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

have one long strand. The most commonly used weights are batteries, a bar of soap, or a travel-size bottle of lotion. If you use batteries, you can even fish in the toilet. It requires two people to do this. Each of you flushes about a hundred yards of string down the toilet while holding on to one end of it. If both of you keep flushing, the strings will become entangled somewhere in the pipes. One man wraps whatever he is passing to you in plastic—a cigarette, for example. He then ties it to the end of the string, and the other guy pulls the whole thing back up through his own toilet. Some men frown on this practice and refer to those who do it as “shitty fingers.”
    I have no idea what it is about fishing that people in the free world find so amusing, but some of them ask me to describe it to them every time they come to see me. They know the story as well as I do by now, but still want to hear it over and over. To me it’s just another aspect of daily life in the Arkansas Department of Correction.
    Most people in the outside world look at you in a different way if they find out you’ve spent time in prison. They can hold it against you for the rest of your life. You’re never trusted and always made to feel like an outcast. For most of the people in here with me it’s a different story. It’s nothing out of the ordinary for people in here to have friends and family within the prison system. It’s accepted as an everyday part of life, as if everyone goes to prison at least once. Several men on Death Row have sons, brothers, uncles, and cousins who are doing time within the ADC. None of their friends or family members would ask for a description of a prison cell because most of them have already seen one.
    One of the first things people always ask is what a cell looks like—my cell in particular—and they want to know whether it looks like what they’ve seen on television or in the movies. To begin with, you have two types of walls. Some of them are made of cinder block; others are simply smooth, poured concrete. The one I live in at Varner Unit is smooth concrete, which is what I prefer. Perhaps that’s because I had to look at the cinder blocks for a decade and simply appreciate the change.
    The color is a very pale blue. Everything here is blue of one shade or another. The walls are so light they’re almost white, while the door is more of a powder blue. The floor is plain, unfinished concrete, and it’s very harsh on the feet. In seventeen years I have not taken a step that wasn’t on concrete. I miss grass and dirt. Sometimes I believe one of the most beautiful things on Earth must be grass. The green of summer or the brown of winter—both are equally bewitching. I’d love to be able to touch it.
    My bed is a concrete slab that stands about eighteen inches off the floor. I have a thin mat to place on top of it that greatly resembles the ones given to kindergartners to nap on. We’re given the cheapest, most horrid blankets ever designed by mankind. When you wake up in the morning you have to pick bits of fuzz out of your nose, eyebrows, and hair. Not to mention the fact that they just aren’t very warm. My pillow is composed of extra clothes—socks, T-shirts, sweatpants. We have to buy these clothes ourselves. Being that there are no chairs, or anything else to sit on, you spend a great deal of time on or in the bed.
    Next to the bed is a three-foot-tall concrete block that serves as a table. You can never see the top of mine because it’s beneath a jumbled mound of books, magazines, journals, letters, pens and pencils. No matter how often I try to organize or straighten it up it will be mayhem an hour later. I can never find anything I’m looking for. Sometimes when I pass other cells I see spotless, well-organized tables, but I can never figure out their secret.
    There is one wall not made of concrete, and it serves as your “bathroom area.” This wall and everything on it is made of steel. It’s nine feet tall and houses the toilet, sink, mirror, light, and shower. The toilet and sink are made of one big chunk of steel. The sink is where the tank would be on most toilets, so you have to straddle the toilet to shave or brush your teeth. The mirror is nothing more than a square of the steel wall that is slightly more reflective than the rest. It’s not very clear, and it’s impossible to make out small details in it.
    Over the sink and toilet resides the hated fluorescent light.