by Damon West
You are approached to buy drugs, and I’m not talking about Advil, although there are guys who sell their prescribed Ibuprofens and Motrins. No, I am talking about the hardest drugs out there: ice (meth), cocaine, heroin, ecstasy. You can also purchase weed, wine (hooch, homemade alcoholic beverages), tobacco products, sex (from inmates and guards), appliances, artwork, tattoos, protection, weapons, and just about anything you can imagine inside of a prison, and many things you cannot imagine. Everything can be purchased with items from the commissary. So many inmates have cell phones. Upon arrival, you are approached by another inmate of your same race asking you what your inmate ID number is and what you are here for. He then whips out his phone and pulls up your info online, effectively eliminating any opportunity to hide from your crimes. In prison, there is definitely a hierarchy, or caste system when it comes to crimes. Not all crimes are created equal. More on that later.
Cell phones are the engine with which the drug market and gang operations run in prison. With these contraband phones, inmates are able to have unrestricted, unmonitored access to the free world. Members of the criminal street gangs can continue calling shots to gangs on the street from the inside. Not only are drug deals planned and executed with this system, more nefarious crimes like assaults, murders, and extortion are also carried out over these phones.
I do my time away from all the underworld nonsense. Becoming involved is a terrific way to find yourself caught up in the drama of other inmates and gangs. Rarely do you see a guy who minds his own business and follows the rules get into a wreck. The prison term for this is “staying in your lane.”
For the time being, it’s enough for me to anticipate the beginning of high school football. Being locked up in the same area where I grew up offers me some unique opportunities at euphoric recall. This part of September reminds me of pep rallies and practices, which I loved. Life was so much better then. Definitely better days.
Recently, I received a letter from my favorite teacher I had growing up. Besides being my Texas history teacher in the seventh grade, he was also one of my football coaches. Now a junior high principal, Mr. Jehlen wrote me in hopes I would consider using my story as a warning to students. He talked about it like it would be within his working lifetime, even offering his school as the first place to give my presentation. His letter lifted up my spirits. It made me think there may be a future of giving back and helping others. A future where a flawed ex-con like me may actually be accepted and forgiven.
CHAPTER 4
Youth Is Wasted on the Young
AS EVERY SCHOOL-AGED CHILD in Texas knows, Friday night football is the only show in town. Football is like a religion, and the best athletes receive praise and worship. Looking back on it now, it seems like an injustice that I should have received so much preferential treatment because I was blessed with a lightning bolt for a right arm. Still, the younger me ate it up.
No one ever gets to where they are in life without a lot of help along the way. I was no different. In fact, I had more help than most.
Having a father who was a sportswriter meant I had access to all things sports. My father would come home from work and play whatever sport was in season with me, either in our front yard or the field across from our house. We played catch all the time. We would go out in the field, and he would pitch batting practice to me for hours. He claims I never could hit him out of the park. Those are some of the greatest memories of my youth.
You don’t have to look far to know from where my athletic ability derives. Although anyone who knows my father knows he is a golfer before anything else. He was a good athlete in general. Originally from Missouri, he began his athletic career playing multiple sports in his hometown of Centralia. From the stories told by my grandmother, anytime my father got the basketball in his hands, everyone in the crowd would say, “Two.” His athletic ability came out when we played sports too. He could pitch, catch, throw, shoot hoops, and, yes, play golf.
To him, golf was more than just a sport; it was a tool. He wanted his sons to learn the sport at an early age because golf was something you could play for the rest of your life, and so much business is conducted on golf courses throughout America every day. The man has played more golf than some pros. He always said, “A bad day at the golf course is better than a good day at the office.”
How many three-year olds have their own real golf clubs? My brothers and I did. My father had his old clubs cut down to the size of a child’s club and regripped. While other kids were hitting Whiffle-ball golf balls with big plastic clubs, my brothers and I were swinging heavy five-irons and hitting Titleists.
We played in junior golf tournaments, too. While I was never that good, I loved to compete. For some reason I never fully took to golf, even though I had every opportunity and resource available to me to do so. My father’s job took him around the country playing some of the best courses. These were trips my brothers gravitated toward. My fascination was for other sports. First baseball, then football. I dreamed of being Joe Montana.
I began realizing my ability as an athlete when I was eleven years old. That was when I met Coach John Bass. He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. I was always very athletic, and loved sports, but he saw untapped potential on a much higher level. When he began coaching my Little League baseball team that year, my life took on new purpose. By the time the season was over, I was an All-Star with one of the best bats in the league for my age group. The next year, I was the best bat in the league, batting cleanup and winning the titles for the highest batting average and RBIs. Had it not been for Bob Hayes outpacing me in home runs, I could have had the Triple Crown.
Hitting was only one area where Coach Bass made me realize my potential. He saw the natural power I had in my arm and tried like hell to cultivate me into a pitcher. My fastball was something to be feared, but I never had a second pitch. Batters can adjust to a one-trick pony on the mound, and they did. I got rocked a lot as a pitcher. No sweat. My true passion in baseball was centerfield. I absolutely loved the free range of the outfield, and I could gun just about anyone out at home from anywhere.
