2007 James Bauhaus

Travis McKinney: A Eulogy

 I lost a friend today. He was a Christian brother. Travis was one of the nicest persons I've ever met. He was very good-natured, and generous too. He always had something humorous to say. He very seldom complained, despite the fact that the State had decided to make him its slave for about 60 years. Travis worked at the school. He was learning Spanish, and was quite good at it. The Latinos who wished to learn English came to him. He taught them both language and American culture in exchange for similar instruction from them about their language and culture.

Travis struggled with demons, though. When he wasn't practicing some kind of selfimprovement, mostly by reading his Bible, he was telling me of some of the horrible things he'd done. Seemed to think that he'd performed these crimes for many years prior to getting caught. Travis was only 34 when he died. What Travis failed to consider is that, other than in fistfights over drugs and payment for drugs, he seems never to have actually hurt or killed anyone. The bulk of his criminal activity involved hardly anything but property crimes. Mere property crime is an annoyance. Property is easily replaced and swiftly forgotten about as we go through life. ' Real crime, it is not. Real crime is murder, arson, deliberate, serious injury and negligence that leads to the above.

Travis would not even rate a four on my list of real criminals. I've seen the worst scum in the western hemisphere pass through these Okie prisons for the past 35 years. I can gauge scoundrels better than any room full of prison psychiatrists because I live what they only hear about and must extrapolate from. Travis was not a scoundrel; he merely had few ethics when it came to sex and drugs.

Travis was stocky: 5'8" and about 225 pounds: a good fighter. He kept the HitlerHugger gangs in check. In prison, under constant snoopage by kops and kop-cameras, it is custom to settle disputes inside the privacy of one of the toilet-sized cages they force us to inhabit in pairs. Two years ago one of these Nazi-kids was foolish enough to "lock down" with Travis for the purpose of a fight. His Nazi-brothers crowded their faces into the slit window of the door to watch the carnage. It didn't go well for them. Nazi-leader got thrown down and kicked around that concrete coffin like a rag doll. When he tried to jam himself under the metal rack for protection from Travis' rain of blows, Travis dragged him out by his foot, continuing to pulp the kid despite his terrified screams begging for mercy. The Nazi-kids have been considerably calm ever since, to everyone's benefit.

Now Travis is dead, and it wasn't the Nazis who got him: it was the Kops.

Travis made his money by meticulously cutting, sanding and shaping hundreds of tiny wooden parts and gluing them into intricate replicas of Harley Davidson motorcycles. Travis' hobby and business is impossible to perform without razor blades, glue and sandpaper. Everything he used in his hobby-craft except the wood is outlawed by the Kops. The Kops would regularly ransack Travis' cage and rip off his tools and supplies, make threats and levy sanctions against him.

The Kops employ many other ways to harass, humiliate and degrade their victims. Their squinty eyes constantly search for petty infractions such as loose shirt-tails, unfastened buttons and I.D. tags askew. Their mouths use these events as excuses to spew the pettiest of orders, hatefully issued with threats of sanction. Some of the most petty and nonsensical demands that the Kops make concern how clothes are worn. For no good reasons it infuriates the Kops to see one of their hated victims wear a sweatshirt into their mess hall. The Kops become very agitated when they see a captive wear a sock-hat under a ball cap. The Kops go psycho with verbal abuse every time they see a Hippie wear a sweatband, a Negro wear a do-rag or a Mexican wear baggy pants. The Kops practically slaver with rage when they see one of their modern day slaves play any type of recreational game prior to 2 PM. The Kops have hundreds of these pointless, mindless little unpublished rules that they pull out of the asses daily and demand compliance.

The Kops think that constant, daily, extremely petty harassment is just plain good fun for them, and a richly deserved punishment for their hated targets. But some of us are not able to endure such constant niggling every day. Travis was one of these sensitive souls. He suffered the Kops' picking at him like they'd tear a scab off an old sore. Travis endured their thefts of his property, their sanctions, their insulting mouths and their ransacking his cage for almost ten years. Then he finally decided that he'd had enough. He would no longer let these grinning, snickering shitbird-sadists make $22,000/year in taxpayer cash to make him suffer. Travis fastened a ligature around his neck and quietly slipped out of this world of eternal torment and into everlasting peace. When the Kops were directed to his corpse, they tried hard to bring him back. They hated to lose such a valuable animal, already paid for, who brought them such taxpayer-subsidized riches. But Travis was thorough. He knew they would not give him a second chance to cheat them. Now he is far beyond the reach of the dirty scum who enjoyed torturing him so immensely.