The Change Agent

by Damon West

The chapel is also a place where the homosexuals will go to hook up with each other. In prison, the homosexuals are called “punks.” The punks often come to the chapel looking for other punks. It is not uncommon to find men paired off with each other in closets, bathrooms, offices, classrooms, and the chapel library. It’s the most in-your-face, disrespectful display I’ve ever witnessed. I’m all for everyone choosing who they want to be with in this world, but do that stuff in private.

  The punks and the gangs in the chapel bother me, for sure, but the child molesters are the biggest nuisance. They flock down to the chapel and congregate there like it is a meeting place for people of their like crimes. I have never seen anything like it. Honestly, I struggle with this particular prisoner.

  My recovery program teaches me that resentments are “the number one offender” of an addict. It also teaches me that the opposite of resentment is forgiveness.

  Who am I to judge anyone? I am a drunk, a drug addict, a thief, a convicted felon. I’d look pretty stupid throwing stones at anyone. The sober me must remind the addict me of this principle daily.

  It is frustrating that the guards do not do more to clamp down on all the nonreligious behaviors that go on at the chapel. People come to this chapel in search of the most elusive thing in prison: Hope. It is an injustice to cheapen or dilute an inmate’s sanctuary of hope. In fact, the chapel is called the Chapel of Hope.

  I’m definitely not a holy roller. I consider myself to be more spiritual than religious. Spirituality is your relationship with your god, religion is more manmade. You never hear about the many different sects of spirituality, or people killing each other over their spirituality. To clarify, I do not think religion is a negative concept. A lot of good comes out of organized religion. I just think a person can be spiritual without being religious, and still be of great moral character. The same cannot always be said of someone who is religious without spirituality.

  In the end, the Chapel of Hope is a government building. On a unit map, it is simply “20 Building.” TDCJ recognizes hundreds of different religions, and each is given equal access to the chapel. It is the way it should be. I just wish it were more respected by the inmates.

  Chapel service or recreation coincides with the 1:30 p.m. count time, when there is no offender movement. Once this count clears, often around 3 p.m., chapel lets out and traffic resumes on the unit. Preparation for “last chow” is now underway. I use the time between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. (when 7 Building goes to chow, we life-sentence inmates are usually last to be fed) to shower, read, catch up on the politics of the pod, and watch the evening news.

  I will give it to inmates, especially the older ones: They are serious about watching the daily news. This comes from wanting to know what is going on in a world they once knew but will likely never see again. Most men in here still have family or friends out in the free world. It gives them knowledge of what their loved ones are going through as well as something to talk about in letters, phone calls, and visits.

  After last chow and the evening news, I’m done for the day. In the hotter parts of the year, I stay out of the cell as long I can. This time of year, however, I turn in and try to block prison out of my mind. I use this time to pray, write letters, listen to the radio, and read. My books are where I escape. I can easily read a book every other day. Two things I’ve learned about books in prison. I never saw a guy reading a book get into a fight, and I never saw a fight over a book.

  Luckily, I have family and friends who send me plenty of reading material in the mail. Sometime in the evenings, the guards will deliver the mail. Mail call is big in prison. It offers a certain status to those who receive it, and often stigmatizes those who do not. To regularly receive mail means you are cared for by the world outside the prison walls, and someone loves you enough to stay in touch with you.

  Many times, I have witnessed men mail themselves letters to give the appearance someone in the world writes them.

  By midnight, I usually go to sleep. This is when the temperature is about right in the hotter months. Again, routine is everything, so sleeping patterns need to be consistent year-round.

  On this particular Christmas Day, however, all routines are altered to accommodate the special schedule we are on. I allow myself the luxury of watching TV in the day room with everyone else. Oddly enough, these big bad-ass guys will all be watching Christmas parades and Christmas movies.

