Read Gang of One: One Man's Incredible Battle to Find His Missing for Free Online Page B

Limited amount of food. Bunk beds. No pillows. Thin mattress, thin blanket. No tea or coffee (a big one for me). No TV. No savouries, no chocolate! Shared toilets. Hard toilet roll. No body products. Bic razors? (Oh, how I hated those.) I put a question mark because I didn’t know how people shaved in prison. Would they seriously give some of these guys a razor? Cold showers. Prison clothes. Strip searches. Invasive strip searches. ‘Humiliation’, I added, as I thought of my old friend Marshal Dave.
    For the positives I chose yellow – a brighter colour and one that I always connected with hope in my mind. Now, the positives. I paused. What were they exactly? Well, I wouldn’t have to cook on my own. That was a good one, yes. Next. Erm . . . There must be some. Ah, yes: reading. So many books that I’ve wanted to read over the years, this could be my one and only chance. I scrolled down and wrote ‘catching up on my reading’ in luminous yellow. Pleased with myself, I sat back looking at the brightly coloured design on my desk. Even just beginning to note some positives was making me feel better already. I sat back and looked again at what I’d written and, as I often did on my own in that apartment, spoke out loud.
    ‘So, on the downside we’ve got rape, buggery, murder, my pathological fear of the dark, and generally living in complete fear, poverty and deprivation for years, while the upside is . . . I don’t have to cook for myself and I can catch up on some reading. Mmmmm . . .’
    My hopeful mood evaporated. There must be more positives, I told myself. I would have time to think. Loads of time to think. Put it down. I could learn stuff, new stuff. Another language, perhaps. I needed to work on my Spanish, since so many of the US prisons were full of Latinos – particularly in Texas. I wrote ‘improve my Spanish’ down. I’d probably lose some weight. That had to be seen as a positive, surely. Then, of course, it would be interesting; terrifying, worrying, scary also, but even so, still interesting. And that was it. I had run out of positives. My map looked more balanced but, in truth, the reds dominated. Draw it out any way you wanted, but the overall conclusion would be the same. This was going to be hellish. Going to prison is shit.
    I moved uncomfortably in my aeroplane seat. Reid seemed to be dozing. We were cruising now at 33,000 feet heading north-west towards Big Spring. I couldn’t see much out of the window, so I closed my eyes and tried to think more about how I had prepared for this day, hoping it would give me some semblance of confidence. I had done everything I possibly could, right?
    When I’d finished that brainstorming session in my soulless apartment, my next step had been to try to neutralise the negatives as much as possible. Looking at them again, they broke down into two distinct categories. After searching for something appropriate I labelled the first group BAD – things like poor diet, boredom, bad beds, no pillow, cold showers, shared toilets, no tea or coffee; basically a loss of all the little luxuries of life. The second heading covered murder, rape, violence, death, etc., so after some thought I named that group FUCKING CATASTROPHIC, as that seemed quite apt.
    Strangely the BAD list didn’t seem that bad when I kept glancing at the FUCKING CATASTROPHIC list, but I made the decision to deal with the BAD list first. I understood that prison attacks your self-esteem by taking away not just your freedom but your freedom to choose. It deprives you of things and that, in turn, leads to a further loss of esteem. So many times the problems and violence I’d read about were triggered by the simplest things: another cold shower, a blunt and uncomfortable shave or a spilt cup of coffee. So I made a decision. I wouldn’t allow the prison to deprive me of these things – I would choose to get rid of them myself. Without dwelling on it any longer, I stood up from the table