The Change Agent

by Damon West

“Damon, when you were a child—”

  “Time’s up,” the guard said, cutting her off. “Let’s go, West!” he yelled.

  “Damon, we love you,” my father said.

  Now my tears came out. My poor parents. My God, what had I done to them? How much pain could they withstand?

  “I love y’all, too. So much. I am so sorry,” I managed to say before they escorted me away. Damn. Me and my selfish ways. I just had to throw out that baseless apology, all because it made me feel better. What did it make them feel like? This was only one of the many things I was going to have to work on when I got to prison. I needed help.

  “West, slowly remove your belt and give it to me. After that, I want you to remove your shoe strings,” said the officer whose face I couldn’t see because he was in a full SWAT type uniform, complete with helmet and shield. This was the infamous S.R.T., The Special Response Team. Not good.

  “What’s going on, officer? Why the show of force? I’m not going to fight y’all,” I pleaded.

  “You just got handed a life sentence. We’re here to remove any potential weapons and escort you to lockup before you’re shipped to prison.”

  “Lockup? What’re you going to lock me up for? I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said with all the conviction of a man headed to a firing squad. Lockup was solitary confinement.

  He said they couldn’t just put me back in general population. Odds were I’d do something stupid, and potentially dangerous, to myself or others.

  Oh, no. You better talk fast, Damon, I thought. I pleaded with the officer to not send me to lockup. The last thing I needed was to be alone with my thoughts. I begged him to have some compassion. I told him I would go crazy in lockup, that I need human interaction. “Please. You have a child, I am sure. I’m someone’s child. Hell, my parents were just in that room over there. You saw them. Please don’t sentence me to a dungeon with no hope,” I begged.

  He was quiet for a moment. Every pair of eyes in the room were on him, waiting for an answer. Waiting for direction. “West, I can’t believe I’m even considering this.”

  He made me promise him I wouldn’t be disruptive to the jail pod, hurt anyone else or myself. He would allow me to go back to population, but one screw-up, and I’d be in solitary until the prison transport arrived in a few months.

  “Deal?” he asked me.

  “Absolutely, officer. You’ll have no problems from me,” I promised.

  I meant it. That was my second promise in five minutes.

  * * *

  I went back to the jail general population that day. My life would be considerably worse today had I not returned to my pod. Mr. Jackson was on that pod, and he had so much to share with me.

  Prison life is so much different than county jail. The characters here are more colorful. There’s an old mobster in my pod named Tommy. He is a little, old, white man, bald, with those caramel-colored, tinted glasses you see from 1970s-era casino mobster movies. He walks with a limp and has a cool stride that you only see with the most confident of men in here, as if he owns the place. Blacks, whites, Hispanics, everyone gives this guy respect. I once heard him go tell a gaggle of Crips and Bloods who were about to fight to go sit down and shut up, that they didn’t even know what being a real gangster meant. They listened to him, too.

  He assures me that looks can be deceiving, that at one time, he was a dangerous, violent man. A killer. He has since given his life to God and lives a life that reflects a man of devout faith.

  Tommy tells me stories about his old days running with the Dixie Mafia back in Dallas, and later in Tyler. I regularly go by his cell to pick his brain about life. Not just in prison, but out in the free world. The guy has seen a lot in his time and has some of the most fascinating stories. If he is to be believed, he knows where a lot of bodies are buried, and he has a pretty good idea who was really behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy, since he was a young mobster running girls on the streets of Dallas in 1963. These were the same girls who worked for Jack Ruby at his Carousel Club.

  More on that later.

  I’m thinking of Tommy today because he’s the same age as my mother. I look at that old man, and I try to imagine one of my parents living in this environment. The thought is too far-fetched, so I let it pass through my mind as quickly as it entered. Prison is not a retirement home; definitely not a place for old people.

