Shakespeare Saved My Life Read online

  “But now,” Newton continued, “I prefer the light on. And when I do turn the light on, I feel more prepped, like something’s going on. I can work better. I have more energy.”

  “It’s like sunshine: your day is beginning, regardless of what time it really is.”

  “Right. My body is saying, ‘Get up, it’s time to work.’ But as soon as the range door opens, I turn it off.”

  “The range door opens and you know that someone is entering the range. But why do you want to go dark?”

  “It’s such a draining and dark environment, you just want to blend into your environment. It’s more comforting even though it’s miserable. Does that make sense?”

  “So you create your own ‘dark cell’ experience, in a way.”

  “You know, the dark didn’t never bother me. I don’t think anything bothered me as much as—let’s see, what would’ve bothered me most of my whole isolated experiences? Probably just that real depressing sense of…loneliness.”

  Solitary confinement is inherently lonely, but in Newton’s case, the experience was greatly exacerbated by his choice of silence over human contact.

  CHAPTER 30

  Isolated…and Alone

  Of all of the thousands of prisoners I have worked with over the past quarter century, Newton has survived the most extreme experiences that I have ever heard of, from his hard-core home life to his supermax prison life. What he told me next seems impossible and probably would be, for anyone else.

  “Have you ever been on a solo range?” I asked him.

  “I’ve been on a range by myself, yeah.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know, maybe a month or so.”

  “A month of no one to talk to?” I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do a day—I don’t think I ever have (even when I had laryngitis).

  “Yeah,” he said, “but I went a couple of years not talking to nobody at all.”

  I was stunned. That couldn’t be physically possible. Could it?

  “I didn’t see any of my family for years, three or four years. It’s understandable; I was such a down and nasty guy, all I would talk about is how miserable I was. And I didn’t really relate with the guys around, even though we shared similar circumstances and maybe even similar experiences, but the discussions with them just made you feel worse: same conversations every day, no joke. Guys argued, same argument every day. Everything was so monotonous.”

  That explained why it happened, but I wanted to know how it happened, so I asked him, “What was that like?”

  “Uh, let me see if I can remember.” He thought for a bit. “Okay, the initial stage, I don’t know what ostracism feels like, but I would guess that you kind of feel that way.”

  “Outcast?” I asked. “Or maybe out of place?”

  “Right!” he said. “Exactly! Even though you’re the one intentionally not talking, you feel like you don’t fit in, don’t belong. You just really feel—that’s exactly right: out of place, initially. But that’s not long, that’s not long. That’s just the very initial stage and then after that, I kind of found pleasure in it. I found things that I liked about not interacting with anybody. And this is a bad way to say it, but it gave me some form of like, supremacy, that I’m of a different league, you know? And I think that gave me little bit more confidence, a little bit more swagger, to be able to deal with the circumstances like that. But the initial stage, you’re just this close to just pulling someone in a conversation. You hear something like, ‘Hey! You know how to do fractions?’ And you just wanna, ‘Yeah! It’s three over four!’ You’re just kind of desperate, you know what I mean?”

  “Because you know the answer, or because you want to speak?”

  “’Cause you just want to interact, you want to be involved, be noticed, or something.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “I think that I had just developed so much hatred for everything and everybody that it just bled out to those around me too. Some of them guys I could look back now and see he was a good dude. He coulda been talking positive things, but I would hate him: ‘Aw, that dude’s so fake, man!’ I’d have these conversations with myself: ‘That dude’s a phony!’ So I wouldn’t talk, but when you hear a conversation, I don’t care how tough you are, you take off your headphones and you listen, and you go through these dialogues with yourself: what you would say, how you would tear down his argument.” He laughed. “You’re kinda living like old Richard said, you know? Your whole world that you made all these characters right there in your head. I really was just so bitter and mad, and I never knew why. So if you don’t know why, you just attach it to the easiest targets, and the guys around me were the easy targets. I just hated them. I’m sure internally I was just hating myself, but who can come to grips with that: ‘I hate myself’?”

