During one of our conversations a while back, Craig made an interesting observation. We’ll get into the specifics of the point of his discussion a little later in this chapter, but the crux of his realization was that he didn’t have “the brain space” to be able to hold onto all the information he was receiving. That’s a really valid point as we discussed how people have created new relationships with him in the past 5 years since his release, and something that should be talked about here a little more in depth, but only after talking about the lost relationships first.

What do I mean by ‘lost’? I’m not going to say I speak for all the guys, and definitely can’t speak for his family, but I think it’s nearly impossible to say that any of us believe he’s the same person today that he would have been without that momentary lapse of judgement. A big fucking lapse, as it were. He’s changed, matured, grown as a man in ways that he likely wouldn’t have had he never gone to prison, and that’s who we have with us now.

But, is that who we’ve always known?

It might be better to say we’ve based all our feelings, all our opinions on the person we knew pre-1994 because, for most of us, we essentially lost him from our lives for the next two decades. Sure, we had intermittent communications with him by mail, but for all but a small few outside of his family, that was it. And even those meetings were limited in nature. He was not a part of our daily lives, not a part of our growing up, or of the world we knew evolving to the point we lived at in 2013 when he was released. He missed out on friends getting married, getting divorced, dying, and having children – and so much more in between. The good, the bad, the eventful and the boring. Life continued on for everyone, including Craig, only in starkly different worlds.

Aaron was one of those few who did see him on the inside. Him and Dwin both went out to camp, on separate trips, to visit with Craig. Dwin did it in 2001, staying two days in early September. I remember him talking about the visit several times over the following years, about how Craig was doing, what he saw while he was there, what he felt Craig needed from us in terms of support. He always had Craig’s back as they were friends with each other longer than anyone else, and he would have been the perfect person to talk with for this chapter – except for the fact that the fat fuck had to up and die on us last year. So that whole interview thing was a no go.

Yes, I’m still bitter if you can’t tell.

Instead, I called up the ‘dad’ of our group since the late ‘80s before we even realized we were all stuck together for life. Aaron was the one we all turned to when we needed someone to be the adult, or at least more adult-like than any of us tended to portray. It probably had something to do with the little interest he had in alcohol back then, and because many of us made up for his disinterest, excessively. Because of this, he became – and really still is, three decades later – our de facto representative to the adulting world. I highly suggest to anyone out there who is not capable of being a fulltime adult, find someone like Aaron and make him your best friend for life. Just saying.

After Craig was moved to Texas, Aaron had a chance to go sit with him at camp in 2003 and 2004 for an afternoon each. He was only a few hours away and wrote in one of his letters that he wanted to visit. To get on the farm, he had to be on Craig’s 10-list. That’s the approved visitor list for anyone who wanted to come to the prison grounds and it only included 10 people at a time. If an inmate had 10 people on the list and wanted to add someone else, he needed to delete someone from the list first. He could always put that person back on later, but at the time, until it was expanded in 2005, inmates could only have 10 people on the list at a given time. In this case, Aaron had to get on it since he wasn’t currently. It took 3-8 weeks to get approved, on average.

The first time I knew anything about a 10-list was reading through Craig’s prison dictionary. It’s an appendix which lays out a ton of terms and what they meant to the prisoners at camp. On Page 5, the fourth and fifth entries, right before the 10-list, are so interesting to me, and sad. Craig wrote:

• Visit – When friends/family comes to see you, best/worst day, get to see loved ones/they have to come here to spend time with you
• Visit Hangover – The letdown after a visit, always very tired

Craig mentioned this a few times, how he loved having people come visit, but at the same time, it was so hard. Inmates almost needed recovery time after loved ones were there because it’s excruciating – mentally and emotionally – to have them in that environment. The depth of almost shame, or maybe guilt, from being seen in that facility with the rest of the wicked and condemned weighed heavily, as did the fact that they’d leave and be gone in what amounted to a blink of the eye for those doing serious time. But still, most inmates would give anything to have another visit as soon as possible. That time together, being seen for who you are as a person, and not just a convict, is so important, yet it’s immensely difficult to cut away the façade of Inmate 114704 when it’s wrapped in razor wire, layered in institutional grey, and covered in acrid Arizona dust.

