All throughout 1986 and 1987 I was living on my own ‘schedule’. I was sleeping in the afternoons, waking in the early evening and then, just when most of the heavily medicated inmates were easing back a bit on their madness, I would stay up late at night, writing legal work and taking psychology correspondence courses.
In solitary confinement on Death Row, as long as you ate and your cell was not overflowing with newspapers and garbage, the staff were happy to let you do whatever you wanted. The lights inside the cell were in your own control, so if you wanted to sit and watch television twenty-four hours a day until your brain turned to mush, fine. If you wanted to read or exercise all day and all night, fine. As long as you ‘showed some movement’ for the head count three times a day, did not harm yourself or assault others in the showers, and did not cause problems while going out to the cages for exercise, you were left alone.
Late one afternoon in the early part of December 1987 I was woken by a guard, who informed me that I had a visitor. My parents’ annual Christmas visit was only a week away, so I wasn’t sure who this could be who had come to see me. I had no other regular visitors; in fact, I rarely had visitors at all and, frankly, that was OK with me.
It takes a lot of emotional effort to go into a room, face people and put on a show. Especially when it’s your family you must face. On this occasion I was still groggy from having been in a deep sleep as I went through the ritual of being ‘dressed out’ – that is, strip searched – by the guards before leaving my cell for the visit. Once I was dressed again, the guards took me out to one of the attorney visiting rooms, right beside B-Block, that were used for all Death Row prisoners’ visits.
I was told to sit down on the chair bolted to the floor of the prisoners’ side of the visiting room while the guards stood in front of me dealing with my handcuffs. As soon as they stepped away, I looked up and smiled. It was Pam. Pam Tucker was the woman who headed up the western Pennsylvania abolitionist movement in 1987. The mother of two girls, who were the centre of her world, she split her life between looking after her family and fighting for the humane treatment of men waiting to die – and I admired her for that.
I was glad there were people like Pam in the world, who really cared about those the state was going to kill, and treated us as human beings. She was one of the very few people I wrote to at that time. I liked her character too – she had a good sense of humour, which she certainly needed fighting the death penalty at a time when the streets of America were becoming bloodier by the day.
Sitting there to Pam’s left and just watching as she and I chatted easily to each other was another woman. Very well dressed, thirtyish and with blonde hair, she just smiled at me as I sat there smiling back at them both. Pam introduced her as a friend of hers from Pittsburgh who had come with her that day to talk to five men and find out what the treatment and conditions were like here at Huntingdon. She was then going to write a report they would be presenting to the Commissioner of Corrections.
The other woman said her name was Jacqueline, but her friends called her Jacque and she had only just joined the abolitionist movement. She said she wanted to thank me for taking the time to talk to them as part of their effort to improve conditions. Pam had asked her to compile the report as she had experience of dealing with state procedures in her role as a union representative in the hospital in which she had worked as a psychiatric aide for six years. Having heard what the other four men had to say, she continued, she was determined to help us. Death Row prisoners should, at the very least, be housed separately from the general prison population and not mixed up with men who had been placed there for punishment.
I was still a bit subdued from having recently rejoined the wakened world, so I just hid behind my big plastic prison-issue eyeglasses and watched her every facial expression. When she had finished this very sincere outpouring of why she was there and what she had decided to talk to me about today, I made a small joke about how I wished I could drink real coffee for once in my life, that’s the one condition I’d love to see changed around here!
Pam laughed at the insider joke. Prison coffee has a unique flavour that you have to taste to understand what I mean. It is a cheap mix of coffee, chicory and ‘additives’ boiled up in huge vats in burlap bags the size of bed pillows. These are then cooked for hours in order to provide for a prison population of 2,300. In prison they call coffee ‘mud’ for good reason. Let a cup of prison coffee sit for a while, pour off the excess fluid, look into the bottom of the cup and you will see a fine layer of ‘mud’ – the residue of boiled burlap and other cost-saving ingredients.
As Pam and I fell into similar exchanges, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Jacque was watching me intently.
It was as if she were not familiar with this sort of two-way conversation with a prisoner, instead of the usual recitation of a long list of grievances against the system or tales of his mistreatment. And the more I ignored the reason why these two women were there but instead asked about life in the outside world and anything else I could come up with, the more it must have occurred to Jacque that I was not bothered by my situation. She saw that it was natural for me to come there and just be ‘Nicky’, a guy who acted for all the world as if it were normal for him to be sitting there chatting with two women.
I can only guess at what the other men had talked to them about before I got there, as they seemed really shell-shocked at the depravity and levels of violence perpetrated in Huntingdon on a daily basis by inmates and staff alike. Pam worked into the conversation some mention of what they had already been told, but I was not really game for that, so I deflected the conversation elsewhere. I was just enjoying the moment. Having spent months in a hermit-like existence, staying up all night and not venturing out even into the exercise yard, I wanted to appreciate all the very fine nuances of our conversation, just talking and laughing. Eventually the obvious became too much for Jacque and she asked me pointedly, ‘Why doesn’t all of this bother you?’
