Down Ocqueoc Road

When visiting America, Charles Dickens was heard to say: “There’s only two things that I wish to see, the Niagara Falls and Eastern State Penitentiary.”  Like many others, this celebrated author was spellbound by that fortress of silence.

 

What follows is a maze of misery, malice, and things maybe best left unsaid.  So I ask, “Can you handle the ‘real deal’, or will you shrink from the silver bullet of truth?”

 

This story centers around two people.  One was a meek outsider in an unstable world.  He was not a member of the “cool crowd,” not one of the popular kids in school.  He had very few friends, minimal family support, and bright hopes and dreams not unlike any teenager his age.  The other figure was an astute old judge, owl wise, dignified and honest, — at least that’s the translation he would tell.  As Adolf Hitler once confessed, “Tell a lie enough times and somebody will believe it.” 

 

My most frightening thought is the probability of dying in here.  This cesspool has nothing good in its veins.  It has no measure of rehabilitation, and no concern for those souls lost in it.

 

As the police car turned into the parking lot, I had no concept of risk or penalty, no rhyme or reason to the evil in this tomb of which I now entered.  Shuffling down the corridor of the world’s largest walled prison, I read a sign hanging over the first set of electric doors. It read: “Through these gates walk the finest officers in the system.”

 

These administrators ignored the facts of prison life, failing to mention that the bulk of illegal drugs being sold on the Big Yard was smuggled inside by rogue employees.  Plus the flow of street knives, bottled liquor, and green money creeping through the front gates. Still deeper, women employees moonlight as “working girls”.  These “soiled doves” sell their sensual pleasures.  I once asked a friend who was a notorious drug-dealer how much these favors cost.  He smiled and replied, “The ladies-of-the-night were fifty dollars, and I paid a hundred dollars for each load of drugs an officer delivered to me.”

 

Money owns the town.  Oh yeah, I was amused at how cheaply these “wanderers” were corrupted.  Then there was that rape case where predator guards preyed upon female prisoners for several years. After a barrage of court dynamics the State of Michigan agreed to some multi-million dollar settlements. This case harkened back to the those words spoken by a Detroit news reporter: “If you want to see the scum of the earth stand in front of the state prison at shift change.”

 

It should be noted that these seamy officials are a minority of the civilian work force inside that compound.  Most of the employees are ordinary and respectable people who happen to work inside a prison rather than a factory, or some other blue-collar job.  In America, we must have a network of police and prisons to assure the safety of its God-fearing citizens.  Without such a system, we would be living in a Wild West world where the fastest gun rules the town.

 

I was a humble and naïve teenager when I first entered the quagmire of state prison.  I had never been in trouble as a juvenile, and had never been inside a jail.  I was the youngest of five people involved in a “counterfeit check” ring.  The police retrieved most of the stolen money.  Somewhere along the way that bundle of cash disappeared.  The money was in the possession of the county sheriff and, to my knowledge, there was no investigation ever held in this boggled riff-raff. Someone in that police department knows what happened to that evidence.  “Not me, not me, “ said the cockroach to the flea, “Not me..!”  This case is a measuring rod of motive, mockery and scorn.  “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” declared William Shakespeare.

 

Since those days, I have endured, in grief as the chapters of my life exploded forward.  Straddling the razor-wire of this diverse culture, living in these prisons made me old and philosophical.  I envision the things that I missed during these agonizing years in a cell.  Haunted by old memories, I cannot retract or change any of it.  While once being interviewed by Geraldo Rivera, the gruff and plain-spoken journalist, Jimmy Breslin, adamantly proclaimed, “I know where crime starts.  It all starts in the family.”  Most criminals come from bad families and broken homes, and quite frankly, so did I.  In my formative years there was no father, a pathetic mother, no money, and no goodness in our lives.  I have now slammed 40 calendars in these cold-blooded snake pits.  Since my senior year in high school, I have been free for only a brief vacation, and that was while still a youngster.  I have no future, no achievements, and no meaningful substance to my credit.  Prison life is ruthless, a rugged, raw-dog survival each day.

