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By John C. Stevens
To Nia, who gave me hope.
This text contains language that some may find offensive.
“...He went and preached unto the spirits in prison;
Which sometimes were disobedient...”
First Epistle of Saint Peter, 3:19-20
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Kill Your Television
2. Mary Writes the Judge
3. Devil in a Three-Piece
4. Shock Probation
5. A Suicide Letter to Ann Landers
6. The Sermon in the Yard
7. He Said Not a Word
8. Forty Days
Famous informer Jude Teller was found hanged in his home this afternoon. Paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene. The medical examiner said that the hanging appeared to be a suicide.
Teller was best known for informing on fellow hacker, Sonny Mann. Mann hacked his way into all of the world’s communications systems, and shut them all down for three days just before the Christmas holiday three years ago. Television networks, radio stations, Internet service providers, and telephone companies all found that they had no control over their systems. If consumers tried to use these services, they heard or saw only a message from Sonny Mann. The message said;
"Don’t be a sucker. You don’t get this holiday at all. It marks the birth of a man who chased the money changers from the temple. You celebrate it by seeing how much money you can spend. You worship the idols that the greedy ones put before your eyes and ears. You do not call them idols. You call them celebrities and lifestyles. You do not need these images.
"You remind me of a story I saw on one of those news shows a few years ago. Some guys ran a farm, and they got cheap labor by hiring people off the street that didn’t have anywhere to go. Once they got people to the farm, they put them to work, and charged them for their room and board. The workers could have got ahead a little bit, but the guys who ran the farm sold them booze and crack on credit, so the workers were always in debt. They couldn’t leave until they worked off their debt, and they’d shoot them if they tried to run away. The longer they stayed there, the more booze and crack they bought on credit, and the deeper they got into debt. The people who ran that farm convinced the workers that they needed the booze and crack.
"People will convince you that you need a lifestyle, so that they can get your money. They give you stories and images that bring out the worst in you. They show daytime talk shows because they know that you sit there and feel that you are better than the people who talk about their problems. They know that you will buy the products that they advertise. They know that you will buy computer games that let you act out your anger. They know that you will pay to get into a movie that shows flashy cars and appealing women. They are playing you for suckers.
"They don’t tell you that you’re running up a debt to your brother who lives in slavery and want.
Debate has raged over the meaning of these words since the communications systems went back online. Sonny Mann refuses further comment.
In a paid interview, Teller revealed that he, Mann, and eleven other men conspired to shut the world’s communications systems down as a protest of the commercialization of Christmas. Teller revealed enough information that authorities were able to follow up. They eventually found enough evidence to indict Mann. Although Mann and his accomplices took no funds during their vandalization, Mann was convicted of the theft of air time, advertising revenue, and lost sales of Christmas season merchandise.
Jude Teller used his fame to conduct fund raising efforts for the poor. He claimed that he suggested to Mann that they redistribute funds from large banks to poor people throughout the world. Mann dismissed this idea as impractical, saying that those who had been rich before the prank would quickly become rich again, and no one would be better off.
Teller became despondent when his fundraising efforts failed to help the intended beneficiaries. He became impatient and argumentative with interviewers who asked him questions about selling out Sonny Mann. Friends said that Teller had talked of suicide shortly before his death. He was 38 years old.
Your Honor,
I humbly request that you reconsider the sentence that you gave to my boy, Sonny Mann. I know he caused a lot of trouble, but he’s not a bad boy.
My husband told me not to let Sonny play those computer games so much when he was little, but I just didn’t know how to keep him occupied sometimes. If I had him help me around the house, or sat him down in front of the TV, he was always driving me crazy with questions. If I sent him outside, he'd bring home every stray cat, dog, man, woman and child in the neighborhood.
He wasn’t just playing games on that computer, like the other kids. He was learning about all kinds of things on that Internet, and he got so he could do just about anything he wanted with a computer. I didn’t see any harm in it, since he always did so well in school.
When he was just twelve, Sonny gave my husband and me a fright. We were getting ready to head back to Memphis after we went home for Christmas. We had four cars and twelve kids, so I didn’t notice right away that we didn’t have Sonny with us. I thought he was in my sister’s car. I didn’t know what I was going to do. We turned around, and looked everywhere. We finally found him at a church, talking with a bunch of old men who were working on the yard and the building. He was asking all kinds of questions, and those old men just loved to talk.
I asked that boy what he was thinking about when he just slipped off like that. He said that he was on his Father’s business. I didn’t know what to say. My husband and I decided that if he wanted to act like a man, he could work like a man.
I tell you that story in this letter because I think it is very much like the situation he’s in now. If I had found him anywhere but that church, I would have let my husband give him the whipping he needed. You know he didn’t do anything wrong, Your Honor. He just gave everyone a fright.
This whole thing got started when Sonny was always hanging at his cousin’s law office. Now, that Johnny Waters was a strange boy. He was a bright lawyer, but he never wanted to take any money for helping people in court. He had a little efficiency apartment, and wouldn’t ever buy a new suit. I asked him once why he didn’t ever try to make any money, smart as he was. He said he just hated to see a brother go to jail. He said that the brothers who needed the most help were the ones who couldn’t afford it. Johnny liked to help a boy if he thought the boy was going to stay out of trouble. He said that he was always telling boys that they got in trouble because of money. He told them not to make money too important, and they wouldn’t get caught up in things that would get them into the penitentiary. I asked him how he decided which boys to help, and he said he would represent anyone who came clean with him, because that told him that the brother really wanted to stay out.
Sonny just loved talking to Johnny, and asking him about the law, and the cases he was working on. Now, Sonny never went to law school, but Johnny talked him into taking the bar, and he passed on his first try! I was so proud. I knew that boy could get anything he put his mind to.
Sonny took over Johnny's caseload when Johnny got arrested. I know Sonny was sick to see his cousin in jail, never mind when they found Johnny with his throat cut. He didn’t know what to do for the longest time.
Sonny didn’t mean any harm, Your Honor. I’m sure he’s learned his lesson by now. He’s never been in trouble before.
Very truly yours
Mary Carpenter
Dear Dad,
I got the most famous computer hacker in the world for a cellmate. You probably saw him on TV. His name is Sonny Mann. He’s a pretty interesting guy. I think you would like him.
Sonny is a hacker. That means that he tampers with other people’s computers. He gets them to give up information that he wants. Some guys hack into computers to get them to transfer funds into the hacker's account. Sonny was not the world’s first computer hacker. He just did it bigger than anyone else ever did.
Then one of his hacker friends snitched on him for a little money. No one knows how Sonny Mann pulled off this caper, and he won’t talk. They would have let him walk if he would have talked, and he still didn’t talk. He talks to people in here, but he won’t tell anyone how he did it. We do know that he did it on the Internet. Like I told you before, the Internet is just computers talking to each other over the telephone lines. If you had a computer in your cell, and a telephone line, you could plug the computer into the phone line. Then, if you wanted to send me a letter, you could type it out on your computer, and then send it to my e-mail address. I could read the letter as soon as you sent it. You wouldn’t have to wait for a letter to go through the mail to get to me, and then wait for me to mail a letter back.
