At my status date in court I had worked out
a deal to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of probation. I
entered my guilty plea. All I had left to do was go to the Office
of Probation and Parole to have a presentencing investigation done, and
then go to sentencing. I never did any of those things. I skipped
my sentencing date altogether. I was so strung out and weak I could
barely move. Even a child could have seen there was something wrong
with me. I knew that if I went to sentencing looking like that I
would go to jail. Within a few days after skipping my sentencing
date the cops came and beat on my door.
Sheer terror possessed me. They didn’t
kick the door in, but I knew if they heard or saw anything they would have
probable cause to do just that. Susan and I agreed we had to stay
somewhere else. Neither one of us liked the idea of getting busted
with needles in our arms using illegal lights because I had outstanding
warrants. We packed up a duffel bag with the things we both needed
and took off.
I wasn’t sure how hard the police would look
for me, but I knew better than to check into a hotel room in either one
of our names. We got a room in Natalie’s name at the General Lafayette
downtown. It was cheap and we could walk back and forth to the house
if we needed to. We didn’t stay there long, though. I found
out about a new hotel with suites another mile north on River Road.
The rooms had kitchens, washers and dryers, a bedroom, a living room and
two televisions. It was nice. We stayed there a couple of months.
By this time the only cocaine I did was through
injection. Because powder had become relatively scarce I didn’t do
a whole lot of it. I got in the habit of saving my pills so I could
do larger quantities at once. I only left the room about once a week
to walk to Capital Grocery in Spanish Town. That was where I bought
the tiny amount of food we ate every week. Gus stayed in the bedroom
with me. He and I watched a lot of movies together. Susan got
rides to and from her job with our pill connections. She paid them
plenty of money every day, so they wanted to make sure she got there to
make it.
I do not consider our suppliers evil people.
I hadn’t met any of them yet when I first got strung out. A couple
of them tried their best to get me to dry out. They tried to feed
me, but I couldn’t eat most of the time. They said they were worried
about me. I didn’t look so good, to put it mildly.
Susan always came back to me with as much
morphine as she could buy. If she did really well she came home with
xanax and powder as well. Business went on as usual. I didn’t
stop her from doing these things because I couldn’t, just as I couldn’t
stop myself. I was far, far gone in the monstrous grip of a disease
that would not even allow me to open my eyes to the truth. I used
Susan horribly, but she didn’t seem to mind. She always laid down
with me, even though I was too weak to make love and too strung out to
get it up. That disturbed me greatly, more than any of my other problems.
The blood, the bruises and the swollen sores meant nothing compared to
the fact I couldn’t have sex like I used to. I was more than a little
bit upset. Things had gone very wrong. I realized if my mom
was going to keep her house I would have to go to jail, no matter what.
I would go through withdrawal, no matter what. Oh no, things had
not gone as planned.
I suffered from the most severe depressions
I have ever been through. I was too busy attempting to overdose to
pay much attention to anyone around me. No matter how much dope Susan
brought home I would do my entire share at one time. If we had any
powder I did all of mine in one shot. I usually blew my mind, but
my heart kept on beating. Everyone who knew what I was doing was
horrified. They told me that a little time in jail wouldn’t kill
me. I didn’t even waste my time explaining that jail was only part
of it. I had twisted my life into a gruesome, shallow existence.
I violated all of my own spiritual values through what I did to other people
and myself. I sacrificed every cherished belonging I had for the
sake of a continued high. I had spoken about all of these things
so many times I rarely spoke about my depressions anymore. I would
just say it was killing me. Susan kept me from killing myself many
times. She loved me to death, just like she always said. When
I got really messed up she even quit complaining about money. She
deserved so much better.
Eventually Susan couldn’t support our habits
and pay for the hotel room. We went back to Europe Street, this time
for good. I had to lose my fear of the police to stay there.
On the side of extreme caution I covered all of the openings to the outside
world with boards and black drapes. You couldn’t see any light leaking
through to the outside, even in the dead of night. I reinforced all
of the doors with extra locks and bars.
The police never came and knocked on the door.
That provided me with a false sense of security. One day while we
were waiting for Susan’s ride to work I heard a knock on the door.
I thought it was her ride. I pulled back the curtain to see two deputy
constables standing on my front porch. I told Susan it was time to
go as I made my way straight for the back door. I ran out, jumped
the back fence and continued running as fast as I could. I didn’t
stop until I was five blocks away. I hid under an abandoned house
for a couple of hours. Susan got arrested before she could even get
out the back door. They didn’t believe her when she said I had never
been there. They searched the whole house with guns drawn.
They took her in on an outstanding traffic warrant, which she paid.
She was released about an hour later. My arrest would have been something
a lot more serious. I never answered the door like that again.
