Tight Lips, Block 6

Parole Exhibit 3A:

Toastmasters Acceptance Speech Transcript from Travis County Correctional Complex, Nathaniel “Dewey” Lawrence, Most Improved Inmate

Thank you kindly for the accommodation. *laughs* Accommodation. Big words like that were never apart of my vocabulary before I was locked up. I always thought prison was gonna turn me dumber than I already was. Seems I owe Warden Jacobs an apology. Maybe then he’ll reconsider my sentence. *inmates laughing* Ok… here we go now.

“Some things are too big to fail.” That’s a saying my mama used to cook up, serving me powdered milk and eggs over hard and all the fixings that turn a boy seven feet straight. She’d grab my hock shoulder from behind, her hands thinned down from all the dish soap, and give a squeeze that betrayed my opinion of her. “And guess what, boy?” she’d whisper in my ear, “You’re gonna be big!”

I’d look at her, over a spoon bent soft through decades of thick cheekbones, and I’d wonder if she had any idea what the hell she was talking about. We had cattle graze the border of our cornfield every summer, both heifers and bulls plumped so fat they left udder tracks in the mulch, and I’d sit on the fence and watch them go around shaping the grass, outgrowing their hooves alongside our crops. One year, our neighbor left the barn open, and I watched him pack the brains of a dozen grade A steer. They were lined up in thin wooden corrals, and they didn’t even have time to moo- just the air gun pop and the blinking of existence. But it was their bodies that talked, seven hundred pounds of premium beef colliding with the Earth, hard as a cannon blast, shaking the crows from out of the cornstalks.

I figure that’s what Mama was thinking of as she built me. Not the size, but the sound of me, tearing canals through cities of men, shattering and smashing with a glossed horn, my only legacy being the shiver of my footprints. Damn knows that’s all she remembered about my father. How loud he could slam that back door to the field. The crack and jostle of him kicking the dirt off his boots at sundown. The wallop of her nightstand on those good nights, when there were shadows and she could forget that he was a stranger. Nobody knows where he took off the day he left the farm and the two of us, but she didn’t seem too phased by it. She knew that silence wouldn’t last very long. She knew she could always just raise another.

At seventeen I weighed two hundred and sixty seven pounds. Now, I know that’s tiddlywinks to ol’ Mastiff over there, who claims he was benching three twenty sophomore summer… I know, I don’t believe it neither… but out in Blanco I towered over those boys. During harvest season, I’d drop twenty pounds and still cycle eight sacks on any given Friday. When they published my stats on the third page of the South Texas Tribuner, my Mama pulled me out of school and we read through it together on the front porch swing, smelling the hay bales and the dead autumn heat. I… I still got the clipping, the only thing I ever won, really. Other than this Toastmasters thing.

Let me read it to you.

*clears throat*

“Nathaniel Lawrence knows his place in this life. He has not verbalized this- he doesn’t verbalize much, his coaches say- but you can tell by the gape of him, the long concentrated steps he takes down the ten yard line before every game, that he’s found a home on the field.

College recruiters say Lawrence has already shattered the Blanco High School sack record as well as the district record. He is six sacks off the state record and shows no signs of slowing down.

Where others flinch in the face of opposition, Lawrence thunders forward. His bull rush is comparable to a young Tommy Nobis, and his hand fighting is strong enough to snap the thickest of wrists. In fact, he’s sent two opponents to the emergency room with bone fractures just this season.

Needless to say, UT fans are excited for a potential in-state pick that could add much-needed depth to their defense and turn the lukewarm Longhorns into a boiling-hot championship contender.”

Doesn’t mean much now, but at the time I knew a trail had been laid out for me, etched in smudgy ink between the Editorial and Finance section. I was good cattle, and I learned that good cattle follow easy. So it wasn’t long before that journalist’s prediction came true.

I signed with Texas. It was always going to be Texas, because we had to tend the crops in September, and if I didn’t come home, then there’d be no one to slam those doors in the morning. Mama loved it, of course. She’d set out the trough for me and wash my burnt orange jerseys and tell me all about the television, how much it loved my number.

