He was a good father, my activities notwithstanding. My problems were simply not his doing; he was strict and caring and a good moral example. But it is a fact that the men of our family surely bristle against authority when they are young, and I was no exception.
Dad knew I could change, because I wasn’t that different from him. He didn’t say it word for word, but I knew that was what he meant in short notes when he said, “I love you, Son,” or “I’ll take you to a ball game when you come home.” I knew the history. I could feel his despair at how my path had strayed, but he hadn’t given up on me yet because the show wasn’t over. In the same way that a great success sometimes comes before a great fall, sometimes it works the other way around, and he was holding out for that. He believed in the medicine of rock bottom and the tonic of God’s grace because those were the things that had changed him.
When he got mad at me, maybe it was like getting mad at his old self. More than once during my high school years he had tossed a suitcase with a change of my clothes onto the back step because I had broken his curfew rule again. Mom would soften him, but then it would happen again. Whatever he told me to do, I would do the opposite. I was his son and his father’s grandson, and, like I said, I guess we don’t like being told what to do. Although Mom’s calming voice always worked a little.
I rolled Dad’s pickup in a ditch, and he was furious. Then my grandparents, Dale and Sandra, sold me their used Thunderbird, and I drove it way too fast and didn’t take care of it, and that irked him, too. I would break a rule again, and he would place my bag on the steps again. We were like the wrong ends of two magnets, pushing away from each other no matter how hard Mom tried to make us stick.
Growing up, the thing I disliked most about my father was that he could outshoot me in basketball. He would take hook shots over me, even after I was taller than he was. The shots would bank off our floppy plywood backboard, caroming right down through the net. With each shot he would say stuff like “I guess the old man is the real ballplayer in this house,” or “This is the difference between men and boys.”
I practiced every day after school and sometimes at night, right through the dead of winter. I practiced so I could beat him someday, and I did. It happened at home out on the driveway one evening, and he hung his head and went inside as I proclaimed myself king of the court. When I went in he was sitting at the kitchen table smiling at me. Few things in life have felt that good to me—not the smile, really, but beating him at his own game. And maybe some from the smile.
He had married the prettiest girl in town, and her father owned the John Deere dealership. He could have slipped into that business, of course, but he wanted to make a life of his own.
He would get on the line when I called home, and we would talk about sports and the farm. But it was enough that I could tell when things had started to warm back up a little.
During one of those calls home, Mom said Ann Marie Metzner would sometimes stop by her desk to talk. I told her to say hello from me, but I didn’t really mean it. I knew I was probably an embarrassment—that spray-painted billboard was within view of their office at KV, and Mom probably shouldn’t go around mentioning me to the owner’s daughter.
Dad and I rarely talked about religion; that was mostly Mom. When her Christian books arrived in my mail, I always had better things to read, so I set them aside. But I would eventually pick them up, like it was my penance owed to her. Otherwise religion failed to interest me. If there was any truth to any of it, I was probably going to hell anyway, so why bother?
“Your mama trying to save your soul again?” Bee Dog once said when he saw another book arrive. “You don’t wanna read it ’cause you know you really need it,” he rapped.
“It’s all yours, Bee—you read it for me,” I said, tossing it over to his bunk. “I’ll see if you sprout a halo.”
“I already got a halo!” he said. “It’s so bright, it’s my reading light!” he rapped, holding out a nudy book so I could see it from my perch.
The guy had grown on me a little. He was good company.
Men define themselves through their stories. Prison is a great pile of stories, told from bunk to bunk to lay down the background hum of prison life. You wake up and fall asleep to the murmur of biographies and bullcrap being told in a hundred cells for the hundredth time. Stories are cultivated and honed for compactness, for rhythm and effect. The subject matter is hardly spiritual: which brother was the biggest baller, which Latin gangster had the nicest ride, which whiteboy could cook the baddest meth.
One night toward lights-out, Bee Dog put his feet up, folded his arms behind his head, and said, “Okay, Shon, I have been telling you everything you want to know. Now I want to know about robbing banks. Tell me a story, man.” I was at the window but I looked at him. I really wasn’t in the mood, but he wanted a story.
“What made you decide to rob banks?” he asked. “Were you trying to impress your mama? You come from a long line of bank robbers, Shon? Your daddy take you into the family business and you screwed it up by getting everybody busted?”
I told him that no one in my family, as far back as anyone knew, had ever been in jail before, much less prison. I told him that my family didn’t take money; they gave it away, mostly to churches and charities. I didn’t represent them very well.
“Well, tell me about the town where you grew up, and I’ll figure you out for myself.” Most prison biographies generate spontaneously from the mud of bad places; if you know the place, you know the story.
So I stood and looked out through the bars at the outside world at sunset and started describing David City, Nebraska, which has a little under three thousand people. I described my family’s old two-story brown and white house; I imagined it among piles of leaves. It sits on the western edge of town—the last line of houses before Nebraska resumes its flat, corn-furrowed infinity.
“Your pop’s a farmer?”
“He manages cattle—not enough money to have his own farm.”
