Gangster Redemption

by Larry Lawton

  “‘Can I see that?’ I asked her. Think of how that sounds. If anyone asked you to see your cell phone, you’d look at them like they were crazy. She was a beautiful little girl, and here was this burly tattooed guy bothering her. She handed it to me. It was a flip phone, and I held it in my hand, and it was like a little baby to me. I was afraid I might break it. I was thinking, How do my fat fingers touch these little buttons? After a few minutes I closed the phone and gave it back to her. She looked at me without speaking, and I know I must have weirded her out, because at the next stop, she got up and moved. If you ever want to ride a bus with your own row of seats all to yourself, just do what I did.

  “I’m on the bus, and I’m looking out the window, and I’m experiencing sensory overload. I was overwhelmed. I’m looking at cars. And every few minutes I would lift my arms over my head and grin. The people around me must have thought I was nuts.”

  Lawton was daydreaming, staring at all the cars and scenery, when the Greyhound bus pulled into a gas station. The driver announced that everyone had forty-five minutes to get something to eat.

  Get something to eat? Lawton thought. At a gas station? When Lawton went to prison in 1996, a gas station was a gas station. This gas station had a Subway sandwich shop, a McDonalds, and a food mart. Lawton knew what Subway was from watching the commercial starring Jared and his huge pair of pants on TV in prison.

  “I went to the Subway store and got in line,” said Lawton. “I was really excited. I wanted to get a sandwich – a real sandwich. I looked up, and there seemed like a thousand choices to make. I started to feel the hair on the back of my neck rise. I knew people were looking at me. I didn’t want anyone behind me. I was getting panicky.

  “When it was my turn to order, I froze. I couldn’t make a decision. My body started shaking. People were standing in line behind me, and I could feel the tension as they started to get antsy waiting for me to order.

  “I left the line, went back to the bus, and I sat in the back of the bus crying like a baby. I thought to myself, I can’t even order a sandwich.

  “After the incident at the Subway, I called my Cousin Cheryl in California from a pay phone. She’s a life skills coach who helps people with psychological problems. As I talked to her I stood with my back to the wall.

  “‘This is normal, Larry,’ she said. ‘You are having what is called sensory overload. In prison you didn’t make a hundred choices in a day. A person on the street makes between 1,500 and 2,000 choices a day. You’re like a newborn baby in this big body.’ Thank God she was able to calm me down.”

  Lawton, shaken, didn’t eat for the entire twenty hours it took for him to reach the halfway house.

  “Sitting in the back of that bus, I was a vegetable,” he said. “I wanted to get back to prison. I had a very bad feeling about being free.

  “I wanted to be confined again, because when you’re confined you feel safe. Sitting on the bus, I felt like I was going crazy. I was totally freaking out. Bad thoughts were going through my mind.

  “Someone’s looking for me, that the police were coming to get me, I kept thinking. The cops are behind the bus, and they’re going to take me back to prison.

  “I had been so looking forward to getting out of Forest City and going to the halfway house. Before I got on that bus I was thinking, Take your time. Look around the world. But on the bus I was sitting there feeling nervous, sure that people were after me.

  “Let me tell you something about prisoners. They have a sixth sense. They can feel tension. You can tell the way a person looks, the way he walks, what he wears, the air about him, the way he might move his neck, the way he might move his hand. If there was tension all around me, I could feel it.

  “The first thing I do when I look at a person is determine: Can I take him? Who’s around? Can I take three of them? I was a fighter, a street guy, and you think, What can I do to him real quick? Your mind plays nutty tricks on you.

  “I was in a defensive mode, ready to hurt someone. In prison they call it ready to go. I was ready to go.

  “After a while as a sat there I got a grip on myself and calmed down.”

  Lawton’s release address was Palm Bay, Florida, his mother’s house, and so he was sent to the closest halfway house, which was in Tampa on Hillsborough Boulevard. It’s run by Goodwill Industries not far from Raymond James Stadium, home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

  The bus dropped him off at the Tampa bus station. Wanting to get to the halfway house where he’d be locked up as quickly as possible, Lawton hailed a cab and was driven there directly. When the cab pulled up, he literally ran to get inside.

  Said Lawton, “It wasn’t in a great neighborhood, but that didn’t mean anything to me. I’d been to Atlanta and Edgefield. I’d lived in the worst neighborhoods in the world. This was paradise.”

  But being free was scaring him half to death.

  “I needed to get back into confinement,” he said. “I felt safe there, as crazy as that sounds. After eleven years of incarceration I was in a new world.”

  During his first day at the halfway house Lawton was given four hours to go and buy toiletries. At first he didn’t want to go. The sensory overload was too great.

  “You would think that in four hours you can do a lot, but you have to take the bus to Walgreens, and I was all nervous because I didn’t know exactly which bus to take or where it went.”

  When he finally arrived at the store, he walked up and down the toothpaste aisle. He couldn’t believe how many different brands of toothpaste there were and how many different kinds of toothbrushes were being sold.

