The whole notion of institutionalization, criminal justice (a definite oxymoron) both comforted and nagged at me; twenty years in a system that renders one a survivor, or not. The weak became strong and conformed, conformed to the violence, the injustice, the inconsistencies and the little freedoms that one never considers until they are lost. Some died or did life on the ‘installment plan’. Either way, you’re screwed. War is hell, prison is war. What do you do when you’re all out of breath, and the world eats your heart out, piece by little piece and all you got is one last shot to get it right again?
Life outside was strange. I felt I belonged everywhere and nowhere. I was, and continue to remain, humbly grateful that I am free to pee whenever I want; eat what I like; watch the sunset, and be outside at night. Before prison, I had taken so much for granted. During the first two years out of prison, it still felt as though these freedoms were not mine to have. It felt as though the outside world had lived while I was confined and was still living all around me - but just beyond my reach. I couldn’t seem to make myself fit and often thought how much easier prison had been. Thoughts would come, that perhaps I belonged there. Perhaps Warden Poole was right; I could not survive as a little fish in this big pond.
I could never rid myself of that seed that the warden planted in my psyche of being unable to survive in the free world, rendering me a small fish in a big pond; her contention that I could only succeed as a big fish in a little pond. It may be the most profound statement ever told to me in terms of the long term impact it had on my perspective, particularly when I wasn’t making it. This ex-convict thing was no easy task. Surviving five years in prison necessitated making a life in prison; getting out meant reversing that process, the latter being much more daunting-that big fish pond.
I had managed to stay out of prison nearly long enough to assume I wouldn’t return there, but afraid that that assumption would turn on me in the midnight shadows of a bad dream and prove how one can never be assured of freedom. Today was tomorrow and yesterday, and it’s all the same fucking day at the end of the day. I smoked cigarettes, drank coffee, and believed I could write a book before I was forty. But the haunting evils of prison and heroin didn’t shake loose and I didn’t think that freedom was tangible. I was trapped in the web of hopeless, helplessness, so congested with life, and so tired of fighting to get educated while simultaneously self destructing.