When I went back home I boarded up the window
on the front door. From then on whenever I had people over we stayed
in my bedroom and kept the noise down to a bare minimum. All of my
guests wound up infected with my own all-encompassing paranoia. Natalie
was the worst. She wouldn’t park a car anywhere near our house.
She was scared to come in the front door. She was scared to go out
the back door. When we were doing dope I had to ask her to repeat
herself over and over. I couldn’t hear her. Susan didn’t make
any noise at all. The only time they went outside was to go to work.
The only time I went outside was to get more dope.
I tried to do myself in all the way up to
New Years Day, 1999. The court would put a lien on my mother’s house
on January 15 because she had put it up for a property bond. I couldn’t
let them do that. I decided to turn myself in on the first working
day of the new year. I did my last shot of morphine at six in the
morning. I left for court at nine. Susan cried and cried, but
she didn’t believe I would be gone very long. I knew better.
I had seventeen outstanding traffic warrants, a warrant for failure to
appear on eight counts of burglary, four counts of unauthorized use, two
counts of issuing worthless checks and one count of attempted misdemeanor
theft. Especially considering the fact I had jumped bail, I knew
damn well that I was going to be gone for a while.
I hugged and kissed Susan when I left.
She and I had talked about it a lot, and she knew I couldn’t let them take
my mother’s house. It was my duty to turn myself in. I wanted
to take the full bottle of arsenic I had been saving for a special occasion.
Susan convinced me I had too much to live for.
The judge was already very unhappy with me.
To make matters worse my urinalysis came back as the worst one the judge
had ever seen, or so he said. I was completely maxed out on coke,
morphine, benzos and marijuana. I also had a hangover from all the
beer I had drank the night before. It took the judge about a half-second
to give me six months on the contempt charge for jumping bail. I
swallowed hard when he said it because I knew I had a rough ride coming.
I got to Parish Prison about three o’clock
in the afternoon. I was still doing well, but I had six more months
to go. After I had been in central booking for twenty-four hours
I began to get sick. Central booking is a nightmare of a place to
be confined in. There is nothing in the cell but a bench and a toilet.
There are twenty other people, or more, in there with you at all times.
You get to have a mattress from eleven at night until five in the morning.
There is no smoking in central booking. On the day I went in there
it never got above freezing outside. It couldn’t have been any warmer
than forty degrees where I sat. I only weighed 120 pounds, and I
only had two thin shirts between the cold and me. I could not stop
myself from shaking.
When the sickness came over me full force
it was the worst I had ever experienced, no doubt because of the length
of time I had postponed it. This sickness had been laying in the
cut waiting for me for more than a year. I sweated in the ice-cold
air, but I never stopped shivering. My teeth clenched. I clawed
at my flesh. I could feel my blood pounding in my ears as my pulse
quickened and my blood pressure went up. As the sweat trickled down
my body it felt like it burrowed beneath the skin, and continued on, burning.
I lost consciousness once only to come back a few minutes later with every
muscle in my body tightened agonizingly. The next time I lost consciousness
I don’t know how long I was gone, but when I came back there were people
standing over me. The other inmates had gathered around me.
When I asked them what was going on they told me I had been having seizures.
They told the deputy in charge, who responded, “Don’t worry about him.
He’s just a junkie.” I had wet my pants and chewed up my tongue.
I didn’t feel any better once I woke up from it. I wished I had remained
unconscious. My whole body cried out in hunger, but no food would
remain in my stomach. After the first round of vomiting I knew better
than to put anything in my mouth. Just the taste of food caused my
insides to wrench out of my throat. The constant nausea and vomiting
continued for another forty-eight hours, all of which I spent on the little
bench in central booking without any sort of comfort whatsoever.
After the seizures, which came about thirty hours into the withdrawal,
I found myself unable to sleep. This condition persisted for another
ninety hours despite all of my efforts to drift off into oblivion.
On the fourth day I finally managed to hold down a few bites of food.
That was when my system vacated from the opposite end. I had a bowel
movement that left me bleeding. It had been about two weeks since
the last one. On January 9th I finally fell into a semi-restful sleep,
the first I had gotten since losing my freedom on January 4th.
Although I felt a little better physically
I woke up to a world of shit. After breakfast that morning, which
I couldn’t hold down, I got into an unavoidable fight. I didn’t have
the strength to get one blow in. I lost the fight in a big way.
My face got scarred. That didn’t make me feel any better. I
was worried sick about Susan. I could not call her on the phone.
Warren had a phone, but it had a block against collect calls. On
top of all that the judge had said I was to be placed in the Parish Prison
Drug Program, but I had been placed on a tier with murderers, robbers and
rapists. I finally went to the Deputies because I thought I was about
to get jumped for no reason again. I told them to look at my face.
