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Category: On My Block

Posted
August 11, 2017
Category
interconnectedness, kindness, life philosophy, My Story, On My Block
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4 Responses

The radical choice of militant kindness

The first lesson every young man learns upon entering the prison system is that aggression is king and violence is law. The traits that are valued in the real worldโ€”honesty, generosity, friendlinessโ€”are viewed as weaknesses in prison. Weaknesses that are pounced upon and exploited. Survival in this world depends on at least the perception of brutality and if you’re not particularly brutal, you had better be a damn good actor.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 22 years. Acting. Acting tough, acting hard, acting cold. Acting as if I don’t see the loneliness and sadness and brokenness that surrounds me. Why? Simple: Fear.

In 1992, a scrawny teenage version of myself looked around at the savage world of prison and said to my mind, “Help! I don’t wanna be jumped or stabbed or raped or beaten to death by abusive guards. I wanna make it back home in one piece!” And my mind, amazing babbling problem-solver that it is, said, “I got this,” and went to work on building a wall and posting the ultra-sensitive ego as a sentry to ward off any potential threats. My job was to act. And act I did. I spent so much time acting that I almost lost myself inside the faรงade that was supposed to be protecting me. Almost.

But looking at prison through the eyes of a 40-year-old man is a much different experience than seeing it through the eyes of a scared little 18-year-old kid. And recently, after decades of fortifying this hardened exterior and living with a conditioned mindset that places toughness over all other attributes, a series of books, films, and extraordinary people have wandered into my life with an unmistakable message: there is nothing more honorable, more radical, more standup than the path of kindness. Especially in such a hopeless world.

Suddenlyโ€”no, not suddenlyโ€”gradually, I wanted this more than anything else. Militant kindness. Love without fear. A wide open heart. For someone who has spent years coveting the appearance of fearlessness and physical strength, the concept of kindness, regardless of consequence, was a revelation. A last shot at a life of meaning and authenticity. I wanted to get back to the me I was before all of this acting BS began, back to the kid I built these walls to protect.

Kindness. It seems like such an easy choice. But a crazy thing happens when you drop your guard and step from behind that icy standoffish barrier: people become comfortable around you. Comfortable enough to open up, to confide in you, and occasionally, comfortable enough to hurt you. Or at least say things that are damaging to your ego. But that is what we want, isn’t it? It’s what I want. This lonely half-life of keeping the world at arm’s length for a false sense of safety and to defend the ego is a fool’s game and the exhaustive struggle to continue propping up an illusion is not only cowardice, it’s treasonous.

Only kindness matters.

[This post first appeared on malcolmivey.com 10/30/14 and was featured on Huffington Post on 11/29/14.] 

Posted
August 3, 2017
Category
addiction, My Story, On My Block
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8 Responses

Party animal

I live on a steel bunk in a warehouse. Everything I own in this world is in the footlocker beneath me. It ainโ€™t much; a photo album, a stack of letters, a few books. Iโ€™ve been in prison 10 years this time. My release date is 2032. A few hazy, drug-soaked months of strip bars, casinos, and fast living cost me most of my adult life.

I run across old friends and associates from that era on the yard sometimes. They look bad โ€” rotten teeth, track marks, gnawed nails on shaky hands. They give me news of other old friends who werenโ€™t as lucky: overdoses, shootings, suicides. Occasionally Iโ€™ll recognize the names of women in the arrest report of my hometown newspaper. Those wide-eyed college girls who were just beginning to experiment with coke and ecstasy in 2003 are now haggard streetwalkers, hardened repeat-offender prostitutes.

This is the natural evolution of drug abuse. Cause and effect. I know youโ€™re thinking it wonโ€™t happen to you. I thought I was an exception too. Believe me, no one plans on destroying their life and coming to prison. No little kid daydreams about growing up to rob gas stations for dope money, or getting doused with pepper spray and beaten half to death by abusive guards in a confinement cell, or dying alone in a motel room with a needle in his armโ€ฆ We call getting high โ€œpartyingโ€ and like any party, thereโ€™s always a mess when the party is over. In fact, the bigger the party, the bigger the mess.