You could also use the Internet to get information from different places, like schools or businesses or churches, or government offices. Some of the courts have web pages now. A guy could find out what’s going on with his case by going to the court’s web page, and typing in his name and his case number in the right little boxes. I hear they have Internet access in some of the joints now, but it will probably be a while before you see it down there.
The other day, the Warden came by our cell. He talked with Sonny Mann for a little while. He said, “Sonny Mann, if you can hack into any computer in the world, why can’t you get yourself some release papers faxed in here?”
“I didn’t come here to get myself faxed out. I hacked into those computers to get myself sent in here. I didn’t hack into those computers for fun, or to get any money.”
“Then why in Hell did you do it?”
“To get everyone else out.”
The Warden doubled over laughing at this.
“Why the Hell would you want to do some dumb shit like that? They’ll all be back here in two weeks! Most of them are institutionalized. They’ll find a way back here. Even if they want to stay out of here, they can’t control themselves. The first time they get a chance at some easy money or easy pussy, or a cheap high, they’ll take it. The only thing you’re going to do by getting everyone out of here is get a lot of cops paid a lot of overtime.”
He couldn’t say anything else. He couldn’t stop laughing, and he had to have a couple of C.O.’s help him back to his office. They could hear him laughing all up and down the block.
I asked him why he cares about getting anyone else out of the joint besides himself. He told me that the world is a prison. It doesn’t make any difference if you’re in a joint like this, or if you’re rolling down the interstate at 95. Everybody in the world is in prison. The only difference is that some prisons are more comfortable than others. He said that he was tired of living in any kind of prison. The only way out that he saw was to get everyone out of prison, because if just one guy had to be in prison, everyone else was in prison at the same time.
I didn’t quite get what he meant, so I told him to keep talking. He said that if we had prisons, it was because we considered some people too dangerous to live with everyone else. If we have prisons, we have to have prison guards, and cops, and prosecutors, and judges, and laws. We have to have laws because of money. He said that as long as people love money, the world will be a prison. As long as there is such a thing as money, some people will have more, and some people will have less. The people who have less will want what others have, and the people who have more will worry about losing what they have. As soon as a person starts thinking about how he’s going to protect his money, he’s created a prison. If someone tries to take his money, he’s going to have to hurt the thief, or have him locked up. The thief is not the only one in prison. The property owner is a prisoner of his property. People love money because they do not have faith that they will eat.
I got him to talk about his life on the outside. He said that he thinks his job of getting people out of here is just like the job he had before he got locked up. I thought he was one of those goggle boys. It turns out that he wrote games for the goggle boys, and later tried to rescue some of them from the virtual reality games.
The goggle boys are those guys I told you about who’ve been playing those interactive virtual reality games all their lives. To play the virtual reality games, you have to wear a pair of goggles. This allows you to watch TV with all of your vision. You don’t have to keep your eye on a screen. You could put the goggles on, and it would look just like you were on top of a mountain, or driving a car. The scenery changes as you move through it, so you can pretend to be just about anywhere you want to be, and pretend to do just about anything you want to do. The guys who write and publish these games are making some huge dollars. So are the guys who make the machines that you run the games on.
They have some games that you can play with other players online. Each player is represented by something called an avatar. It would be like saying that you’re the hat when you play Monopoly. You can make your avatar look like whatever you want it to look like, depending on the rules of the game. That’s what the other players see when you’re in the game with them. Some of the games are so compelling that people don’t ever want to leave them. They like them better than real life. They sometimes have problems taking care of business. It means they have to take the goggles off and talk to real people. They don’t know what to do in the real world.
Some of the brothers have lots of fun with those guys. They’ll get one of them talking about his little fantasy world like he thinks it’s real, and then they’ll ask the guy all kinds of questions like they seriously want to know. Since most of these guys have been playing one type of war game or another their whole lives, they think they’re warriors.
The problem is that they have no experience fighting real humans. They have all kinds of fancy moves, and some of them are even pretty quick, but they don’t know how hard you have to hit a guy to make him stop coming at you. They don’t know how dirty some guys can fight. In the games that they play, they just have to touch their enemy with their hand or their sword, and the enemy goes down. They’ve never had to encounter real resistance from an enemy, just virtual resistance. They also don’t know how bad it hurts if you get hit, and they think you can just start over if you start losing.
If a gangster finds out that the goggle boy thinks he’s a warrior, the gangster will try to get the goggle boy to issue a challenge. If insults don’t work, the gangster will challenge the goggle boy. They make bets on how soon they can get the goggle boy to try to turn off the “game” he’s found himself in once he finds himself on the ground with a ringing head.
The brothers like messing with the goggle boys because they think that their stories about how they got in here are hilarious. The stories are much better than the crackhead jitterbug stories. Many of the goggle boys are here on weapons charges. They forget that they don’t have the goggles on sometimes, and they’ll go and shoot a place up. Some times they wound or kill a person by accident. I know one guy who attacked another guy over a girl. It came out in court that he didn’t even have a rival for the girl’s attentions. The girl said in court that she thought of him as a guy at work. She didn’t know that he thought she was his woman. He took a swing at the guy behind the counter at the convenience store, because the guy reminded him of a character in a simulation that he ran. The guy at the convenience store didn’t even know the girl.
There’s one goggle boy in here for rape. He looked at a lot of pornographic virtual reality, and he always got laid. This guy had a system that you would not believe He had the goggles and the sound system. He had a special suit that he wore, so that it would feel like a woman was moving her hands over his body. He had a life-size doll with a fake pussy so that it looked and felt and sounded like he was with a woman. He told Sonny Mann that when he finally got up enough nerve to take a real girl out on a date, he ended up in here
He took the girl to the movies and out to eat. She liked listening to him talk about the movie, so she asked him up to her place when he took her home. He thought this meant that he was going to get a real-world lay, and he’d have something to tell his online friends. When he got upstairs with the girl, he started in with the lame, corny lines that he learned in the VR games. The visual technology might be better, but they haven’t come up with better lines since you had to go to a dumpy theater to see triple-X movies.
The girl was a nice girl. She was into her schoolwork, and liked to spend a lot of time outdoors. She spent a lot of time with her family. She didn’t know much about virtual reality, and she didn’t know anything about pornography. The dumb shit this guy was saying made her laugh. The dude went off. He told her to shut up, and she just laughed more. He ended up knocking the girl out. When he saw that she was out, he took her clothes off, and did his business. This guy is going a little crazy without his virtual whores.
There’s another guy who’s here for robbing banks. This guy robbed banks so that he could pay his rent and his light and heat and phone. He didn’t do anything except play his VR games, so he didn’t have a job. He would rob a bank, and then stay home with the goggles on for months at a time. When the money ran out, he would rob another bank. He got caught because he bragged about it to a guy he gamed with online.
Sonny told me that he knew plenty of guys like that on the outside. He was a VR deprogrammer. He said that his job was to get those guys to give up their virtual reality games, and live a real life. Sonny told me about his cousin, Johnny Waters. He was a criminal defense attorney. Johnny got his throat cut while he was in jail, and Sonny thinks it was because Johnny put the heat on a captain at the women’s prison at Marysville. The captain knocked up a bitch. When she got out, she said she wanted some help from either the state or the captain. The captain was married and didn’t want his wife to find out, so he had Johnny and the bitch shut up.
