by Damon West
Going about my usual routine of playing hard on defense but doing nothing on offense because I never got the ball, I was at half court, waiting for my team to either make or miss their shot. Out of nowhere, the basketball was passed to me. It was my first pass in all six days. Confused, I started dribbling by habit and took a wide-open shot.
I missed. Damn. Had I known I was going to be able to shoot, I would have somehow mentally prepared myself for it. It was amazing the jolt that simple pass did to my confidence. For the first time since I started this crazy quest for respect, I felt like I was on a team. It felt so good.
The guys were passing the ball to me more and more, and since I was always uncovered, I was able to shoot freely. After a few attempts, I made my first shot.
Then I heard it.
“Good shot, West!” someone yelled.
My name. The same name I had been called all my life by coaches, educators, and friends. West, not White Boy. My name never sounded so good.
After the game ended, most of the black guys on the court circled up around me, much like they had six days before when I jumped on their basketball determined to be a team captain. This time their body language was not hostile, their posture nonaggressive.
“West, you pulled something off that none of us have ever seen from a white boy,” J-Blood said. “You took everything we threw at you, and you even gave some back when you could. No one wanted you out here, man. No one. We all took turns hurting you, but you kept coming back. Damn! That took guts.”
I told J-Blood, and by proximity the entire court, that I felt I had no choice because every time those cell doors rolled, I dreaded hearing someone call me out to fight. “That gets old. The white guys hate me, y’all hate me. I get it. Just let me exist without a constant threat of undeserved violence.”
“West, you’re all good with us, man,” said J-Blood. “You’ve earned our respect. You won’t have to worry about the blacks anymore. We’ll spread the word. Believe that, homey. You’re one tough-ass white boy.”
He embraced me.
Then, one by one, each man came forward and either shook my hand, gave me “dap” or embraced me with the high-five/half-hug. For a whole week, these guys had pounded on me, and now they were publicly showing me respect. It felt so good, I honestly wanted to cry. Damn if Mr. Jackson wasn’t spot on with that coffee bean stuff. The pot of boiling water he called prison had just became a pot of coffee.
* * *
Prison has changed a lot for me since that week of basketball. I enjoy a wide latitude of mobility. In here, everyone has a nickname. Most often, these are given to you, not chosen. Mine is “The Mayor.” I earned it because I walk around conversing and shaking hands with just about everybody I can. One guy remarked that I looked like I was running for office, and the Mayor of Stiles was born.
Looking back on that pivotal moment, that week of hell on the basketball court, I think about the times growing up when my father and I would read the paper or watch the news together. He would often ask me, “What’s your takeaway from that story?” He wanted to know if I was truly absorbing the reporter’s main points. I learned a lot about being an objective observer from him.
In order to fully absorb the moral to the story, with that event in my history, you must look past that scared white guy on the basketball court and put yourself inside the heads of the black men on that court. Think about how a bunch of black men, who had been programmed to hate me simply because that’s what the different races do to each other in this place, had to cope with some alien white guy stumbling into their world one day. Every bit of social and environmental conditioning in prison told them I didn’t belong out there, that I was a threat to their belief systems. Old belief systems, whether good or bad, usually win out in the end.
My takeaway from that story is that people can change. The power of positive energy and the resilience of the human spirit are forces that have the ability to overcome negativity and hate. At their core, people have a need to belong and to be loved. This place has taught me just as much about love as it has about hate, a dichotomy I had never expected to discover when that prison bus dropped me off in this seemingly hopeless world.
CHAPTER 14
The Animal I Have Become
MY FIRST BURGLARY SPREE was during the Thanksgiving holidays of 2005. It was in the expensive high-rise condos where Jessica lived. From time to time, when I could score some meth, I would stay there because I didn’t have a home. These burglaries were not of people’s residences, but rather of their hallway storage rooms, which were guarded by a simple door handle, lever-like lock. Having access to the entire building with Jessica’s key fob and garage clicker, I could come and go as I pleased throughout all hours of the night. Since I was up most nights, I prowled the hallways on my mission to steal for meth.
Avoiding people was paramount for several reasons. One, as a selfish drug addict, I cared about my safety. Being identifiable was not conducive to staying free. I knew these storage burglaries would be reported once the residents returned home from the holiday weekend. The other reason was that I genuinely didn’t want to encounter anyone and have things turn violent. I knew what I was doing was wrong. Unfortunately, my conscience was not enough to prevent me from doing terrible things to get my drugs. My victims did not deserve what I was doing to them, to be sure. The last thing I wanted to do was make them also suffer physically.
Jessica had no clue I was stealing from her neighbors, or that I was using her vehicle (I didn’t have a vehicle at this point) to move the stolen items from her building to dope houses. Her first clue was when the Dallas Police Department showed up at her door because the security cameras caught me on the elevators making several trips with the luggage cart I borrowed from the lobby. Because I covered all the items up every time I made a trip, there was no way to identify what was on the cart. But they could identify me, and they knew where I was staying. It would not be the last time an elevator camera caught me in the act of a burglary. It was the last time that I was able to set foot in Jessica’s building. The streets of Dallas and, eventually, other dope houses were my new residences.