Farmland costs too much money for most people. If there had been another land rush offering free homestead farms, Dad would have put us all in the station wagon and had us at the starting line.
Every morning he would climb into his Ford F-150 pickup and dissolve into Grass Valley Farms.
I tried to give Bee Dog a picture of it. I described my old bedroom window, under the long brow of a roofline, with a view left to the farmland Dad managed, and right, through leafy front yards, toward town. As a kid I often escaped from my window at night, climbing up and over the steep summit, then down through the branches of a big tree—off into the dark to some fresh adventure with Tom.
I described the square, downtown. It’s a wide street that spreads out from a row of historic brick buildings that hold the latest generation of bars and farm insurance offices. The reddish cobblestone street is so wide that cars park in the middle of it. Street dances are held there, and people wander around with a beer in hand or just stand and visit. In my mind the people were all out there and most were smiling at me, despite how I had shocked and embarrassed them. It is, in fact, a forgiving town.
Bee Dog still didn’t see how all that computed into my taking up robbing banks. He said something along those lines, and he fell asleep. I kept wandering around town. I imagined Mom hanging the wash and calling us to dinner, my brothers chasing each other with the garden hose. I saw the basketball hoop bolted to the plywood backboard on the telephone pole.
You think about little things like that in prison, like the backboard, the sound of it wobbling when the ball hit it. I knew that sound. I could probably pick it out from a thousand recordings of other floppy plywood backboards. Men go crazy doing this, falling into their stories, but a measure of it is a drug you need.
I shadowed Bee Dog for those first few months, trying to analyze the people and understand the place. Because inmates often react violently to imagined slights, I tried to create a narrative of myself as a quiet but fearless guy who
would welcome a good fight but was otherwise decent when treated decently. I tried to show everyone respect, and so far, so good. Maybe it helped that people knew I had robbed five banks and wasn’t in for something less physical, like embezzlement or tax evasion. In their eyes, bank robbery, unlike child molesting or domestic abuse, was the all-American crime, complete with a populist tradition and a cultural hall of fame. Or maybe it was my demeanor. Who knows? Still, I knew I would have to prove myself physically sometime. Even the biggest, meanest guys have to prove themselves.
“Don’t think about it when it happens,” Bee Dog advised. “Think about it now instead, so you know just what you’ll do. It’ll be something stupid that someone says. You might just want to laugh it off, but that would be a big mistake if it’s not coming from a friend.”
So I was vigilant, almost looking for the fight.
My first assigned job wasn’t the best. You must have a job in prison; it’s not supposed to be a vacation after all. You need it to kill time and stay productive; you need it to earn enough money to survive, and you need it because, well, that’s the rule. I signed up for a job in the prison’s metal factory because I had riveted and welded at a truck company for a time after high school. But I was told my name would be added to the years-long waiting list. In the meantime, being at the bottom, my first job was in the kitchen—cleaning pots, pans, steam trays, food trays, the floors, and tables.
The kitchen is a sauna of clanging aluminum pans and greasy equipment. It is also the place where people are most likely to be beaten, because there are too many unwatched corners and because someone might want to make an example of you in front of the munching masses.
In the kitchen you are forced to listen to the dumbest imaginable conversations, everything from why Hitler was a great man to screaming matches over which rapper makes the most money.
One day a guy was using a long stick to retrieve a hidden plastic bag of homemade wine from a shelf near the kitchen ceiling, where it had been fermenting in the heat. The bag caught on a jagged piece of metal. He jerked it, piercing the bag, and the hooch poured over him and flooded the kitchen floor.
“What I spoda do?” he said, almost in tears, to the kitchen guard. He spent a few weeks in the hole. “What I spoda do?” became a favorite bit of racist slang for months.
In those work environments you have to look like you’re cool with everything stupid that’s happening. When you are back to the relative sanity of your friends in the dayroom, you vent. I was watching a game on television, and I had been complaining about my job to a guy named Ryan, a white guy in his mid-thirties. Ryan had a six-postage-stamp bet on the game we were watching, to make it interesting. Stamps are the ready currency of prison.
After a while he looked away from a commercial and responded.
“Shon, you should work in the law library with me. I know Burress real well, the guy who runs it. It’s a good job, man. You’ve been to college, so maybe you could get in.”
I knew Ryan was supposed to be some type of jailhouse lawyer. Guys would pay him in stamps and other things for his help in preparing legal filings. He was sharp but slippery.
“I was in college for about ten minutes,” I replied. We were trying to hear ourselves over some awful singing. There was a new music video on MTV, which you could only hear through earphones, but guys were singing along. It was like listening to a room full of the people kicked off American Idol in the first round.
“Yeah, but you act smart, and all you really got to know is how to read and write so you can find books and check them out. If I talk to Burress, I could get you the job. Maybe you could do some work for me. I would teach you.”
It couldn’t be worse than the kitchen. Boring, probably, but maybe I could read novels in there. Even better, it would be a fresh break in the pattern of my days. The passage of time in prison is felt only through changes like that; my kitchen era would be over, the clock would have ticked.
