The Moth (19 page)

He’d go, “Ha ha, Shorty, you’re a little shit! Where do you want to go?”

I’d say, “I just want to go next door, mister, a friend of mine’s next door.”

“You go on, Shorty!”

Now, if anyone else asked, he’d tell them, “Fuck you, I’ll lock you in!”

“But you let Shorty go!”

“Stop snitching! And lock the fuck in!”

But I was all right with him. And so I’d take my wine and put some in my coat pocket and some in my back pocket, and go across the hall and sell it.

One guy told me, “I don’t got no five packs. But I’ll give you a joint.”

I said, “That’s cool.” So I gave him the wine, I got the joint. Now I’m really kicking! I got reefer, candy, cigarettes, I’m eating cookies, I’m really wheeling and dealing.

But then Big Frank Yonkerman and Ronny Worth took a vacation. And some new guards came on, but they ain’t cool with me like Frank and Mr. Ronny were.

So I was lying there one night, and my wine was cooking. I had a couple of guys in the back and a couple of guys in the front, and whenever the guards would come, they would say, “Pass the pen! Anybody got paper?” That was our signal that the guards were coming, and I would hook up the Magic Shave.

But this particular night the guards scared the shit out of them, and they didn’t say nothing. And the next thing I knew my cell door was being cracked, and the captain was there with about four guards.

He said, “Shorty, you want to step out?”

I said, “Man, it’s eleven-thirty at night. What is this all about?”

He said, “Shorty, you want to step out or would you like for us to help you out?”

And he comes in the cell and goes under the bed and gets the bucket and pulls it from under the bed.

In the prison rule book it says you can’t mess with a guy’s
religious artifacts, so I had a big Bible and several Christian pamphlets on top of my wine.

I said, “Man, you can’t be touching my religious artifacts!”

He said, “Don’t worry, Shorty, we ain’t going to mess up your Bible and stuff.” He picked it all up and put it on the bed.

Then he pulled the wine out and opened up the bag, and the fumes jumped up, and he said, “Oh my God! How do you drink this shit? This will take the wax off the floor!”

I said, “What shit? It ain’t nothing but punch. I just put some grapefruit in there with some juice and some sugar. You know, the Fourth of July’s a couple of days away. I was going to give the fellas a little celebration with some punch.”

The captain said, “Do I look like a goddamn fool to you? You forgot one ingredient, the yeast! Motherfucker, get your ass back in the cell! Write him up!”

So they took my wine away and wrote me up. The next day I went to the adjustment committee.

The deputy said, “You Sherman Powell?”

I said, “Yes, sir.”

He said, “You stupid or something?”

“No, I’m not stupid.”

“What’d you say?”

“Yes, sir, I’m stupid.”

He said, “Your name is Powell, not Gallo. What the fuck you doing selling wine in my prison? You in here for selling dope, and you’re going to come to my prison and sell wine? What do you think you’re doing? Are you OUT OF YOUR GODDAMN MIND?!? Take his ass back downstairs and lock him up! Thirty days no rec, thirty days no commissary, thirty days no visits.”

So I told my friend, “Look, go to my people and tell them to send me a block of yeast. I’m going to whip up another batch.”

He said, “You’re crazy, man! You’re on key-lock!”

I said, “That’s the best time to make it! They don’t think you got it, right?”

But he said, “Look, man, if they bust you again, your ass is going to be shipped to Dannemora.”

Now, Dannemora Clinton Penitentiary was the worst penitentiary in the state of New York. So I had no intention of going to no goddamn Dannemora.

But still my greed overtook my common sense, and I wanted to make another batch because my supply of M&M’S and Snickers was down. And so my man went and got the yeast, and I made me another batch.

By this time Ronny Worth had come back from vacation. And so I was sitting there, reading my book. I had gotten all the jars from the guys before they went to rec, and I had filled all the jars up with the wine, so as they came in, I was passing out the jars, and everybody was getting their wine, right? And I was collecting my cigarettes.

