Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row (26 page)

I noticed that Big Blue watched the news every morning with the intensity of a cat sitting outside a mouse hole. He confided in me that it wasn’t the news he was watching, it was the time and temperature readings in the corner of the screen. He wouldn’t take his eyes off those tiny numbers because he believed it was a secret message being sent to him. Who was sending him these messages? It was “they.” He either couldn’t or wouldn’t be more articulate than that, nor did he elaborate on what those messages were. I must admit that after he told me this I found that my eyes kept drifting to the corner of the screen, as if to be certain there was nothing there but numbers.

I live with men who haven’t been in contact with reality for years. The truth is that insanity is rampant on Death Row, as is retardation. The law says that the insane and the mentally retarded (the law’s terminology, not mine) cannot be executed, yet it happens on a regular basis. It’s both sad and frightening. It’s sad because many of them don’t even comprehend that they’re on Death Row or what awaits them.

The mentally handicapped are executed on a regular basis while the politicians all give speeches about being tough on crime. I’ve never come across a single murderer who possessed the mental faculties required to fully comprehend the horror of what they have done. They are not emotionally developed enough to feel empathy. They live lives of nightmare, yet are not even capable of realizing that. They are the dregs of humanity, by both birth and choice. Prison and the prison mentality are not what society has been led to believe they are. These people cannot even take care of themselves, and they suffer from every health problem imaginable. There are no attractive murderers here. It’s like the ugliness inside them manages to transform their facial features so that the outside resembles the inside. There are no conversations here. There are threats, taunts, and screams, but a conversation is an impossibility. Concepts such as love, honor, and self-respect are as foreign to this place as French cuisine. I waver between the extremes of pity and disgust.

The prison system makes no effort to help the mentally ill. There are no therapy sessions, no treatments, no cutting-edge drugs. The only thing they do is shoot them full of Thorazine if they start to get riled up. You can spot a man doing the Thorazine shuffle from a mile away. His every action takes ten times longer than it should, because it takes him a Herculean effort to move.

For many people in prison their worst fear is going insane, because once you do all hope is lost. You will be locked up not only within these walls, but also within your own rapidly degenerating mind. There is no help, and you wouldn’t even be able to work on your own case in order to get your death sentence converted. You would sit in a cell playing with feces and screaming at phantoms that no one else could see. This is not the place you want to lose your marbles. If it begins to feel like the walls are closing in on you, then you have to come up with a way to work through it or shake it off.

Sometimes it’s even more disturbing to see the cases of mental retardation on Death Row than it is to see the insane. I say this because there is often something very childlike in the actions of the retarded. To see a retarded person being led to execution is an abomination. It’s something that should never happen, yet it does. Sometimes even innocent retarded people are executed, which is a double travesty.

There was a guy here who had the IQ of a child, and it was common knowledge that he did not commit the crime he was convicted of. He was here because he was taking the blame for something his brother had done. He was eventually executed in his brother’s place. The guy was blatantly and obviously retarded, and he lived on a diet of potato chips, candy bars, and cake. He acquired the money for these things from a nun who came to see him every so often. Sometimes his mother would come see him, and since they had nothing to talk about they would both put their heads down on the table and sleep. It was heartbreaking to witness. I don’t recall ever seeing him take a shower. He just sat silently in his cell until the day he was killed.

Everyone seems to agree that it’s wrong to execute the retarded, yet it continues to happen. There are retarded people awaiting execution right now. There’s one who often has to repeat himself several times because no one can understand what he’s saying. Another strings words together that make no sense. He calls people names such as “Fish More” and “Fuck Bart.” He paces his cell at four o’clock in the morning yelling, “Twiddle your fingers! Twiddle your fingers! Let’s roll!” and then follows it with a string of obscenities.

A sane man can be reasoned with and talked to; you can guess his motives and predict his actions. A madman, on the other hand, may try to kill you, because he’s convinced it’s God’s will. Like Nu-Nu.

