One more shot

February 2007. In a cramped courtroom in Milton, Florida, a small town just east of Pensacola, I sat handcuffed and shackled in a jury box, shoulder to shoulder with twenty other crackheads, meth cooks, and burglars. Like most of them, I was awaiting my fate. Unlike most of them, I wasn’t sweating it. My fate had already been sealed. Or so I thought…

One year earlier, a federal judge had sentenced me to 379 months in prison under something called The Hobbs Act. Right around the same time I signed a plea agreement for a concurrent state sentence that amounted to twenty years for armed robbery. Once the dust settled, my release date was close to three decades away.

And I was overjoyed.

Okay, maybe not overjoyed, but definitely grateful. With my record they could’ve buried me. But they left me a sliver of daylight. That’s all I needed. One more shot.

Yet here I was back in court. Considering the lengthy sentence I was already serving, it seemed odd that they would waste money and manpower transporting me back from prison on a violation of probation. Especially since the charges were from 1991, when I was 17 years old. In my mind, the worst was over. A concurrent sentence felt like a foregone conclusion. So inconsequential that the public defender who was assigned to represent me never even bothered to visit the county jail to discuss legal strategy. Since the gain time laws from the early 90s would apply to whatever sentence the judge imposed, even a fifty-year term would not change my release date. I was pretty much locked in for 2035.

So you can imagine my reaction when the clerk called my name and I hobbled over to the lectern where the prosecutor announced that the state was seeking a life sentence. (Excuse me? Did he just say life?)

“Does the defendant wish to speak?” asked the judge.

I scanned the audience for Mom and located her sweet bifocaled face on the second row. The same face that had been attending my court appearances since I was 13 years old. She stood. I turned back to the judge. “Yes sir.”

Different families have different skill sets. The Trumps are proficient at real estate, the Mannings excel at throwing footballs, the Partridges played musical instruments. If there’s one area where me and Mom kick ass, it’s begging judges for mercy. We’ve had a lot of practice.

I told his honor that I was already serving concurrent sentences of 31 and 20 years. Told him that I had pleaded with both the federal magistrate and the toughest circuit court judge in Escambia County for these sentences. That as things stood, I would be in my early 60s when I got out. Mom would be in her mid-80s. I had this one last chance to be a good son, to be there when she got older and needed me, to repay her for believing in me. And even this was a long shot. Lots of things had to fall our way. But a life sentence would extinguish even that hope.

Then Mom spoke. She told him she was a widow, that I was her only child, that we moved to Miami when I was ten where she had to work 14-hour days to support the family and that’s when things started to unravel in my life. She told him that despite my lengthy record, I was a good boy (I was 33 at the time). That whenever I did return home, I would be returning to a strong support system. She told him that she still believed in me. Then she tearfully begged him to have mercy on our family.

By the time she returned to her seat, even the prosecutor was misty-eyed. The judge not only sentenced me to a minimal concurrent sentence, but expressed regret over not being able to legally reduce the sentences that the other judges had imposed.

A lot of miracles have happened since then: the books, new people in my life, new nieces and nephews, soul-stretching experiences, a Supreme Court ruling that resulted in years being slashed from my sentence. I’ll be coming home sooner than expected and, God willing, I’ll have the opportunity to be a better son, better man, better human being…

But I think about that day in court often. More so lately as the national conversation seems to be gravitating toward criminal justice reform. What if my mom was not so meek and soft spoken? What if life made her bombastic? What if my words came stammering from a meth-ravaged mouth? What if we were less articulate, less fluent, less groomed?

What if we were black?

I’m not a fan of the term “white privilege.” It’s thrown around as if it’s some Universal truth that can be applied across the board. There are poor people of Scots-Irish descent scattered from the Bible Belt to the Rust Belt and all throughout rural America who have been scraping out a living for generations. People who have never experienced any privileges, white or otherwise, since their ancestors came west. To lump them in with the wealthy or even the lower-middle class in this country, to call them privileged, is as erroneous and out of touch as declaring racism dead.

