Anyone still enjoy good old snail mail? I was just thinking about that today. In today’s computer age, despite e-mail, text messaging and all the other cool ways of communicating with others, there’s still no greater way to say I love you than in a letter. All women like receiving love letters. Or at least I think they do anyway. There’s just something about the written word. Passion and intimacy can be related via paper and pen like nothing else in the world. Personally, I enjoy writing letters. To me whether sending or receiving, a love letter says it all!

       Tenderness, charm and character. Happiness fulfilled! One’s feelings ex-pressed on stationary from the depth of the human heart—insight into the writer’s mind and soul. Personal, confidential, revealing, romantic thoughts. Undying devotion to the one love. It all comes together at the stroke of a pen. Over the years, I’ve composed hundreds of love letters to my lady of the day. A million times your faithful Tripper, oh how I love and adore thee like no other woman alive. Do any of you ladies out there enjoy love letters as much as me?

Just the right touch, passionate feelings, carefully chosen words immersed in intimacy. Yours eternal and better days ahead, my angel, my everything, I dream of you day and night. Not a moment goes by that you’re not on my mind and in my heart. Oh what immeasureable joy is is for me to be able to write this love letter to you and … receive one ever so worthy in return. I confess my love to thee this dark lonely night sitting here in prison. You are the sole light that brings me love, warmth and happiness.

     Struck my Cupid’s arrow of love,  I long for the day I can touch your sweet face, stroke your long, beautiful hair and kiss your soft, moist lips! Please love me forever and always as I love you. Though I can’t be with you now, know in your heart I see you when I close my eyes at night and hope to meet you some­where on the airwaves. Hopelessly devoted,  smitten and intrigued; you are the one and only love of my life and I shall remain your servant and lover until the day when darkness finally overcomes me. Please, accept these words as true.

My private pleasure is to write to you. I’ll never let you go. Although miles between us, rain, sleet, hail or snow, I cannot live without your love and this love letter I know will somehow make it to you. I miss your smile and your eyes that mesmerize. So very fine,  the only woman for me is you. One day soon I’ll be able to show you the true way I feel. But until that time, these special words on paper are all I have to offer. Yet, in them, are my utmost secrets, dreams, desires—written in a whisper to my goddess so beautiful and rare.

    Oh the enthusiastic affection I send to you using paper and pen. In love and enamored, using the minutest detail, I appeal to you in written word—senti­mental feelings, wanton of your heart, mind, body and soul! A craftsman filled with sexual desire, I hope my letters make you blush and cause you to feel the warm attachment that comes with them. As,  in the end,  I hope our game of love is to be won without the loss of a single point. Yes, my love, my darling, my dear. No woman alive holds a candle to you!

Your closeness I live for, to hear your heart beat and to enjoy the perfume from your neck and between your breasts. To watch you sleep and smother you with passionate kisses. Oh how I want thee. Please wait for me my darling dearest, as one day I’ll fly home with a dozen red roses in my hand. I’ll never love another. Your name above my heart, no man alive could ever love you the way I do. Please love me forever as I will always love you, and  …  constantly check your mailbox for more love letters from the pen!

 I’m Tripper! Better Days!

“Who the fuck is this?” I said to my weed dealing friend Jose as a woman in uniform walked toward the back yard where we were doing a deal. “Don’t worry amigo. She’s cool.” In the mid 90’s, I bought a lot of marijuana from a Mexican guy who lived in a suburb of Dallas. The community known as Oakcliff. Anyone from that area knows the place I’m talking about. The only people who live in Oakcliff are drug dealers, hookers and crooks. Many times I traveled to and from Oakcliff from Arkansas to buy weed and cocaine. Only got busted one time. That was in ‘96. Drugs are cheap in Oakcliff, Garland and other small cities surrounding Dallas. That’s why I always loved Texas! It’s a drug trafficker’s paradise! All you have to do is make it back across the Texas state line and you’re home free. Lots of dealers move weed and coke out of Texas. Some in elaborate ways, some even wearing disguise. People like me tend to get busted. We are profiled. But, if you look the part, you can make it without any problem at all. You just can’t look like a drug trafficker.

Tripper’s Personal Stash Right Before This Sentence

PROFILED!!

