when i care about somebody i care about them hard. i really care about him. god answered my prayer and gave me the ability to clean him up from his head to his feet. by the time we met him, maxi had had a few recent brushes with death. the last time he fell into a coma and was rushed to an outside hospital. we was in church and one of the officers came in and was like, pizzaman died. so, you know, we all mourned and, you know we it was crazy. we like, man, well, comes to find out that there was a god in the hospital with his name that died, not him. so when he came back, he come back strutting and we like, oh, man. you know. i was in better shape. we hugging and everything.
where the life and death conflict wasn t rooted in violence, it was rooted in compassion. and it involved an inmate named pizzaman. ee seen him in the gas station and supermarket. i used to work at a pizza place. that s right. you ve the pizza man sort of stuck to me. i got the same tattoo on my chest. how did it tick in prison. everybody knows me and a lot of people from my town plus it was all over the news, my story, my case, you know. the reason john pizzaman maxi s face was all over the news was because on halloween night 1996 he murdered his boss inside the pizza parlor where they worked.
you re basically deemed a snitch, so that s why my custody is what it is. i mean, if i m ever put in general population, i m as good as dead. any prison gang would be happy to get their hands on shawn gaines. it s kill or be killed for me now, so i ll spend my time in protective custody, more than likely slammed down the entire time. while his public confession may have put gaines life in danger, it also generated some welcome attention from the outside world. apparently, i m writing my fiancee. you have a fiancee? yeah. is this someone you knew before you were incarcerated? no. i met her since i was in here. the interview i did with southern poverty law center. she read that and dropped me a couple postcards of encouragement commending the changes i made so we ve been pen pals for almost two years now and been together for about the last year. she s beautiful. she has a good heart, smart, funny, loves me to death, takes good care of me. so, i couldn t ask for more.
knew the extent of his swelling in certain areas of his body and they would make up jokes and names for him and he had a great attitude about it. he would just laugh right back at them and, you know, act like it was nothing. oh, look at you. making that dude crash for the first time. what s going on? i going to my shower. what s up. coming up i woke up in the hospital. john maxi takes a turn for the worse. he was laying right here. death isn t sneaking up on death isn t sneaking up on
trying to learn by being around certain other guys that turn that stuff toward other direction, you know what i m saying, like boxing and working out and all that stuff. even i m even starting out where i starting to read more so i m trying to do the best i can to turn that stuff around. i ain t to the point where i m ready to let go of that certain thing. you know what the first step towards solving the problem is admitting there is a problem and that sort of sounds like what you re doing now. i m going to use a cliche. i want to chew up the meat and spit out the bone, you know what i m saying, but i m so pig-headed and stubborn, i m going to eat the whole chicken, you know what i m saying? bone and all, huh? bone and all. one of the hardest things about this job is we only get to see a little sliver of these people s lives. we don t often get to see the end of a story. and in the case of percy, it felt like we were seeing a beginning. coming up oh, look at you. tw