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Damien: Prose, Poetry & Letter from Damien

From ARKANSAS LITERARY FORUM, Vol 9 2007

HIGHER GROUND

When I was a child, my family lived on an old Indian burial mound. Our house was a tin-roof shack made of old clapboard that would have collapsed in a strong wind. It was as hot as hell during the summer, and freezing cold in the winter. There were no flushing toilets, and our drinking water came from a well which the crop dusters regularly sprayed with pesticide. In other words, it was fucking misery. I remember times when my entire family had to bathe in the same water. My dad would drag a big steel tub into the kitchen while my mother boiled pots of water to fill it up with. There’s nothing like marinating in a lukewarm pool of other people’s filth to make you feel clean.

The shack was situated on top of a raised platform of earth in the middle of several miles of field that was used for farming. It was a stereotypical sharecropper’s shanty. Someone probably thought that putting it on the isolated lump of higher ground would keep the rains from washing it away during a flood. That seemed to work, but there were still times when we had to use a fishing boat to reach dry land once the nearby swamp overflowed. It turned the only road to town into a small lake so that cars couldn’t get in or out.

We had fourteen large dogs who called the area under the house “home.” We didn’t mean to have that many originally, they just kept breeding. People who have never known the hunger of being dirt poor always ask why we didn’t have the dogs spayed or neutered. As if the money to do so was just laying around, waiting on us to pick it up. The truth of the matter is that we couldn’t even afford a trip to the doctor ourselves, much less for the dogs. The rent on our shack was thirty-five dollars a month, and more often than not, we had trouble scraping that much together. The farmer who owned the house didn’t mind if we were a little late with the payment, because he knew we’d eventually come up with it, even if we had to cash in aluminum cans to do so.

There wasn’t much around there for the dogs to do except fight with each other and dig holes, so they were constantly digging pits that they would lie in to cool off. The sun showed no mercy to us or the dogs. They would often dig up bones from the burial mound, which my stepfather and I would have to re-bury. I could tell it made my stepfather uneasy by the way his attention would become unusually focused, and he tried to do the job as quickly as possible. He wouldn’t even talk while he was digging. Without ever saying so, he made it understood that this wasn’t something we would be talking about.

For some reason, I never put a great deal of thought into the situation at the time. I would usually have forgotten about it a few minutes later, at least until the next incident. I was reminded of it one day by something a friend said, and when I mentioned it, her reaction seemed to be equal parts horror, awe, and amazement. Her response was, “It’s no wonder you’re the way you are. There’s no telling what got into your blood our there.” I never was exactly certain what that statement was meant to explain.

Strange things were always hovering at the periphery of my family life, but none so much as during our years in that house. There was just a bad feeling around the place. It was unpleasant in every regard, and the entire house had that aura of the inside of a body bag. It always felt dark, even on the sunniest summer days. There were odd drawings left on the walls by whoever had lived there before us, and something about them made me uneasy. They looked like the sort of thing an insane person with a great degree of artistic talent would have created. Things like a grandfather clock with a single eye where the face should have been. We painted over most of them, but ran out of paint before we got to that one. It was worse at night, when you could always feel it staring at the back of your head.

That place was never quiet at night. I would lie in bed listening as the dogs drug strange things to and fro beneath the floor. Inside the house was as dark as an oil slick, so you couldn’t see anything moving in the room, but you could sense it. It was the same sort of sensation you would experience if a closet door were to swing silently open behind your back. Later I learned a term to describe that sensation—air displacement. What I was sensing was air being displaced by something moving from one spot to another. The worst sensation of all is when I would feel something tall and thin standing next to the bed and leaning over me so that its face was less than two inches from my own. The breath would pass from its lips to my lips like the taste of something unmentionable. My eyes would bulge and strain like an animal, fiercely trying to penetrate the darkness.

