Hole in My Life: Part 3

You can hide out until they catch you, and they will. And they'll be totally pissed off and throw the book at you, which according to the prosecuting attorney is seventy-five years.

"So, I asked Tepper," he continued, "what the indictment looked like and he said they have you listed for fifteen five-year charges.

Twelve of the charges are for conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance, one for conspiracy to smuggle, one for conspiracy to possess counterfeit currency, and one charge of conspiracy to possess.

We'll soon find out and plan our defense based on the strengths and weaknesses of their evidence.

I'm hoping to build a case around the idea that you were just hired to sail the boat and didn't know anything about the hash. Let's start with that premise and see what he has to shoot it down.

"This case is a lock. I have a statement by everyone popped that Gantos was part of the operation. Not to mention that Rik—who hired him—is set to testify."

That night I went out and bought Chinese food and a collection of Poe stories. I was reaching for anything to escape into, even “The Pit and the Pendulum."

We plead guilty to one charge of conspiracy to distribute and they drop the rest.

I could alter my identity, but I didn't know how to change my face, or my fingerprints, or even how to get a fresh set of ID's.

I filled out the applications and promised I'd mail the sample in. But I knew I wouldn't. I had never written anything that was finished. I felt like a fraud.

Those writers had been worse off than I was now, and still they survived to write about it. I knew my fear was as real as theirs, but my words were still submerged.

Like those other writers, I figured I'd have to wait until the pain subsided and left the words behind.

But it was a second filled with a lifetime like it is for the condemned Southerner in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, whose life passes before his eyes from the moment the hangman pulls the lever until the rope snaps his neck.

"And the truth is always in the motivation. You did it for the money. That much is true. Now the law must respond."

For once he was speechless, and had I not been so entirely shocked and confused I might have paused long enough to realize the look on his face was from the anguish that his son was being marched off to federal prison.

For a fleeting moment I thought maybe the judge had changed his mind, or that there had been an awful mistake and everyone now realized that I was really a good kid and now they were going to give me a slap on the wrist and let me go.

A 5010B is a youth sentence. It means you can do anywhere from sixty days to six years, depending on your behavior and what the parole board thinks.

My fear was so great I couldn't endure another moment of the conversation.

It was green and peaceful out the window, and a break from the unrelenting yellow of my cell, which was like having the unblinking eye of the sun blazing on me each day, reminding me that prison was not the dark place where I could hide from my past—and definitely not the place where I could hide from myself.

At sundown the naked bulb overhead came on and beneath it I'd slump into a drama of my own self-interrogation. There was nothing else to do but beat myself up.

And even then I turned that phrase over and over in my mind: "Count me in." Those were three words I'd take back if I could. They were my words to Rik and Hamilton. "Count me in." Now I was counted in my cell every day, and I was counted on to be there morning, noon, and night.

Some wit had carved it into the cinder block so that each time he looked in the mirror he reminded himself that the biggest failure in life is self-communication.

After my first few days the food service worker who had been delivering the special hospital meals took pity on me bouncing off my yellow walls like a cricket trapped in a box. He brought me some books, a pad of paper, envelopes, and a pencil.

It was a long shot to send a jailhouse appeal, but from where I was sitting I had nothing to play but long shots.

On each page I started writing between the lines and then broke out and wrote all crazy around the margins and every which way I could find some space so that it was all jumbled up.

I also learned how to stitch up wounds (I practiced on chicken parts), properly apply tourniquets, tweeze shattered glass out of gashes, wash out eyes that had been burned with bathroom cleansers, pop dislocated bones back into joints, and perform an assortment of other triage skills.

I wanted to appear reformed, thoughtful, and eager to enter a crimeless future, and I thought my gestures would amplify my argument for release.

I had prepared to be contrite and sincere, not combative.

The memory of my youth was such a surprising relief from all the hatred and despair, blood and drugs that surrounded me.

He summarized me as a "situational sociopath willing to give answers that attempted to redefine who he was, rather than to honestly describe himself.

Perhaps," the doctor wrote, "he doesn't have the capacity to entirely articulate who he is."

While in prison, it occurred to me that when I lived at Davy's I could never write about something as unsettling as what I had seen in the hole because when I felt something so intense I jumped up and took a walk or ran to a bar where I had a drink poured into me, and another until I was so numb I couldn't pour anything back onto paper.

I didn't have the patience to slow down and see that I had plenty of material to write about in high school.

My struggle as a writer was a lot like my life, I figured. I made up rules for myself and broke them and made others until I got it right.

It was a two-year school with a focus on communication arts. Their motto was "Learn by Doing."

He wrote out a Special Progress Report on my achievements in the prison, he attached a copy of the college acceptance letter, and he sent it to the parole board for consideration.

My entire identity as a writer was in that book. Everything I had written was squeezed between Dostoyevsky's great lines, as if my words were his discards.

In my writing classes, I first wrote brutal stories about prison, about New York street life, about the men I knew who had hard lives and hard hearts.

And then one day I got tired of all the blood and guts and hard lives and hard hearts and began to write more stories about my childhood, like the ones I had started writing down in prison—stories which at one time I did not think were important, but suddenly had become to me the most important stories of all. They contained the hidden days of my innocence and happiness.

And once I began retrieving the lost pleasures of my childhood, I began to write stories for children.