The Change Agent

by Damon West

  As I was being helped off the field, I was in utter disbelief that I was seriously injured. It was only when I was in the X-ray room in the stadium that I learned the severity of my injury. It was a third-degree separation, meaning three of my ligaments snapped off my distal clavicle bone. No way was this going to be easy to overcome.

  I showered alone in the locker room during the second quarter. My arm was in a sling and the pain was pretty severe. Whatever they gave me for the pain only helped physically. After my shower, I changed into the clothes I had traveled in. It seemed like I had just taken them off to play a football game. Moments ago, yet another life. A life where I was the star quarterback. I went back to the sidelines to watch the rest of the game.

  My mother spotted me and came down from her seat to check on me. She is a nurse, so this was right in her wheelhouse. She told me how much she loved me and how proud she was of everything I had accomplished. I thanked her, but said that I did not feel like talking. We were both devastated, although for different reasons. Hers were empathy and sympathy, mine was an existential threat to my ego and pride.

  We lost 55–0. When we were shaking hands with the Aggies after the game, R.C. made it a point to talk to me. There was real emotion in his voice and tears in his eyes about my fate. As a father, a coach, and a friend, R.C. was devastated. I will never forget his genuine concern for my well-being that day.

  Surgery was required to repair my shoulder. Through my father’s connections with Jimmy Johnson, I was going to have my procedure done by the premier quarterback surgeon for the NFL. Dr. Robert Vandermeer was confident he could remove my distal clavicle bone and have me ready for spring football. The surgery was a success. The rehab was up to me.

  Rehab

  Determined to overcome this setback, I attacked rehabbing my shoulder with tenacity and laser-like focus. This required early morning and after-practice commitment. No worries. I was dealing with an existential threat to my life, one that had become singularly focused on superficial things. Looking back on it with sober and humble eyes, I now know I was setting myself up for a colossal fall and epic failure. Because I had pushed God and all other important things out of my life, my happiness as a person was contingent upon my success as an athlete.

  Although spring football went well, Coach Simon was not going to allow another situation where I could end up as his starting quarterback, nor did he intend to allow me to start anywhere on his team.

  When a person signs an athletic scholarship, it is not a guarantee for the entirety of college. The NCAA says you have five years of academics available to play four athletic seasons, yet your scholarship is renewable for one year. At the end of every school year, the student-athlete will go into an informal meeting and “renew” his scholarship for another school year, sign on the dotted line, and be contracted in for one more season (and year).

  In May of 1997, after I got out of class one morning, I went to the fieldhouse to meet with my quarterback coach, Coach Hall. He revealed to me that Coach Simon might not be renewing my scholarship, possibly cutting me from the team. As a result, I would no longer be enrolled at the University of North Texas.

  “There is nothing I can do,” Coach Hall told me. “I don’t get a vote in this. I’m truly sorry, Damon.”

  To say I was devastated would have been an understatement. I was completely at Coach Simon’s mercy.

  A few hours later, I met with Coach Simon. The meeting was not very amicable; actually, it was nasty, ending with me being thrown out of his office with no renewal of my scholarship. Within forty-eight hours, however, I was called back up to his office. It turned out Coach Simon was going to be reinstating my scholarship. Permanently. Coach Simon’s posture towards me pivoted on a suggestion my father made on how to deal with Coach Simon, from a sportswriter’s perspective. It turned out to be a real game changer.

  The next month, the summer of 1997, I was positioned to make a run for the backup role. I was exactly where I was the summer before. All things considered, life was good.

  Achilles Injury

  In June of 1997, I experienced another fork-in-the-road day. Like the other days of this magnitude, it began inconsequentially. I worked out with my teammates, played golf with the quarterbacks, and was going to help my girlfriend move in to her new apartment. There was nothing to indicate a life-altering event was about to occur.

  Having replayed the events of this day over and over in my head, I still cannot believe it happened the way it did. After moving my girlfriend into her apartment, I suffered an injury, in the shower of all places, that turned my world upside down. I severed my left Achilles tendon when a piece of a towel rack fell off the back wall of the shower and shattered on the side of the tub while I was in there.

  An Achilles being severed or torn has to be one of the worst pains a human can experience. Aside from having to learn to walk again, I would have to deal with nerve endings reconnecting and muscular atrophy in my left leg. For the first time in my life, I was down for the count and not getting back up. Defeated, I began a pity party that would last for over a decade.

  My football career was officially over that night. More importantly, something else was officially over that night: my love of God. I was angry with God and mad at the world.

  Why me?

  How is this fair?

  What am I going to do with my life now?

  With all the requisite victimhood necessary to begin imploding my life, I would take that wrong turn. This existential vacuum in my life was going to be filled with more negativity than I ever could have imagined.

  My pity party was going to be fueled with cocaine, ecstasy, pills, mushrooms, and just about any drug I could get my hands on. My grades suffered tremendously. I was a terrible person to be around too. This is when I began getting into felony criminal addictive behavior. The Lambda Chi fraternity house became a hub for all sorts of illegal activities revolving around narcotics and thefts, and I was at the center of most of it.

