My freshman year of high school I joined the swim team because the only skill required was knowing how not to drown. There were girls on the team of course and my friend Zack and I were very aware of them. As fifteen year old boys in high school noticing girls in Speedos was akin to breathing—we couldn’t avoid it. I had a crush on Jessica, a pretty blonde sophomore who never even looked in my direction. Not that this was in any way a deterrent. My buddy Zack was all encouragement.
                “Dude! She’s gonna be a supermodel some day. Her kids will all be Olympic athletes or movie stars. Man you’ll have to be stupid rich to marry her. Forget it.” I wasn’t listening. All I saw were blonde curls and green eyes.
                It happened one day at practice before our first meet with our rival, Waterville. “Hey Jessica?” She looked at me and I almost fell into the pool. Before my brain turned to mush I did it. “You want to go to a movie with me Friday?” Then common sense kicked in, drying my mouth to a pucker. Holy crap! I just asked this really hot older girl on a date. What the hell was I thinking?
                She thought a moment, shrugged and said “Sure”.
                After practice I staggered to my dad’s car and fell in. When he asked me what the problem was I told him. “Dad, I just asked a girl out and she agreed.” “That’s great, son. What’s her name? Who are her parents? Where does she live?” I just stared out the window and replied, “Yes”. My dad sensed I wasn’t listening and asked more helpful questions. “When’s the date? Where will you take her? Don’t get too creative because these things cost money.”
                MONEY?! I hadn’t even considered it! I didn’t have a job, and allowances were lies perpetuated by TV families, the rich and divorced parents trying to bribe their kids to behave. Money was a problem. But when I told my dad he just winked and handed me two twenties. “Bring back whatever you don’t use.” It was a lot of money. Even with mom working there was no spare change in our house. I took it with the understanding it was his blessing.
                Friday night came and suddenly I was in the back of the family station wagon with Jessica. Dad dropped us off at the mall and we got something to eat at McDonald’s. I struggled not to bite my fingers with the French fries as we talked about classes we liked and teachers to avoid. I really liked this girl and our date would christen my “arrival” at high school, totally obliterating any future fears of fitting in. I think Jessica knew this because even though I was younger than her she treated me like an equal.
                When it grew closer to 9:00pm we walked to the theater and stood in line for tickets. Then it dawned on me: I hadn’t even thought about what movie we should watch! Ohmygodohmygodohmygod! Quick! Think! Uhh . . Tom Hanks is in that one. Yeah. That will have to work. I can’t let her think I don’t know what the hell I’m doing!
                The vendor handed me a pair of tickets. “Have you ever heard of this movie?” I asked without looking at Jessica. Had to stay cool. She was so pretty it tied my stomach in knots. “Tom Hanks is in it.” I said. “He was really funny in Bosom Buddies and Big, maybe this Philadelphia will be good, too.” Pleasepleasepleaseplease let it be good.
                “It might be decent,” she said and when I looked she smiled. I was all in.
                A quick trip to the snack bar for JuJuBees and Coke, then we took out seats near the front. The lack of people on a Friday night should have clued me in that something was seriously wrong. But I was as clueless as they came. During the previews I managed to intertwine my fingers with Jessica’s in what felt like a HUGE victory. Then the movie started.
                To this day I don’t remember a single line or scene of Philadelphia—just the horrible knowledge I took my first date in high school to see a movie about the AIDS epidemic in the homosexual community of Philadelphia. It was a disturbingly sober story painfully worse by my ignorance and the don’t-ask-don’t-tell culture of the 90s.
                Some thoughts galloped through my mind like the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. You IDIOT!! Now she’s gonna think you’re queer! Oh. My. God. She’s pulled her hand away. Say something stupid! Anything. Don’t look at the screen. Don’t look at the screen! Fodder. They will destroy you at school on Monday. Oh crap. You’ve wasted dad’s money too? You might as well leave. LEAVE! Too late.
                We watched the whole movie and though my brain screamed dire premonitions about what Jessica would say to her friends and what she thought of me—there was no social backlash or looks of disgust. No drama at all. No second date either.
 
NOTE: This story has also been entered into the DPS 2016 annual writing competition.