But there are also people of color within a five-bunk radius of where I live who share my exact charges, have fewer priors, and are serving life in prison. Were they slammed because of their race? Or did it have more to do with their socioeconomic class? Maybe it was bad luck. Maybe they just had the wrong judge. Or the right judge on the wrong day. Maybe their mothers couldn’t show up to court because they were working, or deceased, or enslaved by addiction, or in prison themselves. Or maybe it’s all of the above — some intricate algorithm in the judge’s mind that distills all of these variables into a term of years.

Whatever the reason, I’m grateful to live in this body, at this time, with this release date, and Ms Doris as my mom. I’m grateful to have another shot… And when I reach the other side, I’m going to fight like hell for the humanity and hope of those I leave behind. This is my mission.

Talk about a privilege.

ATL

Am I reading Atlanta wrong? You resist arrest. Violently. You disarm a cop in the struggle. Yeah, it’s just a taser but you’re firing it over your shoulder as you flee. What if you hit and incapacitate the cop you’re aiming at? Then you can take his pistol and shoot him or the other cop or civilians…

Dangerous, highly volatile situation. Especially considering the alcohol/drugs in your system, substances that are obviously impairing your judgment. Not to mention the insane amount of adrenaline that is flooding the bloodstream of the officer having to make this snap decision. If it’s a decision at all. It could just be reflexive. Academy training taking over.

Do I need to adjust my liberal lens here? Maybe I’ve got some weird strand of Stockholm syndrome that is clouding my view and causing me to rationalize the brutal actions of the police. The same police that have kicked my ass and charged me with assault, sold me drugs and arrested me for buying them, allowed their dogs to chew on my flesh after I was handcuffed… Maybe this is the residual effect of spending all these years in a cage. Maybe, but I doubt it. It just seems like the overwhelming majority of rational people of every race, age, and political stripe would agree that fighting and disarming the police ends disastrously. 100% of the time.

George Floyd was murdered by a bad cop. The facts support this. All you need is eyes to see. There are others. Eric Garner, horrible. Breonna Taylor, tragic and inexcusable. Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Michael Brown… All killed by the people sworn to serve and protect them. Their deaths reveal a deeply flawed and fractured system. A system that has failed the very taxpayers who fund it. But what happened to Rayshard Brooks was more of an unfortunate tragedy than a murder committed by a salivating racist cop.

As someone who has grown up in the criminal justice system, someone who has been accused and found guilty of numerous crimes, I do not believe a jury will convict the officer of murder. And it shouldn’t. Not if justice is the aim. But how much do we really care about justice? We are living in a time when every constitutional amendment is under attack. Especially the right to due process. Maybe there was never any justice in the first place. At least not for the marginalized fifth of the country that has been watching the local police force-kick their doors down and drag their sons and daughters off to jail for far too long.

Maybe that’s the point.

Jason Isbell

“I hope you find something to love, something to do when you feel like giving up. A song to sing or a tale to tell. Something to love. It’ll serve you well…”

I think Jason Isbell had his baby daughter in mind when he penned these lyrics, but they feel like they were written specifically for me. All of his songs do.

I discovered him a decade ago on NPR’s World Cafe right around the time I was working on my first novel. The homogenized rap and metal on corporate radio felt soulless and prepackaged and did nothing to inspire me. The Indie artists on World Cafe seemed more honest, more creative. Tuning in became part of my writing ritual. A ritual that has evolved over the years. Mainly because tablets were introduced to the prison system in 2018, I barely listen to my radio anymore. But I own every album by Jason Isbell. From the obscure side projects with Elizabeth Cook to his “Sea Songs” with wife and fiddle player, Amanda Shires, to all of his releases with his band, The 400 Unit. When I finally get my hands on a guitar again, his music will be the first I learn. I envision a free me on Mom’s back porch with an acoustic, finger-picking St. Peter’s Autograph. It’s coming…

A friend of mine told me Mr. Isbell is one credit short of a master’s degree in storytelling. I can hear that in his music, in the details he presents in his lyrics. “Sharecropper eyes” and “burning Ferris wheels” and “old women harmonizing with the wind…” Dude is the most gifted songwriter this side of Dylan.