So I’m sitting there, and all of a sudden my friend said, “Mr. Worth said he wants you to come to the front.”

So I came out front, and Mr. Worth said, “Shorty, you done made some more of that goddamn wine, didn’t you?”

And I looked at him, and I thought:
Who the fuck done snitched on me that quick? I didn’t see nobody.

But he said, “Don’t lie! You want to know how I know? Open the fucking door.”

So I pulled the door open that led to the cells, and all you
could hear was the black guys playing their boom boxes loud, singing Motown at the top of their lungs.

And all the Spanish guys are beating on their lockers and desks:

And all the white boys got their guitars, singing country songs in their Southern drawls.

So everybody was in their own world, right?

And he said, “Shorty, I know that you done passed out that shit because it’s total chaos back there. It’s normally quiet as a church mouse. People be reading their Bible, studying, writing letters. Only when you pass out that bullshit is it like that in there! So you want to know who snitched on you? Your customers snitched on you!”

And then he said, “Look, Shorty, you going to board in a couple of months. I don’t want to see you get in no trouble. Go right back in there, empty that shit out, get some pine cleaner, clean your cell out, and retire from being a bootlegger. You get my drift?”

I said, “Yes, sir, I get your drift.” So sure enough, two months later I went to the board, and they gave me a parole date and let me go.

And if it wasn’t for Ronny Worth and Frank Yonkerman being all right with me, had they decided to bust me, I had a life sentence, I could have been there until the next eclipse.

It dawned on me how stupid and childish I had been, doing that shit. And I made up my mind that there’s a time to be defiant, and there’s a time to be compliant. And when you’re in the penitentiary, be compliant!

Sherman “O.T.” Powell
was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and has traveled extensively from coast to coast. He is a graduate at the advanced level of The MothSHOP Community Education Program, and his stories have appeared on
The Moth Radio Hour
and
The Best of The Moth
CD series. He was featured in a brief write-up in
New York Magazine
after a 2004 Moth appearance, and he is currently studying to become a substance abuse counselor and writing his autobiography.

ED GAVAGAN

Y
ou wake up in the morning, get dressed, put on your shoes, and you head out into the world. And you assume you’re going to come back home at night, go to sleep, and get up to do it again. That rhythm creates a framework that you use to form a life, and you make plans, and you count on continuity.

John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

I woke up one morning, and I wasn’t wearing any of my own clothes. I had two chest tubes, a hose going up my nose to drain my stomach, a catheter, and a morphine drip. And I woke into this fog of pain that felt like I had broken through the ice into a lake of frozen hurt.

At the end of my bed I could see the surgeon who had spent all night saving my life, and he was holding my foot. He had given me about a two percent chance of living. Next to him were two homicide detectives. The
homicide
detectives had gotten the case because they didn’t think I was going to make it, and they didn’t want to have to do the paperwork swap when I died.

And let me tell you, when you start your day with two homicide detectives explaining what happened the night before, it’s downhill from there. They told me they had five young men in custody, and they wanted me to identify them from the mug shots before I died. They just wanted me to make an “X” next to the pictures.

What had happened is that these young men had come in from Brooklyn, and they were part of a gang. The initiation for them to move up into the upper echelons of their gang was to come into Manhattan and kill somebody. And they had set up this little ambush where they had one lookout at either end of the block, and then three guys would sit on a stoop in between with their hidden knives. And they would wait.

It was late at night, the night before Thanksgiving, so the city was really empty. The kids had told the detectives that some
other
guy walked around the corner and headed down the block. The two lookouts gave the go-ahead, and the three guys stood up and started walking towards him. But he had his key out, and he put his key in the door and went in the lobby, and the door closed behind the guy, and the gang initiates were locked out. The guy pushed the elevator button, and he went upstairs, got undressed, and went to bed. And he never knew what just
didn’t
hit him.

And I was the next guy to turn down the street.