 

The imagery of “gangster” has been distorted to such an extreme that it has become a colossal joke.  Accepting their station in life, and courting the permanence of a prison cell or shallow grave, most of these pupils are not the genuine article.  What they lack in courage is compensated by group bravado, role playing fantasies of a virulent character of constitution, for a pack of wolves is a pack of cowards — anywhere in the world. Many prisoners prove to be extensions of Judas who resign their souls to an existence of complacency, concealing themselves in grandiosity as they swagger through their cartoon trilogy of plastic-people, wannabe gangsters, and legends in their institutionalized minds.

 

The United States holds the largest incarcerated population per capita in the industrialized world.  Once these repositories are built they will most certainly remain full, no matter the cost to humanity. This modern system, with its cookie-cutter prisons, has become a “business empire” which is not always operating in the best interest of the public, and is lacking in its contribution to mankind.  I’ve studied prison much as a scientist would examine a humanoid race found on another planet.  The subject is inherently dysfunctional, and one’s blind faith in justice seems sadly misplaced.  What the experts garner is fringe learning ripped from perfumed books and other academic systems.  However, what I’ve perceived in this school-of-hard-knocks came courtesy of a tyrannical prison facility.

 

In here there are no goldfish, and every bandit in this tank is a shark.  Some are prone to be more destitute than others, and some are definitely more dangerous, but they all spawn from depravity, spoil and deceit.  Stumbling through these turbulent years, I morphed into decay knowing no bounds to my feral and disquieting madness.

 

Earnestly digesting documentaries, books and files, I became a self-styled “crime connoisseur.” I absorbed the writings of literary lions such as Tolstoy and Dumas, Mailer and Capote, along with a library of masters who reached the pinnacle of their craft in recording history, moulding great novels, and recounting fabulous tales of true life!

 

In any event, one should only speak on matters for which one knows best.  Being judged a reject and branded a killer, I would find firm ground were I to attack the myths of crime and justice, prison and punishment, freedom and death, even mayhem and murderous rage. In some twisted manner prison seems not unlike a school, a gutter university, an animal shelter that breeds game and gangsters, mice and men, junkies and junkyard dogs.  This community grapples with the grim measure of life.  One must face the depth of treachery and become adept at controlling the villainous nature of man.   The essence of prisons was once well defined by the infamous outlaw, George “Machine-Gun” Kelly.  “Prison,” said Kelly, “takes away all that makes life real.”  This vile and desolate colony knows no mercy, no remorse, no compromise, and little hope to anyone trapped within its smothering grip.  Prison is Satan’s castle here on Earth.

 

In moments of brutal confrontations I have had tear gas sprayed in my face, and both food and water withheld for days as I lay in a sweltering slammer cell in detention. A notice attached to the outside door instructing all officers to not open this door for any reason, per orders of the deputy warden.  Unruffled, I pledged retaliation as I squirted urine from a lotion bottle and hurled bowls of feces on any official foolish enough to step within my throwing reach.  In combat zone and combat ready, this battle raged for about six months until the Director of the State Department of Corrections issued a “Special Handling Order” against me.

 

Soon I was transferred to the Michigan Intensive Program Center, which operated as an innovative “behavior modification program.”  It was further ordered that I not be allowed to participate in the program since I’d gone through this procedure two times in recent years. To the dreaded segregation unit I went for another dismal stay.

 

Among a few similar facilities in the nation, this special program — know as MIPC, and located in Marquette, Michigan — on the picturesque shore of Lake Superior, had been designed by, BF Skinner, a highly regarded behavioralist from Minnesota.  It is said that during World War II, he developed a weapon using pigeons housed in the nose-cone of a bomb to guide it into enemy warships.  At any rate, the climate inside this facility was not degrading in any way.  A domain which was influenced by a process of privileges, demonstrating both comfort and compensation to the prisoners enrolled.

 

Aggressively spearheading this program was the chief psychologist, Dr Richard Walter, whose motto was “firm but fair”.  Years later, he would be one of three founding fathers of the Vidocq Society, a professional crime-solving club based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  A group of unsung warriors, brilliant forensic experts and bloodhound detectives whose crime-busting prowess draws from the ranks of FBI profilers, psychologists, scientists, hardened homicide cops, pathologists and well-seasoned prosecutors.  These streetwise sleuths specialize in unsolved murders.  Members are selected by invitation only through a committee vote.  This Society is named for Eugene Francois Vidocq who ironically had once been a criminal himself, but later became a renowned French detective.  According to a story aired on Court TV, Dr Walter has solved more cold case homicides than any other member.

