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Posted
May 24, 2015
Category
character sketch, On My Block
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As if nobody’s watching

There is this middle-aged dude in my dorm. Six-four, probably 240 pounds, mean as a snake and nuttier than squirrel shit. You know those articles in the paper about mentally ill inmates falling through the cracks in the system? This guy is Exhibit A. He rarely speaks, just grunts and mean mugs. Occasionally he’ll howl. But the most noteworthy thing about him is that every day when the mid-day mix comes on the local R&B station, he stands up and begins to dance. Totally oblivious to the cat-calls and laughter from the rest of the dorm, he busts all the old-school moves: the Cabbagepatch, the Wop, the Running Man, even the Roger Rabbit.

While I watch him gyrate from the corner of my eye, a part of me thinks “what a psycho.” I mean, who does that? But deep down, there’s another part of me that kinda respects his crazy, his utter indifference to what anyone thinks about him. A part of me that secretly thinks “I wish I could dance.”

Posted
May 9, 2015
Category
My Story
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‘Maximum Maternal Velocity’

When I was a little kid, it was a big deal to tie a rope to the seat of a friend’s bike and get pulled around on a skateboard through the potholed back streets of South Miami. Wipeouts were inevitable. I remember coming home with bloody knees and my mom crying as she picked the gravel from my wounds and cleaned them with peroxide. She would beg me not to do it again. Of course, I didn’t listen. I was back at it before the scabs even formed.

When I started skipping school in the seventh grade, she tried everything to get me to stop — threats, punishments, even bribery. I blew her off. She had to work 12-hour days to support our family and I knew she couldn’t be in two places at once. She wept when I landed in juvie for the first time. She told me I wasn’t a bad kid, I was a good kid who sometimes did bad things. Her position never changed, even though I would return again and again.

When I graduated to the adult system at 18, she pleaded with the judge to give me another chance. She told him I was worth saving. Despite her pleas, I was sentenced to nine years in the department of corrections. Over the next decade, she spent most of her weekends on the interstate, headed to one prison or another to visit me. She’d sometimes drive hundreds of miles, only to be informed at the gate that I was in disciplinary confinement and she couldn’t see me. I repeatedly let her down, took her for granted, and manipulated her for money to pay my dope debts (yes, there is dope in prison).

When I was finally released, guess who was waiting in the parking lot, hopping up and down like the next contestant on The Price is Right? She gave me a place to live, bought me job interview clothes, even gave me her old car. And all I did was continue to unravel. The skinned knees of my reckless youth that once made her cry were now ICU visits: punctured lungs, broken ribs, head trauma, brain surgery. As my appetite for chemicals grew voracious, so too did my desperation to get more. Until my brief experiment with freedom came to a screeching halt and I was arrested for armed robbery.

If it was humiliating for Mom, as a county government employee, to have her crackhead son’s face plastered all over the news, she never showed it. She came to every court date, kept telling me that God had a plan for me, kept telling me I wasn’t a bad kid. I was a good kid who sometimes did bad things (even though I was 30 by then). She kept believing in me when everyone else — understandably — washed their hands. I think when my mom looked at me, she didn’t see my rap sheet or my numerous failures and weaknesses, or the 31-year Federal prison sentence I’d just received. She saw her baby.

In Cheryl Strayed’s book Wild, she writes that her mother loved her with “maximum maternal velocity.” I know that feeling. My mom is the Rocky Balboa of mothers. She’s Shel Silverstein’s Giving Tree. Most addicts wear down their families and push them away. My mom wore ME down with her unconditional love. Every word in every book I’ve written is typed by her. I get all the credit, but there is no Malcolm Ivey without her. The coolest thing about this writing journey isn’t the new friends (whom I love), or the good reviews (which I appreciate). It’s the thought of my amazing mom handing one of my books to a neighbor, or an old friend, or a former co-worker and saying, “My son wrote this.”

I love you, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day.

Posted
April 6, 2015
Category
character sketch, kindness, life philosophy
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On my block

Last year my 79-year-old neighbor went into my locker while I was on the yard and stole a bag of Doritos. He was positively identified by an eyewitness, a slightly younger old man (74) with eyes like a hawk and no reason to lie.

It put me in a difficult position. A man can’t allow people to steal from him in prison. But on the other hand, come on … the dude is a senior citizen. Spoiler alert: there was no fist fight. I didn’t even want to embarrass him by calling him out on his behavior.

Maybe he was suffering from a bout of dementia and didn’t even remember going into my locker. Maybe he just wanted someone to smash him and put him out of his misery. Or maybe he was just hungry, broke and desperate. In our three years as bunkies, I’ve never seen him receive a money receipt or even a letter.

