Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [27]
Such is the beauty of the prison doc. Regardless of the adjectives that may currently adhere to your life, they’re generally better than the ones describing the existence of a convict. So what if you find yourself staring at convicted felons at four in the morning with tears in your eyes and a bowl of cereal balanced on your leg? At least it’s your television—or it’s not, at any rate, owned and operated by the city, state, or federal Department of Corrections.
LISTEN! It’s our friend Kyle again. Shaved-headed, goateed, bright-eyed Kyle. He’s talking about people who have committed sex crimes, child molesters, gang dropouts, and people like him that have testified. My path to prison started when I got caught selling drugs in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Except for the inked-on CUT HERE around his throat, he looks like a cleaner-cut Woody Harrelson.
I live on SNY 3 C facility. It’s a sensitive-needs yard for inmates that cannot program around the general-pop inmates.
Here comes a winning smile that might just as easily grace a baseball card. Perhaps Kyle was driven to crime by having a difficult-to-pronounce last name, one that I’m not even going to try to spell out here. I had a gym teacher who, for six straight years, called me “Gerlad Stale.” I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I had fantasies about doing things to his face with the Ping-Pong paddle he always carried in his back pocket for swat purposes.
KYLE, the chyron reads, IS SERVING 25 YEARS TO LIFE FOR SECOND DEGREE MURDER.
Turns out Kyle’s family set up him up. Only he didn’t know it till way later. His father asked him how much it would cost “to get a dog run over.”
My parents and my sister wanted to get her husband killed for supposedly molesting their daughter. My parents were phoning me constantly. So at that time, I decided, “Hey, this is family. I gotta do this.” So I asked him, “Dad, hey, tell me exact time, the exact place.” They say Tuesday, two-fifteen, he would go to pre-school, pick up his kids…
So I went to McDonald’s, grabbed something to eat, went to some abandoned horse trail, put on my disguise, and went and waited. I waited for what seemed like forever. He parked in the parking lot, twenty feet from the day care center. I remember the blinds were drawn. That’s why my relatives said it would be a good time. Because kids would be sleeping. Blinds would be drawn. Nobody would see me. I tapped him a few times on his window. As soon as he looked, I knew it was him. I didn’t think. I just started shooting. I didn’t count bullets. I didn’t know how many I fired until I read the police reports.
Now here I am. As much as I would like to say that I killed for a righteous and solid reason in people’s eyes, the truth is, I believe I was mistaken. It was a bitter custody dispute. And one of the ladies manipulated us all. And the truth is, I may have been mistaken. I may have been played. I may have done all this for no reason at all.
You testify, then you’re a rat. I ended up telling them the whole story. Implicated my relatives. So I’m the lowest of inmates. Because I decided to tell the truth and implicate other people. Every day I think about this, that this may be my home. I don’t deserve to get out….
A sense of hopelessness kind of sneaks up on Kyle’s perky delivery at the end. But still, as bad as things are…he’s on TV. As Gore Vidal once famously said, you should never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on TV. Competing for face time with charismatic baby-killers, three-time losers, and born-again, blacked-out wife-throttlers, Kyle made the cut. How bad, really, could life be?
Theories about why the cable public loves inmate docs range from the paternal to the patriotic to the homoerotic. America, God bless her, jails more of her citizens than any other country on the planet. Roughly one in a hundred Americans, at any given