When I was wrongly convicted, I grew angry at everything and everyone. I was enraged that fate had compounded the cruelty of Chris’s murder by taking my life as well. In prison, that anger may have actually helped me. My rage kept me strong; it kept me from looking back. My righteous anger protected me and comforted me and shielded me from my awful surroundings; it kept me hard and cynical about what had become of the man—or the little boy—I used to be.
My anger kept me from looking deeper.
I was certainly familiar with—and disdainful of—jailhouse conversions. The running joke was that these guys left their Bibles behind when they walked out the door. I felt the same way about inmates who talked about profound conversions that always seemed to conveniently happen just in time for their parole hearings. To me, it seemed like bargaining with God—finding faith only when you wanted something, only because you wanted something.
I had never done that.
I had never prayed for help when Chris was killed, or when Eric had his dangerous but lifesaving surgery. I had never prayed to be found innocent—even when my liberty hung on the outcome of a court decision or a DNA test. I had never promised to live a better life if God would only take care of some of the rather large blocks on my road to a more comfortable existence.
But I did struggle mightily with all the bad turns my life had taken.
When Eric decided he didn’t want to see me anymore, the blow was so profound that I felt it physically. When he changed his name from mine to that of a man I didn’t even know, when Eric so completely moved on, I felt the blow emotionally, psychologically—and ultimately—spiritually.
Suddenly, the only anchor I had was gone. Eric was the only safe place I’d had left. He had been the receptacle of all my hopes and dreams. He was the light at the end of the tunnel.
He was my idol, my religion—my reason for living. I believed in him. He was everything. He was the only thing.
And he had vanished.
I felt so bad, so hopeless and so defeated and so broken, that I did something completely out of character for me.
I cried out to God.
I begged for a sign, for a reason to go on, for a way out of my abyss and my pain—for some deliverance, some reassurance, some relief.
Something.
Anything.
I got nothing.
Only silence and emptiness—further proof that I’d been right all along: there really was no one there.
I truly was alone.
So I plodded on, day after day.
Every twenty-four-hour stretch was filled with familiar tedium—working, working out, eating, and sleeping. Then doing it again, and again, and again. Each day was just another gray day in prison. There had been thousands like it for me in the past, and it appeared there would be thousands more in the future.
At the end of yet another tiresome and typical day, I pulled myself onto my bunk. It was late and I was worn out. My cell partner was already sound asleep and snoring. I put on my radio headphones and switched off the small light beside my bunk. I tuned in to a classical music station, closed my eyes, and began listening—preparing to be carried away into another night of dark and dreamless sleep.
What happened next changed my life.
With no warning whatsoever, a bright, blinding, golden light burst into the room. The light swallowed up everything; it enveloped me. I felt wrapped in that light—a warm, wonderful, comforting light. It was a sensation different from any I had ever known.
I felt like I was floating above my bunk—fearlessly, effortlessly, blissfully.
My ears were filled not with music but with an incomprehensible roar. I didn’t know if it was the thunderous roll of a massive wind or the crash and rumble of great, rushing waters. I felt I was being lifted by a monumental power—by something mighty but gentle, formidable and yet more forgiving than anything I had ever experienced.
But most of all—more than the beautiful light or the roar of unseen winds or the pure pleasure this experience gave me—I remember the infinite peace and joy, the limitless compassion and the intense love I felt aimed right at me.
At that moment, this power was not meant for all of the world or for all of humanity—it was being shared directly and specifically with me.
Only me.
And I knew without being told that it was nothing less than God’s perfect, boundless love.
After so many years in prison, after being rejected by virtually everyone—after being bounced out of courts and kept behind bars; after losing my wife, my son, my life—this was the moment when everything changed.
Finally, at long last, I felt peace—real peace—and I reveled in it.
I escaped into the beautiful moment.
The next thing I knew my alarm was going off, the lights were on, and I was back in my same old cell, in the same place—in the same prison. I had the same problems and the same limits.
But for me it was a new day.
I had no recollection of my supernatural encounter ending—no memory of turning off the radio or hanging up my headphones or setting my alarm. I couldn’t remember these things, but they had obviously taken place.
I didn’t know what had happened or why it had happened.
I felt I knew “who” had reached out to me, although it would be years before I fully understood or embraced what had taken place that night in my cell.
As part of my graduate work, not long after this event I was assigned to read about the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages. They were described as individuals who had a direct experience of the divine in this life—people who had literally found themselves in the presence of God. The experiences recounted by the old mystics mirrored mine in startling, important ways. It gave me comfort to know I wasn’t the first person to have had an encounter like mine. I wasn’t insane. I was blessed.
That night in my cell I hadn’t sensed an individual vision of Jesus or seen the traditional icons of Christianity. No disembodied voice told me to build an ark because it was going to rain. What I had seen and felt and heard was divine light—and divine love—and the presence of a power that I had sought, in one way or another, all my life.
