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

more than match him. A fine example of this sad species would be J.C.
    I first noticed J.C. after I’d been here a few months and was moved up to a cell on the third floor. I could not look at him without being reminded of a scarecrow, and he greatly resembled Iggy Pop. He had long, graying hair and was rail thin, every muscle in his torso greatly defined. He constantly worked out, which is what he was doing the first time I really paid any attention to him. I looked over to see him doing squats and wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. I did a double-take to see what the little black spots scattered over his body were. Closer scrutiny revealed them to be crickets. Big, black crickets. They were stuck to his shoulders, chest, and stomach with tiny pieces of Scotch tape. There was even one on his neck. He was fond of calling them his “babies” and knew how to make them chirp simply by touching them in a particular way. He had them, or their descendants, for quite a while before the guards went into his cell and flushed them all down the toilet. J.C. seemed to be genuinely torn up over their loss, as if he were truly attached to them.
    J.C. was an artist of tremendous skill, though his subject matter came from the darkest reaches of a disturbed psyche. One day he was casually standing in the doorway wearing his uniform of nothing but boxer shorts. There was a hand-rolled cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and his eyes were squinted against the rising smoke. He seemed to be looking at something over my head as he tossed me a piece of thick art paper. It was rolled up and inserted into a cardboard tube such as you find in a roll of toilet paper. “Check it out and tell me what you’ll give me for it,” he mumbled before retreating into his cell. I unrolled the paper to see a flawlessly drawn naked woman’s body in a reclining position. The horrible part was that J.C. had drawn his own head on the woman’s body. I stared at it in shock, unable to move. It came as such a shock to my mind that I had no idea what to do. Scream? Laugh? What? In the end I did the only thing I could do—rolled it back up, tossed it to him, and said, “Sorry, J.C., but I’ve already got one just like it.” He accepted this explanation as completely plausible and passed the drawing on to his next potential customer.
    Drawing was not his only medium of creativity. He once made matching handheld crossbows out of tongue depressors, Elmer’s Glue-All, and heavy-duty rubber bands. These were no mere toys, but were strong enough to pierce flesh. Some people got a little jumpy when they’d see him holding one, even though he never actually shot anyone. He wasn’t above whizzing one by your ear, but the only thing he’d actually shoot with them were rats. He thinned out the prison rodent population for a while. One day the hobo got nervous when J.C. started waving the crossbows in his direction, so he snitched to the guards. That put an end to J.C.’s gunslinging days.
    J.C.’s most irritating habit was walking stark naked to and from the shower. He’d stroll up and down the tier at a leisurely pace, like nothing was out of the ordinary. This wouldn’t have been so bad if you could have ignored him, but he’d walk right up to you and try to carry on a conversation. This would tend to make people pretty uneasy. Everyone dealt with it in different ways. As soon as he opened his mouth some men would bellow in outrage, “I done told you! Don’t try to talk to me when you ain’t got no drawers on!” Others would glance around nervously, eyes shifting left and right to see if anyone was looking, and then try to answer him as quickly as possible so he’d move on. All in all, he could be a very amusing character, and no one was happy when the state finally executed him.
    Another potentially dangerous schizophrenic was recently executed after spending twenty-two years on Death Row. He was here so long because he had been judged too insane to execute. The state finally medicated him so that he would be sane enough to appreciate the fact that he was about to die. There was no question about his insanity for those who met him. I’d known it since the day he spit in my face and accused me of giving him ingrown toenails. He was still screaming at me as the guards took him to the hole.
    That’s something you never get used to. One day a man is there, the next he’s gone. It’s hard to make yourself believe that someone