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Welcome to Hell
Guilt? Suit Up and Take a Number
By D.P. O’Keefe
In prison, late at night after I close my eyes, there is a complete John Phillips Sousa parade of thoughts in my head, whose participants are fully marching band-clad thoughts of despair, worry and guilt. Each one passes before me, salutes and moves on—leaving me, the Grand Marshal, with feelings of ill-being so intense it takes me hours to fall asleep.
So, to the question people have of criminals, "How do you sleep at night?" the answer is "Not very well."
Lying awake, staring at the shadows in the semi-darkness, my mind plays through practically everything I’ve ever done wrong in my life: from the psychological thrashings I used to give my ex-wife to the crime itself—a stupid, drunken manic robbery that took only seconds. It’s all guilt.
I cringe over the thought of beating up an innocent classmate as he got off the school bus. My stomach ties itself in knots over lying about Ronnie Schmidt writing on the bathroom wall, when it was actually me—all this from the third grade.
The parade never stops. It goes on night after night in the amber light of the security lamps outside.
I explained it to my brother and confidant who immediately understood what I was talking about. Only he described his scenario as working in a delicatessen. Each negative emotion takes a number, and you have to wait on every one—and the line never ends. It’s a Superbowl Sunday delicatessen line.
Like I said, it’s all guilt with me. And prison, which is all time, you get the maximum out of your guilt. It gets to play over and over like a toddler’s favorite music cassette until you think you’ll lose your mind from the Knick-knack-paddy-wack-give-yourself-a-flogging repetition of it all.
My least favorite, but most common, emotional violation is being unkind toward others—on rare occasions being downright mean. But the baton holder in this parade is the robbery itself. It directs the other negative emotions through the streets of my mind and past the bleachers. From the baton hangs an ornate cloth banner that reads Robbery in the First Degree. And when it passes, I relive the whole 30-second ordeal in high-resolution graphics.
Sometime during the parade I do manage to drift off and, thanks to modern psychiatric medication, my dreams are mercifully innocuous and occasionally pleasant.
It’s no surprise to me that these "parades" are fallout from mental illness. That’s not to say that just because I have a conscience I am mentally ill. They’re too severe, and I’m sure I would "move on" by now if all were normal. And the intensity and emotional vexations I go trough would be more tolerable were I "normal."
I couldn’t have pled "not guilty" to this crime if it were a shoe-in that I’d get off. I just couldn’t. Not after robbing a single person, scaring them half to death and then driving around for eight hours avoiding capture in a drunken manic rage. I was dangerous to myself and others.
And that adds to the parade population: the "what-ifs." What if I had hurt someone? What if I had hurt myself? Wrecked the car, killed a minivan full of boy scouts or driven into a ravine?
The parade participants line up every night on cue and I get to watch them night after night. And perhaps that’s what prison is for: a pass and review of wrongdoings and associated guilt.
And ample time to watch it all go by.
D.P. O’Keefe is a humorist incarcerated in a Connecticut maximum security correctional facility.
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