As he noted in a couple talks, the hangover was real. Craig said it was always great anticipation before a visitor arrived but, after he had been there long enough, there was something else. There was another something looming alongside that anticipation, a deflating element that he knew would set in, an almost depression once his guest left because then it was back to the monotony of the endless days and the bureaucracy of the system. The visits were a blessing and torment, all in one.

Once on the list, Aaron had to be told how to visit. Craig sent a letter with the dos and don’ts, everything he could count on happening and what he shouldn’t count on doing. Don’t bring keys. Don’t bring a wallet. So many little things that left him feeling scared shitless.

“Oh, I was scared. I had never been in prison, or jail. I had no connection to that,” Aaron said. “I remember thinking that it was a lot like the movies though. Your name is on the check list, and you check in and they take you to the waiting area. It wasn’t inside in a room though, that was different. They brought him outside and we sat across from each other at a table to talk.”

Most of it was small talk, nothing really in depth. It wasn’t about stories of fights or prison stuff, but mostly superficial things, Aaron said, mainly because they hadn’t seen each other in 7 or 8 years. He also didn’t want to ask the wrong thing. Not that he was traipsing around on tip toes, but he wasn’t sure how deep a discussion they could have, or more rightly, that Craig would want to have, and he surely didn’t want to bring up a topic that would send Craig over the edge into some kind of funk once he left. So, it was better to just be vanilla, generic.

And because of that, it was awkward. It always is though. It has to be. It’s like that distant cousin who you used to spend summers with when you were in elementary school, but who you haven’t seen in person for two decades and now are getting thrown together at a wedding reception in your early 30s. You care for them as family and are curious how they’re fairing, wonder about their well-being, yet don’t have the intimate depth of conversation like you do with someone you’ve seen or talked to every day for the past five years. And that’s OK. You just keep going and get through it.

“Plenty of people I run into in Rockford since high school or whatever, when you see them, it’s really kind of awkward,” Aaron said. “You talk 2 minutes, and that’s all we’ve got. With Craig, it wasn’t that. This is my friend and I recognized that. Once he moved to Arizona, it was just like he went away to school. We were 22 or 23 years old, it wasn’t like we talked much then on the phone. Instead of emailing like we do today, we just sent letters through the mail. On my side, it was like Craig was out there leading his life, until I got a letter and it was handwritten and I know it’s because he can’t type since he’s in prison and doesn’t have a computer.”

Aaron wrote to Craig about 3-4 times a year he said, which made him a much better friend than me. I felt stupid, childish, even guilty because if I said I wrote twice a year, I’d probably be overstating facts by 50 percent. There was no way I felt like I was being a good friend when I couldn’t even carve out of my day 10 minutes to write him a short note every few months. But, I didn’t. Too often it was the middle of the fall before I got to it, when I realized I’d let the year slide by without writing, and knowing that even if I didn’t get a note sent, I’d still get a card from him in December.

My wife and I always got a Christmas letter, and I remember always thinking it was pretty amazing because he included her – on the envelope and in the salutation – every time after we got married even though he had never met her. But over time, it seemed logical to me that that was coping mechanism for him. He’d hear about our daily lives and ingested that information, taking in who and what we were talking about, and using it to build out his own life outside of the walls that confined him. We didn’t know how much it meant to him for us to just talk about everyday things. It may have been not at all noteworthy to us, but things like what me and my wife were doing when we bought our first house, or when we were going on a trip and what we did when we went home to the Park, were exactly what he wanted. He wanted a normalcy that wasn’t found inside prison.

Those letters propped him up in ways we couldn’t have imagined, even as benign as we made them. We were scared to offend him, scared to give too much detail, really just scared we weren’t doing it right. In the end, it seems we might have found a good mix as he came back to us and joined right in fairly seamlessly.

