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

shoes. The little girl couldn’t have been older than five, and she wore a set of superhero-themed underwear and T-shirt every day. All three had crud-smeared faces, runny noses, and tangled hair.
    The kids had to be kept in the kitchen and out of sight of any customers at all times. They weren’t even allowed to use the restroom. Instead, they used a five-gallon bucket with a toilet seat balanced precariously atop it. This meant there was a five-gallon bucket of shit and piss sitting right in the middle of the kitchen at any given time.
    The kitchen itself looked much like a room from the house in
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
. The walls were greasy and stained black from smoke, the countertops looked like tiny garbage barges, and the entire place carried the aroma of rotting fish. As a matter of fact, my first task was to clean about ten pounds of spoiled fish out of the sink, which I did while swallowing my own vomit. More than once I walked in to find the mother giving one of the kids a bath in one side of the sink as fish fillets or crab legs soaked in the other half. On my first night, I moved a large bag of cornmeal only to discover a large rat nursing a litter of hairless pink babies.
    I had been working there about three weeks when several of the other workers showed up at my door. They said they had to round everyone up and get to work quickly because someone had called the health department and they were coming to inspect the place. We cleaned, scrubbed, and hauled garbage from two-thirty in the afternoon until after eleven that night and still seemed no closer to making the place presentable. At that point I knew I couldn’t take this for another second. I stood before the hunchback with my clothes looking as if they had been plucked from a dumpster and every inch of my body covered in sludge, filth, and crud that defied any attempt at description. I told him that I was going home and would not be returning. I couldn’t escape that place in my nightmares, though. I dreamed about it much longer than I worked there.
    *  *  *
    B rian and I began to drift apart once we started school again. One reason was that I had once again failed and would be spending another year as a freshman. This meant I’d be celebrating my seventeenth birthday in the ninth grade. Coincidentally, one of my childhood heroes had managed to do the same. His name was Andy, and he was the only guy in eighth grade with a five-o’clock shadow. He paid no mind to trends or changing fashions; he always wore jeans with the knees ripped out and a battered green army jacket. He had shoulder-length black hair and wore a long, dangling earring that looked like a crucifix. Andy was the most laid-back guy in the school, and he’d either sleep through every class or draw. Nobody messed with him, and he didn’t mess with anyone. During the summer Brian and I had gotten rides from his little sister, Dawn, who was our age. She loved both of us, and was great just because she was so normal. She didn’t care about high school politics and didn’t fit into any particular group. She also consumed more vodka than a teenage girl should be able to.
    Brian advanced to tenth grade and grew closer to the freak crowd. I completely quit skating and became what people now call “goth,” though I had never heard the word, and there were no goths in our school. I did what I did because it was aesthetically pleasing to me. In addition to Slayer, Testament, and Metallica, my musical taste expanded to include things like Danzig, The Misfits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Depeche Mode. All the old skateboarding posters disappeared from my room and were replaced with old prints I found in odd books. Most of them looked a great deal like images from Goya’s etchings and sketches. I caught a couple of filthy, vindictive pigeons and allowed them to fly around the room as they pleased.
    I spent much less time with Brian and found myself falling back into the old patterns Jason and I had established. Brian was becoming much more melancholy. One day in the fall we found ourselves standing on Ashley’s street. He was looking at her house, lost in thought, when he asked, “Do you miss it?” I knew exactly what he was talking about, but still asked what he meant. “The way things were during the summer.”
    I said, “No,” and realized it was true. Of all the people, times, places, and things in my life that make me nostalgic, that was not one of them. By