I am not thankful to have cancer, but I am thankful that God has brought me through cancer treatment and continues to strengthen me both physically and spiritually. I am richly blessed.
When I read it, I thought, Wow, that was quite a perspective from a guy I had heard crying in the background during a phone call after a particularly hard radiation treatment. He hurt so bad that he was unable to talk to me on the phone, except for whimpers and grunts to acknowledge what I was saying.
Dad’s cancer was now in remission for the second time, and Annie was out of treatment and back home. Dad told me he had seen her one day when he was playing a round of golf. She was visiting the nearby Catholic cemetery where her mother is buried. Dad finished his round and waited for her at the gate.
They had a nice talk. He invited her to come visit them sometime, but she hadn’t. He gave her a lot of credit for my turnaround. She was too humble to agree, but he made her feel like family.
As it turned out, they were both just taking a short break from their illnesses.
I wrote her after Dad’s report of that chance meeting, but she didn’t return my letter or take my call. She was soon in California in another treatment facility.
Long ago Bee Dog had warned me that I had to be mentally ready for the time when I would be tested physically, and that I would be redefined by my reaction.
I figured that just wasn’t going to happen to me, that I had circumvented that trial by defining myself the way I had, but my time finally came in the chow line.
“I gonna smash that bitch. I gonna smash that bitch good—know what I’m sayin’?” He went on and on, talking and rapping to nobody in particular.
Dray had dirty dreadlocks, man breasts, and a reputation for talking too much and starting fights that he rarely won. Backing down from him—losing to a loser—would send me into precarious waters.
He was a few men ahead of me in the chow line. He glanced back at me, continuing his verbal taunts. It was all about some “bitch” in the unit, and how he was going to smash that bitch. The week prior we had had an altercation over one of the televisions. At the time he’d just stared me down with his dumb face and then the next day he had bumped into me on purpose in the chow line. Now, in the line again, he droned on and on, rapping to himself and moving like he had headphones on. “That bitch is going to get it, and you know who I’m talkin’ about.” In prison, the epithet refers to a guy who is regularly sexually abused, a submissive, a guy who will allow another to walk all over him, a guy who garners no respect from anyone. If a friend calls you a bitch, it can be a joke, but there was no joke going on here. The guys in line understood that I was the target. Everyone was tense.
I was nauseous because I knew I had no choice.
I had to react “appropriately.” And soon. If I didn’t, I knew what would start to happen because I’d witnessed it before. Maybe someone else would start calling me a bitch and then someone else would think I really was. Next they’d ask to borrow something and wouldn’t pay me back. Eventually they’d no longer ask; they’d take. Thus would begin the long slide down until I finally fit Dray’s description of me. The difference between the streets outside and prison life is considerable, but it’s nothing compared to a fall from the upper levels of prison life to the lowest circles of its various hells.
Big Meeks and the other gang leaders I’d helped legally were my friends now, but that could change if they saw me shrink from a righteous confrontation. Meeks preyed on weak guys. He’d go into their cells and say he’d heard they’d been bad-mouthing him. They’d shake. He’d do it right when they had come back from a commissary run, with their pillowcases full of goodies. They would just hand him the bag to make peace and save a beating. He would do that when his locker got a little bare. Sometimes he would ask me what I thought about one guy or another. I knew what he was doing: he didn’t want to mess up a friend of mine. So I tried to spare as many guys as I could by saying they were friends, even when I didn’t like them.
I knew that no matter how good I was with a law book and even if it took a year of sliding, I would eventually be on the receiving end of someone’s terrorizing if I backed down from Dray. In prison, if you can’t maintain a modicum of physical respect, nothing else really matters. A man’s body is his castle, and if he doesn’t defend it with his life, it gets looted and burned.
Plus, whatever respect I had earned on the basketball court or football field was ancient history—with my bad back and law work, I hadn’t played lately. Prison credibility has a shelf life of around three years, with all the people who get transferred and released.
After chow, during the ten-minute move, I took a couple deep breaths through my nose and marched to his cell door. His cellmate wasn’t back yet, but that wouldn’t have mattered. I would have gone ahead as I did. I stormed in and threw a straight right into Dray’s jaw. His glasses flew across the cell. I pushed him with one hand under his chin and the other on his gut, working him against the back of the cell. He turned his back toward me and beat his fists on the bars and clear glass to summon help from the guards standing outside the unit.
I moved away from him and went to the cell door to see if guards were running our way; I didn’t want to end up in solitary or lose good behavior time if I could help it. Not to mention that I had a good job, a good cell, and plenty of guys depending on me to do their legal work. That was what I was thinking about during the fight.
No guards were in sight. As I turned back toward Dray, he sprung up and caught me in the eye. I felt blood rush down my face. In the few seconds I’d given him, he had tucked a padlock into the web of his fist like a brass knuckle. His punch flayed the skin around my eye.
There was no way the fight would be unnoticed now. We were already outside his cell, in the wide-open space of the dayroom where everyone was watching. He swung and caught me again. I landed a right to his head and grabbed his dreads. The guards came running. I knew if I stopped right then, serious discipline against me would be unlikely, but I also knew my standing in the yard would suffer. So as the guards started to pull me away from him, I yanked on his dreads to jam his face into my knee. The guards tackled us both.
