Chapter 5

Tuesday rolled around slowly, but it gave me a chance to get a good grip on my surroundings. The rest of Saturday, and all of Sunday and Monday, I had stayed inside my cell exclusively, because I was too uncomfortable being outside of it. I was starting to get used to my new neighbor, though; Damian talked a lot, and mostly I listened and responded when I needed to. But I hadn't gotten sick of him yet, and he was the closest thing to a friend that I had inside this cement-lined hole, so it didn't take long before I was comfortable with him.

I was still too uncomfortable with the other inmates though, and afraid of facing any of them, so Damian and I both ate all our meals inside our cells and kept each other company. The food was awful, and by far the least tolerable part. I knew coming in that I wasn't going to be eating five-star food, but I hadn't prepared myself for it being so bad that cardboard sounded more appetizing.

“You could starve to death around here,” Damian told me at dinner the first night, all the while scarfing down his food like the family dog would snag it if he didn't. “They shouldn't bother with the death penalty – if the food don't kill ya, the hunger will. You'll get used to it, you'll just have to get hungry enough first.”

“I think I'd rather eat my own arm off,” I had responded, staring at the disgusting mess in front of me. That night I'd gone to bed pretty hungry and irritable. Not that it did me any good, because I found out that night that it wasn't easy to sleep in a prison. During the day, the prison was loud and rather obnoxious, but after the lights went out it quieted down and all you could hear was the occasional jangle of a guard's keys as he walked, or the echo of another inmate from farther down the hall. The quiet bothered me too much; if it got too quiet, it felt like something would pop out from behind me to take me by surprised.

What I still had to get used to was the fact that I should have expected all of this coming in. I had expected it to be terrifying before I got here, but all of this was completely foreign to me. Prison wasn't meant to be comfortable. It was supposed to be punishment and a deterrent to bad behavior. Who would want to come back to a place with bad food, a hard bed, and anxiety waiting around every corner?

My anxiety level wasn't the only thing that was “off” either. It had only been a couple days since I told Joey I was definitely done with Brayden, and I hadn't been able to think about anything else but her since I got here. My heart wanted to know where she was and what she was doing, but my head screamed at me, pissed off because it didn't want to know and didn't care.

“You're thinking too much, man.”

I looked next to me and saw Damian looking straight ahead at some inmates playing basketball in the exercise yard.

“Do me a favor,” I mumbled to him. “Stay out of my head.”

“That's all you've been doing since you got here – thinking,” he responded. “You can think in your cell. Enjoy the beautiful day. Before you know it, winter's gonna set in and this yard won't be so pleasant.”

It was a beautiful day outside, warm even for this early in October and the sun was high in the sky on this side of the yard. A lot of the inmates were wearing t-shirts and enjoying the sun, including Damian – but instead of seeing the beautiful weather, all I could see was the constricting fence around us and my prison-issued suit.

“It doesn't really matter,” I said. “I only get to enjoy the outside twice a week for the next year – or more.”

“All the more reason you should appreciate it, then.”

I looked over at him straight-faced, and watched him stare at me as he pulled a cigarette seemingly out of thin air.

“Your choice, I guess.” He popped his cigarette in his mouth and flicked a lighter a few times before it came to life. “You gotta realize that you gotta take advantage of these small amenities instead of moping around, feeling sorry for yourself that you don't get more of them. It sucks, but this ain't your old life anymore – not for a while, at least.”

I stayed silent for a while, but one question lingered on my mind.

“Where the hell did you manage to get a cigarette anyway?” I asked. “Not to mention a lighter. Can't you get in trouble for having that stuff?”

“Why? You want one?” he asked, the sparkle back in his eyes.

“Hell no,” I said. “I don't smoke. Don't you know that'll kill you?”

He smiled and blew a ring of smoke in my direction, and I waved it away with my hand.

“I have my ways of getting things I want and getting away with it. And besides, I'm in prison. What makes you think I'm conscious of my health?”

He exhaled the rest of the smoke from his mouth and chuckled as I rolled my eyes and looked away from him, then one of his friends called his name and he turned his attention away.

