A PRISONER &
A POEM FOR A PRINCESS
By Wayne T. Dowdy
MIDNIGHT EXPRESS BOOKS
A PRISONER & A POEM FOR A PRINCESS
Copyright © 2014 by Wayne T. Dowdy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.
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PART I
A PRISONER AND A POEM FOR A PRINCESS
I was sitting in a prison cell in Lompoc, California, when John asked for help. A friend of his had died and left behind a wife struggling with the loss of her husband. Her name was Karen. She wrote John letters that he let me read, and when I did, I felt her pain in each written word. It was apparent that she was distraught and depressed. I thought that she may commit suicide, and so I told him how to respond to her pleas for help. Though I am no therapist, I am someone who devotes a lot of time toward helping others seek serenity through the spiritual principles of twelve-step programs.
“You want to write her, Wayne?” he asked in his deep, solemn, southern tone.
“No thanks pal. That’s your problem. You write her.”
“But I don’t know how to respond to this kind of stuff.”
“Just tell her the truth and try to get her to go see a psychiatrist or someone who can help her. She has some serious issues and needs help.”
“I know, but I can’t help her.”
“Just keep trying, and everything will work out the way it’s supposed to.”
For about two months, he let me read numerous letters from her whenever I came by his cell, and without fail, he asked, “Are you sure you don’t want to write her?”
After refusing to accept the offer, then I would wonder why I had declined an offer that I wanted to accept. It took a while, but I finally agreed to write her. I wasn’t trying to get involved with anyone “out-there.” I had too much time remaining on my sentence for me to be caught up in a relationship with anyone; furthermore, I felt that John needed to be writing her. Then, after reading maybe ten or twelve of her letters to him, I knew that she and I were a lot alike, and I began to feel a connection with her, even though I had never seen or spoke with her.
A month later, the prison administration moved me to a lower security cellblock, and a couple days after that, I was in the chow hall eating when John hobbled up to the table and sat down. He had a bad hip and looked like an old tomcat with a battle-scarred face. In the midst of the madness caused by the loud chattering of other prisoners, we talked for a while before he succeeded at luring me into a semi-unwanted relationship with Karen.
“You gotta help me, man.”
“What do you mean?”
“She keeps telling me that she’s addicted to some drug and keeps asking me how to detox from it, but I don’t know what to tell her, so I told her that I had a friend named Wayne who would know,” he said with a grave expression on his face. “Please help me out with her. She is driving me crazy. Just write her a couple of lines for me.”
“What kind of drug is she on?”
“I don’t know. She told me, but I cannot remember what she said. Some kind of opiate.”
I learned that the drug that she wanted to quit was methadone, which has serious side effects. Theoretically, it is for short-term usage, and for helping to stabilize opiate addictions, as well as for pain relief. She had been addicted to it for nine years, and for fifteen years before that, to another addictive opiate, Vicodin. Anyway, once the doctor has the patient stabilized, he/she is supposed to reduce the methadone dose each week until the patient is not dependent upon it; most don’t. Furthermore, the methadone is more addictive and has worse withdrawal symptoms than other drugs. Because of that, most addicts that I have known continued taking it to avoid the painful withdrawals unless forced to stop. Karen never had to stop, and by the time that she decided that she wanted to quit, she was suffering from serious physical problems. Maybe a month later, I agreed to write her and to try helping her with her addiction problem. John gave me her address and phone number. Then I mailed a Valentine’s card to her home in Nevada. She responded promptly. I received her first letter a few days after I had mailed her the Valentine’s card. She sent me a twenty-dollar money order and asked me to call. I really liked her voice—she seemed like a real sweet person, and I knew it would be easy to fall in love with her. I believed that if God were going to make a way for me to get out and be with her, then there wouldn’t be a problem if I did fall in love; however, that wasn’t what I wanted to do. Nor did I want her to fall in love with me and then have to suffer by being in love with a man she couldn’t physically have until 2020.1 felt that it would be cruel and prayed for God to use me to help change her life in a positive way.
Over the next two weeks, she sent me letters on a daily basis, which continued throughout our relationship. I wrote her just as often, and called frequently, since she couldn’t call me: phones used by federal prisoners are for outgoing calls only. She wrote me about all sorts of things. When I called, we talked about our past lives as well as our dreams and aspirations. With each letter and conversation, we grew closer as the connection between us strengthened. Then the relationship took an unusual turn. Several times she received letters from me with answers to her questions that she had asked in letters that she had just mailed to me, and sometimes on the same day. The same thing also happened with her letters to me. On top of that, the pre-answered questions were never about issues or events that we had discussed over the phone or written in our letters.
