“I looked there already and they aren’t there.”
I thought for a second. “Have you looked in the freezer, where you keep your extra coffee?” Several things, including her phone, had ended up in the freezer lately.
“Oh, there they are! How did you know that?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Okay, thanks for calling. I love, love, love you. Talk to you later.”
I kept the phone to my ear. I heard some bumping and banging. I realized she hadn’t hung up; she had just set the phone down. I heard cabinet doors open and close. I heard water running and the dogs barking. She walked out of the room, then came back in singing an old Lucinda Williams song that we both loved. I heard her pick up the phone again. I could picture her standing there, puzzled by the apparent call in progress. Then I heard her breathing, listening. I said nothing. She hung up.
I looked at the pills in my hand. No. I couldn’t do this to my mother. I couldn’t do it to myself. Not now. I picked up the bottle of oxycodone, opened it, and returned the two pills. Then I walked over to the sink, put the beer up to my nose, and sniffed. It didn’t smell that great. I poured it out.
Shaken, I went back to the couch, stretched out, and closed my eyes. I was so tired. Tomorrow, I thought, as I was drifting off to sleep. I give myself permission to drink and use drugs if that’s what I feel I need to do. To let go, to say, “Fuck it,” take the plunge. I submit to the intense relief of these words. I will feel the alcohol flow into my body and the drugs course through my blood. I give myself permission . . . to get wasted . . . TOMORROW. Not today. If I wake up tomorrow and still want to use, then I can.
When I woke up the next morning, I knew. My arrest and conviction had already taken so much from me. I would not let it take my sobriety.
I announced to family and friends that I was going to throw a party the weekend before my sentencing. The shindig would be on Saturday night, with a ten-mile fun run on Sunday morning. About 150 people showed up. I had painted RIP onto palm-size rocks and gave them to everybody that came to the run. I told them the letters stood not for “rest in peace” but for “running in place”—which I figured I would be doing a lot of, once my knee healed, in prison. Most people laughed. I felt my strength returning.
On the Sunday night before my sentencing, I went to an AA meeting for the first time since my arrest. AA required absolute honesty, and even though I had done nothing wrong, I worried that people would view me as an impostor, someone who pretended to be clean while living some shady, illegal existence. In my heart, I knew that AA was not about judgment, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that even after eighteen years sober, I was no longer welcome.
I sat in the back of the room and listened to people talk about gratitude and fear and acceptance. I felt they were speaking directly to me. Their words helped me remember how much I still had to live for. I decided to not be scared, to simply accept whatever came next. I could not control what happened, but I could control how I dealt with it.
The next morning, I drove to Norfolk, Virginia. The courtroom was filled to capacity. Runners, recovering addicts, family, old buddies, former girlfriends, and strangers had come from all over the country to give their support. Pam, my boys, my mother, my dad, and my stepfather were all in the front row.
Nordlander and Kosky picked up right where they left off, arguing for a stiff sentence. Eventually it was my turn to speak. My voice quavered as I read from a statement I’d written asking the judge to please send me home, to give me a chance to serve out my sentence by helping others in my community. I choked up when I spoke about my mother and my kids. I could hear sobs behind me.
The judge acknowledged receiving 120 letters from people attesting to my good character—the most he’d ever gotten for a single case. I felt a spark of hope.
Then he cleared his throat and sentenced me to twenty-one months in a federal prison.
CHAPTER 12
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
—MARK TWAIN
On Valentine’s Day, Brett and Kevin, my friends Chip and Liz, and I left Greensboro to make the three-hour drive to Beckley federal prison in Beaver, West Virginia. For most of the ride, we managed to pretend we were off on a fun road trip. We filled the time telling tasteless jokes, quoting lines from movies, and singing off-key to the radio. But then, at about 4:30 p.m., we rounded a turn and saw the prison gates, and I felt the full weight of my impending incarceration.
High barbed-wire fences and sentry towers ringed swaths of manicured grass. It looked like every A&E prison show I had ever watched; I would have been fascinated if I were just visiting. But the anguish on Brett’s and Kevin’s faces was crushing. I hadn’t been sure if bringing them was the right thing to do, but they had wanted to come. I thought not seeing it might be worse for them—that their imaginations would make it even more awful than it was. I was proud of my sons for being here with me, even though I knew they were scared. I was scared, too.
We parked and got out of the car. The sun was bright but a strong wind made it feel much colder than the fifty degrees reported on the radio. I took off my sunglasses, emptied my pockets, and handed everything over to Brett. In my hand I held three $2 bills given to me as change at a grocery store a few days earlier. When the cashier handed them over, she shrugged and smiled, acknowledging the oddness of it. I handed one to Brett and one to Kevin, then tucked one into my own wallet, which Brett was holding.
“Keep those in your wallets,” I said. “Think of me when you see them.”
Brett and Kevin looked at me solemnly and nodded.
“Or at least don’t spend them unless it’s an emergency,” I said with a laugh.
We lingered outside a moment longer. In the months since my sentencing, we had said little to each other. Nothing ever seemed right. Now, in these final moments, I felt every thought I’d had fighting for its turn. I was desperate to take away their pain, to assure them that all would be okay, but we were in uncharted waters. I had no idea how to make this better.