Another incident brought the entire family wide awake and on the run. Sometime late in the night there was a noise so loud it was indescribable. The house actually shook from the force of it. It had all the violence of something as heavy as a car being dropped in the living room. My sister came awake screaming, and I was so flooded with adrenaline that it caused my heart to beat so hard, I could feel it in my forehead. My stepfather ran into the living room wearing nothing but his underwear, looking wild and frazzled. He searched the place from top to bottom, but never found one single thing out of the ordinary. Nothing was out of place. I couldn’t articulate the feeling I had at that moment, but in hindsight, I realized what it was. It felt like the entire house was grinning., like it was watching us slyly as it held its breath.

Eventually we were told to move, and the house was torn down. The suburbs around the city were expanding, and people who lived in the houses that cost a quarter of a million dollars did not want a tin-rood shack standing on a bone hill in their line of sight. Something like that tends to lower the property values.

Before the shack was torn down, it drew someone else’s attention. I used to go to the bank with my stepfather every Friday afternoon to cash his paycheck. It was a few minutes when I had the rare opportunity to sit in an air-conditioned building. During one of these trips, the bank had an entire wall of oil paintings on display. There were the creations of art students from the local high school. I was stunned and momentarily doubtful of what I was seeing when I came to a painting of our house. It had been rendered in perfect detail. One side of the porch was dilapidated and had caved in on itself. There were wild roses growing over all the ruins.

I immediately brought the painting to the attention of my stepfather, but he had next to no interest in it. After looking at it for about ten seconds or so, he gave a low grunt that could have meant anything. He made a quick survey of the other paintings without moving from that spot, then he turned to leave. It felt somehow wrong to me to leave the painting behind, as if we were leaving behind something incredibly personal. Something that belonged to us, whether we wanted it or not.

HARD TIME

Today my feet bled through two pairs of socks. It was bliss. Watching those coin-sized crimson stains bloom through the white fabric has become holy communion for me. Bringing my body to that point of pain and exhaustion has become my religion.

My life has taught me that true spiritual insight can only come about through direct experience, the way a severe burn can only be attained by putting your hand in the fire. Faith is nothing more than a watered-down attempt to accept someone else’s insight as your own. Belief is the psychic equivalent of an article of second-hand clothing, worn out and passed down. I equate true spiritual insight with wisdom, which is different than knowledge. Knowledge can be obtained through many sources: books, stories, songs, legends, myths, and in modern times, from computers and television programs. On the other hand, there’s only one real source of wisdom—pain. Any experience that provides a person with wisdom will also usually provide them with a scar. The greater the pain, the greater the realization. Faith is spiritual rigor mortis.

My adopted mother lives in San Francisco, where she says the weather is pretty much the same all the time. There are no tornadoes, no blizzards, no scorching heat waves that leave the earth dead and brown. It’s just one eternal, mind-numbing 70? day. At first I was intrigued by this. In fact, it seemed somehow magickal. However, the more I contemplated it, the more uneasy I became. Then I realized why. It’s because something about it is vaguely prison-like. It seems almost dispassionate in some way. How is a person supposed to experience different emotional and psychic states when living in an eternally continuous environment? That’s the tidbit that was nagging at me, sticking in my craw. Because that’s what life comes down to in prison—a continuous, soul-stealing environment. Something like that can lull you into a stupor long before you realize it’s happened. I began to wonder how much of my own spirit had atrophied and calcified.

I can vaguely remember life in what I call the real world. It seemed to be a chain of events that flowed one into another, not always seamlessly, but at least naturally. There is nothing natural about my current situation. Nothing flows—or even moves—without someone applying a tremendous amount of willpower to one of reality’s pressure points. Even then, it’s like trying to keep a beach ball afloat just by blowing on it. Life without momentum is not truly life. A person needs movement, or they eventually begin to forget that they even exist.

I’ve read stories where through some bizarre form of emotional alchemy, bliss becomes lethargy or malaise. Perhaps it’s the boredom that causes a prince to give up all he knows and become a beggar. I can’t say. What I began to wonder is if the opposite may be true—if by following the thread of pain to a deep enough level, I could find something else. I knew I wasn’t the first to wonder about such a thing, because in certain Native American tribes, the men would sometimes undergo tremendously painful ordeals in search of spiritual or psychic insight.

