jPay Message #655

I’m spinning laps with Jacktown. We’re having a real conversation–a rare thing in here–talking about who we really are and where we come from.

His family was awful. When he was 6, his mom would stay up doing coke for 3 days at a time, poking her son awake whenever he drifted off to sleep.

“No sleeping yet. Mommy’s not tired,” she told him.

He couldn’t understand why she was acting this way.

At 12, having established himself in the popular group, he would go over to friend’s houses and raid their parent’s porn stashes, as teenage boys do. They’d all watch it together, and then ride their bikes home quickly to masturbate. 

When it was his turn for friends to come over, he discovered a videotape in his parent’s closet. Without knowing what it was, he put it on in front of his friends.

The video was a sextape of his mom getting double teamed by his dad and some other guy. As a white kid in a majority black school, the fallout was swift and brutal.

At school, he was taunted relentlessly for having a fag dad and a whore mom. He constantly got into fights.

Eventually, he ran away from home. His parents didn’t care. Or else, they didn’t come looking.

He ended up staying at a crack house for kids, where the landlord had all the homeless kids staying there sell rocks for rent. He was the only white kid there.

A year later, he organized a crime ring consisting of 13 year old kids, committing B&Es on all the local businesses. This went for almost a year before the police discovered the plot and pinpointed the mastermind. He spent the next 5 years in juvie.

This is a typical inmate childhood.

I’m an anomaly in this fucked up milieu. I was fed, cared for, and loved. I was encouraged in all my endeavors. My parents sent me to private school and helped me in college. I was good kid.

With every advantage and opportunity to succeed, I squandered all of them. Am I just another self-destructive privileged asshole wanting pity? 

In these circumstances, having a good family is cause for embarrassment. It proves my ineptitude.

Does that make me worse than the typical inmate? Even if they’re awful people on day to day basis? 

Jacktown is one of the good ones. He can function in society. But all the others who steal and lie and prey on the weak–they weren’t taught right and wrong. They were taught the crack game at 12 years old. 

That’s not an excuse. It helps me understand.