It’s been about fourteen years since I’ve really celebrated Christmas, or even had a decent meal on this day. The feeling the day carries manages to seep in through these concrete walls, but there’s no one here to share it with and nothing I can do with it. I’d be happy to pass a stranger on the street and hear them say, “Merry Christmas,” or to be able to say it to them. I want to be bundled up as I walk beneath the slate-colored afternoon sky. I want to sit and look at twinkling trees while sipping eggnog. In the outside world the air would feel like a music box, just like in the old days.
This is the time of year when it hurts the most to be here. The summer may be a misery to my body, but missing this magick hurts me to my soul.
December tastes like Hershey’s Kisses. The month of December and those little Hershey’s Kisses candies are connected in a way that I can’t quite articulate. For me, at least. I do know that eating a Hershey’s Kiss is like an act of communion—like taking a tiny taste of December into myself. I don’t like to eat them at other times of the year, because I don’t want that special association to fade.
Sometimes I think the vast majority of the year is about anticipation for me. The year is the journey, December is the destination. On November 30, I always sit up all night long so that I can greet December as it arrives. I like to meet it at the door, so to speak. And then I stay up all night on December 31, not to see the New Year in, but to savor the last few moments of my favorite month. October and November are really, really good, but December is great.
My favorite time of year is from December 20 until sunrise on December 25. During that stretch of time I can feel the entire world come to an absolute standstill. On those few days the hair on my neck stands on end, and the world feels like a pendulum that has swung all the way to one side and hangs suspended for a split second before beginning the reverse swing. At sunrise on December 25 the spell is broken and we begin the swing back in the other direction. Those magickal days are gone for another year, and my vigil starts all over again.
Strangely enough, the song that sounds the most like December is a ballad called “High Enough” by the Damn Yankees. I have a whole list of December songs: “Love Is on the Way” by Saigon Kick, “Don’t Cry” by Guns N’ Roses, “Wait” by White Lion, “House of Pain” by Faster Pussycat, and “Don’t Close Your Eyes” by Kix. That’s the sound track for the month of December. Oh yeah, I forgot one—“Don’t Know What You’ve Got (Till It’s Gone)” by Cinderella. Yes, I still love Cinderella. And yes, I can hear your snorts of disgust. Doesn’t bother me one bit, though. I’m used to it by now, as I even hear it from Lorri.
When I try to picture heaven, I see a place where it’s always December, every radio station plays hair bands, and every time I check my pockets they’re full of Hershey’s Kisses. There’s a Christmas parade on every street, every day is my birthday, and the sun always sets at 4:58 p.m.
The inertia is killing me, wearing me out one day at a time. The legal system is content to let me die of old age. If someone doesn’t do something soon there will be nothing left of me to save.
I woke up this morning to discover a spider on my breakfast tray. It was smashed to a piece of bread. Something about it seemed too malicious to have been an accident. I haven’t felt right all day. Every time that spider pops into my head I feel my stomach lurch again.
Tonight I separated and saw myself again, just as I did when I was seven years old. Tonight I was the ghost of sixteen. It went so fast that I couldn’t say or do anything. It was just a flicker. I was gasping for breath like a fish pulled from the water and my heart beat like thunder. It’s the fasting that triggered it. I haven’t felt like eating because of the spider. A dead spider has given me the ghost flickers. There is a field between me and the ghost of sixteen. Things wait in that field, unable to cross the line that divides me now from the ghost of me then. Step lively and move with purpose, or the ghosts will swarm all over you. They almost never get the chance to touch us, but they’re always waiting should the chance arrive. They can’t usually even see you unless you ride the ghost flickers. I am moving forward and backward at once. Some part of me is always in the ghost flickers.
Or the flicker is in me. It’s getting hard to tell. Everything is happening at once, and I can’t pinpoint anything. It’s all too much. The flickers are like inhaled gasoline fumes. They are a vulgar shimmer with no false grace, and a world unto themselves. The flickers are a place where everything exists as a series of jerky movements.
I can’t stop my hands from shaking, but I cannot feel the cold.
Last night the Rose had a dream of prophecy and bureaucratic bullshit. She was swimming in a competition, able to literally pull herself through the water by finding handholds in it. After she easily won, the judges disqualified her over some small technicality. She was furious because she recognized it for what it was—pointless bureaucracy.
She knew it symbolized the case. We’ve seen it time and again. The good thing was that the dream filled her with certainty. She knew that if she could win once, she could win again. Next time she would beat them at their own game. Fuck the lawyers, the prosecutors, the judge, the liars, the police, and everyone else that stands against us. They will never win, because we won’t give up. Knock me down ninety-nine times, and I will get back up one hundred.
I was sealed inside a concrete box deep in the heart of a super-maximum-security prison several years ago, and since that time have not had fresh air, sunlight, the feel of grass, or anything else people associate with real life. My living space is as confining and unnatural as that of astronauts in outer space. It’s all brought me to the conclusion that I am being treated like veal, and for the same reason.
