Derelict

Prison: One of the few places on earth where sharks sleep, and where "you reap what you sow."The note that prisoner Jamel Ross attached with his (so-called) urgent request to see the prison psychotherapist was supposed to appear desperate: "I need to address some serious issues because all I can think about is killing two people when I leave here. Can you help me!" And that's all he wrote. But, even more than the anger, revenge, and redemption Jamel was ready to bring back to the streets, he also had the prison's psych as a target; a target of his lust. And that was a more pressing issue at the moment. "As far back as I can remember life has been about growing pains," he told her. "I've been through the phases of a liar in my adolescence, a hustler and thug in my teens, and an all-out con man in my twenties. Maybe it was just my instincts to acquire what I considered resources -- by whatever means necessary -- but it's a shame that once you get away with all of those behaviors, you become good at it, like some twisted type of talent or profession. Eventually even lies feel like the truth... "I had a good thing going with Superstar. The magazine. The cable television show. Meeting and commingling with the big-name celebrities and all. I was positioned to have the biggest multimedia company in New York, the biggest to focus on black entertainment exclusively. BET was based in Washington at the time, so I had virtually no competition. Jamel Ross, the big fish in a little pond... "And of course I got away with murder, figuratively, when Angel -- yes, the singer with the TV show and all her millions of fans -- didn't go along with the authorities, including her mother, who wanted to hit me with child molestation, kidnapping, and other charges. I was probably dead wrong for laying with that girl before she turned eighteen. But Angel was a very grown-up seventeen-year-old. Besides, when I hit it she was only a few months shy from legal. So gimme a break. "In a strange way, fate came back to get my ass for all of my misdeeds. All of my pimpmania. That cable company up in Connecticut, with more than four hundred stations and fifty-five million subscribers across the country, was purchased by an even larger entity. It turned my life around when that happened; made my brand-new, million-dollar contract null and void. There was no way that I could sue anyone because lawyers' fees are incredible and my company overextended itself with the big celebrations, the lavish spending, and the increased staff; my living expenses, including the midtown penthouse, the car notes, and maintenance for Deadra and JoJo -- my two lovers at the time -- were in excess of eleven thousand a month. Add that to the overhead at Superstar and, without a steady stream of cash flowing, I had an ever-growing monster on my hands. "One other thing, both Deadra and JoJo became pregnant, so now I would soon have four who depended on me as the sole provider. Funny, all of this wasn't an issue when things were lean. When the sex was good and everyone was kissing my ass. Now, I'm the bad guy because the company's about to go belly-up." With a little more than two years left to his eighty-four-month stretch, Jamel Ross finally got his wish, to sit and spill his guts to Dr. Kay Edmondson, the psychotherapist at Fort Dix -- the federal correctional institution that was a fenced-in forty-acre plot on that much bigger Fort Dix Army Base. Fort Dix was where army reservists came to train, and simultaneously where felons did hard time for crimes gone wrong. With so many unused acres belonging to the government during peacetime, someone imagined that perhaps a military academy or some other type of income-producing entity would work on Fort Dix, as well. So they put a prison there. The way that Fort Dix was set up was very play it by ear. It was a growing project where rules were implemented along the way. Sure, there was a BurAaron Relentless Staff is the author of 'Derelict ', published 2007 under ISBN 9781416549499 and ISBN 1416549498.