What Prison, Death, and Relapse Taught Me About the Power of Dressing Well

I’ve spent some time in prison. Eight and a half years in jail or in prison, plus another six months in a halfway house, made nine years that I was in custody. I’d robbed some things, namely banks in Cleveland. I was 25 and on heroin. Some years before, I'd been a medic in Iraq. I could hit a vein.

The robberies could have been worse, though. No shots were fired. No one was physically harmed. I did flash a piece once, the second-to-last robbery. Not ten seconds of flashing the piece, and I got seven years for that. Plus four for the robberies. I pled guilty to 12 to 15 years, and the judge gave me 11. Which was merciful enough, in as much as he was intending to be. I’m not complaining.

I had already been in custody for 15 months when I was sentenced. I’d been at the regional jail in Youngstown. My parents were the only people that ever visited me there. It was a two-hour drive. They didn’t even especially want to. They just were supposed to, I think. My mom was genuinely sad. So was my dad. It was a toxic mixture of sadness and embarrassment. They felt bad because basically I’d been a fucking whack job and nobody’d said especially boo about it, and yet what a fucking unbelievable moron I was. Quite amazing. I didn’t take it personally, though. I get that people are busy and get wrapped up in their own shit; then they have things going on and don’t especially know how to deal with other people, let alone their own children.

Anyway, whether this was fair or not: I ended up being a published writer, and about six years after my sentencing, I was on the New York Times bestseller list. An article had come out that erroneously credited me with being a war hero, and then a lot of nothing happened, and when that died down I got an unsolicited letter from a total stranger from Mississippi named Matthew, who said he would pay me to write about what had really happened. He co-owned a small publishing house. I said I’d try and write a novel—that was the best I could do. So he said fine, if it’s good I’ll print it. And then he didn’t because he sold a manuscript version of it to Alfred A. Knopf. Which was fine because we both got paid more money.

The novel was about an army medic that gets ad­dict­ed to heroin and starts robbing banks. It was sold to the movies, and the money I made allowed me to pay back the banks I’d robbed. I was lucky. And because I’d paid the resti­tu­tion, I was eligible to get out early, on Oc­to­ber 21, 2019, after serving eight-and-a-half years of my 11-year sentence. They let me out on a com­pas­sion­ate re­lease, because my mother was maybe going to die of leukemia.

My mom had always wanted to be a writer. That’s what she’d have been if she could’ve picked. She didn’t write much, though. Or not while I knew her anyway. It didn’t help her be a writer, having some kids and a job and all. There were many disappointments. I was one of them. Perhaps the biggest disappointment of them all, but maybe that’s giving myself too much credit.

Still, she sent me books the whole time I was locked up. I’d ask her for one, and she’d send it, no questions asked. She was compassionate. I’d asked her for some books about Latin, and as though that were not a waste of time, she sent them right along. I’d asked her for a few dictionaries and some Joyce and Blake as well, and she sent those too. Some of the first books she’d sent me were a trilogy of detective novels that had recently come out. It was a collection called Berlin Noir. The writer was a fellow from the U.K. named Phillip Kerr. They featured a character named Bernie Gunther, who managed to be about everywhere of any importance and mixed up in every fucked up thing that ever happened in Berlin between the 1930s and the 1950s. He’d made trips abroad too, as far as Cuba, Washington D.C., even Argentina. He didn’t like Nazis. He killed them. He was sort of like a cross between Indiana Jones and Detective Marlowe. He was, of course, a former cop, soldier, and sometime P.I. All the same, they were undeniably well written novels. And a whole slew of them came out while I was gone.

The last book in the Bernie Gunther series that I had got from my mom came out my eighth year in the joint. Kerr had written a lot of books in those years. Minus the three that he’d written before I went in, there were 11 that had been released since. Kerr was a machine. He’d have written more, only he died of cancer before the last was in print. It was called Metropolis. My mom sent it to me on my 34th birthday. I’d been in prison eight years and somehow had become a best-seller myself. So things had worked out okay. Except the day before that fucking book came my mom told me she had fucking Leukemia.