 

While doing time at the MIPC facility, Dr Walter and I had several discussions about crime and prison, and I absorbed what I could of his wisdom, knowledge, and intellectual wealth.  On two occasions, Dr Walter urged me to talk with the FBI Behavioral Science Unit from Quantico, Virginia.  I signed the consent form but was transferred out of the prison before the interview could take place.  Then the second time they were not able to make the slated trip to Michigan.  Soon thereafter I was sent to a downstate facility and never heard from them again.  In the movie, Silence of the Lambs, this unit of the FBI is fictionalized interviewing Hannibal the Cannibal to help identify the deranged psycho-killer, Buffalo Bill.  A tenacious team of agents, today better known as profilers, was established after the 1972 death of J Edgar Hoover, who had refused to allow its inception into the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  The two pioneers of this elite squad, John Douglas and Robert Ressler, have in recent years both retired from the Bureau, but Ressler, who originally coined the term serial killer, went on to become a member of the Vidocq Society.

 

I recall from my conversations with Dr Walter a tale I related to him, and how he enjoyed every word.  This fiasco happened in 1976, the bicentennial year.  I was living in an apartment building owned by a reputed mobster named Louie Linteau.  The address was next to the Airport Limousine Service on Paddock and University Drive in Pontiac, Michigan, a business also owned by this nefarious character. Louie “The Pope” Linteau who secured his claim to fame when the white-hot finger of the FBI pointed in his direction and dubbed Linteau the missing link in the Hoffa case.  James Riddle Hoffa, whose nickname was “Little Hammer,” vanished from outside a restaurant in Oakland County, slightly north of Detroit, in 1975.  Never to be seen again, this case, including a private telephone call between Jimmy Hoffa and Louie Linteau, which had not been monitored by law enforcement, set the tone for one of history’s most baffling crime mysteries.

 

Bolstering this myth, a few years later Linteau was found dead in the living quarters of the Airport Limo Service.  Louie’s wife had recently left him for a new man. Still pending were charges levied against Linteau for hiring a thug to assault his wife’s new lover.  This intimidating “bully”, it was soon discovered, turned out to be a police officer.  In September of 1976, our fervid band of outlaws crossed paths with Linteau in such a manner that he stepped very close to being shot dead.

 

The last time I saw Dr Walter was several years ago in yet a different prison.  He recognized my name on the ride-in list and stopped at my cell to say hello.  He’d recently enjoyed a tour-of-splendour around the entire world, and recounted to me the many countries through which he’d traveled.  Before leaving, he inquired whether I still did my running routine which began during my sojourn at the Intensive Program Center in Marquette,  “Yes,” I replied!  Through the years I’ve conditioned myself into an accomplished runner who, in my most prolific season, has powered eighteen mile runs every day, some one hundred and twenty-five miles per week which, I must stress, requires a strict level of discipline, especially in prison conditions where a high-nutrition food supply is not available to me.

 

But those hurdles seem minor when compared to later challenges such as when I endured thirty-five days with no food.  I have been chained to a bed with five-point restraints and have worn both belly chains and leg irons for twenty-five days and nights in a cold seclusion room inside a psychiatric unit. I have hanged myself in artful manipulations on six occasions.  Only five of these incidents are documented, since one time while I was swinging from the door on the night-shift, the officer was negligent and just kept walking down the hallway. This stuff is dwarfed by the most devastating period in my survey of pressure, time and self-indulgence. This became a contest of wit and grit between an unyielding psychiatrist and me when I hanged myself from an air vent and was placed in a suicide garment know as a “Bam-Bam” suit. I rejected all food rations for the next nineteen days and further refused to drink water for the last nine days of this famishing debacle.  My physical welfare was on the brink of irreversible dehydration with my mouth and throat badly parched and swollen. I have sustained the rigors and plunders of prison life, and know its great sufferings quite well.