More than anything else, Coach Bass instilled in me a work ethic like no other. He pushed me until I couldn’t push myself. I couldn’t get enough of it. I loved being the star athlete.
Was this ego? Pride? Yes, and yes.
Yet it was also the beginning of a love affair I believed would last forever, the birth of a voracious appetite for sports. I used all my free time to hone my craft in whatever sport was in season. In my world, sports were king.
Now that I was aware of the talents God had blessed me with, it was time to pick up the sport I loved the most but until then had been too young and too inexperienced to play: football.
I used to watch college football games on Saturdays with my father, and the players were like gods. I wanted to be one of them so badly. I would often tell my father, “One day I will be playing in those stadiums.” He was very encouraging with my sports ambitions, nourishing those dreams.
In sixth grade, I decided I wanted to be a quarterback. My calculus was pretty simple. The quarterback got all the attention, and everyone loved the quarterback. But it went further than that. Quarterback seemed like the only position that was as challenging mentally as it was physically. It was the most cerebral position in all of sports. Even a twelve-year old could see that. Playing quarterback became an obsession. In a word, it was intoxicating. Obsession and intoxication. Two words I now know go hand-in-glove with addiction.
No matter how major a role sports were taking in my life, addiction was also assuming a position of prominence. Secretly, I was drinking all the time, getting into my father’s beer and my friends’ parents’ liquor and wine. Smoking cigarettes was pretty common. Soon, I was smoking pot.
Why would a kid who seemingly had everything going for him in life feel the need to put chemicals into his body to alter
the way he felt? Good question. Now that I understand addiction, it is obvious to me that I was in the early stages of my disease.
During my high school years, my substance abuse was not the only problem. All too often I found myself skipping school, breaking rules, and having sex. My hormones were running wild. I not only suffered from addiction, I had major character issues.
This would have derailed the average kid. Or at the very least it would have landed the average kid in trouble. I was not the average kid. Or so says the ego of the child addict. I suffered from uniqueness among many other afflictions.
High School Football
I worked my butt off to be the best quarterback I could be. Devotion is too soft of a term for my commitment to the sport, the position, to my team, and to myself. The work ethic and drive I discovered through Coach Bass was put into overdrive now that I discovered my true passion. I would become damn good.
My days started earlier than everyone else’s. Often up and running by 6 a.m., I would finish some mornings off by throwing footballs through the tire swing in the field across the street from my house. However, more often than not, it proved to be easier to throw balls through the tire in the evenings, after practice, because of the dew on the ground in the morning. During the season, I went to school early to watch film on the teams we were playing each week. I was a firm believer in film study because everyone has a tell when they play their positions, and every defense tells you what you want to know.
Joe Montana, my idol, talked about being able to eliminate receivers and even half of the field by knowing what the defense was going to do before they did it. He said he watched hours of film each week. It sounded like good advice to me. If he could do it, so could I.
In the summers, I drove around Port Arthur and dragged receivers out of their houses to throw routes with them. When I couldn’t find any receivers, I would find kids playing on the various city parks and throw passes until they were exhausted. I ate, drank, and slept football.
Thomas Jefferson High School was a 5A school, the biggest classification at the time, making it all the more remarkable to be a three-year starter at quarterback. At about 5-foot-10 and 165 pounds, I was not your prototypical quarterback. What I lacked in size, however, I made up for in grit and dedication. I was scrappy and witty on the field, always looking for an angle to win. I absolutely abhorred losing. Still do.
We had some good teams, but not my sophomore year. That was the most difficult. My junior year was great. Joey Mouton and Pearce Pegross, two of the best receivers in the state, made me look damn good. That was a team that should have done more. Our district was fierce that year, and we did not make the playoffs. My senior year was our best all-around team of all three years. While my numbers were not as high, the most important numbers were up: wins. We returned to the playoffs for the first time in five years. It was the culmination of a group of guys who had been playing together since eighth grade.
Although my parents worked hard at trying to keep me humble, keeping my head out of the clouds was not always an easy task. I was very cocky, some would even say arrogant. However, I was not a bad guy. I detested bullies and tried to make others feel good about themselves. A cocky kid at times and a nice guy at others, I went out of my way to hang out with some of the kids who would be waiting by the gates after the game. My mother would remind me on Friday mornings, the mornings of our games, to be sure to stop and say hello to my biggest fans.
My favorite crew, my biggest cheering section, were the handicapped kids on the front row from my school and the Hughen School. They were great. Nothing but joy and gratitude on their faces. I often thought of those kids when I felt down or cheated in life. God will put people, and sometimes events, in your life to give you perspective.
