Getting Life

by Michael Morton

  Randy was a guy who worked in the darkroom when I first got there. Like me, he was sentenced to life. Unlike me, Randy had served prison time twice before.

  Everyone has something they do well—for Randy, it was teaching. He was born for it. He could take the most complex task and break it down into small, simple steps. That’s how he taught me everything I know about microfilm.

  One morning as we were getting ready for the day, another inmate stepped in. I didn’t recognize him, but I could see from Randy’s body language that they knew each other. I turned around and went back to work. Before I realized anything was wrong, the guy whipped out a shank—a kind of homemade knife—and held it to Randy’s throat. Since Randy stood about eight inches taller than his attacker, the inmate looked up to him. The knife was touching the soft flesh of Randy’s throat.

  The inmate spat out an insult in Spanish. I froze, expecting blood on the floor at any moment. With his fists balled at his sides, Randy glared at the intruder and leaned hard into the blade. I was frozen in place. Randy called the man something unprintable—and then took a step forward.

  In a terrifying battle of wills, Randy dared the guy to cut him. He stepped forward again. Instead of slicing Randy’s throat open, the man backed up. Randy kept pushing him and cussing him, eventually marching the man backwards toward the door—at least twenty-five feet from where they started. After another insult, the guy slipped the blade back inside his pants and vanished.

  I realized I hadn’t breathed since the attack started. I had been sure I was about to see my first prison killing.

  “Randy,” I hissed, “you okay?”

  “Pussy,” he muttered about the other inmate—and went back to work.

  In prison, how you handled a direct challenge was everything. You stayed alive by acting like you weren’t afraid to die. You stayed safe by being reckless. And you were able to live in peace by acting like you were always ready for a fight.

  But every inmate had to accept a certain amount of abuse from the guards. Many of them were what we called “state raised,” meaning their families had lived off the prison system for generations. Their fathers had been guards and they had grown up knowing they, too, would become guards.

  As little boys, they had been regaled with stories of the power their fathers or grandfathers had over the roughest inmates in the state. Too often, they looked at inmates the way a mean farm kid looks at cattle—as a source of income and entertainment—props available around the clock to be bullied, demeaned, or disciplined, whichever seemed like the most fun.

  One day as my fellow Typing Pool workers and I were making our way to our jobs, a guard once again took the opportunity to show us who was boss. We all had to walk down a narrow sidewalk flanked by chain-link fence, stopping midway at a gate until we were buzzed through by the guard looking down on us from the tower. On this day, it began to rain lightly just as we started out. We broke into a jog to get to the gate, go through, and head onto the path that led inside. But when we reached the locked gate, one inmate made the mistake of yelling for the guard to “open up.”

  The guard did not like being told what to do by a lowly prisoner, so we all had to stand there while he asserted his authority. We were trapped as the rain grew stronger and the wind whipped it into our faces. It became a downpour, and still, we stood there unprotected and waiting.

  More inmates started to yell. Some cursed. Still, the guard wouldn’t open that gate. There was nowhere to go and no way to avoid getting drenched. We could see his silhouette in the tower—holding a rifle, looking down on us dispassionately as we huddled together.

  Finally, the gate buzzed and we shuffled through. There was no point in running now—we were all soaked to the bone and feeling homicidal. But most important, from the guard’s point of view, we had been reminded again that we were powerless—that he held the keys, that it was his hand that hovered over the buzzer, deciding whether or not to hit it. The guard hadn’t acted that way because he was required to or because he needed to.

  He did it simply because he could.

  It was just another in an endless series of demonstrations of how prison is a hate factory—where inmates go in bad and come out worse, where men go in ashamed and come out angry.

  I decided I would try to come out smarter. I read everything I could get my hands on—all the books I had intended to read, all the books I knew I should read, all the books I would probably never have read in the free world.

  A group of like-minded inmates joined me for what had to be the world’s roughest book club. You practically had to kill someone to get in. Literally.

  We devoured everything from the classics to Stephen King, and we passed each ripped and dog-eared copy from cellblock to cellblock, bunk to bunk. As quickly as I read one, I would be handed another. We would wave each other on to or off of a planned selection. We critiqued each author’s work with the clarity and strength of opinion that could come only from never having written a book ourselves.

  Reading was the only means of escape available to us. With a book, we could climb over the walls, walk on the beach, meet new friends, and mourn the loss of someone we felt we had gotten to know. We got books from the library, ordered them through friends or family, and eagerly anticipated mail deliveries with book-shaped boxes. We were intellectually starving, and each new read was a feast.

  My parents visited me as often as they could. They also sent me a little money for my commissary account, so I could purchase the occasional extravagance. You know, the real luxuries in life—shaving supplies or a pint of ice cream.

  While my mom had been terrified during my first days in prison, the fact that I was still alive months later helped calm her down. When I related to my parents that I had seen an inmate in the shower with tattoos on every inch of his body, my small-town, churchgoing mother had been shocked. But not so shocked that she didn’t ask, “Even down there?”

  I told her, “Yes—even down there.”

