🔥 NEW STORY🔥: Letter to My Teenage Self: An Incarcerated Man Interrogates the Person He Once Was

From his prison cell in Washington state, Hector Ortiz reexamines the traumas, hardships and bad choices that led to his lengthy sentence—and ultimately taught him about the man he needed to be.

When journalist Christopher Blackwell (winner of our 2023 Memoir Prize), first shared this piece with me — which is part of a larger collection he’s co-editing — I had no idea what to expect. By the time I was through, I realized I hadn’t moved an inch since I’d begun reading and I was sobbing. I’ve been drawn to stories about people surviving in prison for years, for a million reasons, but chief among them because I worry that people often forget what Hector shows us so beautifully here: that people in prison are real people with stories that deserve to be told. I also think it’s important to be reminded that people end up in prison for many, many reasons. Stories like these help bring that to light, and I’m so happy to get to share this one with you. Without further ado, Hector’s story in Hector’s words.

—Jesse Sposato, executive editor

Illustration by Lynne Hardy

Hector,

Hey, man! Kinda weird, but I’m writing to you as your older self. Right now, we’re 41 years old. We’ve been sitting in prison for 18 years and still have more to go….

Here’s some good news, Hector. You will travel a journey that will help make you into a great young man. Many hardships will strengthen your faith, love and compassion. Those hardships will be scary at times, and the end result will be a developing confidence that helps you believe in you.

You know the coyote-dog you have named Spooky? Everybody always wants her puppies. Eventually, when you start school, she will wait at the bus stop and walk you home. Those are good times. But before all that is the day you are playing in the ditch with some broken toy cars and a man pulls up across the road and takes out a Budweiser, sets it on top of his car and asks your uncle Roger if he wants it. Roger says yes, steps off the porch and, as he is walking toward the man, the man pulls out a rifle and shoots him right in front of you. You are 5 years old! You’ll always remember that day, but as time goes on, it will play outta your mind. Before you turn 6, you will break into a house for some coins you see through a window, but when you get in the house, you don’t even take the coins. Instead, you throw all the food you find in the refrigerator all over the house and cut up the couch with a knife. Your mom and dad, along with others, will help those people clean up. You never think about how any of them feel. Including yourself!

When you are 6, your dad brings you to school. Kindergarten. Your teacher is Mrs. Schick. She cares and teaches you and the class “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “Where Is Thumbkin?” The school is run-down and asbestos-infested. A new one is being built. That same year you will go to the new building, and on your first day, as you are going to sit down, someone pulls out your chair and you fall. Everybody laughs and you feel sad, hurt and angry. You will never forget that moment and that feeling.

At that time, you don’t know you are a Spokane Tribal Indian member living on the reservation or how big the world is beyond the rez. You don’t even know how big your family is compared with the members’ in the tribe. But you love being around your family, your cousins. Being around your people brings you joy and comfort.

It is the late 1980s. Your dad buys a brand-new extended Chevy van. It has curtains over the windows, a swivel seat, two bench seats and shag carpet. One day your mom picks you and your cousin Loni up from school. Your little brother, Ernest, and cousin Marshall are in the van, too. Leaving the school, your mom stops at the post office and then goes into the trading post. While she is in there, you take a book of matches off the console and climb to the back of the van, behind the last seat. You are lighting the matches and burning the vinyl. You watch it melt and it seems like it is melting upwards. You can feel a sense of urgency, because you know you shouldn’t be doing it, so before your mom comes out of the store, you light the whole book just to smell the sulfur. Rather than let the book of matches burn out, you stomp it into the carpet and climb back up front. Within seconds, the carpet is on fire, then the seat, and the four of you are trapped. You can see your mom and others in the parking lot watching. Your mom is screaming. There is a man named Jeff who busts open the doors as the flames get bigger. You kids are scared, crying as he is saying, “Jump!” with his arms open.

He saves you all. Fifteen years later, at 20 years old, you will smoke crack with him. He will eventually die from drug use.

Up until now, you haven’t even thought about how that day in the parking lot affected your mom and dad. How scared she must have been. How your dad had to pay for a vehicle that had been destroyed. How your brother and two cousins felt in the van. All because of what you did. You were so careless and thoughtless.

Sometime after that, you steal a motorcycle. Some older boys take it from you, and after a week you get it back, and then you get caught with it. You aren’t even 12 years old yet. The matter will take a while to get to court, and during that time you’ll break into more houses, destroying the residents’ sense of security, violating the intimacy of their homes. All the while, you are building the reputation of being a thief, and even though you never really get caught, people know. And you continue to ignore how it makes your family look, or yourself. You love your family and want to be loved by them, but you don’t really think about how what you are doing affects them.

You like basketball, and you are awesome at it. You’ll even be called the Chris Paul of Airway Heights Corrections Center in the future. This interest in b-ball will get you and your brother, Ernest, in trouble one day, when you are just 10 and he is only 8. Your family has just gotten a phone, a landline, and your dad teaches you how to make a collect call from a payphone. But why would you ever need to? He doesn’t trust people, so you never get to go anywhere. But one day, you and Ernest stay after school to play ball. When you’re done, you begin to walk toward home, but it’s too far. You stop by the store to use the phone, but you forget how to make a collect call. You and your brother decide to walk to your aunt and uncle’s, where you show up crying because you are so panicked about how far you are from home. They don’t have a phone either, so they calm you and put you to bed.

Sometime early in the morning, you wake up as you’re flying through the air and are slammed into the concrete floor of the basement. After your initial scream, your aunt yells at your dad from the top of the stairs: “ERNIE! What are you doing down there?” He wakes up your brother and slaps you upside the head and tells you both to put your shoes on and get in the van. Because Dad is a carpenter, he has a pile of 18-inch steel stakes in the van. As he’s driving down the canyon to your house, he periodically picks one up and hits you on your legs and knees. You scream and cry until you get in the driveway.

You still have to go to school the next day, the day of the school carnival. You can barely get out of the van. Some of your classmates are running around and jumping to touch the rim of the basketball hoop. You wish you could join them, but your body is too beat down. All that fun, and nobody knows how much pain you are in. It sort of feels like that all the time. Being beaten like that doesn’t allow your little mind to consider the fear or worry your parents must have had the night before, when you didn’t come home. The pain never lets you consider others, never lets you apologize for the things you do. There’s just too much pain.

One of the first houses where Hector lived with his family growing up. (Courtesy Kristel Monte)

Some months after this, you will move to the Sherwood Loop, closer to the town of Wellpinit on the rez. The motorcycle theft from way back will finally go through the court, and you will end up with 300 hours of community service. You will spend those hours helping the school janitor named Chico — he’s the reason you still twist the can liners and tuck them under, just the way he showed you. You will also go to the senior citizen complex where your grandfather lives, and help the residents with physical tasks they can no longer manage.

Doing community service actually makes you feel good. You like being helpful, and the janitor and the elders are happy to have you around. But life at home is still chaotic. One night your parents are involved in a high-speed car chase with the tribal police in which your mom is driving recklessly and your father is outside the van, standing on a running board, handcuffed to the driver’s side mirror. They are both arrested, and when your mom arrives at the tribal jail, it is clear she has been sexually assaulted by the tribal police. She attempts to pursue this injustice but still spends a year in tribal jail. It sucks visiting her there.