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Lord of the Asylum
1. Why I’m the Way I Am
I guess I should start this story off right from the beginning of my life. That way, maybe you’ll feel sorry for me and you won’t just think of me as some kind of evil monster for doing the things I’ve done. My name’s William Tyler and this is going to be like the story of my life. Everything I’m going to write about in here is really true, and it all happened exactly like I’m telling it. I think you’ll see that I’ve had a hard life compared to most people. I’m not just trying to make excuses. I really have had it pretty bad. I heard my sexy little lawyer saying in court one time that maybe it was all the unfortunate circumstances in my life that made me the way I am. So maybe the things I’ve done weren’t really my fault after all.
I’ll start my sad story way back when I was five cause that’s as far back as I can remember. My brother and sister and I were always hungry, and mostly we were left by ourselves with nobody watching over us. Our house was also really cold, and when we got sick, there was no medicine to take, and without much to eat and no medicine, I got sick a lot. When I was five, I ended up catching pneumonia really bad and I almost died. I probably would have died if our caseworker lady hadn’t called for an ambulance. Families as messed up as ours need to have their own caseworkers assigned to check up on them and make sure the kids are getting enough food and stuff. I don’t even remember anymore what that caseworker lady looked like, but I remember that, when she checked on us, she would sometimes have some healthy snacks in her big old purse – cereal bars and fruit and stuff like that – and she would give us things to eat. She was a very nice lady.
I guess the caseworker lady found me almost dying and called someone. I woke up in the hospital hooked up with this tube running in through my nose and down my throat. I also had tubes with needles going into both my arms. And there was a machine by my bed that made little beeping noises. The machine had a little green light that bounced up and down. I pretended it was my own personal robot, and I even named it and talked to it. But that wasn’t because I’m nuts. Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not crazy. I have never been crazy, no matter what lies I told in court. I only talked to the hospital machine because I was bored and there was nobody else to talk to. That’s because nobody came to visit me for the first few days after I woke up. Finally, my mom showed up and stayed for about two minutes.
“Listen, Willy, I’m gonna have to leave for a few months,” she told me. “Me and Bart’s gonna go down to Miami – get out of this damn cold for a while.” Bart was her boyfriend at the moment.
“Can I come, too,” I pleaded, trying not to cry.
“No, you can’t stay with me anymore. That caseworker bitch says they’re placing you with your grandma. You remember Grandma?”
“Yeah, sure.” As soon as she said I was going to my grandma’s, I quit begging to go with her because I loved going to Grandma’s. She always had plenty of food to eat, and even a TV. She watched some really boring old-lady shows, but at least she let me sit in the same room with her to watch the shows, too. And she never locked me in the bedroom for two or three days, like Mom always did, with nothing to eat or drink and no bathroom till I had to poop in my pants. Grandma’s house was just fine with me.
If I could have just stayed there at Grandma’s house without ever having to go to school, I think everything might have been okay. But everything didn’t turn out okay. One thing about eating every day is that it makes you grow. My Grandma was very tall for an old lady – like over six feet I think. And she told me that my dad was probably this one guy Mom went with for a few weeks – a guy who was also very tall. I guess I was destined to become a giant. By the time I was in fourth grade, I was already six feet tall and very large-boned. That’s the same two words my principal always used when she wrote up police reports about me – “large-boned” – like I was some kind of dinosaur.
What happened was that, since my mom never bothered to put me into kindergarten, I started out a year behind everyone else in school, and the school counselor said that, emotionally and mentally, I was a slow developer. And since I was so big for my age, I didn’t look like I was just one year older than the other kids. It looked like I should already be in middle school. And then they kept me in first grade for three years. Man, was that embarrassing! By the time I got to third grade, I was taller than Mrs. Wellborn, my teacher. She was the only elementary teacher I ever had who seemed to really care about me, and she was the one who finally taught me how to read and write. All the other teachers became frustrated with me because I couldn’t seem to sit still and concentrate. They were always sending me to the office for “being disruptive” or “being too noisy,” so I was never able to spend much time in the regular classroom.
Then I was in 4th grade two years in a row, and both of my 4th grade teachers were terrible. Those two years of school, I quit going very often. My grandma really loved us and stuff, but she was too old to watch us carefully, and she was sick a lot. If they called her from school to tell her I hadn’t come that day, she would talk to me whenever I came home that night, but that’s about all she could do. I knew I could do just about anything I wanted and get away with it. Grandma said I was strong-willed like my mama.
I never officially made it past 4th grade before I got locked up. I was already 12 years old by then and about six-and-a-half feet tall, plus I already weighed about 250 pounds. After that, they always had me in alternative centers for “endangering others” and stuff like that. At the alternative centers, there were mostly just teachers who yelled in my face and didn’t act like they cared at all.
But there was this one guy – Mr. Jeffries for U.S. History – and he always tried to help us. He gave us fun projects and made sure we got good grades. He even started a football team for us, and we could practice during our study-hall hour. He gave up his conference hour time to coach us then. Of course I was the star player because I was so huge. I was what is called a “tackle” and it was my job to tackle the guys on the other team who were trying to run with the ball. I did my job well – maybe even too well. The other kids gave me a nickname – “The Executioner” – because I tackled pretty hard. That was the most fun I ever had in school. But it didn’t last long because a kid got his leg broken, and the principal disbanded the team right after that. I’m sorry to say that it was me who hit the kid who got hurt, but I didn’t hurt him on purpose. I was just tackling him because that was my job on the field.
