A.J. Mcclean to Nick Carter
NOVEMBER 2007
I sat in the pitch black eight foot by eight-foot cell, knees drawn up to my chest, stomach lurching from the stench all around me and I sighed.
“Would it fucking kill you to put a God damn light in here.” I shouted to nobody in particular.
“What’s the matter you afraid of the dark?” A voice shouted back from the other side of the inky blackness. “You should have thought about your need for light before you got yourself thrown into solitary confinement Carter.”
Despite my current shit situation I had to smile when I thought back to the fight that wound me up in solitary confinement in the first place. I wish I had an 8X10 picture of that big son of a bitches eyes bulging out of his head when I punched him hard in the gut before counter punching with three quick jabs to the jaw that knocked him flat on his ass.
I guess it would have been funnier if after I hit him, it wouldn’t have turned into a free for all prison riot culminating in pepper spray and dogs being let loose in the cell block but that would teach him for calling me a “Backstreet Bitch.”
Closing my eyes I dropped my head back against the cold cement wall, listening to the clicking of roach legs zipping across the wet concrete floor all around me. I could feel one making its’ way up my fingertips and across the back of my hand, stopping every so often to regroup before heading towards my arm. Doing my best Mr. Miyagi I flipped my hand over and tried to catch the bastard roach but it struggled to make it over my fingertips and dropped to the floor. Raising up my booted foot I dropped it hard on the floor satisfied that I had won the game with the roach when I heard the loud CRUNCH.
Rolling my head back and forth against the wall I tried to remember how long I’d been in solitary confinement? I think it had been slightly over twenty-four hours, although it was hard to tell. Time was nothing more then an illusion when you were cramped into a tiny space with no light for hours on end. So to pass the time I decided I would think of things that awaited me in the outside world if and when someday I was ever paroled.
Let’s see there was McDonalds, air conditioned houses, glistening blue swimming pools, and the slow rolling waves of the ocean…..Oh and how could I forget the women? I tried to focus on the scent of a Big Mac with fries, the feeling of the cool air conditioning raising goose bumps on my skin and the touch of a woman who would whisper dirty things in my ears. But every so often A.J.’s words would fill my head in his husky ‘too many cigarettes’ tinged voice, piercing the bubble of my happy thoughts.
“Overconfidence will be your undoing……”
They were words coming to me from beyond the grave, seeping into my psyche as if A.J. were sitting right beside me in the darkened cell whispering them in my ear, instead of buried six feet under in a cemetery in Boston.
How many times had he said those word to me and how many times had I shrugged him off with a smile? And now here I was housed amongst the scum of the earth in cell block D living the life mapped out for me by “fate” if you were to listen to the defense and “my own doing” if you were to believe the prosecution.
Rubbing a hand along my stubbly jaw line I realized that this was the first time since the word “GUILTY” had echoed off of the walls of the courthouse that I had let myself think about my life prior to becoming inmate #3201562.
My mind suddenly began conjuring up images of the past. Images of Brian and Kevin, Howie my ex-wife Eva and Belle….My beautiful little girl Belle. How old would she be now? Four….five? No matter how old she got I would always see her as a little baby with golden ringlets and fat pink cheeks
And suddenly I found myself wanting to go back to the beginning, wanting to remember things as they had been, and wondering if overconfidence had truly been my undoing?