After his cousin got killed, Sonny saw that he and Johnny were trying to do the same thing. He realized that virtual reality games are not the problem, money is the problem. Virtual reality is just the latest and most sophisticated way to get humans to worship idols. Before there was virtual reality there was television. Before there was television there was radio and movies. Before that it was magazines and sheet music. Before that it was the theater and statues. Before that it was just plain idols. Sonny explained that the purpose of an idol is to get you to give up some of your money. The idol always promises something. It promises fertility, or prosperity, or love.
Sonny said that people have been using idols to get people to give up their money since there was such a thing as money. They still use them to get people to buy clothes, and perfume, and automobiles, and jewelry. They show the idols with these products on the television or in magazines, and promise that the worshipper will have a happier life through the purchase of these products. They sell underwear by showing happy families, and they sell expensive men’s clothes by showing nothing but beautiful young women.
Sonny Mann said that it doesn’t matter how they present the idols to you. It can be through VR or TV or radio, or a speech to a crowd. The racket is to present the idol, hint that the idol will bring you luck or sexual attractiveness, and collect the money. The guys who end up trapped in a VR game have the same problem as the guys who get trapped in a prison; they’re suckers. They got suckered into thinking that an idol would fulfill their hopes and desires. When it didn’t, they caused trouble.
That’s when he saw that money is what makes the world a prison. He said that the same things happen on the outside that happen in a prison, just on a bigger scale. People on the outside think that they’re better than people in prison, but they just haven’t been caught. Even people who don’t think they have done anything wrong are criminals. They live in a society that benefits from the exploitation of other people, so they are guilty. No one is innocent if there are 27 million slaves in the world.
Sonny figured that he had to turn the prison inside-out. He had to go as deep into the prison as he could, and pull all the lost souls out.
Sonny Mann likes to talk to people, and people seem to like to talk to him. I’m going to bet that something interesting will happen. I’ll keep you up to date. Uncle James says hey.
Your Son,
Peter.
Dad,
Sonny Mann got a guy faxed out of here. He won’t admit it, but he did. The guy didn’t think he was going to get any air. I saw Sonny talking to him a couple of times. When I saw Sonny talking to the guy, I was surprised. Not because Sonny was talking to the guy, but because the guy was talking to anybody. He never talked to anybody. I asked Sonny Mann why the guy got to go home. He said because the guy was ready to go home, and would not be back.
Some guys have an attitude about Sonny Mann, because he’ll talk to anybody. He talks to the snitches, the punks, the fags, and the baby-rapers. He even kicks it with the house nigger correctional officers. I asked him why, and he said it didn’t make any difference to him what a guy did to get in here, or even what he’s done since he’s been here. He would talk to anybody, and he would help anybody who was ready to go home and not come back here. I asked him how he knew if a guy was ready.
“I’ll tell you how I know a guy is not ready to go home. Say a guy embezzles a billion dollars from his boss, gets caught, and gets sent up. He gets a chance at shock probation, so he goes in front of the judge and starts crying. He says he’s sorry, and now he sees how he has to straighten his life out before it’s too late. He’ll make restitution, waa, waa, waa. The judge feels sorry for him, so he decides to give him the shock probation. The guy goes back to the joint until they can ship him out. While he’s waiting, he presses a boy for a box of smokes the boy owes him. The boy gets scared, and tells, so the guy’s in the hole when the judge calls and asks why the guy ain’t out yet. When they tell him, the judge tears up the shock papers, and tells the guy to step it off. That guy ain’t ready to go home if he’s still sweating a boy for a lousy box of smokes.”
I asked him, “Will you help a guy get out of here if he didn’t do anything to get in here in the first place? You know, if he has a bullshit case.”
“Let’s say I have two guys in front of me. They both want me to help them out of here. One guy tells me he’s here on a bad charge, and he ain’t like the rest of the guys in here. The other guy tells me he’s a crackhead and a baby-raper and a thief and a liar, but he wants out of the life. He’ll do anything I tell him if it means he don’t have to come back to the joint. I’ll send the second guy home before I will the first guy.
“The second guy is more likely to stay out. He knows what got him in here, and he don’t want no more of it. He knows he’s a sucker, so he knows what to watch out for, so he won’t get suckered again. The first guy is still a sucker, only he won’t admit it to himself. He thinks he’s better than everyone else in this joint, but he’s just the same. ”
The other day, a guy came to see Sonny Mann. He had a bad skin condition, and he was worried about how the guys in his dorm would treat him if they knew. Sonny told him to see the doctor, and no one would bother him.. The guy’s skin cleared up right after that. The doctor gave him a clean bill of health.
One day, a captain came to see Sonny. He told him that his son was hooked on those virtual reality games. The captain had heard about the work that Sonny did on the outside. Sonny said that if the captain could get him hooked up to a computer and a pair of goggles, he would hack into the boy’s game, and talk to him.
A few days later, the captain came to see Sonny Mann again. He said, “I don’t know what you told that boy, but he put those goggles down, and hasn’t put them back on. My wife asked me to thank you.”
Word about the guy he got faxed out of here, and the C.O.’s son, and the guy with the skin condition got around. Pretty soon, everybody wanted to talk to Sonny Mann. They all had questions for him, and wanted to get faxed out of here.
“One could laugh at the world better if it didn’t mix tender kindliness with its brutality.”
D.H. LAWRENCE
Dear Ann Landers;
The other day, you ran a letter from a woman who wanted to know why her kids and her friends’ kids were bums and addicts and losers. You said that you had run the letter and the response a few times before, and that you got many requests for it. You told her that no one knows why some kids who have everything they need turn out rotten, while other kids who come from poverty and broken homes turn out to be CEOs.
It kills me the way that you never try to look at both sides of a story when those losers write to you. Like if a woman tells you what a jerk her husband is, you don’t even bother to consider what a jerk she might be. I know why some kids turn out okay, and some don’t. The bums and losers got no data or wrong data, and the CEOs got plenty of good data.
The human brain is a computer, Ann. It starts recording and processing data before a baby is born. A computer will do what you program it to do. If you give a computer bad data or not enough data, the computer is useless. The reason we have useless human computers is that they got bad data, or they didn’t get enough data. That woman who wrote to you asking why her kids are all messed up sounds just as clueless as my parents. They made it very clear to me when I was a kid that I was just in their way, and a pain in the ass besides. Now they whine because I never call or write. I am just one example.
I am now in prison, along with all of the other broken computers. I had it better than most of the defective computers in here. We all got here the same way. We got bad data, or not enough of it. Some of us have been in institutions since infancy. I define an institution as any place that has a purpose of holding you. An institution is a storage place for human computers. A computer that is in storage does not get programmed, and does not get used.
I started my institutional life at six weeks, when my mother went back to work and sent me off to the baby-sitter. Many of the broken computers with me here were raised by a parade of foster parents and the state. A mother is a baby computer’s primary source of data. Mother love is just the adult computer giving data to the new computer. It’s the mother’s job to boot up the new computer. An institution can’t program a new computer correctly.
Some of the computers were born addicted. I read about orphanages in Romania a few years ago. They had so many babies, that they had to keep them in wire cages. The staff at the orphanages barely had time to feed and change the children. They never talked to them or played with them. What kinds of problems do you think they will cause when they get out into the world?
