Five People You'll Meet in Prison

Description

After years of hedonism in the literary life, journalist Brandon M. Stickney is caught in an opiate epidemic drug sting and sentenced to prison. Surrounded by society's most troubled individuals and hostile guards, Stickney faces his addiction and mental illness behind the razor wire. Searching for answers, he befriends four inmates and a guard who help change his life. Haunted by severe cravings, nights of mania, and threatened by prison's evils, he clings to hope, learning that recovery is possible, even in the darkest of places. Startling yet humorous, The Five People You'll Meet in Prison is part memoir, part expose on the largest of America's industries: prison. A memorable real-life rendering of the anti-hero's journey.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir
• Activism

Informations

• Publié par: Bancroft Press
• Date de parution: 22 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781610880978
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU’LL MEET IN PRISON
A MEMOIR OF ADDICTION, MANIA & HOPE

BRANDON M. STICKNEY
Copyright: Brandon M. Stickney, 2020. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review.
Cover & Interior design: Tracy Copes Author Photo/Prison Page Illustrations: Patrick Stickney
978-1-61088-196-8—HC 978-1-61088-197-5—PB 978-1-61088-198-2—Kindle 978-1-61088-199-9--Ebook
Published by Bancroft Press “Books that Enlighten” 410-358-0658 P.O. Box 65360, Baltimore, MD 21209 www.bancroftpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
For Bruce Bortz, who helped me get back into “The Show,” and for Mitch Albom, who opened the gates of Heaven.
“…feeling just like this prison system wanted me to— utterly powerless, vulnerable, alone.” —Piper Kerman, Orange is the New Black

“We are sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment.” —Wayne Kramer
AUTHOR’S NOTE

T his memoir is based on my personal experiences and recollections about life in four different New York State prisons over the span of nearly two years. Due to the material’s sensitive nature, I’ve changed most names. I’ve also changed some subject descriptions, some dates, and some locations of some events. Most conversations are drawn from notes I made while in prison, while some are recreated from memory afterward.
All five men alluded to in the book title knew I was a journalist and writer. And all of them urged me to write a book … with them in it. The five named characters are composites, but they are composites of real characters I lived with in prison. The five fine fellows who kept me from going crazy in prison appear here in all their ragged glory.
This book took nineteen months for me to research in prison, and nine months to write and edit after I was released. For reasons that will soon become obvious, it was a very hard book to write.
Brandon M. Stickney Palm Beach, FL May 2019
CONTENTS
Introduction by Geoffrey Giuliano
Preface
Chapter 1. America Jails Journalists Too
Chapter 2. After the Flood
Chapter 3. Crashing the Reception
Chapter 4. Bad Boys, Bad Boys
Chapter 5. A Short Fuse
Chapter 6. Left for Dead
Chapter 7. Suboxone Days
Chapter 8. Cutting Up
Chapter 9. AA (Anxiety Attacks)
Chapter 10. Interview with an Offender
Chapter 11. A “Hands On” Facility
Chapter 12. On Short Time
Chapter 13. Everyone Knows This is Nowhere
Chapter 14. Toughing it Out
Chapter 15. Hiding My Banana
Chapter 16. Nothing to be Gained Here
Chapter 17. The Big Empty
Bibliography
Additional References
INTRODUCTION
I first laid eyes upon Brandon M. Stickney in the local bookstore on Main Street in Lockport, New York, sometime in the very early 1990s. He recognized me as the guy who “wrote books about the Beatles,” which was how all the locals knew me—“Hey, aren’t you the guy?” To which I answered, “Yes.”
A few days later, he showed up at our red brick Victorian manor with a copy of a book about John Lennon that I had penned with Lennon’s half-sister, Julia Baird. The young man was after an autograph. After opening the front double doors of our studio at 735 East Market Street, I said to him for some reason: “You don’t really want an autograph. You want a job.” I then showed him into my first-floor office, and sat down behind my desk, but the job interview was no interview at all. He was hired, and I expected to see him early the next day for work on Blackbird: The Life and Times of Paul McCartney , among other things.
After a week or two, I said, “Look man, you might as well just move in.” The house was huge, and my small family occupied only a few miserly rooms. I invited him to pick an upstairs bedroom, which he promptly did. After a while, a girlfriend of his showed up. She was nice but normal and didn’t blend well with the Krishna conscious vibe going on in our artsy ashram home. Often, I could hear them making adolescent love, which I found vaguely amusing; two young kids going at it like rabbits on the second floor. It’s funny the things you remember.
Brandon was an excellent worker and a very intelligent boy. I never had any expectation he was in any way adversely involved with alcohol. In fact, at some level, he seemed rather collegiate, clean cut, and hopelessly naïve about the world. A good-natured, jovial fellow, he got along well with my family and was courteous and professional with the many guests from all walks of life who flowed in and out of that beautiful big house, including everyone from the famous to the tweedy publishing drones from Toronto and New York who would come to either tweak me on some project they had already paid for or just make sure it was progressing along the lines preferred by their literary masters in midtown Manhattan.
Young Stickney was my right-hand man, a gleeful Gabby Hayes to my Roy Rogers. He was a damn fine employee, a good and trusted friend, and professional colleague. I took him to Europe with me on a publishing tour partly because I needed him, but more because I pitied him—he hadn’t really been anywhere outside the confines of the narrow-minded Western New York arena.
Together we visited classy Krishna temples in London and brothels in Belgium, and stayed in the cheapest hotels I could find—I was very money conscious (then as now) because I’ve often seen people from poor families who go astray when they suddenly strike it rich. Anyway, we buttoned up whatever it was I was after in Europe for, and summarily returned home. I was happy Brandon had a chance to see the world, where he always acquitted himself admirably in the discharge of his duties.
I remember going down to Florida with him in my tricked-out camper van with an automatic bed, fridge, and a crazy cool stereo system on which we played Bob Dylan’s “Everything is Broken” all the way from Western New York to Key West, over and over again. Obviously, a terrific traveling song!
While we drove, I remember making love to my wife Vrnda on the bed, trying to be as quiet as possible, thinking I got away with it, only later to be nudged and winked at by Mr. Stickney about the bawdy marital adventure in the backseat of my rocking super van.