The threat of violence hangs over Nu-Nu like a black cloud. He’s not someone you would want sleeping under your roof or hanging around behind your back. If ever there was a clear-cut case of schizophrenia, this man is it. Nu-Nu shot and killed a man in a coin-operated laundry. When the cops came to investigate they found a security tape with footage of Nu-Nu break-dancing around the body. I’ve often been awakened at two o’clock in the morning by Nu-Nu screaming at the top of his lungs. He claims that the nurses in the inmate hospital are drinking his blood and defecating in his food. The entire barracks has listened to him argue with a mirror for hours at a time, threatening to kill his own reflection. He’ll then stop and begin preaching a sermon in a very calm voice, instructing his congregation to “open up to the Book of Psalms and hold it down by your left nut.”

Others are equally insane but more harmless. I’ve no doubt that they murdered someone at one time, but it’s almost as if their drive to kill died along with their victims. Now they’re just burned-out lunatics.

We have a character here who is stuck with the unfortunate name of “Patches.” Patches despises this name and would gleefully murder anyone who uses it. Anytime you call him by that name he stares at you with the glint of pure, unadulterated hatred in his eye. He was given this name because he sports a hairdo exactly like George Jefferson in the old sitcom
The Jeffersons
—an Afro around the sides and nothing on top. Someone once pointed out that he had patches of hair missing, and it stuck. Patches was born.

Patches isn’t the sort of guy you’d want to strike up a friendship with. He goes out of his way to cause more frustration for anyone he can. Patches is the guy who will change the channel just because he knows you’re watching television. He’ll pretend to be on the phone just so you can’t use it. To put it bluntly, Patches is an asshole. No one stays in a cell next to him for very long, because they quickly grow to despise him, then do whatever it takes to get moved away from him. Patches loves nothing more than to see misfortune visited upon others, and that is the only time you will ever hear him laughing.

Patches has a rather interesting collection, even by prison standards, and he’s rather touchy about it. If you approach him when no one else can hear the conversation he’ll show it to you. If you say something about it where others can hear, he’ll deny that it exists and then swear at you for the rest of the day. The odd thing is that nearly everyone has seen his collection at one time or another and knows that he is lying when he pretends ignorance. Those who wish to torment him will yell out across the barracks and ask him about it. This action is met with either explosive rage or deathly quiet. The only other thing that infuriates him even half as much is when someone starts singing that song from the seventies, “Patches, I’m depending on you, son.”

So what exactly is it that Patches collects? She-male porn. Patches collects pornography that falls under such colorful titles as “chicks with dicks.” Not only does he hoard it like treasure, he turns it into pop-up books that are cleverly disguised as birthday cards. He guards them like a Fort Knox of perversity, as if he believes everyone is out to steal his hard work. You see, this hoard of pop-up she-male porn is interactive. He takes a razor blade and combs through porn magazines in search of penis pictures. He carefully cuts out the picture of the penis and then cuts slits in the pictures of his half-men, half-women so he can slide the penis in and out of the slit. It is indeed disturbing, but no one can deny that Patches is a man who knows just what he likes.

As odd and unpleasant as Patches can be, there are those here who more than match him. A fine example of this sad species would be J.C.

I first noticed J.C. after I’d been here a few months and was moved up to a cell on the third floor. I could not look at him without being reminded of a scarecrow, and he greatly resembled Iggy Pop. He had long, graying hair and was rail thin, every muscle in his torso greatly defined. He constantly worked out, which is what he was doing the first time I really paid any attention to him. I looked over to see him doing squats and wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. I did a double-take to see what the little black spots scattered over his body were. Closer scrutiny revealed them to be crickets. Big, black crickets. They were stuck to his shoulders, chest, and stomach with tiny pieces of Scotch tape. There was even one on his neck. He was fond of calling them his “babies” and knew how to make them chirp simply by touching them in a particular way. He had them, or their descendants, for quite a while before the guards went into his cell and flushed them all down the toilet. J.C. seemed to be genuinely torn up over their loss, as if he were truly attached to them.