One day I backed my car up in Jose’s long, concrete driveway and we were cutting a deal. I heard a vehicle pull up out front. Then all of a sudden from around the corner came a Mexican-American, a female, oh probably about 35 years old, clean cut and dressed in a starched and pressed uniform. Not just any uni­form mind you.This chick wasn’t in the military. Nor was she a dirty cop or local fire fighter looking to buy a couple of hundred pounds of pot. And she was not a security guard employed by Texas Instruments either. She was a Girl Scouts Troop Leader complete with all sorts of merit badges sewn on her shirt. At first I was paranoid. But then Jose and his partner Julio both assured me it was okay. Closing the trunk of my car not sure if I wanted this chick to see what I’d just put inside, she whispered something to Jose then left the scene. A couple of minutes later she returned with six little girls all dressed in uniform themselves, each who grabbed a large box and carried it back to their van. It was then and there I knew something was up.

After they left, I finished conducting my business with my East Texas His­panic compadre and went on my way. Could it have been bricks of marijuana in those cookie boxes the Girl Scout Troop Leader and six young girl scouts toted off that day? Surely not. What dastardly bitch would exploit a bunch of little kids like that just to benefit herself in her enterprise of ill-gotten gain? But sure enough, that’s just what this lady was doing. She’d tell the girls, “Okay scouts! After we take these six boxes of cookies over to a man who is going to buy them all, I’m taking everyone to McDonalds for lunch, then we’re all going to Six Flags!” “Yay!” they all yelled and screamed! Here, they thought they had the best Girl Scout Troop Leader of all times when in reality she was using her kids to do dirt in carrying and delivering dozens of pounds of high grade mari­juana to another dealer. Looking back, I really couldn’t say if the girls knew what was in the boxes or not.Probably didn’t. But what I do know is …  I saw that very same chick at the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City when I passed through in 2005.

I’m sure this lady’s case is in the law books somewhere. If I had the Lexis-Nexis CD Rom law program on PC, I’d look up the case number and cite it for you. Just goes to show you, people will go to any length to smuggle cheap drugs out of the state of Texas without getting caught. There’s so much money to be made in trafficking marijuana and cocaine out of the Lone Star State. Why,  I’ve even heard tale of a guy dressing up as a preacher,  filling his station wagon with Bibles and religious material, telling the cops who pulled him over he was on his way to a theologian’s seminar in Chicago. When in reality, there was a secret compartment built in the floorboard and frame of his Country Squire station wagon holding hundreds upon hundreds of kilos of Mexican weed. But there was something about this Girl Scout thing. I mean really … what cop in a million years would think of pulling over a van full of Girl Scouts and their troop leader to search for a load of pot? Yet somehow this lady got caught. Speaking to her while being hustled down a hallway on our way to board Con Air , I asked her what happened.

“Say Maria, how in the hell did that Texas Department of Public Safety Officer know you had all that weed? Were you and the girls smoking a hooter when he pulled you over? Or was it a canine unit and one of those tricky ass dogs that alerted to drugs in the van?    I mean,  it seemed like you had a pretty good set up to me. Who would have thought a bunch of girl scouts were hauling weed?” “No Trip. Someone ratted me out. Plain and simple. It’s gotten to where a woman can’t make a dishonest living these days without some snitching faggot fucking things up for you.I wasn’t making much on my regular job at 7-11 and I didn’t make any money volunteering as a Troop Leader for the Scouts. I had to do something to feed my kids. So, I trafficked weed. Everyone does it in Texas.  I just saw an opportunity to make some easy money and did.” “Yeah girl­friend, I can relate,” I said to the girl standing next to me dressed in prison khakis just like me. “But hey, I just want to know one more thing. Did those little girls really think they were just delivering cookies? Or did they know what they were carrying in those cookie boxes was really marijuana? “They never knew a thing,” she replied. Then she smiled and held up her right hand in a three finger configuration and smiled, “Scout’s Honor!”

    This is a story about a dude we all called,  “Cutter”. Not as in the kind of cutter that likes to slice their wrists. Another kind of cutter. The kind of cutter that cuts people who fucks them over.Cutter’s real name is Kyle. Last I heard, he’d been transferred back to USP Leavenworth. A born and raised Okie like myself, Cutter did a lot of state time behind the walls at McAlester. He’d murdered a man and got a life sentence. When I met him, he was doing a 30 piece in the feds. He was my celly at FCI El Reno in ‘01. An average looking old boy, you wouldn’t think Cutter a badass at first sight. Yet once you got to know him and learned of his repuation and/or saw him in action, you immediately knew,  look can sometimes be deceiving. You see, Cutter was a straight up killer. He was notorious for stabbing and slicing people up who stole from him, disrespected him or called him names. That’s just the way it was. Lots of men fell to the ground bleeding like a stuck pig at the hands of Cutter.

