I went to prison, here is that experience: Part V
Things with Matthew progressed rapidly after our first encounter under the gazebo in the beginning of October. Recall that Ford Mountain was a small world, and we saw the same 50 residents and 40-something staff members every single day. Although Matthew worked in Forestry and I worked various jobs during my time there (including in the kitchen, in the Paint Shop, and mostly on Grounds), we spent most of our free time together.
We ate together in the dinning hall, with James. Ford Mountain was very cliquey, and they sat at the table with all the people who worked in Forestry. I moved around quite a bit, and at first I only sat with Jessie, until we were no longer friends. Then I moved to sit with Erin and Tyler. After they left I sat alone for a bit, convinced that I would get out on Parole any day now. Finally, I relented in the summer and moved to sit with other people from Bravo Hut.
Then when Matthew and I became friends I instantly sat with him, because truthfully I didn’t really enjoy sitting where I was currently. It all sounds quite pedantic, I’m sure, but there’s a very strong psychological impact when you see the same small group of people 24/7, 365 days out of a year. Thankfully there was a high turnover rate of residents, as most of them were either brought to the Good Place at the latter end of their sentences, or they were there for lighter crimes.
- I went to prison — here is that experience: Part Five
- I went to prison — here is that experience: Part Four
- I went to prison — here is that experience: Part Three
- I went to prison — here is that experience: Part Two
- I went to prison — here is that experience: Part One
So, after work Matthew and I would walk around the baseball field for a bit before he’d get tired and want to go get ready for dinner. Then we’d see each other at dinner, and it was hard not to flirt with him and to pretend to just be friends. Meanwhile, at every chance we got alone we were making out and advancing further along, sometimes. We would finish dinner and he would need an hour or so before he would agree to come meet me.
When we weren’t shivering in the autumn nights under the gazebo, making out until we saw people coming out of buildings, we would play board games in the library with James. One of their favourites was Monopoly, although Matthew was a poor loser and for whatever reason I had stupidly dumb luck whenever I played with them (I wish I had that luck whenever I played with Jessie, who was a poor winner AND loser).
I had some notebooks that the teacher provided me (because I was such an excellent student, and I often told him I needed them for “physics self-study”). In these notebooks I found myself writing a lot about Matthew. Here is what one of them said (it is written in French, I’ll translate it afterwards):
Heir soir on marchait autour le terrain arriere les huttes, comme d’habitude. On parlait un peu, et quand on avait terminé, on venait à un signe. Il me arreté là et il me disait à rester arriere ça pour un moment. On trouvé on-même là, arriere le signe et il me embraissait. Il me disait avant le baiser qu’il serait juste un moment … Et c’ètait juste trés court un moment.
It says “Yesterday evening we walked around the field behind the huts, as usual. We talked a bit, and when we were done, we came up to a sign. He stopped me there and he told me to stay behind it for a moment. We found ourselves there, behind the sign and he kissed me. He told me before the kiss that it would just be a moment. And it was just a very short moment.”
He had me hoping for a future, to be honest. I am a little bit of a pessimist, and given the charges and sentence, I am skeptical about finding true love anymore. He would have been ideal, I thought, since we were both in the exact same place.
Then he dropped a bombshell on me, rather casually one day as we were walking around the field. He informed me, several weeks into our budding romance, that he actually had a boyfriend. Not only just a boyfriend but he had been in a long-term relationship for the better part of the past decade.
It was the story of my life unfolding over, and over again. I am a very conflicted person, as I don’t agree with cheating in principle. However, it’s became a bit of a fetish of mine in my 20s when I was out there living my best gay life and Grindr was a novelty (I’m from Alberta, where the men are a little less open about their lifestyles). At some point the novelty of the passionate hookups, and the taboo affairs wore off, and I found myself wanting a meaningful relationship again.
However, I seem to have pigeonholed myself as a commodity. Nobody wanted to date me, but everybody wanted to fuck me behind their partner’s back. For my young adult years I was turned on by this, and happily participated in it. Now that I wanted something for myself, nobody was available anymore. Not for what I wanted.
The Fall of Jessie Jacobs
It was coming up to our one year anniversary. Recall, Jessie and I came to Ford Mountain in the very same transport vehicle. He was my first friend there, and even though we’d fallen out, I couldn’t help but love the guy. He had the personality of a sociopath who should have been 250 lbs so people knew he was dangerous, but he was trapped in a quaint little Nova Scotian’s body.
