Being Free Book Tour & Giveaway

There was a time in my life, not too long ago, when the one thing I wanted more than anything else in the world, was to die. I was standing in a courtroom in my best tan suit, taking off my watch, my ring, removing my lacquered pens from my coat pocket, and putting them into a little pile for my lawyer to present to my mother. The judge gave me fifteen years in prison, of which I would serve six, with good time. Life as I knew it ceased to exist. I consider the experience a blessing now, because losing everything and practically everyone, cleared the detritus of my greed-inspired life. Only after I found my slate wiped mercilessly clean, was there room to see truth; and what I saw scared the hell out of me. One man who helped me see it changed my life forever. His name is Dalton.

Dalton McCormack does not approve of this book. I have told him my plans to share the story with anyone who will listen. He just laughed. “No matter how many times most people look in a mirror, they still don’t really see themselves.” I found it mildly amusing given the mirrored sunglasses he always wears and what I eventually saw in those mirrors. But appearances are deceiving. I take what he says seriously, because I know he is one of the very few who does see. I’m going to tell you about him but first I need to go back and fill in some details because there was a time when I didn’t believe anything he said. I didn’t even believe my own eyes.

The first night I spent in the maximum-security state prison scared me half to death. Noises of grinding, rusted metal permeated my tiny cell. By tiny I mean that you could stand in the middle and touch both side walls with your fingertips. The walls shook constantly, reverberating every time a barred door slammed violently shut. Small flecks of paint and dirt fell from the ceiling. They filtered like fine silt onto everything I owned: my hair, my clothes, and my books. I had already spent six months in the county jail, but be advised, there is virtually no comparison between the two. If jail is boot camp, prison is war.

The day I arrived at the prison the property officer dispensed a pile of four molting woolen blankets to me that smelled of urine. He topped them with two stained sheets. The sheets were too small to fit the mattress and were not fitted so they came up around the corners and ended up in a ball in the middle by daybreak. Some guys had a way of knotting them so it wouldn’t happen, but it took me years to figure out the trick. As I stood six-feet tall, the mattress was barely long enough. The smoke, during most waking hours, was so thick I had to fashion a makeshift ventilator from the dirty sheets to avoid inhaling it directly. I looked into the mirror over the sink, saw my sunken brown eyes, my copper-colored, unkempt hair, and wondered how I would survive. It took me several days to get a decent night’s sleep.

Especially during those first few weeks, the place was downright scary. When I’m scared I can’t even think straight. Sometimes I pretended to read a book so I didn’t have to listen to the slurs that some of my fellow inmates delighted in delivering on the way by. One of my first major purchases was a large pair of ear-hugging headphones that I employed frequently to squelch the insults and other feral grunts of terminally angry men. Although it had limited utility as a muffler, being ostensibly engrossed in music convinced most people to lose interest in taunting me after a few minutes.

My first friend on the inside was not Dalton. Carl was a well-educated man with anger management issues who I had met in county jail. He’d arrived at the prison about a month beforehand. I found it ironic that we became such fast friends since he pathologically hated lawyers, and I was one of them. He visited me briefly on my second day at the prison, looking surprisingly well-acclimated. He stuck a small, brown, wrinkled paper bag through the bars of my cell. “Can’t talk. Take it. I’ll try to come by later.” Then he was gone. I looked inside the bag and found a package of instant soup. I am now convinced that the ramen soup people must have some kind of kickback in place as they are so popular in prison. I added some hot water to the noodles and made the soup in a small white bowl he had also thoughtfully provided. My first week passed slowly. I read the Bible, wrote some panicked letters to my remaining friends, and generally became emotionally numb.

My first job assignment at the prison was in the kitchen. I was issued a nice blue baseball cap and a bright white uniform, at least two sizes too large, even though I carried a little extra weight. I felt shamed having to wear them at first. People stared because they knew the lawyer was now the pots and pans washer. I slowly devolved into a shadow of my former arrogant self. I knew in some way it was good for me, but I resisted nonetheless.

Permanently discarding my infallible self-image is a first step toward living life in the real world. I think it’s important to put some of what Dalton says into words here. He sums it up this way: “Some people live their entire lives in the cloud.” Perhaps I should explain what the cloud is, since it is a metaphor I use a lot. The cloud is an imaginary place that Dalton keeps talking about with rancor in his voice. It is a rosy world where there are no felons, no crimes; nothing at all to disturb the calming fantasy that much of America prefers to live in every day. “You shouldn’t stop with America,” says Dalton when I start talking politics with him, “it infects the entire planet.”