In the end, I pulled him aside, said I was missing some food and that while I had no idea who stole it, IF it was him, all he had to do was ask. He stopped speaking to me after that. It was no big loss. This is not your stereotypical grandfatherly old man. He’s so abrasive, so grumpy, so racially insensitive that some of the younger inmates nicknamed him Hitler. He snores, his dentures slide halfway out of his mouth when he sleeps. He has tufts of gray hair sprouting from his ears, and he never covers his mouth when he coughs or sneezes. His boycotting of me was more of a blessing than a punishment. He barely existed in my universe anyway. For almost a year we didn’t speak.

Until last night, when out of the blue, he looked over at me and started talking again.

He was born in 1935. He turns 80 this year. He never had a run-in with the law until 1998 when his wife of 41 years died of cancer. Since then it’s been one DUI after the next. As I listened to his story, I could almost physically feel my heart opening. That’s when it hit me. It’s funny how I can do weeks, months, years on autopilot — head down, chest out, face set in a natural prison yard scowl. Me against the world. But then I’ll have a conversation like that and suddenly I’ll remember: “Oh, yeah. Kindness. This feels awesome. This is what it’s all about.”

Unfortunately, the moment always fades and as the days pass, I slip back into unconscious living and forget again. Until the next time. Only kindness matters.

Posted
February 1, 2015
Category
addiction, On My Block
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Party animal

I live on a steel bunk in a warehouse. Everything I own in this world is in the footlocker beneath me. It ain’t much; a photo album, a stack of letters, a few books. I’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 — rotten teeth, track marks, gnawed nails on shaky hands. They give me news of other old friends who weren’t as lucky: overdoses, shootings, suicides. Occasionally I’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 you’re thinking it won’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 arm… We call getting high “partying” and like any party, there’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 we’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 you’re 15 (or 17 or 24) and you’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 won’t happen to you, we can talk more about it when you move into my dorm. The bunk behind mine is open right now. We’ll leave a light on for you. The one from the gun tower.

Posted
December 26, 2014
Category
Miami Dolphins, NFL, sports
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Dysfunction junction

There are 32 teams in the NFL and 53 players on each active roster. That’s 1,696 men. Throw in another 300 or so for each team’s practice squad and P.U.P. list and we’re talking about 2,000 people. Now imagine if that was a town. Dysfunction Junction. Population 2000.

But this is no rural community with an economy on life support, or some fading rust belt township. This is a town full of millionaires. Of mansions and Maseratis. Where the average income is higher than the Hamptons, but the crime rate per capita is worse than Camden, NJ. Think about all the arrests over the past two years. Not just the high profile cases that made the national news, but the other less publicized domestic violence cases, the assaults, the possession charges, the numerous DUIs. There was even an underwear theft in November. And when you include former citizens of this figurative small town, the statistics become even more alarming. Ex-Patriot Aaron Hernandez is about to begin trial for murder with more potential charges pending, and Ex-Saint Darren Sharper is an alleged serial rapist.

Most towns with such minuscule populations have little more than a holding tank in a police substation to house the town drunkard overnight. Think Mayberry. NFLville would need a jail as big as Rikers Island to hold all the defendants. But then again, hardly any of them would ever go to jail because their high-priced attorneys would ensure that they got off with a few months’ probation and community service.

Do I sound bitter? I’m not. I live for the Fall. The Miami Dolphins are right behind Momma on my list of loyalties. And the NFL is not all bad. For every ugly story there are ten that will warm your heart and give you faith in humanity. But I live in a prison dorm and the same can be said for the dudes in the neighboring bunks. I just think it’s amazing that such a small, affluent community could be so rife with crime and self-sabotage.

Makes you wonder if there’s something in the Gatorade.

Posted
November 24, 2014
Category
miscellaneous, music
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Did you see it?

If you weren’t paying attention, you might have missed it. I’m surprised the cameras even caught it. But last night at the AMAs during her performance of “The Heart Wants What It Wants,” Selena Gomez closed her eyes and mouthed the words, “Thank you Jesus.” I admit that I am not the most devout man in the world, and I normally roll my eyes when some millionaire pop icon plays the God card, but there was something different about this. Maybe because it was so subtle. It was almost as if she was asking for and receiving strength mid-performance. It just felt genuine.

I won’t pretend to know all about Selena Gomez, but I’ve watched enough Hollywood Extra to know that she is the on-again, off-again girlfriend of Justin Bieber. I’m assuming that “The Heart Wants What It Wants” is about him, but I don’t know. I do know that great art is supposed to draw you in, to make you feel, to move you. And last night, it wasn’t Ariana Grande’s vocal acrobatics that moved me the most, or Taylor Swift’s brilliant choreography, or even JLo and Iggy Azalea’s booty popping. It was Selena Gomez, beautiful, elegant, vulnerable, standing before the world, leaning on her God and whispering “Thank you Jesus.”