  “I almost fucking freaked,” said Lawton. “In prison there are two kinds of toothpaste, Colgate and Aim. And you have three days to decide which one you want. There are two flavors of Ramen noodles, and you have three days to pick what you want. You sit down in your cell, figure out how much money is in your commissary account, add the cost of the items, put them down on your list, and two days later it arrives.

  “Here I was standing in Walgreens in the toothpaste aisle, and there must have been thirty types of toothpaste. Holy fuck, what do I pick? Do I want to buy the one that’s best for whiteness or best for my gums or best for tooth decay? Do I want the one that’s a dollar eighty nine or the one that’s three ounces more for two dollars and something? You try to do the math, but you’re a vegetable. You really can’t function.”

  He finally picked a toothpaste, a toothbrush, and a dental floss, and he took his items to the checkout girl. The total came to four dollars and twenty six cents. He handed her a five dollar bill, and she rang him up, bagged the items, gave him a receipt, but didn’t give him his change.

  Said Lawton, “I was sure she was stealing my money, so I looked at her and in a real mean voice said, ‘Where’s my fucking money?’ I could see her getting nervous. I was feeling the tension of the people around me.

  “A guy tapped me, and very defensively I turned to face him real quick, and he pointed.

  “It’s over there,” he said. It had come down the coin chute at the end of the counter in an arm of the cash register. I went over, collected the coins and put them away in my pocket, and I just about ran out of the store. I was not ready for society.

  “I got on the bus and got back to the halfway house, and when I told the other former inmates what happened, they laughed, because they all had experiences like that. Some guys left their purchases at the store. Or they walked out without paying, not meaning to steal it. You just don’t know how to function in society.”

  Technically, when an inmate is staying at the halfway house, he’s still in prison. The rooms had six bunks to a room. There were two showers and two toilets. It was a lot better than prison. There was a community kitchen. A lady came in and cooked for them.

  “They gave me the rules and regulations, and I was happy,”
said Lawton. “I was used to following rules. Rules gave me structure.

  “At the halfway house the inmates were not allowed outside their door after eleven at night. You can’t drink. If you have a job, you have to bring your money back and show them what you earned. You can’t get laid in the rooms. All you can do is go out and work.”

  While staying at the halfway house, Lawton was allowed to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and get his driver’s license back. Larry did that, and so he was able to drive his dad’s 1994 aqua colored Buick Skylark to and from work.

  He was given a job working for Verizon calling its wireless customers.

  “If people ever knew they were giving their information to ex-cons! said Lawton. “We asked for the last four digits of their social security number, for instance.

  “I did that for a month and a half. I wasn’t very good on the phone, but I’m an outgoing guy, and I got laid for the first time with a girl named Tiffany in the next cubicle. She was 36 years old, hot, and she had been in prison, but she no longer was on probation.”

  Quickly Lawton became disillusioned with how the system worked.

  “The function of a halfway house should be to help you get acclimated back into society,” he said. “But it’s not. It’s a moneymaker. You have to give twenty five percent of your salary to the halfway house. If you make two hundred dollars, you have to give them fifty. And then you have to pay taxes on the whole two hundred. The system sets people up for failure.”

  Everything was going well for Lawton, but then the federal prison system opened a new halfway house in Orlando, and he and twelve other former convicts were summarily sent from Tampa to this new facility.

  “We were the first inmates ever sent there, and since then it’s had seven directors in a year and a half,” said Lawton. “They were taking people out of college and putting them in charge when they needed someone like me – an inmate – to run it.

  “They had petty inspections. They had stupid rules. You can’t talk to this person, you can’t do this. They made it so hard on you.

  “The director was a Spanish guy who was out of his league. He was fired after eight weeks.”

  Lawton didn’t last that long. He was only there one week.

  “It was run poorly, fucked up, and I told the people in charge that I hated it so much that it was hurting me and not helping me. I told them, ‘You need to send me back to prison or it won’t be pretty.’”

  While living in the Orlando halfway house Lawton had gotten a job as the manager of an electrical service company. The owner was the father of one of the young ex-convicts in the halfway house. The son had known Lawton when they were in Coleman prison together. They had been transferred together from Tampa. He told his father about Lawton, and his father paid him ten dollars an hour.

  “I was going to be an account representative,” said Lawton. “My job was to make sure his accounts were good, but the guy running the halfway house did what he could to make it impossible for me to do my job.

  “He told me, ‘You have to report to us. You can’t go from this place to that place.’ They didn’t want to let me work. What’s a halfway house for if you can’t try to adjust to society? I went to the director and told him, “This is crazy.”

  “If you don’t like it….” he said to Lawton.

  “Just send me back to prison,” Lawton said.

  That day the halfway house director called the marshals and had Lawton taken to the Seminole County Jail. Lawton should have gotten a shot – demerits -- but they didn’t give it to him, he said, because they knew how badly the halfway house was run.

  “The Seminole County jail was a scum hole, but I had been around,” said Lawton. “I was a veteran.”

  Lawton was sent to the felony pod that housed murderers. One inmate had killed his wife. But Lawton had dealt with murderers and killers for eleven years, and he fit right in.

  “It doesn’t impress me,” said Lawton. “It means you got caught and you’re stupid. The other prisoners respected me because of the way I looked, my tattoos and my demeanor. I know how to walk into a prison and scope out the place.