Over the next month, I wrote her enough letters to be a book, and she reciprocated, but I did foresee a problem, if released. I didn’t want drugs around me because I knew it was a high-risk situation. I explained how I felt about living in a house with someone taking a narcotic, and with my knowing that she wanted to quit, I encouraged her to go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings.
She did. Three weeks later, she wasn’t feeling well and went to see a doctor, who sent her to a hospital for an angiogram and liver biopsy, so I had my sister to take money out of my account and have FTD deliver her flowers.
On 04/13/01, I wrote, “Karen is hopefully on her way back home by now. We’re in love or awfully infatuated with each other. It’s hard to tell the difference under these circumstances, but whatever it is—it’s a positive relationship.”
Neither of us had wanted to fall in love. “I don’t want to be in love with you, but I am,” she said and began to whimper.
“Sweetheart, I wasn’t trying to fall in love either, but I can’t deny that I have, and all I can do now is to accept it as being God’s will for our lives,” I said.
She, like me, was afraid of being hurt, but love conquers fear and apprehension. Things continued to progress between us.
04/19/01: Strange things continue to happen between me and Karen, and I know she is my soul mate. She knows it too, and wrote me a poem saying so.
I always seemed to know when she was in need of me and would call at the times she needed me most. Her letters to me intensified in tone and frequency. Sometimes I would get three and four letters in one day.
She expressed her love for me anytime we communicated, as I did with her. I sent her a card with a letter enclosed asking her to marry me, and told her of my undying love for her and how special that I believed she was in mind, body, spirit. She was my beautiful baby doll.
04/28/01: I believe Karen is going to be my next wife. God has given me too many signs, and you might say that I have blind faith, since I’ve never even seen her. I believe God may h
ave planned it this way, because if I had been out there, instead of in here, I would have focused more on the physical, and less on the spiritual. She and I are constantly on the same wave link, and it has never been like that with anyone else before. I’ve already made a long distance marriage proposal, and I know she will accept.
She agreed to marry me when I called her that day and asked if she had received a card that I sent, and after I proposed to her over the phone.
Earlier in April, when she went to the hospital for the testing, she told me that her doctor said everything checked out okay, so we began making plans for our marriage. When I asked her to marry me, I thought that she was a pauper because she received government assistance, but then learned that she was a princess, at least, to me she was, but maybe not to anyone else. Not long after she accepted my marriage proposal, she told me that she owned a large tract of land in California, and was the sole heir to a family fortune. She had chosen the life she lived to avoid her parent’s attempts to control her with their money, power, and influence. Later on she shared some serious issues with me to help me understand why she chose to live the way that she was living. Her identity is protected, and all names changed to protect the innocent and the guilty alike, so, in hope of helping someone else who may be struggling with similar issues, I will write about some of the things she blamed herself for instead of the guilty ones.
In summary, her drunken father falsely accused her of having sex with her boyfriend, and then called her a slut and raped her in the garage when she was twelve years old. Her mother refused to believe it when Karen told her what had happened. Afterward, her parents had her committed to a mental institution owned by her father’s friend. After her release, they threatened to send her back there if she did not behave. She hated living under their rule, but continued doing it until she turned fifteen, at which time her father forced her into an arranged marriage with a professional athlete. A year into the marriage, the athlete, high on PCP, fell from a two- story patio, which caused him to be paralyzed from the waist down. Years later, while caring for him, she injured her back and her doctor prescribed Vicodin for pain relief. And then, years later, another doctor prescribed methadone to get her off the Vicodin.
The crippled athlete became verbally abusive and mistreated her by intimidating her with the threat of violence. She tolerated it for several years due to her belief in the sanctity of marriage, until finally, she had taken all she could stand and ran away with a childhood boyfriend, whom she married a few years later. When I first learned of her, she was grieving the death of her second husband when John let me read her letters. She loved him in her innocence and devotion but he wasn’t a good husband, either: Just better than the first one. He cheated on her. One time, she walked in and caught him having sex with another woman. “Get tha hell out of here,” she said he yelled. After he had finished he came looking for her. She was sitting on the steps of the apartment. “If you weren’t so damn frigid, I wouldn’t have been with her,” he said. The bastard even made her pierce her labia to insert a ring through, which became the site of frequent infections, and then told her that he would know if she removed the ring to have sex. He died from pancreatic cancer—a very painful death.