One of the most torturous and well-known paths to opening the senses wider than usual is by fasting. I decided to give it a try. On my first attempt, I went for two weeks without consuming anything but water. For the first four days or so the pain of hunger, combined with the physical deterioration, was maddening. My skin was hot with fever. It reminded me of the powerful periods of fever and sickness that would come upon me suddenly as a child. There would be no warning, I would just wake up in the middle of the night with a high fever. I would be so weak that I couldn’t move, but it felt like I was floating. I could feel currents of energy passing through my consciousness, and realized they were always flowing through the world, but that I could only feel them when I was in that fevered state. The closest I can come to articulating it even now would be to say that I could hear a river of pink voices. Once I was a teenager, it stopped. During the very last fit, the fever went so high that my mother submerged me in a tub of ice-cold water in order to bring it down. The touch of that ice water on my skin was one of the most horrific experiences of my life. I wanted to scream and fight, but could only lie there gasping. I couldn’t even cry. My mother kept muttering reassurances to me and smoothing the hair out of the way as she poured the frigid water over my face. I kept thinking, “How can she not know that I’m in Hell?” The fever never bothered me. It was comforting, in a way. It was the ice water that I knew was going to kill me.

While fasting I would fall asleep fevered, hungry, and exhausted, but I was closer to that current than I had been since childhood. Still, there was something separating me from it. I could hear it on the horizon like a distant train whistle, but I wasn’t experiencing it. I needed something else to bring me closer.

Meditation is a pain in the ass. I practiced it extensively throughout my mid- to late twenties under the guidance of both Zen and Tibetan Buddhist teachers. I left it behind when I felt myself pulled in another direction, but decided to add it to my fasting to see if it would bring me closer to the experience I couldn’t quite define. It did not. I felt like a snake trying to put last season’s shed skin back on. It had become a husk with no life, so I began shifting through my internal catalog to see what else I could pull out of the trick bag.

I don’t know why I started running. I don’t even remember starting; it was as if I was suddenly just doing it. Being trapped in a cell meant I had to run in place, so that’s what I did. I ran so hard that I lost all track of time. Eventually, I passed out. The world just went black, and sounds seemed to be coming from the far end of a very long hallway. I did it again the next day, only this time, I put on two pairs of socks, because of the blisters on my feet. I ran until I found myself crawling towards the toilet on my hands and knees, retching and dry heaving as I slipped in my own sweat. What should have been horrible was somehow beautiful. It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. I felt closer to all things divine than I ever did in any church. I had run for over two hours without stopping for so much as a drink of water, and I had discovered a new world.

By the third day, my feet had started bleeding, leaving little smudges and droplets all over the floor, but I wouldn’t even notice them until later. I don’t understand how there can be magick in the repetitive movement of the body, but I’ve still found it.

There are times when my mind screams at my body to stop, that it’s not possible to go for one more second. I ignore it and push beyond that point. Only by pushing beyond every boundary that my mind and body pose can I swim in the dark, deep waters that I need. That’s the place where anything worth having comes from. It’s the pain of destroying my boundaries that lets me scan the current for messages in bottles. They come from down the stream with a ghost inside each one. I don’t know who or what casts those bottles, at least not yet. Those with less curiosity or ambition just mumble that God works in mysterious ways. I intend to catch him in the act.

BOTTOM OF THE NINTH

To say that life in prison is stressful would be an understatement of epic proportions. Most people wouldn’t consider being stabbed in the face by a schizophrenic to be a normal job hazard, but in here, it’s just par for the course. Not to mention being physically separated from everyone you love and who loves you. Combine it all with the fact that you’re viewed and treated as some sort of sub-human, and your day tends to go south with a quickness.

Life on death row is deliberately designed to be a cold and comfortless thing. Everything is made of either concrete or steel, and privacy does not exist. You’re often at the whim of prison guards who make third-world dictators look like beacons of light and virtue. Most of the rules you’re expected to follow run counter to anything close to common sense, and if you ever get really sick, you’re probably going to die. I once saw a prisoner lie dead on the floor all night after having had a heart attack, and the only concern the prison administration had was whether or not they were going to be held responsible. During the summer the heat and insects are enough to drive you stark-raving mad. My hands have been so swollen that I could barely flex my fingers due to the number of insect bites.