  “I walked into my cell. There was a kid in the lower bunk. He was in his twenties, and I told him, ‘Get off the bottom bunk.’

  “He looked at me.

  “I said, ‘Get off the fucking bottom bunk. Don’t make me do something I don’t want to do.’

  “And he got off and transferred to the top bunk. He knew I was mean and had been around.”

  Lawton was in the Seminole County Jail about two months when they sent him back to Coleman prison.

  “I had three weeks to serve,” said Lawton. “It was like old home week. It was the best time I had. Vic Orena, the old mob boss from Atlanta, and I hugged. A lot of inmates had known me from other prisons. I was hugging everyone. Through the grapevine everyone knew the battle I had fought for prisoners’ rights. I was very well respected. The inmates were yelling, ‘Hey, Larry. We heard about you, man. Keep fighting the motherfuckers.’

  “Even though I only had three weeks left, I still had to be careful and watch my back, because of jealousy. Some of them had life sentences, and they were never getting out. After being there only a few days, I could see the politics of the place. Guys would say to me, “Don’t talk to this guy. He’s no good. He’s in that gang.” All that bullshit. A lot of guys came up to me and wanted me to join their gang.

  “I thought to myself, I only have three weeks to go. These people are crazy. I’m going to keep to myself. And my spirits were high because I knew that when I got out I wouldn’t have to go back to a halfway house. I kept thinking: I’m finally going to see my Mom and Dad.

  “So I didn’t join anyone. I pretty much stayed to myself. I was thinking, Get out. Just get out.

  “After three weeks they once again gave me those shitty clothes, and this time I got on a bus and headed straight home to Melbourne. But I was a little better off emotionally this time. I knew what to expect. I believe that everything happens for a reason. I’m not a religious guy – the priest took care of that – but I do believe in God. When I got to Melbourne, I took a cab to my parents’ home, because I wanted to surprise them.

  “I knocked on the front door. My dad answered. This was at the very early stage of his getting Alzheimer’s. He was still sharp, and I was very lucky I could talk to him.

  “My Mom was ecstatic and hugged me. I was shaking like a leaf. For no apparent reason either. After speaking to my parents for a while, I drove over to surprise my dear friends Uncle Mikey and Phyllis in West Melbourne.”

  It was Uncle Mikey’s 79th birthday. Phyllis cried as she gave Larry a big hug. They had coffee, chatted, and arranged for Larry to surprise some other old friends at a birthday dinner at Carrabba’s restaurant that night.

  Larry showed up at the restaurant with balloons and flowers. Joe Fraumini, another of Larry’s long-time friends, did a double-take when he saw Lawton. It had been a long time. There were hugs and wine all around.

  Finally, thought Lawton, I am free.

  “That was August 24, 2007, my out date,” said Lawton. “Within seventy- two hours I had to report to my probation officer, Dave Lubinsky, who was an asshole sometimes, and sometimes was okay. He was my probation officer, a typical government employee who questions everything and never believes you’re going to do good.

  “I went to see Lubinsky, and he told me I had to get a job. I’m lucky because I had a roof over my head living with my parents, and because I was getting a pension of $1,021 a month from the Coast Guard. A lot of ex-cons don’t have that.

  ”I had to go back to the VA to set up my medical services. I had to get acclimated to society. What am I going to do for a living? I know I’m not going back to my old ways. What am I going to do?”

  The week after Lawton arriv
ed home, he saw an acquaintance of his who lived on Tortoise Island in a well-to-do section of town. The man invited Larry to a house party about six weeks later. During the party one of the other guests, a golf pro he knew by name of Ronnie, said to Larry, “I need a big favor.”

  Immediately Lawton figured the guy had a beef with someone and wanted him to rough him up. .

  “What the fuck,” was Larry’s initial response. “I just got out of prison.

  I ain’t into that shit anymore. You want to get me back in the business? You want me to break someone’s legs or something?”

  But that wasn’t what the man wanted.

  “Larry,” he said, “I caught my son smoking weed and stealing, and when I confronted him, he told me, ‘Fuck you, dad. Where have you ever been?’ I was hoping that you could talk to him.”

  Larry didn’t know the golf pro’s kid very well at all. His son had been a little kid when Larry went to prison.

  “If that’s all you want,” Lawton said, “I’ll talk to him.”

  “Talk to him about prison, what it’s like,” Ronnie said.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I will.”

  Lawton started thinking about what he wanted to say to the boy. He went home, and looked through his pictures from prison. He had put the photos in albums, and as he looked at them, memories came flooding back. As he flipped through the pages he began to cry, because some of the men in the photos were dead, no good, fucked up, or never getting out.

  The golf pro lived in a beautiful house. Lawton walked in, and they shook hands.

  “Larry, I really appreciate this. I know you just got out. If you need anything…”

  “Okay,” Lawton said, “Let me ask you and your wife about your son.”

  The golf pro had a gazebo on his property, and Lawton went there to talk to the parents to find out about the kid. During their talk Lawton told them stories about what he had endured in prison and showed them pictures.