Preview of Out of the Miry Clay: Freedom From Childhood Sexual Abuse

I froze as a sinister eeriness crept into the room.  The only sound was the clanging of a series of mechanical gates opening and closing as I entered into the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater.  My heart was pounding in my throat.  I had walked through these gates so many times before in the many years I had been visiting my husband.  Improbable as it seems it was here within these infamous walls that I had met and married the man of my dreams.  Normally I was excited during this ritual procedure of entering the prison for I would soon be in the arms of the man I loved.  But today there was a sense of foreboding that I just could not shake.  Once inside the last gate, I saw a guard with a set of handcuffs dangling from her rubber-gloved hands and I heard the disgust in her voice as she turned them over to the control center.  "Don't touch these!" she shrieked, "they are contaminated!"  The way she said the word "contaminated" made me feel so dirty and ashamed.  Contaminated!  What did she mean?  As if reading my mind, she turned to me and said "with AIDS".

Suddenly I heard profanity behind me and turned.  In the pale light I saw him.  His face was so dark, so hollow and so full of hate.  His eyes pierced right through me.  I shuddered; glad for the security of the bars that separated us.  There he sat in a dank holding cell.  So it was he who had contaminated the handcuffs.  I looked from the convict to the handcuffs to the guard and looked into her eyes.  It was then that I understood that she made no distinction between us.  We were all contaminated in her eyes - the scum of the earth.  I knew she hated convicts and anyone who visited them.

I tried to ignore him, to remind myself that he was just another convict, one of the hundreds that I had seen over the years I had been visiting my husband in this wretched place.  But his eyes beckoned me to look at him again.  His face will be forever etched in my memory.  I wondered to myself what could make a human being have such intense hatred.  I shivered as I felt the guard's venomous hatred for both of us and it pained me but it in no way compared to his hatred.  Somehow I felt and understood his hatred.  There was a familiarity about it.  It was like meeting a very old friend.  His eyes seemed to peer into my broken soul and I just could not take the scrutiny.  I quickly walked past his sinister gaze and snapped back to attention.  I angrily told myself that it was ridiculous that he could understand me.  After all, I was a preacher's daughter and he was a complete reprobate!   How could he possibly know what was inside of me?  But somehow I knew that he did.  It was as if he had read my heart and saw past my phony facade.  He had seen the real me - the one that not even I understood.  In a glimpse, he had exposed my pain and I knew I would never forget him.   I pulled myself back to reality and put on my smile again but there was a hollowness that would thereafter haunt me.  Little did I know that in the years to come, I would have to face my own toxic emotions and that I would find that same evil hatred, his kind of hatred - a hatred so intense that it would literally eat at my soul like an acid.  For the time being, everyone could easily see the hatred in his evil eyes; it was much harder to see mine behind the smile.  But my facade was already beginning to wear thin and it would just be a matter of time before life would disintegrate before my eyes.  Soon I would find myself completely buried in the miry, mucky clay of my past.  There in my slimy pit, I would find the love I had craved for a lifetime.  But until then I was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.

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Preview of Just One Step From Hell

“You are cheating Dale, now knock it off!”  Just as quickly as the words came out of my mouth you could hear a hush come over the prison yard.   It was a hot, humid day in August and I was playing a game of doubles in handball.  I had just spanked the two best players in the joint single-handedly.  I had watched Dale cheating all throughout the game.  Every time a shot came to my partner, Dale would push him out of the way so he missed the shot.  I was such a strong competitor and this wasn’t the first time my big mouth had gotten me into trouble.  But I realized this time might be my last.  I had just insulted the most feared man in the whole penitentiary All the other convicts waited to see what Dale would do next.  I stood and faced him.  I knew who Dale was – everyone knew who Dale was.  There wasn’t a single man in the joint who would have dared to say what I had just said - at least if he wanted to live to tell about it.

Dale was a fierce and volatile man.  He had spent most of his life in and out of prison.  He was notorious for his violent temper.  Dale was also a dope fiend; this made for a deadly combination.  Lots of times he would stay high for days at a time.  Dale did every drug known to man but his drug of choice was Valium.   He would cook it down in a spoon and mainline it.  When he was coming down off a high he could get downright vicious and I could tell he was crashing because he had been nasty all throughout the game.   This was not a good time for a confrontation with Dale but it was a little late to figure that out now.  There was no predicting what Dale was going to do to me.  Everyone had seen Dale fight with the other convicts and I knew that he could easily kill me with his bare hands.

The stories of Dale’s strength were legendary.  One time when he was out on the streets he ran into a guy who owed him some drug money.  The guy was in his car at a stoplight in downtown Minneapolis.  Dale waved for him to roll down his window so they could talk.  The man refused and Dale doubled up his fist and blasted him, crashing his fist so hard through the window that he hit the guy hard enough to knock him out cold.

Dale sauntered over and towered above me with his six-foot 225-pound frame.  He stared down at me and I looked him right in the eye.  “You know you were cheating Dale,” I said.  Dale’s nostrils started to engorge like an angry wild stallion in captivity.  I continued to look him straight in the eye bracing for his first punch.  Dale’s eyes were flames of violent rage.  The veins on his neck stood out and the sweat was glistening on his strong sinuous body of flesh and steel.  The only sound you could hear was Dale’s breathing.  I was no match for him and I knew it but I also wasn’t afraid to die for I had faced death many times before.  When Dale was finally able to talk he said, “You say one more word kid and you…will…die.”  I knew he meant it.  Dale wasn’t one to mince words.  We stood there staring each other down.

A crowd of convicts gathered around to see who would back down first.  Next to leaving prison, the best thing was watching a good prison brawl.  They knew Dale had never backed down before.  Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that the guards in the four watchtowers on top of the wall were paying very close attention.  They had their rifles ready to fire a shot if things got out of control.  If eyes truly are the “windows to your soul” what I saw in Dale’s soul that day was pure evil.  I expected to die at any moment because I knew that he wanted to kill me.  It was all about saving face.  A convict would rather die than back down.  To back down was a sign of weakness – something a convict could never do.

All of a sudden Dale grabbed me around the neck and said “You’re all right kid.  You may be a little guy but always remember it’s not the size of the lion but the size of the heart that’s inside the lion that counts.  And you kid, have a heart this big” as he held his hands up for all the other convicts to see.  Everyone clapped and cheered.  The confrontation was over but I never forgot those words.  No one knowing me growing up would have ever thought of me as lion-hearted.    I was afraid of everything; so afraid that I had spent many years sleeping with a gun.