A Checkered Past

In New York City it’s the 1977 “Son of Sam” summer, and I’m several weeks into my disciplinary sentence. Dark as a cave, oppressively hot, my tall narrow cell is like living in a caul. The air is still, thick and fetid, the brick floor worn smooth from decades of countless pacing feet. Baking in the unrelenting sun, the maze-like building absorbs heat like a potter’s kiln until late at night, when the heavy stone radiates the stored heat back out, getting hot all over again. I’m on disciplinary half rations...mostly beans and cornbread...and the pounds melt off my frame like old butter. I pace relentlessly, covered in a sheen of sweat...you never stop sweating in the Flat Top...chastising myself for foolishly becoming sidetracked with chain gang hustling instead of focusing on my one true goal: escape. Now I’m moving backward, not forward, and I haven’t even attempted a move. Idiot!

Working out in the early morning or late at night, when temperatures briefly dip below a hundred degrees, I ransack my mind for a new game plan. After each set of pushups, situps or squats, I must press my face against my cell bars, gulping in the whiffs of hallway air, sweating like old cheese. Every few sets I wring out my drawers, the oily sweat pouring into the crud-encrusted toilet. I pace, work out, pace some more, trying not to count the slow-moving days and winding up counting the minutes instead. Roaches scurry across the ceiling, and at night large rats boldly patrol the halls.

I have no property other than a Bible and a few dog-eared religious books that were already in the cell. There’s barely enough light for me to see my Bible, which I read mostly because there’s nothing else to do. The verses are familiar by now, vaguely comforting bromides, but I’m merely passing time, not groping for spiritual handholds. I believe in much of the Bible and occasionally engage in ruminative conversations with God...though He never replies...but He’s a remote and distant Creator and I’m content with the pact I made with God years ago: I got myself into this mess and I’m going to be a man and not whine to God to rescue me now. I’m certain God respects my position, perhaps even admires me for taking responsibility. There will be no foxhole conversion for me.

I’m flipping through the Christian books sitting in the corner, a popular series published by Chaplain Ray, a prison minister out of Texas. The slim volumes are autobiographies by various infamous criminals who eventually found Jesus and turned their lives around. One is penned by “Al Capone’s Wheelman,” another by an old-school gangster who once ran with Bonnie and Clyde. Others are by ex-jewel thieves, robbers and assorted career criminals. Bored, I read them all, finding I can relate to many of these guys. They’re not weak, not rats, not cowards, punks or pedophiles, which enhances my appreciation of their accounts. I’m mostly interested in the first ninety percent of each narrative...the tales of daring robberies and scores...yet even the powerful spiritual conversions strike a certain chord in my heart. These conversions, of men just like me, appear genuine, the result of a real God moving in their lives. I don’t doubt their authenticity, but each shares a common prerequisite: total submission and surrender to God. It’s a notion totally at odds with my self-reliant nature. I do not surrender to anyone.

One night, deep in reflection after finishing one particularly compelling volume, I lie in my bunk and ponder my life, turning it this way and that, asking myself hard questions. My thoughts slide back to my childhood when I regularly attended church and wanted to do good. I vividly recall being ten years old, responding to an altar call at our old-style Southern Baptist church...torn and trembling, pulled forward by powerful forces...and my bitter disappointment afterwards because, unlike the others, I’d felt no change inside, no speaking in tongues, no being slain in the spirit, no celestial visions. Why was I different? Didn’t God have any grace for me? I reflect upon all the wrong I’ve done and speculate on who or what I’d now be had I taken life’s better path. A doctor? Lawyer? Architect? I wonder where I’ll be in ten or twenty years. Sitting in a cell just like this? Will I be dead? Or occupying a death row cell? I ask myself if it’s too late to change, or whether I’m already lost. Looking around my dreary cell, one of a countless succession of similar cells, a sudden conclusion leaps into my mind. I set out to be nothing. And I’ve arrived. I’m nothing. Nothing. I feel an internal wrestling match being waged in my spirit as forces seemingly struggle for possession of my soul. I sense a monumental decision lying before me, one requiring a great recasting of priorities, a leap of faith across a dark divide, and I bitterly argue with myself, vacillating, resisting, back and forth, seemingly on the verge of salvation. I can feel it, taste it, hanging there before me just beyond reach, full of bright hope and promise, ripe for the plucking if I’ll just trust and believe. I know I should get down on my knees to pray...I must submit in order to receive God’s grace...but I have my own personal Rubicon to cross, the dividing line between damnation and redemption. And I come close, so very close to bowing down and humbling myself. But despite the small voice tugging at my spirit...is this God’s gentle whisper?...the idea of surrender, to anyone or anything, is so abhorrent, so freighted with implications of weakness that I cannot bring myself to do it. Pride can be a terrible thing. In the end I let the moment pass. I toss the book back into the corner and slip back into my self-reliant skin, depending solely upon myself to come up with a solution to this latest jam I’ve gotten myself into.