Time is your biggest enemy in prison. Day to day it slows to a crawl, a release date is just some distant dream seemingly out of reach. So you occupy yourself, you read, you work out, you watch TV, you go to whatever job they assign you . I played handball. The urban legends about federal prisons being some posh resort like place where wise guys sit around eating pasta and drinking Chianti imported by guards , is a load of horse shit. In the 5 years and change I was away I never once met a Mafioso or a Big time criminal of any ethnicity. Most of those guys are in Florence Colorado in super max. The truth is most prison populations are comprised of street level drug dealers, forgers and petty thieves. While it was far from the stone fortress look of a Leavenworth, it wasn’t exactly the Club Fed many people mistakenly believe prisons to be. But I digress.
Handball is racquetball without the racquet. If you are reasonably good at it and your opponent is on the same level of skill then it is fairly physically demanding. More importantly it eats up time. There is a rhythm to it and for a couple of hours a day you manage to get lost in it and you kill time. The best games I played were against a diminutive 50 something white guy we will call Clyde, because that was his name. Clyde looked like a school teacher . He wore plastic framed glasses, he looked like a nerd. But when Clyde took off his shirt the first thing you noticed was that his entire upper torso was covered in ink, and not flowery tatts of birds and hearts with MOM in the center of them. His entire back was covered with a Grim Reaper that appeared to be ripping its way from the inside out. Despite the grim tatts, Clyde was a quiet polite unassuming guy who had one hell of a kill shot. A kill shot is when you hit the ball so low against the wall your opponent cant return it. Clyde could hit it so low it would virtually roll on the return.
I played handball with Clyde for about a year before we ever got around to talking about our sentences or crimes. Asking someone what they are in for is a major faux pas so is talking about the length of your sentence. Eventually you may get to know a guy long enough that the subject will come up. One day Clyde and I were waiting on a court to open up and we got to talking. At some point Clyde mentioned being in a federal lock up in Atlanta when all of the Cubans rioted. Now those riots took place back in the 1980's so I asked him if he had been locked up all of this time. He said yes and that he still had 132 years left to serve. I was ready to leave it at that, I figure anyone who has that much time did something really bad and was best left alone. Besides I didn’t want to tell him the relatively short bit I was serving and run the risk of getting stabbed in the face .But apparently Clyde was feeling talkative and he proceeded to tell me that he had 4 murders on him.
Clyde was a Coke dealer. Clyde’s cousin broke in to his house and took some coke and some cash. Clyde found out he did it, knocked on his door and when his cousin opened the door Clyde shot him, dead. Clyde told me that he stepped over his cousins body and went inside to retrieve his stuff. There on the sofa sat 3 stunned witnesses. Clyde killed them all. It goes without saying that this was a pretty disturbing story. But what was really chilling was the last thing he said to me. The sun was shining, it was a beautiful late spring day, the little blue handballs were making their plunking sound against the walls on the courts. Clyde turned to me and in the same tone of voice you would use discussing the weather he said " I hated killing the other 3, one of them was my ex girlfriend from High School, but they all saw me shoot him, what else could I do?
Clyde was a scary guy. I took up jogging. What else could I do?
Handball is racquetball without the racquet. If you are reasonably good at it and your opponent is on the same level of skill then it is fairly physically demanding. More importantly it eats up time. There is a rhythm to it and for a couple of hours a day you manage to get lost in it and you kill time. The best games I played were against a diminutive 50 something white guy we will call Clyde, because that was his name. Clyde looked like a school teacher . He wore plastic framed glasses, he looked like a nerd. But when Clyde took off his shirt the first thing you noticed was that his entire upper torso was covered in ink, and not flowery tatts of birds and hearts with MOM in the center of them. His entire back was covered with a Grim Reaper that appeared to be ripping its way from the inside out. Despite the grim tatts, Clyde was a quiet polite unassuming guy who had one hell of a kill shot. A kill shot is when you hit the ball so low against the wall your opponent cant return it. Clyde could hit it so low it would virtually roll on the return.
I played handball with Clyde for about a year before we ever got around to talking about our sentences or crimes. Asking someone what they are in for is a major faux pas so is talking about the length of your sentence. Eventually you may get to know a guy long enough that the subject will come up. One day Clyde and I were waiting on a court to open up and we got to talking. At some point Clyde mentioned being in a federal lock up in Atlanta when all of the Cubans rioted. Now those riots took place back in the 1980's so I asked him if he had been locked up all of this time. He said yes and that he still had 132 years left to serve. I was ready to leave it at that, I figure anyone who has that much time did something really bad and was best left alone. Besides I didn’t want to tell him the relatively short bit I was serving and run the risk of getting stabbed in the face .But apparently Clyde was feeling talkative and he proceeded to tell me that he had 4 murders on him.
Clyde was a Coke dealer. Clyde’s cousin broke in to his house and took some coke and some cash. Clyde found out he did it, knocked on his door and when his cousin opened the door Clyde shot him, dead. Clyde told me that he stepped over his cousins body and went inside to retrieve his stuff. There on the sofa sat 3 stunned witnesses. Clyde killed them all. It goes without saying that this was a pretty disturbing story. But what was really chilling was the last thing he said to me. The sun was shining, it was a beautiful late spring day, the little blue handballs were making their plunking sound against the walls on the courts. Clyde turned to me and in the same tone of voice you would use discussing the weather he said " I hated killing the other 3, one of them was my ex girlfriend from High School, but they all saw me shoot him, what else could I do?
Clyde was a scary guy. I took up jogging. What else could I do?
Can't blame you.
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine who is in prison says the same thing, you never ask. He's pretty sure he's bunking with a child molester now. He woke up the other day and the guy was watching nickelodeon.. ick.
ReplyDeleteMan that's scary. No empathy whatsoever.
ReplyDelete