It’s like you don’t have a choice. Life sentence, death penalty. Life sentence in prison—you’re going to die a slow death at an old age—or you’re going to die in the death chamber. It was no choice. You’re twenty-two years old. What do you do?

And if people notice, every confession, every time there’s a wrongful convicted guy, most people were in their mid- to early twenties. The cops are trained. They’re going after people that want to live. They know your weakness, and your enemy knows your weakness. That’s what he’s going to look for.

Danziger’s girlfriend, they brought her in. She was saying, “No, he was with me.” They interrogate and say, “You know what? We think that you were there. You and Ochoa and Dan-ziger were there—you held her down while she was being sodomized. So what’s going to happen: we’re going to send you to jail. They’re going to take your kids away.” A mother’s kids. What does she do? She caves in. That’s her weakness.

They send me to prison. The first night, they put me in the cell, and then they close the door. They close the door, and it was the loneliest feeling in the world. I was all alone.

So many things you see in prison. I don’t know. I started seeing body bags roll down the hallway. I saw a guy stabbed. A riot broke out in the kitchen where I working. And you just start smelling the pepper spray, and you put a towel on you and it just makes it worse. Tear gas is different. You can put a wet towel on your nose and it’s okay. But pepper spray, it just makes it worse.

I had to go through riots. I had to go through lockdown. They would lock the prison down because people were killing each other. And it was pretty bad when they locked down the prison. When we were locked down in the summer it was hot, humid. I remember I sometimes had to put the fan on the toilet so that the fresh air that was bouncing off the water would hit the fan. Or throw water on the floor. You would lay in it.

It smelled bad, it felt even worse. Tennessee County, Texas. Three days without a shower, three days in the same cell. Fortunately I always had plenty to read. That’s all you do, read and listen to the radio. They didn’t allow TVs in the rooms in Texas. They do in other prisons, but we didn’t have them.

The bars were navy blue, or baby blue. The color would supposedly make you more mellow, instead of the higher, brighter, sharper colors, that make you vicious or whatever. And we wore white all the time. That’s why you will never see me in a pure white shirt.

I’d been there almost ten years. I’m thirty years old, I’m looking back on my life. I’m a failure. I have no family, I have no kids, I have no education, no car, no house. I used to get the newspaper from back home. I used to see these people I went to high school with. They had kids, beautiful homes, beautiful wives, and all this stuff, and I had nothing, and I didn’t know what I did to deserve it.

Christmas Eve, I was really depressed. No cards came for me. People can tell when you’re going to kill yourself in prison—they know. They saw me really sad, and they said, “You’ll get a card.” Mail call came. I didn’t get anything.

I went up to my cell, I took a razor and I busted it open and I got the razor blade itself and I put it on my arm, and I was going to kill myself on Christmas Eve. I was in so much pain that I didn’t want to live anymore. It hurt too much to live. So I just wanted an end.

But somehow, before I did the deed, my morals, everything came flashing back—my family, my religious upbringing. I didn’t have the right to take anybody’s life, not even my own. It really took all I had not to do it. I dropped the razor. I flushed it down the toilet.

I went to sleep, woke up the next morning. I was still in pain. I mean emotional pain, not physical. I started going to church, not because I wanted God to save me or give me release or whatever—no. I needed peace.

I found peace. I would go to school, I would work out, weight-lift, do all this stuff. I would read everything: Bible, love novels, horror novels, everything under the sun. I pursued my college education, got two associate’s degrees.

When I was a little kid, I would go to my grandfather’s house, and if I had a hole in my pants or my shirt, he would take the hole and just rip it all to shreds, and I would have no clothes. And I thought that was funny. I would laugh, and my mom would get mad. He would do it to my little brother and my brother would cry; I was laughing. My grandfather was my best friend. I found out later that I was his favorite grandson.

When I was in prison, he would write me. He would send me money every month. Fifteen dollars to put on my books. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

One day, my parents said he was getting sick, he was about to die. The doctor gave him I don’t know how many months, or a year. I would tell him, “You can’t die, you can’t croak.” He would say, “I’m not going to kick the bucket, I have to wait for you to get out.”

At some point, I just stopped writing. I was like twenty-four. You take people for granted at that age sometimes. He would get mad. Why didn’t I write? And I don’t know what possessed me, one day I wrote him a letter. A long letter. I thanked him for everything he did, specific instances where he helped me. A heartfelt letter.

My mom said that he died at three in the morning, and my letter got to his house at like seven. And it totally devastated me, that my letter didn’t get to him on time. Because I wanted to say that. I mean, I guess something inside of me felt that he was going to die, and I didn’t get to say goodbye to him.

But he would always tell us not to cry—never cry for him when he died. He says, “Always cry for people when they’re alive, because that’s when they want to hear it the most. I’m dead, what the hell are you going to cry for me then?” He even told my family, “The first person you see crying over my grave, you push them in the coffin with me—push them in the hole with me.”

So I didn’t cry.

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