Childhood Poetry Criminal

Fear of Prison

When I was a child I had a fear that one day I would go to prison by no fault of my own. There would be the movie marathons on channel five TV in Los Angeles with Falsely Accused Week or Women in Prison week. I really wanted to watch these movies to see what they were about in order to protect myself. Instead I was sent to bed, or only able to catch snippets of the movie entirely out of context as I walked back and forth between my bedroom and the kitchen for drinks of water. From what I could gather prison was not a place I wanted to go, but people kept inadvertently going there by no fault of their own.

At age 9 I asked if I could get a tattoo, nothing fancy, just my name or something like that after watching Hawaii 5-O and seeing how a man’s tattoo saved him from the inevitable fate of being the wrong man in prison.  DNA typing was not on the cop shows yet so I was convinced this was my only hope to maintain a life on the outside. My parents did not tell me no, only that I would have to save up for it.  I called the three tattoo parlors listed in the phone book but none of them would discuss my permanent identification needs.

My Dad told me that if I just kept myself out of the wrong crowd and did not commit any crimes, no matter how small, that I would be OK. Easy for him to say, he did not know about my life of crime.

I was convinced that I was going to be a great writer or poet one day. At the back of magazines I would find “Poetry Contest – Win $50” or “Write Your Memoir, Make Big Bucks” which certainly would have funded my lifesaving tattoo. The catch was that the poetry contests wanted between $2 and $10 to enter, and the self publication bookseller wanted $500. I had to settle for the poetry contests.

My parents would not give me the money to “throw away” and send to who knows who to just take it and spend it as they pleased. I was expected to be satisfied with the mere literary knowledge of my 4th grade teacher. My Dad asked me “how do you know that they actually read your poems and not just take the money to buy beer?” What an insult! Obviously he just did not believe in my dream of one day becoming poet laureate on fart jokes and observations about my beagle.

I had an afterschool babysitter who was into Amway and to bore us to sleep made us listen to audiotapes about reaching our goals which I personally took as justification to defy my parents and enter poetry contests.

Now that I had set it in mind that I was going to be an award winning author it was equally important to select the right material. My submission was a love poem to pickle eaters: Your Breath Smells Like Brine, Oh Won’t You Be Mine. Mrs. Bartel my fourth grade teacher found it amusing so perhaps this was just what it was going to take to win poetry contests.

Convinced of my literary supremacy I took to the work of finding funds for my project. I picked up pennies of the sidewalks, coins out of the ash trays of my parents’ cars, and the daily dig through the couch for coins. I dutifully put them all in my underwear drawer until I had enough.

Covertly I got up out of bed at 5am. This just seemed like the right hour to get things done without anyone else waking up and asking me what I was up to. I found the copy of Ladies Home Journal and cut out the tiny entry form perfectly from the middle of the page so no one could notice it missing. Then I concentrated in my best handwriting filling out the form. I snuck a postage stamp from my parents bill desk.  I poured my $3 in change into the envelope and sealed it then placed it in the outgoing mailbox on the front porch so that no one would notice. I went back to bed like nothing had happened.

The first entry was sent off into the great beyond of great fame and fortunes, but I never heard back from them. The Amway tapes said to keep trying so I took to it with an entry every week as much as my little fingers could find.
Then I got caught. My Mom found one of my entries in the bottom of the mailbox waiting to be picked up. She looked at me and jiggled the coins around.  I was in trouble. First for stealing a postage stamp, which I knew was wrong, but worse I was guilty of the crime of attempted assault on postal workers everywhere.

My mom explained that my coins could fly loose out of the envelope through the equipment at the Post Office and hurt some unsuspecting postal worker. It could put someone’s eye out or worse – take up the speed and velocity of a bullet and kill.
I was headed for trouble.

I had not heard from the poetry contests because I was a postal criminal. I could not sleep that night. I saw on TV people being taken in handcuffs from their homes for mail fraud by the postal inspector. Was I going to meet the same fate? Should I turn myself in? How many victims of my senseless crimes were there out there walking around missing eyes or worse dead? How long do I have to plan my escape? Will they arrest me at school or tear us all out of bed in the middle of the night?

I felt terrible about myself for days which stretched into weeks. Then eventually I figured I had gotten away with my master crime or at the very least no one was ever injured. I resumed entering poetry contests but with a new tool. I glued the coins onto pieces of paper which I then carefully folded up so that no coin could ever fly out. I also in rethinking my crime spree started using my elementary school as the return address so that my parents would not find out I had entered until I was ready to cash my prize check.

Over the 3 years that I kept making poetry entries in cheesy contests with entry fees of $5 or less I only ever heard back from one. They mailed back to my school a photocopied letter thanking me for my entry and the junior high was kind enough to stick it in the front office like it was some great accomplishment, which of course I thought it was.