PART ONE
At the insistent tapping on his window, Jimmy McGill came to. Even in his altered state, he knew he was in trouble. A quick scan about the cabin of the running car reminded him of the copious drugs on his person, the stolen property stacked in the back seat. Even the pit bull sitting next to the longtime gangbanger, drug addict, and wannabe rapper seemed to know the score, looking at him with a mix of disgust and pity.
It wasn’t rock bottom, he says today, but it wasn’t far off, either.
“I woke up in the Lonoke County Jail, which I’d heard nothing but bad stories about,” Jimmy says. “There was something about the hopelessness that I woke up with. It was over. I knew in my heart that it was over. I’d done got caught with seventeen grams of ice, all this stuff in my car, I’m on parole, I’ve been to prison five times. I know one of two things is going to happen: I am either going to die in prison or, if I come home, I’m going to be too old to enjoy life.”
At this Jimmy snorts a sarcastic chuckle. He’s told the story a thousand times and the hubris and moral bankruptcy of that period still taste bad.
“Not that I knew how to enjoy life,” he continues, eyes cast out the window. “What I was doing wasn’t living, it was surviving. I used to live, and I lived to use. That was it.”
They say every person is born with the same potential and while that may be true, there are some people who enter the world in such circumstances that they have no chance but to become what their environment demands. For Jimmy, there was hardly a decision in his life, especially early on, that hadn’t already been made for him.
“My house was broken. I came from broken spirits, broken bones. It was unhappy to say the least,” he says, when asked to start from the beginning. “I didn’t know what a happy home was until I broke into one.”
“Somewhere along the line it became apparent that I was growing up different than other people. I remember going into the sixth and seventh grades knowing that I was the only kid in class who had spent the night in a dope house or a bar, you know?”
Central to Jimmy’s life and mentality was his father, the late Thomas McGill, a complicated figure who lived by a very black-and-white code.
“He was violent. He was an outlaw. He loved the only way he knew how to love,” Jimmy says. “I don’t ever want to paint a picture that my dad wasn’t a loving person, because he loved me the best that he could love me. He did the best he knew how to do. In the end, my dad was my best friend, and he was all I had in the world.”
At the same time, Jimmy acknowledges the outlaw code that his father lived by opened the gate to the troubled and ultimately dark road his life would follow for nearly forty years.
“Behaviors are learned traits,” he says. “In a world that’s basically separated from normal functioning society, there’s this outlaw code that actually exists. So, my idea of what a man was, was extremely tainted. A man doesn’t tolerate any B.S.; you don’t owe me without paying me. A man takes what he wants, or he’s weak. It’s a dog-eat-dog mentality.”
“My dad, in my mind, was someone everybody owed a favor. Everybody was too scared to question him. He didn’t fear any consequences. So, there was this big shadow in the dope world that I felt I had to live up to, almost like I’m a prince amongst thieves, you know? I got a lot of free rides because I was Thomas’ son and I loved it, thrived off of it.”
Thomas may have been an authentic badass, but as a kid Jimmy struggled to follow suit. Picked on in school for lack of a tribe, he’d eventually search the various cliques for his people.
“In the seventh grade, I’m not tough at all,” he said. “I was looking for kids who didn’t get bullied, the outcasts and rule-breakers. I noticed the jocks, the preps, they weren’t picking on the stoners because the stoners will hit you with the middle finger and be like, ‘I’ll kick your ass, punk!’ I was like, ‘Ohhhh, there they are!’”
“I immediately started trying to be whatever they need me to be to be accepted. The first thing I abused wasn’t a drug, it was attention. Skipped school one day, broke into a house, got arrested and it was off to the races.”
Jimmy got sent to a youth ranch near Harrison, of the variety meant to scare offenders straight before they really mess up. But an ill-conceived breakout landed the thirteen-year-old in juvie prison, to this day the worst of his multiple incarcerations. There, he learned firsthand how savage the laws of the jungle were, the violence, the abuse, the gang code.
