Shakespeare Saved My Life Read online

  “Hey, I was a stupid little kid, a moron, just a dumb, little punk kid. I don’t even think any of this is real. I still thought I was going home. Deep down inside. It’s like Boys’ School: ah,

  I’ll be out in six months! I never took it seriously, not until I was in prison. I was already in seg when it hit me: ‘Man, I got life in prison!’ All along I thought somebody was gonna fix it. It’s dumb and it’s my own fault. Obviously, they meant life in prison. But it never sunk in. Besides, I thought I knew how I’d end up.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Executed,” he replied. “Or gunned down in an escape attempt.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Escape Artist

  The idea of being gunned down in an escape attempt was not just some dramatic fantasy. Newton had an extensive history of escape attempts that began when he was still a juvenile.

  “I escaped from all them places,” he said. “Every one of them: Children’s Home. Youth Service Bureau. Juvenile Detention Center. Indiana Boys’ School. Two from each. Total of eight.”

  “Your first escape, from Children’s Home, how old were you?”

  “Probably thirteen. I was with a couple of older kids. The first time, I left from school, me and another guy. Just walked off. The second time, we cut the alarm on the exit door.”

  “So then they sent you to the Youth Service Bureau.”

  “That was a step up from Children’s Home, more isolated, more intense. First time, we just walked off from school. The other time, me and two other guys—they were older than me, they’re closing in on eighteen and I’m just barely fourteen—we cut the alarm wires on the exit door in the back of the building. It was January. We were just freakin’ walking out on the highway. I’m cold, I’m wet, don’t know even where we’re at.”

  “Next you’re sent to Juvenile Detention Center.”

  “That’s where you wait on your court, it’s like being in jail without bond. When you go outside, you’re shackled, handcuffed, it’s the prison for kids. Harder to escape—but I did. The first time, we took out the screws on the window. The second, we climbed the fence. It was intense, man! Here’s how it happened: We was out playing ball and we go to the guards like, ‘How about a game?’ And we kinda weed out, let the other guys play with them, get ’em distracted, and then we just took off, got up the fence, a good twenty-foot fence, barbed wire, and just outrun them. They chased us down, and I remember I was running in these bright orange shoes. And this crazy woman yelling through the neighborhood: ‘Aw, Dink just escaped out of Juvenile!’ So I jumped in a Dumpster and I hid in there for a couple of hours.”

  “Then you’re sent to Indiana Boys’ School. That’s a much bigger deal.”

  “Let me tell you how it works: if you’re crazy bad, you get six months; otherwise, it’s ninety days. I did over a year! I went twice—that’s what they call the young supermax, the lockdown unit. In fact, it may be even more locked down than adult supermax: you don’t have TV, radio, none of that stuff. You’re in a cell twenty-three hours a day, by yourself. I spent probably four months of that year on R.U.”

  “How did you escape from Boys’ School?”

  “The first time, really, I had done good, and I got to go home on the weekend. Once I got around my buddies, I never went back. So that was my first escape. The second, I just walked off campus. Me and this other guy. That’s the weirdest thing. Good thieves can go into buildings and act like they belong there, you know what I mean? They can walk in every restricted area. If they got the demeanor that they belong there, nobody questions them. I walked off campus like that. And you’re way out in the country. I was hiding in a shed. All these country bumpkins, you think—boom!—they’re gonna kill you.”

  “You’ve got two adult escapes, both from supermax.”

  “The first one isn’t really an escape. But I was digging holes, so yeah, I guess that is ‘escape’; what else would it be? And it’s not like I wasn’t testing the material. I cut into the chase way.”

  (The chase way was a small opening that connected the venting system throughout the prison. Newton had actually starved himself to become small enough to fit into this opening.)

  “For whatever reason,” he continued, “they had the unlocked part on the inside, and once you get to that stage, there was a door and you were out! You had to get the bar off the back board; it’s a little tricky but I had it figured out.”

  He looked at me and laughed. “Is it hard for you to get into the mind-set?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t think it was hard to imagine a lifer wanting to get out of prison, by whatever means. “Did you actually get out?” I asked.

  “Technically. Just into the chase way. I’ll tell you how I got busted—it’s the coolest thing ever. I take the vent off and I take a piece of paper and draw little black circles on it so it looks just like the vent. You really have to get close to see it’s just a drawing. And all the mortar I took out, I took toilet paper and toothpaste to fill in. One day there’s a shakedown, everything’s cool, we pass. I’m getting cuffed up and everything to go back to the cell, and there’s a guy complaining: ‘Hey, ain’t supposed to take the radio!’ Brings the sarge in, and sarge figures he may as well look around, so just as they roll my door, sarge, he just kind of peeks into my cell, gets up on the toilet, as he goes to brace himself, his hand pushes in on the paper, and he goes, ‘Whoa! Whoa!’ and he sees it goes right through to my neighbor’s cell. It was pretty funny. So that was the first attempt.”

  “How did you get to do it again?”

  “Well, it’s ’cause they’re really smart people.”

  “Same cell?”