I hugged Kevin and then Brett one last time. I could see them struggling not to cry as I turned to walk to the front door of the prison.
I gave my name to a guard at a desk and told him I was a “self-surrender.” He said they were expecting me a couple of hours earlier and that I would miss dinner. I wasn’t hungry.
Next I was led to a storage room and told to remove my clothes and put them in a box on the floor. They would be shipped back home. My welcome-to-prison strip search included lots of lifting and holding, followed by some squatting and coughing. I was issued too-big gray sweatpants, slip-on orange rubber flip-flops, a white T-shirt, and underwear that appeared to be clean but not new. Then I was put in a temporary holding cell, and the door to my old life slammed shut.
I was grateful nobody else was in that cell with me because I was a mess. I sat down on a bench, but my knees shook so violently that I had to jump to my feet and pace around the cell. I had been preparing myself for this moment for months, but saying good-bye to my kids had done me in. I felt on the verge of breaking down. I couldn’t do this. I had to get out of here.
Then I got angry with myself. Don’t be a pussy, I told myself. Suck it up. Deal with it. I had a long history of rising to the occasion when things got tough. I needed to do that now.
After I waited an hour or so, a different guard came to collect me. I had a lot of questions but I thought it was best to keep my mouth shut and see what happened next. The guard walked me out the front doors and pointed at a small, dented white pickup truck parked at the curb. Was I supposed to get in the back? I wanted to tell him to speak, but he just motioned for me to go. I opened the truck door and slid into the seat. The guard closed my door, turned, and walked away without having ever spoken a word.
The driver of the truck was a white guy, thick through th
e waist, maybe sixty years old, with a bushy gray mustache and a strange pageboy haircut. Out of habit, I looked for my seat belt. There wasn’t one.
“Parham.” He stared straight ahead.
I looked at him blankly. Then I realized that Parham was his name. Normally, I was a first-name guy. “Engle.”
Parham seemed nice enough. If all the guards were this friendly, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. He put the truck in gear and pulled away from the curb. I felt oddly excited, stepping into the unknown. We drove about a mile and pulled up in front of a one-level brick building that looked like the entrance to a strip mall. Parham pointed to the front doors.
“Go inside and tell the CO who you are.”
“Ummm, C-O?”
“Correctional officer . . . guard . . . guy with the badge.”
“Oh, okay. Thanks.”
Once inside, I approached a counter with a Plexiglas divider. I assumed the man behind it was the CO.
“Yeah?” he growled without looking up.
“I was told to report here.”
“Who told you that?”
“The guard, I mean . . . CO who drove me over here from the main building.”
He looked up and gave me the once-over. “Who the hell are you?”
“Engle . . . with an E. I’m a self-surrender.”
He looked down and flipped through a stack of papers, running his finger over a list of names.
“If you don’t have a reservation for me, I can just come back later.”
Nothing. Tough crowd.
“Sit down over there. Wait. Just so you know, that was an inmate that drove you over here. Not a CO. You should probably learn the difference. Oh, and you are going to miss dinner because you were late. So I don’t want to hear you bitching later.”
I turned and took a seat and waited and said the Serenity Prayer to myself:
God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
I had said it thousands of times in nineteen years of sobriety, but it had never had more meaning than at that moment.
A glass door to my right opened, and a short, stout black man in his fifties walked over with a big grin on his face. He was wearing dark green pants over black, steel-toed boots and a dark green long-sleeved shirt with a white T under it. The shirt had a name and number on it. I realized then that the driver who had delivered me here had been dressed the same way.
“Are you Engle?”
“Yes . . . with an E.”
“You’re late. But don’t worry, I saved you a plate. I’m Pick-n-Roll, but you can call me Pick.”
I stood to shake his hand. He offered me his fist and I bumped it firmly. “I never met anyone named Pick-n-Roll. You play basketball?”
He stared at me, not unkindly, and seemed to be assessing me. “You ever been down before?”
“Ummm . . .”
“Have you ever been in prison before?”
“No, first time.”
“What’s your bid?”
“Ummm . . .”
“How much time did you get?”
“Oh! Twenty-one months.”
“That’s not even enough time to unpack your things. Follow me.”
As we walked through an open courtyard, he pointed at doors. “Medical . . . laundry . . . barber . . . commissary.” Then we entered a cafeteria. It was deserted, except for one black guy mopping and another wiping tables.
The inmate mopping looked up with a scowl and yelled, “We closed. Get the hell out!”
I stopped in my tracks. Pick and the man busted out laughing and pointed at me.
“Oh, Lord, you should have seen your face.” Pick wiped his eyes. “Come on, Engle with an E, sit down over here and I’ll get you a plate from the back.”
I wasn’t really hungry but I felt obligated to eat. My new friend watched me force down mushy green beans, white rice, and a piece of dry corn bread. I tried to look as if I were almost enjoying it.
“Tastes like shit, don’t it? You gonna eat that chicken?”
I shook my head, and Pick looked around, then pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket as if he were going to do a magic trick. He reached over, plucked the chicken from my tray, dropped it into the bag, and tucked it into an interior pocket in his jacket.