There is an incredible tale about my end times in Lockport and how everything I had built so carefully, so purposefully, so lovingly was destroyed by other people’s, avarice, jealousy, and petty mindedness. Others may hold differing opinions, but now at sixty-five the way I look at the history I myself created and successfully marketed reign supreme over anyone else’s views on the world of what I did or who I am.
The fact is I dropped the ball when it came to my relationships with people—trusting those I should have kept at arms-length and tossing aside those I should’ve embraced. Being wealthy is hard work and it doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Anyway, I fucked up and lost, or rather, had it stolen away, piece by piece by persons—who here shall remain nameless. But, as they say, you know well who you are!
As for Brandon, I never knew anything about his savage substance-abuse. I think I recall him doing a bit of cocaine back in the day and not thinking too much about it (even though it wasn’t my cup of tea). I was a pretty much a live-and-let-live kind of enlightened dude. Fifteen years and about five lifetimes later, I heard that Brandon had become a hopeless addict and was in and out of jail on various offenses in that insular, close-minded, know-nothing town of Lockport. That black hole of blue-collar colloquialisms would be enough to make anybody a junkie. I blame Lockport—don’t blame him, say I!
Brandon’s a lovely man with a good heart whom for quite a time, ended up the worst kind of unsalvageable human wreckage, stomping around that one-horse town making one monumentally stupid mistake after another until now, after a decade plus of complete and ardently dedicated self-destruction, he has finally come to his senses, or so I hope!

There is an interesting parallel here: I too went crazy for approximately the same period of time, but my drug of choice was beautiful young Thai women. Now that I have quietly fucked my way from one end of Southeast Asia to another, I’ve pretty much had my fill and now live quietly and contentedly with my ten-year-old son, Eden.
To be honest, I do regret all those years of my devotional practice lost, my beautiful home decimated by those closest to me, my career in ruins by the glut of crappy free content on the Internet, which prevents people from getting in their cars, going to a decent bookstore, and plopping down $35 for a copy of one of my thirty-two books.
Strangely, while all this was happening, pretty much the same kind of soul-sucking monster was eating away at my man Brandon. As a highly productive and responsible reprobate, however, I still managed to turn up in about twenty-five Z movies, start a hip T-shirt design company, resurrect my audiobook business, and push out an angelic little boy who sits across the room from me now as I fiddle with this crummy iPad while talking about a guy Eden never knew and long ago, a life he never lived.
In many ways, this introduction is as much about me as Brandon because we were, and are, kindred spirits, brothers in arms, lovers of the literary life walking together now (even without seeing each other for decades) as colleagues and the closest of friends. Which of us enters first the yawning grave over in Lockport’s historic Cold Springs Cemetery, just around the corner from my old manor, time will tell. But from the moment he showed up at my grand front door seeking an autograph—perhaps three decades or so—I have had nothing but love, respect, admiration, and compassion for this exceptionally talented, big-hearted, terminally scattered soul.

Read this book carefully b