J.C. was an artist of tremendous skill, though his subject matter came from the darkest reaches of a disturbed psyche. One day he was casually standing in the doorway wearing his uniform of nothing but boxer shorts. There was a hand-rolled cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and his eyes were squinted against the rising smoke. He seemed to be looking at something over my head as he tossed me a piece of thick art paper. It was rolled up and inserted into a cardboard tube such as you find in a roll of toilet paper. “Check it out and tell me what you’ll give me for it,” he mumbled before retreating into his cell. I unrolled the paper to see a flawlessly drawn naked woman’s body in a reclining position. The horrible part was that J.C. had drawn his own head on the woman’s body. I stared at it in shock, unable to move. It came as such a shock to my mind that I had no idea what to do. Scream? Laugh? What? In the end I did the only thing I could do—rolled it back up, tossed it to him, and said, “Sorry, J.C., but I’ve already got one just like it.” He accepted this explanation as completely plausible and passed the drawing on to his next potential customer.

Drawing was not his only medium of creativity. He once made matching handheld crossbows out of tongue depressors, Elmer’s Glue-All, and heavy-duty rubber bands. These were no mere toys, but were strong enough to pierce flesh. Some people got a little jumpy when they’d see him holding one, even though he never actually shot anyone. He wasn’t above whizzing one by your ear, but the only thing he’d actually shoot with them were rats. He thinned out the prison rodent population for a while. One day the hobo got nervous when J.C. started waving the crossbows in his direction, so he snitched to the guards. That put an end to J.C.’s gunslinging days.

J.C.’s most irritating habit was walking stark naked to and from the shower. He’d stroll up and down the tier at a leisurely pace, like nothing was out of the ordinary. This wouldn’t have been so bad if you could have ignored him, but he’d walk right up to you and try to carry on a conversation. This would tend to make people pretty uneasy. Everyone dealt with it in different ways. As soon as he opened his mouth some men would bellow in outrage, “I done told you! Don’t try to talk to me when you ain’t got no drawers on!” Others would glance around nervously, eyes shifting left and right to see if anyone was looking, and then try to answer him as quickly as possible so he’d move on. All in all, he could be a very amusing character, and no one was happy when the state finally executed him.

Another potentially dangerous schizophrenic was recently executed after spending twenty-two years on Death Row. He was here so long because he had been judged too insane to execute. The state finally medicated him so that he would be sane enough to appreciate the fact that he was about to die. There was no question about his insanity for those who met him. I’d known it since the day he spit in my face and accused me of giving him ingrown toenails. He was still screaming at me as the guards took him to the hole.

That’s something you never get used to. One day a man is there, the next he’s gone. It’s hard to make yourself believe that someone you were just talking to a couple of days before is now gone forever. These are men you’ve lived with for years, yet you don’t even get to attend the funeral, so there’s no sense of closure. The preachers all get a disgusting gleam in their eyes when an execution is at hand. They hover around the condemned man’s cell like flies, threatening him with damnation unless he buys the mentality they’re selling. They don’t have time for you unless you’re about to die. They never even stop to say hello until that point. Many men vow that they’ll verbally abuse them if they hang around their cells when execution is imminent. The sentiment is “You had no time for me when I was living. Now that I’m dying I have no time for you.”

The worst part of the weeks preceding an execution is the guards. You can tell they get off on it, because it adds a little excitement to their jobs. A spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Correction will go on television to give a speech about how hard it is on them, but it’s nothing more than words to convince a gullible public how humane they are here. The truth is that the guards stand around and tell jokes about it before and afterward. They’ll actually be friendly to the condemned man for a few days before the execution, even if they’ve abused and neglected him up until then. This is done out of sheer morbidity. They want to be able to tell others that they had a conversation with the dead man.

Some of the prisoners can’t remember what you said to them or what they said to you just hours before. If you remind them, they will argue with you that such a conversation never took place. Others are grown men in their thirties who still behave like mean-spirited teenagers. Their mental development (what little there was) stopped once they began abusing drugs and alcohol.