“Hey, do you know you have court in the morning?”

It is 1:14 am. The dorm is dark, save for four menacing red emergency lights. I’ve woken up to piss, and on my way back to my bunk the officer asks this question.

Yes, I am aware, and nervous as well. I tell him one of these things.

“They want you in AP by four thirty. What time do you want me to wake you up?”

“Four,” I tell him and head back to bed, resisting the urge to ask him questions that have been assailing my mind throughout the day:

Is it still snowing?

How are the roads?

What are the chances the van crashes and I die on my way to court?

I’m being irrational, I know. It is a talent friends, counselors, and coworkers over the years have insisted I unlearn. Another one of my talents is stubbornness. Much like the way eyes are drawn to the scene of an accident, my mind keeps going there of its own volition. Death, I suppose, is magnetic.

After a fitful couple hours more of sleep, the officer’s gentle tapping wakes me. At the same time, my cubemate’s alarm clock starts screaming, and he hops up to get ready for work in the kitchen.

My hands shake as I brush my teeth and wash my face. The bottle of daily multivitamins rattles like a maraca, and I drop several yellow-orange tablets on the floor. Those things are jail-expensive—almost four dollars!—and I wince at the wanton waste of money.

At four thirty the corrections officer greenlights my trek to Admitting and Processing, where I was told by my peers I would sit for hours until my ride arrives. They, of course, are correct. They are veterans of this prison game, and at seventeen months into my only bid, I am still a rookie, first day on the job. I should know better than to doubt them.

The bullpen is a tiny room with thin wooden benches and toilet with a handwritten sign warning inmates not to use it, to ask for the other bathroom. During the wait I am joined by three men. The first is wearing sweats, and I assume he’s headed home. He is, and I am skewered by hot envy. 

How I wish it were me in sweats, ready to roam the free world again instead of being reduced to my last name, even though I am a fountain of grief and remorse. 

The other two are wearing tans, like I am, and are also headed to court for sentence modification hearings. That ices my nerves a bit, knowing I won’t be physically alone on this long day. And if we crash and die, I won’t be alone either. This is selfish, I think, but I can’t help it. Does that make me a bad person?

One of the guys, it turns out, I am familiar with. He goes by Spice, and during a trauma-based addiction treatment program in which he was a participant and I the peer mentor, he noticed my last name and that I was from Waterbury. He and my dad used to run together, he had proudly explained. 

Spice asks about my case. I tell him: I was sentenced to three years for manslaughter with a motor vehicle while intoxicated. I had been drinking, but drank something my friend had spiked for himself, accidentally getting myself high on something. He refused to tell me what up until the day he took his own life.

“Damn,” he says, “that’s rough.”

Then he inquires about my father. A noncommittal grunt escapes my mouth as I shrug.

“Same old?” he says.

“I guess.” 

“You know, I used to love your aunt, Donna.” We laugh a bit, mine half-assed, forced. “Yessiree! I used to love me some Donna. Mmmm-hmmm!”

We chat a little more about Aunt Donna, and I start to ease up. Relax, I tell myself, it won’t be so bad. Maybe I should take Spice’s presence as a sign; some acquaintance is better than complete unfamiliarity. It’s strange how humans have this intrinsic need for companionship, and tend to find it where they least want or expect it. Here, in this little holding cell, I give in to that need, despite feeling unworthy of any kinship.

Our ride comes around six thirty. Our driver is a short, Black female officer with neck-length thin, brown dreadlocks. One by one, she cuffs our wrists, shackles our feet, and restricts our range of motion by connecting our wrist cuffs to chains cinched around our waists.

I try to grab my manilla envelope of legal documents from the table, and look and feel ridiculous. This, I think, is how T-Rex must have felt, and chuckle aloud. She looks at me and I shake my head. No point in telling her I just empathized with a long-extinct beast. No point at all; she couldn’t care less. While this is only her job, this, right now, is my life. I want so badly to tell her my story, how my circumstances make me different, but I don’t. I’m sure she’s heard a bunch of sob stories and, likely, mine would sound like the hum of the transport van she drives, low and incessant, but infinitesimal to desensitized ears. To her, I am just another penny in a well trying to shine brighter than all the others.

