Letters From Prison:

a Long-Distance Relationship

About five years ago, I “met” Tim. My friendship with Tim exemplifies long-distance, both in physical mileage and social circumstance: Tim is a convicted murderer on Death Row in Ohio.

As is common amongst prisoners, Tim came from poverty and neglect. He didn’t have a stable home-life, and did not finish high school. Petty crime became a means of survival. Like an entry-level position leads to middle management, minor infractions evolved into a more intense culture of drug abuse and trafficking. The farther down the hole he fell (or up the ladder he climbed, depending on your point of view), the less likely he became to ever fit the shallow and flawed ideal of the “upstanding citizen” that perpetuators of this country’s ongoing war on drugs and poverty insist exists in a pure, utterly attainable form, despite a person’s background. While the idea that drugs lead to inevitable violence is not always factual, in Tim’s unfortunate case, it became the single determining factor in his life’s direction. He got in too deep, or up too high; things went wrong. Violence. Death. Those who defended him in any capacity did so out of professional obligation. He’s in his early forties, and he’s been languishing on death row for over two decades.

My friend Brittany found Tim through a prison pen pals website. She’s been corresponding withTim for several years. She mentioned me in a letter, and Tim asked if he could write to me. He sent me an introductory letter via Brittany, and I sat on it for several weeks before writing back. It seemed strange, the idea of writing to someone I wasn’t even remotely invested in, someone who’s situation I didn’t understand, who lived in obscurity over a thousand miles away. But I was lonely. I’d just been through a break-up, and was unemployed. It seemed impossible to make myself happy, but the ability to make someone else happy had become immediately attainable. It was astonishing that someone who’d never met me would be so eager to offer himself up for instant friendship—but on a selfish level, it was nice to be in demand. I wrote back: I introduced myself and told him about my cat. He really liked cats, he’d mentioned. They are cool, furry little dudes.

Tim spends most, if not all, of his time in his cell. He’s a movie enthusiast and an avid writer. He’s written a number of short stories and articles, and several novels. He writes me a letter almost every week, and I know he has at least a handful of other pen pals. There’s Brittany, of course, and there’s a pastor from the Midwest who makes copies of Tim’s manuscripts for dispersal amongst his other pen pals. There’s a middle-aged woman from somewhere near Ohio who sends him crafting supplies, and a couple from England. He always begins his letters in the same way: “I’m doing okay. Just getting by. Taking things one day at a time.” But each day is almost entirely similar to the day previous; an unending funeral march of typewritten letters, pillowcases sewn from old T-shirts, solitude, and the knowledge that society finds his presence so unacceptable that, whenever they get around to it, they’ll send a representative to perform involuntary euthanasia.

What keeps a person engaged in their life when there’s no hope of change, no hope of anything different or exciting on the horizon—forever? I sense desperation in him; he frequently has half-cocked schemes to make money, or gain influence with his attorneys or the appeal board. He lives on fraying strands of hope for freedom, though I don’t know if he’s gone so far as to concoct anything other than whimsical fantasies of a life outside of prison. Maybe I’m cynical, but I suspect there’s little opportunity for a man with a murder on his record, no family, no high school diploma, and no real skills. That kind of reintegration into society is intense, and there’s potential for falling prey, once again, to the perpetual cycle of crime, poverty, and futility. Tim is a fighting dog who was trained, by way of a shitty upbringing and the distructive cycle of destitution, to be a criminal. The best way out is severe rehabilitation, the kind that takes a very personal touch from someone who really cares. He’s a felon, but he’s also a veteran, a transgendered person, a jewelry-maker, a writer, and a gentle soul. One of the best days of his life, he told me, was the day he found a litter of newborn kittens in the yard. They were tiny, he said, and their eyes were still closed. They made tender, infant noises, and he and some of the other inmates picked them up and held them. It had been such a long time since he’d held a kitten. He held its body, the size of his palm, and gently touched and stroked it with his fingers. It was a rare enjoyment of a simple pleasure, a momentary, blissful meditation, a brief glimpse at the memory of what it was like to be a whole person. It ended after only a moment when the guards took the litter, and the mother, a feral cat they’d trapped on the property, to the animal shelter.

I write to Tim about once a month. I send him postcards from my travels, and pictures of my cat. I send him a Christmas card every year and thank him for his service on Veterans Day. He always thanks me for being such a good friend, even though our friendship is completely conditional on either one of us taking the time to write a letter. We’ve never met, and probably never will. He always asks me to help him; help him write to his lawyers, help him sell his jewelry on the internet, help him manage his meager funds as he gambles on taking advantage of fluxuating foreign currency exchange rates, a practice I’m not convinced is a wise investment opportunity; I always decline. However legitimate my excuses—I don’t have the time to manage his accounts, I don’t want to be the go-between amidst his legal battles, etc.—I do want to have something to offer him, if only to help him break up the monotony of an entire existence of the same four walls, punctuated here and there by news of the adventures of people living on the outside—an existence that he’s been absent from for so long that I consider him a stranger to it all.

Tim wants to have a voice. Writing to me, to Brittany, and all the rest, allows him to be heard by at least a few. The fact that he exists to people outside the prison is a very important link to the free world. I’m posting his most recent article below. I won’t manage his money, but I can give him something he desperately craves: an audience.

And truth be told, I respect the hell out of his initiative. The secret to being a writer is writing—right?