, who think they know me and what I’ve done but don’t really, while I know nothing about them. “I am not so afraid of the dark night / As the friends I do not know.” When I’m surrounded by other inmates, I never know if someone has a weapon and may intend me harm. In solitary, at least I feel relatively safe. I’ve spent much of my life accompanied by a retinue of friends. Now that solitude has been thrust upon me, I’ve come to see it as a gift, a thing that I need.
I have a lot of time to ruminate, and I catalogue my grievances. I dream of seeing Nick and slapping him in the face. I feel embarrassed that I gave the DEA my original statement. I regret my decisions.
Hope is the oxygen of captivity. Everyone has a legal submission pending, or a petition for clemency waiting to be heard. When those options are exhausted, people find religion. My lawyers and family say they’re confident that my second sentence will be overturned, but I feel my hope slipping away. What’s the point of hope, if it gets consistently dashed? There have been so many times when I hoped things would turn out one way, and they turned out another way. I hoped that heroin would save me. I hoped that once I moved to New York from L.A., I’d escape the DEA investigation. I hoped that if I put my trust in my lawyers, everything would turn out all right. I hoped that by backing out of my cooperation agreement, it would automatically remove my deeply felt sense of shame, and change how I was perceived by other inmates. Instead, it’s been one serious blow after another.
How did I get here? Is something wrong with me? I’m finally starting to question my romantic notions about prison. For every storybook bank robber like Eddie Boyle, there are a hundred codeless drug fiends who’ll do anything for a fix. I’m choked with regret. I regret never giving myself a chance. When I had everything going for me, when all I had to do was jump in the water and go with it, I insisted on tying a boulder to my ankles. I didn’t have a belief in myself that was earned. I lacked determination. I read a passage in Night Soldiers by Alan Furst that speaks to me: “Regret will kill you. A concept he embraced to a point where any thought that represented itself for contemplation had to be inspected for traces of hidden anger or sorrow before he would allow his mind to pursue it.”
* * *
—
At the same time, I do take some comfort in how things have unfolded. If Dr. Millman hadn’t divulged my cooperation in court, I’d probably have gone along with the deal. I’d be lying about it every day, and just waiting for the truth to be revealed, because in prison people live to dig and to expose. Instead, the revelation of my cooperation, and my decision to stop it, have forced me to become brutally honest with myself and to make some serious choices about what’s important to me, what traits I admire, and what I’m willing to do to honor those traits.
Until now, I’ve prayed every night. I stop praying. Instead of waiting around, whittling off the years, passively hoping for some kind of divine intervention, it’s on me to make every day mean something. I want to be industrious.
My feelings of regret and remorse are necessary, if I’m to evolve. I believe that we all contain everything we want to be, and life is the process of making it real. The traits I held in high regard as a child are those of the man I’m becoming. Whatever I may think about the justice system’s approach to addicts, it’s up to me to change my situation.
I try to forgive myself. There’s no escape from where I am. All I can do is make the time work for me. I’m paying a high price for my mistakes, so it’s essential that I get what I’m paying for. I need to use hope as a tool. It can keep me inspired and pushing forward toward something better. I just can’t let it break me down when it doesn’t work out.
It’s unnatural being confined to a little box like this, but I try to highlight the positives of solitary. I can use this time to educate my mind and strengthen my spirit. I spend more time writing poetry. I read the shitty cart books. Some other inmates who hear me going back and forth with the guards give me better books. Occasionally a nice cop is on duty when mail arrives, and he lets my books through, including Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Alan Furst's Night Soldiers, a historical spy thriller partly set in a prison. One line in the Furst book makes me laugh out loud: “Thus, at last, he came upon the prisoner’s timeless and universal conclusion: There is nothing worse than prison.” In the margin, I make a note: “I hold this truth to be self-evident.”
We go outside at 5 a.m. every morning, the crack of dawn, and stay out until 8 a.m. at the latest. The SHU’s yard is hemmed in by four high, concrete walls. If I catch any direct sun at all, it’s just a sliver at the corner, which I seek out. There’s no exercise bar or handball wall, and I do most of my exercising in my cell.
I do a daily calisthenic workout for two and a half, sometimes three, hours. I interval-train, alternating three high-intensity exercises with a sixty-second jog to get my breath back. I run hundreds of miles in place in front of the metal mirror, closing my eyes and imagining I’m out on a road, visualizing it as clearly as possible, then opening my eyes to my real surroundings. I do this so that one day, when I get out, I can do the reverse: close my eyes, imagining I’m back in prison, and then open them.
I’m disciplined about meditating and have an active mantra: “I move fluidly through balance, harmony, awareness, understanding, and intelligence.” As I say each word, I try to feel it, to pinpoint a time that day when I used each quality.
My twice-a-day masturbation practice continues—rain or shine, happy or sad. I’m a scientist of self-pleasure. I consider it a dispassionate matter of practicality, a Darwinian imperative to use it or lose it.