  “No, but upstairs, directly above my buddy’s cell. This is a funny story too. I get some saw blades from a buddy, cut the entire light off, but I’m short, I’m trying to jump off the bed and take a cut each time.”

  “No cameras?”

  “No cameras. I get all the guts out, took nine days, but the back panel of the light I can’t reach, so I figure I’ll kick my leg up in there and kick the back end in, and I’m stronger than I think. I kick it and the whole panel just flies off onto the chase way, hitting every pipe and wall in the thing, big metal aluminum thing: ding ding ding ding! The whole range went dead silent. I stood there for like two hours not knowing what to do. Eventually, I get enough courage to climb in there to get it, so then we’re ready but we can’t leave till night. My buddy tells his buddy that we’re ready to go, and this guy, he sees an opportunity to get brownie points so he puts a little slip in his mail bag.”

  A prison snitch.

  “Pretty soon,” Newton said, “I hear somebody downstairs say, ‘Hey man, look out the window at all these dudes with guns,’ and I know it’s one of them squads. I know we’re busted. Yeah.”

  He laughed.

  “That would’ve got you all the way out, to the street?”

  “Yeah. I woulda made it,” he said with certainty. Then he opened up his Shakespeare homework.

  “Good thing I didn’t.”

  CHAPTER 23

  The Dagger I See before Me

  Is this a dagger which I see before me,

  The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

  I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

  Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

  To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

  A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

  Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

  I see thee yet, in form as palpable

  As this which now I draw.

  Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going;

  And such an instrument I was to use.

  Mine eyes are made the fools o’ the other senses,

  Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,

  And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,

  Which was not so before. There’s no such thing:

  It is the bloody business which informs

 
Thus to mine eyes. Now o’er the one halfworld

  Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

  The curtain’d sleep; witchcraft celebrates

  Pale Hecate’s offerings, and wither’d murder,

  Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf,

  Who howls his watch, thus with his stealthy pace.

  With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design

  Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,

  Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear

  Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,

  And take the present horror from the time,

  Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives:

  [A bell rings.]

  Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

  I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.

  Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell

  That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

  —Macbeth, act 2, scene 1

  Lee Bentley, the latest addition to our group, joined not out of any interest in Shakespeare but because of his interest in rap music. He knew that his hero, Tupac Shakur, had studied the bard’s work. A poet himself, Bentley enjoyed adapting key speeches from Macbeth using contemporary hip-hop language. And he was good. In his rendition of the hallucination that leads Macbeth to murder King Duncan, the dagger becomes a pistol, but much of Shakespeare’s original language is echoed in the contemporary translation. In addition, he retains the seductive quality of the weapon that attracts the killer to it:

  What is this?

  Are you the vision I’ve seen in my thoughts,

  reflecting the face of death from your chrome skin?

  Come on, baby, let me hold you, yeahhh!—but my palm feels nothing!

  My mind is playing tricks on me, due to the drama I know I must face tonite.

  I see this pistol again, as vivid as a movie scene,

  like the one against my waistband now, that I draw upon the shadows.

  It is leading me deeper into darkness,

  to stumble into bloody puddles that are deeper than the ocean.

  I still see it!

  And now, on her chrome face and firm backside are splashes of blood,

  and her mouth moans with the satisfaction of our secret affair.

  This can’t be real!

  It must be the bloody wickedness that I am about to commit

  to someone who thinks I’m his friend.

  This visual poetry is already writing a part of me dead:

  the voodoo of those strange sistas.

  And now I must hold her hips to the music of murder,

  but slowly, slowly, like the spider whose web already shakes with its victim,

  not to rattle the fly tangled in the web.

  I must go, to take destiny’s hand: the bell invites my trigger finger to coil like a snake.

  If Duncan only knew that bell is summoning his soul

  to the kiss of the longing lips of death.

  In the group sessions, I listened to Bentley read his poetry, and then at his cell, I listened to Newton read his analysis. I couldn’t wait until I would be able to bring the two of them together.

  (Photo credit: Indiana State University)

  CHAPTER 24

  The Shower: Newton

  Before killing the king, Macbeth’s conscience conjures up the frightening image of a bloody dagger. He should be repelled by it, but he reaches toward it. Trying to understand the killer’s motivation, I asked Newton, “Is that evidence that he is not looking for a way out of doing the deed, but a way in?”

  “A way in, absolutely!” he agreed. Then he added, “’Cause, hey, you know what? I had a ‘bloody dagger,’ but not a bloody dagger. I’m not doing anything like, ‘Is this a gun I see?’ But I am acting out the deed psychologically: I jump out of the car and just start shooting. I’m trying to build myself up, trying to pull myself into the deed, ’cause the pull is way stronger to get the hell out of there. So that’s my ‘dagger,’ that’s what I have to do to get me in there to do it. So I am kind of seeing my own dagger. It’s the scene, and it’s bloody.”

  “Like Macbeth’s dagger, it’s bloody?”