Which isn’t to say, he adds quickly, that he got a whole lot smarter overall. His many rule infractions prolonged his sentence from a few months to ultimately two years, and he still didn’t put together in his mind that the system would one day run out of patience with him. After hopping the fence and breaking into yet another house, the legal machinery decided to fix the fifteen-year-old incorrigible once and for all, convicting him as an adult.
“Incarcerated in juvenile prison, they give me an adult charge. I’m convicted at fifteen,” he says. “No chance for military. No chance for anything. My juvenile record could have been quashed, but the system really did screw me, even though I made my own decisions. I’m put on adult probation for five years and there’s no way I’m going to make that without screwing up and they knew it.”
During Jimmy’s incarceration, Bangin’ in Little Rock came out, documenting gang violence in Central Arkansas. He knew many of the kids featured in that production but wasn’t in it himself due to being locked up. What he missed on film, he lived for the next twenty years.
“I get released and by the time I’m seventeen, I come home, and I’ve got this gang life in me,” he says. “I’m an active gang member and I bring this back to my neighborhood. I’ve always been able to influence people. I’m no longer the kid getting bullied. My heart’s got hard. My mindset had got hard. I come home with this tough-guy mentality, and I bring this whole gang set to my neighborhood.”
Jimmy had evolved into every dangerous person he idolized growing up and his career as a gangster was off to a racing start. In no time, he’d built his own crew, hustling his way through one live-fast, die-young scheme after another. He stood out in that dark and violent subculture, and the attention and fear he received was intoxicating.
“I had to be the guy that stands all the way out because I had so many issues of being neglected and abandoned that I needed to mean something to somebody,” he says. “When people showed me attention, in my mind, it made me feel like I was something to them. See what I mean? I had this God-sized hole that nothing can fill; I just keep putting stuff in and the hole doesn’t get filled. It’s not quenchable. It just keeps getting bigger the more I put in it. So, the more attention people showed me, the more dumb stuff I do to get attention.”
Photos from the time are jarring. Jimmy stares into the camera with eyes that are cold and nearly lifeless as if sizing up some mark, looking for a weakness. Laid end-to-end, the snapshots are also a timeline. The pictures of him posing with his homies or flashing bling and flipping off the camera with both hands morph into one in an orange jumpsuit during one of his many incarcerations. And that one bleeds into a shot of him staring out from under a hoodie with the hundred-yard stare of a walking dead addict.
In his late thirties, Jimmy had gone from OG Original Gangster to OG Old Gangster. Guys generally didn’t live that long in the life, but even with five stretches to his credit, he never stopped looking for the next hustle or the next high. Having sampled almost every intoxicant out there since before he was a teenager, there was little that got his attention. Then one day, he tried meth.
“Man, I’ve done almost everything, but the second I experienced methamphetamine, there was no looking back,” he says. “I had found the thing that could fill that hole.”
Meth sapped things out of Jimmy no other drug or gangbanging wound ever did. It chewed him down physically and mentally, turning his life into a haze. His addiction was suffocating and brought with it a panic similar to being trapped in a leaky footlocker someone had tossed over a bridge, sinking into black water.
“I lived to use,” he says. “The only thing that meant anything to me was my next bump and I couldn’t enjoy it because as soon as I was doing the bump I would start worrying where my next shot of dope was going to come from. The paranoia and insanity would kick in and everybody around me would hate me. I would be in a constant and immediate psychosis, thinking everybody was communicating telepathically or something.”
Then one day, he awoke in that car, with that dog, on that road. The racket banging in his ear against the glass was being hammered out by a Lonoke County sheriff’s deputy, demanding an audience. Jimmy, not knowing how he got there or how long he’d been out, tried to pull it together. He opened the door in compliance, stepped out of the vehicle and a waterfall of pills poured out of his lap and onto the pavement. His face hit the hood, his wrists met the familiar bite of the cuffs. Jimmy McGill was going down for the last time.
…TO BE CONTINUED IN OUR APRIL ISSUE
