It was early afternoon, but my work was just about done for the day when my buddy, Lance, told me about this fish who wanted to buy a job. Said he had some dynamite shit, and needed to make some friends. Of course he was pointed in our direction. If you needed friends in this medium/minimum security joint, we were the ones to have.

We had control of all the jobs . . . well, not all, but enough so that we were probably—not probably, certainly—the most powerful cons on this prison yard. Not because we were so tough, or because we had money, but because we had "the juice". We could get a guy transferred from a shit kitchen job into the plumbing shop, or the shoe shop if there was any room there, or even get him "unemployed" for a few days, a week, or if he could afford it, a month or two.

You might wonder how we could get such good jobs ourselves. The answer is simple. We were white, we could type, and we didn't seem to have an attitude problem toward the guards. Not many guys like that doing time. When one of these jobs came open because of a parole or transfer, we would always be sure to get one of our own homies into it. And the guards always played our games, 'cause they knew that if they did us right, then we would always be there for them when they had a shitpot full of paper work to get out. No matter what time of day or night, Lance or me would get it out pronto. After you've done a half dozen or so escape bulletins you can knock one out in your sleep. Since we monitored all the fire camps, which any convict could escape by just walking away from at just about any time, we had a bunch every month.

We would never really rat anyone out, but the guards who were in close, the ones who could do us the most good, cut us the most slack, could also depend on gettin’ a straight line on the yard. We'd never tell ’em the mug to look for, but sometimes we'd let 'em know where to start lookin’.

So anyway, back to this fish who wanted a cush job. Lance lays it on me that we're gonna meet the dude in the Medium yard at 3:00, by the gym doors. That's why we get our job crap done by then. But we don't have to bother telling anyone that we're going, except that we tell the watch clerk, also a con, we will be back to read the DMS, if the Lieutenant should ask. Then we just split over to the meet. It was a real nice day out, about 60^o or so, sky was real blue. The guy is there and he's real nervous--real young. First fall, I suppose. Even Y.A. don't get you ready for hard time. But this was real easy hard time. But he don't know that yet, and we ain't tryin' to hip him to it until we find out what kind of asshole he is.

Right away he pulls out the dope and starts firing up a street doobie, and right away we know he's either real "fat", real lame, or probably both. We all toke up a few hits and I start rushing like the Mixer at Knott's Berry Farm. I know I gotta maintain, 'cause we still got to go back and do the sheet with the Louie. But Lance is the one's gotta actually read it to him. All I gotta do is run it first with Lance to make sure it's right.

So I pull myself together real hard and put the stone-face to this kid with the cigar joints. He gets even more nervous after the hits and starts motor-mouthin’ ’bout his beef. Big yawn.

After a minute I'm not payin’ any attention to either of ’em, but just groovin' on how nice it is to be stoned at three in the afternoon, and how fine the weather is. I'm lookin’ around the yard, checkin’ for guards and kinda watchin’ the guys on the tennis court bat the ball around. (Yeah, tennis! A cracked, shit asphalt court and a net with tank holes in it, but still, tennis.)

Then like a whole new revelation hits me, like it was news. One of those stoned moments when somethin’ you've known all along smacks you right in the chops like you've never heard it before in your life. And wow! There it is: the earth is round, or 2+2=4! One of those, ya know? Ever had one? I guess if you do dope you must have, and if you don't, ya don't have any idea what I'm sayin'. So the big insight for me that moment was that, are you ready for this? I'm in PRISON.

Yeah, I know. By then it should have sunk in real good, but I guess it hadn't. Cause right then, lookin’ up at that tower with that guy in that uniform carrying that M16, and realizin’ that he would actually shoot me—SHOOT ME—if he thought I was out of line, it sorta stunned me. Up ’till then the whole thing had been an ordeal, a process. Right then it became a concept. Am I gettin’ through to ya? It's a moment in my life I know I'll never forget.

Oh, yeah. The thought right after that was; I can do this.

That may not mean anything to someone who’s never done that kinda time, but if you've done it, you know just what I mean. It's a real dangerous thought too. It's the one that brings most of 'em back for seconds and thirds. I can do this.