  “Yes! Absolutely, man! But it’s different! It’s different! I mean, look, it’s a gun! A stabbing killing, there’s much more gore and blood. Shooting somebody is not nearly…I can tell you, it’s probably easier to shoot somebody than it is to stab somebody, like I did in the shower at Michigan City. That was a lot harder.”

  “In that incident, did you see a dagger?”

  “Yes! I did, man! No joke! All the way up! It started to fade out only when I actually went into the shower. Until that point, I’m walking back and forth on the range, and in my mind, I’m going through it over and over, till I go to do it, and that’s when I lose the visualization.”

  “Does the vision convince you—and Macbeth—to do the deed?”

  “Right, yeah. It builds your confidence. Or it may just keep your brain so occupied so that it don’t let the doubts creep in, ’cause it don’t take a lot for that doubt to pull you all the way out. It don’t necessarily attract you to the deed, but maybe it makes you committed to it. It blocks everything out so all you think about is the deed: the deed, the deed, the deed.”

  “Macbeth sees the dagger, but he doesn’t see Duncan. Did you visualize your victim?”

  “No, it’s just the deed. It’s the attack, my part of this. I’m not even visualizing how he’d try to get away as strategies to stop him. It don’t even cross my mind that he’s gonna fight for his life. I’m not seeing him being stabbed; I’m seeing me stabbing.”

  “If Macbeth wanted to kill Duncan in the most efficient, most merciful manner—”

  “He would stab him once, through the heart.”

  “But he uses two daggers.”

  “That’s a butchering! But you know what, I’m just thinking: I went into that stabbing with two knives. Why did I think I needed two knives? I don’t know, man, I don’t know. I had never done anything like that,” he said, and then added, “Or maybe I am Macbeth!”

  “Could Macbeth be so disoriented that he’d leave the scene with the daggers still in his hand, and not even be aware that he has them?”

  “Yes! I can absolutely see Macbeth having the daggers and not being aware of it! I never thought about this before—and I never told you, because I never linked these two things, but that’s the cool thing about reliving it—but I remember the stabbing that I did in the shower at Michigan City. When I left the shower, I still had the knife in my hand! I swear, man! No joke! I still had the knife! Just like Macbeth—wow! It wasn’t until another guy, in his cell, pointed it out to me that I was even aware of it. By then, I was all the way down the range! And then I tried to drop it and kick it towards the cells. I remember—boom!—dropping it. And that’s when I noticed I was being sprayed. There were like thirty officers on the walks spraying me with their mace while I was stabbing the guy, but it didn’t affect me then. I didn’t even notice it until I was on the range and the guy told me that I still had the knife in my hand.”

  “What did you have against this guy?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why were you trying to kill him?”

  “I wasn’t trying to kill him.”

  This was one of my many prison moments when I’m sure I must have had a look of confused naïveté on my face as I stammered, “But, but you—”

  “Look,” Newton explained. “It’s really hard to kill someone by stabbing. Most stabbings don’t result in death. It’s not like Macbeth.”

  And that made me recall Newton’s earlier observation that he didn’t believe that the kingship was Macbeth’s motivation in killing King Duncan, that it was really something else that he was after. So I asked Newton, “What were you after?”

  “Seg at Michigan City is a dangerous place,” he replied. “Really dangerous. And remember, this is my first adult prison experience. I
was still young, nineteen years old, 155 pounds, a skinny white kid. They were all bigger than me. I was just trying to make an impression. The guy, my victim, he had got this other guy, caught him blinded and hurt him real bad, so he knew that people were after him. I go into the shower, fully dressed. I got my hand in my pocket, and I see he’s standing with his back to the wall. I come up and hit him in the right shoulder with the weapon in my right hand, and it’s a big fat weapon, it’s not a blade. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d never done anything like that before. I assumed the bigger, the better, but actually if you want to hurt somebody, it’s the smaller, the better; it’s hard to get it in somebody and keep pulling it out.”

  He looked at me to be sure that I was okay with the details before he continued.

  “Eventually, it got stuck between his ribs, I couldn’t get it out, so I pulled my hand back to my pocket to get my other one, and stabbed myself. And that’s what took me out of that single-minded, focused, B-lined kind of behavior, and I started noticing other things. I noticed the whole area was full of COs [corrections officers] yelling, ‘Stop!’ And when I come out of the shower, I remember my clothes were covered with blood, but most of it was from my own cut. I lost so much blood that when I went for x-rays, I passed out in the chair.”

  “It would’ve been funny if you died,” I said, wondering if he would laugh or take offense.

  He laughed. “Wouldn’t it?” he said. “Yeah, man, I agree: ‘Died of a self-inflicted knife wound stabbing someone else.’”

  He stopped laughing. “You reap what you sow.”

  CHAPTER 25

  The Shower: Me

  I had a shower incident of my own when I had been working in supermax for just half a year. I was feeling more familiar with the SHU—perhaps too familiar. Sometimes I would catch a range door left open if chow or mail had recently been delivered, and walk onto the range without even letting the officer in the pod know that I was there. That backfired on me more than once. The first time, I got locked in. The second time, I could’ve been killed.