  “So you just made a decision one day, or was it a gradual development?”

  “Both. ’Cause, you know, that ain’t the only time I’ve done that. I can remember making that decision: ‘Yeah, I’m not talking to none of them cats, nobody, I’m not talking to nobody!’ And other times that just being a consequence of being around these people: ‘I ain’t got nothing in common with them; what am I gonna talk about?’ Michigan City, man, it’s a whole different world, very much segregated, racially I mean. In lockup, there were only two white dudes, and I didn’t relate to the other one. I mean, he’d bang Elavil and—”

  “What?”

  “Oh yeah,” he laughed. “I forgot you’re not a prisoner. ‘Banging’ is when you inject drugs, so he would take Elavil—it’s an antidepressant drug, it’s not a drug you bang, but he’s such a dopehead that we didn’t have a lot in common. So there wasn’t nobody to talk to.”

  “I can’t imagine it,” I told him.

  “It never really bothered me,” he replied. “It didn’t bother me not talking. It’s only when you’re used to talking and then you go to not talking, that initial probably couple of weeks of adjusting, and then you just learn to enjoy the solitude, being to yourself. And the same thing the other way, you just learn to enjoy talking to people again. So it’s the same adjustment either way, the same awkwardness. I think I can handle both: I can handle the social, and I can handle the solitude.”

  It occurred to me that this was one of the few decisions that a segregated prisoner could make: to talk or not to talk. For Newton, that was the question.

  “In the ten years that you spent in isolation, how many face-to-face conversations did you have?”

  “Man!”

  There was a long pause. Apparently, he couldn’t think of a single one. Again, I was stunned.

  “There was a behavior clinician that come through every month, does that count?” he said at last. “And I’d just say, ‘Everything’s fine.’ ‘Everything?’ ‘Everything.’ Every time, that’s what I’d say.”

  “Exactly those words?”

  “Exactly those words.”

  “Every month?”

  “Every month.”

  “Was it true?”

  “No.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Ghosts in the Cell

  O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell

  and count myself a king of infinite space,

  were it not that I have bad dreams.

  —Hamlet, act 2, scene 2

  Supermax prisoners know how Hamlet feels being “bounded in a nut shell” and having “bad dreams.” They also have a unique perspective on Hamlet’s vision of the so-called ghost of his dead father that urges him to seek revenge for his murder by committing murder himself. I say “so-called” because the prisoners convinced me that the ghost could be—probably is—in Hamlet’s mind, urging him to kill the uncle he hates. If you’ve read the play, you may question the fact that it opens with two nervous guards on patrol who think they have seen the ghost, and they then tell Hamlet’s friend Horatio, who also comes to believe he has seen the ghost. The prisoners had a ready answer for
that too:

  “How many people have seen Elvis? Or Jesus?”

  “Mass hysteria: they see what they need to see.”

  Makes sense. Once again, they were basing their interpretations on a detailed analysis of a passage that is often overlooked in classroom study, and nearly always cut in performances. Furthermore, they know what it’s like to see someone you really want to see. They have had their share of “ghosts” in their cells. Every one of them told me that he’s had the experience.

  “Any slight little shift in your head, it’ll look like movement, that little break in the light through the cell door, so it’s easy to get tricked into thinking somebody walked by your cell,” Newton explained. “I could’ve swore at times there was someone in my cell, but it was me pumping myself into it, and wanting it so bad, interacting with a ghost.”

  “Did you see anyone in particular?”

  “It’s Aunt Jane!” He laughed. “No, man, I’d have to be crazy.”

  Wondering if he ever was on the brink of going crazy, I asked Newton to tell me more about the “fantastical walks” he had described earlier. In researching the psychological effects of supermax incarceration, I learned that a key distinction between sane fantasies and insane hallucinations is whether the prisoner believes the vision is real.

  “How does it work?” I asked. “The fantastical walk.”