When I got out of prison, the judge sent me to a half­way house in Tupelo, Mississippi. Only problem was my mom was in a hospital near Jacksonville, Florida. So the judge added a caveat to the order, which said that I could travel to see my mom in the hospital, within reason. What amounted to about every six weeks.

Within a week of arriving at the halfway house, I was on my way to see her, and I went from the airport straight to the hospital. She’d been breaking down all that summer, and it was telling on her. But that was nothing like what this was. This was something else. If you’ve never seen one of your family, your own mother no less, radiated and chemo-ed and experimented on to death, then you are missing important knowledge. Either you know, or you can’t imagine.

I walked into her room and I said, “Okay, mom. I’m out of prison. You can stop pretending now.” I don’t know if she smiled or not. Maybe she did. Her brain was fried pretty bad, and she wasn’t very responsive. The hospital was saying she had caught Legionnaire’s Disease from the ice machine, of all things. She was running fevers of 104. It was hard to tell, because the thermometer was broken and for some reason the hospital wouldn't get a new one for her. Which was how it went for some days.

Understand about my mom that she was hardened in some ways. She could be the nicest person, but she had an edge to her. She’d been born in the occupied Saarland in 1957. Or maybe it was Alsace. Wherever it was, there were people who spoke German living there, but the French were running things. Apparently she’d been born in a convent. And the midwife had had a peg leg. Her father, an Italian man named Vittorio, died in Paris when she was a baby. Throat cancer. He was from a good family, and a fine dancer. I’ve seen a photograph of him. And that makes up all I know about him. Her mother, Erna, remarried some years later, to an American named Jack. He was a sergeant in the Army. And so my mom became American, and an Army brat no less. She was kind, though. Too kind, really.

My dad had been in the hospital five or six weeks by the time I got there. He hadn’t left the room. He was losing his mind over the thermometer. There were nightmares everywhere. You leave one nightmare, and another’s just around the way.

We’re gonna skip to the end. She died. It was bullshit. I’ve been around some, and it was maybe the cruelest shit I’ve ever seen. But she was brave about it. She never wasn’t brave. Some people say it’s stupid or pointless, bravery. But that isn’t so. What’s pointless is anything else.

I’d gone to see my mom in December, right before Christmas. We’d thought she might live then. She’d survived the virus she’d caught from the ice machine in the hospital. The bone marrow graft had taken. She was having trouble keeping her pills down was all. And she wasn’t feeling especially well, of course.

Then on her last blood test, the results came back, and the doctors told her in so many words that she was going to die very soon. I was able to see her one last time after that, when she went into hospice. I was with her when she died, on the 12th of February. Earlier that day I’d put some prosecco on my fingers and dabbed it on her lips. She was half-conscious. She’d had a craving for prosecco for some time, and hadn’t gotten well enough to drink it. One of a number of things she’d been looking forward to that wouldn’t happen now.

The halfway house was going to let me travel again, despite the six-week rule, so that I could go to her funeral. I’d bought a suit for it. I wanted to be sure I didn’t show up looking like a bum. I hadn’t really made my mom so proud by how I’d dressed, despite her best efforts. I didn’t know anything about nice clothes. I knew what I thought looked alright, and that was all.

So this time Matthew—the guy who wrote me in prison and got my book published and is now my manager—helped me figure it out. He called the Paul Smith store up in New York and had them send several suits down, some shirts, some ties, so I could pick something out. I told the man on the phone that I wanted an unstructured suit. I wasn’t a fan of shoulder pads. For the pants, something tapered. I’d need to get it tailored of course. And I got some Dunhill boots. They were $1,000. I hadn’t even heard of Dunhill. I thought they made cigarettes. I said it was a lot for some boots. Matthew said, Fuck it, man. Do it.

