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

Definitely not the best of equipment, but it gave me my start.
    Day and night I did nothing but practice tricks and read
Thrasher
. I would stare at the ads for the new decks like a sex fiend in the porn section. I also became acquainted with a different world of music I’d never before heard of, and discovered The Cure, Dinosaur Jr., Primus, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and many other classics.
    Nanny moved into a trailer park located between Marion and West Memphis with the dubious title of “Lakeshore Estates,” and when I went to see her, a couple of the neighbors would give me five dollars to mow their lawns. I saved the money to order clothes from skateboard companies, and replaced the cheap parts on my board with better-quality stuff, one piece at a time. Skateboarding became my life, and I did just enough work to get by in school that year. Soon enough, summer vacation was on me once again.
    That summer was as hot, miserable, and lonely as the others, but it seemed to pass a little more quickly just because I now had a little life in me. I’d skate up the old deserted highway between the cotton fields, all the way to the courthouse and public library. Once there I made use of every curb in the parking lot until I was drenched in sweat and on the verge of heatstroke. If not for the old librarian allowing me to guzzle from her water fountain like a horse at a trough, I would have likely suffered terminal dehydration. I never walked anywhere—the skateboard became an extension of my body. I knew the name of every pro skater, I knew who they were sponsored by, and I knew what tricks each of them had invented. I could have quoted any of these statistics to you without even having to think about it.
    Skating had an unexpected side effect, too. It started when I noticed that people who saw me skating would stop and watch. I’d never thought about it before, but this made me realize I was actually good at something. It occurred to me for the first time that this was something not everyone else could do, and they were impressed with my ability. It gave me self-confidence and raised my self-esteem. I walked with my head higher, and any feelings of inferiority withered away. It was as if I had become a completely new person. A new era had begun for me.
    When I entered eighth grade the next year, school was vastly different. I was no longer invisible. It seemed that a few others had learned the pleasures of skating, and we drew together to form our own little group. We had our own style of dressing, our own obscure references, and our own rules of conduct. The way we looked made it easy for us to identify other skaters in the crowd of students, and made it easier for them to identify us. Things have changed in the years since, but back then skaters drew quite a bit of attention, and often enough it was not of the positive sort.
    Perhaps I stood out a little more than the others. One side of my head was shaved to the scalp while the hair on the other side was long. I wore combat boots while everyone else had the latest Nikes. I had earrings in both ears and in one nipple. No one looks twice at that sort of thing these days, when even housewives have tattoos and every kid on the street has some part of their face pierced. A nose ring is now about as shocking as a glass of milk. Things are always different in the South, though.
    My behavior wasn’t exactly low-key, either. I was thrown out of class at least once a week for disturbing the peace in general. Part of the problem was that I was just so happy to be away from the hell of home. I mocked teachers, screamed out bizarre and nonsensical answers when they asked questions, and made a nuisance of myself in a variety of ways designed to drive authority figures mad with rage. One teacher even threatened to “slap that bird nest off of your head,” in reference to my haircut. I was delighted.
    When I met Jason Baldwin, he was quite the opposite. I don’t recall hearing him ever speak during his first year of junior high. I was the immature pervert who liked to amuse himself by looking up vulgar words in the dictionary during study hall. I certainly wasn’t going to waste my time on such pointless exercises as homework. One day after exhausting my sexual vocabulary for the millionth time I slammed the dictionary shut and looked up with the intention of finding someone to bother.
    Looking back at me was a skinny kid with a black eye and a long, blond mullet. He was