    Fortunately, Cutter being my homeboy from Oklahoma, we saw eye-to-eye on stuff and got along just fine.He knew some of the same dudes I knew from the Oklahoma joint and we’d done time at some of the same prisons.Quiet around those he didn’t know, Cutter was pretty mild mannered and calm. He stuttered real bad and didn’t talk much but when he did say a few words,  the worst thing a man could do was tease him about his speech impediment. Many times the alter­cations he got into had something to do with some asshole chastising or making fun of him when saying stuff like,”Wha-wha-what are y-y-you-you loo-lookin’  at du-du-duh-dumbass? “Constantly pumping iron and doing pushups, Cutter was in excellent physical shape.And, not only was he trained in mixed martial arts, he was one hell of a dirty,  state raised, prison fighter too. If you came to Cutter looking for a fight, you’d better be ready to go like hell. Because true to what I’m telling you here, he wasn’t anyone to fuck with.

At El Reno, if an inmate wanted to watch a particular television program, that inmate would sometimes make a sign and tape it up on the wall near the tv. Being an old cowboy, Cutter liked professional rodeo. As a kid he’d been both a bronc and bull rider. And a pretty damn good one so T was told.One evening Cutter put up a sign that read,  “PBA Bullriding 6:00pm tonight.” At six when it was time to kick back and watch bull riding, Cutter went into the TV room only to find some black guys had tore down his sign.”Who-who-who t-t-t-tore down m-m-m-my sign?” he announced to the room full of convicts. At first, no one answered yet with basketball on TV and a room full of St. Louis gangbanger it was pretty much easy to figure out.”I said, who-who-who t-t-t-tore down m-my sign?” Suddenly, one young black dude with a mouthful of gold teeth stood up and said, “I to’ it down cracker! Now git yo’ stuttering ass outta here. Nobody wants to watch no fuckin’ white boys ride bulls!” Cutter silently left the room while all the blacks began to laugh.

Standing in the center of the housing unit,  I saw the same black dude that had just embarrassed Cutter in the TV room bending over at the water fountain getting a drink. That’s when Cutter came out of nowhere making his move. Sneaking up behind the  ‘banger with a homemade ice-pick, Cutter brought it down hard stabbing the guy in the shoulder. He was aiming for his neck but at the last minute the black guy saw what was coming and jerked to one side.His reflexes saved him. Because,three or four inches to the left and Cutter would have got him right square in the jugular. Stabbed and bleeding,the black guy ran toward his cell grabbing a folding chair along the way holding Cutter at bay as a lion tamer might do a ferocious lion. “Come on out of th-the-there mo-mo-moth-motherfuck-er! You asked for this sh-sh-sh-shit!” To make a long story short, the cops rushed in and took both Cutter and the black dude to the hole.Later on, the black guy apologized to Cutter for teasing him about his stuttering and both were released back to the population.

      Another time, Cutter came in from work and noticed his new NIKE tennis shoes had been stolen from his cell. Asking around, no one knew anything. A few days later Cutter was walking by the bank of telephones in the unit and saw a black guy wearing his shoes. He knew the shoes were his, because like everyone else in prison, he had them marked so he’d know they were his in the event someone stole them. Tapping the guy on the shoulder Cutter said,”Hey! Th-th-those are m-m-m-my shoes!” Mad because Cutter interupted him when talking to his baby momma,the black dude covered the mouthpiece on the phone and said, “Get the fuck away from me punk fo’  I kick yo’  cracker ass!” Thinking no more of it, the black dude kept talking on the phone. Cutter quietly went to his cell, got a single edge razor blade, slid down the wall next to the bank of phones, reached up and cut the guy’s throat. Damn near bleeding to death before prison staff could get him to the hospital,  the black guy never stole another pair of tennies nor did he ever talk trash to another man with speech issues ever again.

     Cutter got sent to lockup and then to USP Terre Haute. Anyone who knows this guy, knows he’s for real.I thought about him because there’s a guy here named Dave who knows him and we were talking about him the other day. Dave told me he’d been at both Beaumont Medium and Forrest City Medium and got into fights over the TV at both joints. Dave knew him from USP Florence where once again he cut some guy with a lawn mower blade for cutting line in front of him in the chow hall. One more thing before I close. Ever heard the old saying,  “Think before you act?” Well, here’s what Cutter told me one time. “Trip,  sometimes it has to be the other way. A man does wha-wha-what he has t-t-t-to do, and thi-thi-thinks about the con-con-se-se-se-sequences la-la-la-later.” An average looking man who stuttered, men in prison thought they could take advantage of Cutter. Just goes to show you, sometimes the real badasses don’t always look all that bad. Watch out for guys nicknamed Cutter. Don’t steal from another, don’t cut line and don’t make fun of anyone who stutters. I’m Tripper.    Better Days!