Reluctantly, she shared how people had mistreated her. It made me angry for them to have taken advantage of someone so sweet and precious. I was her liberator who was willing to battle all of her demons and slay all of the dragons in order to defend and protect her until death. I wanted to hug and hold her while I assured her that everything would be all right. If possible, I would have righted all the wrongs in her life, and did manage to convince her that she was not at fault, that the ones who had treated her so badly were the evil ones. To me, she was an angel.
06/14/01: I was at work and consumed with thoughts about her. She was supposed to have gone out of town the night before. Cell phones weren’t popular back then, so she didn’t have one I could call. That evening when I returned from work, I walked in the unit and headed straight for the phone. Normally, I would have stopped by my cell first, but I was drawn to the phone.
She picked it up on the first ring, and told me that she had been praying for me to call. She was troubled because someone in Narcotics Anonymous, who was supposed to be helping her get off the methadone, had instead relapsed on Karen’s methadone, stole some of it, borrowed some money from Karen, and then left with some of Karen’s clothes. Her being upset and praying for
me to call, and then with my walking in and heading straight for the phone to call her when she was supposed to be out of town, is one example of many that convinced me we were soul mates.
06/17/01: I wrote her a fairy tale on Friday called Two Broken Hearts and a fifteen-page letter this weekend. I am about written out. I love her more and more each day and know that God put us together … This is the poem I wrote for her:
TWO BROKEN HEARTS
Once upon a time, there were two broken hearts. One belonged to a beautiful princess named Karen: The other to a wild and crazy guy named Wayne. Karen’s early years in life had been sheltered, in some respect, yet had been abusive in others. Her precious heart had been broken from the start.
Wayne’s early years in life had been wild and crazy. He had looked in all the wrong places for all the wrong things; it was a life headed for disaster, which he found. Years of pain and misery had crushed his spirit of love: the people he had loved had broken his heart many times. Many years later, Wayne and Karen were introduced. It wasn’t love at first sight; it was love before sight, a special love, indeed. A love that cannot be explained.
God knew from the start that they were to be man and wife, and that He must first mend their two broken hearts for it to work. He had to discard many unusable parts: they had been destroyed by too many years of pain and sorrow. God knew that the only way for Him to save them would be to combine the two broken hearts into one perfect heart. It was a time consuming process, but one of great importance; two lives were at stake, not just one.
That is just what the Master Surgeon did. He performed another one of His many miracles in life when He saved Wayne and Karen so that they could see another day. God used the finest and most durable thread that He ever made, a special thread made specifically for the task at hand; a soft-hearted-thread. Once He had the correct thread, he began by gently mending the two broken hearts into one special heart. After many hours of intense labor, God knew that the task was complete, so He gently tied the knot as He smiled upon His handiwork. Pleased with the results, He then pronounced them man and wife and blessed the one perfect heart which He had created.
Wayne and Karen are now inseparable; they share the one perfect heart made just for them by the Lord above. What God has put together, let no man separate.
She loved the poem I wrote for her. So many of the little things that I done meant the world to her. In many ways, she was as exuberant as a child on Christmas morning when it came to my calls and letters or anything I had done just for her. I felt she had been deprived of the attention she deserved, and I went out of my way to make sure she knew how special of a person she was.
She said she hated her father and felt betrayed by her mother, both of whom were in their mid-eighties. I knew that her resentments were poison to her, so I shared my experience in dealing with resentment through the spiritual approach. To encourage the forgiveness of her father, which is the antidote for resentment, I assured her that God got His due every morning her father looked in the mirror. Death would be too kind, I said. He torments himself more than anyone else ever could, because such a memory would leave one filled with guilt and shame. I expressed my belief that her father’s actions demonstrated he regretted what he had done, and how as an addict and alcoholic, myself, I understood how we often do things in an alcoholic stupor that we would never do otherwise. I assured her that it was not good for her to continue hating him. Together we prayed for the spirit of forgiveness to free her from the resentment. God granted the prayer.