“It was like he already knew RJ and other guys, and felt like they were already friends because of my letters,” Aaron said. RJ was someone Craig had never met but when they did finally come face to face the first year Craig attended our long-running guy’s poker weekend, it was like Craig knew RJ – and everyone else – the whole time. Half the group he had never met, but he knew who all of them were, living vicariously through those of us who wrote him, even if irregularly. He wasn’t just a new guy despite it being his first year in attendance; he was already core part of the larger group.

When he came back to us, we did have to start anew. It was as if the gap in-between was almost erased; never forgotten because of the seriousness of the situation, but allowed to fade to the background so that we could concentrate on building a new world that included Craig.

Not everyone can easily do that. Craig knew that would be the case. He has said on several occasions that there are only two responses to how people react when they find out the crime he committed and the sentence he paid: they either stay or they go. Fight or flight is real, and there’s hardly any in-between.

“I’ve had the entire spectrum of responses,” Craig said. “For the vast majority, they’re in the middle. They’re not terribly shocked but their reactions are either, ‘Meh, it’s not OK, but I can understand how that can happen’ or ‘I see no reason why that should have ever happened.’ Where people end up depends on the intensity of the response and their views, but it’s always pretty close to bordering between those two. They’re on one side of the fence or the other, but within a stone’s throw of the fence.”

Sounds pretty spot-on if you think about it. Befriending someone isn’t that hard. But how often have they, when you’re starting to get the relationship into full bloom, told you they were previously convicted for murder and spent 18 years in prison? Just a guess here, but that’s not an everyday conversation for many of us.

When he meets someone new, they’re going to have a decision to make on whether they want it to go any farther than that point in time right there. It’s especially true nowadays when technology creates a completely different experience than in the mid-1990s when the crime first happened. Back then, if you weren’t near Phoenix or didn’t get a call from him or his family like Aaron did, you likely did not have any idea of what was going on. Today, any question or doubt can be confirmed or dispelled almost immediately. I found it that quickly – with a 3-minute internet search – when I looked as I started writing this chapter. Right there in black and white on my phone screen was the initial Arizona Republic article that was printed on Thursday, May 19, 1994. The small story on page 22 of the Phoenix newspaper read:

Police seize suspect in killing, find body dumped in desert
A Phoenix man was arrested Wednesday in the slaying of another man at their northeast apartment complex. The case unfolded after police received a tip early in the day that a man had been killed at an apartment complex in the 1800 block of West Cortez Avenue, said Lt. Kevin Robinson, a police spokesman. Officers located the body of a man in his early 20s in the desert near 67^th Avenue and Joraax Road. The victim apparently died of “significant trauma all over the body,” Robinson said. Craig Holte, 23, who lived in the same apartment complex as the victim, was arrested Wednesday afternoon on suspicion of first-degree murder, Robinson said. No other details were available.

Yeah, reading that out loud, it’s easy to see why Craig feels there are only two reactions. You either know he went to the very extreme and fucked up, and feel reasonably certain it’s not going to happen again, or you’re going to bail and not give him a chance to show himself. That even happens in prison. And it could be the guy in the next bunk. When that happens, there’s no choice other than to deal with it head on. Yet you can get to the point, Craig said, where you can have that difference, coexist and breathe the same air, even sit at the same table at chow if you have to, but just not interact with that person.

“I think that’s a valuable skill, the mentality of going into yourself so that you’re not mindfucking yourself over (and acting like), ‘This person doesn’t like me, so I’m going to kill myself.’ For me, it took a while to figure it out. It comes with maturity, but I think everyone gets to this point where ‘I’m OK with people who don’t like me or don’t want to talk to me. I can coexist with them.’”

The one caveat Craig admitted to was that the people on the inside, inmates classify you by your crime. And there were people who seemed disappointed that he wasn’t something else. When he mentioned this, I had to ask him to elaborate, as to what else they thought he might be.

