You might want to exchange that crown for a tiara.

The Independence Examiner had a a hard hitting (not really) piece on the 4 Identity Confused knuckle heads, who recently beat two men in an Independence church parking lot, killing one and seriously injuring the other. The Examiner took a few excerpts from one of the offending douche bags My Space page. It was edited,(washed of all meaning and context) for the readers. It was so diluted they wouldn't even include a link to the page they reported on. The reporter missed the real story here. Aside from the tragedy of four dirt bags taking the life of a young man who was playing ball in the parking lot, the real story behind the my space page of Justin M. Trotter, is his contrived street thug persona. It's a growing problem throughout the Metro, but seems especially prevalent here in Independence. Well there won't be any beating around the bush here, so lets just get to it, shall we? Normally I would just pick these clowns apart, make some derogatory remarks, and move on. But to steal a line from Jules of Pulp Fiction, " I'm in a transitional phase, I don't want to hurt you, I want to help you. So in keeping with that spirit of helping my fellow Independites, I am composing a letter to the four misguided young men, who if convicted, are facing lengthy prison terms.

Dear Soon to be Fuckin in a Winnie the Pooh suit,

I have no idea if you are in fact guilty of the charges leveled against you. It is totally plausible that the authorities have mistaken you for some other group of Wankstas, (white punks who attempt to emulate black gangstas and fail). There are so many of you misguided ass hats prowling the streets of the metro, it's possible you are innocent. Highly unlikely, but possible, considering at least one of you admitted to attacking the two victims without provocation. In any event, should you be found innocent, you are well on your way to the joint anyway , so just use this letter as a guide for your dismal future.

As I was reading your My Space, my space, really ?, it became increasingly clear that you are part of a growing trend of pasty white kids, who think adopting an urban black street dialect makes you a gangsta. It doesn't. What it makes you, is a walking advertisement for the pro choice movement. Your use of said dialect comes off as genuine as someone from Little Rock adopting a contrived Australian accent. Your use of the word Niggaz in your my space page, is but one example of a major faux pas that will get your shit pushed in when you get to the joint. You are going to gravitate toward the young black guys who run much of the prison yard, I suggest you greet them with a hearty, "Wuz up my Niggaz". After you are released from the infirmary, and the bruising of your entire body, including the soles of your feet, has faded, these young urbanites will gladly welcome you into the fold. You will learn to cornrow hair, wash draws,(underwear), and scrub socks in a prison toilet. You'll also need to learn to be content with your new found status , because you will be ostracised by everyone else in the prison. Before long you will change your name to Peaches, or Mercedes, rouge your cheeks, and stain your lips with koolaid, and start wear your prison shirt tied at the midriff like Ellie Mae. Hence the term, "Fuckin in a Winnie the Pooh suit". I realize that Ellie never actually wore a Winnie the Pooh suit, it's a prison metaphor.

I realize much of your life experience was derived from grand Theft Auto, Vice City, and Menace to Society. I am saddened to have to tell you that unlike Video Games, and Hollywood dramatizations, the real world of criminals doesn't have a reset button, and there is no super power boost mode that will allow you to escape when the wolves come calling. "It's a Hard Knock Life" isn't just the lyrics to a Jay Z song, or from the Movie Lil Orphan Annie. No my dimwitted, soon to be walking funny wiggaz, you are going to be living a real Hard Knock Life. Shit gets deeper. In a few years, maybe just months, your friends and family will write you off. Mom will decide that your commissary money is dipping too deep into her beer and cigs fund, and the money orders and letters will slow to a trickle, then stop altogether. On the bright side, you will have mad skillz at hair braiding , sock washing, and a few other tricks. While some of those tricks may leave you with a bad taste in your mouth, heh, that's just your pride fuckin with you. Fight through that shit. When you are living it up on the yard, hands soft from hours of greasing scalps with Blue Magic, smoking joints the size of toothpicks, while curled up in a corner with Debo, you are gonna thank me. You'll think, "M M was right, I look pretty good as a girl".