Every afternoon I have rec. I can choose to go to a number of different places. Most of the time I go to the library. I have also been up to the prison Chaplain’s office quite a bit. But sometimes, like when I have to buy something at the prison store, I have to go to the yard. The yard is the place where people congregate, talk, show off, yell, lift weights, play pool, and make general assholes of themselves. I do not use that word lightly; there are plenty of them in prison.

The yard is also the place where I first noticed Dalton. He was carrying a large grocery bag of stuff back to his cell from the prison store. As he walked past me up the hill, he said “hello” for no reason at all. If you haven’t had the experience, saying “hello” to someone you don’t know is a big deal in prison. It can lead to a fight, ostracism, being strong-armed, being told to mind your own business, or just being harassed. Personal space is at a premium on the inside and hello can be expensive. I took it as a gift, returned the favor, and kept walking. But I didn’t even really notice him before he said hello to me. This too is part of the gift.

He was wearing a red bandanna, blue jeans, and a black jeans jacket. His trademark mirror glasses hid his eyes, and, as I later found out, made it difficult to tell whether he was kidding. He walked confidently and smiled. When I began to see him around the compound more and more, I noticed that he smiled almost all the time. It wasn’t a stupid smile saying, “I’m in prison and I like being here,” but a gentle smile that said, “happiness is a choice.” I decided to ask Carl about him.

“Don’t know him. What’s he look like?” Carl wasn’t much help.

I first heard about the meditation group over the intercom. The prison had acquired a large number of scratchy and garbled-sounding army surplus bullhorns, but seasoned cons could decipher the metallic, unsquelched announcements with all the alacrity of an NSA code breaker.

“Mdtashn ad dis dime, mdtashn.”

“What did they say?” I asked the guy in the box next to me. I really had no idea.

“Meditation. They shou’ finish chewing before dey use dat microphone.” Ed was a very cool guy who occupied the cell next to mine. He loved to talk. When he wasn’t playing handball down in the yard he was working on college courses. He grew up in New Jersey and everyone knew it from the moment he opened his mouth. He also had a very open mind. I thought about his translation for a minute.

“Maybe I should go.” I was thinking aloud, but in prison no one notices.

“Go. I went, dit’n do much for me. You migh’ like it dough.” Ed sounded genuinely encouraging. That was another reason I liked him.

“OK.” It took twenty minutes to coax a guard to descend one flight of stairs from his office and unlock my door. I didn’t know all the rules yet, but I sensed that patience would edge me closer to the room where the people were meditating faster than any other strategy. I thanked the guard. He looked at me as if I was being rude. Ok, so, I still had some things to learn.

I took the small white slip of paper that was my pass and hurried to the building where the group met. I opened the metal door and stepped into a large, brown-paneled room that also served as a sanctuary for church services. Metal chairs were arranged in a circle. Ten to fifteen men were already seated there. A few chairs remained empty. I took one. As I calmed down and let the tiny modicum of freedom permeate my being, I looked around to see whether I recognized anyone. Carl had come, and so had Dalton. They both nodded to me. I nodded back.

The only woman in the circle was a volunteer. She was a gentle person with brown, curly hair, who brought her own tire-sized dark-purple pillow to sit on. The other men looked like they had all been coming to this group for a very long time. The volunteer explained that I was to clear my mind of all thoughts, noises, and distractions. Anything that caught my attention should float away like a cloud.

“Start by focusing on your breath.” I closed my eyes, trying to relax and listen.

“Breathe in, I know I’m breathing in, breathe out, I know I’m breathing out.” She repeated this phrase over and over and lulled me into a very peaceful state. At first, everything around me seemed orchestrated to disrupt the class: people yelling outside, a phone ringing in the next room, a guard taking very little care to muffle squeaky door noises as he completed his rounds. I kept returning to my breath. The volunteer had become silent and I decided to open my eyes. When I did, I got a shock that to this day gives me chills. Dalton wasn’t there. He had been there when I closed my eyes, but now his seat was empty. Had I gone to sleep? It made no sense to me. I looked all-round the room and saw nothing out of the ordinary. I decided to close my eyes again and tried to return to my peaceful state. After a few minutes of trying I heard him whisper. It came from directly behind me. He very clearly said, “Look again.” I opened my eyes and there he was, sitting right where he was supposed to be, a very peaceful smile on his lips that was also part smirk. I opened my mouth to speak, but then, without opening his eyes, he shook his head ever so slightly to stop me. A wide range of emotions ran through my mind: fear, excitement, panic, curiosity. I remained silent. To signal the end of the first sit, the volunteer took a small mallet and tapped a long metal chime three times. It resonated gently through the room. The others began to open their eyes slowly and stretch a little. I looked around to see if Carl had noticed anything peculiar. If he had, he wasn’t giving it away. Then Dalton winked at me and smiled. I almost leapt right straight out of my chair. I couldn’t concentrate very well on what the volunteer was saying. But I was dying to ask Dalton what had happened. As it turns out, I didn’t get a chance to right then.