  This is the third birthday that I’ve had to send my mother a letter from prison. My letters are a poor substitute for having me there in person, yet they are much better than those many years I missed birthdays altogether because I was whacked out of my mind on meth and committing countless property crimes to get it.

  My biggest fear is my parents dying while I am locked up. Honestly, it is most likely going to happen. The going rate on parole for a life sentence like mine is about ten to fifteen years. Add to that the amount of years I have surely taken off their lives with the pain and suffering I have put them through, and it does not look promising we will ever be reunited outside of these suffocating prison walls. Although I am sure they realize the realities of this as well, we never talk about it.

  Tomorrow my parents will come see me at visitation. Being assigned to a unit fifteen minutes from my hometown has been a gift from God. Our visits are the highlight of each week for me. My poor parents have to visit their once-promising son in a Texas prison. I’ll turn this around. I’ve kept the promise I made to my mother back on May 18, 2009, ten minutes after I hit that rock bottom.

  My mother’s advice has served me well. That, and riding on God’s back this whole time. I wonder if His back ever hurts from the burden that I must surely be. Well, too bad. I can’t do this without Him, so on His shoulders I stay.

  Sorry, God. You said I could ride here as long as I needed to, through the painful and tough times. This has been as painful and tough as they come. But I do feel peace and relief riding on Your back. Thank you, God, for carrying me.

  In a way, thanks can be the present I give my mother tomorrow at visitation. Yes, I think I will. I can’t give her anything else. But I can give her thanks for such great advice. I wouldn’t be in this position today had it not been for her impromptu talk about debts that day.

  I’ll turn this around, Mom. I am paying all my debts. When I get out, I will rub your feet at your command, just like I did as a little boy when you came home from working twelve-hour shifts in the emergency room. I am doing what you always told me to do: making lemonade out of lemons.

  I miss my family so much. The last good memories of my family were those years after college, when Brandon and I moved to D.C. to start new lives.

  CHAPTER 8

  Proximity to Power

  I’VE ALWAYS LOVED POLITICS. From an early age, Brandon had a strong influence on the things I thought were cool. Since Brandon was extremely intellectual and I was a jock, his idea of cool was definitely not my friends’ idea of cool.

  Brandon was extremely level-headed, and I trusted him implicitly. He was never at a rush to give me answers to my questions and would thoughtfully craft an answer, patiently making sure I understood things.

  That was the chief motivator for my phone call to him in the summer of 2000. I was recently let go from my position at Jobs.com when the dot-com bubble burst that spring, was sitting on some cash reserves, and had an unhealthy addiction to cocaine and the Dallas party scene. I knew I needed to get out of Dallas, and soon.

  I told Brandon I wanted to move to Washington, D.C. Since he had once lived there in the early ’90s, working in the Washington office of Beaumont Congressman Jack Brooks, I thought he might be interested in going back. No need to worry about financing; I would foot the bill of the entire move. I was going with or without him, but I told him I would like for him to come, that I could use his guidance and wisdom.

  A guy I knew from college was living in a row house o
n Capitol Hill and had an extra room to rent out. It was a spacious room, which we would share. Again, I could cover us until we both got jobs and got on our feet financially.

  Brandon was agreeable to making the move. He had one condition, however. I had to clean up my act. While alcohol consumption by staffers on Capitol Hill was accepted, drugs were the kiss of death.

  We were both running away in a sense, but not in a bad way. I was running from cocaine and the Dallas party scene, while Brandon was running from a life that had become stagnant in Austin. It was a win-win for both of us. It was also the first time since childhood we would be together again. I’ve since learned you can’t run from your addictions. They run faster.

  I left Dallas with a U-Haul loaded down with all my possessions, my Nissan Altima being towed behind me, and a box of Tide detergent, which had four ounces of cocaine inside. That’s thirty-two eight-balls.