The prison administration doesn’t want you to be too healthy, because then you would be strong. The weaker they can keep you, the easier their job is—especially when an execution comes up. If they keep you soft by putting you in a tiny space so that you can barely move, then feed you nothing but grease and carbs, while maintaining a constantly elevated stress level, then when an execution comes up the man tends to die pretty quickly. Hell, most men are usually at least a quarter of the way dead by the time they make it to the death chamber. Actually, I don’t even think I’m supposed to call it that anymore—the death chamber. In these politically correct times they’ve given it some other less self-explanatory name that I can’t quite remember. Still, everyone here knows it’s where they do all of the official killing.
A friend recently told me there was an article in a national magazine about how super-max prisons drive the inmates insane. I already knew that, because I see it every day. Not so long ago a guard made a mistake and pushed the button that opens all the doors in a cell block at once. One schizophrenic man immediately smashed another’s skull with a steel bar, killing him. Neither man could have been considered sane by any stretch of the imagination.
Perception becomes distorted in here, which leads to bizarre behavior. It’s because there is nothing for a person to compare themselves to. There is no barometer for judging what is “normal,” so the thought processes begin to gradually drift in odd directions. The next thing you know, someone snaps and begins screaming that there is blood in his food. At first when something like that happened I was horrified and in a state that I can only describe as terrified awe. Now I find a raving lunatic to be only mildly annoying.
After a while it makes you wonder if you yourself may have lost your mind. How would you know if you had? And the crazy people all seem to think themselves completely sane, so they must not be able to tell the difference. I can’t think about it for very long or I get stomach cramps. The last thing I need to add to my current list of woe-inducing problems is insanity.
The courts have ruled that executing an insane person is inhumane, so what they do now is begin pumping the lunatics full of drugs a few weeks before the execution date. By doing so they can make them lucid enough to comprehend that they’re being murdered on a given da
te, which qualifies them as sane. Somehow that strikes me as being far more inhumane than allowing a person to remain in a state where they don’t realize they’re being murdered.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m no bleeding-heart liberal who believes everyone is a victim and no one is responsible for their own actions. However, I do possess the intelligence and acumen to realize that something is horribly wrong with this system. I don’t know what the answer is, but I know it’s not veal.
FEBRUARY
The temperature dropped to around twenty degrees last night. I woke up at 2:30 a.m. when a guard began beating on my door with a metal bar and yelling for me to get up if I wanted a breakfast tray. When I got up it took me a minute or two to get my hands to work right because they were so cold. I slept in two sets of clothes, but my bones still felt like glass. Not that I’m complaining—I’ll take the cold over the heat any day, and summer in here is hell. I actually like the cold. It fills me with nostalgia, reminds me of my youth. When I was a kid the fire would always go out in the middle of the night and the cold would roll in and coat the entire house. I was always amazed to see that the water in the toilet had frozen over. Something about the cold always makes me feel young again.
They set another execution date this week. There’s now one scheduled for March and one for April. It’s looking like there’s probably going to be at least one a month for the next four or five months, not counting February. The non–Death Row prisoners like when there’s an execution because it’s the only time the prison serves fried chicken. I’m still not one hundred percent positive what the point of the fried chicken is—either placating the rest of us or celebrating the execution. Whatever it is, it’s looking like the fried chicken may be coming fast and furious this year.
I can feel the daylight hours growing. I can’t see it, but something in my core feels it happening. It’s strange how I can still feel when the sun is up, even after not being out in its light in seven years. I’ve heard of experiments where people were closed away from sunlight for long periods of time, and eventually they lost the ability to feel if it was day or night. Perhaps I would have, too, were it not for the solar and lunar energy-circulating practices I do. Last night was the full moon. The Storm moon, which usually falls in February. That means the Chaste moon will be in February this year, instead of its usual time in March. I would have loved to have been able to go out and look up at it. That’s one of the things I miss most—the night sky. The stars, the moon, the crisp air. Maybe soon.
Time to get busy. My routine is not going to do itself.
The Boston Red Sox are big, big magick. I’ve heard that some analysts are saying they won’t even make it to the play-offs this year. I don’t like sports for the most part. It seems like a tremendous waste of valuable, precious time to me—time that could be used for something constructive, productive, or to further your growth: studying, meditating, working out, talking to loved ones, et cetera, but there’s something about the Red Sox that soothes my nerves, like a security blanket or a rocking chair. I like to have them on the TV or radio playing in the background as I go about my business. It’s better than one of those ocean sound tracks.
I’d better get to work. Talk to you soon.
I’ve been keeping an eye out for the Charlie Brown Valentine’s Day special. I know it will be on soon, and I never miss a Charlie Brown special. The best one is the Halloween show about the Great Pumpkin—which I’ve only missed one year in my life, due to the local ABC station having technical difficulties—but all the Peanuts shows make me feel like I’m one step closer to Halloween.
When I was in second grade we were told to write a letter to someone we admired. Most kids wrote to the president or an athlete. I wrote to Charles Schulz. He wrote back and even sent some autographed Peanuts drawings. The teacher took them and put them on display for the whole class to see—and I never got them back. She kept the drawings. I wonder where they are now.