It was when I was homeless and bouncing around from one dope house to the next that I observed other addicts shooting meth, injecting it into their veins. I had heard about shooting dope, but I never saw it with my own eyes. The intensity with which these addicts lived under the lash of the needle scared the hell out of me. The high they described was different from what I experienced smoking or eating meth. Having an intense phobia of needles and watching the potentially deadly sharing of syringes scared me away from ever wanting to try their method. I would always remain a smoker. The decision no doubt spared me the harshest effects of drugs on my body.
When I ventured out of the meth den in which I was living each day, I didn’t view the world the same as a normal person would. When I rode or walked through a neighborhood, apartment complex, or store, I only saw opportunities to score more meth. I looked for vulnerabilities in security everywhere I went. I noted cameras, neighbors, vehicles, dogs. It was not a question of if I was going to find something to steal, but when. If I was awake, which was most of the time on meth, I was a threat to society. A menace to society.
Thankfully, at this point, Gato was no longer in my life. When I lost my real value, my apartment, I was no longer useful to him. The thought of him eventually torturing me in someone’s bathtub the way I had witnessed him torture so many was enough for me to find a different connection once I was on the street and living in dope houses.
My new dealer, a white Aryan-type ex-con named Mark, would trade stolen property for meth. His dope was coming from old meth cooks who lived out in the country, in the woods, so it was different than the stuff Gato got from the cartels. In an effort to distinguish their dope from the cartels, these white meth cooks, most of whom were ex-cons, called their product “Peckerwood Dope.”
Mark’s place was like a twenty-four-hour pawn shop. It was a constant flurry of criminal activity.
My storage unit burglaries were but a stepping stone to other theft rackets. From that I graduated to stealing things out of people’s cars. I would steal everything from iPods to GPS systems to anything that was lying around that I thought could be traded for dope. Stealing gate openers was paramount because they provided future access for other trips.
The most common forms of theft with meth addicts, I discovered, were credit card fraud and identity theft. These were also the easiest because they usually could be accomplished by stealing victims’ mail. So much information could be pieced together by various documents delivered via the postal system. Credit cards were the big find. They were easy to get activated.
It was like an office inside some of these dope houses. One room was designated for the sorting of mail, another had a few laptops connected to the internet, checking on websites that gave personal data about anyone for a fee, and yet another room had a few paper shredders going to get rid of the evidence. In every room you would find pipes, bongs, and syringes laying around.
Credit card applications were being made, driver’s licenses were being forged, and even checks were being faked. It seemed there was nothing a determined meth addict couldn’t do once they committed themselves to it. These were but a few of the dozens of meth dens in Dallas.
And there I was, right in the mix of it, participating to the fullest with no regard for the victims I was creating. That boy from Port Arthur, with the potential to do great things, who had all the love, support, and opportunities to be anything he wanted, was now nothing more than a junkie, a thief, and a criminal who hurt anyone he came across. All I cared about was meth.
Mark
Mark and his other white trash buddies, as if I had any right to label anyone, always enjoyed making fun of me. They loved remarking about how far I had fallen. For entertainment, Mark would have me tell stories about all the places I had been, the people I had met, the halls of power I had walked, and the legitimate potential for wealth I threw away. I was like a court jester to them, brought out for laughs when they came over. As a reward they would feed me more meth. It was humiliating and pathetic, and it only made me loathe Mark even more.
Eventually I began regaining some of my disposition and started taking better care of myself. From my ill-gotten gains, and with a “loan” from Mark, I bought a used Jeep Cherokee that he once received in exchange for a few grams of meth. I rented a ratty little apartment in the same complex as him as well. Had I been in my right mind, I would have never agreed to such an arrangement. Once again, my home became a place to do drug deals, tie people up, and store stolen items. And once again I was being owned by my meth dealer. I had swapped out a Mexican drug-dealing psycho for a white one.
Mark and I had a strange coexistence, and our hatred was mutual. It was as if he were bi-polar. One minute he was friendly and even considerate of my pathetic station in life; the next it was as though he were possessed. He was also a shooter, preferring to inject his dope. What did concern me was that he always carried around a loaded 9-mm.
As his neighbor, there was no escaping him. One day he barged into my place, pushed me against the wall, and put his gun to my head. He was foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. I could tell he had been up for days. My heart leaped through my chest when he stuck that barrel to my forehead.
“I know you stole it! I know you took that dope!” he was screaming with a gun in my face. “Where is it? Tell me where it is, or I swear to God I will blow the top of your head off!”
I had no clue what he was talking about. This was not the first time he had played this accusation game with me. He would use this tactic as misdirection, to keep me off balance. He didn’t do it with just me; he did this with many others.
“Mark,” I pleaded, “I didn’t steal anything from you. Why would I do that when you give me so much? You just traded me an 8-ball yesterday. Please put the gun down.”
