After a dream of heaven, a nightmare intervenes
You are both alone in his cell. You 've slipped out a knife (eight-to ten-inch blade, double-edged). You're holding it beside your leg so he can't see it. The enemy is smiling and chattering away about something. He thinks you 're his fool; he trusts you. You see the spot. It's a target between the second and third button on his shirt. As you calmly talk and smile, you move your left foot to the side to step across his right-side body length. A light pivot toward him with your right shoulder and the world turns upside down: you have sunk the knife to its hilt into the middle of his chest.
The author of those words, Jack Henry Abbott, 37, had practiced that lethal sidestep on a fellow inmate while doing time in Utah state prison. He described the art of murder in one of some 1,000 letters that he wrote to Author Norman Mailer between 1977 and 1980, providing a cool but furious description of life behind bars. It was an existence filled with violence: the violence done to Abbott in roach-infested solitary-confinement cells and the violence that Abbott, long a prison incorrigible, did to others. His was a voice so choked with rage that he admitted, "I have to intentionally gauge [it] in conversation." That anger, he wrote, "could consume me at any moment if I lost control."
Abbott began his correspondence with Mailer after reading that he was at work on a book about Gary Gilmore, a Utah inmate who was executed for murder in 1977. Abbott, who had spent all but 9½ months of his adult life in prison, offered to give the author a sense of "the atmospheric pressure" endured by long-term convicts like Gilmore. Mailer accepted the offer and was stunned by the hard-edged eloquence of the self-educated Abbott, who boasted: "Nine-tenths of my vocabulary I have never heard spoken." Wrote Mailer: "I felt all the awe one knows before a phenomenon." He helped Abbott publish the letters; In the Belly of the Beast appeared to critical ovations in July. Then, by attesting to the convict's talent and promising him a job in New York, Mailer helped persuade the Federal Parole Board to release him last June. A $15,000 book advance paid three lawyers who handled his release.
Abbott arrived in New York on June 5 with something "only one in a million convicts ever get," as Ed Henson of the federal Bureau of Prisons put it. Not only was Abbott suddenly free—a condition he had once likened to "a free man's dreams of heaven"—he was also a celebrity, invited to literary parties and interviewed on Good Morning America. His work would be hailed in the New York Times Book Review as an "awesome, brilliant, perversely ingenuous . . . articulation of penal nightmare." Says Henson: "He had everything a man needs to start a life outside." Then a new nightmare intervened.