  In my youth, starting in the early ’80s, I ritualistically watched A Christmas Story every Christmas morning. No matter where I’ve been in life, on drugs or sober, I’ve always tried to keep this tradition alive. Today will be no different. It’s playing on a loop on TNT all day, and inmates of all races will be watching it together.

  One TV will still be devoted to sports. Sports is king in this place. I have used my own athleticism to level the playing field in here. These guys respect an athlete. Thank God.

  Once word got out that I played college quarterback in Division I, and that I could hold my own in combative-competition, I was afforded a status few white guys in life-sentence hell will ever enjoy. Talk about hard-fought ground. I owe it all to my youth, and to my playing days at the University of North Texas.

  CHAPTER 6

  Fork in the Road

  COLLEGE WAS THE FIRST TIME in my life I had autonomy over much of the decision-making that comes with the responsibilities of adulthood. Had it not been for my full-ride scholarship to play football, I would have been completely unshackled. As it was, I pretty much went off the rails, even with the safeguards of the program and the university.

  I arrived at the University of North Texas in June of 1994. My stated purpose for getting there a few months before the rest of the arriving freshman class was to begin working out with the football team. In reality, I could not get out of Port Arthur fast enough. My ego drove me out of Southeast Texas faster than the Pontiac Grand Am I was driving. Mr. Bigtime could not be contained to a small town any longer.

  In the beginning, my intentions were good. Workouts went well and the three guys I roomed with treated me well. I got a job working for one of the alumni who owned an oil company. When they told me I was going to have a job with an alum, I was thinking about guys who earned hundreds of dollars a week to watch the grass grow. But the alums in Denton were not giving any money away to cocky quarterbacks from Small Town, Texas.

  This oil company operated a bunch of gas stations owned by a guy named Zeke Martin, of Martin Eagle Oil, who had played QB at North Texas decades before. At the time our paths crossed, Zeke’s gas stations were changing out the underground gas tanks that fed the pumps used to fill your car up. This constituted driving a dump truck, operating a wet saw to cut the concrete in a giant square around the pump, 60- and 90-pound jackhammers to break up a ton of cement, and the back-breaking labor of loading all the broken cement into the dump truck.

  I lasted two weeks.

  The summer of 1994 was eye-opening. I was drinking every single night, and smoking pot here and there. No red flags were being raised in my mind because so many around me were into the same stuff. Besides, this was the college experience. I was entitled to partake in it.

  The women. Oh, my God, the women. I was girl crazy in high school, but that was nothing compared to college. It’s not something I am proud of, but I slept around a lot in college. Honesty compels me to not sugar-coat this part of the story. Being a decent-looking guy with an outgoing personality, who also happened to play football, was a perfect storm for an immature raging alcoholic and addict who knew little of adult, loving relationships. I was a player and a real ass.

  My freshman year was my redshirt year. A redshirt is when you sit out a year from playing your sport. The NCAA allows a college athlete five years of a scholarship to play four years on the field. Many guys redshirt right out of high school, allowing them a chance to adjust to the fast-paced level of collegiate level sports. It was a g
reat buffer for me, which was solidly reinforced by the fact North Texas had an All-American senior at QB my freshman year, Mitch Maher.

  Mitch was exactly what a role model is supposed to be. He had character, and a commitment to God that the Pope would have envied. An excellent athlete, top-in-his-class student, a leader on and off the field, and a guy who tried so hard to instill these traits in me.

  While Mitch was my mentor, and I admired him greatly, I thought his lifestyle was boring. In my immature mind, Mitch never did anything exciting. He never went to parties, didn’t drink or smoke, and, somehow, the guy was proud he was still a virgin at twenty-three. What the hell was wrong with this guy?

  Mitch tried hard to positively influence me. He and my quarterback coach, Coach Steve Kragthorpe, stayed on top of me as much as they could. They saw early on I had character issues. Of course, you can’t help someone who doesn’t want it or doesn’t think he needs the help.

