To Free the Truth

The first thing most people notice when they meet me are my tattoos. My left arm is entirely inked out except for a small piece of flesh on my bicep, and my right arm is a quarter of the way covered. A third of my back is covered by a piece as well. All that was done in a little over 2 years while in general population. Had I not been charged with capital murder and placed in administrative segregation in December of 1999, 90% of my body would be covered by now, I think. Tattoos are very addictive. 

What most people never see at first or even second glance are the deep scars up and down the inside of my left arm, from my wrist to the bottom of my bicep. A moment of weakness that the ink covers rather nicely. 

It was around November of 1996. A psychologist named Dr. Cripen presided over the wing where I lived on Skyview and he caught wind that I was selling coffee to the patients that drank theirs up quickly. He must’ve thought I was exploiting them because he called me into an office and gave me a lecture about it, then told me he’d have me discharged from Skyview and sent to a “real man’s farm.” The problem was that I wasn’t quite ready to go.

My friend Shane told me the only way to avoid being discharged is to make the doctors think you’re truly suicidal. “How the hell do I do that?!” I asked. 

“Cut yourself. Do it good and do it in front of someone so you don’t actually kill yourself, ” he advised. 

Later that day I broke a shaving razor apart and cleaned the blade. I tentatively pulled the blade across my wrist barely drawing blood. It was too superficial of a cut to make anyone think I was seriously suicidal, I thought. The sound of approaching footsteps told me the guards were walking around doing a head count, so I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth and dug in deep just above the first cut. Blood was pouring out more freely now, and when the guard looked in my cell, he shouted, “Stop that!!” and to the desk officer he yelled, “Call the rank! We got one cutting! Hurry it up!”

Moments later the hall in front of my cell was crowded with bodies. By then I’d cut myself a couple more times, blood was oozing down my arm and hand. I tell people that I was only fooling, that my intention was to stop the discharge in hopes of staying at Skyview a bit longer. Maybe a part of it was really that. I think all of it was when I first drew blood, but as I got going my mind started racing. Ninety nine years, not hearing anything from my mom for months, the thought of spending my life in prison…it all washed over me and gripped me. If the cutting was slow and easy at first, they were surely fast and hard at the end. I raised my hand up and slashed down ferociously, blood started spraying the walls and floor. I was in a zone and I wasn’t stopping, so they opened the door and tackled me, carefully wrestling the razor out of my hand. 

A physician cleaned my arm and sewed me up while several guards held me down. I spend over seven hours strapped down in 5-point restraints on a cold, steel bunk…naked. It wouldn’t have been so long but for the first few hours, I cried and tried to bang my head against the bunk. They strapped a football helmet to my head after that. Once I was completely exhausted and calm, they moved me to the suicide room where I ate peanut butter sandwiches and peed in a hole in the ground for eight days, wishing I was truly dead. 

I ended up staying on Skyview for about 9 more months, but the scars will last a lifetime. I caught a lot of hell for them, too. In prison any sign of weakness is exploited. People who cut themselves are seen as “weak-minded.” They don’t do their time; they let their time do them. so, people thought they could take advantage of me because of my scars at first. I got into lots of fights just because they thought I’d break weak and pay some form of protection. 

I never did, but what I did do was try to cover the scars, those symbols of life overwhelming, with tattoos.