Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

right now. There’s one who often has to repeat himself several times because no one can understand what he’s saying. Another strings words together that make no sense. He calls people names such as “Fish More” and “Fuck Bart.” He paces his cell at four o’clock in the morning yelling, “Twiddle your fingers! Twiddle your fingers! Let’s roll!” and then follows it with a string of obscenities.
    A sane man can be reasoned with and talked to; you can guess his motives and predict his actions. A madman, on the other hand, may try to kill you, because he’s convinced it’s God’s will. Like Nu-Nu.
    The threat of violence hangs over Nu-Nu like a black cloud. He’s not someone you would want sleeping under your roof or hanging around behind your back. If ever there was a clear-cut case of schizophrenia, this man is it. Nu-Nu shot and killed a man in a coin-operated laundry. When the cops came to investigate they found a security tape with footage of Nu-Nu break-dancing around the body. I’ve often been awakened at two o’clock in the morning by Nu-Nu screaming at the top of his lungs. He claims that the nurses in the inmate hospital are drinking his blood and defecating in his food. The entire barracks has listened to him argue with a mirror for hours at a time, threatening to kill his own reflection. He’ll then stop and begin preaching a sermon in a very calm voice, instructing his congregation to “open up to the Book of Psalms and hold it down by your left nut.”
    Others are equally insane but more harmless. I’ve no doubt that they murdered someone at one time, but it’s almost as if their drive to kill died along with their victims. Now they’re just burned-out lunatics.
    We have a character here who is stuck with the unfortunate name of “Patches.” Patches despises this name and would gleefully murder anyone who uses it. Anytime you call him by that name he stares at you with the glint of pure, unadulterated hatred in his eye. He was given this name because he sports a hairdo exactly like George Jefferson in the old sitcom
The Jeffersons
—an Afro around the sides and nothing on top. Someone once pointed out that he had patches of hair missing, and it stuck. Patches was born.
    Patches isn’t the sort of guy you’d want to strike up a friendship with. He goes out of his way to cause more frustration for anyone he can. Patches is the guy who will change the channel just because he knows you’re watching television. He’ll pretend to be on the phone just so you can’t use it. To put it bluntly, Patches is an asshole. No one stays in a cell next to him for very long, because they quickly grow to despise him, then do whatever it takes to get moved away from him. Patches loves nothing more than to see misfortune visited upon others, and that is the only time you will ever hear him laughing.
    Patches has a rather interesting collection, even by prison standards, and he’s rather touchy about it. If you approach him when no one else can hear the conversation he’ll show it to you. If you say something about it where others can hear, he’ll deny that it exists and then swear at you for the rest of the day. The odd thing is that nearly everyone has seen his collection at one time or another and knows that he is lying when he pretends ignorance. Those who wish to torment him will yell out across the barracks and ask him about it. This action is met with either explosive rage or deathly quiet. The only other thing that infuriates him even half as much is when someone starts singing that song from the seventies, “Patches, I’m depending on you, son.”
    So what exactly is it that Patches collects? She-male porn. Patches collects pornography that falls under such colorful titles as “chicks with dicks.” Not only does he hoard it like treasure, he turns it into pop-up books that are cleverly disguised as birthday cards. He guards them like a Fort Knox of perversity, as if he believes everyone is out to steal his hard work. You see, this hoard of pop-up she-male porn is interactive. He takes a razor blade and combs through porn magazines in search of penis pictures. He carefully cuts out the picture of the penis and then cuts slits in the pictures of his half-men, half-women so he can slide the penis in and out of the slit. It is indeed disturbing, but no one can deny that Patches is a man who knows just what he likes.
    As odd and unpleasant as Patches can be, there are those here who