I used to have a paranoid fantasy that I was the subject of an unethical sociological experiment. The government wanted to find out how they could most effectively use television to manipulate viewers. Their ultimate goal was to create a whole generation of Americans that gets most of its information about the world and how to get along in life from television. They started these experiments right after World War II, after they saw what a job the Nazis did with radio and films. By the time I came along in the Sixties, they knew how to control a test subject to make sure that he got information in the way the government wanted him to get it.
I imagined that someone monitored what I watched on television, and what information I got from my parents, teachers, and neighbors. Not only that, but they kept careful notes on how I processed and used information. They wanted to study how television influenced the learning process. They foresaw a time when the majority of children would be parked in front of a television set for at least part of the day. Even the kids who had both parents at home would have both of the parents working. They saw a world in which children spent their time in school, at daycare, or in front of the television, and little time with their parents. They wanted to start the propaganda as early as possible. By the time the next generation of viewers came along, they would know just how to format their messages so that they would be easily absorbed, and not debated much.
I imagined that I was one of thousands of test subjects all over the world. The unethical experimenters observed us, and analyzed the information to see what we believed, and what we could be convinced to believe. They studied us to gather information for the biggest brainwashing experiment in the history of the world.
A new computer needs a great deal of data. It needs to know if it will survive, and what its function is. Most of us broken computers in the institutions did not get this data. We also got bad data on the protocols of interfacing with other human computers.
You said that some kids come from hellish places, but get along in the world anyway, and no one knows why. I would bet that those kids succeeded because they got the right data, and enough of it. They did this by avoiding institutions, and avoiding television. As I said before, I am but one example. Consider this example;
There is a broken computer in one of these prisons that has malfunctioned so disastrously that a judge ruled that he can communicate with his lawyer and his priest. No one else in the world. He was a big gang kingpin, and moved cocaine and heroine. He was ruthless, and had plenty of people killed, in other gangs and in his own gang. I mean, this guy ran a drug empire. He had thousands of people moving drugs for him.
The killings and the drug charges caught up with him, and he got sentenced to life without parole. He was still a pretty powerful guy, and being in jail didn’t stop him from running his business, or having people killed. An article in the paper told how a judge had ruled that the prison he was in could keep him in solitary forever if they wanted to. He couldn’t have any phone calls or mail, either. This guy was dangerous if he was able to get any kind of a message out of the joint. The only two people he could talk to were his lawyer and a priest. No family, nothing. He couldn’t get any mail, and he couldn’t send any mail, and no phone calls. None.
The judge said he didn’t like to do it, but he couldn’t give this guy a chance to have anyone else killed.
This guy got sent to a prison in Cuba when he was nine! Do you know what a Cuban prison is like? What do you think he learned about the world there? Why does a nine-year-old think he has to steal or fight? What do you think he learned about the world to do things that would get him into prison when he’s nine? Even though this guy had many people killed, I don’t think anyone has a right to judge him. My guess is that this guy learned some powerful lessons about how to survive when he got sent to prison in Cuba at the age of nine. His crimes are the crimes of neglect. If we neglect the new computers, we won’t know what kinds of information they will absorb that will make them dangerous.
A new human computer is different from a man-made computer because it always wants new data. That’s why little kids ask questions all the time. When I was a new computer, I had plenty of questions, but no one to answer them. The baby-sitters told me to ask my parents, my parents told me to ask my teachers, and my teachers told me to sit down and be quiet. My parents did not think they needed to teach me anything. They thought that I would learn everything I needed in school.
You’ve probably seen all of those public service announcements on TV that urge parents to talk to their kids about drugs and sex. One of them even shows the kids looking into the camera and telling the parents to talk to them about smoking. These new computers crave correct programming, but no one provides it. We wouldn’t need ads like that if they did. I had parents who talked to me about smoking, but I worried more about looking stupid in front of other kids, so I ignored what my parents said. Most of the other broken computers in this warehouse got no data on smoking or drugs or sex from their parents. They may have gotten data at school if they paid attention, but they didn’t trust the data. They got bad data from other broken computers on the street. Those church people kill me when they talk about getting sex education out of the schools. They think that parents talk to kids about important things in their lives.
The television gave me some data about the world and the people in it, but it was random. It did not answer my questions when my questions came up. It also made me think of more questions that did not get answered. Much of it turned out to be incorrect. The problem was that I did not find out that it was incorrect until years later, and ended up looking like a fool. Those kids that you talked about who beat the odds probably had someone tell them what the world is like, so they didn’t have a lot of false romantic notions.
They had someone who took the time to teach them how to get along with other people. I did not have that. When I was five and talked to my dad about a dispute I had with the neighbor kids, the instruction I got was to avoid the kids. So, now I have no old friends because the only thing I learned to do when I had conflicts with people was to avoid them.
You want to know why I don’t seem to know the difference between right and wrong? It’s because no one ever told me the difference. The only instructions I got were to stay out of trouble. When I did something wrong, but didn’t know that it was wrong, what I heard was “Don’t you know any better?” When I was eight, my alcoholic mother told me to put some water on to boil for her instant coffee. When the water started to boil, I went in the other room to tell her, but she had passed out. I turned off the flame, and went back to my game of solitaire. When my mom came to, she cracked me on the side of the head for not putting her water on, as she had told me. From this I learned that it doesn’t matter if you do right or wrong.
Violence doesn’t mess up a computer all by itself. Violence can be a useful programming tool. You hear lots of stories about successful guys who got beaten by their fathers only once in their lives. That one beating was for lying, and it’s a beating that the guy will never forget. That’s why he never lies, and that’s why he never gets himself into situations where he has to lie. His backside will start hurting if he even thinks about telling a lie. You get a different picture about telling the truth when you get cracked in the head for busting your parents when they lie to your grandparents.
I just had an alcoholic mother. Many of the broken computers in this warehouse had crackheads for mothers. They got even worse programming than I did. That is why they are so dangerous. They got beaten because their mothers were short the money they needed for a rock after buying diapers. Right and wrong doesn’t make any difference. It’s all a crap shoot. The punishment you get depends on whether the judge had sex the night before your sentencing.
You want to know why I got on drugs? It’s because somebody encouraged me to do it. My parents wanted me to figure out for myself what I wanted to do, so they didn’t want to push me into sports or other activities. The only reason I got halfway decent grades in school was because most of it was interesting to me. Many of the other broken computers in prison with me didn’t even have anyone who cared if they went to school. If they did go to school, they had to spend most of their energy on avoiding getting beat up or stabbed or shot. Plenty of others went to safer schools, but they had friends who sneered at good grades. If you don’t get encouragement from anybody to do well in school, and people congratulate you after your first joint, you’re going to get on drugs. That’s how the human computer works.
You want to know why I never gave a thought to the future? It’s because I didn’t think there would be a future. I thought that we would all die in a nuclear blast. I grew up during the Cold War. I was convinced that it was just a matter of time until the Soviets or the US got the wrong signal. The Soviets would think that we were attacking them, and we would think that they were attacking us, and we would all be fried.
This is a lot different than knowing you’re going to die some day. If you know that everyone else in the world will die at the same time you do, then nothing you do will matter. No on will remember anything that you did. If you discover a cure for cancer, or write the Great American Novel, what difference does it make? You’ll be wasting your time if try to make the world a better place. If everyone is dead, nothing you did will help them. That’s why I didn’t want to go to college. I considered it a lot of work and time for nothing.