The irony is that the kids we label squares and lames and dorks because they refuse to party grow up to be the doctors who resuscitate us when we overdose, the psychologists who attempt to help us put our broken lives back together, the lawyers who represent us in court when weโ€™re arrested, the judges who sentence us to prison, and the men who step into our families and become the fathers and husbands we failed at being.

So if youโ€™re 15 (or 17 or 24) and youโ€™re popping bars, snorting Roxys or dabbling in meth or molly or whatever, this is what middle-aged drug life looks like. Guaranteed. And if you think it wonโ€™t happen to you, we can talk more about it when you move into my dorm. The bunk behind mine is open right now. Weโ€™ll leave a light on for you. The one from the gun tower.

[This post originally appeared on malcolmivey.com 2/1/15.]

Posted
July 13, 2017
Category
On My Block, prison reform
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8 Responses

Video visitation: it’s coming

Visitation was packed. The line to get in barely moved. Tired moms chased screaming kids across the parking lot. Angry girlfriends, denied entry for wearing spandex and sleeveless shirts, stormed off in profanity-laced tirades. A grandfather passed out from heat exhaustion. After a two-hour wait, it was finally my mom’s turn to be frisked, then led through a gauntlet of metal detectors, cell phone detectors, and drug dogs. The guard who escorted her rolled her eyes and smiled, “Come on, video visits!” As if my sweet, 70-year-old mother, who has spent every Saturday for the last 12 years eating microwave food, walking laps, and playing cards with her wayward, knuckle-headed son would share this longing for dystopian efficiency over human contact. She does not. No prisoner or visitor wants this.

It’s coming, though. Not only because these contact visits — which have been standard operating procedure in the Florida Department of Corrections for the last 150 years — are now suddenly deemed a “security threat,” but mainly because there’s a market for it. Companies like Keefe and Access Correctional stand to make millions when video visits become the new normal in Florida prisons.

Most county jails have already made the transition with little or no resistance, but there’s a glaring difference: County inmates are either awaiting trial or serving minuscule sentences. Prisoners in the department of corrections are serving anywhere between a year and natural life. Imagine never being able to hold your daughter again, or give your little boy a piggyback ride, or kiss your wife, or hug your mom. You can argue that the prisoner deserves this. But do his children? His wife? His parents? Families serve sentences together. These types of policies have collateral consequences that extend far beyond the inmate.

John Cacioppo, PhD, a psychologist and social neuroscientist at the University of Chicago studies loneliness and he’s found that feeling socially isolated disrupts not only our brain but also our endocrine and immune systems. Over the long term, lack of human contact can be as damaging to our health and well-being as obesity and smoking (Men’s Health, Jan/Feb 2015).

In this era of Skype and Facetime, my words probably ring trivial. Old fashioned, even. Especially to the millennial who maintains several relationships over a mobile device. That’s not my world. There was no such thing as a smart phone when I was arrested. Many of my fellow prisoners were locked up before the advent of the internet.

Again, who cares? Outside of prisoners and their families, no one. And let’s be honest, the average inmate’s family is not exactly affluent, connected, or politically powerful. The Florida Department of Corrections knows this and passes its draconian rules with little resistance, as I’m sure they’ll do with this one.

To mangle a Leonard Pitts quote: Things like this will continue until the families of prisoners understand themselves as a constituency and organize their voices accordingly.

Posted
June 3, 2017
Category
My Story, On My Block, writing
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2 Responses

In the tradition of Fyodor

Naked, shoulder-to-shoulder, and five at a time we stood in the bathroom, awaiting orders.

“Lift your top lip, bottom lip, tongue up, bend forward at the waist, run your fingers through your hair, stand up, lift your penis and penis only, penis and nutsack, turn around, bend over and spread ’em, cough twice, right foot, left foot, next five!”

We were then herded into the dayroom like cattle, 75 of us in all. I found a spot on the floor to wait out the storm. As soon as I sat down, the old man to my immediate left removed his dentures and began to blow the trapped food from between his false teeth.

“Honey, you is disgusting,” said the sissy to my right, while covering his “breasts.”

I had to smile. In spite of the nauseating heat, the persistent flies, the cacophony of smells and my aforementioned neighbors, a sort of calm gratitude washed over me. But the soothing voice in my head was more Dostoyevsky than Gandhi, more David Mitchell than Lao Tsu, more Donna Tartt than Siddhartha. The voice said, “Dude, this is definitely going in the next book.”

