Last Dance, Last Chance

foot cell that had a cot, a desk, a sink-and-toilet combination with a mirror made of shiny steel, all of it bolted to either the floor or the walls to prevent suicide attempts.
    Anthony used his superior education to keep from “screwing up” and losing out on his two months of “good time.”
    “I was able to read, write, work out, and practice my faith,” he wrote. “I made it my goal to adjust and befriend everyone.”
    From his own description of his activities in jail, he was the model prisoner. He studied in the law library an hour a day, and he finished twenty-two books during the time behind bars—a book a week. However, Anthony wasn’t quite the paragon of perfection that he said he was. He needed items that weren’t provided in prison—items that were, in fact, frowned upon.
    Debbie had realized for a long time that her husband was “borrowing” the painkillers and tranquilizers her doctors had prescribed for her neck pain. And Anthony had held back most of the painkillers he prescribed for his surgery patients. Now, all his usual sources of drugs had dried up—and the jail mess hall didn’t serve tequila.
    He was pleasantly surprised to learn that Arnie Letovich could hook into an illicit chain that could bring heroin inside the walls. Heroin took the sharp edges off his worries and made doing time a lot easier. Heroin more than replaced the painkillers and tranquilizers he took before his imprisonment.
    Ironically, he was also working on keeping in top physical shape. He jogged three miles around and around the yard each morning and spent his afternoons exercising. “I left that facility, at forty years old,” he recalled, “in the best shape of my life.”
    For the record, he added pages to his journal about the “unbelievably dirty business” of drugs in prison, and mentioned that he was in the “wrong place at the wrong time” and was forced to observe some drug transactions in the yard. He wrote that he had tried to look away from all of this because it was none of his business. He was “afraid” of the tough guys who dealt drugs.
    Anthony never lost touch with Debbie and his children, with his mother—or with his girlfriend. Like any prisoner, he could phone out as long as his collect calls were accepted. And they always were. His family visited him as often as they were allowed to, twice a week.
    Ironically, this was the first time in a long time that Debbie knew where he was and whom he was with. But her earlier disillusionment with her marriage had begun to vanish, anyway. During his court hearings, and now locked up, Anthony was as loving and sweet as he had been almost twenty-five years earlier when they first started dating. She began to hope that they could start over. Anthony couldn’t be a doctor any longer, but they would find something else. He had such a creative and inventive mind, she knew he would work his way to the top again. All he needed was some encouragement and the love of his family.
    Tentatively, his children, Ralph and Lauren, started to write to him. He had never been the kind of father who had much time for his children beyond the occasional trip to the zoo, a boat ride in Florida, or a drive to buy ice cream. Now, they wrote to him almost every day, and he answered their letters. They began to look forward to the time when he would come home to them.
    Anthony wrote that he knew that the national media were fighting to interview him, but he had wisely turned them away. Comparing himself to Amy Fisher, the “Long Island Lolita,” in terms of public interest, he was afraid that the tabloids would “devour” him, too. “Sure she was guilty,” he wrote of Amy. “But she was also a victim.”
    And he certainly considered himself a victim. The more law books he read in the prison library, the more convinced he became that the attorneys who had represented him had led him down the garden path. Even in his embryonic study of the law, he had found any number of legal loopholes they might have used in defending him.
    All through Anthony Pignataro’s journal, when he became too overwhelmed by his terrible luck and the unfairness of the justice system and the New York State Board of Health, he added a little wry comment that seemed to make sense to him, although its meaning was vague. He blamed his bad luck on timing:
    “Well, this is the Nineties!!!”
     
    Whatever illegal activities Anthony Pignataro might have engaged in in prison, he was not