In the Sanctuary of Outcasts

by Neil White

  I had $400 in my personal account at another bank in town. It occurred to me that I didn’t really need $3,000. I needed time. I needed two days. Sixteen working hours. Just enough time for the grocer to return and deliver the promised funds.

  I opened my personal checkbook and, despite having a balance of $400, wrote a $3,000 check to myself, from myself. On the bottom of the check I wrote, “loan.” The following day this check would bounce without some kind of coverage, so the next morning, a Thursday, I wrote a check from my business account to my personal account for $3,000. On the subject line I wrote “repayment.”

  The next day, the grocer returned. I drove to his store and picked up a check for $4,700. I deposited the funds in my business account to cover the check I’d written the day before.

  No one seemed to notice the transfers. All was well once the grocer fulfilled his promise. I discovered that with two checking accounts at different banks I could do something I’d never dreamed possible. I could buy time. And no one would ever know.

  Walking in circles around the track, I understood a gerbil’s drive to run inside a wheel. I felt that same instinct. I walked so many hours, the concrete wore down the soles of my boots. By late August, I had lost almost thirty pounds, leaving the fat behind me, one drop of sweat at a time.

  On my laps around the path, I passed Ella in her antique wheelchair, navigating the walkways. I waved at Harry and Father Reynolds riding their old-fashioned bikes. Jimmy and Sister Margie nodded as they trekked by on their three-wheelers. They were going in circles, too. And I wondered if it gave them some sense of escape or helped them pass the time.

  One particularly hot day, I noticed Ella making more than a dozen trips from her room to the patient canteen and back. I wanted to ask if she had heard about the plans to relocate the patients, but I didn’t want to upset her.

  As I turned the corner by the breezeway that ran between the prison and the leprosy sides, I heard her call out for help. I looked around for a guard. Through the screen, I saw the handles on her wheelchair, but I couldn’t see her. She called out again. I yelled that I’d be right there. Ella had slid down in her chair. Too exhausted to pull herself up, she was about to fall onto the concrete floor. I reached over the back of her chair, put my hands under her arms and gently pulled her into a sitting position.

  “You OK?” I asked.

  “Tired,” Ella said, her voice weak.

  The temperature, even in the shade of the hallway, was in the nineties. I was about to tell her to be more careful, to stay in the air-conditioning, when she asked if I would push her to her room. I looked around the inmate courtyard again. No guards. No one else to help. I pushed the old chair around to her dorm. The faster I pushed, the faster the hand cranks rotated. I slowed down after Ella’s head listed to the left. I worried the spinning handles might hit her.

  I held open the door of her dorm and waited for her to take over.

  “To my room,” she said, nodding down the hall.

  “I’m not supposed to go inside,” I said.

  “Will they put you in jail?” she asked, exhausted, but with a smile.

  She had a point. I figured I couldn’t get in too much trouble for aiding an eighty-year-old woman with no legs. As I pushed Ella into the cool hallway of her dormitory, I realized that for the first time I had touched someone with leprosy. I made a note to pay attention not to touch my own face until I got back to my dorm to wash my hands.

  No one saw me push Ella into her room. No guards. No other patients. No inmates. No one knew where I had been.

  CHAPTER 22

  On one of my afternoon walks, when the shade from the trees started to spill over onto the concrete track, Link joined me as I made laps around the inmate courtyard.

  “Why you hang out with them leopards?” Link asked. “You gonna catch that shit!”

  “I thought you wanted to catch it,” I said.

  “I do, but I gotta figure out how to make some cash ’til I get that shit.” Link looked at me and smiled. “Teach me how you stole money from them banks!”

  “What kind of relationship do you have with your banker?” I asked.

  “Fuck,” Link said, “I ain’t never been inside a motherfuckin’ bank!”

  I explained to Link that kiting checks required patience, a unique relationship with financial institutions, and was dependent on the appearance of stability. And I reminded him that I didn’t actually get any money for myself. “It’s really about buying time.” I told him. Link didn’t follow. “It’s complicated,” I said, hoping he’d lose interest.

  “My shit complicated, too!” Link said. He launched into the difficulty of supply and demand in the drug business. Link had been forced to adapt. When the drug money dried up, he said, he fell back on carjacking.

  “You didn’t.”

  “Fuck, yeah, I did!” he bragged, adding that carjacking took patience, too. “I hide in the bushes at the Popeyes drive-though,” Link said. “I wait there until a woman come through in a Mercedes or a BMW. Late model,” he said, “Couldn’t be no man in the car.” Sometimes Link waited for hours. “Then after she get her food, I jump out, point the gun at her face, and say, ‘Get out the car, bitch!’” Link threw his head back and laughed. “Them ladies would jump out the car—leave their keys, their purse, and their chicken. So I had something to eat on the way to the West Bank.”

  “You planned your carjackings around chicken!?”

  “You ever had Popeyes chicken?!”

  I thought about Neil and Maggie and Linda. Driving through a Popeyes in our vintage Mercedes. “You never did that with children in the car?” I asked.

  “What the fuck difference do that make!?”

  “That sort of thing affects people. They have nightmares. They are afraid to leave their houses. They get depressed. They live in fear after that sort of experience.”