Prison is my internet. Here there are carnies, junkies, boosters, charlatans, doctors, athletes, psychics, preachers, bullies, dope cooks, gigolos, sociopaths, card sharps, gangsters, killers, coyotes, refugees… Any lifestyle I want to research is somewhere on the yard. Guaranteed. The same goes for experience: strip searches, beatings, gassings, riots, solitary confinement, naked fear, transcendent love, seething racism, unexpected kindness, stabbings, overdoses, undiagnosed mental illness, it’s all here. Every day. These are the stories I tell.

As the shakedown commenced in the living area, as bunks were tossed and lockers dumped, the momentary gratitude was swallowed by a familiar paranoia. I know that most of the men crammed in the dayroom with me were worried about their knives, naked flicks, dope, buck (homemade wine), altered radios, contraband bowls and gambling paraphernalia. My mind was somewhere else. I was sweating my manuscript.

Like Ezra James, the protagonist in my latest novel, On the Shoulders of Giants, I’ve lost my share of pages in shakedowns. Precious sentences and paragraphs gone forever, drenched in tobacco spit, ripped to pieces, swept from the dorm in a pile of soiled linen and rotten fruit. Crushing.

I wonder if other incarcerated writers went through this. Did Cervantes have to stash his draft of Don Quixote when the guards made their rounds? Surely Dostoyevsky had some close calls during his years in Siberia. Oscar Wilde, Henry David Thoreau, E. E. Cummings. Not to throw my hat in the ring with these masters of the craft, but I can at least say I write in their tradition. If confinement can be considered a tradition. (Condition?)

As for the manuscript, when I returned to my bunk, post-shakedown, I was relieved to find it under my mat. A little bent up and crumpled but still in tact. It’s called Sticks and Stones, available this fall on Amazon.

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Posted
May 7, 2017
Category
life philosophy, My Story, On My Block, prison reform
Comments
2 Responses

Same as it never was

A couple of months ago, shackled and numb from a three-hour ride in a mobile sardine can, I watched through the steel mesh window as the first gun tower of my new prison appeared above the treeline.

And by “new” I mean “next,” my seventh institution in the last 12 years. There’s nothing new about this place. It’s at least 40 years old, maybe older. It’s not even new to me. Two decades ago, a skinny, gullible, wide-eyed 21-year-old version of myself arrived at this same prison.

Memories came flooding back as I hefted my property and shuffled off the bus into the light of day. Aside from a few fresh rolls of razor wire and different guards with the same scowls, everything was just as I left it, frozen in a perpetual state of 1994.

I looked toward the visitation park where Mom used to visit each weekend, ever faithful, ever believing, ever seeing the best in her son. She was in her 40s back then. She’s 70 now. Still faithful, still believing, still seeing the best in me. I have a lot to be grateful for.

Over the gray-wash shingles of the chapel that I helped to build, I could see the confinement unit looming. Somewhere in time, my younger self was still pacing those cells, nursing swollen black eyes and busted lips from fighting off wolves. Prison has extra challenges for young, skinny, blue-eyed white boys.

Beyond the confinement unit sprawled the rec yard where, once upon a nightmare, I sat cross-legged in the softball outfield, acoustic guitar in my lap, shielding my arm from the gun tower while an older convict shot me up with cocaine. Before my arrival in prison, I had only smoked pot and tripped acid.

The chow hall where I saw my first rat, the dormitory where I witnessed my first stabbing, the bunk where I got my first tattoo… These landmarks spread across the panorama like monuments to a darker, more confusing time. Though smaller and shabbier than the imposing dungeon of my memory, the prison is relatively unchanged. The only thing that’s changed is me.

I’m almost a quarter-century removed from the naรฏve and inexperienced kid who once roamed this compound seeking himself in the opinions and acceptance of others. That dark-haired, fresh-faced, 125-pound boy is now a bald, bearded, 200-pound man. I no longer confuse manhood with brutality and judge myself to be lacking. I treasure my loved ones instead of taking them for granted. I understand that fear is just a voice in my head. Discipline and a hunger for self-mastery have taken the place of addiction and impulsiveness. Then there’s the books…

T.S. Eliot once famously observed that “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

I’m not sure if I know the place any better, but I know myself and, in the words of another famous poet, “that has made all the difference.”