The thing I like about the shows isn’t the characters—it’s the background. The colors are so amazing it almost takes my breath away. Every time I watch The Great Pumpkin I feel like I’m going to have a seizure during the scenes where Snoopy is in a dogfight. Just look at the background in those scenes. It really is too much to take. I can barely keep from holding my head in my hands and involuntarily groaning like I have a mouthful of the best chocolate cake ever made. I look at them and can literally smell the crisp autumn air—even in this cell. No horror movie in the world makes me feel the magick of Halloween as strongly as The Great Pumpkin.
The Valentine’s show is good, too.
I’m excited today, and happy. Not for any particular reason, other than the fact that good things are coming. Good things are always coming; sometimes we just forget it.
P.S. Wednesday, February 10. That’s the night that love is in the air for Charlie Brown, on ABC.
In a way I’m thankful for all the physical pain and suffering I’ve had to endure in here because it has forced me to keep learning and moving forward. If I didn’t have pain, I’d probably take the day off. And that day could become a week. And that week could turn into months. But as it is I know I have two choices—practice every single day without fail, or hurt so bad that life is a misery. So I keep reminding myself that the pain is a gift from the Divine, and that I should be thankful for it.
Today the guards made me bleed again. They chained my feet so tight I could barely move. I bleed through my socks—last month it was my left ankle, today it was the right. When I wash the soap burns like fire, but I have to keep my ankles clean because I don’t have any alcohol or peroxide—nothing to kill bacteria or infections. And this place is filthy.
I can’t remember what it’s like to walk as a human being anymore. My cell is so small that I can only take two steps. Anytime I’m brought out—however briefly or infrequently—I have chains on my hands and feet as well as guards hanging on me. It’s been well over sixteen years since I’ve actually walked anywhere. Sometimes I still can’t wrap my mind around that. I’m working on my seventeenth year now. There are times when I’ve thought, “Surely someone is going to put a stop to this. Surely someone is going to do something.” But no one ever does. Time just rolls on. It’s insanity. I am truly amazed at what they’ve been allowed to get away with, and for how long—especially Burnett and the Arkansas Supreme Court. If Burnett gets that senate seat, I really do fear how many people he’ll be able to hurt. If he’s engaged in this much corruption as a judge, the thought of what he could do as a senator is horrifying.
Ah, well . . . does no good to dwell on it. Either I waste my energy by focusing on things I cannot change, or I conserve my energy and apply it to the small things I can change. That’s what the I Ching calls “the taming power of the small.” Every great victory is made up of many smaller victories.
Someone sent me a letter that had one of the best quotes I’ve ever read. It said “What is to give light must endure burning.” It’s by a writer named Viktor Frankl. I’ve been turning that quote over and over in my head. The truth of it is absolutely awe-inspiring. In the end, I believe it’s why we all suffer. It’s the meaning we all look for behind the tragedies in our lives. The pain deepens us, burns away our impurities and petty selfishness. It makes us capable of empathy and sympathy. It makes us capable of love. The pain is the fire that allows us to rise from the ashes of what we were, and more fully realize what we can become. When you can step back and see the beauty of the process, it’s amazing beyond words.
All my life I’ve heard people say, “Why would God allow this to happen?” I think it’s because while we can see only the tragedy, God sees only the beauty. While we see misery, Divinity sees us lurching and shambling one step closer to the light. I truly do believe that one day we’ll shine as brightly as the archangels themselves.
To the person who sent me that quote—thank you. I stuck it up so that my eyes will travel over it several times a day. It’s something I’ll never forget.
Just about every time I do an interview they ask me what I miss most. When they do, a hundred things flash through my mind—the memories giving me that free-fall feeling in the pit of my stomach. I miss the rain. I miss standing beneath the sky and looking up at the moon and stars. I miss the wind. I miss cats and dogs. I miss wearing real clothes, having a real toothbrush, using a real pen, drinking iced tea, eating ice cream, and going for walks.
I’m tempted to say the thing I miss most is fruit. I haven’t had a piece of fresh fruit in about eight years, and before that I only got it once a year. The prison used to give everyone two apples and two oranges on Christmas, but then they stopped, said it was a “threat to security,” along with tea bags and dental floss. So I haven’t had any in nearly a decade now. They prevent scurvy by giving everyone a cup of watered-down orange juice for breakfast. It doesn’t have much taste, but enough vitamin C to keep your teeth from falling out.
In the end, it’s not the fruit I miss most, though if you rolled all the deprivations into one thing, it would be this: I miss being treated like a human being.
FEBRUARY 12
This place is hell on the body. One of the reasons I cannot write letters the way I used to is that living in this cell twenty-four hours a day has destroyed my vision. I used to read three or four books a week. Now I average about one a month, if the print isn’t too small. The eye works like any other part of the body—use it or lose it. A person confined to a small space never has a chance to see anything that’s more than a couple feet away, so the first thing to go is your ability to see at a distance. Even with my glasses on, I can see maybe ten feet. Without glasses, maybe four inches—anything beyond that is color and movement.
Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row Page 28