Stand Tall

by Dewey Bozella

  Fear. Fear kills dreams. I could not open my door to fear, not even a crack, or it would come crashing in like a tidal wave and drown me.

  Commitment. Once you step in the ring, you see the fight through, even if you’re outmatched. Pain isn’t what defeats you; not giving a shit does.

  Persistence. In all things you do. It’s not how much weight you can lift that proves your strength; it’s how many reps you can do. Repetition builds muscle and muscle memory, not just with your body, but with your character, as well.

  Hope and faith. Without this, it’s impossible to overcome struggle and conflict, which every human being faces in one way or another. I wasted a lot of precious time in my life before I believed in God and understood that he had a plan for me, that I had to trust there was a purpose to my suffering.

  Forgiveness. Anger and frustration are death by slow poison. If you don’t forgive, you can’t move forward. It’s that simple. And that hard.

  Once the guests had cleared out of our one-bedroom apartment, I fell asleep on the floor next to the bed Trena and Diamond had always shared. I woke with every sound through the night—the neighbor’s key unlocking the door, the wind rustling dead leaves outside, a car alarm three blocks over. My body heard everything before I did, and my muscles would already be taut each time my eyes flew open. I was still in prison. Still on point. In the morning, I got up early and found a small saucepan to boil water for my coffee. Trena joined me at the kitchen’s rickety table to figure out some answers to that question still hanging stale in yesterday’s party air. What next?

  A job was the obvious answer, and the most urgent task at hand. Trena and Diamond had been teetering on the edge of homelessness, getting by on Diamond’s $1,100 monthly paycheck from McDonald’s while waiting for a red-tape mess over Trena’s disability check to get untangled. I was eager to start providing for my family. I snatched up the first job I could and went to work part-time at the local Walmart, stacking boxes and cleaning shelves for $8.50 an hour. It was just temporary work for a couple of weeks during the holidays. I started on Black Friday, working back in the TV department. Gotta hand it to Walmart: hiring a dude with experience in prison riots was a helluva smart move. People were going nuts. I did exactly what I used to do in the prison yard—kept my eyes open, my back to the wall, and minded my own business. The big difference was how much I enjoyed the chaos this time around. Just being surrounded by all different kinds of people, in all different kinds of clothes, soaking in all the new color, the new sounds, I felt alive in a way I never had before. My senses were on overload.

  Even after my Walmart job was over, I found myself seeking out places where I could be by myself inside a crowd. I happily discovered that the role I had perfected in prison, the detached observer, translated to the outside world as a form of entertainment instead of survival. The Poughkeepsie mall became my favorite hangout, an easy bus ride from home. Going there turned into a daily ritual. Even if I had only a little spending money, I would buy something small—usually a movie or CD—just for that buzz of gratification I got from being able to choose, from doing something so completely ordinary. Fun had become a lost concept to me. The word itself seemed alien, from a foreign language I had once known but forgotten. Fun hadn’t crossed my mind, much less my lips, for twenty-six years. Even being able to idly browse through the stores for hours and ponder my choices was satisfying. I tried on a pair of ostrich boots and promised myself a pair someday. I bought Trena my first gift not from a prison commissary—a ring with little diamonds in it at Kay Jewelers.

  My first day in the mall, I parked myself in the middle of the food court to people-watch. I had to get used to regular people again. I was happy, hell yes, I was happy, but the numbness was slow to wear off, and I needed to discover what feelings actually felt like again. I wanted to scoop up the world in greedy handfuls and bury my face in the sweetness of it, but I was paralyzed, frozen in place. I would get my greasy Chinese food and choose a table where I could sit with my back against the wall and clear sight lines in front and beside me. I watched shoppers stream past and felt calmed by the white noise of their chatter and laughter, the parents scolding runaway toddlers, the teenagers showing off, the old men griping at wives who ignored them. It all washed over me, until the afternoon I heard an unfamiliar sound, one that pierced me straight through.

  How long had it been since I had heard a baby crying? I felt something give inside me, a soft collapse.

  That’s when I knew I was home.

  That one baby’s cry gave me a rush of joy that no street drug ever could, back in the day. Why is it that people always want to hush their children? Every day, I would go to the mall and listen for those few bars of lost music. Let them cry! I mentally urged every passing parent who shushed their squalling baby. Please let me hear that beautiful sound!

  THE DAY THAT I SAT DOWN WITHOUT THINKING at a table in the middle of the food court, my back exposed to the tables full of strangers behind me, I busted out laughing. I’m free! I thought as I started eating. I’m finally free. Fucking free. Six months, it had taken, just to sink in.

  I lined up a position as a counselor at a nonprofit organization that helped parolees reestablish themselves back in society, placing them in jobs or training programs, putting them on track to complete their educations if they’d dropped out. The job wasn’t going to pay the bills, but I liked it, especially when I got through to some young knucklehead the way Shariff had reached me so many years ago in the prison yard. My old mentor had passed, but the lessons he taught me had held true no matter how my life twisted and turned over the years.