Clothes are pow­er­ful. Take prison: Some­one’s de­cid­ed you have to wear a uni­form. You have to dress how they tell you. In federal prison, the uni­form was kha­ki pants and a kha­ki shirt. You could also buy a sweatshirt and some sweatpants at the com­mis­sary. But you’re not allowed to mix-and-match clothes. You cannot wear the sweatshirt you bought at the commissary with your khaki pants. The prison says it’s for security reasons, but really they don’t want you looking any more free than you are. If you wore your sweat­shirt with your khakis, then you looked clos­er to what peo­ple look like on the street. You might feel a bit more free as well. And the prison didn’t want that. Khakis and a sweat­shirt were dan­ger­ous. The prison has to be in con­trol. There’s a reason the warden is the only man in a suit.

Now that I actually was free, I wanted my own suit. I wanted it to go right. Not much ever does, though, and it’s hard to get around when you’re in a halfway house. And in a small town as well. The tailor couldn’t handle much volume. It was going to be close already. Then when I picked up the suit, the lady’d made the pant legs two different lengths. Luckily she said she could get it done by the next day. So I’d get it the day before I left for the funeral. Only it ended up not mattering at all, because that night, when I was driving back from work, I got a call from my dad. He told me the funeral would have to be pushed back. Probably at least three weeks, maybe four, because of COVID.

My mother never did get that funeral. She’d always said she didn’t want one, anyway. She’d said that for some years, always the same: no funeral. She’d been a fighter for a long time. Fighters have no use for funerals. What’s the use of them, when the fight is over?

I was released from the halfway house 23 days early. They wanted to free up beds so the Bureau of Prisons could un-crowd a prison or two in the event that COVID did, in fact, get out of hand. It was in April, on the first day of lockdown in Mississippi. And by chance my friend Rachel Rabbit White, the poet, was stranded with me. New York had locked down the day she had flown out, and so we quarantined together. I had a place that I was going to be leasing from Matthew. And Rachel was staying at an Airbnb off of the highway, one next exit up from mine. She was in a big apartment complex with a pool, which was across the road from a lot full of electrical transformers, some kind of a power station. I had a car and I could go and get her and take her back as need be. We did 47 days together this way. We are married now.

The lockdown in Mississippi ended in mid-May. I emailed my probation officer to ask him if I’d be able to drive to Florida to take care of a few things and see my dad. I hadn’t seen him since the day after my mom died. Rachel was going to leave town as well, to go and see her parents, who were not far from us, in Southern Illinois. So I dropped Rachel off at the Airbnb on a Saturday, about an hour before her parents arrived to pick her up.

Some hours later, I died for a few days.

I woke up in a hospital early Monday morning. Family Matters was on the TV. I heard a laugh track. I was an asshole again. The first thing I did was I left. I had to borrow some scrubs so I’d have a shirt. My jeans were wet from the piss. My head hurt, and I didn’t know why. My throat hurt. I had not been intubated, so I didn’t know why. The hospital was empty. I only saw one doctor and one nurse and a student nurse, the ones who had been in my room. The rest of the hospital was a ghost town. I thought of 28 Days Later. And for a while, I was wandering around, not knowing how to find my way out. I had no phone. The nurse gave me a hard time about using the hospital’s. She let me make one call, like I was in jail. No one answered. There was no one around to ask about a ride, and it didn’t matter because I had no money on me. Plus, I figured no driver would be in a hurry to give me a ride back from the hospital, under the circumstances. People were scared.

And I’d have had no idea how to get home except that the hospital was across from the transformers near Rachel’s Airbnb. She’d only just left, and yet that time could not seem farther away from where I was. I kept my head down as I went, because I was in a fair amount of pain and wasn’t moving too well. I felt as though I’d slept in a rock tumbler. A heavy one. It wasn’t a long walk. The door was unlocked. My car was in the driveway. It had not been totaled. This was good. Everything could still be fine. On the table by the door, the police had left a note: They had my car keys and my cell phone.

My parole officer was good enough not to send me back to prison, despite what all had happened with my phone and with the police and my not knowing anything. But I would have to go to rehab in Clarksdale. I’d been hit on the head so hard during that time I can’t remember that my hair fell out in a big circle in the back of my head, like a tonsure, and the gash on it, what had opened up when the swelling went down, steadily leaked blood and pus throughout the day. I hadn’t been drinking any water, I’ve been told, for the first six weeks after I was out of the halfway. My condition had suffered. I was tired a lot and could feel sick. My head was bad. The gash in my head was bad. And I’d gone and been a dumb fuck again, not free two months and back in the system.