The first few years are going to be touch and go. The days of impressing like minded, clueless, suburban white kids are long gone. No more will you be able to post pictures of your pistols, or your scrawny pot plants, captioned with tough guy thug dialect. There is no My Space in prison. There are no girls to impress out of their panties with manufactured stories of being "one of the most savage motha fucker youll ever meet". That's a mighty bold statement and one you will be retracting. In comparison to the guys you are about to meet, you are as soft as the Bear on a Snuggle fabric softener box. Medicated cotton is hard in comparison to you 4 young wanna be's. I would advise you to get religion when you get to the joint. Toting a bible won't save you from the well earned abuse you will be suffering, but it will give you someone to talk to in the long sleepless night ahead. You four morons should be happy, you are finally living the life of a true gangsta, locked up, devoid of hope, your future bleak, congrats and welcome to the big time. You earned it, and you deserve to reap all the rewards that come with it.

Sincerely and Fuck you very much,

Midtown Miscreant

Prison for Dummies....Chapter one....Remanded to Custody.

If you have been reading my blog for very long, it should be clear to you that I am a people person. I live to serve my fellow man (nolo homo), and woman. I asked myself, what wisdom do I have to depart, that might in some small way help someone in need. I took a personal inventory. I am a 3 time divorced, convicted federal offender, living with 2 dogs, and 2 puppies in my bedroom closet. Okay ,a how to be a success by 40 seminar is out. I cant give any tips on how to get away with crime. Moral and ethical issues aside, I still haven't figured out that part myself. Then it hit me! Prison for Dummies.

With the ever increasing government infringement on privacy, you dear reader are but one faulty mouse click away from stumbling on to some illegal website, or a couple of errors in judgement , pick your poison, and the next thing you know you are on a school bus with wire mesh on the windows.

I will be covering the entire process, from the county lock up to the day you get paroled. From bright orange jumpsuits to ill fitting khakis and cardboard shoes. It's going to be the next best thing to actually being there. So strap a couple of phone books around your midsection, sharpen your toothbrush and don't make eye contact. Here we go.

I remand you to the Bureau of Prisons for 64 months

You are standing before the bench one minute, a little hungover from the night before. You knew this day was coming , but you aren't really prepared for the reality of the moment. Before you get your head around it, a U.S. Marshall in a navy blazer that reminds you of a movie usher, gives your elbow a squeeze and herds you through a door out of the courtroom. You go down a long hall, through a couple of doors that require the usher to punch in a code. Your escort opens a door that looks like a closet but is actually a holding cell, you sit for 3 hours.

Pretty boring so far, Huh? Boring is an oft repeated theme in the joint, so get used to it. Eventually one of the Marshals shows up, leads you down another hall and into a waiting van. After a short ride to Leavenworth Kansas, you arrive at CCA, the privately owned contractor who houses newly charged or convicted federal offenders. I wont spend any time on CC. It is a boring uneventful place. At CCA you wait, period.

One morning at about 3 or so, the lights in your cell will wake you up while simultaneously blinding you. There will be a couple of turn keys telling you to pack your bags, you are transferring out. You might take a bus or a plane. I took a bus, so that's how we are going today. Imagine a gray church bus with hard plastic seats, an eye bolt in the floor and mesh over the windows, and you have a picture of the prison bus. What is more insufferable than the bus , is the BOX. The box is a black metal sleeve that fits over handcuffs to transform them in to devices of torture. Im not shitting you, they hurt, and if you wear them for 9 or 10 hours, you may never use your hands again. The black box makes water boarding look like a relaxation technique. Okay, maybe it's not that bad, but it's pretty bad just the same.

So there you sit, staring out the window, not because there is anything worth looking at, but to avoid directly facing the fat guy sitting next to you. A guy so fat if he cut himself shaving , he would bleed gravy. Your travel companion exhales when he talks, and his breath smells like he has been eating shit sandwiches without the bread. You begin to question just how accurate your attorney was when he told you that you would go to a camp, Club Fed ! It almost had a nice ring to it, Camp. In a few hours you will discover that the term Camp just means prison. Camp brings to mind log cabins and making lanyards. Three twelve foot fences ensconced in razor wire does not look like a Camp. But that's what they call it. Welcome , you have just arrived ,U S P , Rochester Minnesota.