  Some of the parolees I coached got serious about themselves and their futures; they were the ones who landed factory jobs and ended up making fifteen, sixteen dollars an hour. Others didn’t get it, and maybe never would. I had one kid who thought he had it all figured out, that he could just keep hanging out on the streets and play like he was the man. He wouldn’t follow through on any attempts to line him up with a legitimate job or secure a spot in a program that would give him a marketable skill. I was more determined than he was to turn his life around. I went by his house to try to talk sense into him, but he was full of attitude. I noticed scars on his face and body; it looked like he’d gotten into a fight. “Yo, man, what happened?” I asked. “Code of the streets, man,” he replied, puffed up with his own self-importance. When I went by a second time, he wouldn’t even come to the door. I called him on the phone, instead. We talked for maybe a minute before he hung up. You’ll need me, I said to myself. It was his mother I heard from next, begging me to do something.

  “My son is in lockup,” she said.

  “Really? What for?” I asked.

  “Possession of a gun.”

  I told her it was out of my hands now.

  Live with the consequences, homie, I silently said. You wanna be a thug, deal with your time. Handle it. You thought you were a man, but you’re not. Listen to the brothers trying to save you that kind of hurt.

  Trena thought I needed counseling myself, that I couldn’t just walk out of prison after twenty-six years for a murder I didn’t commit and plug right into real life. I thought I was doing okay, myself. Handling it. I had my dreams for a future, and it seemed like the big pieces were coming together, but lots of little pieces were missing. It was like getting the best present imaginable on Christmas morning but then discovering the instructions on how to put it together were missing. I knew how to make french fries in a prison cell without a deep fryer, but doing a load of laundry blew my mind.

  “I lost a sock,” Trena announced one day as she came in from the Laundromat with a load of my freshly washed clothes.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Disappeared,” she said with a shrug. “Only one of them came out.”

  I shook my head, disbelieving. Where was my white tube sock? This made no sense.

  “How the hell can you lose a sock in the laundry?” I bellowed. “It’s
impossible!”

  Trena was taken aback by my genuine outrage.

  “It happens, Dewey. Why are you getting so worked up over a sock? There’s war going on, people are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan—” she started in. I cut her off.

  “By the way, it’s my sock, not your sock. Why wasn’t it your damn sock?”

  Trena looked at me and spoke firmly, trying to get through a wall whose thickness she couldn’t fathom.

  “Dewey, you can buy new socks now,” she said at last.

  My clothes were important to me. Overly important, she would say. I had to have them all in a certain order that only I understood. Trena would put them away, and I would hover anxiously, then slip back into the bedroom later to sort and rearrange it all. Trena finally gave up trying to figure out my system and just left the laundry basket in the bedroom for me to take care of. She couldn’t understand why my socks, my pants, even my sneakers, were of such vital interest. They were my things, that was why. In prison, you are only issued so many socks a year. If you want to keep them, you never send them to the prison laundry; you pay someone who works in the laundry to do yours separately. My socks never got lost in Sing Sing.

  Fugitive socks weren’t the only thing that baffled me. It fell on Trena to walk me through the mundane steps of day-to-day life, like filling out job applications on a computer, or getting health insurance, or filing taxes. I had little patience for the niggling details and rigid reality of things like a computer program automatically rejecting me as a job candidate because I had a record. If a recruiter would just meet me face-to-face, I knew they would see how serious I was and give me a chance, but I didn’t know how to negotiate the ever-changing obstacle course of the outside world, and I hated any confrontation. Confrontation, from my vantage point of the past three decades, anyway, was almost always explosive. I knew how to keep my head down and avoid a shank between the ribs, but I had no skills when it came to arguing with the cable company. Trena always knew when to push and how hard. It was easier to withdraw and let her deal with the frustrating things for me. She was fight; I was flight. I was too caught up in my own world to notice the resentment building inside her.

  The outside world was constantly bombarding me with new or rediscovered things to see and hear, taste and touch. Just being able to choose for myself—whether it was what kind of bread for my sandwich at the deli or what time to go to bed at night—felt so damn good that I sometimes went overboard. Every morning, I would go to the quick-shop to buy lottery tickets and sugary treats to indulge my sweet tooth—Little Debbie cakes, candy bars, soda—I couldn’t decide, so I bought them all. Damn candy bar costing a dollar twenty-five, a soda two bucks, what the fuck is this? I thought. Life is a lot more expensive when you’re not bartering for everything with loose cigarettes. I’d come home and empty that little sack like some king piling up his gold to admire. I’d scratch off my lottery tickets, never disappointed that I hadn’t won an instant million dollars or fifty thousand or even five, but happy that I’d had the chance. Trena and I would have coffee together, and she would just shake her head at the ritual I had to follow to make it, boiling my water in my favorite pan on the back left burner. If she or Diamond moved the pan to another burner, it irritated me and I would move it back. I suppose the psychiatrist I refused to see would say that was a symptom of institutionalization, that I took comfort in the predictability of small things I could control. What I didn’t understand was why it should matter to anyone how I made my damn coffee.