If I’d walked out of the rehab I’d be a fugitive, and when they caught me I’d be back in prison. Also, I had no clue where I was. So I’d have to ride it out. I’d have to be good. If I got kicked out of rehab for something petty like, say, talking to a female inmate in a context outside of classroom discussion, I could go back to prison for that. I wasn’t interested, but the bald gash on my head was insurance. And I just chilled out and felt like shit. This is what happens to ungrateful people.

I was there a month, a whole June. Another June of my life gone. I could afford no more mistakes. The first thing that I did after rehab was donate money to charity, a bat­tered women’s shel­ter. I donated it for my mom. It was the funeral that I had for her. Then I went about buying some clothes. Whatever I was, I was going to stand on that. And I wasn’t going to hide, dressing safe, dressing like who I was always told I was. I was gonna dress up like I had juice. Whether or not I had any, I’d show up like I did.

Lockdown had ended six weeks prior. There were businesses that reopened. I knew all about what Drosten was on by then. And I said to myself, I have some money. Where will I spend it? There is a pandemic on the run, and I may as well keep one or two people from going into the poor house, for as long as the cash may hold.

There was a store on the Oxford town square called Hinton & Hinton, and it is still there. The clothes were different from what I’d been accustomed to wearing. But I was changing. Hoping I could grow up. I ended up having a suit made, then and there. From now on, I’d be in the habit of wearing a suit of clothes, as often as I could and not be fake about it. I needed thin fabrics that I could bear in the summertime. I spoke to Garner about it—he’s the salesman, and he’s good. He keeps a memory of his customers. What you might pay is a bit high, but you have to remember, you’re not just paying for clothes. You’re paying to talk to Garner, in a nice store, where they take care of people.

What’s an essential business? I’d say a place where you can buy a suit of clothes is essential. I wouldn’t call it a luxury. Is self-respect a luxury? A good suit doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. Just know where to go and what to look for. I put one together at Goodwill just the other day. All told—the jacket, the pants, the tie—it priced out to about $30. I fucking look alright in it, too. I bought a coat so fucking old it was made in the U.S.A. It is of noticeable quality. I am fond of it. Whoever had a hand in making it could probably afford groceries.

There’s a saying: Life is a shit sandwich, and the more bread you’ve got, the less it tastes like shit. A guy in prison told me that. The guy had been a lawyer, and a Freemason. He had his faults, and in certain ways he was fucked-up, same as we all are. And maybe life is a shit sandwich. But a suit of clothes can help. A suit of clothes might function as a sort of frame through which you view the world and yourself. You may feel a need to live up to the things you’ve cared for—that is, if you’re lucky enough to even have a chance.

I get a little help from some cosmetics, too. Not tons, only a little here and there. Not that there’d be anything wrong with going a bit harder on the cosmetics. Anyway, my point is, I was told my whole life, by various sources, that I’d be fucked up if I were wearing cosmetics. And that’s some sucker shit. I wear makeup for the same reason women wear makeup: I want to feel better about myself; namely, about how I look. In any event, try for beauty.

I’ve been wear­ing suits ever since I got out of re­hab. The only thing my mom gave me a hard time about was my scruffy appearance, how I was a raga­muf­fin. She be­lieved in keep­ing up dig­ni­ty. She was raised work­ing class. Her mom worked in fac­to­ries. Her stepdad was in the Army. They were not rich. I think back to when I was a kid and re­mem­ber that there was one thing mom and Omi and Opa all had in com­mon—they did not slack on their ap­pear­ance. They were well dressed and they took care of what they had. My mom be­lieved in the val­ue of dig­ni­ty. And if you’ve got dig­ni­ty, no one can take it from you.

You can go out right now, and you can put together a suit of clothes at the Goodwill and have enough for a sandwich after. You’ll need $40 and some self-respect. And that last one’s essential. So file your fingernails. Put on your best suit. The day is still young.

Nico Walker is the author of the novel Cherry.