A lot of inmates have calendars in their cells, and mark off the passing days like castaways carving notches in tree bark. I just get lost in the time. I often don’t know what date it is, or even what day of the week it is. I just focus on my routine.
* * *
—
Once a month, I get to make a fifteen-minute phone call; a phone is wheeled to my cell, and I usually use it to call Erin. Otherwise, my only real connection to the outside world is mail. People live for the mail call in prison, especially in the box, and when it comes to mail, I’m blessed. A lot of the guys around me have nothing and no one to write them. I’ve been gone, out of sight and mind, for two and a half years, but my letter flow has never dried up. I get more letters than anyone else here, and mail call is the high point of my day. The guards make fun of me. They say, before looking, “You know Douglas has mail.” Then it’s “Douglas…Douglas…Douglas…Douglas.”
Erin continues to write every day. My pal Gabriel’s trial finally happened, and she went through the stressful ordeal of being a pro
secution witness. I’ve really been touched, lately, by all her love and support and warmth toward me. She still can’t visit me, because of her criminal record, but since my arrest we have talked about the day when I’m released, when she’ll come with the dogs to pick me up: Eve, who was too young to mate when I went to prison; Scooby, who now has only three legs; and Junior, the greatest dog I’ve known. Erin has gotten Junior’s sperm frozen, and it’s stored in a bank.
Mom writes every day too, enclosing inspiring quotes, articles about solitary, updates on my appeal, and pictures of her new farm. Dad writes me once a week. Pappy writes every two weeks, sending his and Oma’s love and words of support and hope, sharing family news, updating me on his progress writing his latest books, I Am Spartacus! and Fragments of Memories, and doodling cartoon heads. The mailbag also brings daily installments of This Is Your Life: I get letters from childhood caretakers, teachers from elementary school and high school, fellow students from Provo Canyon, addicts I was in rehab with. I get letters from people who tell me I changed their life, but whom I don’t remember. Twenty-three to twenty-five, my liquid cocaine years, are a blur. I receive letters from unsolicited pen pals, including a young woman named Ashley, a self-taught artist in Connecticut who sends me impressive drawings.
Someone I still haven’t heard from since my arrest is Jay. We were best friends from the age of seven. I still have his initials tattooed on my arm. When I was arrested, I protected him, even though he was as involved as Erin and I were in our crimes. But he’s also the same guy who left me high and dry in Ireland, who ditched me after fights we were both involved in. I kept overlooking his actions, because I wanted him to be someone he wasn’t. I wanted him to feel the same way about me that I felt about him. Even now, when I understand all of that and see it more clearly, I keep expecting to hear from him. I keep believing there was some kernel of genuine friendship there. It still hurts that I haven’t received a single letter from him. I’m sure he’s told himself all sorts of things to justify his distance. He feels ashamed. He feels guilty. He doesn’t want to get roped into the criminal case. But the sad truth is, I think he just doesn’t give enough of a shit about me to make the effort to find out where I am, write a letter, and mail it. The only thing he gives a shit about is drugs.
* * *
—
After four months in the SHU, the unit captain comes by my cell and says, “If we let you out into gen pop, are we going to have a problem?”
I’m moved to C1, an underground unit. The surroundings are grim—cement, pipes—and overcrowded with sweating men. I’m in a cube with six beds. It’s July, and C1 has no windows, ventilation, or air-conditioning. Loud industrial-size fans blow 24/7, but it’s so fucking hot.
After nearly ten months in the hole, when I first step onto the sunny yard, I feel like a Sherpa who lost his goggles and is stricken with snow blindness. I don’t have any of my property yet, and I walk laps around the track shirtless, wearing prison-issue work boots. I’ve spent months pacing my cell in Jackie Chans, and the boots tear up my feet. I get terrible blisters. But it feels great to be outside.
Everyone knows who I am and is trying to size me up. My hair is hippy-length. When you come onto any yard, people check out your tattoos closely. If you have the tattoo of a gang that controls a yard, and you’re not in that gang, they’ll make you cut it out or cover it up or “check in” to protective custody. I have to explain some of my ink. A pair of stars on my back looks like the logo of Tango Blast, a Texas gang. Two S’s, which stand for Safe & Sound, a small record label I founded with my friend Serebe, resemble the mark of the Southsiders, a Mexican gang. The 13 behind my ear could easily be mistaken for the mark of MS-13, the Salvadoran gang. And everyone seems simply confused by the giant monarch butterfly on my chest.
* * *
—
When I was at Lewisburg, I thought I understood what prison was like, but now I see that I didn’t have a clue.