I stared back in front of me, watching the guys in the yard and thinking about what Damian had said. He was right, this wasn't my old life anymore. I had spent a lot of time the past couple of years feeling sorry for myself because of how my old life was turning out, not even realizing that I didn't have it half as bad as I could have.

This was bad; this was hopelessness. I had lost my faith in everything.

“Take a walk with me,” Damian said after a few moments, cigarette still hanging loosely out of his mouth. He stood up and took one last puff of it before throwing it down to the ground and grinding it out with his foot.

“Come on. Get up.” He stared at me for a few seconds with a questioning look, before I finally stood up and followed him with heavy footsteps.

“Look, I know things aren't great,” he finally said after a few steps. “But damn. You're so depressed that you're bringing the whole place down a notch – and that's a feat here. What's got you down so much?”

“Take a look around you, Damian. What do you think has me down?”

“It ain't just that,” he said. “Look at you, and look around at most of the other guys here. This is your first time in some real big trouble. You ain't like these guys. You're gonna get out, and you know how to stay out. The way you've been acting, one might think you on death row or something.”

I shrugged my slumped shoulders. “It's depressing. I'm not like you, Damian. This is not who I am.”

“It may not be who you were,” he said. “But it's who you are now and for the next couple years, whether you like it or not.”

He was trying to help, but talk about someone being down – he wasn't helping.

“What'd you think, you were going to come in here and live your life like normal? That everybody was going to treat you special 'cause of who you are? Who you think you are, Martha Stewart?”

“You know who I am?” I looked at him, a little surprised. I had told him people knew me the day I first got here, but I hadn't yet told him how people knew me.

“Of course I know,” he said, almost scoffing. “I knew before you even got here. This may be a prison full of guys, but when you got nothing better to talk about gossip tends to go around. I pretended I didn't know, because I thought if you felt anonymous you might feel more comfortable.”

“I'm not going to feel comfortable whether people know me or not,” I said, hanging my head again.

“Well, that ain't the only thing people know about you. Most of us know what your girl did to you. It ain't right,” he said. “Ain't right at all.”

“The most fucked up part is that I still love her.”

“Nah, that's not fucked up,” he said. “Y'all got a daughter. You're supposed to love her. The most fucked up part is that she's supposed to love you – and when you love someone, you don't do that to them.”

When he put it that way, I realized I had everything backwards – all this time I had been questioning what I had done wrong to make her act the way she was, when I had been doing everything right. She was the one who had been doing everything wrong.

“Relationships might be nice if they were like those songs you sang with that band. Unfortunately for us, they're not.”

“I assume you don't have a girlfriend,” I said.

“I got a sweet woman back home,” he said with a smile. “She's a good woman – but there ain't a person in this world who compares to my momma.”

That was another thing I had been thinking about lately – my mother, and how disappointed she had to have been in me.

“What's she like, Damian?”

“Well...she ain't much of a homemaker, but my momma's a damn fine cook,” he said. “She's a good Christian woman, southern at heart. I don't think I've ever seen a Sunday that she wasn't in church. That woman is a saint to put up with my ass.”

“Do you think she's ever disappointed in you?” I asked.

“Nah,” he said after a pause. “I think she got over that a long time ago. At first she was – I think that poor woman wore out her mouth with all the Hail Mary's she said for me. But then she started accepting it, and forgave herself for it because she realized it wasn't her fault. Now she prays for me; prays for me to be safe, prays for me to get out...hell, maybe she prays for Jesus to save my poor soul. I don't know.”

The conversation between Damian and I had pretty much halted right there. He rarely talked through dinner in our cells again later that evening, until I mentioned that I had a headache.

“I got something for that,” he said, and he went silent again. I didn't even hear him looking through his cell, until I saw him drop something into my cell from the slightly opened vent.

“What's that?” I asked.

“Let's just say it'll take care of your headache, and maybe your ass will finally get some sleep tonight.”

Curiously, I walked over and grabbed the small package – a coffee filter fashioned into a little pouch, with a little string tied around it to keep it closed. I unwrapped the string and opened the filter and saw several round, white pills.

“What is this stuff?” I asked him through the vent, in a low voice so we wouldn't alert any guards. “Where'd you get this?”

“Man, quit being nosy and get your ass to bed,” he said. “All you need to know I already told you – it'll take care of your headache and you will get some sleep tonight. The less you know about it the better – for me, and for you.”