2. Juvenile Prison Life
By the time I was 13, I had already been sent to a “juvenile facility” – in other words, a prison for kids. They called the place “Meadowlands,” as if it was some beautiful country resort, but it was a horrible place – shabby, cold and brutal. I was sent there because I hurt some guy in the alternative center – not the football kid whose leg I broke. It was some other kid who was stupid enough to disrespect me in front of my peers. Him I hurt on purpose.
Because I was so big for my age (especially for my mental age back then before I developed mentally), I think my peers and teachers expected me to act more mature. When I would start goofing around and acting like a little kid, they would always get ticked off and say disrespectful things to me. Most of the boys in there were several years older than me, including the ones I hurt, so I guess, to them, I was acting like a juvenile fool.
But I think my biggest problem in life is not just my size but the fact that I’ve always been way too strong for my age. You might be thinking that’s a good problem to have, but it’s not a good thing for someone like me – someone who lacks self control (according to my head doctors). It’s fine to be extra strong when I want to open a tight jar of jelly or something, but usually it just causes problems. Like, if I’m the one who closes the jelly jar or turns off the water spigot, then nobody else can open it and they all get mad at me. Also, lots of times when I’m trying to work on something, I break it because I turn it too hard or squeeze it too tight in my hands. I’m not trying to show off; I just do things the way it seems natural to do them, and things often break – including, sometimes, the people around me.
The first time they threw me in the Meadowlands facility it was, like I said, because I was horsing around with some guys at the alternative center, and one of them said something about me that I didn’t appreciate. I’ll admit that I jumped on the kid as soon as he said that, but I didn’t really intend to hurt him as badly as I did. What happened was that, when I fell down on top of him, the kid got some broken ribs, a crushed kidney, and a ruptured spleen. They had to do a surgery to remove his spleen and the damaged kidney. My lawyer told me about all that later after he had seen the doctor’s report. So I got two years inside. Then, instead of getting out early for good behavior like most kids do, I got six months added because of some things I did while I was locked up. There were a few fights, but the thing that finally got me time added was when I escaped.
3. Escaping from Meadowlands
Normally, there’s no way to escape from places like Meadowlands because they have these twenty-foot-high fences all around, with barbed razor wire on top and guards everywhere. But I managed to escape during a visit to the dentist’s office. They always take us off campus for visits to the eye doctor or the regular doctor or the dentist whenever we’re sick or whatever. They also feed us three times every day. That’s one of the good things about being inside – that they take good care of you and all – but it’s pretty much the only good thing about the place.
Like I said, they had taken me to the dentist because I had a toothache. I wasn’t too happy about someone drilling on my teeth. I had been to the dentist once when I was little, and I knew it was gonna hurt real bad. But that’s not the real reason I escaped. I’m not that much of a wimp when it comes to pain.
No, the main reason I ran is because I was missing my grandma and feeling sort of depressed. Don’t get the wrong idea about me. I wasn’t like some little baby, crying for his grandma all the time. But I was worried about her cause she was so old, and I thought she had gone missing. What had happened was, the last few times when I had tried to call home to talk to her, the phone was disconnected. I figured it was maybe just because she had forgotten to pay the bill, but this had gone on for over two months.
Then my prison caseworker told me that my grandma was no longer living there, and no one knew where she had gone. When the parole department had tried to go to her house to check things out and see if her home could be approved for me to stay there after I was released, they found out my grandma didn’t live in the same place anymore. Some other people had already moved in, and nobody seemed to know what had happened to my grandma. My sisters were already living in foster homes by that time, and they told the caseworker that they didn’t know where Grandma was either. For all I knew she might have been dead. So I ran off from the dentist’s office because I was wanting to get out of jail to see if I could find Grandma to make sure she was okay.
At the dentist’s office, I told the guards that I wanted to use the bathroom, so they escorted me to the men’s room and waited outside. The dentist’s office was on the fourth floor of an old building, and there was a window in the bathroom. It was a long drop down to the alley below, but after I managed to get the window open, I saw there was a little ledge outside the window. I got out onto the ledge on the toes of my shoes and, holding onto the bricks above me with my fingertips, I crept sideways across the ledge until I got to the fire escape. I went down that as fast as I could without making a lot of noise.
Then I ran like crazy for six or seven miles without stopping – all the way to Grandma’s old house. Sure enough, the people living there didn’t have any idea where she was living now (or even if she was still living at all). But they gave me the address of the person who owned the old house, and he lived nearby, so I ran over there. When the man answered the door, I recognized him because he had come by to collect the rent a few times from Grandma when I lived with her.
“I used to live in that little house you got over on 49th Street,” I told him. “I’m trying to find my grandma. You know where she lives now?”
“You mean Luvee Tyler? Yeah, she’s living over in the Rankin Projects now. I’ll get her address for you.” He looked me up and down while he talked to me because I was still wearing my Meadowlands prison garb – a faded blue jumpsuit with “INMATE” printed in big black letter down the front. But I guess the old guy wasn’t a snitch because he just told me where Grandma was and I left. Some people know enough to mind their own business.
By the time I found my grandma’s new apartment, the sky was already starting to get very dark. She was home, but she answered the door cautiously, not taking off the security chain at first. Grandma doesn’t see very well even when it’s light outside. When she figured out it was me, she acted all surprised and worried, but she unlatched the door for me. As soon as I stepped in, she started telling me I had to leave.
“You can’t stay here, Willy. The cops came by here half an hour ago looking for you, and they probably got people on their way over here right now. They’ll get me for harboring a fugitive if they find that I’ve been hiding you here – that’s what the man told me. I’ll lose my rent-free apartment.”