On the way to New Haven Correctional Center, the place from which another ride will convey us to court in Waterbury, we stop at three other prisons to pick up and drop off other men going to court. Between stops our driver chats on the phone and smokes cigarettes. I used to smoke, but now the smell forces my stomach into acrobatics. I retch at each ashy wisp of smoke I smell.

“Is she allowed to do that?” I ask Spice.

“Hell no,” he says.

It’s freezing—I can’t feel my toes—but the other guy from my prison, a corpulent Hispanic man shouts, “Miss, you close the heat? I fockin’ sweating.” And, to my surprise, she complies.

“What the fuck,” I mumble.

From beside me, Spice asks, “Why didn’t you bring your sweatshirt?”

“I didn’t know I could.” 

There are so many rules about what you can and can’t do, and they all come from fellow inmates, who, oftentimes, know as little as I do. The people who should know the rules—the officers and counselors—claim not to know and aren’t willing to find out. Their lackadaisical approach to Connecticut’s “progressive” prisoning reminds me at every turn that, though I mourn the man whose life I stole nightly, and though I’ve dedicated myself to helping others in prison through peer mentoring with the Addiction Treatment Unit, that I am, underneath the shiny veneer and smile, the same as everyone else: wearing tans and eating chow. I am the sorriest thing in the room.

But so is everyone else.

The bullpen in New Haven has about twenty men spread among three cells, all waiting for state judicial branch marshals to arrive and spirit them away to more waiting in courthouse cells. The toilets are clogged and smell, ammonia-acidic, but I have to pee. I try to flush, just to see if it will go down. It doesn’t.

The clock on the wall reads nine. We should be leaving soon, I think, although our hearings aren’t until two o’clock. As I sit on a bench and watch men leave for other courts, I remember the last time I was here.

After sentencing in 2022, they took me here for initial processing. I rode in the marshals’ van—the ice cream truck—shackled to five guys like human sausage links. Everyone had to wear masks at all times. This is what I deserve, I thought the whole ride from court to county. I remember the stoic, professional faces of the officers as I did my first-ever strip search—“Squat and cough!”—and taking my prison ID photo. As others file in and out now, I think, This is still what I deserve. If I am left here, by mistake or by karma, I wouldn’t be surprised. 

It is a cargo van, like a Ford Transit or whatever it’s called, with the back split longways down the middle. Either side has a small bench, off of which half your ass inevitably hangs and onto which six or seven men, regardless of size, squeeze like human sardines in an expensive can. From my experience, it certainly smells the part.

Once the marshals arrive, they cuff and shackle us again, this time connecting us via chain to one another. Instead of Spice, I end up with Colón, the sweaty Hispanic man, to my right and stranger from New Haven to my left. 

The ride is as horrible as I expected. Colón makes jerky movements, yanking the chain—and my wrist—back and forth. A few times I pull back, as if in some passive-aggressive tug-o-war. Not halfway through the forty-five minute drive, he again wails about heat that only he is experiencing. Off goes the heat, and ten minutes later, off comes his shirt. I notice suddenly that I have a headache.

For the rest of the ride, he remains shirtless, every pothole and turn thrusting his sticky left arm and gelatinous stomach against my “good” set of tans. I think, I hope he doesn’t make me smell, and then, like a flash of slow lightning: What if we hit black ice and crash?

Death for me, right now, just might be a half-step above the little hell of this ride.

Under the courthouse I stew and ruminate and try to sleep. I’m lucky because we arrived before the newly sentenced fill the cells, and the marshals give us the choice of bullpen or single cells. Solitude? Sign me the fuck up.