They’s say things like, “This was your crime? But you’re not enough of a hardass, not enough of a convict, not violent enough, not running around beating people up all the time.” They were disappointed, by the look on their faces, their attitude. It was like when you see people coming out of a crappy movie. They thought it sucked because it wasn’t what they expected or what they wanted or what they thought they’d get. This is how many prisoners felt when Craig told him what he was down for.

“That response was more prevalent in prison because they were like, when they found out you killed someone, ‘Oh come be a part of our group, be the enforcer, the scary guy who keeps everyone in line.’ I was like, ‘No, leave me alone because you annoy me.’ Then they’re crestfallen because their champion, their hero turned them away. You’re a grown man, handle it yourself, dickhead. I have more important things to do than be your thug.”

I’d pay to have seen that conversation firsthand.

Unlike many other convicted felons, Craig has been awfully lucky that so many family members and friends fell into the first group where they knew he screwed up but weren’t going to leave his side. His support group has been – and is – huge, although it starts and ends with his family. Honestly, from afar, it’s pretty inspiring seeing a family stick together through something as shocking and life-altering. They’re not perfect, and they’ve had their ups and downs with him and each other, but they’ve rode it out this long and stayed behind him. I applaud their strength and love for family.

“I was fortunate that with my family and group of friends, they were pretty much in the camp of ‘Meh, we don’t condone what you did but we support you and know who you are. We know this isn’t a new hobby of yours.’ And this was without knowing details, so they thought, ‘I know you, so it was something extreme, and it’s not just something you woke up one morning and thought this was a great idea.’”

One thing he noted that has been a pleasant surprise is how “universally understanding the average public is” when he mentions his past. Some people are still in the Oh.My.God. category and will never be able to see past it, but not nearly as much as he expected. He believes it boils down to the fact that people not in prison are less judgmental, or maybe more appropriately put, civilians are not as judgmental as prisoners. Yeah, read that right. It may seem odd, but people who were just judged by the courts when they were sent to prison are more likely to reach a harsher verdict from what Craig’s witnessed.

There isn’t a single question that he said he hasn’t answered 25 times already. Too often, people will come back later and be like, “Really? You? That happened?” I know I said it and so did most of our friends when it originally happened. But people who don’t run off into the deep end as if he’s the Boogieman tend to have good interactions and move along. They let sleeping dogs lie, if you will, and instead push forward.

That’s where Craig really wants to be in life: moving forward. One thing he’s learned with age is to sit back and decide, “Does it matter? Does it have any application to today, tomorrow, next week? Is that information a substantial building block for what I need to do?” For most of the information we process on a daily basis, that answer is typically no. Things we hear, see, do, or interact around aren’t that important in the vast majority of life. And if it’s not going to be a practical affirmative response, then why worry about it? That’s where he says, “I only have so much brain space.”

Keeping that in mind, he also has to take into account how he presents his past when the situation arises. How you present and to what degree of how big a deal something is to you sets the stage for how big a deal it is to the person receiving the news. If Craig were to treat telling a new acquaintance about his prison time as an all-encompassing, Earth-shattering event when first meeting them, it’s likely they’ll perceive it that way and treat it as Earth-shattering. But if he treats it as ho-hum, yada-yada, and that he’s over it, then they likely will receive and treat it that way too, at least in his experience so far.

His conversation with our friendly fertilizer known as Dwin during one of his prison visits is quite telling in this respect.

“It’s a fine line, particularly with my crime, that, yes it is by any standard of definition something that anyone could have done. And yes it is significant, there’s no doubt in that. I think the first time I used the phrase, Swanson came to visit, and we were sitting and talking. He asked pretty in-depth questions, wanted to know more exact details. He wanted to know, and I told him. One of the things I said to him, and it struck me how significant it was to him, is that it is part of my life but not who I am.

“[This blog has] done a good job depicting and stating that I’ve taken full ownership from the beginning, but at the same time, I’ve not allowed this one event to completely shape who I am. So it’s a very fine line to convey, ‘Yes, this is important, but it’s not everything of who I am.’”