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Her health worsened over the next two months, but in light of her illness, she was excited and prepared to move to Lompoc, California. She didn’t like the local hospital where she lived, and hoped to find a better one in California. She wanted to be near me so that she could come visit me every day allowed, and so that we could work out the marriage plans with the prison administration. Two weeks before the date that she had planned to come visit me and to look for an apartment, I learned that I was being transferred to another prison in Louisiana. On August 2, 2001, I left Lompoc heading to the United States Penitentiary in Pollock, Louisiana. Because of the processes the United States Marshals use to transfer a federal prisoner from one prison to another, it took five days to get from Lompoc to Pollock (I was held in a prison in Oklahoma before going to Pollock). During transit I could not use the phone. In the meantime, her health continued to decline, but her spirit never wavered. Whenever I called, her excitement showed through in the tone of her voice. My heart swelled every time I heard her speak; especially when she would say, “I love you, darling.” After being at the new prison for two days, I was allowed to call. She began crying and when I asked her what was wrong, she told me that she had had a mild heart attack, and had been worried that the reason I hadn’t called was because I was mad at her. I wasn’t. The only mad that I was experiencing was being madly in love with her. The news of her having had a heart attack was shattering. Fear struck. I was afraid I was losing the woman I loved.
In August, after another trip to the hospital, her parents flew from Texas to stay with her and then carried her to her apartment in Nevada when she was released, where they stayed and provided care for her. I was glad that she had them near to do what I could not do because of my being in prison. Shortly thereafter, she had to go back in the hospital.
Monday, August 27, 2001: I called Karen from the chaplain’s office today, she asked me to help her make a decision on where to live, and whether she should get a Pacemaker, then a partial liver transplant, and then a heart transplant. I told her that I agreed with the Pacemaker operation, and they may have done it today, but if they did - neither of us was expecting it. On the day that she went into the hospital (16th), I woke up with the old song that says, “The Lord took her away from me .... I want my baby back.” I will be real fucked up if she dies on me, and won’t understand why God’s playing games with me. I pray that all is well and that she is safe. Amen.
I had used my 300 phone minutes by August 27 and requested additional minutes from the warden, but he denied my request; consequently, I had to wait until September 1 to call again. When I did, I was surprised to learn that she had checked herself out of the hospital. Our last conversation was heartbreaking. She began to weep as she said, “I’m afraid I’m going to die.”
All I could do was comfort her by saying, you’ll be okay, baby doll. For months, I had told her that she would be okay, and meant it in the spiritual sense, because I felt she was at peace with her past, but I did not know her life would end the next day.
In the preceding months before her death, she had fought her addiction to methadone, and had done well, but her heart continued to falter until it stopped after a brief forty-seven years due to congestive heart failure. I wiped the flow of tears streaming down my face as I wrote about one of the saddest events of my life while I sat at a small steel desk in a cold prison cell.
Sunday, September 2, 2001, (7:32 PM): God took her away from me. Why? I will never know? Half of my heart died sometime today, and the other half is filled with a whole lot of pain and grief I am really going to miss her, but I am glad that she doesn’t have to suffer any more. She was a wonderful person, and the only woman that I knew in my heart that I could trust completely. I knew that she loved me as much as I loved her, and God knows how it hurts to have lost her before really having her. I can only be thankful that God as able to use me to restore happiness into her precious life.
9:39 PM: God blessed me by showing me that there really was such a wonderful woman for me as Karen, but why did He have to take her? That’s one question that I will ask for many years to come … God knows that I would have died in her place, or suffered any amount of pain to have relieved any of hers, but... it wasn’t in His will, and I really hate that it wasn’t. May she rest in peace. Amen. I love you Baby Doll!
Many years later I’m still asking, why did He have to take her? I recognize that God used each of us to heal the other, and yet, though my heart yearns for her presence, I am comforted to know that she is okay. I spoke with her mother while they were at Karen’s apartment packing her belongings. Once when we spoke, her mother said, “I just want to thank you for making her the happiest I had ever saw her. On the way to the hospital, she laid her head on my shoulder and said, ‘I don’t want to die, Mother,’ and said that she was worried about how you would be.”
Her mother went on say that once they were at the hospital, she was holding Karen’s hand as they waited for a Flight-for-Life helicopter to arrive and carry her to a better-equipped hospital. When the swooshing sound of the chopper’s blades reverberated throughout the corridors of the hospital when it neared the roof to land, Karen gently said, “Mother, call the nurse,” and then closed her eyes. She passed on into the next phase, peacefully, painlessly. I wailed as I wondered why God had used me to give her a desire to live, only for Him to take away her life. It just didn’t seem fair. However, now that time has lessened the pain of losing her, I realize that life for me is better because of the relationship I shared with the princess.
I am the sole survivor of this chronicle of Karen and my love for her, because cancer killed John on February 14, 2007, six years from the time that my relationship with Karen began with a Valentine’s card. This is where it begins.