“Boy, when that game starts,” she’d say, “It’s 31 from first quarter to fourth.” She’d drop a double ribeye onto my plate and watch me chew it, eyes folded in my lap. “My Dewey baby, too big to fail. Just like I told the world.”

I stuck half the steak in my mouth.

“Want another?” Her eyes were up, high and wrinkled. Moths danced in the kitchen light. “Dewey, I don’t want you losing a single pound. You’ve got Tech next weekend.”

My mouth was full and I chewed faster to get it down. I shook my head no.

My mama didn’t move. It was quiet except for the cows an acre over. I think one was giving birth because it was screaming, but Mama didn’t even notice. Without breaking eye contact she slipped a third steak on my plate and exited the room.

That’s the first time I thought of it, gagged by a half-pound ribeye with two more to go, the origins of my plate just outside my window. I wondered what it’d look like for the herd to overtake the Shepard.

You fellas all know how the slaying went. If I never told you the story during chow hall, then you can find it pretty easily on the web. All the majors covered it- Daily Mail, New York Times, The Sun. Hell, the South Texas Tribuner made my trial their front-page serial. I always question if that sports journalist from high school believed the news about me when it was passed up through publishing. If he still thought I knew my place in this life.

I guess what’s less public is the event that turned me down the track. What made me take matters into my own hands.

The trigger.

*points to the room* We’ve talked about this in group, as material for our speeches. Mastiff’s was the white reflection of a shoehorn during a tense argument with his wife, bouncing against his eye socket, making him go crazy. Smoke said when the Giants blew a 24 point lead for the NFC Championship at Levi’s Stadium, he walked outside and threw a homeless man off the interstate.

Mine was a shattered ankle at Notre Dame. It was an important game- one where the bookies had us slated below the Irish with a double digit spread. That never shook our defensive line. We were the ones carrying. We were the superstars. If we won a game, it was because I got my hands on someone I shouldn’t have.

Problem was, it’s cold in Indiana. There was icicles below the yellow field post and boiling Gatorade in orange barrels and wispy exhales every which way, fogging up my sightline. When Coach Martin asked me how I was feeling, I tried to speak, but my teeth chattered so hard I couldn’t get a word out.

“Damn, boy,” he said, “I hope that ain’t nerves.”

“Definitely not, Coach.” It was the longest sentence I ever said to him.

So he nodded and sent me out there, onto the purest green grass I ever played on, and with each step there was a crunch of a hundred blades, frozen solid, snapping under my weight. We took position on the line of scrimmage, and I heard it all: two bands squealing cold brass heroics, and the crowd’s nauseous, drunk, furious mix of desert and night, and the molecules of sweat evaporating off the skin of the twelve polar giants in front of me. I was cold. I was ready. Then I heard the whistle.

I blanked. Above the eyeblack of my opponents I had seen something, so clearly that I hesitated. It was those bulls trapped in the barn, fat and angry and taken out with nothing, with less than nothing, unknown to the speed of their imploding fates, the speed that gravity would suck them to the ground and sap their kinetic energy, their only useful resource.

I saw myself. I saw number 31. And under the dogpile I was complete.

My teammates said they heard something crack as they stripped the men away, but when they saw me limping off alone, lips white and sewn shut, they assumed it was a simple sprain. Sideline doctors had to deliver Coach some harder news- a non-returning injury, shattered in four places. Most likely career-ending based on swelling and angle alone.

From the sideline I watched my teammates keep chipping away at those blue jerseys. They were on the thirty yard line, and while craning my neck to watch the following drive, the stretcher creaked underneath the weight of me. Coach put a hand on my shoulder to keep me from slipping off. I looked him in the eyes and they were so brown I couldn’t make out the irises.

“Sorry it had to end like this,” he told me before sending me back through the tunnel.

The field became smaller and smaller as I pulled away into that yellow mouth, but I continued straining my neck, kept trying to watch one more play. The green became a painting, than a spot, and then an echo, roaring down the hall. I was far away for the fourth-down turnover, but I could hear the cheers, the high fives and helmet taps. It all came together in one forceful pulse down the hall.

In the dark, my nurse smiled. “Seems you boys stopped ’em.”

