Killing Chase Read Online Free PDF Page B

released early all the time. Due to overcrowding, you are one of a hundred inmates across the state who will be released due to this unfortunate circumstance. We’ve got all the bases covered. So do we have a deal?”
    “I’m flat broke, except for the three hundred fifty bucks in my prison account; what do I do for money?”
    “That’s up to you. Combined, your parents are worth millions. I’m sure they’ll be more than willing to help you out.”
    “I’m not big on asking for money.”
    “The thousand dollars deposited into your account every month would say otherwise.”
    “Those are guilt payments, nothing more. I’ve never asked for a dime; however, it’s true that I don’t send it back.”
    “Half full, Chase. Half full. So what’ll it be?”
    I sat there with a zillion questions swirling in my head, vying for attention and needing to be answered. Astounded at the thought of getting out, I said the only thing someone in prison for seven years would say, if given the same opportunity.
    “We have a deal.”

Chapter 5
     
    I spent the first three years of my prison sentence continuing the aforementioned pity party. I was depressed, and the only way I could fight the depression was to eat. The money my parents sent funded one of the biggest three-year vending machine splurges in prison history. “Go big or go back to your cell,” I liked to say. It was not uncommon for me to purchase five or six Cokes, seven or eight of those coconut-flaked, moist, mini-doughnut packs, and two or three T.G.I. Friday’s frozen teriyaki wing packages a day. I was lost, and I turned to processed food as my savior. When I had my first prison physical, shortly after I began my sentence, I weighed in at one hundred seventy pounds, and my body fat was somewhere south of ten percent.
    I had another physical eight months in and stepped off the scales in shock at seeing two hundred ten pounds. It was during this time that I learned the importance of sharing my wealth with my fellow inmates, but my eating was still out of control. I added Snickers and honey buns to my menu, and two years in, I was pushing two hundred fifty pounds. I could see Sam Farley territory on the horizon. My weight gain caused me to become lethargic, and so I burned fewer calories while continuing to empty a vending machine or two a week. Three years in, I weighed two hundred eighty pounds and was in a downward spiral. Prison counselors were no help. Neither was the money my parents were sending me, but send it they did.
    The turning point occurred when I transferred to Carrboro State Prison in June of 2008 and met someone who would end up saving my life. Of course, he almost drove me crazy in the process. Carlton Givens was a jack-of-all-trades at Carrboro and master of none. He had been in and out of prison for thirty years for running con games on the elderly. He used to tell me that to be a good con artist you had to learn to sneak in on people through their emotions instead of their windows. Physically he was harmless, but mentally he had the uncanny ability to hone in on your biggest weakness and beat you upside the head with it. Unless you could score him some smokes, then he was your best friend and you couldn’t get rid of him. The first time he laid eyes on me, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see what was going on.
    “Let me guess. You got convicted of eating someone?”
    After cementing our “friendship” with a carton of Newports, he said to me one afternoon in the prison yard, “You in here fo’ the rest of yo’ life, Chase?”
    Before I could answer, he continued, “No, you ain’t, so stop livin’ in the damn past and look forward to the damn future, boy. It don’t take a brainiac to see dat you killin’ yo’self one damn Twinkie at a time.”
    I wasn’t into Twinkies at the time, but Carlton was on a roll, so I let him finish.
    “The secret to surviving prison is you got to have a villain. Someone or something that you