 

In a flurry of activities, another prisoner had his throat slashed, the prison’s hearing officer was assaulted, and a prison counselor was twice stabbed with a knife that I clutched in my hand.  Then the judge’s gavel rang, affirming my tenth life sentence.  Still showing my contempt for authority, I was further levied one additional year after trying to overpower two armed transportation officers with a gun carved from a bar of soap. In a later episode I received a fifty to seventy five year sentence for hijacking a big rig and ramming the 18-wheeler through some heavy perimeter fences in an escape attempt.

 

Feeling tremors of a derailed mind, I tumbled down the tunnel of darkness devoid of human interaction or dreams.  Then, in a miracle of resistance, I found the way to return my soul to sanity.

 

I have logged an aggregate of fifteen years in various segregation units.  We call this extreme custody The Hole, since one remains locked in a cell at all times with no mobility whatsoever.  Its realm seems a fog, a void of disturbing privacy, perhaps only a mirage where I desperately seek refuge from a life whose effects feel both sombre and severe.

 

Prisoners locked in these conditions long term can easily flirt with disaster, since suicide and psychosis are always in the fog lights of this conflict with claustrophobia and other demented things.  This is gruelling for those whose spirits are now broken, chained to a concrete slab with steel restraints controlling their every move. Still others drink their own urine and eat their own feces in this vegetated metaphor of unsurpassed surrender. 

 

Two prisoners known to me actually severed their own penises and threw them away like pieces of unwanted meat.  One of these guys used a razor blade, while the other employed the heavy lid of a steel footlocker as he smashed its rough cutting edge down on himself. “Severe sensory deprivation” someone once said, “is the tranquilizing venom which will reduce one to a grinding ritual of non-existence.”  There’s a 1973 murder case of a prison guard at that old dungeon in Marquette, and the killer is still in the hole to this day.

 

These prisons are functioning as soot-blackened “hate factories” that will hemorrhage one’s mind and bleed one’s heart of all merciful acts.  Prison is Hell on Earth and the worst thing this side of a tombstone. It radiates a truth raw yet realistic, full of life’s trials, tribulation and lies.

 

Be that as it may, prison does deserve one high mark.  It captures the sense of time.  It affords one the opportunity to study the past, and to glean insight. I grew up in prison and in early adulthood never scrutinized its law, let alone reflecting if such fundamental basics might apply to my own shadowy life.  In leaps and bounds, I evolved from forgery to robberies, kidnappings and murders.  One dog day afternoon, a partner and myself went so far as to play a game of tic-tac-toe in a pool of dead man’s blood. On another day we made a man dig a grave with his bare hands before shooting him and burying his body in a remote gravel pit.  Like bloodthirsty hounds from Hades, we were roving marauders, death’s ugly eye giving us direction.

 

Michigan’s northern territory, with its abundance of wildlife, is residence to the Tahquamenon Falls, the second largest waterfalls on the eastern side of the United States.  In 1889, the last stagecoach to be robbed east of the Mississippi River was in the Upper Peninsula of this state.  Some people were killed in the heist, including the driver.  The highwayman, a German immigrant, was hunted down by a posse and narrowly avoided being lynched.  He did, however, serve the next 24 years in prison.  Further, there are the “Soo Locks” which connect the two Great Lakes of Superior and Huron, and in whose neighboring reaches off Whitefish Point is the site of the shipwrecked “Edmund Fitzgerald”, which sank in a storm in November of 1975, and was later immortalized by the gifted Canadian singer and songwriter, Gordon Lightfoot.  Lastly, this state’s western upper region is “Copper Country,” and experts believe it is where the bulk of copper was mined and then shipped back to Europe.  After being smelted and mixed with “tin,” these alloys became the new metal, which fueled the “Bronze Age.” 

 

As a youngster, I lived in rural northern Michigan in a quaint farming community called “Ocqueoc,” some fifty miles from the scenic Straits of Mackinaw.  I was raised by my grandparents while my mother also lived in the house.  I attended one of the last country schools still used in the state.  It was named the Vilburn School, after a family who lived nearby.  It had one teacher and one classroom for all the students which, I believe, went to the eighth grade.  It had a wood and coal furnace and a belfry on the roof, and the older kids took turns ringing its bell.  

