Free A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden by Stephen Reid

are eventually delivered to its gates.
    When we were lucky and got a package in, we used homemade rigs — syringes made from ballpoint pens and coat hangers. Other times we cooked down Darvons and cough syrup from the infirmary, or stole yeast and tomato juice from the kitchen to make a brew. We did what we could to get past the four corners of our cells.
    Eventually I was transferred to a medium-security facility. I decided to throw the dope to the ground and look for another kind of escape. Within eight months I had a hook ‘n’ ladder play happening and was living the life of a fugitive in Ottawa, where I met Paddy Mitchell and Lionel Wright; the three of us became known as the Stopwatch Gang. For the next dozen or so years, heroin ceased to be at the centre of my universe. I sipped whiskey to soothe the beast but I was too busy to chase a dope habit. We stole millions of dollars, racked up nine escapes between the three of us, and made the Most Wanted list in two countries. By Halloween of 1980 the FBI had caught up with me in Arizona. They dragged me off to the ultimate penitentiary, Marion, Illinois.
    Four years later I was transferred to Canada. I had grown bone-weary of prison culture and my criminal lifestyle. I went to my cell one day, closed my door, and began to write. When my head came up a year later I had the first draft of a novel. I sent the manuscript to Fred Desroches, a criminologist at the University of Waterloo, who passed it on to their writer-in-residence, Susan Musgrave. Susan became my editor, then my wife, in a maximum-security wedding. I published Jackrabbit Parole , and a year later I was released.
    We moved to Vancouver Island, to a vine-covered cottage by the sea. I bought a weedeater and a pink bicycle for my stepdaughter, Charlotte. I planted annuals. I began to engage with a new matrix of friends; I planted perennials. For the first two years I fixed up our home, pounding nails and painting trim. Susan and I had a second daughter, Sophie. I began another novel but found myself staring for hours at a blank page. I had been released from prison, but still I had not escaped. I felt the same aloneness in the midst of my warrant-burning party in our garden as I had in my grade nine class. Once again I went in search of the only solace I knew.

    The only real serenity I have ever experienced in life, paradoxically and tellingly, has been without the assistance of drugs. It arose from a long period of abstinence, late in life, encouraged by the love of my wife and my daughters, nurtured by my friends, and witnessed by a God of my understanding — in whom, ultimately, I could not extinguish my addiction.
    But even after a lifetime, I was not done with my crimes, nor were they done with me. In 1999 I returned to a full-blown heroin and cocaine habit. I had tried to keep a foot in each world, to hold onto the weight of love and family, but was pulled into the underworld of drugs. I chose to destroy both lives — not in a calculated way, more by default, but I chose nonetheless. I committed the worst bank robbery of my life, an unprofessional, unprovoked act of violence. It cost me an eighteen-year sentence, and nearly cost some people their lives.
    Now, at fifty pieces, I find myself stripped bare, beaten back from hope, all out of illusions, in yet another prison cell. Having fallen through the crust of this earth so many times, it seems only on this small and familiar pad of concrete, where I can make seven steps in one direction, then take seven back, do my feet touch down with any certainty.
    A year before my arrest, when Sophie was nine, we went out sliding after a freak snowfall. Hurtling down the hill on a red plastic saucer, we whirled faster and faster until the edge caught and we spilled. We tumbled through the snow, Sophie’s pearly whites shining to the heavens, her laughter like small golden bells.
    Now Sophie is twelve. When she accompanies her mother on their