I am still uncomfortable, however. The cell is five stars compared to the county bullpen—clean toilet, working sink-water fountain combo, large wooden bench protruding from the wall. But my headache hasn’t dissipated despite my welcomed separation from Colón and his pestiferous stench. Like every other time I have a headache, I think my brain is hemorrhaging, and I’m starting to suspect it’s because I skipped out on coffee this morning to avoid a bowel movement during my court trip.

That, however, has backfired; my head is splitting, healing itself, then splitting again, over and over, and on top of that, I still have to shit. Briefly, I consider using the cell toilet, but there’s no toilet paper and asking for some is out of the question. The marshal touring every half-hour is the best-looking man I’ve seen in almost eighteen months. He is not allowed to know that I shit with this ass.

Using my prison uniform top as a blanket, I lie on my back with an arm over my eyes to block the aggressive overhead fluorescent light, wishing that we’d crashed and, by some divine act of Skydaddy, only I had died. That would be fair, that would be dessert for karma. 

Someone down the hall asks the hot marshal for the time. “Ten thirty,” he says, and I sob an embarrassing cry of defeat. He runs over to my cell and asks, “You okay?” I don’t

(can’t)

look him in the eye, so I groan, hopefully in the affirmative. His footfalls grow more distant, and I hunker down. Two o’clock cannot come any sooner.

By the time a marshal fetches us modification guys, I have gone over everything I want to say at least a hundred times, probably closer to two hundred. I plan to highlight how I’ve helped others in their recovery as a peer mentor, both in programs and in my dorm, a therapeutic community; how I believe helping people this way is my calling and the only way to repay, cent by cent, an incalculable debt to society.

My head aches still, and when the marshal asks if I’m ready, I want to snap, “Do I have a fucking choice?”

I’m shaking, but ready to get this over with. It’s mid-January, and it’s been five months since I filed this motion. What’s the worst that could happen? The judge says no. There are worse things in the world than rejection. Maybe, this time, I won’t almost pass out in the courtroom. 

The marshal cuffs us (our feet had remained shackled while we waited) and I use my T-Rex arms to carry my envelope of copies.

Four of us choose to sit together in a small cell upstairs. Everyone goes before me, and they call come back with the same result: come back on a later date with missing documents and to give the judge time to review everything. Spice theorizes I’m last because the judge will grant me the modification. After all, my packet of supporting documentation is thickest. The fourth guy, from another prison, compares my packet to his and says it looks “healthy.”

Outwardly I agree, and on the inside I hope that’s the case. I don’t want to make this trip a second time. Deeper on the inside something says maybe going last is just coincidence, that there’s nothing special about me, you narcissistic jackass. Deeper still, another something tells me that I’m a horrible person—the worst, actually—and there’s no forgiving my actions and the judge knows this.

I shake the voices from my head and make a mental note to request a mental health appointment when I get back to prison, as the marshal ushers me into the courtroom.

The judge is not the man who sentenced me. For one, this judge is a woman and is young compared to the original judge. She’s nicer, too.

There’s no one in the courtroom, and I am glad of that; I was worried about judgmental eyes lashing me for my sins. Still, I try not to make a fool of myself during the short hearing. I fail instantly by asking if I am supposed to sit or stand. The marshal, a woman, laughs from behind me at that and tells me to stand.

Suddenly I become aware that I am the only man in the room. 

The judge peruses the documents I sent in and instructs me to bring two more next time: my presentence investigation and my prison disciplinary report history. I have no tickets, I explain, so I didn’t think to bring my disciplinary report history. For proof, she insists, bring it to my next court date. 

Next, the judge cannot seem to find a form that proves my victim’s family has been notified of my attempt at a modification. The clerk ruffles through her papers, pulls one out, and hands it to the judge. The she gives me a slight smile, which I interpret as meaning Good job. The prosecutor flips some pages on her table and finds what she’s searching for.

“Your honor,” she says, “in October, the victim’s brother emailed saying he strongly opposes any modification and feels as though Mr. Taylor didn’t receive enough time as is.”