 

One day the teacher came to our house for some reason.  As she stepped from the car she was bitten on the leg by our dog.  She threatened to seek a lawsuit, but Grandma said we were safe because there was a handmade sign nailed to the big tree in front of the house which warned all strangers to ‘beware of the dog.”  There was a traditional Christmas play held at night while the adults and young children crowded in the darkness of the classroom and enjoyed the amenities of this warm and old-fashioned landscape. We treasured those days of adventure in this place of beauty and bountiful things.  I cherished this time, the first couple years of my schooling, and still retain precious memories from those sentimental seasons of an innocence lost long ago.

 

Grandpa was a hard-scrabble man who married Grandma in the days of the Great Depression. He served in Europe during World War II, and survived the tragedy of the Cedarville, a huge ore freighter that collided with another freighter and sank near the Mackinaw Bridge in the summer fog of 1965.  It was one of the largest ships to sink in the Great Lakes, and it claimed the lives of ten sailors, three of whom were never found.  There’s a 2000 documentary titled “Tragedy in the Straits – SS Cedarville remembered.”  I was told by a close relative that Grandpa’s  name is mentioned in the dialogue of the film.

 

So here we lived in this filth with bed bugs.  No one cleaned the rooms or prepared a good meal.  In the worst times there were twelve people living in that deplorable mad house, including my two aunts and their children. No one got married, so none of the “illegitimates” had a father.  There was no maturity, no responsibility, no communication, and no one held accountable.  Their lack of ambitions eclipsed any logic or parental obligations.  Not one of these jaded sisters worked a job, and they all contrived excuses which they tried to disguise.  With a whistle of posture, every weekend these rowdy alley cats scurried to the local bar to chase some fluff and fancy.

 

We kids, feeling inferior to the world, were cast to the wounding winds and no adult in our circle seemed to notice.  Adrift and with barnyard manners, it was determined we youngsters didn’t need a father, or income, or clean house, or good food.  Oh no, we didn’t need a “real” mother, or family structure, or security, or the inconvenience of concern.  The cruelties of abandonment ran wild. Throwaway children feeling the sting of their murky and disgraceful surroundings.  

 

 “Everyone knows we’re doing all we can for our kid…” Or so the big lie went.  All while alienated youngsters were made to struggle in this cauldron of torment, defect and delirium.

 

Peace and harmony never allowed. My imposing mother would storm through the house spitting at people and starting fist-fights, slamming doors so hard that it knocked plaster out of the walls, throwing food across the table and slinging chairs across the room. In her reign of terror, she would then claim to be badly injured in that last rumble, and therefore unable to clean the house, cook a meal, or go get a paying job.  So it went year after year as my grandparents allowed this to continue in that pigsty.

 

I once asked my mother for help with my school work.  Spiralling out of control, she hovered over me and roared, “Ask the _____ school teacher, that’s what they pay that ______ for!”

 

At around eleven years old I tore two gashes in the inner arch of one foot as I stepped on something sharp while splashing in a down stream stretch of the Ocqueoc River, not far from the twin falls.  The cuts were serious and required medical care. My mother, in front of family, friends and strangers, went into a frenzy of vulgar names as she shook her fist and screamed a melody of vengeance. She refused to take me to the hospital, even though she had Grandpa’s car sitting there in the parking lot.  One of my aunts carried me to the picnic table of a lady whom we did not know, and she was kind enough to drive me to the hospital. When I got home my mother announced that I would not be getting any crutches.  “You can hobble around on that foot until it gets better,” she shrieked.  My aunt later rented me a pair of crutches from the same hospital.

 

When I asked to go to Boy Scouts the request was denied. The reason given by both Grandma and my mother was that they could not afford to drive me to town once a week.  Yet this was the same town where my mother faithfully went to the bar to pursue her jollies.

 

No, I would not join the Boy Scouts, but in that same year I was guided to a bedroom where my toothless mother ordered me to caress her bare buttocks as she lay on the bed moaning in pleasures of approval, with the door locked and the light out so as to mask these violations in secrecy.  Then to make things fair, at least in her crude mind, she rewarded me with a piece of chewing gum each time.  I, being so young, was not able to stave off the obsessions of this carnivore. She called these episodes “back rubs,” and as I grew older she stopped doing it probably for fear of me telling the wrong person and her facing public exposure and reproach.