His eyes were rolling around the room and sweat was beading down the side of his head. This didn’t instill confidence in me at all.
“I’ve never liked you, Damon,” he said, cocking the hammer back. “You think you’re better than everybody else, but guess what? You’re beneath me. You’re nothing but a thieving dope fiend. The world won’t even miss you when you’re gone.”
Then he pulled the trigger.
Click. Click. Click.
Falling to the floor, hysterical and in tears, I thought I was dead.
Mark stood over me, laughing. “I was just playing with you, but if you ever steal from me, we will do this drill for real,” he promised. He threw a baggie with about a gram of meth in it on the floor next to my head. “No hard feelings,” he said, and walked out.
Grabbing the dope, I thought about my hatred for Mark. I hated him for the way he took so much joy in my miserable existence, but mostly I hated him because he was right. I was nothing more than a thieving dope fiend.
So I got high. This was my answer for everything.
My family knew something was wrong. It had been over two years since I lost my job at UBS. Every time they called me, I came up with some kind of lie for where I was working or what I was doing. My mother constantly begged me to return to Southeast Texas and live with them. That idea was a nonstarter. No way was I going to separate myself from the network of meth dealers, other meth addicts, and criminals I had accumulated. These degenerates and hopelessly addicted were my new family, as evidenced by the way I pushed my real family completely out of my life. My family represented a reality I did not wish to face.
When all the credit card theft, identity theft, storage and car burglaries, and every other form of deception and theft were not enough—with addicts, it’s never enough—I graduated to home burglaries. It was but a small step from the gutter to the sewer.
My first home burglaries were in the Uptown area. Since I was familiar with the layout and the security of so many places, it seemed safest. I could gain access to the gated communities with ease, for I had been breaking into cars in their parking garages for over a year. I had gate clickers to just about every apartment and condo building there.
Since I had never been on a home burglary, I went with the guidance of another addict named Zack. He was a shooter who had lived in Uptown previously as well, right behind Primos. I met him at a meth house in North Dallas, where he lived. He’d been doing the home burglaries for quite a while, and was happy to take on an accomplice who both knew the neighborhood and fit in. In other words, someone who did not look like the stereotypical meth addict who was skin and bones, with missing teeth and sores all over them from picking their skin in the mirror for hours.
His vehicle was a newer-model SUV which attracted zero attention—better to navigate the Uptown area with than my used Jeep Cherokee. We moved from condo to condo with impunity. His method for gaining entry was a simple flathead screwdriver, which could easily pop most deadbolts. We usually picked our places by spotting the doors with newspapers and packages stacked up in front of them, or local dining places’ flyers in the door. It was hard to be home and open your only door of entry with so much junk around it. It was a dead giveaway, and a huge flaw we exploited.
Those first burglaries I went on consisted primarily of stealing smaller items we could trade or sell for dope. We would load these into some bags or luggage in the closets of the victims we found. We spent minimal time inside these condos, putting an emphasis on speed. We rarely ever wore anything to conceal our identities, as that would attract attention. A hat was about as much of a disguise as we ever put on, and we wore gloves once we were inside our crime scenes to avoid leaving a clue.
Eventually I saved up some money and rented an apartment with a girl I knew from the meth world, an addict just like me. Wendy was five years younger than me and graduated from No
rth Texas as well, although we were never on campus together. She came from a familiar middle-class upbringing and was in a similar state of existing day-to-day on meth. We immediately hit it off. She was a good person who happened to be an addict. No way did she fit into the world in which we both inhabited.
Our apartment on Holland Street in Oak Lawn was only about five miles from that ratty place I lived in Mark’s complex, but it felt like another world once I was out of the immediate orbit of that gun-wielding, psycho meth dealer. Mark was not happy with me moving, viewing me as his own personal dope slave. Once liberated from that area of East Dallas, I began to branch out to other dealers who were more than happy to trade meth for stolen goods.
Steven
It was in one of these new meth dens that I met my partner in crime, Steven. A white guy, the same age as me, Steven immediately bonded with me over talk of meth and burglaries. We were both at the same dealer’s house trading stolen goods for meth, so the conversation was a natural fit. The sick and twisted part about this world we inhabited was that the burglaries became just as much a part of my life as the drugs themselves. Often, I found myself getting high on the endorphins my brain released just thinking about the next score.
Steven had previously been convicted of a felony for an assault on a public servant, so he was already in the system. He told me about his experiences with the criminal justice system and his desire to never go back. He was very cautious when approaching these burglaries, being very careful to conceal his identity and never leave any DNA or fingerprint evidence behind. After we had been on a few burglaries together (in which we either used a screwdriver, which is messy and leaves a scarred-looking door, or picked the lock, which is time-consuming) we came up with a cleaner, quicker way to gain entry. This method, though it served its purpose with speed and efficiency, would be the “signature” in our spree, allowing law enforcement to catalog all our crimes.