  Once, they sent me to a Fellowship of Christian Athletes camp for college players in San Marcos, Texas. I went into it with the attitude that it was a huge waste of my time. Besides, I was no longer going to church anymore, so why would I bother going to the woods to pray? They never tried to send me to any other character-building program again.

  As a redshirt, I did not have to worry about traveling to the out-of-town football games. I was on the scout team, which prepared our defense each week for the offense they would be facing. I took this job seriously. I would study game film of the opposing team’s quarterback each week to gain knowledge of his tendencies and mannerisms. If I could spot his tell, I would exploit it for our defense that week. This was my offense, and I ran it well.

  We won the Southland Conference Championship that year. Right out of high school, and I already owned a championship ring. Not a bad start. I also won Offensive Scout Team Player of the Year. Throw in over thirty hours of college completed that first year, with a GPA above 3.0, and you’ve got the makings of a man with delusions of grandeur.

  First impressions are often irreversible. Not because you do not have the opportunity to make a better impression later, but because most people immediately make up their minds about someone and become comfortably entrenched in their assessment. This was certainly the case with my head coach, Matt Simon. First impressions cut both ways, though.

  Coach Simon did not recruit me to North Texas; he inherited me from the coaching staff that signed me but was gone when I arrived on campus in ’94. He never cared much for me, often reminding me I was too short to be a quarterback. He also never forgot the partying fool I was my freshman year. No matter how good my grades were or how solid my performance on the field, he refused to seriously consider me for the starting quarterback job the next season. The first game of the season was at Missouri. He put me in late in the fourth quarter, after the game was out of reach for us. I did not do terrible for the limited time I played. After that, I was relegated to third, and even fourth on the depth chart.

  It used to piss me off when we would be losing and he would make a quarterback change, only to go with one of the new quarterbacks he’d recruited. Eventually, he found a way to completely get me out of the way. One week, when our secondary was stretched thin with injuries, he offered me to the defensive coaches. His logic was that I was an athlete who could, theoretically, play free safety because, as a quarterback who studied defenses, I knew everything a free safety did in every coverage.

  I was never built to play defense. Defensive guys have an aggressiveness about them that cannot be imitated. Being a competitor was never a problem. I was as big of a competitor as there ever was. Hitting people, however, was something I could never get comfortable with. As a quarterback, we spent our entire careers avoiding contact. Now I was being coached to collide with people at full speed.

  The team player in me took the position change seriously. No matter how miserable I was, I went where I was told I could be most useful. I had to find a way to channel my intensity and aggressiveness to play a position my heart could never be in. This was a tall order. Life was throwing me a curveball that was looking to be increasingly difficult to hit. For the first time, my attention was moving away from football. I began to explore college for whatever else I could take away from the experience.

  The spring of 1996 was when I rushed the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. After being on campus close to two years, it was easy to select the fraternity I believed to be the biggest partiers, which best represented my personality. In actuality, Lambda Chi Alpha was more than just a group of guys who partied. Most of the guys in that fraternity were better men than me, often exhibiting the moral fiber one would expect from a young man moving into adulthood. I never got that memo. Life was a party for me. Smoking pot, drinking, and chasing women were the chief motivators for my affiliation with the Greek life on campus. Everything in my life was all about me. I was a selfish prick. Then again, most addicts are.

  During the summer of 1996, however, things began to turn my way again. My services were needed at quarterback. To the dismay of Coach Simon, I was going to come into the 1996 season as the backup quarterback. When our starting quarterback, Jason Mills, was injured during the first game of the season, I was thrust into the starting role.

  Twenty years old and starting quarterback for a Division I college football program. I could check that one off the list.

  The second game of the season was against Arizona State. In 1996, the Sun Devils were number two in the nation, with future NFL stars like Jake Plummer and Pat Tillman. They were as serious an opponent as could be faced. This was going to be my first collegiate start. Talk about a baptism by fire.