  “You think I give a fuck!?” Then Link said, “Why you always worried ’bout other people?”

  I asked Link to imagine what it would feel like if someone carjacked his mother.

  “My momma ain’t got no good car.”

  I obviously wasn’t getting through. “Did you ever get caught?” I asked.

  Link was almost caught once, but only because he abandoned his well-laid plan. He made a spontaneous decision.

  “There was this Little Debbie truck,” he said, “making stops on St. Charles Avenue.” Link said the driver left the engine running to make a quick delivery. Link assumed the money bag was inside the truck. “I jump in, take off. That motherfucker was a stick shift!” Link jerked his body back and forth as he described the drive down St. Charles Avenue. “Zebra Cakes flying all over the motherfuckin’ place! Drove five blocks. Then hit a motherfuckin’ streetcar pole!”

  “Were you hurt?”

  “Fuck, yeah,” Link said, “racked my nuts.”

  Link’s stories were outrageous, but he had a sharp sense of humor, and I sensed, deep down, he was a good person. I didn’t understand how he could randomly point guns at people.

  “If you saw me walking down the street in New Orleans, would you point a gun at me and take my money?”

  “No,” Link said. “I know you.”

  “Then how can you just point a gun in a woman’s face and never think about it again?”

  “When you on crack,” Link said, “you don’t see no faces.”

  Link joined me often. Most of his youth had been spent in and out of juvenile detention centers. And Carville was his sixth go-round in prison as an adult. Link told me he was only twenty-seven years old. He had been shot four times. “Bullet burns like a motherfucker,” he said. “How many times Clark Kent been shot?” he asked, laughing at the absurdity of the thought. “Fuck, I forgot, bullets just bounce off Clark Kent!” Link threw his head back, laughed, and walked away.

  Link and I were different in many ways. But I had trouble in my twenty-seventh year, too.

  On a humid summer morning in 1987 in Oxfor
d, I received a call from my banker, a lovely young woman named Wendy, who had just been promoted from teller to loan officer. When I entered her office, I saw the look on her face, and I knew. My heart pounded fast, but I tried to hide my fear.

  “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to say,” she said in her sweet southern drawl. Wendy looked down at her desk and said it had come to her attention that I had been kiting checks. Close to tears, she told me she was going to be forced to call my loans. She would have to close my checking account, at least for a while. And, as if the words almost wouldn’t come out of her mouth, she was required to complete a form that would notify the FBI of my activity.

  I left her office and went to see my only local investor. With nowhere else to turn, I explained what had happened. When he asked the amount of the overdraft, I told him: “About $8,000.” He seemed relieved. He called a meeting of the other investors. They agreed to invest another $30,000. We opened a new account at another bank in town. The investor’s secretary would serve as bookkeeper. The next day, I covered the overdraft, paid off the loan, and went about my business of publishing the Oxford Times. I got the sense that, in spite of my poor financial management, my investors liked what I was doing with the newspaper. I had also convinced myself that my actions were justified because the newspaper was important to the community.

  I didn’t tell Linda about the incident. I was rattled, but I had a newspaper to get out. No time to waste with worry. I would tell her when the FBI called. But they never did. The incident was never investigated. I never heard another word about it.

  In a way, I did feel bulletproof. And one thing was clear. As long as I raised the money to pay my overdrafts, nobody seemed to take kiting too seriously.

  I also figured if the investors had put up another $30,000 after I’d been caught kiting, they would follow me anywhere. I embarked on an aggressive campaign to attract new advertisers. I fired our delivery boys and shifted to direct mail delivery of the Oxford Times. It added $2,000 per week to our expenses, but I was certain it would pay off. I also hired more writers. Better stories, more complete coverage, would help me compete against the Eagle.

  But the new advertisers never arrived. Seven months later, I stood in a U.S. bankruptcy court in Oxford, Mississippi.

  My investors lost $90,000; local vendors lost more than $50,000.

  I had failed, but I did not regret trying. And I refused to end my publishing career in failure. Even as I stood in bankruptcy—an attorney at my side and creditors to my back—I knew I would try again. I would take a lesson from the Oxford Eagle. Its editorial restraint had a financial upside. I would move to Gulfport, a market thirty times the size of Oxford. I would avoid conflict with those in power. I would publish a glossy magazine that showcased the Mississippi Coast. I would focus more on making money and less on changing the world. I had already talked to Linda about my plan. She agreed to get a job to support our family while I raised money for the new venture. All I needed was $50,000.

  As I turned to face those I owed but could not pay, I noticed a singular absence in the courtroom: reporters. The Eagle’s indolence extended even to my demise. I had launched the Oxford Times precisely because the established daily was unresponsive to situations like this. Now, I was the beneficiary of their lethargy. There would be no detailed account of my debts, no questions about shuffling funds, no printed opinions surrounding my failure, and no testimony from local merchants who had lost money. No one was there to tell the story.

  CHAPTER 23

  Doc’s job as an office clerk afforded him access to inside information. As a clerk, he made copies, transported memorandums between departments, and overheard conversations between guards. Sometimes he made extra copies of memos to pass among the inmates. We often knew about prison initiatives before the guards did.