Posted
November 20, 2014
Category
addiction, life philosophy, the middle way / moderation
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The case for not being a lick

Do you know what a lick is? Not the generic definition. This has nothing to do with the tongue or fire or even defeating something. I’m talking slang here. For those of you who have never tasted the misery of being enslaved by a chemical, a “lick” is what a drug dealer calls his customer. The guy who pawns his mother’s lawnmower for crack money is someone’s lick. So is the woman who sells her body for a 20 rock, or a shot of ice, or a Roxy 30. A drug dealer may pretend to like you, he may act oblivious to your rumpled clothing and declining weight, he may even chill with you for a while after money and merchandise are exchanged. But make no mistake, inwardly he’s smirking at your weakness. Regardless of the illusion of equal footing, this is not some business transaction. You are sick and desperate for what he has in his pocket, and he has all the power. You’re his sucker, his chump, his lick. Pointblank. He’s buying clothes and cars and bling while your life is crumbling all around you.

It’s humiliating to admit this, but I’ve been a lick for most of my life. As of this writing, I’m not even halfway through a 379-month prison sentence for robbing gas stations. Not because I was starving or because there was a recession and I was desperate to feed my family. No. I wish, but no. I was just a lick trying to scrape up money to bring to my dopeman. So you get it, right? Drugs are bad. I know what you’re thinking: “Thank you very much, Diane Sawyer, but this is not breaking news.” There are millions upon millions of stories out there about the soul-sucking consequences of drug abuse.

But this is not an anti-drug rant. This is an anti-lick rant.

At the risk of sounding like the illegitimate child of Tipper Gore and Joe McCarthy, I’ll attempt to explain. The predatory paradigm of dopeman and lick is not restricted to drug culture; it’s everywhere. Millionaire rappers laugh all the way to the bank while the kids who mindlessly, hypnotically repeat their lyrics get shot down in the streets, or come to prison with life sentences for trying to live out these murderous, unsustainable fairy tales that are being spoon-fed to them under the label of “cool.” Metal bands romanticize suicides and overdoses as if they were heroic acts. Violent video games, sexting, internet porn; it makes sense that kids are the biggest licks because they are the most inexperienced and therefore vulnerable. But it’s not just kids. Big Pharma is a billion-dollar industry. Middle Eastern turf wars are reported as ideological clashes but are really all about oil and who gets to sell it to us. Think we’re not China’s licks? Check out the “Made in” sticker on the back of any product sold at the local Super Walmart. Everybody wants a piece.

The Eagles have a terrific lyric in the song “Already Gone” – “So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains, and we never even know we have the key.” In this case, the key is awareness, knowledge, moderation. Don’t be a lick.

Posted
November 11, 2014
Category
life philosophy
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Form vs. substance

We’ve all known loudmouths. There’s one in every hood, every club, every schoolyard, every basketball court, every prison dorm. They’re everywhere, beating on their chests, threatening, bullying, shadowboxing, trumpeting their own toughness. And most of the time, we believe them. So it’s always surprising when someone comes along and knocks them on their ass. They were all form and no substance.

How about that dude who’s constantly spouting off about politics? He’s brilliant and he wants to make certain that you know he’s brilliant. What’s this guy even doing working a 9 to 5 job? He should be hosting Face the Nation. Yet when engaged in conversation with him, it becomes clear that he’s merely repeating the opinions of others, that he’s woven a mask from the words of Fox News analysts and talk-radio blowhards. And underneath there is no substance.

Have you ever met a beautiful person whose good looks were nullified by a selfish, shallow personality? An intellectual with no common sense? A loyal church-goer with no compassion? Form is vinyl siding; substance is a house’s foundation. Form is candy paint and chrome rims; substance is a V8 engine. Rippling muscle, hairpieces, tats, piercings, boob jobs: form. Courage, honor, faithfulness, sixteen-hour workdays during Christmas: substance.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bashing form. There’s something to be said for a nice body, a sparkling white smile, a sick tattoo. But if there’s no substance, then all the shiny outside stuff is basically expensive wrapping paper over a pair of tube socks.

How would I know? What qualifies me to speak on this subject? The short answer is: I’m a master of form. I am all of the above (minus the hairpiece and boob job) and after spending the better part of 40 years creating the illusion of instead of being, my chameleonic ways have left me feeling empty, phony, insubstantial. That’s what has led me on this fantastic journey of self-exploration, of spinal fortification, of reconciling inner with outer. Form never lasts. Pretty words evaporate. Skin sags, teeth rot, hair eventually falls out. It’s inevitable. When I’m 90, do I want to be a miserable clot of fears and complaints and regret, or a beacon of light? The relentless pursuit of character is Botox for the soul. Choose substance.

Posted
October 30, 2014
Category
kindness, life philosophy, My Story, On My Block
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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 world — honesty, generosity, friendliness — 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 façade 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.

Suddenly — no, not suddenly — 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 also appeared on Huffington Post on 11/29/14.]

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