Well, I think, he’s not wrong. My negligence resulted in another man’s death and, for me, a charge of second-degree manslaughter with a motor vehicle. I went to a party and drank a drink with something in it, unbeknownst to me. Still, I had been slipping further and further into my addiction, and this crash only sped up the process. My decisions leading up to it were mine, and mine alone. At my sentencing, I was prepared to ask for the death penalty myself. Why should I be allowed to continue living?

There’s nothing more ignominious than what I did, and hearing those words feels like what I imagine having a limb sawed off with a serrated blade feels like. My head throbs, still, and now I have a hummingbird heartbeat. 

The prosecutor tells the judge their names—the brother and my victim—and my heart skips a beat. It is the first time I have ever heard his name: Jovan. In court, he’d been called simply “the victim,” and I was too much of an anxiety-riddled coward to learn his name, as though it possessed some unspeakable talismanic power. 

His name gives context to the man I spend many nights wondering about. Why was he out on the streets in the wee hours of the morning? Who was he? Did he have kids? Just exactly whose light did I extinguish? What if he could have gone on to cure a disease? Or helped on weekends at the animal shelter? 

(what if what if what if)

The possibilities are endless, and my mind, it feels, is determined to hypothesize about them all; luckily for my mind, it has the rest of my life to do that.

Grief, which sometimes feels like a small shard of glass lodged in my heart, swells within me, and it becomes a cement block tied to my ankle as I wade willingly into the ocean.

And it hits me, like it does at random times since the crash: There is no amount of sorry that can fix what I have done, bring back the life I stole. I am a thief, a criminal, and should be treated like one. I am a bad person.

My legs become jelly and my body heats to a million degrees, mostly concentrated in my now sweaty face and moist armpits. The room starts spinning. I’m having déjà vu. Shit, I’m going down, I think, and drop my head and close my eyes. I try to stay standing.

“So next time, Mr. Taylor, bring with you the required documents,” says the judge from a point in space light-years from where I am. 

When I return in April, the prosecutor will remark that though I am, on paper, the perfect candidate for a modification, to grant my motion would be a slap in the face to the family of my victim. I won’t argue with that point.

Court is adjourned, and I go back to my cell, wishing again that I’d crashed and died. It’s not too late for that miracle to happen.

On the ride from court back to New Haven, I think about how roundabout and inefficient the court trip process is. If my three stops were points on a triangle, my starting point would be the top and my final destination, Waterbury Superior Court, would be on the bottom left corner. Instead of taking the path from the top directly to the bottom left, we drive to the bottom right corner, then to the bottom left. Going back, we again avoid the direct route. Can that be any more stupid? I should write a letter to— 

Colón barks about the heat, then removes his shirt. This has to be some kind of violation of human rights, I think as his body rubs grotesquely against me.

We reach the jail and sit outside in the cramped ice cream truck for over an hour. 

“They’re taking someone with TB out,” explains our driver.

Tuberculosis? When did we slip back in the 1800s, and why wasn’t it on black ice, because this interminable day is somehow getting worse?

Colón talks the whole time in Spanish with the guy on my other side, loudly and obnoxiously. His odor, like my headache, is worse than ever. Why can’t I escape this man? I cannot wait to get back to my own prison, and the unlikely comfort of my dorm so I can sleep and forget about this day.

What was I thinking, I contemplate, applying for a sentence modification? I don’t deserve it, no matter the amount of good I’ve done this last year and a half. I will always have this past I created, and no matter how hard I try to swim around it, there always will be judgments and biases because of what I have done. Sometimes, the harshest of those may come from myself. But am I a bad person? I hope not. Until I find a definitive answer, I remind myself: try to forgive yourself, even if no one else will, and, whatever you do, don’t forget to be kind to yourself. It may save a life.

I don’t reach my home-prison until after eight o’clock. It’s dark and cold. I say to the officer in Admitting and Processing, “I’ve never been happier to see you.”