Joe Loya

And my psyche pulled up this bald kid.

out of nowhere, I'm visited there.

And it's so humbling, this experience of going mad, of having this hallucination.

I know how to perform prison maleness.

I know how to perform, don't mess with me like I've done violence already.

And now I have this homicide investigation that I survive.

And when I come out, there's something that happens to you when you're investigated for a homicide and you don't get the case, right?

What men in prison think is, oh my God, you beat a homicide.

Right.

You're a killer.

Yeah.

It's easier for them to think that because it's safer.

You don't know if I killed someone.

I may have, though.

And so you don't want to bother me.

And what that did is allowed me distance from people because now I've been writing the last year in prison trying to save myself.

I'm writing, I'm thinking of stuff, I'm writing stories.

The first one story I wrote that ended up in the memoir was about this bald kid, right?

And so I'm writing all these stories from my past and I need time in my cell to keep writing and investigating who I am.

The great irony of my second half of doing time was I had to periodically really pretend like I was ready to stab someone or whatever and commit violence on people so that I could...