 

At thirteen I went to work on my cousin’s nearly dairy farm.  The work was rigorous and the hours were long as I tried to improve my life.  I was paid forty cents per hour which earned me five dollars a day.  This money equated to about one-fourth of the legal minimum wage in those days.  I was a resilient, honest and highly-principled young guy who went to school and held a job.  Stretching my meager resources, I bought my own clothes, paid for my own food at school, got everybody in the house a Christmas present, and even had some cash in the bank.  

 

When my rigid schedule permitted, I went in the kitchen and baked cakes and brownies from the pre-mixed box.  Always on the prowl for creature comforts, the adults eagerly helped themselves to those sweet and tasty treats.  All this while my mother and other parasitic, slouches sat around watching TV and concocting fictions so as to not work a job, or contribute anything significant at all.  One of my mother’s most common lines was, “You’re gonna have to learn how to go without.”  Practicing what she preached, she even refused to earn enough money to buy a set of false teeth.

 

On another occasion my mother and her youngest brother had a scuffle which ended with the front windshield being broken in Grandpa’s car. Instead of getting a job and ordering a new windshield, my mother elected to lie to the insurance company, fabricating a story which fingered some unknown suspect, and in turn allowed my conniving mother to receive a free windshield for the car.

 

In 1969, I was allowed to buy a rifle and go deer hunting.  Trying to be frugal, I didn’t buy a hunting suit until the following year.  That second season a deer came sprinting down a fence line towards me, and I opened fire.  It was a button-buck, which because of the short antlers must be tagged with a doe permit, and I did not have one.  My uncle and I gutted the little buck and hid it in some bushes.  The next morning a trusted friend helped retrieve the deer in the back of his old Studebaker pickup.  Later that evening he returned to our house with some of the venison and a story to go with it as Grandma ridiculed us younger hunters for failing to get a deer.  Nevertheless, the only reason I did not claim this trophy was because my mother would have called the game warden, and gotten a thrill out of it. This would prove to be the only deer that I bagged in all my life.

 

At sixteen, I received my driver’s license and purchased a car with my own money.  When I brought it home, Grandpa rushed to the front of the vehicle, leaping in the air as he waved clenched fists and cursed in my face.  He then threatened to get a hammer and smash the windows. Grandpa expected me to attend college and demanded that I pay for this education with my scant savings from working on a small farm; while he never put a penny in the package, and being hobbled by his own weakness, couldn’t collect the strength of mind to tell his grown children, including my mother, to find a job and earn some money for the family’s practical purpose and benefit.

 

To compose my mother’s biography, one would require two taunting words: “lie and deny!” Never trying to mend her stifling disorders, she cast over this family a pallor of pain and dejection with a scowl on her face and a vapor of detestation.  Unwilling to conform to society, she became a disaster who cheated herself out of life.  Then the county paid for a pauper’s funeral and her days of derision were no more.

 

Understandably, as a youth, living in this war zone was very discouraging.  Pushed towards violence, I ingested struggle, strife and sacrifice which diminished my desire to be good. From that declining household all three daughters birthed “black sheep” children. One aunt of mine birthed FOUR children out of wedlock,  one of them dying under suspicious circumstances. Three of the boys went to prison and three of the boys spent time in a state mental hospital.  Also, one girl and one boy were involved in wanton and grisly crimes, including murder.  At least six people from this house have bummed off welfare for extended periods of time.  One night I caught an uncle trying to molest one of my little cousins.  He later twice burglarized the parsonage of the nearby Baptist Church, and each time stole only the panties of the pastor’s wife. This pervert now nicknamed “Pants Thief,” was then committed to the state nuthouse for a couple years.

 

Another uncle broke into a local tavern and stole some beer.  The owner identified Grandpa’s jeep fleeing the scene.  Grandpa interceded and reimbursed the damages to keep his son out of jail. When it happened again at a different tavern he was sent to prison.  Another time Grandpa’s brother burned down a public school in Ocqueoc because he did not get the job of bus driver.  By any measure, we were the redneck neighbors from Hell.  

 

Our courts have adopted the supremacy of ancient rulers in their thirst to be hard on crime.  The United Sates boasts the “greatest judicial system in the world.”  Wasn’t it the Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz, who said, “No money, no justice.”