  I asked Doc if he’d heard that the patients would be relocated.

  Doc had read all about the plans to move the leprosy patients. One plan called for handing out an annual stipend so patients could pay for their own housing. Another plan required displaced patients to be relocated at a nursing home. Another option included construction of a new set of dorms on the other side of the colony so the inmates and patients could not commingle.

  The Bureau of Prisons planned to turn Carville into a massive prison with more than a thousand inmates. And the primary objective of each proposal was simple: remove the leprosy patients.

  On a rainy Sunday afternoon, when Doc took a break from his reading, I told him about my plans to write a magazine exposé about Carville. I recounted Ella’s journey to Carville. I told him about my shared history with Annie Ruth at the LSU football games. I gave him a detailed account of Link’s carjacking escapades.

  Doc raised an eyebrow. “Don’t believe everything these people tell you.”

  “The inmates?” I asked. “Or the leprosy patients?”

  “Both,” he said. “They make this crap up.” Doc, in a rather condescending tone, reminded me that the patients were institutionalized. The inmates, he said, had nothing better to do with their time than tell lies.

  I felt like I had disappointed him. Like a younger sibling who was naive and gullible. Doc was annoyed that he had to live with these people. They were beneath his intellect. He didn’t want them as friends. But I believed the stories. The details were too vivid to be fabricated. My instincts, everything I had learned as a reporter, told me they were not lying.

  “They don’t have any reason to lie,” I said.

  Doc didn’t answer. He went back to reading his medical journal. A moment later, he said, “Just don’t believe everybody.”

  The photograph that appeared in Entrepreneur magazine, 1991.

  CHAPTER 24

  Carville was full of men whose grand schemes trumped common sense. Steve Read and I were two of the best examples. Three weeks after I declared bankruptcy in Oxford, my family and I moved to Gulfport, Mississippi. We lived rent free in my aunt Viola’s empty house. Linda took a job as a receptionist at a local advertising agency. I stayed at home, wrote a business plan, and sought out investors. My mother and father encouraged me to get a job. “You’re obviously not cut out for business,” my father told me. But he didn’t understand. I’d read stories about businessmen who rebounded from bankruptcy. “Success is always built upon failure,” I’d read. I believed in second chances, and I was perfectly positioned for a comeback. Because my financial troubles in Oxford never hit the press, my reputation in my hometown of Gulfport remained unblemished.

  I presented investors with my business plan for a glossy lifestyle publication for the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a metropolitan region situated between New Orleans and Mobile. Within three months, I had convinced a local businessman to invest $50,000 and I launched Coast Magazine.

  In the first year of publication, our circulation grew to twenty thousand. It surpassed our wildest expectations. Linda quit her job at the advertising agency and joined me as editor of the publication. Our magazine made the people and places of the coast look beautiful. New investors approached me about getting in on the action. I launched a sister publication, Coast Business Journal. Soon, I bought out the businessman who initially invested.

  I hired a ragtag crew in the early days, men and women with real talent who had never been given a chance. I trained them and, for the most part, they rose to the occasion. An elementary school teacher’s assistant ascended to the position of editor. A recovering drug addict and ex-con handled door-to-door subscription sales. A high school dropout worked his way up to the position of art director. A marginally literate woman became a top salesperson among the restaurateurs and nightclub owners of Biloxi.

  I owned a burgeoning media empire, and I was having a great time again. The advertising dollars rolled in, as did the awards. The plaques and trophies and certificates covered the walls of our offices. Linda and I moved into a new home one block from the beach. I bought a vintage Mercedes for Linda, a boat for myself.

&nb
sp; Our magazine featured never-before-published photos of Elvis Presley, as well as rare images of Jayne Mansfield taken the day before her fatal automobile accident (the starlet was photographed straddling a large cannon on an island just off the Mississippi coast). Each issue featured exquisite architectural photography highlighting the finest homes in the region, including full-color spreads of the home of Judge and Mrs. Walter Gex. We added fun departments like “People to Watch,” “20 Questions,” and “Nostalgia Yearbook,” wherein we scanned high school yearbook photos of bank presidents, mayors, beauty queens, and politicians, along with a few notorious residents serving prison time.

  I set out to build an empire and everything that went along with it. As we celebrated the first anniversary of Coast Magazine, I presented a five-year plan of ascent to my employees.

  The first year, I would buy Louisiana Life magazine, a financially distressed publication with a devout subscriber base that in its heyday had won a National Magazine Award. It would be the first acquisition in building a network of city and regional magazines.

  The second year, I would purchase real estate—the Hewes Building, a five-story structure across the street from Hancock Bank. Equipped with an antique, hand-operated cage elevator, replete with a full-time operator, the building would serve as our corporate headquarters.

  In year three, I would purchase a yacht. I would christen it Magazine, and it would be available to all employees to entertain clients, advertisers, and prospective investors.

  In year four, I would launch a weekly trade journal entitled Business South. The weekly tabloid would be sent free to every business owner in the southeastern United States. It would function as a quasi Reader’s Digest for businesspeople in the South.