Sam Paul - Why I Committed Suicide

When somebody calls you some name or tries to gain verbal power over you it’s foreshadowing their physical domination and attempt at physical power. There are only two choices in here: flight or fight. The first choice is that you can smile and take the verbal assault, maybe even laugh it off, but that means somebody in your cage knows they can get away with the same thing and might try and punk you out. That means they feel like maybe they can make you their bitch. And if you are somebody’s bitch they can take your food, take your blanket or even force sex if it gets too crazy. I’ve seen enough male rapes and sex to warp me for life. They ALL started out with something innocent like borrowing a bag of chips or some Cro-magnum motherfucker making kissy faces through the bars like the gorilla across from me.

Your second choice is to stand up to the guy, no matter his size or the crazy look in his eyes. You might have to fight and you might get your ass beat or even killed, but people will learn that you are not going out like a bitch. You’ve got to convince them that they can fight you and that maybe they’ll probably win but you’re going to hurt them in the process and then you’re gonna be back and you’re not going to back off until somebody’s dead. I’m just hoping I don’t get stuck going to court the same day as Grape-Ape because he is fucking HUGE and I’ve said enough serious shit back to him where he feels like he’s got to stand up for his reputation now. We’ll see. I’ve only had a few minor skirmishes in the jailhouse and I’ve made out alright, nothing too serious.

It helps that I’m in better shape now than I’ve ever been in my life. I’m way too skinny but I do a thousand push-ups a day, lift the water bag weights we’ve fashioned out of plastic bags and I practice throwing combo punches using different styles. There’s this black Muslim in here that works out with me and he’s always pushing me beyond my limits when we work out. He’s short but stocky and strong with his own set of crazy eyes. We’re cool though. Most of the black Muslims are fine with the white devils since we’re all being persecuted in the same boat together. While you’re locked up, unless you have “White Pride” tattoos all over your body, you’re not a devil, just a potential devil. We greet each other with an “Asha-llama-lake-a” (forgive my phonetics) and get along just fine.

He saw Grape-Ape talking trash to me one day and liked the way I was able to spit smack right back at him without flinching. He even got into it with the guy for a minute, reminding him about us all being persecuted together or something to no avail. My Muslim buddy just kind of shrugged his shoulders after a while, it wasn’t his fight, but later on he asked me if I wanted any of his kin-folk to “talk” to the guy. As much as I would like to have the black Muslims take the guy out for me, there’s no way in hell I want to be in their debt in here. I very politely refused his hint of an offer. My best guess is that Jumbo is getting out soon anyway and if by fluke we do end up in a cage match together I won’t be here towrite. Or I’ll have a murder case. Either way I’m dead, so if it comes down to it, I fight.

3AM—How many months now? Grape-Ape has been gone for a while, released back into the fury of the world some time ago. I just realized that I am no longer afraid of the dark. I can no longer remember the time of my life when I was afraid of what might be lurking in the darkness. I’ve seen darkness in the hearts of men, men walking boldly in the daylight that could cool the very sun. At night the rats scurry above my head and the spiders still drop onto peoples’ faces as they sleep. They crawl down their shirts and bite them on the stomach or legs giving people those vicious welts. Nighttime has become something to embrace. A time when people sleep and I can creep around and look. This is when I am powerful. I know in my heart I could cut up the bottom of a person’s foot with a razor. I could get them in the neck if I needed to or even take an eye out lickety split-split-split. If I cut them on the feet it will humiliate them. When your feet hurt, you hurt as a person. You lose your confidence because your foundation is ruptured. I could kick Shaq’s ass if I cut up his heels and toes enough. It’s the equivalent of taking a baseball bat to the knees over and over and over. A Mexican showed me how they make their shivs down south. Take two safety razors (instead of one) and melt the blades side by side into the end of a toothbrush. That way your weapon will slice the flesh into pieces side by side. “Ain’t a doctor in the world that can stitch that kinda cut up,” he says. “That, or a sock full of dominoes, will ring their bell. Heh heh.”

No, the dark is my friend now. It is in the dark that I can feel silence and a sliver of peace amidst the chaos. I can sit here all alone and write in the dark, watching the people’s stomachs going up and down up and down up and down up and down.

I’ve made friends with a very intellectual black man in here named Charles. Charles is older than me and very smart. He’s a jazz piano musician and has played with all sorts of people that are pretty high up in the North Texas music scene. He buys packs of ‘real world’ menthols and I bum them off of him on occasion. We read about the same amount of books and know a lot of the same shit. He’s a crack addict and just like me, his own demons sent him into this downward spiral that landed him here. The crack must be pretty fearsome stuff to break a man of his caliber.

For some reason, I was just thinking about my neighbor Frank. Or I should say my parents’ neighbor. Frank was my first gainful employer. I used to mow his lawn for five dollars a pop. I negotiated my own deal and when I was 12 it seemed like a good agreement. Frank was a lawyer and the immensity of his yard, the miniscule wage he paid me to mow it and the way he would walk around and critique how I neglected to cut a blade or two here and there should have clued me in the nature of lawyers right then and there. But at 12, five dollars was a shit-load of money. Like the generation that got caught in the loophole of the seventies and will never have to apply for the draft, I was left out of that mythical allowance business I’ve heard tales of taking place in distant lands and counties. Frank was/is Jewish so I’m sure he thought that he was giving me valuable work experience or else giving me a hard lesson in negotiating that stereotypical Jewish people will never be able to get out of their genes.

On the outside I was the typical bumbling gangly white kid in suburbia with seemingly no worries and issues of import, but on the inside I was an intelligent prideful creature going through the stubborn phase that most men never quite break out of—the “never ask for directions phase” and the “I should be able to kick someone’s ass” phase that’s mostly brought on by the onset of testosterone and pubes. My lawn mowing job eventually leveraged me into a semi-lucrative baby sitting job with his wife, Sue, a beautiful woman who seemed to be his one true weakness. Sue was a stubborn Catholic woman, whom he adored, and while I knew them she blessed their family with 2 boys (eventually more) named Adam and Elliot.

Frank and Sue came home from a jaunt out of the insanity of parenthood one evening and he tried to get me to learn a minor history lesson by quizzing me as he counted out the large sum of money required for my babysitting services. When you are desperate to get out of the house and I’m the only babysitter around, you must pay the fee. He asked me who Horatio Alger was or more specifically what a Horatio Alger story was. I said I didn’t know and once he knew that, he said that if I could tell him what a Horatio Alger story was he would take me out to any restaurant in Dallas that I wanted. On the surface this seemed like a pretty sweet deal and the first thing I did when I went home that evening was look up this person from America’s past. It was an interesting story too. An old tale of rags-to-riches/streets-paved-with-gold sort of story for which America is famous.