  Her eyes were the size of dinner plates. “What’d it say?”

  “Good God, Mom. I’m trying to stay alive in here. I didn’t bend down and read it.”

  Seeing my parents—or anyone from my old life—was bittersweet. I desperately wanted to have visitors from the free world. But when they left, I felt more alone than ever. When we hugged good-bye, it was a reminder that I wasn’t going to get another hug until they came back, that I couldn’t leave with them, that I had lost virtually everything of value in my life. I had lost Chris. I’d lost many of my friends. I had certainly lost my reputation. I’d lost any property I owned, my car, my savings, any chance I’d once had to make any money. I had lost my freedom.

  And I was now losing the most precious thing in my life—my son.

  By the time our next visit came around, six months later, it had been a year and a half since I’d touched him—since we had really talked, since we’d hugged or played or laughed together.

  By this visit, the TDC had determined that they had to obey court orders and let me have a contact visit. We sat outside at a wooden picnic table—behind double chain-link fences topped with razor wire—under the watchful eye of a guard cradling a rifle in the tower above us. Other inmates were having visits with their families all around us.

  As we talked and I tried to engage him, I realized that he really felt no connection to me. A year in the life of a four-year-old is an unfathomable eternity. I was no longer even a memory. I was a slightly disheveled man in an ill-fitting white uniform, desperately trying to make conversation by asking too many questions about the specifics of his collection of Hot Wheels cars.

  I don’t know what Eric felt that day—or if he felt anything at all.

  But I held on to every word he said for dear life. I was fascinated by his every move, by what he did, by what he chose to eat, by the way he was dressed. I could see that he was growing. He was literally gro
wing away from me. I wasn’t there to see his milestones or create new memories with him or fall asleep on the couch watching TV or the other things that parents take for granted. I wasn’t there at all.

  I asked him about school and sports and his friends. And I memorized his answers to replay in my head, again and again, until our next visit. To the guards, to the other prisoners, even to Mary Lee, it probably looked like Eric and I were having a conversation. It was all a charade, of course.

  He was my son—but he didn’t know me. I hadn’t been part of his world for so long. As I watched him play with his cars at the prison picnic table, I wondered whether he remembered Chris at all.

  Or were both of us forgotten and forever gone?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Merry Christmas.

  I have a new toy—courtesy of my mother’s Sunday School class.

  When I received the envelope with a return address from her church, I thought it would be just another one of those “praying for you” sentiments we inmates often get close to the holidays. Instead there was a small note written in careful cursive, telling me I had a gift waiting for me on my commissary account.

  Apparently, the class had raised enough money to purchase the typewriter I had been craving.

  And they’d thrown in another hundred dollars for toiletries or whatever else I wanted.

  I was overcome with emotion—as though I were a little kid who’d accidentally caught a glimpse of Santa Claus in the living room, setting up a toy train under the tree. Instantly, I felt “Christmas” wash over me—in all its almost forgotten, childlike glory—transporting me to a table overflowing with Mom’s cooking, a comfortable chair in a familiar place surrounded by people who loved me. I could almost hear the music of the whole family in the kitchen laughing and cleaning up after dinner. I could almost feel the peace of sitting on the couch in the living room—coffee and a plate of cookies at my side—bathed in the twinkling lights of the tree, basking in the warmth of a crackling fire.

  I almost wept.

  The lovely, big-hearted ladies at church had held a bake sale to raise money for me. I’d been telling my mother for months how much I wanted that 100 percent plastic, prison-approved, no-parts-that-could-be-turned-into-weapons typewriter on display in the commissary. It was cheaply made, but for an inmate like me, it was expensive.

  I had been saving my money, stretching my deodorant and toothpaste to last for months and months, so I could afford it. I wanted the typewriter for my legal work, but I also wanted to try my hand at writing.

  Inside, I’d been reading so much I felt like I was doing time with Mark Twain, sharing a cell with John Steinbeck, and sitting in the dayroom with Kurt Vonnegut and John Irving. Occasionally Tom Robbins would pop in. Stephen King was always lurking around a dark corner, motioning for me to join him someplace terrifying. They had all become my friends—men I could count on to keep me distracted at night and entertained in the lonely hours when I couldn’t find anyone to talk with who knew how to read.

  Their books felt like gifts, as though they were written specifically for me. I wanted to write back.

  With my new typewriter, I could.

  I began keeping a journal and mailing pages to a friend, Jack Anderson, for safekeeping until I got out.

  Whenever that would be.

  Somehow, typing out a record of the day’s activities or awful spectacles allowed me to maintain a healthy distance. I could laugh at how darkly hilarious everything was. I could tell the story of prison in my own voice, in my own way, at my own speed.

  Or in the future, when and if Eric ever asked me what prison had been like, I could hand my bulging journal to him and say, “Here, Son, read this.”

  Reading that journal now, I am reminded of the long-forgotten details of deaths, transitions, and traumas. I can remember where I was when I wrote a particular entry. With the distance of years, and the safety of being outside prison, I can now acknowledge that the bravado with which I wrote these stories did not always match the mood of the man who sat hunched alone in the dark of his cell, feeling hopeless—tapping out entries.