  Like every addict, I was selfish and self-seeking. This was the new norm for the once All-American kid from a loving home who could have been anything he wanted to be. My days and nights were consumed with nefarious living. I went from hanging with the bad crowd to becoming the bad crowd. Looking back through the rear-view mirror of history, this would become a recurring theme when in the throes of my addiction.

  I took the party life off campus whenever I could, going the half-hour drive into Dallas a lot. One of the places I ventured off to when the weather was in season was a lakeside party enclave called Sneaky Pete’s on Lake Lewisville. It was a hangout for people from all walks of life, but especially for the wealthy Dallas crowd. I didn’t own a yacht, but I had a buddy who did.

  Rankin Fulbright, III was a friend I met out on the lake one summer day. Rankin was the up-and-coming defense attorney in Dallas in the late ’90s. He always told the alleged DWI cases, dope dealers, murderers, and others, to be sure and put some money aside for the lawyers. Defending those clients paid for his lifestyle.

  Rankin always had the most interesting people on his yacht from the many cases he was working. I met DEA agents, FBI agents, judges, district attorneys, defendants, and other alleged criminals.

  One weekend, I met someone consequential on his yacht.

  “Damon,” Rankin said, “I want you to meet a friend of mine, Colonel Snipes. Colonel Snipes, this is Damon West, he played football at North Texas.”

  “Nice to meet you, Colonel Snipes,” I said, shaking his hand. “I’ve met tons of people on Rankin’s boat, but this is the first time I have ever met a colonel.”

  Snipes was retired, but they still called him Colonel Snipes. He was retired from JAG, the military court, and was an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Texas.

  Damn. I had never met someone from JAG, nor had I met a federal prosecutor.

  Life is fu
nny sometimes. I had no idea that the man I met and drank beer with all day on Rankin’s yacht would go on to become Judge Mike Snipes. The man who would, ten years later, deliver my sentence of sixty-five years in prison.

  The party that was my life raged on. I managed a 1998 campaign for a guy running for mayor in the city of Denton, a local businessman and pub owner named Scott Finfer. I mostly worked for free beer in his pub, Kinky’s. Kinky’s was my hangout. My buddy and fraternity brother, Jeff Boyd, tended bar there, and you never knew where the night would take you. The women loved Jeff, so proximity to him was usually a well-placed move.

  Scott was always into gimmicks to promote the campaign and the pub. He once bought an old yellow school bus, ripped out the seats, put in leopard print couches, and had “Shaggin’ Wagon” painted on the side with purple flames. I drove this highly illegal moving drug- and alcohol-fueled party bus around the metroplex all the time. Amazingly, I was never pulled over. Had I been, this story would have been cut short in college.

  Scott lost the campaign handily. We knew we wouldn’t win, but we had fun. Somehow, I graduated college in 1999 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology. I say somehow because my cocaine consumption was outrageous, and my criminal life was taking over my legitimate life.

  After college, while working for a dot-com, I realized I needed to get out of the Dallas area. My life was spinning out of control. I could no longer blame my lifestyle on youthful indiscretions. When the dot-com bubble popped in the spring of 2000, taking the company I worked for with it, I was in a position to make a move.

  Perhaps it was that preservation-of-life instinct that kicked in. That God-wave that people tap into and mistakenly call it a sixth sense. Whatever it was, I was being told to get out of Dallas.

  That time, I listened.

  I had always loved politics. To me, there was no other choice but to move to Washington, D.C., the mecca for politics. By the summer of 2000, I was ready to go. My brother Brandon, who was living in Austin, was going to move with me. We arrived in D.C. just in time for one of the most divisive and contentious presidential elections in U.S. history. By the end of November, I was working for Houston Congressman, Gene Green, and the nation still did not know who had been elected president. Protests were happening all over Capitol Hill.

  To close out the year 2000, George W. Bush was declared the winner, Brandon and I were living right by Eastern Market on Capitol Hill, Grayson was in college at Lamar, and my parents were living on the golf course in Labelle, a tiny town about twenty minutes away from Port Arthur. For my father, this was heaven, as you could never play too much golf.

  My substance abuse issues continued to worsen. Away from Dallas, I did not have access to cocaine anymore. No matter, I would substitute daily inebriation for it. The culture on Capitol Hill encouraged heavy drinking. Add to that the proximity to power and all the delusions that accompany that, and I was right at home. My Godless life was growing in fertile ground.

  Photo courtesy of Derrick Freeman

  Port Arthur Woodrow Wilson Junior High football team in 1988. I’m #17.

  In 1980, my father often took me to Lamar University football practices when he was covering them. A photographer captured this moment of me checking out a football helmet.

  High School football in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1993.

  Courtesy of University of North Texas Football

  University of North Texas football team in 1995. I’m #7 on the third row.