A lot of inmates here have violence on their records. One of my cubies is a gay meth head who gave a friend a fatal dope shot and is now doing twenty years. Another is a sharp-looking Cuban hustler—he always has a fresh haircut and shave and a gold chain around his neck—who stabbed someone at a penitentiary and has another sixteen years left in his sentence. While I’m here, there will be a serious riot between Mexicans and blacks. It starts on one unit and spreads to all the units and to the yard, where combatants smash each other in the head with balls from the bocce pit. It’s pandemonium, and afterward there’s a lockdown for a few days.
People are more guarded here. If you ask someone for something—maybe you want a particular job, and he’s an inmate involved in doling them out—he’ll say, “I’ll have to check with my people.” You have to be vetted. I think back to my eagerness to join in when I arrived at Lewisburg, and now see that it was a rookie mistake. Only luck kept me from getting hurt in flag football.
Here, instead of trying to find things to belong to and giving anyone the satisfaction of shutting me out, I become more of a loner. No matter how friendly people may be, I know now, you need to give yourself time to understand what’s going on before making any moves.
But Loretto has a nice weight pit, and after a week in gen pop, I find some people to work out with. Dimitri, who is my height and well built and has a raspy Jersey accent, became a millionaire at twenty-five by moving truckfuls of weed from the West Coast to the East Coast, and he invested the profits into building successful contracting and snowplowing businesses. Kenny is older. He’s in on a crystal meth case and has had a tough life; he has Hep C, and was in a terrible car accident where his arm almost got torn off. Jerry Woo, a black kid from Harlem who was attached to a famous criminal named the Priest and robbed and killed drug dealers, has been in prison for at least a dozen years and worked his way down to this Low. Jack, an Albanian who everyone likes, was a truck driver who ferried illegal immigrants on their first leg after crossing the border. He really doesn’t belong in prison.
I learn that I can pay to have a no-show job. Each unit has a head orderly, an inmate who can go to the cops and say, “I want this person on my team,” and the cop will sign off on it. The crew mops bathrooms, scrubs toilets, empties the trash, cleans the TV room. To get out of the work, you have to bribe the orderly. I buy him a pair of Nike Air Force 1s from the commissary, and in return he gets me on his crew, and I don’t have to do anything.
While I’m here, the BOP introduces MP3 players. The day it happens is the closest I’ve seen in prison to Christmas morning when you’re a kid. Everyone is so happy, smiling and hugging each other. At these prisons in the boondocks, all people have had is a small plastic radio that doesn’t pick up many stations, so to be able to buy your own music is a huge deal. It’s also smart business for the BOP, which makes a killing charging a dollar a song or more. MP3s change my prison life. Now I always wear my headphones. They let me tune out.
* * *
—
Prison is drowning in bullshit: made-up, self-glamorizing tales of criminal derring-do, defiance of the Man, and general acts of bad-assery. No one cooperated. No one committed a sex crime. Everyone, to hear them tell it, is “rock solid.”
But increasingly, it’s hard for inmates to skate by on their bullshit stories, because of a huge shift that’s taken place in the five years since I entered prison. Then, inmates had no access to computers. A year in, computers arrived, and they began to change the game. Besides connecting inmates to a comprehensive online law library, they led to an explosion of other information available to convicts with nothing but time on their hands.
When I first arrived, inmates not routinely covered by the New York Post could by and large tell the stories they wanted to about themselves. Fellow convicts, with no easy way to research each other, tended not to bother digging into the facts. Now there are inmates who sit in the law library all day just looking up the names of new arrivals and doing due diligence on them. The Italians, who also
have their lawyers out on the street doing research, pay other inmates to sit on the computer and look into everyone. I’ve seen a lot of people get exposed, including high-ranking gang members being revealed to have worn wires. It turns out that some of the most outspoken alphas and shot callers, having the most highly developed survival instincts, are among the most aggressive cooperators.
The new transparency punctures the absurd myth, prevalent in every prison I’ve been at, that these places are snitch-free. In reality, nearly a quarter of federal drug defendants cooperate. Everyone has his story, but only some of them hold up under scrutiny.
I meet a guy named Michael who says he’s in on a cocaine conspiracy charge, doing ten years after his best friend ratted him out. I can relate, having been betrayed by Alex. Michael and I work out together. He says he’s getting a football team together and asks if I want to join it. We’re practicing one night, before the season begins, and I go to catch a pass, and the ball hits my left middle finger. It’s bad. The bone pushes through the skin at the base of my cuticle. A physician’s assistant named Ms. Golden tells me “there’s nothing we can do.” That’s the end of football for me, but after the finger heals a bit, I resume lifting weights with Michael.
Then someone asks me, “Why are you fucking lifting weights with a pedophile?”
“What are you talking about?”
“That guy is a chomo.” That’s what they call child molesters in prison.
I ask Michael about it, and his story is that she was sixteen and was flirting with him, and he didn’t realize how young she was, and he got lured in, and da-da-da-da-da. He’s a nice guy, and I feel bad for him, and I’m not interested in making his life any harder, but I’m also not interested in continuing to hang out with him.
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