Freedom

What is freedom? Are you free? How would you know? When George Michael back in early 90s said he wanted Freedom, at the time we didn’t know he meant to cruise men’s bathrooms without getting arrested. Do you want to hear a crude joke?:
How does a guy know if he has a high sperm count?
If the trick has to chew, before he swallows. Too much?
It’s called freedom of speech that as an American I feel I can say what the fuck I want no matter who I offend. It didn’t work out so well for Don Imus.

Lately I’ve been pondering freedom. Our English word "freedom" comes from an Indo-European root that means "to love." In America, we constantly told we’re free, yet, we’re at war. Mohandas K. Gandhi said freedom can be achieved through inner sovereignty. He got a bullet to the back of the head by a close friend. No one said freedom would be easy. I think true freedom is in the words of Whitney Houston when you’re forced to say, “Hell to the no.”

This is how I got free. Sitting up in jail, I had lost my freedom. I questioned if I had ever been free. I knew there was the hell I was born into and the hell I created. Mama was a crack head. Daddy got himself killed. The foster care system. Grandma didn’t like me. It was like I was born into the first circle of hell, limbo. It was for those who would never know God. Who would never know real freedom. I couldn’t imagine what I did to deserve such a spiritual fate. Even if it was hell, all I ever wanted for it was to want me, maybe even love me.

I grew to treat myself like I knew a boy with a low self-esteem would. I got into fights. I made a lot of bad decisions. I felt suffocated being spiritually imprisoned. My soul just needed to survive for eternity. I’d gotten arrested for DWI. The cop just stopped to give me a ticket and all I had to do was sign it and hand it back to him. But I didn’t like his attitude. I thought he was picking on me. I knew everybody took that back road and I’d never seen anyone get pulled over. I jumped out the car to put my finger in his face when the vodka bottle fell out and busted. It was so stupid. I was one of those stupid people I’d seen on that TV show COPS.

To make things worse, they made a mistake. It was the weekend. My records got mixed up with some other guy with the same name. They said I was a convicted felon. The raised my bond significantly and put me on the floor with other murderers. I wasn’t getting out for a long time. I tried to tell them but everybody lied in jail. Everybody was innocent in jail. My friends couldn’t understand like Jail had a customer service department. My friends didn’t have enough money. My family decided that I got myself into the mess; I needed to get myself out. Ironically, jail is the one mess a person really can’t get themselves out of it. Help has to come from the outside. Somebody has to post the bond. Somebody has to get the lawyer. You’re helpless once you get arrested.

Sitting in jail, it scared me how normal I felt, in the handcuffs, in that cold room of concrete and metal, that too big orange jumpsuit. I didn’t feel that normal in college or my big city job. it was like I could finally be free, couldn’t get any lower and they told me what to do, what time to wake up, what time to eat, and what my choirs were going to be. It felt good to not think anymore. To let go of that struggle in my head of fleeting happiness. I had nobody to fight anymore or anything to prove. It was like I was meant to go to jail. Every male on both sides of my family had gone to prison. It scared me that it felt so normal.

They stuck me in some room by myself for five hours because I wasn’t being friendly. The room was cold and the uniform was thin and I had no shoes. I could only lie on the floor and bawl myself into the fetal position and close my eyes. I couldn’t understand why I was punishing myself. I was scared. Everybody was treated me like shit. The security guards said they didn’t like the look on my face. They said I was too cocky. In the silence I knew I was self-protective. I was hurt. And then there was the law of attraction. I knew I wasn’t safe anymore. I was going to last circle of hell of people who been hurt and hurt. I had “fuck with me” on my forehead. I was in trouble. They kill guys like me in jail.

I finally was giving a mattress and escorted to my final jail cell. I didn’t realize jail had so many rooms. It was like going further and further in hell. I was at the last circle, the fraudulent—those guilty of deliberate, knowing evil. It was the most violent. I got to my bed and some guy keep saying he smelled ass and then he would look at me and smile. I started to feel as if I didn’t belong anymore. There were worse fuck-ups in the world than me. I prayed I wouldn’t get raped. Yet, I wanted it. Not the abuse. I just wanted for the abuse to want me. Maybe even love me. Grandma when I was a kid would give us weekly beatings just in case we did something she missed. I stopped caring about the bruises. I only cried when I was innocent. It made me start purposely doing stuff because the punishment came anyway. No reward. Just punishment. That’s what got me in jail thinking the world was full of just beat downs. I hated intimacy.

