Kenny Johnson: The Last Hustle

The Last Hustle: A True Story



We can never know what will lead to our freedom


Steel shackles cut into my wrists and ankles and I had to take a piss. Would this bus ride ever end? Did I want it to? Truth was, I was scared shitless. I was scared to death.
 

We’d been riding for eighteen hours straight, crisscrossing the countryside, dropping men off at one institution and picking others up at the next. The moonless night outside my window revealed nothing but blackness, a blackness that did nothing to ease the growing panic inside my heart.

It was January 1980, the dead of winter, and there was no heat on the bus. The only thing warming my sorry ass was the fire raging along my nerves and inside my head. Even my bladder was on fire.

It’s too damn much time! my mind screamed into the darkness. This place is crazy dangerous. What if I never make it out?

I was thirty-two years old and facing the longest stretch of time in all my years of hustling, an unthinkable forty years. I would serve a minimum of ten before ever laying eyes on a parole board. All the time I’d been in the game, all the different jails I’d seen the inside of, somehow I’d never really believed I’d be headed here, the “butcher shop,” what every prisoner dreaded the most. What a helluva name to hang on a prison. Finally the worst was upon me.

The men were making their usual racket, chattering away and yelling back and forth. Sweat and stink, pain and fear, oozed from every pore, filling the inside of the bus with an acrid stench like old cigarette butts. I had no idea who the guy shackled next to me was and I didn’t care, lost as I was in my own private nightmare.


I felt it long before I saw it, that hellhole of a prison. Its heavy energy of despair emanated for miles outside the razor-wired walls and armed guard towers. Rounding that last bend in the woods I looked up past the driver and got a glimpse of what was to be my new home, Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, well known 
as one of the most dangerous maximum-security prisons in the nation. Same as every other prison, high-intensity lights defined its perimeter, flooding the countryside for miles in unnatural brightness.

My lips and tongue felt as dry as an old cowhide left on a cracked desert floor; my chest constricted, so I could only suck in little sips of air at a time. Taking a deep breath didn’t seem like a good idea anyway. That might make me relax, and this surely was no time for relaxing. All my senses were winding up into a 
fever pitch of self-preservation.

Suddenly the whole of the prison came into focus. Shit! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Looming above us was Dracula’s castle, huge, ancient, and sinister. The memory of every scary movie I’d ever seen as a child came rushing back at me. Given the amount of fear I’d been generating for the last eighteen hours,
 Barbie and Ken’s plastic toy home would’ve looked like a monster house. Almost imperceptibly, the conversations of the men around me began coming into focus.

“Man, they got guys in there who’ll just walk up to you and start stabbing,” one guy was saying. My eyes traced the long white scar traveling from the side of his nose to the nape of his neck. He looked like he knew what he was talking about.

“Gotta get you a knife,” he went on. “Gotta be ready to protect your ass.”

My already crazed mind shifted into overdrive. Somebody’s gonna try and stab me? I don’t know nobody here! How am I gonna get a knife?

“Yeah,” another chimed in, “they got mobsters in there who’ll eat lesser cons for lunch.”

But I’m just a little ole chili pimp! A sneak thief. Plus I’m out of my home territory. They’re gonna eat me alive!

Intense light suddenly flooded the inside of the bus. The lines of fear and tension etched on every man’s face jumped out in stark relief. Eyes wide, we were a herd of captive animals frozen in the prison’s headlights. Like a Polaroid snapshot, that instant of collective emotion would be forever branded onto the desolate field of my heart—anger, fear, frustration, doubt, anxiety, hopelessness, faith, prayer, wishing, hoping, wanting to cry, wanting to yell, wanting to scream, wanting to...

My jaws clenched. My fists clenched. The muscles in my shoulders corded up like old vines. I stopped breathing.

I felt like I was being squeezed ten miles deep in an ocean of dread, drowned in an infinite, mind-freezing fear of the unknown.

Looking out.
Seeing nothing.

Official release date 7th August: available for purchase from Non Duality Press or the StillnessSpeaks online store.