To Be Continued................................

What are you reading ?

I've been thinking it's time to go back to prison. Take it easy, I'm speaking in terms of this blog and not an actual stint. As I've said before, your biggest enemy in prison is time, it passes slowly no matter what you do to stay busy, but it can slow to a standstill if you allow it to. Aside from the usual past times in the can, like handball, weights and basketball, there is an unending supply of ways to keep yourself occupied. From reading to loansharking, there is something for everyone in prison.
1. Reading.
I devoured books in prison. From fiction to history and anything in between . I drew the line at some of the more popular fare. Adult westerns were a big favorite. They were like Penthouse letters, but instead of a pizza delivery guy getting laid by some bored house wife and her babysitter, these wastes of paper had some cowpoke poking the schoolmarm. So I stayed clear of the Long arm type westerns.

Another problem with books in prison was ....Boogers. Yes you heard me right the first time, Boogers. For some reason people thought it was acceptable to discard boogers twixt the pages of whatever they were reading. Besides the obvious fact that it's just plain repugnant , here is a less obvious fact..... I could do a study on the reading comprehension level and attention span of an entire prison population, just from the booger data on the prisons library books.

Now that's a bold statement, I know, but that doesn't make it any less true. Books with the highest booger count were westerns. From Louis L'Amour to Long arm, Zane Gray to Rawhide, westerns were veritable booger farms. And as a side note, even though most westerns were just a couple of hundred pages long, they were checked out for weeks at a time by the same person. I worked in the library for about 6 months, so I've got first hand knowledge. Im assuming this was to insure that the reader marked his territory on as many pages as possible. I read a lot of old stuff, classics like Great Expectations or Grapes of Wrath. You seldom came across a booger while reading about Pip or the Oklahoma dust bowl. And if you could force yourself to read Tolstoy or one of the other Russian authors, (sorry Meesha, Tolstoy sucks), well lets just say I suffered through War and Peace and never ran across a single Nose Nugget. So here's my theory, the guys who read the stuff like adult westerns had lower reading levels and were more prone to load the pages with snot scabs, while those with higher reading levels for the most part refrained from defacing books.

2. Vice.

It should come as no surprise that gambling, sex and drugs are popular pastime's in the joint. Lets face it, prison isn't exactly a monastery. You have a high number of incorrigible types in the slammer. Shocker, I know. People in prison will gamble on just about anything. Craps, poker, pinochle, handball, Football, you name it and someone in some prison is betting on it as I write. Guys ran football parlays with the points stacked in spreads that you couldn't possibly win, but that didn't stop rubes from playing 3 or 4 tickets a week. With gambling the actual motivation wasn't winning, but the distraction it created, it was a lot like reading, it kept you from thinking about the outside world or the one inside the fence.

Drugs were plentiful and priced at 10 or 20 times the street level. They would also get you a new case.

Sex also plentiful if you didn't mind the fact that your date had a beard and a penis.

So I steered clear of the gambling, other than some friendly pinochle games. I steered clear of drugs. While I admit that I like a little herbage from time to time, I had a problem with the idea of smoking weed that had been stored up someones ass. Wasn't interested in sex, which much like the drug trade , involved someones ass. So I read, and I got by reading and avoiding thinking about the outside world. I read more in that 5 years than Ive read in my life before and since combined. I learned quite a few things from all that reading, not the least of which is this....

You can't judge a book by its cover, but you can judge a man by the number of boogers in the book he is reading.

The perpetual debt

Just a few blocks from my place a 57 year old man was found murdered. The guy was an employee of Sunfresh grocery in Westport. He was also an ex con with a fairly ugly track record. With convictions for Attempted Rape and Manslaughter under his belt, it is a little tough to garner much sympathy for the guy, even though he served his time, and seems to have lived within the confines of the law since his release in 2003. In time we may learn that he strayed back to his former criminal ways. His death also may have been as simple as a street robbery gone bad. Either way, it seems his past caught up to him. People who live a violent life, and commit atrocious acts, generally meet a similar end. If you must give it a name call it Karma.



