A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden Read Online Free

with a bazooka. I plead out and although the judge listens to my junkie alibi he knows what everyone else, including me, knows — that we live in the arena of choices and now I’ll have to live with this one.

    I found myself stripped bare, beaten back from hope, and all out of illusions in yet another prison cell like every other prison cell I had lived in.
    The media vilified me as the man who had won redemption, then trashed it. The mayor of the city passed out hardware at the cop Oscars. I lay on my bunk, stared at the ceiling and began to think up ways to take myself off the count.
    I studied that ceiling until the first snowfall. I had two months until sentencing. That day I swung my feet to the floor and began to pace, hesitantly at first, seven steps in one direction, seven steps back.

A M AN T HEY L OVED
    M Y HANDS ARE BROKEN, MY RIBS ARE BROKEN , and I’m dope sick beyond belief, but I know the real pain is in the mail, deeper than broken bones. It’s about broken promises, broken hearts, and broken lives. The headlines in the newspapers are as black and bold as gunpowder. The Jackrabbit Stumbles : after thirteen years of freedom, thirteen years of a publicly redeemed life, I have gotten myself wired, robbed a bank, shot at policemen, and held two people hostage. A nightmare I can’t imagine away or hide from in sleep.
    I collapse on my bunk and try to shut out the glare of the twenty-four hour light. Behind my eyelids life has become everything I can’t get back.
    I’m forty-nine years old, married to one of the most interesting and beautiful women on the planet, and parent to two incredible pieces of magic, Sophie, who is ten, and Charlotte, seventeen. The forfeiture is unbearable. I see a clear plastic laundry bag lying in one corner of my cell. If I could only get it over my head, wind it tight, airtight, at the neck.
    I keep the garbage bag clutched in my hand for five days, as I lie fetal, curled around that cavity that others call the centre of their being. I lie down with the pain and I sweat and I weep. Every five minutes I gather enough strength to do it, to place that bag over my head, and every five minutes and one second I gather enough strength not to do it.
    By the weekend I can sit up. Another inmate brings me a plate of congealed stew with a biscuit. I manage to swallow a few plastic forkfuls of the stew, but I don’t manage for long. I charge for the toilet bowel and sell a Buick all over the corner of my cell.
    The guy who brought me my dinner also helps me change clothes and clean up. That evening I sit on the edge of my bunk, sip a cup of water, and this time keep the biscuit down. I glance over at the plastic bag, now filled with sweaty socks and underwear. Who’d want to be sticking their head into that?
    Susan visits. She’s been here on previous days but this is our first contact; I couldn’t get up to see her the other times. I measure the two guards assigned to escort me to the visiting area. The top of my head comes level with the epaulets on their cannon ball shoulders. I step carefully. I know I am in ‘roid country; nobody grows that big eating homemade bread.
    They place me in a security booth and it is all Susan and I can do just to sit there, so numb and so saddened, and watch each other weep through that scratched-up sheet of plexiglass. And when we pick up those black forty-five pound telephones and hold them to our ears, all we can do is listen to that weeping until the hour has passed and the guards come for me.
    Susan begins to visit every day. Our words come slowly, the trembling of my face, of my hands, lessens. Soon thereafter my lawyer, a good and kind friend, begins to show up for a series of consultations. Each time he comes I am led out to the interview room, and he is waiting, yellow legal pad in one hand, pen in the other, poised to take notes. Just the facts, ma’am. With my bones back in my body, my will to live