I explored the possibility that something else had triggered this—what had I eaten that day anyway? What had I done? But after months of questioning, after analyzing and reanalyzing everything I could, I found nothing concrete that would have induced that moment, nothing that could provide a reasonable earthbound explanation for what had happened to me.
In the end, I fell back on Occam’s razor—the old philosophical theory that the simplest explanation is probably the best.
In other words, I realized I had cried out to God—and received exactly what I had asked for—a sign.
Nothing more, nothing less. It was that simple and that profound.
I didn’t change overnight. I was—and still am—a human being with deep flaws. Like everyone else on earth, I still have the capacity to make unfair judgments about others, an inherent tendency to make mistakes of pride, an ability to unthinkingly inflict casual cruelties on others.
I am a work in progress. But I want to be a person who deserves to be in the presence of God.
I still don’t know exactly what happened to me on that dark night in prison. But I do know this—after the night that my cell and my soul filled with light, I am a different man, a better man, a more forgiving man: a man of faith.
That light has stayed with me through years of challenges and disappointments, through fresh heartaches and the settling of old scores—through the discovery of new love and the letting go of old hatreds.
That light has found its way to the center of my life. And the center is holding.
Back then, I didn’t know how much I would need that solid base to survive all that was yet to come.
CHAPTER TWENTY
&
nbsp; There wasn’t a prison in Texas I couldn’t escape.
After close to two decades in maximum security, I knew all the tricks. Just minutes after I entered my cell, I’d vanish. Without a sound, without suspicion, without a sign that gave away my plan—I would be on the other side of the world before anyone noticed I was gone.
I disappeared into different countries and centuries, other lives and faraway places. By keeping my nose in a book or a magazine or an unfinished novel of my own, I read my way out of prison every day. It did more than keep me amused. It kept me sane—and safe.
My literary life kept me from being pulled into the unending ugliness of prison—the fistfights, the petty tyrannies, the mindless repetition of spending years and years doing the same thing and desperately hoping for a different result.
Stacked in my cell, there were always books and authors, characters and adventures—real or imagined—waiting to sustain me intellectually and emotionally, to give me a place to play out my anger, nurture my hope, and indulge my ache for escape. As soon as one book ended, another began. Sometimes, I read two at a time, jumping back and forth from one universe to another.
It was the only freedom I had.
I was an insatiable reader, always seeking writers and stories that expanded and explained my claustrophobic world.
Homer’s Odyssey, with its constantly changing litany of physical and psychological challenges, rang true. Odysseus’s son—living so long without his father—felt painfully familiar. The epic gave me perspective. It reminded me that there have been injustices since the dawn of time. It helped me survive the monsters I faced behind the walls. Some of those monsters were other inmates, but some lived deep inside me—inflicting terrible wounds, feeding on years of accumulated indignities, self-doubt, and despair.
Over time I had internalized a toxic amount of the shame and undeserved guilt associated with Chris’s murder and my conviction. Once in a while, when I would reveal to another inmate—or a free-world prison employee—what had happened to me, I found myself automatically offering whatever external support I had for what I was saying. Even for me, my truth was no longer enough on its own.
“I passed two polygraphs,” I’d say. I’d kept the paperwork, verifying the results.
“The prosecution withheld evidence of my innocence,” I’d tell them—not knowing that even I was completely unaware of the most dishonest and illegal of these omissions.
I assured my audience that I knew Chris was killed by someone else—probably someone who had broken into our house—because “my three-year-old son told me he saw a large man taking a shower with his clothes on.”
I sounded, even to myself, like an old con—itself a kind of awful evidence—further proof that my circumstances had diminished me, made me doubt myself, made me want to get away from me. I hated it. It was so easy to feel hopeless.
Books like The Odyssey and authors like Cormac McCarthy and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reminded me that even the longest journey has a finish line, that someday I would close the book on this chapter of my life. Reading reminded me that finding justice in the end was possible.
In the meantime, I still had to survive.
Not long after receiving my master’s, I was promptly and unceremoniously transferred off the farm and onto the Michael Unit, yet another maximum-security facility.
This place was closer to my parents, which made me happy. I’d been behind bars for nearly two decades, and in that time, I had seen them age too much. They were bewildered by what had happened to me—they simply couldn’t comprehend it—and I could offer no comfort. Knowing they would be able to visit me without making a lengthy and draining cross-state drive made me feel a little better.
But as usual, this new setting was a mixed bag. The cells were larger, but they seemed to be filled with an unusually high percentage of psych patients—dayroom screamers, men yelling at the TV (as well as at imaginary people), prisoners in desperate need of medication, prisoners catatonic from too much medication. There was also more than the usual quotient of flat-out crazy people who really didn’t belong in prison at all. They should have been in a mental institution.
Unfortunately, one of them was my cell partner.