He had brilliant, beautiful blue eyes, but one day somebody made a joke about him that whenever they thought of him the song “Angel” by Sarah McLaughlin came on, and ever since then that’s how I thought of him. He had self-deprecating humour, which he used to justify his cruelty towards other people. As I said, from what he told me, he had a bit of a rough life. I wanted so desperately to hold him in my arms so tight that he finally glued back together, but something tells me that even he knew that wasn’t likely to work.
After our falling out, his friend Marcus was eventually released and went back to the Island to live his quiet life of niche candies and D&D. Kevin Lahey was also released on Parole, and soon I started to realize all the people I’d known from the beginning were starting to disappear. Soon, it really was just me and Jessie (well, there were a couple others).
When Jessie told me that his sentencing was finally coming up in November, I felt a tinge of sadness. I knew that the outlook wasn’t good, he was likely going to get a federal sentence (meaning he would not be eligible to spend it at Ford Mountain, which is a provincial institution). He absolutely deserved it, not only because he wasn’t remorseful, but he truly believed he was in love with his victim.
Back in the spring, just before Erin was released, he was working in the Wood Shop and I was working right next door in the Paint Shop. He would make stools and signs and bring them over to me and I would paint them. He also lived right across the hall from me in Bravo Hut, and we were the best of friends at Ford. He was such a pleasant man, and not at all bothered by gossip or triviality.
Well, Erin worked in the Wood Shop with a new arrival named Wes. The rumour was that Wes was actually a former police officer, so he and I bonded over our reverence of the Crown. Wes was younger, perhaps in his very early 20s. Being gay, of course I noticed him, but I was never going to put the moves on him. One has to suss these kinds of things out with a bit of decorum. Erin and Wes seemed to get along quite well, but when Erin was released Wes went to work in the kitchen and I’d quit the Paint Shop by then.
At some point in the summer I noticed Jessie and Wes out in the baseball field hanging out. It was the most ghastly sight, because Jessie Jacobs was Satan incarnate, and Wes was what I would describe as “Lawfully Good.” The only thing they had in common was their height, to be honest. Yet, there they were, playing football of all things (Jessie hated sports, he told me himself, and he often made fun of me for going to the gym every night).
Jessie did have a bit of a hot-boy summer, though, and uncharacteristically got himself out there to play volleyball with the regular volleyball crew. Even I wasn’t cool enough to be invited to volleyball. I imagine that when Marcus left, and D&D became more of a chore than a passionate, intellectual affair, that he simply got bored and needed to branch out and socialize with new people.
One last item of business to set you up for the story. One of the duties of the kitchen crew was to prepare and distribute the daily coffee for Coffee Break. This was mandatory, just like the meals, as we were counted there. Then we were stuck for 20 minutes and nobody was permitted to go back to work until it was over. As a Mormon, at first I hated this ritual, because I was still clinging onto my “faith.” I was corrupted within a month and soon partook in the daily coffee rations. It was free after all.
It was now approaching our one year anniversary, Jessie and I. By then we barely spoke, even though I desperately wanted to. One day Wes was on Coffee crew, meaning he had to put on his kitchen “whites” and push the little cart all the way from the Admin/Dining Hall/Kitchen building up to Forestry. I was sitting with Matthew and James, as per usual, and didn’t even notice anything.
The whole camp sure did though, and shortly after coffee break I was hearing the news from everybody else. It’s kind of ironic that the former news journalist didn’t even hear about it first, but when I did, it was all I could talk about. I found myself walking around talking to people I never even spoke to, asking them questions. “So, what happened to Jessie Jacobs?”
Apparently, during coffee break he got a little handsy with Wes and grabbed his ass. I’m sure he thought nothing of it, because Jessie Jacobs only wants people who don’t want him, and doesn’t want the people who do. However, this obviously made Wes uncomfortable, and he immediately reported it to the staff. At some point Jessie was paged to admin and by the end of the work shift I witnessed corrections staff entering his room in Bravo hut and hauling his items away in plastic bags.
The word on the street was that he had been taken into solitary confinement (so, he was still on grounds, but was being housed in a separate unit in Holloway House, the prison-style facility). Of course this was entirely appropriate, considering that if the rumours were true, he’d just committed a sexual assault while in prison awaiting sentencing for a sexual assault charge.
It was the talk of the town, all day, everywhere I went everybody was talking about the downfall of Jessie Jacobs. And that was the last I ever saw of him. I later learned he’d been kept on grounds until his Sentencing date in November, a few short days later. If only he made it a few more days…
Love is a tragedy
One evening in early October I was sitting outside of Bravo hut on the benches with some other B-Hut residents. It was like our patio, we were soaking up the last days of warmth. It was very fraternal. Justin, the Hut Rep for Bravo after Jessie stepped down, was a very gifted guitar player.