This also meant that no one would be around to remember anything bad that I did. My dad tried to tell me to think about the consequences of my actions, but I didn’t worry about any consequences. If I couldn’t get elected to Congress because I smoked pot as a teenager, so what? The Bomb would drop before I got a chance to run for Congress. If I got a criminal record, so what? There wouldn’t be any records of any kind once they dropped The Bomb. I wouldn’t have to worry about a criminal record making it harder to get a job.
You want to know why I could never keep a girlfriend or a wife? It’s because I got plenty of bad data about how to get along with the opposite sex. I believed all of that feminist crap I heard from the television that what a woman really wants in a man is a guy who’s not afraid to show his feelings. They want a guy who’s man enough to admit that he’s vulnerable. What they didn’t tell me is that women really think of a guy like that as a sucker. They say they want a nice guy but they can’t get over some jerk who treats her like garbage.
After they got divorced, both of my parents had several different girlfriends and boyfriends and spouses. From what I could see, more people got divorced than stayed married. How am I supposed to think of marriage as a permanent thing?
Most of the data I had about women was from the TV, which meant that most of it was wrong. I tried to talk to women the way I had seen guys do on TV, and the women thought I was a nut. So, the only women I could find were whores or women even lonelier than me. A whore knows when she sees a guy who will do almost anything for a little attention and sex from a woman. She knows that she can get a free ride from a guy like that for a little while. She can’t keep it up forever, though. Sooner or later, she will tire of his need for attention. He will figure her out for a whore, and send her on her way.
Lonely women are even worse. You can’t have two lonely people together. When I hooked up with one of them, we always had a contest about who loved the other one more, and who did more for the other. They got that way because they got bad data from the television about how to get along with men. They think a guy is going to come along and rescue them, or make their life complete somehow.
I got the message from you and other women that it is never okay for a guy to hit a woman. What you didn’t tell me is that a woman will do everything she can to provoke a guy to hit her, and if he doesn’t hit her, she will think he is weak. It really makes me mad that I played by the rules, and lost because of it. This is an example of things I have learned that are too late to learn. I can’t have a decent relationship with a woman, and I don’t know how to have a life without getting tangled up with women.
One thing I’ve learned from my psychological treatment is that I’m not stupid. My parents sure seemed determined to program me to believe that I was stupid. It’s too late to just get rid of that programming. One of the things that got me in here was trying to prove that I’m not stupid. Another example is credit. Now I know how to maintain a good credit, and how important it is to do so. This does me no good now. I have a criminal record and terrible credit.
This computer will crash. I did not get programmed correctly. Now I have to sit in this warehouse with the other broken computers. It won’t be any better if I ever get out of here, so I’m going to tie a sheet around my neck, and just shut the system down. What’s the point? I have no use, no function. I have plenty of time to read and talk to people, so I can get good data now. But what good is it? Most of the time, it just makes me angry. It just makes me wish that I got the data when I needed it. Most of the data is too late to do any good. I will always have a marginal function, at best. Much of my data and software is outdated. I am like an old, off-brand computer that might fetch twenty dollars at a yard sale.
Before I go, I want someone to know why this computer shut itself down. Maybe it will help another computer from being wasted. I doubt if you will print this, but I had to give it a try.
Please don’t suggest talking to the chaplain here, Ann. He’s a lame-o.
I handed this letter to Sonny Mann. I told him that my bunkmate gave it to me before he tried to kill himself. He told me to mail it to Ann Landers when he left here. He tried to electrocute himself by standing in a bucket of water, and grabbing the lightbulb socket. The C.O. came by and saw that the light was out. It was out because the guy had taken the lightbulb out. The guy grabbed the socket just as the C.O. on the other side of the closet door flicked the switch several times to check it. This gave the guy a few bad shocks, but he fell over and busted a couple of toes in the bucket. I showed it to Sonny Mann because I wanted to know if I should mail it. The guy was still in the joint, but he had not gotten any word to me about what to do with the letter.
I asked Sonny what he would say to the guy who wrote the suicide letter. I didn’t see any way that a guy like that could stay out of here. He said that he would have to give the guy some hope. I asked him how he would do that.
“I’d tell him the same thing Ann Landers would; ‘kwitcherbellyachin’, and get a job.’ I have a function for him. I’ve seen guys worse off than him get over it and have a life. If a guy doesn’t have any hope, there’s nothing I can do for him. That’s the only kind of guy that I can’t help out of here.”
“You can get out of here if you are pure in heart.”
“Pure in heart? What the fuck? I never seen a motherfucker like you! How the fuck do you expect anyone in here to be pure in heart? You are the most naive motherfucker ever came through that gate.”
“What I mean by pure in heart is that you want the same thing that I want. You want to get out of here and stay out of here, and you want everyone else in here to get out of here and stay out of here. You want to help me make a world in which no one thinks of sending anyone to prison. You want to help me make a world in which we need no prisons. You want a world in which no one would even think of doing a crime, and no one would need to do any crime.
“You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt isn’t salty anymore, how can it be salty again? It’s not good for anything anymore, and it’s thrown out, and people walk all over it.”
“See, I told you that this guy is just as crazy as all those other computer geek motherfuckers. What the fuck is he talking about salt for?”
“I mean that you have to want to get out of here, and you have to want to stay out of here. If you don’t care about staying out of here, then what am I doing? I know you’re not evil in your heart. You’re adrenaline addicts. You want the booze and the cars and the women because they give you an adrenaline rush. You do your crimes for the adrenaline rush. Those who want money have figured out many ways to get money from making you chase that adrenaline rush. You’re like the guy who crashed a truck through a roadblock just because he saw it on TVso many times, and always wanted to see what it was like.
“What you have to do is to show me that if I get you out of here, you will stay out of here. You do that by showing me how you act in here. If you don’t let this place get to you, and do what’s right, you will show me.
“Look, you might think that we’re here to talk about a jail break. We’re not. I’m not going to just fax everybody out of here. You have to be ready first. This is how it is: I won’t be done with my work until I close all the prisons. That is not going to happen until there are no more laws. We can’t get rid of the laws until people don’t think they need the laws anymore. That’s not going to happen until they’re not scared anymore. They won’t get rid of laws or prisons unless they’re convinced that they don’t need them. So, if you get out of here, and get a speeding ticket for going 46 in a 45-mile-per-hour zone, and violate your parole, you’re not helping me convince anyone that we don’t need prisons. You’re convincing them that we do need prisons. You have to be better than anyone on the outside if you want me to help you get out of here.
“You may have read in the Bible, ‘Thou shall do no murder.’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say, that if you get angry with someone else, it makes it harder for me to get you out of here. And if you insult someone, or call them out of their name, you will have to explain yourself.”
“Say what! You tryin’ to tell us that we can’t even get pissed off with another motherfucker, no matter what he does? We just supposed to be chumps? Somebody does something to me, I’m going to say something.”
“Not only that, but if you say to a guy, ‘You fool’, you’re not getting out of here.”
“But what if he is a fool?”
“It doesn’t matter. Who are you to decide who’s a fool, and who’s not? I’m not helping anyone get out of here who has a conflict with anyone else in here, because both of them are going to do something stupid, and they’ll end up back in here. I won’t waste my time getting someone out of here if they’re just going to get themselves back in here.”