I told them to take me off of the line. They took me out of there
immediately.
I sat in the tank in the old building for
sixteen hours while I waited to be moved to the Drug Wing. It was
worth the wait, though. The Drug Wing was nothing like the rest of
the prison. It was clean. The people were all considerate.
Most of them understood at least the concept of what I was going through
(there aren’t a lot of junkies in Baton Rouge, but there are tons of crackheads).
There was no smoking in the bed area. It was really quiet.
The good part was all of the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and counseling
sessions. I was too stupid to stay there though.
Two weeks after I got there one of the deputies
offered me the opportunity to be a trustee. When I heard that you
could have contact visits for an hour I jumped on the opportunity.
I was placed in a job in the kitchen of the old prison. A guy named
John and I were the first white boys to work in the kitchen in the history
of East Baton Rouge.
Trustee wasn’t too much like the rest of the
prison, but it was no cakewalk. There were more old convicts on trustee
because they knew it was easier to pass the time if you worked every day.
If you didn’t watch your step you could find yourself in a fight.
That never happened on the drug wing. On trustee the television stayed
on all night. We got to make coffee twenty-four hours a day.
There was also dope on trustee. I soon found out the kitchen jobs
were all hustle jobs. After I became a cook the older inmates told
me how to get paid cigarettes. All I had to do was cook real cheeseburgers
and wrap them up in saran wrap. The real trick was to get the burger
to the buyer under the nose of the deputies, who were supposed to watch
every move we made. It wasn’t as hard as it sounds. At one
pack per cheeseburger I made quite a few cigarettes. I spent all
of those packs on weed and sleeping pills. It felt good to be stoned.
I got in a fight in the kitchen, but I didn’t lose
badly. I had been eating heavily and working out since I got to the
kitchen. I drank two dozen raw egg whites every morning with the
express thought I needed to put on weight in case I got in another fight.
I put on about sixty-five pounds between the first fight I got into in
jail and the second one. That was why I did okay.
I got contact visits from my mom, my stepfather
and Susan. It was good to touch her, to hold her in my arms.
I could look into her eyes and see she hadn’t managed to get cleaned up.
I kept pushing her to go to the methadone clinic. She had lost a
lot of weight. I was very worried about her. She was staying
in the house all by herself. She was still trapped in the nightmare
I was forcibly removed from.
I saw her on Valentine’s Day. She had
gotten back on methadone, but she was still shooting up. The dose
they give you at first isn’t enough to keep you from getting sick.
My brother Warren took her there every morning because he wanted to help
her. She and I talked about what little I had to talk about, and
then she and my mother left. She cried when she had to go.
She told me she loved me, and that she missed me.
Susan didn’t make it to see me the next week
or the week after that. I was frantic with stress. I just knew
something terrible would happen. On the night of March 11 I got called
up to central booking for an “interview”. I was scared as hell.
I didn’t know what to expect. When I found out a detective was on
his way I became even more nervous. The detective turned out to be
from homicide. My hands were shaking. He asked me where I lived,
was I married and who my wife was. When I told him her name he took
out her driver’s license.
“Is this her?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I replied as my heart burst with fear.
“Is she in jail?”
“No,” he said, “She’s dead.”
He went on to tell me the dog had been guarding
her dead body. I lost my shit. They had to take Gus to the
pound. That broke me up even worse. The deputies took me to
the medical tank and left me in there by myself. I have since decided
that the medical tank that night was the worst place in the entire world.
I couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down my face. I told the deputy
to take me back to the trustee building.
The tears kept coming for the next three days.
Everybody in the dorm felt sorry for me. They wanted me to say a
prayer with them that night, but I couldn't. How could I tell them
the thought made me feel sick? I just kept my mouth shut and stared
at the wall as I grieved. I mourned silently, and if anything that
made it hurt worse. Susan was so much a part of me. I wanted
to follow her into death so bad I could taste it. I didn’t go to
work for a couple of days. I couldn’t. I couldn’t even eat.
I told myself I would never smile again.
***
I named this chapter for all the people who told me, “It’ll be alright.” After Susan died I lost all traces of the considerate person I was before I got strung out on drugs. I became respected, not for my physical prowess, but for being able to say anything I thought without fear. What could they do? Beat me up? I had already done far worse to myself. So when people said, “It’ll be alright,” I said, “Ain’t nothin’ alright. Ain’t nothin’ gonna be alright. Now, take your little positive bullshit and get on down the road.” Some people didn’t like that, but no one hit me again. I think they could tell from the look in my eyes that it wouldn’t make any difference if they did.