Posted
April 21, 2017
Category
character sketch, life philosophy, My Story, On My Block
Comments
3 Responses

Finding peace without hope

Recent photo of J.G.A few years ago, I used to walk the track while pondering the cosmos with my homeboy JG at a private prison in the Florida Panhandle by the shady name of Blackwater (no relation to the infamous private-sector security firm that dominated the headlines in Green Zone Baghdad during the second Iraq war).

Although he was 15 years younger than I was, JG and I had a lot in commonโ€”same hometown, same circle of friends, both audiophiles, both sports fans, both committed to self-mastery and a life free from the enslavement of addiction. We were also both doing a substantial amount of time: him, 10 years; me, 30. But for all the things we had in common, there was a fundamental rift in our philosophies regarding the prison sentences we were serving and how we approached them.

JG is a Christian who is also well versed in The Secret, The Prosperity Bible and other new-thought, mind-over-matter, mustard-seed doctrine. His guiding principle is Biblical, Matthew 21:21-22 which, to paraphrase, says “Prayer and faith without doubt can wither fig trees and move mountains.”

While I don’t subscribe to any religion, I lean Eastern, spiritually, and call myself Buddhish. Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha has had a profound impact on my life. I’ve read Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul three times, and We’re All Doing Time by Bo Lozoff has been a constant companion and manual to me for over a quarter-century in the chain gang. My guiding principle is straight out of The Four Noble Truths: Desire is the root of suffering and contentment is the way out.

Day after day, lap after lap, we debated our philosophies and invariably arrived at the same dead end. In a nutshell, JG believed that through prayer, visualization, and faith, he could will his way out of prison long before his distant release date. I believed that through meditation, gratitude, and acceptance, freedom could be attained right here, right now, regardless of my release date.

We hit a stalemate. He thought it was cowardly of me to accept my conditions without a fight. I thought he was naรฏve to believe in the impossible. In the end we had to agree to disagree. I was in my tenth year of incarceration at the time and he was on only his second. Sooner or later he would come to the realization that hope hurts and learn to find peace in the present moment without clinging or resisting.

Fast forward two and a half years. We had both been transferred to different prisons, and I was so immersed in writing the final scenes of On the Shoulders of Giants that the only time I departed the story world of Izzy and Pharaoh was to eat, sleep, and shower. So I was shocked when I called home one day and my mom told me that JG had won his appeal. It was all over Facebook.

That night as I lay in my bunk, I thought about JG and Blackwater and all those afternoons spent walking the track and debating the power of faith vs. the freedom in acceptance. Guess he won that argument.

But since then I’ve been wondering, have I robbed myself of miracles by failing to expect them? Would I be home right now if I hadn’t tapped out and surrendered to my circumstances? Are desire and contentment really mutually exclusive? Maybe there is a Tao between these two polarities, a middle road that allows for both ambition and inner peace.

I won’t say that JG’s release caused a radical shift in my belief system, but it did inspire me to open my mind, adjust my philosophy, and leave a little room for hope… at least a mustard seed’s worth.

Posted
April 5, 2017
Category
addiction, My Story, On My Block
Comments
6 Responses

The truth about spice

I awoke to a shrill and piercing wail, half panicked, half orgasmic. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!”

I sat up in my bunk and glanced at my watch. It was 5 a.m. The commotion was in the back corner of the dorm. A crowd of inmates was gathered around a young black man whose body was locked in a half-crouch, knees slightly bent, fists clenched, as if he were about to ski the K-12. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!”

One of the bystanders urged him to snap out of it. Someone forced their way through the crowd and dashed him in the face with a cup of water. When that didn’t work, he was slapped. His distress only increased. The guard frowned through the Plexiglas window of the booth.

Sleep faded and recognition dawned as I watched it all unfold. He wasn’t being attacked or having a meltdown. He was only gooking. No, gooking is not the gerund form of a dated slur, it’s the umbrella term that covers a myriad of strange behavior that goes hand in hand with the drug spice.