“You read in your Bible, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ But I say that if you look at a woman with lust, you have already committed adultery in your heart.”
“Well shit, if it don’t make no difference if I do it or if I just think about it, I might as well do it. Why shouldn’t I? If I think about it, I’ll want to do it, and then I’ll already be an adulterer, so I might as well get some relief.”
“Then you can’t get out of here. I’m not going to get help a guy out of here if I know the first thing he’s going to do when he gets out of here is get a prostitute. He’ll go somewhere he doesn’t need to go, and break his parole, or he’ll buy the woman a rock, and get busted for possession.
“There’s just two ways for you to keep women from getting you back in here if you get out; Find a woman, and stay with her. The other way is to be celibate. Don’t have any women at all, ever.”
“So what are you saying? A motherfucker can’t have a bitch at all? Or you got to stay with the same one ‘til you die? What if she turn out to be a kook, or a crackhead? Or what if she’s a drunk? Or what if she beat the kids all the time? Or she sleeps all over town? Or what if she doesn’t ever want to give it up?”
“Makes no difference. You married her. Deal with it.”
“Man, that don’t even sound worth it. And you say the only other choice is to never get any at all? Then why do I have a dick, and a sex drive to go with it? And why are there so many willing bitches out there? That’s fucked up, man. All them bitches out there, and we got to settle down. Stay single, mingle. Get married, get buried. That’s what I say. What if we don’t, man? What if I get out of here and just fuck one bitch after another. What are you going to do, send me back here yourself?”
“I won’t have to. Sooner or later, you’ll end up in here, or you might as well be in here. You will never be satisfied with the women. You’ll fall in love with a woman who just wants to play you, so you’ll beat her up or kill her. Or, you’ll get a woman pregnant. Then you will have to pay child support or run away to avoid it if it’s yours. Or else some woman you don’t care about will fall in love with you, and she’ll find a way to get you in here if she doesn’t get what she wants from you.”
“So how do you know how a motherfucker is going to act? There ain’t no women in here.”
“Remember, I can get into any computer in the world. I can hear what you say about women. They have microphones and cameras in here. I can get into the computers in this joint, and listen while the C.O. is listening. I know how you’re going to act by what you say.
“And when you come to me to talk to me about why I should help you get out of here, don’t swear that you’re not going to do anything to get yourself back in here. If you think you have to swear, I know you won’t make it.
“You’ve probably heard the expression, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you not to resist someone who does evil. If he slaps you on the right cheek, turn your other cheek to him.”
“I’d rather stay in here than be someone’s bitch, man!
“You don’t have to. If someone does something against you, doing the same thing in return is just going to get you back in here. Because as soon as you want to get even, you’re getting angry, and you’re going to do something to get a case.
“Yeah, all that sounds good, but I still ain’t going to let some motherfucker slap me in the face like I’m a bitch! How the fuck do you expect anyone to listen to some shit like that? If someone slaps you in the face and you don’t do anything, pretty soon everybody knows that they can do anything they want to you. I’m supposed to just take anything until you get around to faxing me out of here?”
“Yes. I want to get everyone out of here. I need you to help me do that. To do that, you have to want to get everyone out of here. It doesn’t matter what they do. You still have to want to get that guy out of here, even if he slapped you in the face.
“You have to be ready to go to the dirtiest, stinkiest, foulest places in Hell, and pull them out. You have to talk to those people who committed the crimes you despise, and tell them what they have to do for me to help them out of here. You can’t think that you are better than any of them. People know right away if you judge them.
“They will do things on purpose to see if they can make you angry or disgusted. They will be angry that no one ever loved them, so they will test you. You have to let them know that they can do nothing to stop you from giving them my message.”
“Some of them will be like a drowning person. Sometimes, when you rescue a drowning person, he will fight you in his panic. You have to grab him by the hair, and pull him to shore. That’s why I need to know if you can take a slap in the face. You can’t get angry at the drowning person who fights you, and you can’t get angry at the person you are trying to help out of here if he fights you.
“You have to be strong to take it. If you can take it, you can get out of here. If you do that, it shows me that you want the same thing that I want.
“If a couple of guys come up to you and say that you owe one of them a pack, give him two packs. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.”
“I’m supposed to just give up my money to every bum in here just because they ask? That’s stupid, man! What if you know they’re not going to pay you back?”
“Doesn’t make any difference. Staying out of here is more important than money. I’m not going to get a guy out of here because of how many packs he has in his locker. I’m going to get him out of here because I know he won’t come back.
“You may also have read in your Bible, THOU SHALT LOVE THY NEIGHBOR, AND HATE THINE ENEMY. But I say that you have to forget which gang you’re in. If I see you wearing colors in here, then I know that you’ll wear them on the street. You’ll just get yourself back in here by doing that.
“Here is what I want you to talk about when you ask me to help you out of here: I want to hear you talk about the world that needs no prisons, and how we are going to make that world. I want you to understand that I make the decisions in here and out there. Don’t tell me that you need anything except food. I don’t want to hear about your case, and I don’t want to hear about how somebody owes you. Talk to me about whatever help you need to stay out of here once you get out.
“Don’t worry about getting enough to eat and drink, and sporting new clothes. I can see into this joint, so I know if you need anything. I can do something about it if they are not providing these things to you. If I can see that you want to help me get everyone out of here, I will take care of you while you are still in here.
“What the fuck are you saying? We can’t have any kind of a hustle while we’re in here? We have to wear state clothes, and eat whatever slop they serve over in the chow hall?”
“That’s right. If you’re trying to run a hustle, you’re taking something from someone else. If you run a hustle, you are trying to get more than you need. If you get more than you need, someone else will get less than what he needs.
“If you try to run a hustle, you will end up with a conflict with someone else in here over money. Like I said, I won’t help you out of here if you have a conflict with someone, because you will take that conflict out of here, and you will just end up back in here.
“You won’t know what kind of mission I might send you on to rescue someone from this place. That guy might live in filth. You have to go there, and not worry about getting your clothes dirty.
“Don’t always be trying to find out what will happen tomorrow. Getting through one day at a time is enough.”
“You mean that you don’t want us to think about when we’re getting out of here?”
“That’s right, and I don’t want you to think about what it will be like when you get out of here. Don’t worry about if your shock motion is going to go through, or if they will have the things you want when you go to the commissary. You don’t need to worry about any of that. It will be taken care of for you.
“Do not judge anyone, so that no one judges you. Any judgment you make on anyone will turn right around and come back on you. You will be judged with whatever measure of judgment you use.”
“Wait a minute! You mean that we have to treat some fuckin’ skeezer whore crackhead snitching baby raper the same as anyone else?”
“That’s right. You had to do something to get in here. The same way that you king-pin drug dealers and bank robbers look down on child molesters, the people on the outside look down on all of you in here. If you want to help me get everyone out of here, it means everyone. You don’t know how that criminal might help me.”
“So if that motherfucker, Hitler, was my bunkmate, I’d have to share my food box from home with him?”
“Not only that, but you’d have to help him with his case if he asked you to. Hitler was a sucker, same as you. He got suckered into ranting about his Master Race so that some guys could sell a lot of weapons. He gave a good speech, so they used him to sucker the German people into going to war.