But it’s not just that. In an era where southern men are increasingly judged by the size of their MAGA hats, his songs are a rallying cry for kindness and courage and humanity. Don’t believe me? Check out these ten Isbell standards:

1) Traveling Alone — “Damn near strangled by my appetite. Ybor City on a Friday night. Couldn’t even stand up right…”
2) Cover Me Up — A story about finding your soulmate.
3) Last of My Kind — A country boy attempts to make sense of neon lights, dirty sidewalks, polluted rivers and the invisible homeless.
4) If We Were Vampires — His wife shadows his vocals in this haunting song about love and time.
5) Overseas — Blistering guitar riff. “This used to be a ghost town but even the ghosts died out…”
6) 24 Frames — You thought God was an architect? Now you know. It’s almost like he told his bass player “you can hang out on this one.”
7) Live Oak — Classic Isbell storytelling
8) Elephant — A song about watching a friend die from cancer.
9) Only Children — “Remember when we used to meet, at the bottom of Mobile Street, to do what the broken people do?”
10) Flagship, Chaos and Clothes, Alabama Pines, However Long, Something More than Free, Dreamsicle (I added a few bonuses just in case anyone shares my enthusiasm.)

The highest compliment my fellow prisoners pay me when they read my books is that they recognize themselves in the stories, that I’m writing their lives. Jason Isbell has a similar effect on me. I can hear my reflection in his songs.

Since his new album Reunions dropped a couple of weeks ago, and his music is such a big influence on my life, I figured this was overdue.

A shining example

A month ago I had a little rift with someone I love very much over Trump. (Who else, right?) This was my first real taste of a phenomenon that free people have been experiencing with friends and neighbors and coworkers since 2016. I have always assumed that anyone intelligent and empathetic and kind would reflexively reject Trump’s lack of humanity.

If only things were that simple.

I’ve known this girl since she was a baby and there is nothing dark about her heart. She is the embodiment of innocence and light. She just has different views. But what was really troubling for me in this confrontation was my own response. The way my blood pressure skyrocketed, the way I stammered, how empty I felt when we hung up. I was so rattled that I began questioning my own beliefs. Maybe I had a blind spot. Maybe I was drinking the “liberal media” kool-aid. Was I biased against Trump from the outset? I thought I had written something around his inauguration saying that he deserved the benefit of the doubt, that America’s success was tied to his success as president. I went back through my essays, searching for evidence of my own open-mindedness and instead found this from 2017.

If you’re reading this, and I know you are, below is some of the back story that informs my opinions. This is what I couldn’t shoehorn into an emotional 15-minute collect phone call. I love you.

A shining example

Blame it on George Orwell. He once said that it’s impossible to enjoy the writings of someone with whom you take political issue. For this and other reasons, I decided to steer clear of politics in 2017. I even made it a New Year’s resolution. I consider my novels to be letters to the world and want these posts to read the same way. I thought this year I would include more humor, more story, more music. But like many Americans, I’m already backsliding on my resolutions, three weeks in.

For this I blame another George: Stephanopoulos. Last weekend I watched him stroll around the White House with President Obama for a final interview and as the outgoing Commander-in-Chief answered each question with the same poise and equanimity that have been the hallmarks of his tenure in the Oval Office, I knew I had one more political post to write.

I campaigned for President Obama in prison visitation parks in the Deep South. I spent much of 2008 convincing mothers and fathers of lifers that the Supreme Court justices and lower appellate court judges that he would potentially appoint could one day mean freedom for their sons. Or at least provide hope. He did not disappoint. Eight years later he leaves the job as the biggest criminal justice reformer in the history of the White House.

He was also the most gifted orator, certainly of my generation. Over and over I watched him run circles around his opponents in presidential debates (horses and bayonets, anyone?). He did it with humor, too. Remember the press dinner in the lingering aftermath of the birther allegations? He had the band strike up “Born in the USA” and came out pumping his fist like Springsteen. His State of the Union speeches were honest and engaging. His presidential addresses, especially after tragedies such as Sandy Hook, the Boston Marathon bombings, and the Dallas police murders conveyed hope and healing to a heartbroken nation.