If someone is crawling around on the floor, flopping like a fish, mumbling incoherently, seizing, vomiting, or locked up screaming “Oh my God!” over and over, chances are they’re gooking out on spice.

I consider myself a chemical connoisseur. I’ve never met a drug I didn’t like. I started out pinching weed from my dad’s stash, then moved on to blotter acid by the eighth grade. Crack, ecstasy, pills… I doted on each with unconditional love. And whether on this or that side of the razor wire made no difference. I shot cocaine for the first time at age 21 on a prison rec yard with an acoustic guitar in my lap to shield both needle and arm from the gun tower. The first time I snorted heroin was in a prison bathroom. My love affair with dope is well documented. I love it so much that I’m doing 30 years in prison for it.

That being said, spice scares the hell out of me. Ever since it burst on the scene, I’ve watched my fellow inmates have their nervous system attacked, their kidneys fail, their brain function diminish. I’ve watched them hyperventilate and drool and faceplant into the concrete. A potent batch of that shit will have the ambulance in and out of here all day.

But that’s not even the scariest part. The most concerning consequence of the spice epidemic from where I sit is the deadening of hearts. I’m no neuroscientist but I’d be willing to bet that spice suffocates whatever chemical in the brain is responsible for empathy. In a place where kindness and humanity are already scarce to begin with, the last thing we need is a substance to snuff out what little light remains. But spice isn’t just a prison problem, its popularity is exploding everywhere because it doesn’t show up on standard track urinalyses. I’ve just been able to study its disastrous effects day after day in the condensed ecosystem of my prison dorm.

Take it from a dope aficionado: This is no drug. This is a lethal, man-made, brain-eating chemical masquerading as a drug. Big difference.

You know those movies like I Am Legend and World War Z where a contagion creates a sub-human, zombified race that multiplies exponentially? They had it half right. Only the viral spore isn’t from some toxic waste spill or globetrotting bacteria. It’s Yellow Jacket, it’s Red Dragon, it’s the millennial chemical called spice. Smoke up.

Posted
December 11, 2016
Category
My Story, On My Block, writing
Comments
0 Responses

Blunt force trauma

Doggy doorI got punched in the face the other night. Long story. It didn’t knock me down, but I was out on my feet. Hurt my pride more than anything. Thankfully, in the parallel universe of prison, standing up for one’s self supersedes wins and losses and after spending so many years in a cage, I’ve at least got the standing up part down pat.

But in the groggy aftermath of the fight, as I lay in my bunk with a vicious headache and a wet rag attempting to staunch the blood flow, it occurred to me that I had probably suffered yet another concussion.

I’m paranoid about my brain. I’ve been that way since I started writing books. Any minor lapse of memory is immediately suspected as a precursor for dementia. I mourn the brain cells I once squandered sucking on crack pipes and water bongs and I even meditate in the neuroplastical hope of rejuvenating gray matter. I’d take three broken legs over another concussion at this stage.

Headshots, like felony arrests, have been a recurring theme over the first couple of semesters of my life. When I was five years old I had to be stitched up after running full-speed into a wall in our apartment. Then there were seven years of head-on collisions in Pop Warner football, then juvenile hall lumps, prison yard lumps, a metal bar stool across the head in my mid-30s… but the most memorable concussion of my crash test dummy life was the car wreck that preceded the above photograph. That’s not Frankenstein up there, that’s me. And those are 70 staples in my head.

Luckily there were no other cars involved. The roads were slick, my tires were bald, and my Pathfinder hydroplaned, flipped, and crashed through a fence, smacking an oak tree. The metal roof collapsed on my head.

I awoke two days later in the ICU of Sacred Heart hospital. The neurosurgeon told my mom that I could be deaf, blind, slow, or paralyzed post-surgery, but that my brain was swelling and if he didn’t operate immediately, I would die.

That was 14 years ago and much has happened since: heartbreaks, hair loss, addiction, a lengthy prison sentence, and yes, more concussions. But in the midst of all this dreariness, something transformative has also occurred… books! And with these books, discipline, honor, maturity. I think even the most skeptical reader would concede that a brain-damaged, crackhead, ADHD, high school dropout summoning the concentration to write full length novels longhand is pretty unusual, if not miraculous. Sometimes I wonder if that near-fatal head injury back in 2002 caused some undeveloped part of my brain to light up and assist me in becoming a normal, fully functioning human being.