  Anyone who has been addicted to cocaine can tell you about the controlling power of that drug. When you’re jacked up on blow, it is difficult to function, as all thoughts lead to that white powder. Coke addiction for me was all or nothing. I could never put anything aside for the next day. I did every grain before my body and mind would eventually exhaust in frustration and self-loathing. I had enough coke on that truck to last a dozen people a few days. If I was going to survive without exploding my heart, I was going to have to pace myself.

  It took me two days to load the truck and leave Dallas. I had a few buddies over for one last party. When I hit the road, I packed the box of Tide as far back as I could in case I was pulled over. I checked repeatedly for my stash in that box because I was certain one of my buds was going to steal it from me. And why not? I would have been scheming to steal it from them had I been in their position. In the end, I broke each of them off a little, like tipping the blackjack dealer after an all-night session where you lost your ass in the casino. It seemed like the only way to guarantee my precious cargo’s safety.

  After all the empty promises to stay in touch and “I love yous,” I was finally on I-35 to Austin, without a wink of sleep during the previous forty-eight hours. In the cab of the U-Haul, I had a few grams to get me the three and a half hours to Austin. Surely those rationed grams would be enough, right?

  Wrong.

  I stopped just north of Austin, climbed in the back of the truck, and removed more coke from the bag inside the box of Tide. Unfortunately, this was all off of a brick, and my grinder was nowhere near my stash. No worries. I smashed up the coke the old-fashioned way, with a dirty dollar bill laid out over the coke, and a credit card on the other side, smashing it up and raking back and forth.

  Looking back on this now, I am aghast that I would ever put something in my body that had been so intimate with a dollar bill, which may be the dirtiest thing on the planet. It was always recommended to use a one hundred-dollar bill to snort your blow because they are handled less. Perhaps there is truth to that. Thankfully, I will never need that information again.

  I showed up to Brandon’s place in Austin as high as a kite. He knew it too. I told him that everything was under control, that my stash was gone. In keeping with this lie, I went to sleep. I could not possibly do any more blow or stay up any longer. My nose was bleeding and I had about a 1,500-mile trip ahead of me. Minor setbacks for a cokehead.

  Brandon planned to drive his car up and meet me in a week. This was perfect for me because I (a) would not be able to snort rails of coke off of a CD case with him in the cab and (b) it would give me an opportunity to do all my stash, which I was obsessed with by this point.

  Somehow, I made it to D.C., crossing multiple state lines without killing anyone or myself. My stash was running low, but this was actually a good thing. A few days after I arrived, the last of the blow was gone. It would be three years before I saw cocaine again in the capital city. Thank God.

  It’s truly scary how dangerous I was to others and myself. The theme, unfortunately, would repeat itself. I had no drug-dealing connections in my new town of D.C., but my addictions were still there. I chose to drown myself in alcohol the entire time I lived there.

  Brandon and I arrived in D.C. a few months before the Supreme Court handed down an unprecedented 5-4 ruling in Bush vs. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 presidential election. Talk about being a witness to history.

  It did not take long for Brandon and me to make new friends. I can trace the majority of my D.C. friendships to one guy: Jon Wadsworth. Wadsworth stood about 5-foot-6 but had the personality of someone 7-foot-4. The guy was as Type A as they got. He was also one of the most genuine people I have ever met and would do anything for his friends, which we were proud to be. We networked through Jon.

  We did not have jobs when we first arrived in late August, but Jon found us part-time gigs and we volunteered on the Gore campaign when we weren’t out looking for full-time employment. We got involved up the East Coast, going block-walking as far north as Philadelphia. The Philly trip with Brandon was so much fun. I actually organized a pickup-football game in a Philly inner-city neighborhood while passing out campaign literature.

  After applying to no less than fifty congressional offices, I got two call backs.

  One was a Maryland congressman named Steny Hoyer. The job I interviewed for was “personal assistant/driver.” It was not going to be a good fit because I had no clue how to navigate the streets of D.C., let alone the roads between his Maryland district and downtown. I thanked him for the interview practice and went to my next appointment.