But it wasn’t just words. It was action, too. Despite being hamstrung for three-quarters of his time in office by a partisan Congress that needed him to fail, he still managed to tame a gluttonous Wall Street, rescue American icons Ford and Chevy from the brink of extinction, steer us out of an economic crisis that cost the world 40 percent of its wealth, and commute the disparitive sentences of hundreds of war-on-drugs prisoners.

Oh yeah, he also got Osama Bin Laden.

However, his legacy will not and should not be tied solely to this historic hit on America’s most notorious enemy. But rather to the kindness, tolerance, and humanity he displayed over the last eight years. Just how kind was he? Well, I wrote him a letter and he wrote me back. Think about that. Amid all the global tension, intelligence briefings, and thousands of voices clamoring to be heard, the leader of the free world took the time to respond to a prisoner.

Critics will point to the ACA as a failure. Maybe. Millions of Americans who are now insured would probably disagree. I have no voice in this debate. As a prisoner, my health care expenses are limited to the five-dollar copay I’m charged each time I visit the clinic. I do believe that no idea is born fully formed and eventually, some future administration, possibly the new one, will iron out the kinks in Obamacare, repackage it, and present it to the American people as a glowing success.

Critics will also point to race relations as a failure. On this I vehemently disagree. Because of President Obama, the issue of race is no longer the elephant in the room. It’s a hot button issue. A water cooler issue. And people from all walks of life are expressing their opinions. If there is ever to be a united America, it has to start with an open line of dialogue. His polarizing presence in the White House alone has nudged us into having these uncomfortable conversations.

But the main reason I admire our 44th president has nothing to do with diplomacy or policy or statecraft. During one of the darkest periods of my life, as I tried to claw my way out of the immense hole I had dug for myself, President Obama was a shining example of what leadership looks like, what self-mastery looks like, what manhood looks like.

I found this quote from Michelle Obama scrawled in the journal I used while writing my second novel, With Arms Unbound. It’s from the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. “Even in the toughest moments, when we’re all sweating it, when all hope seems lost, Barack never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise. He just keeps getting up and moving forward … with patience and wisdom and courage and grace.”

I hope that one day, when I leave the world of prison behind, my future wife will hold me in similar regard.

I know this election season has been vitriolic and divisive. Despite our new president’s numerous faux pas, head-scratcher cabinet appointments, and thin-skinned cringe-worthy tweets, I do not wish him failure. To wish him failure is to wish America failure. At minimum, I’m hoping jobs continue to grow under his stewardship. His entrepreneurial chops could well prove to be a huge asset for the country. But no matter how prolific Donald Trump’s triumphs, Barack Obama will be a hard act to follow.

Since this has to end somewhere, I’m thinking a good place would be where the journey began: on a Tuesday night in November 2008, Grant Park, Chicago. After an historic landslide victory over John McCain, a younger, less gray president-elect put the following question regarding change to the spirited crowd of thousands: “When are we going to realize that WE are the ones we’ve been waiting for?”

Eight years, three novels, and a couple of miracles later, I can point to that speech as a major turning point in my own journey. Thanks for the inspiration, Mr. President. I can’t speak for the rest of the nation, but in my little corner of captivity, you will be missed.

Reconciling Minnesota

In the late eighties, somewhere between Iran-contra, Exxon Valdez, and a World Series earthquake, I was handcuffed and driven from the Dade juvenile detention center to Miami International Airport. I had the dubious honor of being the first Florida juvenile delinquent to be sent to an out-of-state program. A place called Sherbourne House in frigid Saint Paul, Minnesota.

I remember the double takes and raised eyebrows when I stepped off the plane in shorts, a t-shirt, and a mullet, with only a rumpled brown lunch bag as my luggage. It was December in the Twin Cities. Everyone else was dressed for the occasion. The van driver had no problem picking me out of the crowd.