  While they were ranked number two, we were somewhere around 110, at the very bottom of the college rankings. It was only our second year at the Division I level. Two other teams that made the jump from D-II to D-I with us in 1995 were Marshall and Boise State. Their programs were making the adjustment better than ours.

  We rolled into Tempe, Arizona, on Friday, September 13, 1996, the day Tupac Shakur died. I was taken aback by that because I, like so many others my age, used to listen to Tupac.

  Sun Devil Stadium was a majestic sight. Cut right out of the mountains, this place was like no other arena I had played in to date. At North Texas, having played the 1995 season against LSU, Alabama, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kansas, and other big-time schools, I knew all too well what it was like to come into town as the heavy underdog. You not only play the opposing team, you must also play their dedicated fans.

  It is easy to name the most intense opponent I have ever faced in my brief collegiate career. Pat Tillman was a maniac on the field, playing linebacker with an intensity that was disconcerting. The scouting report on him talked about his “odd” rituals, like climbing the light posts at Sun Devil Stadium to meditate. On film, he was the guy who could end up in the mix on any play. Run, pass, scramble, whatever. Being cognizant of where Tillman was would be vital to my mission of moving the ball, and to my survival. This is not hyperbole. Anyone who has ever faced the guy can validate my claims.

  The game was a one-sided slaughter. Their offense, led by quarterback Jake “The Snake” Plummer, outmatched our defense, while their defense was enjoying the same luxury with our offense, and me. Mistakes I made did not help our cause in any way.

  Among the notable stats for the game, I think I threw three interceptions, one for a pick-six, and fumbled on the three-yard line, which was also returned for six points, while trying to run the option for a score in the first half. Welcome to big-time college football.

  In the second quarter, I did manage to throw the first and only touchdown of my career. To make it even sweeter, it was on a play where the pocket collapsed immediately, sending me on the run to scramble and improvise. I took off to my right, bought some time, and found my receiver, fellow Southeast Texas native Bo Harrison, in the end zone. He made a great, leaping catch. It was the only time dur
ing the game that we got the better end of a play on Tillman, as he was, big surprise, the guy in my face as I released the pass.

  We lost to ASU, 52-7. Next up was Texas A&M.

  Every boy who grows up playing football in Texas dreams of either playing for or against Texas A&M. I was no different. My second start was going to be memorable, too. My entire family, from my parents and siblings to my cousins, aunts, and uncles, would be at this game. People from Southeast Texas would be in the stands. My father would once again have the opportunity to write about me. This was my moment to shine.

  Texas A&M’s school spirit and fan participation are rivaled by few. These people are intense. When they talk about the twelfth man, there is little argument from me that the fans play that position well. No matter, I was going to show what I could do. Moreover, after watching tons of film that week, I felt there was real potential to do better than the forty-plus-points underdog odds that Vegas gave us.

  Their linebacker corps were anchored by two future NFL studs, Dat Nguyen and Keith Mitchell. No matter, they were not anywhere near the team Arizona State was, and Nguyen and Mitchell were not as intense as Tillman. I was starting to gain more confidence.

  September 21, 1996, was as beautiful a Texas Saturday afternoon as you could want. The sun was out, but it wasn’t scorching hot, and there was not a cloud in the sky. It was the perfect setting for a memorable day.

  My father’s friend and fellow Southeast Texas native, R.C. Slocum, was the Aggies’ football coach. R.C. is a great guy. His son John and I were friends, having grown up together close in age and hanging out at A&M football camps over the years. R.C. was excited I was going to be starting against his team, having seen me grow and develop over the years.

  If I had to pick a handful of days in life that forever altered the path I was on, this day would be at the very top of that short list. Definitely a fork in the road. Not in my wildest nightmare would I have ever believed this would be my last collegiate game ever. On the third play of the game, on a screen pass, I suffered a separated right throwing shoulder. It was a perfectly clean hit, too—I just landed the wrong way on Kyle Field’s turf. Just like that, my season was over.