 

What a prophetic testament of truth those words do tell.  My first conviction stemmed from cashing bad checks.  I had no juvenile record, but still was banished to the world of state prison.  They had the option, and could have sentenced me under the Holmes Youthful Trainee Act, which was a program conceived for troubled adolescents.  Or they could have offered a pivotal judgment and sent me to the Army for a few years.  Most likely this would have directed me down a different road in life, especially since I was a germinating 17-year old and could still be salvaged from the elements of crime.  Now here I rest, both a hated and hateful person.

 

During those years our closest neighbor was the Baptist Church, which I attended but never felt warmly greeted or welcome.  So where were those noble citizens when a downtrodden child, and my vulnerable young cousins were growing up with nothing?  We strove to survive in this dehumanizing family which had no role models, no mentors, no camaraderie, and not one person intervening on behalf of the children living in those squalid and unruly conditions.  Moreover, not one church member, nor any county official, ever gave a hoot!

 

Since high school I have tasted freedom a total of seven months.  Savoring nostalgia, I often wonder what happened to that wholesome farm boy who worked so honorably for everything he had in those days.  I’d like to talk with that youngster and tell him not to come in here, tell him how a life in prison will turn him weary and desperate and vile.  Yes, I’d like to talk with that teenager and tell him so many things, but I can’t talk with him because he’s gone.  What’s left is a tortured soul trudging down this forbidden road carrying a pine-box of doom.

 

While still a teen I began a perilous journey and made choices which, as I now reflect, seemed hell bent on destruction. It is now my autumn of life. Most criminologists agree there is a solid correlation between poverty, crime, and a garden variety of other unbalanced fodder.

 

I often ask, “Am I a casualty of my environment?” I was never a drug addict and never an alcoholic.  I did not go to the bard.  I have no uncanny, amoral or insatiable habits, and have never committed any sex crimes which, according to national statistics, is rare in the wretched world of criminals.  For we are the dregs of society, the underdogs most people don’t want to know.

 

There’s a timeless saying in the Amish community: “You need not summon the Devil, for he will come without calling.”  If Webster’s dictionary placed a picture next to the phrase Jekyll and Hyde, it would be the mug shot of my former crime partner, Jerry.  This scavenger had a persona which was always smiling and debonair, but his gracious façade was only a well-polished scam.  While in prison he conned every woman with whom he had contact, and married, then later divorced, two of them.  Laboring with his wish to be free, Jerry piloted the most riveting escape plan that I have ever encountered.  Recently returned to prison with a lengthy sentence for robbery, Jerry, with a loathing air of fresh confidence, recruited the services of a friend about to be paroled.  Jerry, the defunct sociopath, had shown his elusive profile.

 

The plot required that the parolee go to the home of Jerry’s mother and kill her, which he dutifully did.  Following this homicide, Jerry would apply for a “funeral visit” which must be approved by a warden.  Once on site, the parolee would pull a gun to out-muscle both escorting officers and liberate Jerry.  As this debacle unravelled, the parolee was stopped by the police in a traffic violation which somehow led back to the dead mother and a murder conviction for him.

 

Though never suspected in this bizarre and selfish scheme, Jerry’s request to attend the funeral was denied, and the murder of Jerry’s mother was for nothing.  This game of roulette proved to be hazardous for all concerned, and to my best knowledge is the only such case in United States history.  Jerry, the epitome of a jailhouse mouse, went on to serve almost three more decades in prison.  Floundering from hepatitis with a tumor on his stomach the size of a watermelon, in the spring of 2002, Jerry was granted medical parole and died two days later.

 

Trying to articulate this reality, my mind reaches back to an incident where myself and a co-defendant were separately sentenced to life in prison on a murder case.  Upon returning from the courthouse, as my crime partner passed my cell he said, “The judge told me that if I had some money, I could get out of this.”  And the under sheriff who was escorting my partner remarked, “The judge shouldn’t have said that.” This was the same ambassador of arrogance who sent me to prison five years earlier for cashing bad checks.  The under sheriff, while guarding after sentencing that same day, patted me on the shoulder as he laughed and said “That’s what they call ‘all day’, isn’t it?” Less than two years later, as the elected county sheriff, he was mortally wounded by a crazed gunman who had recently been released from a mental hospital.  Then, in response, a deputy shot and killed the attacker.  Years earlier my mother dated this damaged individual.  The fallen lawman, Duane Badder, was the second sheriff to die in the line of duty in the State of Michigan.