We both landed in solitary for three weeks. But in the screwy world of prison where status is everything, I’d purchased enough safety to maybe last through the three years I had left.
I didn’t get off on violence; some guys really do live for bloodshed. They have plenty of time to psyche each other out, plan revenge, probe vulnerabilities with little taunts and dramas, and find opportunities to climb the ladder of respect at someone else’s expense. If you had a summer camp for kids with extreme anger management problems, and you took away most of the adults, added weapons, and you didn’t let anyone go home for years and years, you’d have a U.S. prison. It’s strictly Lord of the Flies.
In solitary, I reread my stack of letters from memory. That connection with the saner world always helped me think above the pointless dramas of prison life. I had time—three weeks alone is eternity—to think about how prison had changed me. Had it worn away the good part of me or the bad? Maybe that wasn’t the best way to think of it. It had pounded the young idiot out of me, for sure. Maybe I still had a bit of the De Niro gangster cool in my official persona, but it was kept now as some kind of protection, not as something I valued in any way. I couldn’t let it go too fast, as looking too soft was probably what had landed me in the predicament with Dray.
I probably had forgotten where I was. I was thinking I was some young lawyer and wasn’t paying attention. I kept telling myself now: I am an inmate in a prison. The hard shell needs to be very hard, or men will mess with you. The fact that someone had messed with me proved I hadn’t kept the shell steely enough. But it didn’t matter, I thought. I could picture myself having lunch with Noah and Seth now a lot more easily than I could picture myself punching a guy out in a prison cell. My former life was diminishing with each calendar year, but I couldn’t let this happen a
gain. I had to be the tough prison guy, even if it was just something of a Halloween costume.
The time alone also made me see the whole future with Annie clearly again. I stopped thinking of myself as some jerk wasting her time. Nobody could love her as much as I did. I felt I was good enough at a few things, and I could figure out how to support a good life for us. I wanted to heat things up with her. I decided to write more letters and have faith that she would read them, even if she didn’t answer them. And in my cell alone I prayed she and my dad would remain safe.
I had a lot of catching up to do on the legal front when I got out of solitary. Deadlines were approaching for quite a few briefs, so I worked like a first-year Biglaw associate.
Like I said, not everyone in Pekin was happy about my legal victories. The unhappiest was a Nation of Islam fellow who wore the standard pillbox hat and had an attitude about everything. He took himself seriously as a legal expert—though he was not an expert by any stretch of the imagination. He would take paragraphs from one opinion and use them with paragraphs from other opinions, as if legal opinions were made of LEGO blocks that you could take apart and rearrange as you pleased, without regard to context. I tried to talk to him about things like that, because it bothered me that he was ruining some guys’ one chance at legal relief, but he was just insulted that I might think he needed any information.
With each of my victories there came a longer stare from him. One day in the law library we were on opposite sides of a bookshelf, and I could see his angry eyes over the tops of the books.
“You don’t impress me, cracker,” he said. “You got outside lawyers helping you.”
That was very true; I was regularly calling Noah to ask questions.
“But I do what I do all from here,” he said as he poked his own temple way too hard, knocking his cap sideways and making himself wince. “Don’t be takin’ on no more brothers, because they don’t need your help. You been warned, whiteboy.”
His words stung a little. I had been operating an equal opportunity firm.
He was affiliated and had a very powerful band of brothers. I thought about what to do. I could stop helping black guys, or maybe I could stop the legal work altogether and just concentrate on my classes. I gave it a moment’s thought and then decided to just ignore him.
Then another danger sprang up. A new guy arrived. His nickname was Kaos. In our circus world, he was a star freak.
He was missing his front teeth. That was fine, except he sort of celebrated the look by tightening up his upper lip to reveal the hole in his smile and then sticking his tongue through it.
“What up, Shon?” he said, smiling. I had been friendly, watching him operate, but I didn’t want anything to do with him. I had my newly hardened steel shell on.
I walked past him.
“Oh, you don’t have time for a playa,” he cackled behind. “Well, f-you then,” he said.
He ran his mouth like that constantly. Overhearing him one day, I realized he was the nightmare I had been dreading all my years at Pekin. He was telling stories about his former cellmate, Tyler. I recognized the name and the stories. He had been cellmates at another prison with my Tyler, the drug dealer from Lincoln who had provided the guns and the stolen cars for my bank jobs, and who hated me for taking a plea bargain. Kaos looked at me as if he knew the story, like he was carrying Tyler’s anger, like he had finally let the thing slip out within earshot so I could start worrying.
Kaos looked at me like I was the enemy. All my codefendants, as I mentioned, had pled together except Tyler, who insisted on playing a losing hand. We were not obliged to go down in flames with him and spend our entire lives in prison. I didn’t consider myself a snitch, but the wrong words can paint you as one.