“If you need help, all you have to do is ask. You will get it. Is there anyone here, who, if your kid asks for bread, will give a stone?”
“Yeah, you stupid motherfucker! They’re called crackheads and alcoholics and junkies! Where the fuck you been?”
“Shut the fuck up, man! Let him talk! Not even a crackhead would do some shit like that”
“Bet me! I bet we could find a motherfucker in this camp who’s done it, or close to it. Or his woman has. If a bitch can leave her kids out in the car to freeze to death while she sits in a bar all night, or if a motherfucker can put out a cigarette in his kid’s ass, then they can give a kid a stone if the kid asks for bread. That means Sonny Mann here don’t know shit! He don’t know us! He tells us that he can tell how we’re going to act on the outside by watching us in here. If he don’t think that anyone would give a kid a stone if the kid asks for bread, then he don’t know what he’s talking about.”
“What you got to say, Sonny Mann?”
“Sorry, wrong sermon. That was from the Sermon on the Mount. I was supposed to take that out of the one I wrote for Hell.”
The whole crowd laughed at this, and Sonny went on.
“What you need to keep in mind in everything you do is to do to the next guy the same way you would want him to do to you. That’s what all of these laws are all about. You won’t kill a guy or steal from a guy, because you don’t want him to do those things to you.”
“Don’t look for an easy way to get out of here. If you look for the easy way, you will just end up back in here. The way that I’m talking about getting out of here is the hard way, but if you follow it, you will stay out of here.
When Sonny Mann was done talking, everyone had to admit that he sounded like he knew what he was talking about.
Dear Dad,
The jailhouse lawyers had a fit after Sonny spoke in the yard. They all got together, and told each other that they couldn’t make any money if everybody listened to Sonny Mann. No one would bring their money to the jailhouse lawyers if they all thought that Sonny Mann would fax them out. They got together with the C.O. ‘s who made a little money smuggling drugs and alcohol into the joint. They decided to snitch him out.
Colonel Powers himself came down for Sonny’s disciplinary hearing. The colonel said, “Now, what am I supposed to do with this man? I listened to the surveillance tape. I didn’t hear nothing about a jailbreak out of him. What do you have to say about all of this, Mr. Mann?”
Sonny didn’t say a word. He didn’t even blink.
“It ain’t going to do you no good to act like that, young man. My men tell me that we’re going to have a mess of trouble if I don’t get you out of here.”
“Do what you have to do, man.” Sonny told him.
So, Colonel Powers told them to transfer Sonny to a joint with a higher security status.
When the hearing was over, the C.O.’s told Sonny to go back to his bunk and pack up. They would keep him in segregation until they had a van going to Lebanon. No one escorted Sonny to his bunk, and all the C.O.’s disappeared from the yard. A crowd stopped Sonny on his way back to his bunk.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going, man? You think you’re funny, don’t you? You think you can come in here and sucker us all into acting like bitches. Then you spy on us through your little cameras and microphones, and you show your computer geek friends what a joke you pulled on a bunch of stupid motherfuckers. You think you’re going to get a big laugh when this is all over, don’t you?
“You said you’d be watching us and listening to us to see if we could take it. Let’s see if you can take it, faggot!”
They pushed him down, and kicked him. They pushed his face in the mud. One guy put a blade in his side. About four of them fucked him in the ass.
We heard whistles blowing, and everyone scattered. They took Sonny to the infirmary, and then to the Correctional Medical Center. We all thought he was dead.
He was back in three days. I didn’t know it at first. He walked up to me in the yard, but I didn’t know it was him. I didn’t expect him back, and he looked a lot different. He changed his voice, and started asking me stuff like he was new to the joint.
He stayed another forty days, and then he got transferred to Lebanon. Before he left, he told me to remember what he said, and to tell it to others. He said we would be back to collect his sheep. It won’t be long before he’s down there in Lucasville. I guess he wasn’t kidding when he said that he wanted to tour the whole system.
“Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's own need to think."
Adolf Eichman
Sonny Mann spends a lot of time talking to the goggle boys. All they want to talk about is getting out of here, and getting back into some game. When they talk to each other, they compare notes on the games they played before they came in here. They talk about meeting up online after they get out of here, and teaching their games to each other.
I heard Sonny talking with one of the goggle boys the other day. The boy said that he knew that he couldn’t be in the game all the time, like he was on the outside, but he didn’t know how he could get along without the goggles. He found real life too boring, and too confusing. He told Sonny that he knew that he wasn’t in a game while he was in here, but pretending that prison is a VR game is the only way that he can take it. He said that prison is better than the outside if he can’t have his goggles. In prison, the rules are fairly clear, and the characters that he has to deal with are more predictable than people on the outside.
The goggle boy told Sonny that he didn’t see a point to going on without his goggles. There was no challenge, no object to the game. He asked Sonny how he was supposed to find any fun or enjoyment out of life. Everything happens so slowly, and one day is just like the next. Nothing really exciting ever happens, either.
Sonny Mann told the goggle boy about a game. He said that the game has some very clear rules. The first and most important rule was to work at making the game better for everyone who played. The second rule was a lot like it; help out another player whenever you have the chance. Sonny said that other players would try to convince him that the object of the game was to get money and power. He would see that the players who got a lot of money and power were looked up to by the other players. He would see that very few players followed the rules, and that they were laughed at and scorned by other players.
Sonny told the goggle boy that he could check the rules whenever he wanted to, but he would meet players skilled at interpreting and bending the rules to justify and rationalize how their money-grubbing.. He said that some players would be skilled at convincing other players that the rules meant the opposite of what they said.
Sonny said that the object of the game is to remind all of the other players in the game of the real rules of the game. He said that those players who did this would be persecuted and harassed by the players who had money and power. They would have to endure prison, torture, and starvation.
The goggle boy asked Sonny, “Who the fuck would want to play a game like that? How the Hell do you win, anyway?”
“You win by following the rules. Everybody who follows the rules, and tells other players about the rules, will win. Even if you break the rules, you can do a start over, and just start following the rules again. But don’t think that you can just do a start over after every time you break the rules. You don’t know when your time in the game will end. If you’re not busy trying to remind other players of the rules when your time ends, you lose.”
“Like I said, who would want to play a game like that? It doesn’t sound that interesting or fun, and you would just have to put up with a lot of humiliation just for following the rules.”
“You want to play it, son. You said that you wanted a challenge. What could be more challenging than putting together the best online party ever? This is the most intricate and complex game you’ve ever seen. If you play the game right, it will always hold your interest. Besides that, it’s the only game around. They won’t let you have goggles in here, so you might as well play.”
“You don’t need goggles to play it?”
“No. You’re already playing it. You just don’t know it. Here’s the manual.”
Sonny Mann handed the goggle boy a Bible.
“What the fuck is this? A Bible? You’re out of your fucking mind! That shit’s just stupid, man. My grandma dragged me along to her stupid fucking church when I was little. I had to go to that Sunday school they had. Those kids in there were assholes, and the teacher just talked about a lot of stupid bullshit that I didn’t understand. Why do we have to learn all that stuff about some old guys who lived a long time ago? That stupid “Ten Commandments” movie we had to watch every fucking Easter was really boring, man. You’re telling me that I have to read about a bunch of stupid shit like that to get out of here? I don’t see the connection.”