I found myself flirting with my soon to be rapist. I needed to play with the fire. I’d been in jail for a week with no liquor, drugs or nothing. I was ready for my weekly punishment. I knew he had plans on attacking. I knew it would be violent. Him and his boys had be pointing and smiling at me for a couple of days. I wonder how it would feel the rape. I felt my dick get hard. I knew it was because they didn’t give a fuck about me. I knew they probably beat me bloody in the shower, stab me, and leave me for dead. Death made my dick rock hard. It’s that hurt that I always wanted to love me. Want me. It’s that hurt. It’s that hurt that I’d been trying to control, make it see me as human. It’s like those beatings I got growing up, that if I cried loud enough she stop. She’d take some pity on me. But if I didn’t cry, fought it, she kept going until she sprang her wrist, then she just get something bigger to break me. It seemed that it was always about breaking me and then she would say afterwards that it hurt her more than it hurt me. Yet, I would be the one standing there with the bruises and crying. She would then want to hug me and say she only did it because she loved me. Grandma beat us weekly because she loved me.

It was day eight, I stood in the shower, I felt the heat of new presence, and the men who had been taunting me had finally gotten me alone. They dropped their towels. It was five of them. I felt my dick get hard. I closed my eyes. I knew it’s going to happen, I prayed that it be slow. I wanted to feel my weekly beating. I hadn’t gotten so numb like a slave just getting beat one last time. And then I heard my name. The guard called my name. He said I made bail. I walked pass the men with my dick rock hard. They called me a freak. But I saw their dicks were rock hard too. I start to cry when I put on my clothes. They were going to kill me. I was going to like it. It scared me. What did it mean?

Processing out, I got my wallet, car keys and shoe strings back. I immediately think of my Grandmother again. I knew she lied. I remember one time she beat us kids for four days. She had lost twenty dollars and accused us. She was going to beat a confession out of us. She went back and forth for four days, but nobody had the money. She found her money at the bottom of one of her shoes. She gotten drunk and forgotten she put it there. She didn’t even apologize. I remember I never cried so much during those beatings. It was because I was innocent. I was just a kid and bad shit kept happening to me. I was just a kid. And it all began to make sense. Maybe I wasn’t a freak. Maybe I wasn’t a fuck-up. Maybe it was all just a lie. I was innocent. Maybe that’s why everybody in jail say they’re innocent. In court, the get dressed up in the Sunday best and look like wide eye children who couldn’t hurt a fly, yet they’ve robbed, committed fraud, or something worse.

The last door in jail, there was a sign that said “Freedom.” You have to push through the door to get out of the jail house, to get out of hell. I pushed through the door. The sun was shining. The wind was rustling through the trees. The green grass in the park made me want to take off my shoes and run through it. She lied, my grandmother. It wasn’t freedom. That’s why jail felt so normal-- I had been in it my entire life. I put myself in it. When there weren’t any bars, I went to find them and built the walls. But it was all a lie.
I had to find that Freedom was inner peace: a proactive mind with rational understanding of consequences. I had been coward, afraid to say to the universe “I love.” Gandhi said “a coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.” A coward was incapable of being free. You have to demand it, and nobody said it would be easy. I got free when I pushed through that door labeled “Freedom.” My soul promised me a better life, I decided to take it. My soul promised me a life of no walls. My heart promised me of life of true commitment. I was going to love. I was going to live a life of love.

This is love. When I look back at the fact I’ve done this comic for two years, I know truth. Just like that day in jail, the door I had to push through; I had to be brave enough to say to the universe, I am writer. I had to push through my fear. Looking back, I think there was something I needed to know. There was something I had been trying to say. I needed to get myself happy. It was time I stopped the show. I wasn’t that fuck up. I was more than just a cute face and a nice body. I had a soul. There was someone I forgot to be caught up in the bassing music and streaming lights. I couldn’t look in the mirror the same anymore because I knew the wounds didn’t make the man. I knew the mistakes didn’t make the man. I knew I could get free. I wanted to be a free man. I knew I needed to take the lies and make truth somehow. It was my freedom. Thank you for sharing my journey these last two years.

What is freedom? Are you free? How would you know? “A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.”---Gandhi