As we drove down the snowy streets to the former rectory that would be my residence for the foreseeable future, I had no idea I was heading into some of the best days of my troubled youth. Ice fishing, Twins games, sledding, skiing, snowball fights… Definitely a different experience for a Florida kid.

But the memory that stands out the most about Minneapolis-Saint Paul is the same takeaway most visitors to the area have: The people are so nice.

In Miami it was nothing to see grown men come to blows in a traffic jam on the Palmetto. Or cars speeding by a stranded, broken down family in the hazard lane. That would never happen in Minnesota. The low income neighborhood where Sherbourne House was located was home to people of Nordic descent, plus Vietnamese, Somalians, and every gradation of black and white on the color spectrum. They all waved and smiled when the van drove by. Every time. But they wave and smile in the south, too. It’s not just that. Minnesotans cared for each other. Like “cared” as an active verb… Checked on each other during brutal winters, shoveled snow from neighbors’ driveways, looked out for the elderly among them. In short, they were a community.

I think this is why it’s so difficult reconciling the Minnesota in my head with the one I’ve been seeing on TV. Where police kneel on the necks of unarmed citizens while the life drains out of them, like big game hunters posing over a trophy kill. Where molotovs fly and struggling small business owners weep and precincts burn.

This is not the Minnesota I remember. But then America as a whole is pretty unrecognizable right now.

2020

They passed out masks at my prison last week. Triple-ply polyester squares made from uniform pants that are mandatory when we’re not eating, sleeping, or bathing. As if the barren, windswept Times Square footage on the evening news was not eerie enough, or the daily death toll on the GMA news ticker, or the images of shiny, late-model SUVs in five-mile-long food queues… Prison life just went from dark to dystopian in the elastic snap of a mask.

Although I’m convinced that a third of my dorm already had the virus back in February (myself included), the pandemic has not officially reached the prison where I am housed. Not since authorities began keeping track, at least. But it has ravaged two of my previous camps. Sumter Correctional had one of the biggest outbreaks in the state, and Blackwater Correctional has had four deaths with hundreds under medical quarantine. I have so many friends trapped in those places. We’ve grown up together in the prison system. Their families and my family brave the weather and the rudeness and the indignity on the weekends in order to spend a few hours with their sons and husbands and brothers. Or they did until visitation was canceled almost two months ago.

I’ve been hesitant to write about the corona virus. In this era of daily televised White House briefings, where Dr. Fauci is a household name and the president is faced with an enemy he can’t dismiss as fake news or a witch hunt, where the NBA playoffs have been canceled and the NFL draft is held online, where everyone is talking about hot spots and flattening curves and social distancing, what can I possibly add to the conversation? I’d rather talk about books and music and football.

But these essays are more than social commentary. They are chronicles. Mile markers. One day I will read over them as a free man and remember where I was when each was written. What was going on. And as much as I want 2020 to be known as the year Tua took his talents to South Beach, the year Brady became a Buc, the year I finally finished writing this novel… all these will be footnotes in the annals of history. 2020 will forever be known as the year of the pandemic. The year when everything changed. The year the handshake died, the mall breathed its last gasp, and the world was reminded of just how interconnected we all are. Rich and poor, black and white, American and Chinese, convict and guard, conservative and liberal. If we learn nothing else during these troubled times, hopefully it will be to put data and science before politics, to say “I love you” while we have the shot, and to take better care of our grandmothers and grandfathers. There is no them… only us.
Stay safe out there.

Back to work

Five years ago, I was flipping through a writing magazine on autopilot, dismissing various poets and essayists based on appearance — basically being a shallow, troglodyte male — when I spotted a pretty face next to an article. I stopped to see what the author had to say… and was immediately hooked.

She was an adjunct professor at a university up north, was also a memoirist, recovering heroin addict, and former dominatrix in a Manhattan dungeon. Her essay dealt with interviewing for writing faculty positions, packing up her girlfriend and her dog and moving to Brooklyn, and working on her book during the long public transit commute to and from the university.