My ego was put in check by my father if I did not perform well on Friday nights. His way of doing it was unique. He would put it in the Saturday morning paper for all the town to see. There is nothing like having to read about your shortcomings in a game. It felt awful enough letting my team down when I knew I could have done better. But having my father explain in his style of prose was a big reality check. Truth be told, it did not bother me after my rough sophomore year. His reasoning was spot on, too. No one could ever accuse my father of playing favorites when it came to him doing his job as a writer. He gave me a crash course in media coverage that made other writers’ critiques sound friendly by comparison.
My mother thought he was too tough on me when I screwed up. I did not complain about it because he made up for it when I did well. His job could not have been easy, he loved me so much and helped nurture me to the point that I was in a position to be the star quarterback, under the microscope. I compared it to the kids whose fathers were coaches on our teams.
I loved my father, and he loved me. We were always close.
Football was always a vehicle for me. Sure, I loved the game and worked hard at it, but it had a definitive purpose. It was my ticket out of Port Arthur. Nothing and no one was going to get in the way of this goal.
Every football player’s dream is to receive a scholarship and take their game to the next level. Yet the odds are stacked against you. My dream came true in the form of a full athletic scholarship to the University of North Texas. More and more, I was identifying myself by my ability to throw a football, and less by the other, more important internal qualities that truly make a person good and decent. I was setting myself up for a fall of epic proportions.
Jimmy Johnson
I was allowed to do so many things other kids were not able to do because of my proximity to my father. While my brothers traveled with my father to some of the nicest golf courses in the country, I traveled with him to tons of Dallas Cowboys games from 1991–1993. This was right at the beginning of their Super Bowl runs.
Jimmy Johnson is one of Port Arthur’s favorite sons. My father had always covered Jimmy closely, not just because he was from our town, but because he was one of the greatest football coaching minds ever. Dad recognized that early on. Their relationship has evolved over the years.
While Jimmy was the head coach for the Dallas Cowboys (1989–1993), I was a teenager playing football. One week, when the Cowboys were playing the Oilers, my father surprised me for my birthday with a sideline pass. What kid gets a sideline pass to watch the Cowboys play?
It was at that game that my life of anonymity would change. I was on the Cowboys sideline watching the game when Jimmy became tangled up in his own headphone cord. This was before wireless headsets. He grew impatient with the guy shadowing him with the cord, looked around, and saw my familiar face.
“Damon, get over here!” he yelled at me.
“Yes, sir!” I shouted with excitement.
Jimmy grabbed the loop of cord extension he had just taken from the guy who tangled him up, thrust it into my hands, and said, “Take this cord and follow me. Keep up.”
Just like that, I was holding Jimmy Johnson’s headphone cord. At every game I could travel to, there was a sideline pass waiting for me at the team hotel the night before the game. Every week, when the cameras would zoom in on Jimmy during the game, there I was, right behind him, on national TV.
The trips to the Cowboys games are some of my best memories from high school. For example, in 1991, before the Cowboys’ playoff game against the Bears, the other sideline guys and I played a pickup game right there on Soldier Field. I was playing QB, dropping bombs from the 50-yard line into the end zone. I was hamming it up, and that’s an understatement. Thousands of fans were screaming and clapping every time I threw the deep ball. Watching from the press box, my father told me all about the scene when I saw him after the game.
Outside of the addiction issues, my character flaws, and the sports stuff, I had a pretty normal life. All my grandparents were still alive when I became a teenager. By the time I went to college, only my father’s mother, my Grandma Marge, was still a
live. My mother’s side of the family, the Cajun side, was huge. I enjoyed a wonderful childhood with my brothers and many cousins. Holidays were so much fun, especially when my mother’s mother, my Grandma Montie, was still alive. I was particularly close to my maternal grandparents. When I was eighteen, I left home for college a few weeks after graduating high school. It was June 19th, 1994. With everything in life figured out, and a big-time college career ahead of me, I could not be bothered with the concerns my parents had for me when I drove off to a new life that day.
“Youth is wasted on the young,” my father told me as I hugged and kissed him and my mother goodbye. As I was driving away, I realized that no matter how independent-minded I was, I was going to miss my parents very much. I loved them and did not want to let them down.
CHAPTER 5
Menagerie of Miscreants
Prison Diary
Christmas Day, 2011
Today, a cloud is hanging over the entire unit. Christmas in prison is depressing.
I get it. Most people in here probably have some genuinely good memories from this day. I had more love than a child could ask for, need, or want. I was lucky.
Out of necessity, I’ve learned to make the best out of a bad situation. Prison is the ultimate testing ground for such a philosophy. I’ve never considered myself an optimist. Pragmatist suits me better because I’ve accepted things as they are and, therefore, I am practical about my realities. Peace comes only with acceptance. With acceptance, I can find the best outlook. That outlook is my key to escape this place mentally and spiritually every single day. My sanity demands it.
CHRISTMAS IN PRISON IS SPECIAL as far as daily ritual goes. At breakfast, each inmate is served an apple and an orange. The only other time you will receive whole fruit is on Thanksgiving. At lunch, there will be turkey or chicken, dressing, cobbler, pie, celery, pickles, and no beans for once. Beans are served a lot.