I used to extort people in prison for money.  Not the soft or the weak, I was more of a bully’s bully.   Prison can be like the N.B.A. – the guy who sits on the end of the bench is better at this than anyone you’ve ever known.   He’s earned his spot on the team.

I’d see a look in my victim’s eyes, the silent conversation most people turn their heads to avoid having with those less fortunate than they are.  They saw me as the proverbial thug.  A brute.  Simple minded.  Someone peaking at the bottom of life, much the way boxers and MMA fighters are viewed – violent because life after high school couldn’t be hash-tagged and the words needed to file articles of incorporation were too big to sound out. 

I was someone society needed bars to separate itself from.  I was one of those who’d never get it, who had chosen a pistol over a pen as the problem solving tool of choice.   Though it hurts to admit – it was true.  That was me. 

For the longest time, I could only be seen through my writing, and until I began to push this pen into the light, I spent my life dodging everyone’s gaze.  Caught without my pen and out in the open, I’d regurgitate snatches of things I’d heard, cutting and pasting quips into the proper spaces in conversations, twisting my face into the appropriate expressions, only to then slowly recoil from sight in the safety of silently vulturizing the words, thoughts, and comprehension of others.  No one would know I was stupid, that I had serious issues simply reading the English language, that I was a fake and a thief of other people’s skills and experiences.  Why would I ever allow anyone to see that in me?  So, like a child, I’d flash, I’d rage, I’d lash out to draw eyes elsewhere.  Savage Illusion.

In high school I could dunk a basketball, but I couldn’t read.  I had to sound out words as I’d learned to do from Sesame Street as a kid.  Never having owned a dictionary or even seen one in my family, I was able to understand a few words and reason out the jist of what was being said.  It was like trying to decode a message written in a long dead Russian language.  It made me feel small and hopeless.  I felt that the world had somehow regressed into an antebellum-ish landscape, I an escaped slave, yearning for the freedom the secret of which was hidden in a language everyone else could speak, one I wasn’t smart enough to master.  I’d gaze wistfully at TV shows where parents played music for their unborn, read their babies bedtime stories or used hooked on phonics to teach their two-year-olds to read at a level higher than my own.

I imagine my teachers must’ve known, they must have noticed the string of clichés, quotes and song lyrics I would line together to answer questions and escape conversations, to appear what I thought to be ‘smart’ and not be rejected.  Surely, teachers noticed the chair that I threw through a glass door in 7^th grade.  The teacher was demanding I read aloud in class.  Look at the violence – not me!  It cost my g-mom $100 we didn’t have and me a week of school and a beating with an extension cord, a price I gladly paid.

Maybe it was because I was a multi-sport star athlete in a results-driven society that the lack of substance to my shine was deemed ‘good enough’.  After all, according to one history teacher, I’d be ‘dead within five years of this conversation’.  I was advanced to the 10^th grade, and it became someone else’s turn to fear-teach me history.

Yes, I was that kid.  The one who’d fight you for joking that I was stupid, going from zero to sixty in a snap.  Hearing what a friend never said.  Being embarrassed by laughter that rattled like a tommy gun’s 45’s into my soul.  Laughter only I could hear.  Can a gangster doubt, feel alone?

It was my father, the preacher, who noticed during my weekly phone call from prison.   Ever the pragmatic intellect who too often believes love isn’t real unless it bruises, he said to me, “You’re speaking in clichés, and you’re spitting back the thoughts of others, DeLaine.  You have your own mind!  Stop being so damn lazy and use it!” 

It was in segregation – 23 hours a day lockdown and isolation – I taught myself to read.  With my spirit feeding on itself in a soup of depression, I learned to escape.  It took all of thirty-two years for me to submit my first piece for publication though.  Something I was forced to do, really.  You see, when I’d tell people I was a writer, they’d ask if I was published.   Can’t be a writer unless someone else says you’re worthy.

Dismiss, change the subject.  Move along, little wannabe…  man?  Worthy?  Extorting the extortionist?

When I received the first response from Walk In Those Shoes with a copy of the piece they’d published, I lost it!  I danced like a fool, and cried like a snitch in a gangster’s convention.  It was as if Beyonce and Cardi B had taken my virginity at the same time!

Every person is responsible for their own self worth, but to have the validation of others for something that has meant so much to me?  All I can say is – can you see me now?!

Mr. Jones has validated what we do with his words, and – we DO believe in him and all our writers. I was thrilled the judges saw what I did, and he is also our first place winner. Mr. Jones can be contacted at:
DeLaine Jones #7623482
82911 Beach Access Road
Umatilla, OR 97882