This post isn’t really about the dead grocery store clerk, that story just got me thinking about life after prison. The popular misconception is you serve your time, get out and move on with your life, debt paid. It is more than a little naive to think that someone who has been in prison can ever lead a completely normal life, and even more naive to think the past wont bite that person in the ass on a regular basis. In other words, being released from prison is not the same as being released from your past.



The conscious decision that we make to break the law, to lead a particular lifestyle, is one that will stick with us for the rest of our lives. It will hinder the pursuit of a really good job. It will linger in the minds of people who knew us "Then" and they will always have doubt about our character. So to the people who think that parole means true release, it doesn’t. More importantly , it shouldn’t. For guys like the dead grocery store employee, it is a little hard to move beyond the fact that he was responsible for the loss of a life or attempting to rape a woman. Regardless of how stellar a life he may have led after the fact, his past will always loom over him, as it should.



In my case, I defrauded banks and other financial institutions. Does the fact that my victim was an FDIC insured bank rather than john q Citizen make me a better person than the guy who commits a murder? No it doesn’t. I like to think of myself as a better person than a murderer, not because my crime wasn’t brutal, but because my character wouldn’t allow me to kill someone in the commission of a crime. In the eyes of the law, I am no better or worse than the dead ex-con grocery clerk, I’m just another in a long line of numbers.



So if the debt is never truly paid, if an ex convict is never completely free of his past crimes, what’s the point in going straight. And if he goes straight what is to prevent him from walking around with a huge chip on his shoulder? The first question is easy, you go straight to avoid returning to prison. You can live the life for years and never get caught, but once you get that first conviction under your belt, they got your number. If you re-offend, you will go back to prison. So going straight for most of us that do, is a no brainer, its self preservation, pure and simple. Most people that serve time in prison come out bitter and pissed off. The resentment festers and grows and they spend the rest of their lives angry at a world that had the audacity to punish them only to turn around and tell them that the time they served was just a down payment on a debt that will remain in perpetuity, unpaid in full.



The easy route is the one that is too often taken. You get out, you struggle, you never get free of the past. So you end up angry and bitter at a world that by and large has done nothing to you.



There is no magic bullet for absolution, in fact absolution is unattainable. The best that you can hope for is to make amends, or a close facsimile of amends. My way of doing that is to write about my past. I put my picture up on this blog and I spill my guts for all to see. I don’t sugar coat things or try to soften the edges. I suppose this is my way of doing penance, instead of Hail Mary's, I write and expose myself. Hopefully in the process I reveal the human side of a cross section of society that most people only see in a negative light. Absolution is out of reach, but redemption is mine in the telling. That is why I do this.

Great Inventors, Thomas Edison, Bell, Eli Whitney and Joey the Nose..

Okay Joey the Nose is a fictitious character. In prison you cant take a trip to the local Wal-Mart whenever you need something, and even if you could, some things just aren’t allowed or available. That is where the ingenuity and inventiveness of inmates comes in. Everything from boiling water to introducing contraband falls under this category. Whether it be a jail or a prison, people will find a way to get what they want or come up with a close substitute.

The Stinger.
While instant coffee is readily available in many institutions there is no way to heat the water. This was the case in a federal holding facility I was in, so we used a Stinger. A Stinger is 2 razor blades secured with dental floss to a 1 inch long piece of toothbrush handle, an electrical cord from a broken radio is attached to the blades. You drop the device into the water careful to not touch the cup during the process. You plug the stinger in and Voila the water will boil in under a minute. In a classic example of ass backwards thinking, razor blades and electrical cords were readily available but a hot pot was a security risk, go figure.

Drugs and other contraband are brought in by visitors, inmates and staff. The most common way is through the visiting room. Contact visits where the family sits at a table was the way most smugglers got the stuff in. Weed , heroin, cocaine, etc is usually packaged in balloons and swallowed by the inmate. Immediately after the visit the guy returns and throws up into a sink or trash can recovering his product. Should he fail to get them up by regurgitation he would wait until nature takes its course and catch them on the other side. Weed that passed through someone’s digestive system was known as Dookie weed. No matter how well sealed, the shit ended up smelling like, shit. Always seemed like a good way to catch something to me so I refrained from partaking of herb from that type of pipeline. Some guys will forgo all the swallowing and vomiting process. They use a bullet. A bullet is when the contraband is sealed in plastic and shoved up the rectum. This is also known as keeping it in the safe. Again not a very sanitary method, and as much as I’ve been known to enjoy a little herb as a way to fight off glaucoma and hair loss, I passed on the dookie weed. Employees also were a major pipeline for drugs in prison, rarely is it a correctional officer. Usually the employee is a regular worker, kitchen staff or maintenance. There are a lot of guys locked up with a lot of money on the outside. the square people working in prisons don’t make so much that some of them cant be bribed.