He was out there playing “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by Elvis, I was sitting with Tory (who will become a main character in the next story) and some other friends. Even Jessie came out and joined us for a bit. But when Matthew exited the Library, I saw him walking across Parade Square towards the baseball field and I took my cue. I got up and followed him.
Fast-forward to the same day all the drama happened with Jessie, and Matthew and I agreed to meet up at the gazebo again later that evening. On the dot, we both arrived there from separate directions and commenced our regular evening date together. It got pretty heated, I don’t know if for me it was partly because I felt vindicated after everything that happened with Jessie. Everything that happened between Matthew and I was consensual, and what Jessie did to Wes wasn’t.
Like Rose says in Titanic (1997), “A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets.” It reminds me of a famous line from Romeo & Juliet, where Juliet says:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep. The more I give to thee, the more I have.
To be fair, Jessie had his own consensual romance several months before I ever did. There was another resident who came and went in the blink of an eye, named Jon. He was flamboyantly gay, and often showered with the curtains wide open. He once asked Kevin (the devout Christian) to come in and turn the hot water down for him, which Kevin declined. Well, one day Jon kissed Jessie (they’d been friends), and even though Jessie didn’t report him for sexual assault, the corrections staff moved Jon into a different hut as punishment.
Which is why my affair with Matthew was so intense, we were not trying to be as disastrously public as Jessie was. The stakes were real, and if they moved a guy out of his hut for kissing another guy with consent, what would they do to two people having a full-blown affair in the dark? It kind of felt like we were living in 1984 by George Orwell.
After that night, Matthew stopped talking to me. He seemed to feel guilty, but to be fair he only had one more week before he was released. Which is what frustrated me, because I wanted to spend more time with him because of that, not less. Maybe the fact that he would soon be back in his bed with his partner in a few short days was all too real for him.
But we’d talked about meeting up on the outside nearly every day that month. He wanted to do more things to me than we could get away here in this idyllic prison, a trap disguised as paradise. I gave him my email address, and he joked that he probably wouldn’t answer it until I was out. I later heard speculation, after he left, from the others, that maybe he had an internet ban because of his charges, and he just didn’t have the heart to tell me.
One night I blurted out that I loved him as we were making out, and he told me not to say things like that. Maybe it was just a novel affair for him after all. What gay guy doesn’t fantasize about hooking up in prison, or a prisoner?
Then, one day in November, Matthew was gone. I didn’t cry, I didn’t react, but all I had left of him was James, our mutual friend. James, the clown that he was, continued to keep the conversation light, but I think he could tell I was sad. We tried calling Matthew, but James said he wasn’t able to get through. I only tried three times, then I figured he didn’t want to talk.
Matthew had apparently been in the news, when he was first charged. That was our first conversation, actually. I was telling him about working for CBC, and he told me that the only time he’d ever been on the news was for that. Several people joked with me after he was gone that he was famous. He’d been on Creep Catchers or something like that.
I don’t think Matthew wanted attention, or to be famous, and I had been the exact opposite. I knew I was selfish for wanting him in my life, because I was dreaming we could fade away together into anonymity. Maybe we’d retire together into a blissful life of solitude. But that is not my life, and it never has been.
My life is a swirling vortex of chaos at best, and it is only incidental that I was on the news for my charges. Remember, I worked for the news, and I live my life like I’ll probably be in the news again for something. Maybe not necessarily something bad, but my world was politics and drama and publicity, and it’s no place to bring love into.
I don’t think you’re reading this blog randomly. More than likely, you heard about Vincent Papequash, the former CBC employee who went to prison. Or you Googled me, and found this site. I don’t think I believe in the right to be forgotten, and that’s certainly not what this blog is about. I can’t erase what I did, but I can move forward with my life and continue to hold myself accountable.
Everybody needs a saviour
Shortly after Matthew left, I decided to move on rather quickly. Almost as soon as he left, another man arrived to Ford Mountain Correctional Center. His name was Morgan Oliver, and he was one last episode in the chapter of my life that was prison.
This concludes Part V of this narrative.
All names of inmates and staff have been changed for privacy reasons. Names of organizations and public figures are unchanged. Although presented as a narrative, this is my account of true events. As a former journalist, I wanted to write about my experience after being incarcerated.
Vincent Papequash 