Excerpt

June 15, 2002
8:15 a.m.

Dear Laura,

In an hour and 45 minutes I will begin my 25th year in prison. I thought I’d spend my morning writing to you because it’s foggy out and yard was cancelled. We’re on top of a mountain, and when the fog rolls in they can’t see us so well, so...

My life is flying by, Laura. It may be hard, even impossible for people on the outside to believe, but in here time flies so fast it scares me. I’m an expert at doing time—the key being to keep busy and keep my mind sharp. They call state time hard time, but even when I’m in the hole it isn’t hard time for me—after all, I’ve done 15 of my 24 years in solitary confinement.

That’s a lot of hole time. But I kept my mind busy. During my hole time between 1983 and 1993 I earned a college degree.

I’d say the hardest part about hole time is knowing my friends and family think I’m hurting. I’m not. When I’m in the hole I do more writing, and I order a second newspaper and maybe some magazines. In a sense the hole is a sanctuary for me, because I enjoy my solitude.

Especially lately, as I’ve been spending most of my time searching for inner peace. I think I may have found a way in Buddhism. Learning that Buddha came from wealth and gave it all up to live humbly and simply has appealed to me on several levels. For years I lived the high life in prison. Living large, they call it in here. Being jailhouse rich. I was The Boss. Mr. Big. They called me Big Lou, but that was because of my size. When you’re six foot tall with twenty-one inch biceps, you tend to get a lot of respect, no matter where you go.

But simple respect wasn’t enough for me. I had to be in charge. I had to have my fingers in everything, and since I was the biggest and baddest dude in the place, I got to make most of the money. I was the man you came to see when you needed something done.

Kind of like how you got my name. You were worried about a kid you’d been writing to and hadn’t heard from in a while, so a mutual friend gave you my name, and as a favor to him, I looked into it for you. It’s my kind of thing to do these days, look out for young kids.

I wasn’t always so altruistic. For years I sold drugs and ran gambling operations, neither of which is easy. You have to be able to defend your turf, and you have to be able to keep your crew in line.

Anyone can sell drugs in prison, it’s getting paid that’s the hard part. I got paid 95 percent of the time. The other five percent took Administrative Custody lock-up to avoid paying. They had to. I couldn’t allow anyone not to pay.
My point is I’ve never had to ask my friends or family for money because I’ve always supported myself. I still support myself, but not by selling drugs or gambling. I do it legally now. I work at a legitimate job in the prison, and am living off of my savings. Which means that since my most recent release from the hole, less than a month ago, I’ve drastically and deliberately lowered my standard of living.

Why? I’m hoping a simpler lifestyle will help keep me out of the hole. For once I’m just taking life easy and enjoying the summer, looking forward to visits from family and friends--something I was denied these past eleven months in solitary. Even the administration told me they don’t expect any trouble from me until my visits are over.
I’m hoping that by the end of the summer I’ll have established a new pattern of not having to be The Boss anymore.

All I want now is to be more serene. I want to be seen as having a calming effect on the people around me and to be looked at by staff as being peaceful instead of violent. I know what I need to do to get there, but I’m not sure I have the nerve to make the break.

I guess I’m afraid of what my old friends will think if I go straight, even though most of them have already hung up their guns.

But I’m tired of being The Boss, since all it does is manage to land me in the hole. And while I can do hole time, I’d rather be in population. Would you believe I’ve never spent an entire summer in population? Every time I bounce back to the hole, I could kick myself for letting myself get caught up in the rat race again.

These last couple stretches in solitary, however, have been to pay for past sins, not present ones, and so, as the Buddha teaches, what you do in this life, you pay for in the next.

I’m just getting a head start on it.

What am I talking about? Well, in 24 years I’ve been given less than 15 misconduct write-ups, and most of them were for acts of violence in the 1980s and early 1990s. Hole time now is usually based on my reputation, not my actual activities. I’ve learned to consider the extra time as poetic justice, even though I’ve never been caught with anything drug or gambling-related on me.

A lot of my friends in here have been dying, Laura. I’ve been happy for them. When my time comes, be happy for me, although I don’t think that day will come any time soon. With my luck, I’ll live well into my 70s or 80s. It’s not the life I would have chosen, but it’s my choices that brought me here. I’m not guilty of the crime of which I’ve been convicted, but I am guilty of others. I’ve created my own life and circumstances, and now, I hope to re-create them into something worthwhile.

I think my search for inner peace has been a big part of this unexpected change in me. I also think we all hit times in our life when we hate ourselves for what we’ve done. Sometimes we hit it more than once. I know I have.

Chances are, I will never get out of prison, and believe me, to have to accept this is at best not easy. But the hardest thing to do in here, as in any tough situation, is not to fall prey to false hope. When you live in false hope, you feel the pain of having those hopes dashed over and over again--and each time the pain of disappointment only deepens. When I look at all these prisoners with 30-plus years in, many of them what the administration calls model inmates, and they can’t get out, I wonder how I can even dare to dream of getting out, myself.

Because of my past, I have been labeled, and justifiably so, as one of the worst prisoners in the state. Ten years ago I would’ve been thrilled with that reputation, reveled in it, but now I don’t. I no longer want people to be afraid of me, something I relished in years past. It made me feel big, important.

Understand that twenty years ago I was in the hole in Dallas and looking at doing Life. Most of the dudes around me were the top guns in the state, guys who were locked down for escaping, taking guards hostage, jail house bodies—I mean, there were eight of them in there. I was in my 20s and had nothing to do but time.

I decided I wanted to be like them. I wanted to be feared like they were. So I became one of them. I worked hard to earn my reputation, and was proud of it. I used to enjoy seeing the fear in people’s eyes. I thought it meant they respected me.

Now I know better, and seeing the fear in their eyes makes me respect myself less.

So where do I go from here? I don’t know, but I hope that in the years to come I’ll be able to do something good and positive with my life. Make it count for something, like you do yours. I want you to know that your kind words and prayers over the years, and those of my family and other friends, have not been wasted. I may not have appreciated or paid much attention to them at the time because I was so caught up in living in the land of plenty, as we say in here, but now I do.

Ironically, the things that brought me to prison—namely gambling, greed and wanting to get to the top without working for it--mean nothing to me now.

Why did it have to take me almost 25 years to realize this? I don’t know. And now that I’ve finally learned my lesson, why can’t I just go home?

If only life were so simple. Obviously I still have some lessons to learn. Only time will tell what those lessons are.

Maybe it’s time for me to write a thank you letter to everyone who’s hung in there with me over the years, some of whom have been with me from the start. I’ve tried to push a lot of them away, but they just kept coming back at me with nothing but love. Maybe it’s time I told them how much they mean to me, and that I’ll try not to disappoint them any more. Maybe that will help keep me out of the hole.

Oh, and I think I’ll tell them something else. I think I’ll tell them any time they run across a kid headed for trouble, they should send me his address.

Because I’m never too busy these days to try to help save someone from coming to prison.

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