My third novel, On the Shoulders of Giants, is now available on Amazon. If you read it, you’ll find a character with a scar very similar to my own. This was done not only in adherence to the author’s axiom write what you know, but also as a tribute to my lifelong toxic love affair with blunt force trauma and banging my head against things.

 

Posted
September 29, 2016
Category
addiction, Criminal Justice Reform, interconnectedness, juvenile life without parole, life philosophy, On My Block, racial prejudice, racism, raising children
Comments
4 Responses

The solution

Given what happened in Chicago over the weekend, a continuation of rampant violence that barely makes the news anymore, I wanted to repost this piece I wrote a few months ago. Unfortunately, it’s still relevant.ย 

The Middle East โ€“ Sunnis and Shiites murdering each other. For territory, for power, over ideology. Death tolls rise along with the level of hopelessness. Every day, violence is a fact of life to which the citizens of places like Baghdad and Aleppo have become desensitized. There is no place too sacred for bloodshed. No mosque, no school, no hospital. In addition to sectarian violence, children have grown up watching their cities and villages bombed by foreign drones, their families and neighbors killed or taken away by foreign soldiers. Flames of hate are fanned by radical clerics. An insidious โ€œus vs. themโ€ mentality seeps into the soul of the people.

The fear and distrust flow both ways, feeding off each other. Too many soldiers have watched their comrades fall to IEDs and sniper fire. Too many service members have witnessed the carnage of suicide bombings.

America โ€“ Drug pushers and gang members murdering each other. For territory, for power, for street cred. Death tolls rise along with the level of hopelessness. Every day, violence is a fact of life to which the citizens of places like Chicago and Oakland have become desensitized. There is no place too sacred for drive-by shootings. No church, no park, no school bus stop. In addition to gang violence and inner city drug wars, children have grown up having their doors kicked in by narcotics officers, seeing their neighbors slammed on car hoods, electrocuted by tasers, sometimes murdered by police, their fathers and brothers taken away in cop cars, often never to return. Flames of hate are fanned by ratings-driven news channels, through bullhorns of activists, and the microphones of rap stars.

The fear and distrust flow both ways, feeding off each other. Too many cops have seen their comrades murdered in the line of duty, in shootouts and chases, and more recently in cold blood, executed over their uniforms.

There is no simple fix to this complex and generational problem. A congressional hearing wonโ€™t solve it. Nor will any new law. The American way of throwing truckloads of tax dollars at the situation wonโ€™t make it go away either. But there is a solution: Love.

Donโ€™t roll your eyes. Naรฏve and idyllic as it sounds, if every pastor, teacher, mentor, and concerned citizen formed a government-backed coalition, a movement to ensure that every inner city kid in America is loved, nurtured, and taught respect for human life, 20 years from now, we would see a major downscale in violence, hate, and intolerance.

This is no hippy-liberal, peace-and-love idea. It takes balls to go into high-crime areas and mentor children. Volunteers could be robbed, shot, raped, murdered. But we have missionaries and aid workers traveling to the Middle East every day. Kayla Mueller, a young American Doctors Without Borders worker in Syria who was kidnapped and eventually killed by ISIS, said: โ€œFor as long as I live, I will not allow this suffering to be normalโ€ฆโ€ Her same heroic philosophy needs to be aimed at Americaโ€™s inner cities.

โ€œGreat idea, Malcolm. So why donโ€™t you do it?โ€

Because Iโ€™m in prison. But from this side of the razor wire, things are crystal clear. My dormitory is full of 19-year-old kids with life sentences. Unraised, uneducated, unloved. Many of them left children behind who will grow up the same way. These are young men who laugh at domestic terror attacks and applaud when police are gunned down. As cold-blooded and evil as this sounds, itโ€™s a problem that will continue to grow exponentially if not confronted at its roots. Not with force and intolerance, but with love and compassion.

In my latest novel, On the Shoulders of Giants, a story that deals largely with race, there are three sections titled โ€œThe Other America.โ€ But the truth is, there is no โ€œother America.โ€ Thereโ€™s only one America. No them, only us. Itโ€™s time to start investing in ALL of our children.

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