I came down the block, and one of the very lucky things from that night was that when I was in college at Notre Dame I was on the boxing team. So I got one good punch and knocked the middle guy out. They caught him, and he gave up everybody else, which is how they had these five guys in custody.

So nobody expects me to make it, but I do. I live. They take me off life support, move me into ICU, and the nurse comes in
with the clipboard, and she wants to talk to me about my insurance. I was self-employed at the time, so I like to say I was insurance-free.

And when they found that out, the nurse who came in the next morning said, “It’s amazing how well you’re doing, and we think you ought to go home.” And they gave me a bottle of Percocet and a cane, and a bag to put my stuff in, and sent me on my way.

The flowers hadn’t even wilted yet.

So I ended up in my apartment, at home, in very bad shape. The nightmares were unbelievable. I couldn’t eat. They had removed about a third of my intestines, I had two collapsed lungs, I was missing organs that I hadn’t known I had. Things were very difficult.

In New York, if you can’t go to work, make money, and pay your rent, you don’t get to stay in your apartment. So I would try to do my job—I had a little business building custom furniture. But whenever I saw a young man that had any hint of menace, this feeling would hit me, and the feeling was like this:

You know when you’re driving late at night in the winter on a snowy road, and you’re going a little fast, and you come into a turn, and you feel all four wheels slip, and you see the guardrail, and you know there’s nothing you can do? And then all of a sudden, you hit the dry pavement, and the wheels grip, and you’re back in control and nothing happened.

And then you get hit with this adrenaline. It’s a feeling in the back of your knees and in your palms, and you taste it in your mouth. But you’re driving, and you’re like,
Nothing happened.
I would have that feeling seeing teenage kids on the street six, seven, eight times a day, and it wore me out.

I was having post-traumatic stress symptoms.

I ended up losing my apartment, and essentially then becoming homeless, and losing my business. I went to the district attorney’s office for an appointment, where I had five attempted murder trials that I had to handle. And I broke down crying.

I was like, “I’m so lucky to be alive, but now I’m homeless.” And he gave me a number—a little late I thought—for the Victim Assistance people.

And so I go, and this girl comes out, and she’s like Reese Witherspoon in
Legally Blonde
. She’s got the turtleneck, and the ponytail, and she leads me back to her cubicle. And I’m in a really dark place, and I have this feeling that we’re not going to connect. I get to her cubicle and pinned up on the wall next to her monitor is that poster—I know you know it—of the kitten with the branch saying, “Hang in there, baby.” And I just don’t feel like she’s going to be able to help me.

She gives me this paperwork to fill out for Medicaid, and she gives me some more paperwork on how to get on a list for subsidized housing. (“It’s an eighteen-month wait but, you know, at least you’re on the list.”) And another sheet with some addresses in the Bronx where I can go for free group counseling.

I feel like a drowning man who’s just been thrown a kit to build a boat.

I walk out of there, and I go to my favorite bartender, who’s this cute Lebanese-Canadian girl. She’s a poet. And she lets me move in and stay on her couch. She’s rocking this Simone de Beauvoir look, and she’s smart and funny.

But the biggest thing is she
listened
, which was amazing. Because most people—and they were all very well-meaning—had one of three responses.

The first response was, when I tried to talk about my feelings, and my fear, and this turmoil in my head, they would
say, “Well, everything happens for a reason.” And that made me want to punch them in the face, and ask them if they knew what the reason for that was.

The second thing that people tended to say was “You’ve just got to get over it, man. You’re alive. You’re lucky. You’ve just got to put this in the past, and move on.” And that made me want to stab them six times and come back and talk to them in six months and go, “So how’s it working out, you got any advice for me now? Because I could really use some help from somebody who knows what I’m going through.”

And the third thing that people would say, and again, very well-meaning, but it just was absolutely no help, was that “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

And I mean, I had read Nietzsche too. I had gone to college, and I was up all night in the student union drinking coffee going, “Yeah, if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger,
man
.”

The problem with that was I had come to New York, started this little business, built a life, and I had lost
everything
.