Back when I worked as a therapist, having acquired something of a reputation around Memphis, I tended to get the hard cases, the ones no one else wanted. Referrals, they're called, like what Ambrose Bierce said about good advice-best thing you can do is give it to someone else, quick. And for the most part these referrals proved a surly, deeply damaged lot, none of them with much skill at or inclination towards communication, all of them leaning hard into the adaptive mechanisms that had kept them going for so long but that were now, often in rather spectacular fashion, breaking down.
I was therefore somewhat surprised at Stan Bellison's calm demeanor. I knew little of him. He was, or had been, a prison guard, and had suffered severe job-related trauma. The appointment came from the state authority.
Why are you here? is the usual, hoary first question, but this time I needn't ask it. Stan entered, sat in the chair across from me, and, after introducing himself, said: "I'm here because I was held hostage."
Two inmates had, during workshop, dislodged a saw blade from its housing and, holding it against one guard's throat, taken another-Stan, who tried to come to his fellow guard's aid- hostage. Sending everyone else away, the inmates had blockaded themselves in the workshop and, when contacted, announced they would only speak to the governor. The first guard they released as a gesture of goodwill. Stan, whom they referred to as Mr. Good Boy, they kept.
"You were a cop," Bellison said. Once again I remarked his ease.
"Not a very good one, I'm afraid."
"Then let's hope you're better as a therapist," he said, and laughed. "I don't want to be here, you know."
"Few do."
His eyes, meeting mine, were clear and steady.
Each day the inmates cut off a finger. The crisis went on eight days.
On the last, the lead inmate, one Billy Basil, stepped through the door to pick up a pizza left just outside, only to meet a sniper's bullet. The governor hadn't come down from the capitol to parlay, but he had sent instructions.
"So then it was over, at least," I said. "The trauma, what they did to you, that'll be with you for a long time, of course."
"You don't understand," Stan Bellison told me. "The other inmate? His name was Kyle Beck. That last day, as he stood staring at Billy's body in the open door, I came up behind him and gouged out his eyes with my thumbs."
He held up his hands. I saw the ragged stumps of what had been fingers. And the thumbs that remained.