Although it’s been five years and four prisons since I read the article, I remember this sentence clearly: “The psychic immersion required to write a full-length novel is not conducive to the guy in the next seat on the bus munching pork skins…”

I felt her. Attempting to write books in prison is a similar experience. Only the dude munching pork skins is always there, and the bus never stops. I decided to write her a letter. Why not? We were both scribes. Both part of the same community. Consider the Dragonfly was racking up positive reviews by this time and With Arms Unbound appeared in Writers Digest magazine for an honorable mention in their annual book awards. But when you write in a vacuum — when you live in a vacuum — there’s always that nagging question: Am I really a writer? So in the opening paragraph of my letter, I didn’t just acknowledge the elephant in the room, I grabbed Babar by the trunk.

I don’t remember exactly what I said but it was something like “I’m intimidated by you. Not only because you’re a beautiful lesbian, not only because you’re a published author, but because you’re an adjunct professor. Please don’t grade this letter…”

While I was waiting for her to respond, I ordered her book. Like her article, it was brilliantly written. Unlike her article, it gave a detailed account of her work in the sex trade. Most of her clientele were investment bankers and wealthy hedge fund types who wanted to dress up in diapers and have her shout at them, smack them around, tie them up. Seems like there was something about a catheter too. I’m not sure. I was pretty traumatized before the midway point of the book. Not by the rich guys and their weird sexual fetishes. But by my own words. I told her I was “intimidated” by her. Did she think I was, like, into being intimidated? Was she confusing me with those billionaires in baby bibs? To add insult to injury, she meets a guy at the end of the book who becomes her fiancé and they live happily ever after. In my letter I called her a beautiful lesbian. Oops.

When you write complete strangers from a correctional institution, there’s always a chance that you’ll be mistaken for a deranged stalker. This is why I stick to the one letter rule. Just send it out and let the Universe deal with the rest. Whether it’s an agent, a reviewer, a sentencing judge, or the President of the United States. If I never hear back, then I can breathe easy knowing I gave it my best shot. But this was different. I had to write her again. If only to clarify. So after six months and no response, I did just that.

“First of all, I want to apologize for calling you a beautiful lesbian. I didn’t realize you were engaged to a guy until I read your memoir. Second, when I said I was intimidated by you, I didn’t mean it as a come-on. I’m not into being beat up or wearing diapers and the only time I’ve ever endured a catheter was when I woke up in ICU after a car accident that resulted in brain surgery. A highly unpleasant experience that I hope I never go through again…”

Two weeks later, I heard my name at mail call. I knew it was her when I saw the envelope. She said that she had been meaning to write since my first letter arrived, that time had just gotten away from her, that it never crossed her mind that I was into intimidation, but she got a good laugh out of me worrying she would think that. Finally, she said she IS a beautiful lesbian. So there was no need to feel like a jackass. Her happily-ever-after ended before her book was even published and all her subsequent happily-ever-afters had been women.

I received one more letter from her after that. It was somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2016. I was in solitary confinement at Santa Rosa, and Trump had just been elected. Things looked pretty bleak. But I was moved by her words: “The morning of November 9 was one of the worst of my life. At least as an American. That day I had this overwhelming feeling, like I wanted someone (Mom? Obama?) to swoop in and rescue us. But then I realized that I am an adult writer and educator and activist, and it is my job to rescue us. Whatever complacency my generation has enjoyed as a result of the struggles of our parents, that shit is over. It’s time to work!”

I recently came across that letter when I was straightening out my locker. Crazy, that three years have passed since the Newly Crowned King proclaimed his inauguration a glowing success with unprecedented attendance. Three years of illiterate tweets, climate pact pullouts, hush money payouts, inner circle indictments, hurricane map embellishments, ally alienation, enemy enabling, hate group coddling, war hero disrespecting, constitutional nose-thumbing, wedge-driving, name calling, obstructive, divisive, classless, clueless leadership. But we’re in the homestretch now. Last leg of the journey. November 2020 is 10 months away. I took last year off. I didn’t want to participate in the toxic polemic and political vitriol that is driving families and friends and neighbors apart. So I just focused on humanizing the people in my orbit. But my professor friend is correct. Too much is at stake to be complacent. It’s time to get to work.