Tattooing in prison is another cottage industry. There are some really talented artists in the joint. But with so many blood born diseases available today, its not a good idea. The tatt gun itself is usually made up of an electric motor from a walkman, a mechanical pencil and a piece of a G string from a guitar. Ink is anything from ashes of burnt plastic to paint pigment from the paint shop. I’ve seen some really good tattoo work done in prison but its just not a good idea considering you don’t know where the needle has been.

Hooch, home made booze, is usually a witches brew of sugar, yeast, tomato sauce or some kind of fruit. Its put in a trash bag, hidden away, usually in food service or one of the industry shops and allowed to ferment . When ready it is strained through a T shirt and served chilled. It smells like vomit and rubbing alcohol. Again not something I would choose to ingest and would advise against.

Weapons. The shank also called a shiv or bone crusher is probably the most recognizable type of contraband . Everyone in the free world has heard the term shank. They are as simple as a razor blade for slashing, a pencil, a bed spring, a can lid, toothbrush handle, you name it and someone will figure out a way to stab you with it. Plastic was the preferred material because it was not detected by metal detectors. A couple of bars of soap in a sock or towel ,often used to beat the bee Jesus out of someone, was another popular choice for those so inclined.

I’ve already touched on the gay guys in prison. Wait a minute that didn’t come out right. The prison concubine better known as a Punk is another master/mistress of ingenuity. They would pluck their eyebrows and pencil in new ones with shoe polish. Red Kool-Aid was used as rouge and lip color. They seemed to favor tight clothes and they grew their nails long. Regardless of what enhancements they used, they just looked like a man with shoe polish eyebrows and really big hands. The slogan "Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's Maybelline" does not apply in this instance.

I’ve just skimmed the surface of contraband and the ingenuity of the average convict. Suffice to say that prisons thrive on their own black markets, not unlike some impoverished countries. If people want something bad enough, they will find some way to get it or a close facsimile.

Andy, Barney, and the Boyz

I realize that some people would assume that violence would be a major theme when someone was writing about prison. Those same people are probably a little surprised to find that I’ve made little mention of violence , fighting, stabbing, killing, et. al. There were fights on a daily basis, usually several. About 4 or 5 guys got stabbed while I was there. That said it was a medium security prison so it wasn’t Pelican Bay or Leavenworth. No riots, no big gang fights, little of the drama many might expect.

Now the county jails and Federal contract jails were a different story. Jails differ in several ways from prison, none of them for the better. The area of confinement is small, you have little or no movement, and you share these confined spaces with more people than there is really room for.
There are guys coming in off of long drug binges, unstable and unpredictable. Tension from the constant noise and a room full of people with no check on their emotions and no self control is a good setting for trouble.

When I was indicted the Marshals took me in to custody and transported me to a federal contract jail in Osceola. I'm thinking that since they are taking me to the sticks then the jail will be full of hillbillies and tax evaders, I was wrong . I was put in a 16 man tank. Its like an octagon room maybe 18 ft x 18 ft, there are four -4 man cells on one end with the larger area being occupied with 4 steel tables bolted to the concrete floor. A TV bolted to the wall inside a plexi glass box. Oh, and 12 black guys, a really quiet Mexican , 2 white guys and me, makes 3. Don't let anyone ever tell you that there isn’t a huge racial divide in prison, or jail for that matter. In prison the divide is greater than jails, simply because there is no room to separate in a jail. I’m not saying it is right, wrong, or indifferent. It just is.