When you tell people on the outside about doin’ time, lots of 'em say the same exact thing, the same words: God, I could never do that, I'd go nuts! In fact, that's what I thought before I went down. That's why I fought so long and hard to stay out. Twenty-seven months in court, and ten thousand hard earned legit bucks worth of lawyers fightin’. If I’d only known in my body back then what I learned that moment in the yard, I could have saved myself a lot of time, grief, and money. Cause, obviously, I could do it. I just didn't know it.

But again, back to fatjoints. I'm squattin’ there with the two of ’em, stoned trippin', when a dormie of mine comes by, says hi to Lance, and then says to me, "Hey there, Killer!" Well, the guy with the joint immediately shifts his attention to me, ‘cause he already knows Lance is down for an armed robbery, and Lance guards to it that his gun wasn't even loaded, and Lance puts out a pretty mellow vibe anyhow. But me with my stoneface needing a shave for about a week, I coulda posed for State Pen Posterboy. I was definitely looking like the guy your mother told you to walk on the other side of the street if ya saw comin'.

Now this guy hears the "Killer" tag, and puts the inevitable 2+2 together, and figures if anyone on this yard is capable of taking life and turning it into death, I'm your boy. If anyone could have seen my shiny little proud face when my den mother pinned my Bobcat badge onto my brand-new Cub Scout uniform, they would never have thought that about thirty years later I would be wearin’ this type of blue uniform, and definitely without merit badges.

Now he's real nervous, and figures his best shot is to lay some weed on us up front and not even ask for the job. Just depend that we'll do right by ‘im. I accept the doob, and tune the lop out, knowing he's gonna be a problem to somebody, and it ain't gonna be me. Besides, I know Lance will fix him up okay, 'cause that's the kinda guy Lance is.

So after the workday was done, I went back to my dorm to read for a while before dinner, and they started again, the flies. They would land on my book and on my face, and buzz me so bad that I would really go off. So I put down my book and got a newspaper rolled up and headed for the john, where they all seemed to live and breed. I guess they were mostly in there ‘cause that's where the water was, and that was where the only good shit-smell was. So it was home for 'em.

My bunk was my "house", and since they wouldn't stay away from mine, I guess I felt compelled to go to theirs. And on the way, someone says, "Oh, oh. There goes Killer again. Kill a few of those little bastards for me, Killer!" And that's how I got the tag.

Killing flies.

I was good at it. It seemed like therapy for me. I could get a lot of hostility out that way. I could kill as many as fifty or sixty in about ten to fifteen minutes. It was pretty easy because they were so thick in there. Why they were so thick was because the trashcans were just outside the john doors, and almost everybody in the pen eats a lot of candy and ice cream (and smokes a lot of Camels) and the candy wrappers would attract the flies by the hundreds. As soon as anyone would open the door, they’d let in a dozen or so flies with them. Sometimes it would be so hot in the dorms that some fools who’d be home all day would use the trashcans to prop the doors open all afternoon. Then the flies would be so thick you couldn't even walk in there.

So I’d go into the bathroom and kill flies in the afternoon. Once I killed five with one swat—two females and three males. How could I know what sex they were? Think about it.

I was living in a beautiful apartment on a cliff above Redondo Beach. It was a fine place with a panoramic view of almost fifty miles of about the richest beaches in the world. From the north end of Malibu to the southern tip of Palos Verdes, with Catalina right in front, just about thirty miles out. At night the light-show alone was worth the rent, almost.

But this was about mid-afternoon and I was home alone. Sharon was down working her butt off (literally) and I was sitting alone in the place, depressed and wondering what to do about it, when I remembered that I had about a dozen hits of acid somewhere in the medicine cabinet. I figured, what the hell, I've used acid to blow out depression before, and sometimes I've come down very inspired from it. So I went in and found them and dropped one. But since I remembered that I'd put them in the bottle about a year or so before, I figured they were probably weak from age, so I dropped another for good measure.

I came on in about an hour or so, and was lying on the bed watching MTV. After I came on a bit I wanted to do something more than just plug into the tube, so I got out my Nikon and started snapping shots of the view. I sleep naked, and hadn't bothered to dress that day, so I was still naked. After a while with the camera, I became aware of my nakedness and started to take some pictures of my dick. Acid seems to make it shrink up to peanut size, and with my wide angle I was firing shots with the head of it stuffed into the plastic film can.

Just tripping.