“McCormack?” A guard in a blue uniform was at the door. Dalton got up.

“Yeah?”

“Visit.” Dalton picked up his jacket and followed the guard out of the room.

“This time, try to really focus on the breath.” The volunteer was leading us all back into another twenty-minute sit, but it was nearly impossible for me to sit still.

The next day I looked everywhere for Dalton but failed to find him. Carl and I decided to go walking in the afternoon, even though it was cold. It was probably twenty degrees out and the clothing I had on really wasn’t warm enough. Still, we kept up a good pace and tried to act nonchalantly despite the fact that there was an armed guard walking the wall above us with a high-caliber rifle. He, on the other hand, looked very warm.

“Did you see anything strange yesterday at meditation?” I asked Carl after a while.

“Just you. You looked like you’d seen a ghost.”

“I might have.” I remembered closing my eyes and focusing on my breath. Everything seemed normal, until it wasn’t. “Did you get a chance to see the guy I was talking about the other day, you know, the guy they took to visits?” My brown state-issue shoes were not insulated and my feet were getting cold.

“Oh yeah. That’s the guy who said hello to you, right?” Everybody was painfully aware of the hello thing.

“Right. Did you notice anything weird about him?” I liked Carl well enough, but I was still unclear about how open-minded he would be if I told him that one of the guys at meditation had spontaneously vanished, even if it were just for a few minutes.

“No, not really. He struck me as pretty quiet. Looks like he’s been in a while and has figured out how to do time.” I wasn’t sure if he knew it, but Carl had given me another piece of the puzzle. How to do time. I had heard inmates talk about doing time as though it were a job: the fine art of turning something that should normally take five minutes into an hour. The institution provided their own version of doing time by needlessly complicating things, in typical military fashion, and so most inmates found alternative ways to get the things they needed.

“Wonder what he did?”

“Probably murder,” said Carl. “Anybody who’s been in that long must have killed somebody.” He was right about one thing: Dalton looked as though he’d been in prison for twenty years. There was no sense of shame about the man. At first his serenity irritated me because it ran against the grain of what I had always been taught about criminals: that they should be ashamed for the rest of their lives. I didn’t really believe that everyone was guilty, but I knew most were.

“What did you think was so weird about him?” Carl asked the question before I had made up my mind. I still debated whether to reveal what I saw.

“He winked at me.”

“Oh. Yeah, well, there are a lot of guys like that in here.”

“No, not sexually, he just gave me a wink like he knew something I didn’t.” Carl looked confused and decided to change the subject.

“You heard anything more from your girlfriend?”

“Nope. I think she’s given up on me. I don’t blame her though. Who can wait six years for someone to get out of prison?” Carl knew how unhappy I had been when I got my Dear John letter. It was my own damn fault for lying to her. I had told her I was innocent. Technically true as a presumption, but in fact I was guilty. There are some things that sorry just won’t cover, but I still keep saying it as if she can hear me. I knew better than to ask Carl anything about his ex-wife. Their divorce was epic in its devastation and had left him virtually penniless. Small wonder he had such a deep hatred for lawyers. We left the walking track and went back inside to warm up.

When I heard the call for meditation the following week, I was ready. I had already secured my pass and reminded the guard that I wished to go. He pressed the button for my door and it sprang open a hand-width. I locked it behind me and walked quickly to the chapel, trying not to look at anyone along the way. Even looking at someone could be as risky as hello.

This time I was the first one there, except for the volunteer. She introduced herself as Pam and apparently didn’t remember I had been there the previous week. It made very little difference to me at the time since I was more concerned with talking to Dalton. It amazed me how little contact I could have with some people in a prison that held just under five hundred men. I didn’t know my way around well enough yet to visit someone intentionally. That was a skill I would develop over time however, and I was doing the best I could. Most people immediately recognized my status as a fish out of water (though perhaps a shark), and for some it was an opportunity to con me. Others, like old Ronnie who lived on my cellblock, called me a “civilian” and gave me latitude when I failed to discern all the subtle nuances of the infamous inmate code.

Dalton came through the door and approached me as if we were old friends. “Glad you decided to come back.” He patted me on the back and went to take a seat in one of the metal folding chairs. I was, once again, speechless. I chose a chair next to his and he seemed pleased. Carl didn’t show up, but I knew he might not since the group met during his shift in the laundry. Attending programs was always encouraged by the institution, so he could go if he wanted to, but he still had a certain amount of work to complete; unless he found someone else with whom he could trade.