I stared at her above me. “Like slammin’ a screen door,” I told her.

In the hospital I read that Tribuner article many times. The paper had yellowed and grown transparent. I could see my fingers through the text, blurring out the words that used to make me believe. The athletic program covered the surgery and rehab, but it wasn’t going very well. My ankle was a loud and fearful tenant. Any form of pressure became a noise complaint, a broomstick rapping against the ceiling. Coach didn’t think I moved the same. I had known before he said anything. Ground drills and sled pushes and even basic jogs across the green were completed by someone separate from myself; I could hear the gears of the glue shop and the wagon surging towards me, up and down hills glowing black in the Texas summer.

“Take some time off this season,” Coach said to me in a puddle of my latest effort. “Focus on your schoolwork. You can still be a leader on this team, but it’s not going to look the same.”

My lips hurt from quivering but I stayed silent. He pat my shoulder and moved out of the shadow of the bleachers, onto the orange field. I left the team two weeks later.

I know you all had hoop dreams. I see the ten of you guys in the yard, how Jorge and Boone ram shoulders in the paint, as if Warden’s gonna put together an incarcerated Space Jam team. Half of us could have made it, maybe, if we had a clue how to tuck the darker things away. *inmates laughing*

But I didn’t play to go pro. I played because it was who I was. I was rock and football was ocean, consuming me until I was morphed in its image. The traits that served a purpose were accented- calves and callouses and brown skin growing tawnier every tackle. And the rest of it? It just… shriveled away.

I was angry, not at the breaking of an outlet but the realization of the source. It was staring back at me in the mirror, a scarab’s black inflated husk, built for one objective and nothing more. I couldn’t recognize myself. I wondered if I had ever known who I truly was beneath it all.

I came to my mother with questions. We sat at the table, across from one another, cornsilk sticking out my bandana, hands on fire and cut up from husking. She could tell I was moving slower, the limp separating one heel from another. She didn’t bring it up. I think she was hopeful.

The windows were open, so there was a breeze full of cricket shells and enchantments that only exist thirty miles from nowhere. I didn’t care about any of them. She carved a turkey between the two of us when I stood up, pointing at her chest.

“What is it, Dewey?” She stared hard, not scared but curious. I took a breath and found there was no space left for it. Words were gone from my lips. I realized, my whole life, they never existed upon them.

“Do you want to carve the bird?” She gave a sharp laugh. “An extra workout never hurts. If it helps you pummel the second stringers a little harder, then I’m all for it.”

She handed me the knife. It was serrated down to the handle, blunt ridges meant for hacking. “Go on, boy.” She smiled, her eyebrows and jugular identical in their tension. “Horns up!”

I gave one last attempt at verbalizing the moment. I felt every muscle flinch, right on the scrimmage line, ready to push forward. But it was quiet and, despite her expectations, I was not a noisemaker. In this life, I let my feet do the talking.

I couldn’t hear the cows that night. Years later I came to an epiphany, that those steers were probably listening to me instead. Humans don’t go down like cows do. Humans anticipate. They scream and moan and avoid the cleaver because they know what’s coming- a very bright light or a very dark hole. Neither one is an appetizing outcome.

I know where I’ll be going. I’ve got the hole picked out already, right next to Mastiff in Cell Block 6, with the concrete corners and the blue rolling gridirons that rattle as they close into place. In the night, if I close my eyes hard enough, it sounds just like the back screen door at Mama’s house, rattling like a sheet of foil, keeping the beautiful things out and the bad things in. That is what I deserve as an inmate at Travis County Correctional.

At least, that’s what I thought before I joined the Toastmasters program. I didn’t say much the first few weeks, and if Smoke hadn’t boggled that “I Have A Bigger Dream” speech, then I probably would have left here with the same old gag between my teeth. But hearing your stories, I realized there is another way to get around this weight without bursting right through it.

I don’t have to strip the muscle and bone from my form just to know who I am. Because I am more than just a branded sow. I am more than the absence of silence. And if you don’t believe me, I’ll write it out and tell you.

I’ll write it out for everyone.

That’s what this award means to me. Thank you, Toastmasters. I’ll see you around the block.

*inmates clapping*