After those, I realized that when I had these developed, whoever looked at them to proof them would think that I'd been badly slighted by Mother Nature. So I followed those shots up with some more of a raging hard-on that I had managed to come up with after a few minutes stimulation.

Finally bored with my body, I decided to water my houseplants, a job that took a while because at the time I think there were about twenty or thirty pots of various types. I watered and cleaned and talked to them, and since we didn't have any furniture in the living room where most of them were, they were all set on the floor.

I got down on the floor with them, and crawled around between them, letting them know that I still loved them, and that's when I saw…flies; alive and dead, about twenty or so. I hadn't noticed them before because, as I said, we didn't have any furniture, so I never hung out in the living room, and because they hid behind the drapes. I cleaned up the dead ones, and then got a paper rolled up for the rest. I began to remember how it was in the pen, and started to enjoy chasing them down and killing them.

One particular fly, a fairly big one, kept evading me. He was a great little flier, and he was very quick, and seemed never to land. I chased him for at least five, maybe ten minutes before I got him. And then I had to hit him a couple of times to kill him. With all the plants and curtains I had a hard time getting a good shot. But with the acid in me I was very focused, very into it.

Once he was dead I felt a great sadness come over me.

It was a very strange feeling, applied to the death of this one little fly. I had killed perhaps thousands of flies. I'd always hated them. Not fanatically, but a normal revulsion for them. And here I was, mourning the death of this one little fly. Feeling sad because I had killed him. Wondering why I'd really done it. I could have chased him back outside. I could have just ignored him. It wasn't like in prison, where they were landing on my face and crawling all around the sinks and urinals. If I hadn't gotten down on the floor with my plants, I probably wouldn't even have known he was there.

I decided that the reason I had killed him was for sport, out of my boredom and depression. I had taken life and turned it into death, just for fun. I was indeed a killer.

I started thinking about how big I was to the fly and how many advantages I had over him. When I compared my comprehension of him to his comprehension of me, I thought that to this tiny little creature I could be his concept of God. Why not? And if not God, then certainly an infinitely more powerful and complex creature than was he. Then I began to contemplate how it would be if God was to take a notion

to seek me out, tiny little creature that I am to Him, and start

swatting away with His edition of the New York Times. Whack, whack.

And me, I'd be scurrying around down here, maybe getting in my car and making

a run for it, weaving in and out of cars and houses, trying to escape from

my fate. Other people jumping away from me and shouting to each other,

"Look out! God's after another one! Stand clear!!"

And that Big Arm coming down from the sky,

hand fifty yards across the knuckles, with that big

fist wrapped around that huge newspaper. I'd look up and see the sports finals,

thirty feet high, coming at me at about the speed of sound. Lakers 116 - Celtics 110.

And every time it came down all

the trees would blow from the wind, and the ground would

rumble and shake. Sometimes He would change directions a little and SPLAT,

a bystander would get his ticket punched. But He would always return to me,

the way I'd kept returning to that fly, determined

to kill me.

I didn't beat myself up about the whole thing too much, but did give it a lot of thought. A fly lives about eight days, I think. And for the whole life trip, he has to work his ass off beating those wings or he'll die. Only about one male in ten gets laid in his entire life, and all of them live on a diet of shit and garbage from days one through eight.

But my greatest insight about flies was that they couldn’t help being flies. There is not one Goddamn thing they can do to change what they are.

After that I stopped hating flies and stopped killing them. I don't think I've killed even one since that day. In fact, I've avoided killing all bugs since then as much as possible

So as the acid started to wind on down, I decided that the way to beat the last of the depression was to get a shower and get dressed up and go down to Sharon's work looking good. I’d get one of her smiles that would blow the rest of the depression out the door.

As I got my tie tied, I reached for my tiepin from the little heart shaped box that I'd always kept on the back of the toilet. It isn't really a tiepin, but a small diamond earring stud for pierced ears. I thought to myself that, although it had never happened, if I continued to keep my good jewelry on the back of the toilet, someday I would be down on my knees, up to my elbow in toilet water, clean toilet water if I was real lucky. I’d be groping down in the bowl for something that wouldn't have been there if I'd had the sense to keep it somewhere else. Right then I moved the little box to a safer place and thanked the acid for this second little insight.

Now I never keep my diamonds on the back of the toilet, and I never go out of my way to kill flies. I never sell pot anymore either. Oh, I can do the time. I know that now. But I never want to again.