We went back to the laundry and I was issued some sheets, a pillow, and a pillowcase. Then we walked up a long sidewalk to Evergreen, my housing unit and home for the next year and a half. Evergreen. I wondered who had come up with that name for this place. The walls were gray and the air had a smell that was hard to identify; it was nutty and sweet and cheesy and fishy, with undertones of body odor. The front door opened to a common area that separated the two sides of the housing unit. Straight ahead were two TV rooms that could accommodate about twenty-five guys each. In between them was a big table that held three microwave ovens that would be the source of some of the direst arguments I saw in prison.
Pick explained how the commissary and phone system worked, and finally he led me to my cell. “Welcome to the bubble.”
I could see why he called it that. From the hallway a big plate-glass window looked into the room, creating a fishbowl effect for the inmates inside. We walked in, and two guys on bottom bunks looked up at me. I nodded nonchalantly, but they looked away and went back to talking. Another inmate was snoring on a top bunk. The room had four gray metal bunk beds set on surprisingly shiny linoleum floors. Next to each bunk was a locker and a corkboard covered with photos of kids and dogs and nearly naked women torn from magazines. The only natural light came from two tiny windows, high on the outer cinder-block wall.
I had been assigned a top bunk. Pick told me the bottom bunks were for guys with health problems or seniority. “If you want to stay around six or eight more years, I can probably get you a bottom bunk.” He elbowed my ribs.
He pointed to my locker. “Don’t put anything valuable in it until you buy a lock. Make your bed every morning or else everyone in the bubble gets punished. And be sure you’re here for count time.”
I wasn’t sure what that was, but I was so overwhelmed with information, I was afraid to ask.
“Oh, and one more thing. When you meet with CO Whacker, don’t have your hands in your pockets. He don’t like that and he’ll send you to the hole. Some inmate whipped his ass years ago, and he’s afraid somebody might shank him.” Pick smiled as if he had just delivered good news, smacked me on the shoulder, and walked out of the cell.
Then I heard heavy footsteps coming from behind me, and when I turned, I was face to chest with a light-skinned black man who had to be seven feet tall. He looked down at me and asked if I was the new guy. I said yes.
He extended his massive hand. “Shorty.”
I should have guessed.
Shorty said he’d been there only a few days and was still learning the ropes himself. He told me a few more helpful things, such as what time breakfast started, the best time to take a shower, and what jobs I should try to get. “Oh—and do not have your hands in your pockets when you meet with Whacker.”
Shorty asked me if I had been out to the “yard” yet. I said no. He motioned to follow him. It was comforting to be walking next to him. I felt as if I had a bodyguard. He greeted some inmates with head nods and fist bumps. Some he passed in silence, and when we were out of their earshot, he leaned in close and said, “You don’t want to know that motherfucker.”
We walked out to a basketball court and stopped to watch a heated game. I looked up at him, and before I could ask, Shorty said, “Yeah, I used to play, but I hurt my knee a long time ago.”
Beyond the basketball courts loomed a snow-covered expanse, illuminated by lights on tall poles. I noticed a wide shoveled path that extended in an oddly shaped loop around the rec area.
“Is that a track?”
“Yeah.”
“Any idea how long it is?”
“Shit, I don’t know, man. Do I look like a runner to you?”
I could see one old white guy with a beard and long gray hair jogging on the track.
When he got close, Shorty yelled, “Yo, Frank, how long is this track?”
“Quarter mile!” he yelled over his shoulder, and kept going.
“Do a lot of guys here run?” I asked Shorty.
“Only Frank, maybe a couple more. Lots of ’em walk though.”
We turned back toward the housing unit.
“What are you in for, man?” Shorty asked.
I was tempted to say something cool, such as armed robbery. I mean, mortgage fraud? What was I going to do, get a prison tattoo of a fountain pen?
“I was charged with overstating my income on a mortgage application.”
Shorty gave me a blank look. “Mmmm . . . mmm . . . mm. Who did you piss off?”
I laughed and we kept walking.
He pointed at another door. “That there is the library.”
I had expected to spend a lot of time reading and had asked friends and family to send me books—but it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d have a library to use. I asked Shorty if he minded going in. He said he needed to head back to the bubble. I almost asked him if he had a date, just to be funny, but I stopped myself. On the outside, I liked making people laugh. In here, I needed to learn what was amusing and what wasn’t.
I resisted the urge to tuck in behind Shorty and follow him. I thanked him for showing me around and said I would see him later. He told me not to be late for the 10:00 p.m. count. I said I wouldn’t be, even though I still didn’t know what count meant. Whatever it was, I figured I had until ten to find out.
I hadn’t realized how noisy the prison was until I stepped into the wonderful quiet of the library. Several inmates were reading newspapers and books. They all looked up at me, then went back to what they were doing. I browsed some shelves and saw plenty of familiar authors: Hemingway, Steinbeck, Stephen King, Paulo Coelho. One section held law books, which I gathered could be used for research. I picked up The Grapes of Wrath, one of my favorites. Now I needed to figure out how to check it out. I asked an older man seated behind a desk what to do.
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