Some guys will cause trouble just to feel the passage of time. There is otherwise a lead-heavy sameness to prison days. Clocks and calendars cut too slowly through the big mountain of a prison sentence; freedom seems to come faster through sudden movements: a new man arrives, a man is transferred out, a new guard is hired, a guard leaves, they serve something new in the chow hall, someone is clubbed with a can of Goya beans stuffed inside a sock.
Watching the game, I kept glancing at Ryan and wondering if I really wanted to be working with him closely every day. He was a schemer, always concocting some way to score dope, or wine, or both. His breath was always a horrid mix of rotten orange juice and cheap tobacco—he rolled his own. If that wasn’t enough, he had a slick grin that belonged in a slasher film.
But it was an opportunity. I might otherwise be stuck in the kitchen for years if I turned it down. So I went for it. I was hired after my minimum ninety-day stint in the kitchen.
I didn’t know, and Ryan didn’t bother to mention, that the Crips were using the law library for other reasons altogether.
The big fight I was expecting kept not happening. I had been following the rules: respect everyone, ask first, stay close to your friends. I was lifting weights, doing pull-ups, and running every other day, thinking I needed to be in top shape—first because it was a morale booster, and second because every day in prison made me a day older than the teenagers arriving and looking for trouble.
My last real fistfight had been a couple of years earlier, and I hadn’t exactly won. It had been with my friend Tom in the spring of 1997. I was working at a farm and living day to day, camped in my parents’ basement. My small paycheck would be overspent by the time the next one came around. I had returned from two years in the Navy the previous summer. I was twenty-one and clueless.
After plowing fields for twelve straight hours one day, I was heading home in an old truck when I saw Ann Marie out running. She was coming toward me on the farm road that runs west of town. I was surprised because I thought she was away at Creighton, the Jesuit university just north of downtown Omaha. What I didn’t know was that she often came home on the weekends to run in the wide-open spaces. There had been some snow that April afternoon, late in the season for snow, but not so much that you couldn’t run if you were a fanatic about it. It was coming down lightly as she ran. She looked a little too thin but otherwise just beautiful. She smiled as I passed her.
I should have stopped and said hello, but that would have seemed pathetic. Besides, I was embarrassed to be working on a farm back in David City, while she was finishing up her degree in the city.
A real blizzard moved in that evening. By midnight I was drinking in a David City bar with Tom. The joint smelled like it had been mopped with stale ale, and cigarette smoke hung in layers. The tattoos on the new bartender’s arms made it clear he had been a Marine in Vietnam. He was our parents’ age.
“Must bother you that you went and put your butt on the line for your country, and you end up serving beer in this dump,” Tom said. It was odd for him to be overtly rude and hostile like that—by Midwest standards, that was rude and hostile. He usually wasn’t that way.
The bartender shrugged it off at first. But after a few more of Tom’s sharp remarks, he was becoming angry and ready to do something. That would have been a mistake, as Tom would have thumped him.
I slammed two shots and settled into a draft of beer.
“Just leave the guy alone,” I said.
“You his protector?” Tom said.
“What’s your problem tonight?”
“Maybe you’re my problem. Maybe you’re the bartender’s friend and not mine,” he said.
“Whatever,” I said. “Is it because he made it into the Marines and you didn’t?”
“Oh, yeah, you two are the real men here!”
When I joined the Navy and left Nebraska, Tom decided he wanted to be a Marine. He had a meltdown somewhere along the recruitment path, so it hadn’t worked out.
“You’re crazy,” I said.
Tom had been moving from college to college, dropping out, drifting between jobs, never finding the right thing. He had ultimately returned to school, but I could tell he wasn’t happy about it.
He finished another beer, downed a last shot of Jack, and walked out into the blizzard. He sped west out of town in his Ford Tempo. I headed after him in a Grass Valley pickup that my Dad drove; I didn’t have a car. I was soon speeding along about ten feet behind him through the zero-visibility blizzard. We were doing eighty or ninety down farm roads, drunk.
Four miles out of town, Tom jammed on his brakes for no apparent reason. I skidded into him; the trunk of his Tempo folded upward as I hit. I stumbled out and checked the truck I had borrowed from Dad—not a scratch. It had a cattle catcher that shielded the bumper and front end.
I can’t remember who threw the first punch. My guess is he did, considering I had smashed his car. His face was red with the cold but mostly with anger. This should have concerned me, as he was the stronger by far, the result of pumping weights for football since freshman year in high school. His bulk and his blue eyes and olive skin stood in contrast to skinny, pale, green-eyed me. We didn’t look like brothers, but we did look like pals, and you wouldn’t pick a fight with either of us without getting both.
My hand and face stung, so I knew I had hit him hard and that something had hit me.
We had fought each other a few times growing up but this was something different. When he regained his footing, all I could see were the whites of his rolled-back eyes—no pupils. His fist moved too fast for my drunk brain to process. He caught me in the cheek, knocking me back against the wrecked quarter panel of the Tempo.
Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption Page 4