The second death row story slam was a huge success . . . for somebody. There were some really great stories told and it was obvious the people involved practiced a lot. There were no noted authors or prison brass this time, which is a good thing considering the content of one story in particular, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
                My story, entitled No Seconds (see the following post) was fairly PG compared to some of the others, but this was intentional. The stories I hear from guys on the block are anything but family friendly and rarely contain any threads of wisdom. Most of the time they are attempts to brag about what material wealth was gained, various sexploits, and tales of violence. This is not an exaggeration or oversimplification – it’s prison talk in the condensed form. Jerry Springer a cappella.
                Since I don’t really come from a background where selling drugs, gang warfare, domestic violence, and whatnot is common my stories are kind of tame. As a writer with creative license though it is my duty to make tame things interesting and lame things funny. So it was with No Seconds. I utilized all of the acting and gesticulating learned from 12 Angry Men and Serving Life to put on a show. Oh, and I memorized the hell out of about 750 words in a week.
                Despite being high strung with anxiety and caffeine I was the seventh to tell my story with three other guys to tell their stories after me. I was fairly confident my hard work and new theater knowledge would pay off and it did. The audience laughed a lot. It was pretty funny. After all, who brings their first date in high school to see a movie about . . .
                Anyway, everyone finishes telling their story and the judging begins. Stories are graded on a scale of 1-5 with categories for creativity, structure, presentation and so on for a total possible score of 30 points. I felt good about my chances for placing second. There were two stories I believed would beat me out based on emotional value and presentation. One was about an incident of domestic violence being halted in its tracks and the other was about a beat up car with a hole in the floor and a good motor.
                The car story placed second. Not a big surprise, but it left me wondering if I was in the running for first place against the domestic violence story. Was my story on that level?
                Nope.
                The winning story perplexed a number of people I’ve since talked with about the Story Slam. It violated the only rules ever set down for story content—no stories about institutional violence and no profanities. In addition to this it was not vetted in class prior to the slam, unless it was given to the instructor privately, out of the view and feedback of the class. There were other inconsistencies with the story that do not match up with things some of us know about the teller—but that is neither here nor there. Truth was deemphasized during our preparatory classes. It does beg the question: why was a story that violated every rule mad the winner instead of being disqualified?
                My first thought is that this was done intentionally as a way of catering to the interests of certain people. Prisoner politics being what they are, was it possible the judges were swayed? Probably not. Only one of the judges had any real interest in seeing the story that won, succeed. Scoring is a bit tricky too. For this second Story Slam the audience and the judges scored and those two numbers were combined to create an average. Unless the average was somehow changed, mess with the scoring is pretty unlikely.
                By the second day my anger cooled to the degree where I really wondered how this guy won with a story that was no different from any I’ve heard on the cell block. At this point, it no longer mattered I hadn’t placed. Sure I was disappointed, but writing is about trying and failing and trying again. When success in publication and readership comes, it’s sweeter for being infrequent. Hard work and effort is rewarded because the writer finds ways to work within a defined system of rules of the craft. The more you write, the more dedicated to the craft and details of the English language (for those of us who write in English) you become. It gets easy to recognize flaws in structure and violations of rules that have been set for a very good reason.
                Stories of institutional violence deal with assaults by prisoners on other prisoners, staff or vice versa. They are common and gritty because prison is a hard place containing harder people. This content was originally banned because it seemed to upset or rankle some of the higher ups. No problem. Eliminate such stories and tone down any violence or offensive language. PG-13, tops. The whole reason for the vetting process prior to the Story Slam—or so I assumed was to make certain the stories followed the rules. Apparently not.
                This is not the lesson I took away from the experience. Life is never fair and telling tales in prison is the last place I would look for such a thing. No, my lesson came on a much deeper level and had to do with the victims’ families who may hear or learn of the success of whichever prisoner is responsible for their loss and maybe think: “How dare they?” It was a well-deserved cold bucket of water to my remaining anger. “How dare they thwart punishment with reform—they’re breaking a well-defined system of rules! They need to suffer!”
                I seriously doubt this line of thinking was the purpose behind the second story slam, but I’ll run with it since there is real value in the perspective of the victim’s family. I think this gets lost in the struggle. I will certainly try much harder to include them in my efforts to write and evolve as a human being. Even though the law prevents prisoners from even contacting the victim’s family I believe this is one element that should be central to our lives in prison. They have lost more than us and it stands to reason we owe our potential, time, energy and ability to them.