The twelfth year I spent in this cage was the worst one for me, at least so far. My nerves were at the breaking point and my life was misery. That was the year I nearly gave up and lost all will to live. My physical health was rapidly deteriorating, the strain of trying to hold a marriage together in these circumstances was breaking my back, and I had used up every last ounce of willpower that I had. Then a miracle happened. The Boston Red Sox won the World Series. My sanity was saved by Johnny Damon.

Most sports mean absolutely nothing to me. The Olympics bore me to tears. Football is something I can take or leave. But when it comes to baseball, I am rabidly devoted. I never miss a game that I can pick up on television or radio. The reason is because baseball is magick. It gives off an aura that is greater than the sum of its parts. A baseball player is the closest thing to a titan that the modern world knows. When I see a player that I love step up to the plate with a bat in his hands, my heart absolutely soars. At that moment he becomes a symbol of hope. There’s something heroic about a man with a stick in his hands rising up against those who oppose him from reaching home. Johnny Damon is the new Odysseus.

There are only two things within these walls that can soothe or relax me. One is going to Mass, the other is baseball. Having a baseball game on the television has the same effect on me as sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair. It’s a security blanket. When I have reached the very bottom of hopelessness, I will turn on a game, lie on my bunk, and pull the covers up over my head. I leave a tiny opening so that I can see the television with one eye. The sound of the announcer’s voice lulls me towards relaxation in a way that’s almost hypnotic. It helps me to heal.

Perhaps the comforting quality that baseball has for me stems from the fact that some of my best childhood memories have to do with watching games with my grandmother. She was a lifelong fan of the St. Louis Cardinals and never missed a game. I would be next to her on the couch as she watched, or quietly lying on the floor. For Christmas she would buy me baseball cards, protective sleeves for them, and albums to store them in. Even though I grew up to be a Boston fan, there’s still a soft spot in my heart for St. Louis. When I watch them play I can still feel my grandmother near me.

When a Red Sox player switches to another team, it always feels like a personal slight, as if he’s consciously betrayed me. The day Johnny Damon signed a contract with the Yankees, I felt my heart drop. I was stunned, unable to comprehend how he could have defected to the Evil Empire. I was in mourning. Up until the very last second I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe he was just joking, and that at any moment he’d pull a red cap out of his back pocket, put it on his head (with his still as yet uncut hair), and say it was all a publicity stunt. Part of me knew this was as pathetic as going to a relative’s funeral and waiting for the moment he sits up in the casket and says, “April Fool!” Still, it’s hard to crush that hope out. Damn you, Johnny Damon (shaking my fist towards the heavens).

Baseball is my escape hatch. When I’m watching it I become enveloped in the feeling that everything will turn out okay. It reminds me that if I just hang on long enough, anything could happen.

Poem 58
by Damien Echols

The smell of the air
and the wind on my face
makes me remember
other places
and other times
when I wasn't
in hell


Poem 92
by Damien Echols

Teenage girls
with no life experiences
and boys who
call themselves punk
are on my radio
singing about
how much pain they've endured
and how hard
their lives are

I wanted to let everyone know that I will soon be making my first of hopefully many appearances in the literary world.  My work is going to be featured in the upcoming issue of "Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine," or just "Porcupine" for short.  I'm hoping everyone will read it and give me some feedback.  Let me know what you think.

A subscription to Porcupine only costs about sixteen dollars for a year's subscription, and is well worth the price for anyone interested in cutting edge and up-and-coming new artists.  I'm uncertain if it's possible to order single issues or not, but it can't hurt to check.

I also want to thank everyone for the letters, gifts, and emotional support you've been sending.  I can't even begin to thank everyone, or tell you how much it means.  It's the crutch that keeps me from collapsing.  Thank you.

Happy Holidays, everyone.  May this year be better than your last.

Sending much love,
D.

[please click here for more information about "Porcupine" and to see the actual letter.]