It took all of three seconds for me to realize that that philosophy was probably best to live by for a while, and I wrapped the pills back in the coffee filter and shoved the whole thing under my mattress.

I laid on the uncomfortable bed for a while, completely silent while I listened to the sounds outside of my cell and Damian's tossing and turning turn into rhythmic breathing. Normally he had more problems falling asleep; he must have found solace in the mystery pills tonight, too.

He had given me a lot of things to think about. On one hand, I thought that I had an absolute right to feel sorry for myself. Feeling sorry for myself was honestly the only right that hadn't been taken away from me yet, and I'd had so much taken away that all I felt capable of right now was wallowing in self-pity.

On the other hand, he was right – in every corner of this prison I could find a man whose life was much worse than my own right now. Damian and I had talked about many things the past few days as I was getting used to the boredom I was experiencing, and he'd told me some of the stories of the men he knew in this prison. All I knew were nicknames, otherwise they were all nameless and faceless, but the stories of how they had ended up here and what they had lost horrified me.

There were numerous men who were supposed to be out many years ago, with ten-year sentences that dragged into twenty or twenty-five because of different behavioral issues that ended up ruining their chances of parole. Some of them weren't out yet, and most of them had no idea when they would be getting out. They only knew it probably wouldn't be any time soon.

There were the men with kids like me – only they didn't look forward to getting out in a couple of years to see their kids. Damian told me some of them had been here twenty years and most of their kids were grown up now. One had missed giving his daughter away at her wedding this past April; another got to see his son every week but only because his son was here in the same prison.

Then there was the one who had said goodbye to his son last month, when he was able to attend his funeral in handcuffs.

After that, I couldn't listen anymore.

I had no right to complain – but I still felt sorry for myself. I wouldn't be home for Thanksgiving this year, when Bailey and I always took a road trip back home to Mississippi to spend a week with my parents. I wouldn't be home for Christmas, or be able to take Bailey to see all the lights in New York, or see her face when the snow started falling. And I would have no chance of being there for her sixth birthday. I'd never get these years back.

And without Brayden, I had no idea where my future was headed. Clearly, I was going to lose custody of Bailey, and with no proof that Brayden was an unfit mother full custody would obviously go to her right away. One thing that Bray always held onto with a death grip was a grudge, and she had one against me now that I'd walked out on her. She never thought about anything but herself now, so of course she would use Bailey to hurt me, because she knew losing Bailey would be as close to ripping my heart out of my chest as she could get, without having to get blood on her hands.

I couldn't help but think that if I'd chosen not to leave, none of this would have happened. If I had stayed and stuck it out one more night like I had become accustomed to, maybe everything would be relatively normal. I could at least be at Joey's house now, tucking Bailey and Joey's girls into bed and reading them bedtime stories, instead of contemplating my own self-sympathy.

The tides had turned – a couple of days ago, I had been cursing at the idea of being up with a sick five-year-old and having to wait up until dawn for my girlfriend to come home. Now, I'd have given anything to have that night back, if only so I could go back and do things differently.

In my eyes, my life was in pure and utter shambles. There was a big, black cloud hanging right over my head. The problem was that I was the only one who could see it, because to everybody else I was the lucky one.

I wasn't feeling very “lucky” right now, though.

I reached down and lifted up my mattress, and pulled out the coffee filter again and looked it over. Maybe I really did need some sleep. I didn't think I could handle another night of laying here with my eyes wide open waiting for whatever monster was inside my head to pop out and get me.

I laid on my side and propped myself up with my elbow, and reached for a glass of water on the desk that I hadn't finished earlier. I peeled open the coffee filter and took two of the pills in my hand, and quickly put them in my mouth and swallowed them down with a gulp of water before I lost my nerve and decided not to take them.

I don't know why I continued to look at the rest of the pills in the coffee filter, and I have no idea what compelled me to take the rest of the pills in my hand and swallow all of them. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment decisions that you make when you don't want to waste time pondering over it.

I needed something to happen to pull me out of this, whatever it was going to end up being. So I decided to get off my bed and stand at my cell doors and wait for whatever that was going to be.