 

Unprincipled, uncaged and on the hunt at 21-years old, I graduated from cashing bad checks to randomly butchering human beings. I feel eternal flames scorching my bones.  At times it seems I’ve earned a doctorate degree in the dark side of humanity. I transformed into a wrecking machine firing on only three cylinders spewing hatred, fury and failure.  A master of malfunction with bad people and the bad seeds they sow.

 

Prison taught me how to be a criminal, how to hate, and how to kill. Our jurisprudence has no rationale in its overwhelming hunger to punish.  There’s a staggering divide between a forlorn teenager committing a frivolous theft and hard core crime.  Still, with no compunction, a judge will send youths to prison, while other avenues were readily available but ignored.  Our system refuses to incorporate a safety net to prevent this from happening.  

 

Prison is the back streets of Purgatory, its desperadoes running wild.  Our gestures overtly racist and fierce, we adhere tooth and claw to the primitive code of the jungle.  Living among these lepers, one must maintain total awareness of one’s surroundings, for lifeblood in these jails runs penny cheap, and destiny will call only once.

 

Prison, it has been said, does three things.  It makes you bitter, very bitter.  It brings you to the crossroads of life where big decisions must be made.  Then it kills you.  Prison is both over-rated and underestimated, thriving with ignorance and exaggeration.  Yes, this chaos is real, and it’s too late for me to benefit from change, for the true campaign must begin with properly raising the children.

 

My nightmare started when as an impressionable and gullible youngster I embraced an older clan of devout rebels.  This crowd of ruffians included an uncle who was 15 years my senior. Three of us cashed bogus checks, while a woman friend went along for the ride. My uncle would only drink beer and drive the car, pocketing some of the money as a fee from each check we cashed.  Following our arrest, we were placed in a tiny lock-up beneath a county courthouse which resembled the Mayberry Jail on the Andy Griffith show.  After six weeks I pleaded guilty and soon felt the wrath of a sneering and callous judge.  His hand did not hesitate with a fiery decision.  Even though most of the money was recovered by the police, and later went missing from the evidence vault, this old judge showed indifference to the plight of a corroding teenager as he unleashed his “justice” upon me.

 

Exhausted by this expedition called “life,” I gaze down on my avalanche of destruction. I have come to terms with my fate, renounced crime and bloodshed, and tried to make sense of this existence.  I have great remorse and a conscience which gnaws at me like a cancer.

 

“If you don’t want to taste the fruits of sin, stay out of Lucifer’s orchard,” so the saying goes. Perhaps I am that bruised apple. Or maybe I am the son of a serpent gone astray.

 

Trying to decide which route to follow, good or bad, and whether to pursue the decency or the narrative sins knowing quite well that my mind was enslaved to depravity while my heart was that of a dead man walking.

 

With my manifesto, I am consumed with this genesis of my infliction. I gained confidence to analyse the speculative subject of myself. I urge you to not embark on a career of crime, for the only thing waiting at the end of this road is a cold and lonely grave.

 

I cannot stroke a brush like Picasso, or romance the common word like Hemingway, Homer and Poe.  Emitting no hocus pocus, I here pen a thesis reflecting my dim and ill-fated voyage.  A gritty lesson is that “one must be careful what one does in life, for none of it can be undone.”  My deepest regret is that I did not become an “achiever.”  I was not there to help my cousins when they needed a real friend in their fragile and formative years. I launched crimes against non-criminal and innocent human beings.  The word “Penitentiary” is a term from the Roman Catholic Church that relates to penance, and with all these decades now behind me, the gravity of my actions comes to me, full and frightful.

 

Let this be a cautionary tale to those who wager with extinction, for no matter how low we sink in life, there’s still a right and wrong. I feel akin to the Devil’s shadow as I scribe my ominous deeds. I’m swept towards oblivion, my blood cold.

– FINIS-