I wanted to say so many complicated things in reply to that simple question. I wanted to show this person that I had my own reasons for wanting to be different from everyone else here. And I certainly did not want to be seen as one of those inmates who have been so conditioned by prison that they have given up the struggle. But I had no clue how to say it all.
I was just flooded with shame. Either I could humiliate myself by saying that I was not guilty but I was here on Death Row because of my own stupid mouth – in which case I would have had to launch into the entire saga of how I had made up the ridiculous story that had landed me here – or I could let her think that I was a murderer who deserved to be here. While I was not keen to have anyone think that I was at ease here because I was a psychotic murderer, nor did I have the will to make the huge effort it would take to convince them of the contrary.
As I sat there looking at this well-groomed woman who had no clue who I was before that moment, I was so aware that, although I could not care less how the prison staff interpreted my lack of concern for my living conditions (since they all thought I was guilty anyway), it was much harder to explain to someone from outside these walls that I was this way because I just chose to be.
So, I swallowed my heart in my throat twice before I came out with the only response I could think of: ‘I’m sure Pam can fill you in on my case on the way home. It’s a real twisted story that makes you proud to be American.’
It was hard to tell, but my answer seemed to play on Jacque’s patience. She was not impolite but she did not enquire further. I went through the rest of the visit knowing that there was an unmentioned 300lb gorilla seated next to me and for the entire remainder of the time we all conspired to dance artfully around it.
I went back to my cell and replayed to myself every detail of every second of my time in that visiting room. Years of being tormented by the memories of my past life playing out endlessly in my head had left me with a finely honed ability to play over and over any new encounters. I re-listened to every word that I could recall speaking to both Pam and Jacque. I rose through the sweet exchanges and died inside again and again as I dwelt upon how I had failed to defend myself. I looked again at every detail of the clothes Jacque wore and every strand of her hair. At will, I saw again every movement that she made.
It was both sweet and painful to sift through every little thing that had resulted from Jacque and Pam coming to pull me out of that ‘nothingness’ of spending endless days locked up by myself in a concrete box.
Exactly one week after my visit from Pam and Jacque I was awakened once more in the middle of the afternoon to be told that I had a visitor. This was an obvious cause for alarm, as two visits in the span of a week meant only one thing: bad news.
As I entered the attorney visiting room once again to sit down on the bolted-down inmate chair, and again had my handcuffs placed in front of me by the guards, I looked up and saw Jacque, alone. She was pacing back and forth nervously on the other side of the room barrier, impatient for the guards to leave us. Then, as soon as the snap of the lock had sounded our being alone, we both spoke at once. I asked her why she was there. Had she gotten lost? I joked. I had never thought I would see either Jacque or Pam again.
Jacque looked at me and replied earnestly: ‘During the three-hour drive home from here with Pam last week, I kept trying to steer the conversation back to you. I found myself asking her about you; not about your case and what put you here – I know you invited me to get that from her and I did a bit – but what I really wanted to know was why you are the way you seem.’ And then finally, while standing awkwardly between the two wooden visiting chairs on the other side of this tiny room, she said simply, ‘I cannot stop thinking about you.’
As she spoke I looked at myself in the reflection created by her dark jacket’s shadow on the glass barrier between us. I saw my thinning hair, which had left me nearly bald across my forehead; I saw my thick plastic-framed eyeglasses; and I saw my skin bleached white by six years of having been locked away in a windowless cell. What could anyone see in me? My face was drawn and haggard from losing some teeth and I had not shaved since the last ‘shower day’, three days previously. I felt as unattractive and inhuman as it was possible to feel in front of a member of the opposite sex.
And I was so caught up in how I looked right then that I thought she could not really be speaking about that person I saw there every day in the closest I ever normally came to a mirror – the sheet of metal bolted to the wall above my rusted-out toilet. Even without a proper mirror, I knew from the many taunts of both inmates and guards that I looked how I felt.
When she stopped talking I was trapped in that moment when you know your thoughts are written all over your face but you are at a loss as to what to do. I understood perfectly well what she had said and it stole all my courage. I started being facetious, but she was not smiling along with me and all my efforts were just so out of tune with her. I knew it and she knew it.
I sat still and brimmed with tears as I looked down at my thin, ill-fitting blue canvas prison-issue prison shoes. I hated it. I truly hated how much my ordeal had left me looking like some mental misfit who was rotting away here in hell waiting to be killed.
