Chapter 40

If there was anything which could make me feel worse that I already was while I was at El Reno, was a visit from Taylor. There were two, maybe three such visits, and although I suppose I should have been grateful they cared enough about me to visit, it was really like a dark cloud hovering over my head after they wrote and said they would be coming up there. Each day I found myself becoming more tense, allowing it to spill over to those around me. It was a normal thing for inmates to have those kind of feelings, for whatever reason, somehow news or visits from home always elicited some kind of overreaction. I am quite sure that my caseworker at El Reno had told my parents that visitation from them would go a long way in determining how soon I would be released. I say this because it is true, and also because of the way my mother acted when she would visit. Georgia Orean Bolton was a vivacious, talkative woman normally, never one to hold back her feelings to anybody. But when they came to see me she actually became almost mute. In the book I describe that unnatural behavior of her because she was in a situation where she could not take center stage in a room full of other people. No on there wanted to hear her views on anything, they were there, like her, to visit someone. To not be able to project her persona, wherever she might be, was a huge comedown for her. The visits was the only time in my memory that my daddy actually did more talking than she did. The one bright spot in the visits? They brought Steve, he would be around five-years-old by then and already I could begin to see the hero-worship her would have for me during his formative years.

After that Saturday visit, the next day I was so wired up about it that I went into the yard and found "my" spot,, away from most of the milling inmates and lay flat on the grass and stared into the Heavens. At some point during my incarceration I found that if I lay on the ground and stared up into the sky for a while I would be able to chase what demons were giving me problems. It was a strange phenomena . . . The vast immensity of the sky, with clouds forming and reshaping into themselves seemed to allow me to push aside negative thoughts and become as one with myself, which given my paranoia was no easy chore. But it always worked and I have often wondered, why, later on in my life when things were "getting to me" that I never found that spot of ground somewhere and challenged myself to come back to reality like I used to do in the joint . . . I would do the same thing when I went to another prison later on, Lompoc, for parole violation.

Chapter 41 coming up . . .

My Novels:

Write To Murder . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/956621

Margaret and David: A Love Story . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1072842

My Mother's Revenge . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1132742