Death makes us real

The eminently quotable Mark Twain once scribed, “The mere knowledge of a fact is pale; but when you come to realize your fact, it takes on color. It is all the difference between hearing of a man being stabbed to the heart, and seeing it done.” If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to have seen such violence, I’m sure you agree.

I grew up in the 80s, and never had cable as a kid. None of the other kids in my neighborhood did either, so my friends and I were always limited in what kind of movies we could watch. A good R-rated movie was harder for us to get our hands on than the “secret location” where our Mom hid our lunch sweets. (HELLO, Little Debbie!)

I guess we finally got a VCR when I was 8 or 9 years old, but remember, we’re talking about a time before Blockbuster Video and Netflix. Any attempt to liberate anything but purely children’s fare from the local Mom & Pop video store was sure to invoke a requested explanation (which was always the same, “It’s for my Dad!”), and ultimately an unwelcome phone call to not-so-understanding and not-quite-wanting-to-be-bothered parents who saw NO EXPLANATION for their 8 year old trying to rend “Rambo” or “Friday the 13th Part XII: Jason Kills INNOCENT OLD LADIES.”

Every now and then, still, we would somehow manage (through tactics which can never be revealed) to possess one of these forbidden and ostensibly inappropriate videotapes. Then, down in a basement, far out of parental earshot, we would torture our young psyches with scenes of Freddy Krueger slashing his sinful teenage victims, fallen heroes gaining vengeance by going on bloody rampages, and soon-to-be-robotic police officers being tortured with gunfire at the hands of the soon-to-be-remorseful bad guys.

I always had to watch the most graphic scenes through slightly spread fingers, and rarely saw the payoff. I was somehow compelled to look away at the bloodiest, goriest moments. I think we all were. But we didn’t let on. Instead, we gave high fives all around as each scene climaxed, and talked of how we couldn’t wait to see who would get it next.

Usually, sometime after the fact, our exploits would be discovered. Whether through an ineptly hidden videocassette, or a nightmare that brought the truth out of one of us in a moment of weakness. At that point, a doting mom would insist we NEVER watch such trash again, lest we be scarred for life. The thing was, we weren’t scarred for life because deep down inside, even though we were kids, we knew the difference between fantasy and reality. It was only a movie, after all.

Not long ago, fate handed me a front row seat for the most violent and gruesome of the several murders I’ve had to endure witness to. Even on the silver screen, this scene alone would easily ear a film an NC-17 rating, or worse. To watch even a fictional portrayal of such unadulterated malice and undiluted macabre would be disturbing to the sane, if not disabling to the sensitive.

But to compare the experience to marketable entertainment is simply unfair. I’m sure if you were to ask the men and women who have served in our wars, and been on the front lines where violent death is commonplace, they would tell you that no movie can replicate what they saw and felt.

I am not a Veteran, but I can tell you this: Improvised prison shanks do not whistle in slow motion when they kill. Cold-blooded murderers do not stop and say insightful, plot-related things before they take a life. The look on a man’s face as he comes to the realization that he has been eviscerated is not worthy of a close-up shot, because it only comes fleeting as he slumps to the floor lifeless, expired. And the moment after it is over, there is no invisible hand (or editor) that cuts to some less dramatic scene. You cannot erase or soon forget the evidence of what has just happened in front of you.

There are very few of us in prison who are so heartless, so void of emotion that they are not deeply affected by being witness to a killing. We all deal with it in different ways. Some try to laugh about it, some try to desensitize, a few even secretly go to their cells and cry. Almost always, however, you can count on there being a serenity and reflectivity throughout the prison for at least a few days afterwards. Even in instances where there is to be a retaliation murder, it seems we are all given a brief time to adjust, as if too much violence at once would somehow be more than we could collectively handle.

On average, a maximum-security penitentiary probably has one or two homicides a year inside its walls. We’re never all in the same place at the same time, so most men will only see a couple of them happen throughout the course of their sentence. I’ve seen more than my share. Yet it only took one to do what all those slasher movies couldn’t do—change me forever. I will never be the same since I saw unexpected death come and steal a victim for the first time. I’m not going to soliloquize here about how it put everything in perspective; how life has a deeper meaning for me now. What I do want to tell you is that it helped me get my priorities straight. My new number one priority after that was to get out of here alive, and that hasn’t changed; I’ve almost made it, too.

I don’t care to watch any of those violent types of movies anymore. It’s not that they bother me anymore than they did before, either. It’s because they don’t feel like anything anymore. There’s no longer a thrill when those forbidden moments happen. I guess once you’ve been on the Space Shuttle, getting on a 747 doesn’t really do anything for you anymore.

Of course, no one here knows that this is how I feel. I wear my poker face well. Since we started with Mark Twain, we will end with some of his wisdom, also. He wrote, “A king is a mere artificiality, and so a kings feelings, like the impulses of an automatic doll, are mere artificialities; but as a man, are real, not phantoms. We are anything but kings, but as prisoners we wear many masks that are completely artificial. Every once in a while, though, something gets beyond our armor. And when we watch someone die, most of us become real.”