Back at Osceola I’m having visions of Andy Griffith and Otis the drunk. The guards were as country as a chicken coop. The marshals turn me over and Huckleberry the guard processes me in. I get my stylish orange clown suit, requisite scratchy wool blanket, plastic covered pillow, wash cloth sized towel and postage stamp sized washcloth. I step in the tank expecting good old boys and get Boyz in the Hood. Now I am not prejudice and the only problems I had when I was locked up was with other white guys. But I have to say that walking in to a jail cell that is 85 pct. black guys is a little disconcerting.

So I get settled in and they come around with supper . After I eat I go stretch out on my bunk and catch a short nap. I wake up around 8 or so and go out to the main room for a smoke, the TV is on and all these guys are watching a movie. I noticed that the two white guys were not in the main room. The mexican guy was on the phone speaking Spanish in a hushed tone. I sit down light my smoke just as the commercial goes off and the movie comes back on. The movie was Roots. I shit you not. I don’t recall what part of the mini series it was, I have no recollection of what scene was playing. I just remember thinking Id hot box my smoke and go read a book, maybe a nap.

As it turned out , it was a pretty laid back group, and I never had any problems the whole time I was there. But that first night I didn’t sleep so good.

Dont drop the Soap!

Whenever the subject of prison comes up there is the inevitable elephant in the living room. Everyone wants to know , but nobody wants to be the one to ask. Ill save you all the trouble. Lets talk about sex. Does it happen? Who , how , why and where.


What prison movie is complete without the obligatory shower room rape scene? The truth is yes it happens but not as often as Hollywood would have us believe. If you aren’t already in to men (pun intended) then you aren’t likely to suddenly switch teams just because you are locked up. The only meat whistle I’ve ever touched is my own and the only time I ever got whisker burns on my face was when I made out with an Italian girl named Marie in Jr. High. So I will state for the record that my sexual activity in the joint was confined to a tube sock and a worn picture of Jennifer Tilley torn from a people magazine....I’ve said too much.


There is a twisted logic in the joint that says if you catch you are a Punk (gay guy), but if you pitch you are not gay or even bi. I always figured if you went to the moon you were an Astronaut , doesn’t matter if you flew the ship or just rode along. Then again I don’t make the rules so what do I know.

Men who offer up sexual services in prison are referred to as punks. While this term has a derogatory connotation it is what they are called. The typical punk is usually a black guy, usually tall, with a five O’clock shadow and balls the size of his Adams apple, in other words they are not by any stretch girlish looking, though they seem to think they are. Again I don’t make the rules, and I’m not making this shit up, its just how it is. I’m sure there are an equal number of white Punks but they are undercover. The black ones however are not only out of the closet, the closet doesn’t even have doors. They are flamboyant and in your face, seemingly convinced that they look like Halle Berry, while Chuck Berry is closer to the truth. Imagine Little Richard meets Dennis Rodman and you have a pretty good idea of what they look like. To be honest they scared me more than Clyde the killer.


Another little known fact about the girly men in prisons, they can fight. On more than one occasion I have seen some buffed up kid get his clock cleaned for disrespecting a He She. The humiliation of being beaten up by a lanky black gay guy, sporting eyebrows drawn from shoe polish and cherry Kool-Aid rouge, must carry an extra sting to the ego of some young gladiator who thought just because a guy liked dick he would be an easy target.


So we know the who, and the why is a given, then where pray tell do these people carry out the tryst? I wish I could say they do it in the shower or get a room. Unfortunately that’s not the case. Showers are always watched over by a guard or at the very least a camera that has a guard on the other end. It seems that the one place with nooks and crannies big enough and secluded enough to do the deed is also the last place you would want to think of it happening in. The kitchen. With that bit of knowledge its easy to see why most of us ate ramen soup or canned chili from the relatively safe confines of our cells or dorms, depending on which you were in. To this day I refuse to touch a ramen soup, I must have eaten thousands of them.


There were female guards and if they weren’t lesbians a guy might have a shot. To be honest most of them didn’t look much better than the punks. But it does happen as evidenced by the stories we see on the news about a female guard helping some guy escape.

So there it is, everything you never wanted to know, but couldn’t stop reading, regarding sex in the pokey.

The Scariest Guy in the Joint

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?