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Welcome to Hell
Wanting Home
By D.P. O'Keefe
I used to commute from Hartford to Boston daily before I came to prison. It took two hours each way-and you would think I was being skinned alive the way I bitched. When I think back, I had a comfortable seat, NPR and coffee-for four hours a day.
After being here for 21 months, I'd box Mike Tyson for a comfortable chair-and would probably get physical over a decent cup of coffee. And after the commute-and I missed the beauty of this-when it was done, I was home. Where I would find my fiancée making dinner and "my" stray cats in the driveway. Where I could sit on the soft sofa and smoke a Marlboro Light and give myself cancer without the state interfering. Where I could take a bath. Where I could cook, write on a computer, and go to bed and have my fiancée next to me-warm and safe.
But I screwed all that up. I'm about one third of the way through my "bid," and I've forgotten simple things already-like what money smells like or the way walking on grass feels; or the touch of my fiancée's hand, the smell of her perfume, the taste of her lips.
Now I know what men on a nuclear submarine feel like during long missions. "Not going home" at the end of the day beats the hell out of you. It's like being perpetually on the set of a TV show-and at the end of the day, the lights are turned off and you just stand there in a black void.
Waking up here is a daily reminder of what I did to land here-and the reality of it hits me like a hot water burn. The mantra you begin is: "You're not going home today ..." and the burn and the chant stay with you all day.
I work on a computer at my job in the library, where I repeatedly have to enter the current date, which is comically short of my release date. I laugh maniacally when I realize just how far I have to go before I can go home. The "year" numeral on the computer isn't even close. Still, there are men here who will never go home-and my heart breaks for them. I'm "lucky."
I'm coming to realize what I've taken for granted for so long-because the state takes things away from you that you forgot or didn't know you had. Like pocket change. Who would think you'd miss a quarter? Or drive-through fast food? It's all about taking things for granted.
One thing I've come to realize in here is that I'm not a "people person." And while that might be a "likes and dislikes" check-off on a dating questionnaire, it's a crucial personality shortfall in prison. If you're not a "people person" in prison, you're like a cat in a bathtub full of water-because you've got people in your face every waking hour, and they're some pretty ugly faces at that.
I keep myself entertained by thinking of things I'm going to do on my first day out. The first has to be hitting a 12-step meeting-because I'm not joking myself: if I don't, it's only a matter of time before I'm back in here again. The second thing I plan on is "intimacy." After that, a salami sandwich and a nap. (Hey, I'm 40-not 19.)
The good news is I will exit prison someday. The date's not certain, because neither is parole-but I do know this: I will never take for granted my freedom, my fiancée, pizza by phone, cigarettes (no matter how badly they're taxed), processed meat-like products stamped into patties and fried in grease, soda, coffee, laptops, rain, mowing the lawn, making my fiancée laugh before we go to sleep ...
I could go on for pages.
D.P. O'Keefe is a humorist incarcerated in a Connecticut maximum security correctional facility.
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