  That newfound greediness about making choices and wanting to feel in control led to my first big postrelease blowup with Trena. I honestly thought I was doing something good for the both of us, that this was how you went about being the head of household: I bought a new sofa. With three of us living in the apartment now, and some money saved away, it was time to upgrade from Trena’s smaller, worn-out couch to something the whole family could lounge around on. Trena and I had decided the week before to shop for a new one. So I went to the furniture store and chose a big, deep sofa in black leather. I brushed off the saleswoman who wondered whether I might want to check with my wife before ordering it.

  Trena was furious. She was convinced I did it because we’d just had some squabble and I’d gotten worked up and wanted to prove myself. “You wanted to be Mr. Big Shot,” she fumed. We kept the couch, but it remained a hot button for her, and literally a sore spot for me: I can’t sit on it for long. After a lifetime on hard surfaces, my body can’t deal with softness.

  Both Trena and Diamond felt disrupted by my sudden presence in what had been their snug mother-daughter space for so long. No one had had time to gradually adapt—I wasn’t a date who became a boyfriend who became an occasional overnight guest before moving in and then marrying Trena. I was an absentee husband and stepfather of more than a decade who arrived out of nowhere and started taking up space—emotionally and physically—that hadn’t been cleared for me yet. “Dewey, you’ve been in the bathroom for an hour and ten minutes!” I would hear Trena complain outside the door as I used up all the hot water and fresh towels, enjoying the luxury of taking a shower whenever I wanted and for as long as I wanted, conveniently forgetting there was only one bathroom in the house with two women waiting for their turns to use it.

  Diamond and I weren’t communicating much at all. Reserved by nature, she had withdrawn even more around me. As Trena struggled with poor health over the past several years, Diamond had become the rock she leaned on. I knew my stepdaughter felt like I was invading her territory—I was, after all—but I trusted that she would come back around if I gave her space. Trena kept trying to force it, though, nagging Diamond to socialize if we were sitting in the kitchen and she came in after work to grab a snack. “Why aren’t you talking?” she barked at her one night. Diamond angrily bolted out the door. I went looking for her; it bothered the shit out of me that I couldn’t find her, but she came back on her own a half hour later.

  “I promised your father I wouldn’t let nothing happen to you, that I’d take care of you,” I reminded her. Trena’s ex and I had a civil relationship, and I respected his place in Diamond’s life. “You can’t be doing this shit like running away! This is not how I want this to be!” Diamond confirmed that she felt displaced and resented how I was always using all the hot water or bogarting the TV. It hurt my feelings, but I needed to hear it. Even before I went to prison, I had never known what it was like to be part of a normal family. All I could do was learn as I went, and that process wasn’t as smooth or easy as any of us had hoped.

  This wasn’t anything like my fantasy of coming home from a white-collar job in a nice suit, putting my own key in my own front door, walking into a house I’d bought for my family to find them waiting eagerly for me, the smells of dinner cooking on the stove wafting in from the kitchen. This was hard and frustrating. I never expected freedom to be such hard work. I was different. Even the way I sat and contemplated things alarmed Trena. “It’s not normal to stare at a wall for hours!” she objected, not understanding that a blank wall, in prison, is your mind’s only canvas. Other times, I would spend all afternoon playing chess with the computer, addicted as much if not more to the offer, always, of another chance, as I was to the game itself. Chess reminded me a lot of boxing.

  Even the lighter moments between Trena and me carried reminders of where I had been and what I had gone through. My default setting was a prison yard. My body often automatically processed as a threat whatever I didn’t expect. One time, Trena was feeling playful and decided to creep into the bedroom and scare me like she was a monster. I almost took her head off. “Don’t ever sneak up on me!” I yelled. Truthfully, she didn’t scare me nearly as much as my own reaction did. Self-defense is a habit. The edge I had honed so carefully in Sing Sing seems to be a permanent part of me now; I can’t just undo it or flip a switch to turn my hyperawareness off for good. And I’m not so sure I would want to, anyway. I know better than most people that anything can happen in
this world.

  AFTER SEVEN MONTHS IN MY PAROLEE COUNSELING JOB, I knew it was time to move on to the next level. I needed a better paycheck, for one thing. But I couldn’t bring myself to say I was quitting—it felt like I was abandoning people who needed me—and Trena ended up calling in to quit for me. I took comfort in the other volunteer outlet I had, which I hoped would be the warm-up exercise toward realizing my biggest dream, of owning my own gym and running a boxing program to keep at-risk kids off the streets. An old friend of mine named Ray had a gym in Newburgh, and a couple of aspiring young boxers were training there. I helped out around the gym and coached the kids who sought me out.

  Sometimes my ingrained prison ways drove Trena crazy, like the way I would just plow forward, looking straight ahead, without noticing if I was cutting in front of people. I had to consciously remind myself where I was. I was used to looking out just for myself, but the very skill that had saved me was dogging me now.