I was starting to get angry, so she spoke to me in this soothing way, which I interpreted as condescension and made me further angered. She saw I was getting upset and began to tell me that she did not mean to make me feel bad by not laughing heartily at my jokes. She said that she was just trying to tell me in all sincerity that I had her respect for having displayed such a calm, strong and easy manner in her previous visit. That she felt it was a quality that showed to her that I was not totally lost to whatever had put me there. That, despite what Pam told her had been done to me physically inside prison, I had managed to keep my sense of humour. She admired me for this and she hoped I would keep my sweet outlook.
I really started to feel stupid at this point as I began to think that any ‘attraction’ she might have felt for me was all imagined on my part.
Here was this person come to offer me moral support for my efforts to deal with the inhumane conditions in prison and I had gotten it all wrong in my lonely little mind. I was bouncing off the mental walls inside of my head as I lost all confidence in my ability to handle the situation. Jacque was not what I had expected and she had not said what I expected. But, having been convicted of being a sexual deviant, I was too churned up with the emotion of trying to deal with a woman to react appropriately. This was just my conditioned response to the way other females treated me regularly in prison and it cut deeply every time. At that moment I sincerely wished she had left me alone and picked out one of the other guys from last week.
When I looked up again, though, I realised that she was not speaking softly any more and slowly we smiled at each other. I did not want to smile too widely as I was missing my front teeth, so I lamely tried to cover my mouth by holding my lips tightly over my gums. I even hated her for looking at me, it hurt so much to think what I must seem like to a woman. The more I tried, and failed, to rebound from all the awkward and difficult feelings I had felt earlier, the more I just wanted to find a graceful way out of here and go back to my cell.
I don’t really know how, but eventually we got through those first twenty minutes and then, suddenly, we started talking about how she had studied psychiatry and how she worked with all sorts of mentally impaired children and adults. She started telling me that, as a trained psychiatric aide, she saw at first-hand how much change was needed in the mental health system. She was really frustrated that the insurance companies had found ‘treasure’ by getting mental patients released into family care so that they were covered by the family’s medical insurance and then, once they were inevitably brought back for hospitalisation, the insurance companies could get paid by the state for looking after them.
In response, I told Jacque what a nightmare it was to be housed in prison with all these men who suffered from all sorts of mental disorders. How, if they were not being preyed on by inmates in the general population, they were being thrown into solitary confinement on Death Row. I tried to be as gentle as I could as I told her about how these men were also subject to abuse from the guards, who had not been properly trained to deal with them. It is very hard to watch a supporter of the system be hit forcibly by the real horror of what happens in prison to men trapped by mental illness; also, what it makes the ones who are not disabled do to those who are impaired, simply because these men are so easily exploitable. Most sex-abuse victims in prison are mentally impaired.
Hours passed as we talked about the empowerment and understanding we had both gotten from studying the human mind and child development. Jacque never tried to call for any other inmates to be brought out and, as for me, I just wanted to stay and talk for as long as I could with this real-life human being who really seemed to care.
Every week for the next four months, Jacque drove 225 miles along gruelling mountain roads from Pittsburgh to Huntingdon to visit me and every week we found new things to talk about. I saw in her so many fine qualities and I was enchanted by her sense of humour, as well as how she obviously really cared about people. But what impressed me most about her was how she wanted to make things better for people caught in the system, including men who were just waiting to die.
I also definitely made an impression on her with my efforts to learn as much as I could about humanity and about life once I had lost my right to either of these through my own folly.
I knew that Jacque’s visits were becoming really important to me, and as each week passed I grew closer and closer to her. I tried to comb my thinning hair and make myself presentable for her, even though my only sartorial choice was a bright orange jumpsuit. I felt so happy each time she came to see me and so terribly lonely when she left. I found myself writing her ten-page letters following up on all the things we had failed to discuss completely on her visits. I was aware that I had feelings for her that were deepening daily.
I was also absolutely aware that there were men in hopeless situations like mine who simply used women. I did not want to be one of those guys, putting their partner through years of hell in the hope that someday they would ‘come home’. I did not have a great past history when it came to honourable behaviour, but now that I was in the process of finding my moral compass I did not want to let anyone down any more than I had previously. I already lived with that terrible feeling that my family was being sucked dry in slow agony as they fought for me. I was aware that there was this terrific pull within me to have someone come here and care for me. But I also knew that there was not likely to be any ‘happy ever after’ ending. I could not be so cruel to someone who was herself so genuine. I could not be so selfish, even though I knew we were falling deeply in love.
I had no clue how to fight this battle raging within me. But, as I hoped for the best and feared for the worst, I knew that I was going to take the coward’s way through all this and let her decide for us. The emotional journey we had embarked on had become such a challenge to me on so many levels. I was not really sure why, but I felt as if I were destined always to learn each lesson in my life only through very meaningful events. Why else was I so aware of these things that none of the other inmates seemed troubled by as they blindly scratched and fought their way through their day-to-day lives?