  “You start pacing,” he said, and he started to do so, as if to demonstrate. “At first you’re just thinking, about anything, and that evolves into thinking about life outside of the cell, on the streets. It’s you somewhere else—it starts out with you in your past, hanging out on the streets with your guys, you at a party, then it’s you at that party but how you would act now, with your mentality and personality now. The next stage is you’re who you are now, but you’re in a different life. You’re fighting off all these other thoughts and distractions, so you don’t get far.” He stopped pacing and came back to the cell door. “It can take a week of ten-hour days of pacing to live three hours of a fantasy.”

  “Are you always aware that it’s just a fantasy?”

  “I think you’re conscious of it as it goes. There’s just certain defenses that you drop. The only way to appreciate the true feeling of those moments is to not make yourself aware that it’s just a fantasy, ‘cause that’s distracting. You can’t get 100 percent in it, but you want to get in as much as possible. You can get it to where you can feel the sensations, smell the food, feel the dampness of the rain.”

  “The power of the mind.”

  “Right. You can trick your mind to feel certain things. There’s a feeling to all this, man, there’s some kind of liberty, and if you just pick up where you left off, you lose that liberating feeling, so each time you start over, you rewalk into the house, whatever it takes to start again.”

  “It always starts with an entrance?”

  “Right, exactly! I’m sure that has to do with that whole wanting to make an impression. I would play out these fantasies as I walked, but I would also play them out physically. Like, if I walk in the house, and I go sit down on a chair, I’ll sit on the bed and act like I’m right across from the person I’m talking to. Like, ‘Yeah, man, you know.’ I’d do this whole gesture, and I’d do that with anything that I was doing in the fantasy.”

  “You’d get even more involved? For example, if you were playing cards, you would—”

  “You would, right! You’d beat the desk, like ‘Hey, what’s up, man!’ You’d physically do things, you’re more involved, and that makes it more real.”

  “Did you one day make the decision to begin acting out the fantasies?”

  “No! It was a natural development; it just started happening.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t remember doing that as much at WCU [Westville Control Unit, Indiana’s other supermax] as in the SHU. So I don’t know if it takes a certain amount of time of this kind of solitude, but where it got full-fledged was in the SHU.”

  “Do you talk?”

  “Yeah, there is talking. If I sit down to drive: ‘Hey, what’s up, man?’”

  “Do others speak?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, but that part’s in your head. You don’t go, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ and then respond, ‘Not much, man.’ You’re the only vocal character. The other one’s in your head.”

  “What comes first: speaking or gestures?”

  “Gestures.”

  “How long after is speaking?”

  “Not long after. Initial speaking is just gonna follow the gesture. You turn your head: ‘Hey, what’s up, man?’”

  “Longer speeches too?”

  “Later on, you will. Whole speeches, and then you gotta stop and restructure your speech, ’cause you’re always trying to improve it. Your impact on the world. But if you ask a guy who’s at the two-month stage about this three-year stage: ‘That’s retarded, man! Who does that? Freakin’ psych patients!’”

  “What gets you out of the fantasy is some kind of interruption?”

  “It’s not always external. Sometimes it’s your own thought. Sometimes, you want to see what another fantasy is like.”

  “You switch channels?”

  “You switch channels, that’s exactly right! Now you’re grown up, rich, doing these charitable things.”

  “Have you ever had difficulty getting out of a fantasy?”

  “Well, that’s one of them questions: How would I know? There were times that I worried about where my sanity was and how far I had gone. You don’t know where the line is, so how do you know if you crossed it?”

  It’s the same question that has often been raised of Hamlet.

  CHAPTER 32

  Insanity

  Hamlet fakes his insanity as part of his strategy to seek revenge on his uncle, while Newton was all too familiar with the real thing.

  “Over the years, I’ve watched a lot of people go through psychological breakdowns back here,” he told me, “and I got to know the symptoms.”

  “What are they?”

