When we were last with Gerald in New Orleans, he was fighting a charge in jail and he’d just gotten a new lawyer…
It’s funny how I met this lawyer, Wayne, but it’s the truth. I met Wayne and he say, “Look, they want you to sign this.”
I say, ”Honestly, I can’t read or write.” (Like I can now.)
He tell me, “Sign these papers, you might get a probation.” So I’m thinking I’m gonna get a probation. I sign the paper.
I say, “When I’m going home?”
He say, “I don’t know, the judge ain’t made a decision.”
I go back there to Templeman, the prison. Come to find out I get seven years.
Or boot camp. I do six months in boot camp, or I do the seven years in prison.
I said, “Damn! They’re gonna give me six months of boot camp. What the hell!?” It’s so funny, but that’s from not going to school and not reading.
I got my stuff packed up and one night they come got me out of Templeman and told me I was going to DOC, Department of Correction.
We get there, they book me, they fingerprint me. So I stays up in RODC, the center where people stay a week or two and the boot camp was next door. You could see ‘em in the morning, Hut Two Hut. Back then the boot camp was funny. They make you get on your back, say you’re a cockroach and all that.
I was hearing some guys they come in, “Man, I checked in, I ain’t going no boot camp. I’m gonna go do my time. I got six years, I gotta do three years on it.”
I’m like, “F*** it, I ain’t going to boot camp neither.”
So they come got me. I said, “Man, I’m not going nowhere.”
I was fat, I was big. They tell me, they say, “They gonna work your big ass. Make you drop your big ass.”
Then they might make me get on the floor, say I’m a cockroach!
I told the deputy when he come down, we call him Free, I say, “Man, Free, look, let me tell you something, man, I ain’t going.”
He say, “Well, I can’t make you go. But you know that mean you gotta go do the seven years.”
“I don’t care.”
Long story short, I get shipped out to WCI, Washington Correction Center up in Bogalusa, Louisiana. I’m a prison dude anyway, so it didn’t even matter where they sent me. I’m gonna be a man. Get up there, chat around, move around, everything was alright with me.
I went to the prison, did my time. At least I didn’t say I’m a cockroach.