  Congressman Gene Green represented the 29th district of Texas, in Houston. His office had an opening for a staff assistant position, the lowest get-your-foot-in-the-door job there is in Congress. The fact I was from the same state helped tremendously. The chief of staff, Marc Gonzalez, offered me the job. I think it paid around twenty thousand dollars. I was thrilled to have it. Just like that, my foot was in the door. I now worked in the United States Congress.

  Working in the Rayburn Building was as good as it got on the House side of the Capitol. It was the newest of the three buildings that housed the members’ offices and their staffs. I sat at the front desk, answered calls, opened the mail, assisted on a few legislative issues, and gave Capitol tours to Gene’s constituents when they visited D.C. The tours were the highlight of my job. I absolutely loved the architecture and history surrounding so much of D.C., especially the Capitol Building. Anyone who received a tour from me went further and deeper into the Capitol than most. I read books, took a guided Capitol tour, and asked staffers who had been around for decades about that wonderful building that George Washington, along with eight other Freemasons in full garb, laid the cornerstone for on September 18, 1793.

  The first few months I worked in Congress were an unusual initiation. This was immediately following the 2000 election, and America still did not have a president-elect. The first big protest I ever saw was in front of the Supreme Court. It was about the election. There were hundreds of people out there, and the camps were firmly divided into two opposing groups. Then came the media and the cameras.

  Thousands showed up for the protests. A sea of humanity stretched from the Supreme Court to the grounds of the Capitol. It was absolutely breathtaking to see and experience. The platform and attention those protests offered were too tempting a target for those who wanted to practice their First Amendment rights and bring awareness to other causes. What started out as a civil exercise with a concise aim and two opposing views quickly morphed into a free-for-all of all causes. Toward the end, the protests seemed more of a giant protest expo.

  In mid-December, the Supreme Court issued its 5-4 decision, Bush was the winner, and the protesters slowly moved out. The country moved on.

  First and foremost, I was an American, so I pulled for the Bush administration’s success because that was every American’s success too. I even went to the inauguration on the National Mall and the inaugural pa
rty for the Texas State Society, Black Tie and Boots. Even though my guy lost, I still had a wonderful time hanging out with Texans in town for the event, and the inauguration the following day.

  I took pride in my job and eventually was rewarded with vertical advancement to legislative assistant, moving in the proper direction. I found the time each week to walk through that beautiful Rotunda and marvel at the dedication and sacrifice of over two hundred years of Americans.

  Living on Capitol Hill was quite an experience. For one thing, no one used cars much. You walked, took a cab, or rode the Metro. People told me repeatedly how pointless it was for me to own a car in the district. “You’re not in Texas anymore,” they would say.

  Brandon and I eventually moved out of our first room we rented together, and into other residences where our new friends were needing roommates to make ends meet. People on Capitol Hill were always moving around and none of us had any money. I moved into a row-house on Constitution Avenue N.E., and Brandon moved into a row house on D Street N.E. Only blocks apart, we still saw each other all the time.

  My first summer, in 2001, was wonderful. Washington comes alive with tourists in the summer, and the nightlife was hopping. I also was able to travel up the East Coast and see more of the country. My buddy and fraternity brother Jeff Boyd was living in D.C., so we gravitated toward each other and picked up where we left off on our drinking days from Denton and Dallas.

  A bunch of us took a trip to New York on August 31st, 2001. We stayed with a friend at her warehouse loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We partied all Friday night, coming in around sunrise on Saturday morning, September 1st. One of the guys was smoking a joint in the window facing Manhattan. He called us over to marvel at the beautiful view.

  “Look,” he said, “you can see the Twin Towers coming out of the ground like two giant fingers saying, ‘Peace.’”

  We all agreed it was beautiful. Had I known it was going to be the last time I would ever see the World Trade Center, I would have taken it all in more, maybe taken a picture. This was the calm before the storm.