  With Jimmy Johnson on the sidelines.

  CHAPTER 7

  Debts Demand to Be Paid

  Prison Diary

  Friday, March 2, 2012

  Today is my mother’s birthday. She is 65. It is also Texas Independence Day. Texas is 176. Happy birthday to both.

  I am eternally grateful for my mother and her unconditional love for me. She has been a constant in my life. Mothers, I have discovered, are like that. They love you no matter what. They will love you when no one else will. When you cannot even love yourself, they will love you.

  THERE WAS A SONG THAT WAS POPULAR around 2006, after I was well into my meth addiction, called “Hate Me” by a group named Blue October. In the song, the singer is asking his mother to hate him for all the pain he has caused her because of his addiction. It all begins with an eerie, actual recording from his mother on his answering machine. She is checking in on him because she is worried about his mental state following their last conversation. She said that he made her “nervous.”

  I have received dozens of those messages from my mother. They were messages because I didn’t always take calls from my parents anymore at that point. They knew something was wrong with me, but what could they do? I was an adult man living in Dallas, six hours from their home.

  I lied to them whenever I could. I made up all these stories about jobs I had, where I was working, new opportunities coming my way. All lies. When the lies were no longer keeping them at bay, I sent their calls to voicemail. I couldn’t turn the ringer off, because I had to be accessible for meth dealers, people who would buy my stolen goods, and other meth addicts who were criminals like me. All meth addicts are criminals, and all are thieves.

  “Hate me today. Hate me tomorrow. Hate me for all the things I didn’t do for you.” That was the chorus to the song that screamed at me.

  I was obsessed with that song. It was like I was flogging myself every time I heard it. It was my punishment for a life of addiction, failure, and unreciprocated love. I went to Wal-Mart and stole a copy of the CD. This song was speaking to me, making me ask myself uncomfortable questions, questions whose answers baffled me.

  How can my mother love me after all the pain I have caused?

  Why won’t she just give up on me and leave me alone?

  Is there anything so awful I could do that I would lose my mother’s love?

  Does she know it hurts me to hurt her?

  That last one is the typical posture of the addict. The victim stance. It was always about me. Selfish, self-seeking, self-absorbed. That has always been me in my addiction. I asked myself all the above questions without any genuine concern for their answers.

  * * *

  Immediately following my “rock bottom” moment of the jury sentencing me to sixty-five years, I was ushered into an anteroom holding area outside the courtroom, which had thick glass separating me from the courtroom door. For a brief moment, I was all alone. I thought about my stupid prayers for probation that went unanswered. Probably because I was trying to bargain with God. I guess He did not like my offer.

  Then the courtroom door opened and in walked my parents. They looked terrified. The glass partition between us had tiny holes drilled into it so conversation could be heard. Dear Lord, what do I say?

  My mother spoke first.

  “Damon, neither one of us really knows how to process the sentence we heard the judge give you ten minutes ago, nor do we know how to process all the things we heard about you for the past six days of your trial. That will come later, I believe. They agreed to give us five minutes to speak with you, so we need to talk quickly.”

  I’ll never forget her words.

  “Debts in life demand to be paid,” she said.

  She said the state of Texas had just hit me with a massive bill for a debt I owed society. Since I did the things they accused me of, I was going to go to prison and pay my debt.

  “Do you understand me, Damon?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  She told me I hadn’t been paying my debts for a long time now, that I owed an unpaid debt to them. “We raised you with proper morals, and provided you with all the love, opportunities, and support to achieve any goals. Do you understand what I am saying, Damon?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  She told me that I could not go to prison and become someone they don’t recognize. Specifically, I was not to go to prison and get into one of
the many white hate gangs because I was scared. I was raised better than to hate. “You’re from Port Arthur, a giant melting pot of a city. Race has never been the lens you were taught to view life through. Don’t start now. Besides, anything you look at through the lens of race will give you a distorted image.”

  Moreover, she said, I was not going to prison to sit around. She told me to get on God’s back, let Him carry me, and work on myself. She reminded me I couldn’t do this alone, and that my way of doing things obviously did not work. “Like I told you the first time you called from jail, ‘You are now a captive audience to God.’”

  “Mom, I’m scared.” I started to cry. Then I looked at my father, whose face had regained composure, masking pain, confusion, and rage.

  How disappointed this man was in me was written all over his face.

  I am so sorry, Dad.

  Now was not the time for an apology. Besides, my apologies rang hollow. Only my actions would speak for me going forward.

  My mom said they couldn’t even imagine what kind of hell I was about to go through. She reminded me again that my only option was to do this time with God as my guide.

  “You owe us this much. No gangs. Don’t you dare come back with a bunch of swastikas tattooed all over your body. Don’t you dare come back as someone we don’t recognize.”

  She made me promise I would come back from this as the man they raised me to be.

  “I promise, Mom. No gangs, and I will let God carry me,” I answered with no hesitation.