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

necessarily mean they no longer use. For the right price, guards are more than willing to help them get a shot of whatever they need. Some are alcoholics who brew their own. That’s
very
common. It’s made from the most God-awful ingredients you can imagine, and just the smell of it can turn your stomach The prison slang for such unpalatable crud is “bootleg.” It’s no Merlot, and you won’t see this stuff being bottled by Turning Leaf anytime soon.
    I watch as men hand-roll cigarettes in pages they ripped from the Bible. They call it “smoking the Holy Ghost.” The ones with no tobacco will smoke anything they find—old tea bags, toilet cleanser, whatever. I saw one man fall to the floor jerking and foaming at the mouth after smoking something that looked like a handful of baby-blue rock salt. His eyes rolled back in his head while his feet tried to propel him across the floor in a concrete backstroke. These are hard days for fiends, and the addicts have long since sold their souls.
    You don’t make many memories in prison—at least none you’d want to keep, or look back on fondly. It’s more like you have horrific scenes and situations burned into your psyche like a branding iron. The ability to create good memories, though . . . is gone. The ones you came in with are the only ones you’ll ever have. I would revisit mine constantly, trying desperately to wring every ounce of nourishment out of them that I possibly could. I was like a vampire, sucking them dry and then sifting through the dust in hopes of finding a drop I’d overlooked the previous hundred times. Sometimes I’d revisit a profound life experience; other times I’d chew over a minuscule detail like a hyena trying to find the marrow in the center of an old bone. For two weeks I remembered the handle on my grandmother’s front door. I remembered what it was like to look at it on a winter morning, knowing it was going to be as cold as ice in my hand. I remembered the way it felt to raise my arm and reach for it, to curl my white fingers around the gray metal. And then the best part—the gush of warm air that poured out as I pushed the door open. It wasn’t just warmth pouring over me, it was home. Bathing me, enveloping me, welcoming me. And then the door was closed again, the process beginning anew for the tenth time that day, or perhaps the hundredth. I lost count. The number was insignificant—only the experience mattered. You’d be amazed at all the little things you begin to remember when there are no new experiences to distract you.
    Gradually, as the years passed, I could slip more and more deeply into this state of remembrance. Eventually the prison disappears altogether, and only the world in the mind’s eye holds any importance. I called this state by many names, one of which was the Land of Nod. Nod was the city Cain was banished to in the book of Genesis, and that’s how I felt—exiled, cast out. The world didn’t want me, so I would retreat deep into the Land of Nod.
    Other times I thought of it as December. In my memories it was always December. December became another word for home to me. Then there were other times when I would swear the past almost had a personality. At those times I thought of it as Nostalgia. Nostalgia is the only friend that stays with you forever.
    The most potent and powerful means I had of entering the Land of Nod was through writing. Every day I disappeared into the pages of my journal, scribbling from margin to margin, wallowing in the memories of a thousand December afternoons as my hand moved the pen. I filled a dozen leather-bound journals, many with the same memory examined from every angle. I never wanted to go back and read what I’d written because it didn’t really matter to me. I hoped, too, that perhaps someday the pages would be of importance to someone, somewhere—but not to me. The memories were for me, but the journals were for someone else. The journals were a castle I was building for some future magician to find and explore. There were rooms full of beauty, pain, magick, love, horror, despair, and wonder. Every page was a hidden corner. When I was inside those journals, deep in the Land of Nod, the prison ceased to matter. I was no longer slowly dying in a godforsaken cage. In the land of Nod I was more alive than ever before.
    *  *  *
    O n August 22, 2003, I was transferred from Tucker Max to the Varner Super Maximum Security Unit in Grady, the same prison