  I plinked away, one letter, one finger at a time, typing up poorly thought out legal appeals, novels, and short stories I could tweak and tinker with until I was happy. Or I worked on them at least until I was satisfied—or convinced I shouldn’t continue. A few of them were published in small, obscure magazines, sources of triumph for me.

  The days passed.

  The months slid by.

  The years melted together.

  And the clock just kept ticking.

  Behind the walls, you learn that you can fight the clock—but you can never win. I was determined to do something with my time.

  From inside the penitentiary, I went back to college—but this go-round I was living in a particularly restrictive dorm and newly committed to getting my degree. God knows, I had fewer distractions than I did when I was younger. There were fewer women, of course, less booze, and not nearly as many drugs as on most college campuses.

  There were other disruptions—constantly being frisked, sleeping poorly because the guy in the next cell sobbed all night, or worrying about being stabbed in the neck at dinner—you know, the usual. But I soldiered on.

  Sam Houston State University offered prisoners degrees in psychology and sociology. Psychology became my major. My classes were paid for through a Pell Grant. One night a week, I attended a three-hour lecture taught by one of the professors from the university.

  It was a real treat—an oasis of sanity in an intellectual desert. Sometimes the two opposing worlds collided and we’d hear a fight break out between two “students” in our “schoolhouse.” One professor found the juxtaposition of violence and higher learning morbidly funny. When he heard the familiar thuds and scuffling outside his classroom, he would look up appreciatively. “Ah, academia,” he would muse with a knowing smile.

  All the professors seemed to like the arrangement. They could get in an entire semester of teaching by lecturing only one night a week. And inmates were different, in some ways better students.

  I took school seriously, as did most of the men in the program. We were older than college kids and had no hesitation about challenging our instructors if we didn’t agree or didn’t understand—or wanted to know more.

  Many of the inmate students were, however, terribly emotionally needy—always feeling inadequate and wanting affirmation from outsiders. They would ask the instructors how their work compared to that of students on campus. The profs would say honestly that often inmates were better prepared than full-time students—because inmates did their homework, read their material, and came to class ready to talk about it.

  I told myself it was embarrassing that the other inmates needed all this reassurance. In truth, though, I was curious, too—and happy with the answer.

  As I climbed the educational ladder in college classes, I was simultaneously getting a PhD in penitentiary life—the unique rules, rituals, and language of “Slammerland.” I had to catch on to the lingo fast. Words and phrases that meant nothing when I arrived quickly became part of my vocabulary.

  •A chain bus or Blue Bird is used to transport inmates, who are chained together. Blue Bird is a brand of bus.

  •A house is an inmate’s cell.

  •Punks are weak-willed inmates who would do anything to avoid a fight or, alternatively, gay men. In the penitentiary, punk is an insult.

  •Restriction is when the administration takes some “thing” or some activity away from an inmate for a rule infraction. Sometimes, it meant you couldn’t leave your cell, sort of like being grounded if you had very strict—and possibly demented—parents. It also has unofficial and profane applications. Use your imagination.

  •Ride is a word believed to have biker origins. It was used in all kinds of ways. “Who you riding with?” could mean �
��Which sports team are you backing?” Or “Which gang are you with?” Or “Who’s your man?” Riding on the back of a motorcycle is sometimes called “riding bitch.”

  Prison patois went on and on—colorful and coarse, singular in its subject matter, brutal and unfathomable to outsiders.

  My early years in the penitentiary were a dualistic experience. Part of me adapted to prison, while part of me tried to hang on to the person I used to be. I fought the insidious creep of prison slang and mannerisms into my personality. I struggled against the crudeness that comes from living in state-sanctioned internal exile. I took no small amount of pride when someone asked me, “What are you doing here?” The inference was that any fool could see I did not belong behind bars.

  But despite everything I tried and all the good intentions in the world, prison wore me down. Things came out of my mouth that made me cringe. The casual curses, the prison language, the hateful posing—it all oozed out when I didn’t watch myself.

  During one visit with my parents, my mother told me to do everything I could “to stay out of trouble.” As is the prison way, I tore her head off. “Don’t tell me how to behave,” I barked. “You don’t have the slightest idea what goes on in here.” She could see her son was changing, and so could I. Neither one of us liked it.

  I hated how easily I had lashed out at her. I’d done it without thinking, without feeling, without mercy. My rough edges became a coping mechanism.

  But then prison is where coping mechanisms go when they grow up—when a person’s ability to survive psychologically requires a complex system of rationalization and denial, pretense and posturing, the creation of new standards for acceptance and rejection.

  If my family had known what one of my favorite coping mechanisms was, it would have broken their hearts.

  For many of my early years inside, I had crafted elaborate, carefully planned fantasies of how I was going to take revenge on each and every one of the people responsible for putting me behind bars. I knew exactly how Ken Anderson was going to be killed and how Sheriff Boutwell was going to go down. I knew how I was going to do away with anyone who had testified against me. I knew how I was going to get away with it.