“Like I said, it gives you clear instructions. You said that if you couldn’t have your goggles, you’d rather be in here than on the outside, because you couldn’t understand all the rules on the outside. Just give it a try. Have an open mind. Start off by reading it as if it were the manual for a role-playing game. There are plenty of characters to choose from, and plenty of intricate plot lines. What else do you have to do in here? There are plenty of guys you can go to if you have questions.”
“I think you’re full of shit, man. I used to read a lot. My grandma dragged me along to that corny-ass church of hers. I tried to keep an open mind, but the more I read, the more I found out that religion stuff is a bunch of bullshit. I don’t see the difference between my grandma’s preacher and those psychic sleazebags who sucker the weak-minded out of their money by telling them what they want to hear.
“The church is supposed to be based on a guy who preached about peace, but they made a saint out of a guy who tortured people during the Inquisition. Before that, they went to war because their Holy Land was occupied by Muslims. They had more wars because that Martin Luther guy finally said something about how fucking corrupt the church was, and wanted to change it. That fucking Christian church has to be the most hypocritical and downright evil organization the world has ever seen. That doesn’t go along with what I heard you say out on the yard before you got knifed, man.”
“So if I want to get out of here, I have to be like one of those sorry-ass motherfuckers who steals his grandma’s Social Security check to get a rock, and then he goes into court and tells the judge that he found Jesus? Or, I have to be like one of those preachers who tells old women to give up ten percent of their measly little money, so the rev can drive around in a new Volvo or a Beemer, and wear Italian suits?”
“See, you’re already playing the game, son. If you care about things like that, you’re in the game. If I see you doing something about these things, I will help you out of here.”
“Why do I have to act like those fucking goofballs rolling around on the floor, and waving their arms, and pretending to speak some language no one can understand. What the fuck is all that shit about anyway?
“Now, you gave me a Bible, and told me to read it. What about motherfuckers who can’t read, like those crack babies? Even if they don’t have damaged brains, they couldn’t sit still long enough to read, even if some one cared enough to teach them to read. Some of them can read, but they can’t read no fucking Bible!
“Every time we went over to my grandma’s house for a holiday, my dumb-ass uncle would try to get someone to argue with him about the King James Bible. He has a bumper sticker on his car that says “IF IT AIN’T KING JAMES, IT AIN’T A BIBLE.” I tried reading it once, and it was like it was a whole different language. Why do we have to learn a different language to get out of here?”
“You don’t have to learn a new language. You can help them to understand. Read the manual, and explain it to those who can’t read. You will get answers to your questions if you read.”
“But why did you have to make the game like that, Sonny Mann? It just seems cruel. You made a game that I can’t get out of, unless I help everyone else get out of the game. That sucks, man. I can’t control what anyone else does. What’s wrong with you?”
“What I’m doing is cleaning up after a virus that got into the game. We spent a lot of time making that game. We programmed the celestial mechanics, the biology, the chemistry, everything. We finally figured out how to program some players who could think on their own. They could make decisions, and they could talk to us. We gave them everything they needed. We told them that they would have everything that they needed.
"My partner got bored, though. He wanted a little more drama, a little more action. He showed one female how to plant crops, and told her that she wouldn’t have to worry about going hungry, because she would be sure of a food supply. She started doing this for a few years, and pretty soon the other players would come to her when they couldn’t find enough food in the land.
My partner told her, 'You’re smarter than they are. You worked for this food. You’re feeding everyone else, while they are idle. They should be working for you. Make them till the crops, while you sit back and eat.'
"The female listened to this. She thought my partner was right. She needed a little muscle to get the others to work her crops, so she gave her man the same line that my partner gave her. Not only that, but she told him no sex until she had people working her fields. So, he started smacking people who asked for food but didn’t want to work.
"Pretty soon they started to argue about who worked more, and who produced the most crops, and who deserved to eat more. Someone came up with an idea to let each player work his own little plot of land, and use markers to make it easier to barter. The virus is money. The game went smooth until the players started going after money all the time. It wasn’t long before they came up with the idea of debt. They started to trick each other to get each other into debt. It wasn’t long before some of the players were slaves, and some were masters.
"Some of the smart players figured out that they could con the others into thinking that they were put in charge by the spirits to help them with their crops. They made masks and shrines, and made up little chants that were supposed to be to keep the spirits from getting angry, but they were just a show to get the players to give up some of their money and crops so the priests could live on Easy Street.
"My partner got his wish. There was plenty of drama after that. Lots of suffering and heartbreak, too. They went to war over money. After that, it just got worse, because they spent their time figuring out more efficient ways of killing each other, and trickier ways of enslaving each other. Cleaning up after this virus is hard. I have to reprogram each player. I need some help with it. Will you help me?”
My name is John Charles Stevens. I was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1960. I am engaged to a wonderful woman. I live in Columbus, Ohio.
I was inspired to write He Descended Into Hell after reading the Gospels. It is how I imagined Jesus Christ spent the three days between His Crucifixion and His Resurrection. The title is from the Nicene creed. It is the story I needed to read twenty-five years ago. Sometimes I think that I was sent to Earth to be an example of the old saying that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
I apologize to those who may be offended by some of the language in the story. I did not imagine Hell as a place where the spirits would watch their language. I thought that it was necessary to make the setting Hellish.
We all have our own ideas about what Heaven and Hell are like. I tried to imagine what Christ would say to the spirits who have no love and no hope. I focused on The Sermon on the Mount, because I think that it is the core of what Christ taught us. It is a lesson that most of us have ignored. Those few people who try to live by what Christ taught in his sermon are looked on by the rest of us as crazy, or at least eccentric.
I believe that Jesus was an anarchist and a rebel. The Sermon on the Mount was a call to insurrection.
Albert Camus said that suicide is the ultimate philosophical question. The question is, “Why should I stay in this world?” Faith provides us with the only satisfactory answer to this question. Faith gives us purpose, and liberates us from out demons. The Sermon on the Mount offers hope and comfort to the suicidal and the disturbed. Unfortunately, many people who most need this comfort do not trust religion. They see it as irrelevant and silly. I have met many people who think that Christianity is a force of evil in the world, rather than good. I used to be one of them. They think this because of the evil things that have been done in the name of Christ.
Christ gave us some valuable and simple spiritual principals. Even though we worship Him as the Son of God, we still judge other people, we grub after money, and we think of those who turn the other cheek as wimps and sissies. By doing this, we have made the world a Hellish place for many people. We have made religion irrelevant to many people, and so have stolen any hope that they might have.
I have spent most of my adult life working in fund raising, telemarketing, and market research. I have also worked as a busboy, file clerk, elevator operator, farm laborer, bartender, furniture mover, data entry worker, warehouseman, salesman, house painter, waiter, paint store clerk, airplane waxer, orderly, newspaper deliverer, toy store clerk, construction worker, art museum guard, hod carrier, and an unemployment and workers compensation claims clerk and hearing representative.
I enjoy traveling, pinball, reading, skipping stones on the water, shunpiking, old movies, crossword puzzles, Frisbee, basketball, hiking, Scrabble, cribbage, meeting new people, and checking out the Internet. I spent the summer of 1981 hitchhiking around the United States. It was a wonderful time.
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