At first, I judged him to be a tolerable sort. But after a few days, I realized how misguided first impressions sometimes are.
I began to notice that he brushed his teeth, showered, and washed his hair with Bippy—a crude abrasive prison cleanser, a lot like Comet or Ajax. Odd practices, sure—but I figured, to each his own.
The topper came when I saw him adding it to his drinking water. He was actually ingesting it. Soon he shared with me his firm belief that his clothes were bugged. Then he said he knew guards came into our cell every night to search through his belongings. He said he knew this because, in the morning, everything was “suspiciously” sitting there, exactly as he’d left it before falling asleep.
Good eye. I’d noticed the same thing.
He told me he was planning to kill the guards who went through his stuff at night—just as soon as he was able to wake up and catch them. He said he had written federal dispensation to do that.
Furthermore, he was a secret agent. I knew that because he told me so.
Ironically, in prison, none of this was considered evidence of mental illness or any serious indication that this guy could be a danger to himself or others. It all would have been darkly hilarious if I didn’t have to spend every night sleeping—completely unprotected—just a foot or two away from him. What if he mistook me for a guard one night?
We both slept lightly.
Difficult as it was at times, the Michael Unit was, for me, a place of great possibility. It was here that the Innocence Project finally made progress on my DNA testing request. Along with the team in the New York office, an attorney from Houston agreed to represent me pro bono. I wouldn’t meet him for months and months, nor would I meet the angels from the New York office for ages. But we talked by phone, exchanged letters, evidence requests, updates, and their deep thoughts on strategy.
Despite the delays, I knew my file was flying across time zones, that the pounds of paperwork and peculiar details of my case were being absorbed by smart lawyers, looking at it all with fresh eyes. And I knew that these generous souls were doing this—without having any real reason to believe me.
I wanted to be worthy.
So I waited patiently—and felt grateful to get the attention of anyone this late in the game.
The Innocence Project, on my behalf, was asking for permission to test all the autopsy swabs taken from Chris’s body—everything from scrapings under her fingernails to the tiny hairs found clutched in her hand. The testing would include evidence that would tell us with certainty whether Chris had been sexually assaulted in any way, something I dreaded learning.
Furthermore, we were asking to test for DNA on the blue bandanna that Chris’s brother had found behind our home. If we found evidence that the square of fabric had been in contact with Chris—if it carried her blood or her cells or her hair, intermingled with that of some unknown third party—it would change everything about my case.
It could very well tell us who had killed Chris.
I prayed it would at least reveal who hadn’t: me.
So I sat in prison, through seasons marked by the changing color of leaves on the big trees outside my windows—spreading oaks that I fantasized about sitting under with a beer.
In winter, with inadequate heating and inadequate clothes, I learned how to keep my hands from getting too cold by making tight fists, then changing the grip every minute or so. I would tuck my thumbs under my fingers and squeeze tight—then reverse it, then do it again. I learned to pull my hands as far up into my sleeves as I could, then cross my arms and hang on tight. I would keep moving and keep hoping someone would turn up the heat inside the building.
At t
he time, I was working in the prison slaughterhouse, which was every bit as pleasant as it sounds. We had no heat in much of the slaughterhouse. In fact, it felt like a meat locker inside—since it was. The buildings we lived in were not much better. Everything was off by at least a season. It felt like heat was running all summer and the air-conditioning was set at full blast in the winter. Eventually—after decades—I stopped being surprised when the guards, year after year, handed out wool blankets as soon as summer temperatures reached the nineties.
Still, just as I had done on the outside, I looked forward to the holidays. Every Christmas I tried to tell myself I was being spared all the mad shopping, crowds at the malls, and tough decisions about what to buy for someone I loved. Instead, I carefully signed Christmas cards in my scratchy script—trying to always include an upbeat message to reassure my handful of friends and endlessly frustrated family—and sent the whole bundle out in a bulk mailing. In one day I was done with my Christmas social obligations—at least for another year.
One Christmas I got a surreal glimpse of Eric’s life. A Houston TV newscast was showing off pictures of decorated homes around the city—and I saw Mary Lee’s address highlighted under a full-screen photograph of a colorfully lit house. Through the windows, the rooms glowed amber. I imagined Eric in one of those rooms, maybe sitting at a loaded Christmas table—laughing, oblivious, lucky to be getting on with his life.
I felt like an astronaut, watching the proceedings on earth from my outpost on the moon.
My holiday meals were not so cozy. One Christmas Day, the chow hall ran out of turkey. Then they ran out of its replacement, chicken—an unforgivable institutional sin. Of course, the near riot that ensued was equally uncalled for, but it did give me the unforgettable gift of seeing a corrections lieutenant race into the chow hall, sweating and angry and wearing a disheveled Santa hat—while holding high a gas grenade, ready to be launched into our laps.
Ah, memories of Christmas past.
Getting Life Page 17