My hard work to earn and keep some respect seemed at risk now. Kaos could start trouble. We circled each other for weeks, waiting for the other to start it up. He was a Latin Disciple. The group included both Hispanic and non-Hispanic white guys. My good friend and basketball teammate Joe was a Latin Disciple, as was Milan. The leader of the LDs was a Puerto Rican named Jay, who was also my friend and someone I had helped with a habeas motion. If Kaos and I fought, those friendships and loyalties would be tested, and it was more likely than not that I would be on the losing end. It might break some guys’ hearts to go against me, even to hurt me, but they could not and would not turn their backs on their gang. All I could do was keep my eyes open and hope it didn’t come to that.
So there was this dark cloud above, with Kaos and the Nation of Islam guy, and then—rule of three—we got this new inmate with an electronic voice box, presumably installed after losing his larynx to cancer. His flat, electronic voice was a strange addition to the prison sounds, but that wasn’t the problem.
The morning he arrived I was working with John “Hater” Davis. We were going through a box of forensic evidence from his trial.
“Take a look at this,” Hater said as he handed me a document. It was the sworn statement from a guy who had said, under oath, that he had been at John’s farm and bought some drugs.
“Look at the name of the guy.”
I looked at the name on the statement. I had heard that name just recently. Where? It was the new guy who had come into the unit.
“You got it,” Hater said. “It’s Voicebox. He’s the guy who signed this, and it’s nothing but lies, because I’ve never seen him before this morning.”
“But you’ve seen him now?” I asked.
“I saw him when he came in. Complete stranger to me.”
“You have never seen him before?”
“Never, Shon, I swear.”
So one of the people who had framed Hater was in a cell less than fifty feet away.
I was worried that Hater would do something out of anger, so I devised a plan. We would pay Voicebox a visit when his celly, Bernie, and my celly, Roger, were around as witnesses.
That evening, Hater, Roger, and I walked to the cell. Bernie and Voicebox were reading.
“Hey Bernie,” I said, hoping not to alarm Voicebox.
Bernie was on his bunk with a novel resting on his belly. He’s a big guy, so he had a good place for the book.
Hater stepped in.
“Hey, do I know you?” he said to Voicebox.
Voicebox scanned his face.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure?” Hater said.
“Were you at the holding facility in Oklahoma?” Voicebox asked.
“No.”
Voicebox was puzzled.
“I don’t think we’ve met, then.”
Hater pulled the signed statement from the pocket of his khaki pants.
“Then how come you said you bought five pounds of dope from me at my house?”
The cell was quiet. I checked the floor to make sure Voicebox hadn’t urinated on it. He made noises, kind of whiny-like. His body was heaving, first a little and then big heaves. His eyes, which I could see because I was now sitting beside him, were flowing.
He handed the paper, shaking, back to Hater.
He looked on the bed for the voice device. He held it to his throat, slowly took a deep breath, and looked at all of us.
His rasping voice was interrupted every few words by his heaving and sobbing.
What he said was that Hater’s codefendants had put him up to it. They wanted someone to verify their lies, so they had concocted the scheme in county jail. One of Hater’s codefendants had paid Voicebox $2,000 to do it. He said he had always regretted it, and, crying, he apologized to Hater in his robot voice.
But how do you apologize for a life sentence? Well, you just do.
We left. Hater had stayed calm. The guy had agreed to recant and sign a new affidavit. He was still shaking when we left. I thought it was a mix of remorse and fear. He had been worried for so long about this moment that he didn’t understand that the storm was blowing over, and his agreement to sign a new and accurate affidavit would bring a new start. It m
ight not bring forgiveness, but it would be a basis for coexistence, which is half the battle in such places.
But his fear overwhelmed him. He wanted out of there. The only way out was for him to say Hater had threatened his life. That is exactly what he claimed, and he checked into protective custody the next morning. He even had the gall to write Judge Kopf to say Hater had threatened to kill him.
Just like that he was gone. Hater’s best ticket home had just slipped away. I wished we had stayed longer in the guy’s cell and settled him down, but it was what it was. At least we had witnesses who would sign affidavits as to what everyone had said.
Though the Supreme Court had granted Hater’s petition and sent the case back down, he was denied resentencing by the court of appeals. We filed a habeas motion to Judge Kopf, raising a number of claims, relating the evidence we had about Voicebox and others, and attaching a number of affidavits. Judge Kopf rejected the motion. He didn’t believe us. So Hater is still there. It kills me. How would you feel if one of your friends was stuck in a bad place for life and you couldn’t help?
By the summer of 2007 I had about a year and a half left. I wanted no trouble from anyone. I had made contact with Annie and was fanning those coals as best I could. She needed love and I could now almost see the day when I could be with her and hold her. I was doing sit-ups on a cold morning when the Nation of Islam guy appeared. It was a little after everyone else had headed off to their jobs. I had some extra time and wanted to boost my heart rate. He saw me and left without saying a word.
It somehow shook me a little. Since there was still a controlled move under way, I headed back to the unit to start my work for the day. There he was again on the compound with a couple of his gang buddies, looking all business. They were just standing there up ahead, in my way.
Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption Page 17