  “It starts with the pacing. That’s the initial stage that this place is starting to affect you. Then there’s the desperation to talk, to anyone. That’s the stage where it’s starting to hurt you, you’re starting to really want out of here, you’re starting to tread water, or more like quicksand: if you stay calm, you’ll be okay, but if you panic, you start sinking faster and faster. So the danger in that is that you do jump feetfirst into that SHU lifestyle: ‘I’ll throw poop on you!’ That kind of outburst is so common back here. But I understand why they do that; there’s passion in that kind of anger, there’s a purpose in life.”

  “What happens later?”

  “You develop that sense of powerlessness that you feel in a lot of situations, but after your fair share of seg time, it’s much more prominent. You really feel like there’s nothing you can do. A prisoner may not have a great deal of power, but early on, psychologically, he does feel he still has an outlet, a say in what goes on in his life.”

  “One short-term guy in the group today was complaining about his laundry being late.”

  “Yeah, you feel you have some say. You still feel you have some power.”

  “Short-term guys are not feeling long-term effects.”

  “Right, they still feel they have some power or say in their life. But later on—and I don’t know if it’s gender specific, but I’ve always felt that a guy has these impulses to be the provider, so the helplessness is hard to swallow, to think you can’t take care of yourself. You want to feel like you can do these necessities, can take care of your family, of yourself. In seg, after so long, you get this sense of helplessness: there’s nothing you control in your life, nothing! You need somebody else for everything in your life: for your clothes to be clean, for something to eat, to go to the shower, you need somebody else. After long exposure to that, it just grows into you and then you don’t have any kind of confidence in yourself, you feel like that’s your life, you feel lik
e you’re just this animal that they say you are.”

  “Do you ever come to accept the powerlessness?”

  “To the breaking point, you’re still fighting it, still searching for avenues and outlets to find power in. Shakespeare is one of them: a positive outlet, a source of power. In seg, there’s a lot of bitterness and anger, and a lot of guys find those outlets in each other: fighting and feuding, arguing, having poop wars. But a guy like me, who didn’t talk, didn’t expose my hand to anybody, where could I find that outlet? ‘I’m gonna kill you! Somebody’s gonna pay!’ And you have to ask, why does a guy do these violent acts? Psychologically, it’s a sense of power he has over people. In these kind of conditions, where a guy’s dealing with this whole power failure, having nothing to have power over, he can find a lot of power in that: killing people. Absolute power, you know?”

  “So there are two outlets for the frustration of that powerlessness: insanity or violence.”

  “Right.”

  “How did you retain your sanity in segregation?”

  “When people ask me, ‘How did you stay sane all that time in seg?’ I just say, ‘You do what you gotta do.’ People say, ‘I think I’d go crazy,’ and I say, ‘You don’t know what you’re capable of.’ That’s what I say, but in my head, I attribute a lot of that to that…”

  “That what?”

  “The ‘fantastical walks,’ that I was able to leave, in a way, and live a different life while all this crap and turmoil was going on around me. And I think King Richard even mentions that. Doesn’t he suggest that it’s a coping mechanism?”

  “So Shakespeare not only had the insight to know that’s what you do in isolation, but also maybe even to know that it’s the key to surviving?”

  “Right—but, oh! Here’s the thing, man: too much of a good thing can be bad. Because I had done this for a matter of years, right? You keep doing it over and over, and getting more involved to where you lose that reality line, and I thought about that: This must be how people do it, these people that really think and feel they’re in different places or different people. They just get into these characters every now and then, and eventually they’re not sure which one is real, and then they become this other. I remember thinking, ‘This must be how it works.’ And then obviously, the natural thing is to think: Where am I at? And when will I know? You don’t know. You don’t know what line to cross or not to cross. So, finally, it got to the point where as soon as I started doing the fantastical walk, my mind would start attacking, like ‘That’s retarded! What are you doing?’ It would ruin it, I couldn’t do it, and I remember hating that. Once my mind would go ‘that’s ridiculous,’ I’d go ‘damn!’ because I really wanted to do it.”