NUEVAS TECNOLOGÍAS PARA LA TELEFONÍA 4G

( R e p r i n t e d with p e r m i s s i o n of t h e B o s t o n Herald)

Neil Scott looked out of the airplane window at the Boston skyline like it was some kind of promised land. For the last six years—ever since doctors on the prison ward at a Texas hospital had told him he would die of cancer of the colon within 90 days—it had been people living in Boston whose letters of advice and support had sustained him. Now, as his flight touched down, he was about to meet these guides to his new life.

But Scott was scared. Sure, he'd beaten his cancer, and his drinking.

He'd even survived nine years in Texas' most hellish jail, Huntsville Prison. And now he was free. Trouble was, freedom didn't feel quite right. There were strange new decisions to be made. Choices inmates can only dream about: where to go, what to do, how long to stay. And others even less tangible, like what to say, how to act, and who to be.

Indeed, for Scott the world was much different than the one he left behind on April 2, 1975, the day he, Claude Brown, and Harry Bader set out to rob the First National Bank of Cushing, Texas.

What Brown had not told his pal, however, was that he had robbed the same bank twice within the past three months. Also unknown to Scott was the fact that a bank employee had died of a heart attack as a result of the second robbery, and that Brown's picture was plastered on every post office wall in Texas.

Scott commandeered their lone gun—he didn't want anyone to get hurt and he didn't trust Brown's judgment in a crisis—and led the way into the lobby.

By the time Cushing's sheriff John Lightfoot chanced upon the scene, Brown had already emptied the bank's four registers and was heading for the vault. Bader, who was supposed to be standing guard by the door, had fallen asleep from too much booze. And Scott, just as scared as the hostages, threw his Colt. 45 at the lawman's feet and

prepared to surrender. But as other policemen poured into the lobby and handcuffed Brown and Bader, somehow Scott was overlooked.

He ran out the front door, jumped into his car and made his getaway with the police in pursuit. For five miles they chased him before he was forced to stop by a police roadblock. But instead of storming the car, the police poured round after round of bullets into it for nearly two minutes. They only stopped once Sheriff Lightfoot ar-rived. He pulled Scott from the car—bloodied by glass and bits of metal but not seriously wounded—and read him his rights.

A week later, Brown, Scott, and Bader pleaded guilty to "aggravated robbery" and were each sentenced to life in prison. Scott, whose theft of a lawnmower and prior conviction on two counts of first-degree robbery had landed him 45 months in California and Oregon prisons, was eligible for parole in 1987, or 1985 with "good time."

The next day, the would-be bank robbers headed for Huntsville Prison, home of the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC). With 32,000 inmates at the time, it was the largest state-run penal system in the land. It was also the toughest.

Conditions in the T D C were so bad that in 1980 a federal court found it guilty of abuses ranging from housing to health care. Count-less rapes, unprovoked assaults, and unbearable overcrowding—situa-tions cited by inmate David Ruiz, who filed the suit, and other wit-nesses—so angered federal judge William Wayne Justice that he termed it "impossible" in his 206-page opinion "to convey the pernicious conditions and pain and degredation which ordinary inmates suffer within the T D C prison walls." It was "cruel and unusual punishment,"

he concluded, if not at its worst, very close to it.

Yet for Neil Scott life at Huntsville his first few years were his best.

By day, he tended the T D C ' s multi-million-dollar bus-repair facility as bookkeeper. At night he worked on a writ of habeas corpus he hoped would win him a new trial and a lighter sentence.

Often, Scott reflected on the many jobs he'd had; from bar owner to bartender to bookmaker and salesman. He looked back over his 45 years and saw the maids and butlers who waited on him as a child at home in Seattle. He recalled the death of his father—a prosperous dentist and insurance businessman—in 1936, and his mother's fall to cancer six years later. There was the awful boarding school his guardian

162

sent him to when he was 14; the honorable discharge from the Navy in 1952; the $250,000 inheritance blown on liquor and gambling by the time he was 21; and his three wives, all of whom he took to the altar while drunk.

Despite his life-long drinking, health had never posed a problem for Scott. Through the years, he knew few colds and no major illness.

He ate little meat and practically no sweets. If anything, he had more energy than he could use. But as 1977 dawned, he began to lose strength. His back ached. There was a steady throb and a clicking sound "like a busy signal on the telephone," he recalls. "Nothing was working right and I couldn't move my bowels."

Gradually, his condition worsened. By March, he had trouble moving. Sitting hurt. He couldn't keep up with his work, and he was losing weight. Enemas relieved a bit of the pressure, but the pain kept coming. By September he was incontinent, but T D C medical staffers, tired of his complaints, accused Scott of malingering. One incredulous doctor even scribbled "turkey" on his file.

Fourteen months later, in November 1978, Scott was too weak to walk and barely able to lift himself out of bed. T D C doctors sent him to Galveston's John Sealy Hospital for tests, where within six hours physicians diagnosed probable cancer. Three days later, surgeons spent nine hours removing what they could of it from his colon, the walls of his stomach, and his lower back. After the operation, the chief surgeon told Neil he'd be lucky to live three months.

With his prison term and poor prognosis, it might have been easier for Neil Scott to give up on life. But the cancer filled him with purpose he never knew as a free man. Relying upon a litany of "medical facts"

his mother—a Seventh Day Adventist—had taught him as a child, he drew a connection between diet and recovery.

First, to soften the ill effects of chemotherapy he drank "huge amounts" of water and juices. Then, three days after surgery, with his scars still fresh, he suspended all pain medication. Three weeks later, he gave up all meat, poultry, and dairy products. And to the chagrin of his doctors, he started getting better.

Back at Huntsville Unit Hospital just before Christmas, Scott intensified the battle to save his life. T h e key was to find the right weapons; and since neither T D C doctors nor those at John Sealy

Hospital seemed to have them, he began to look elsewhere. Among the volumes of cancer literature he scoured in early 1979, Ann Cinquina's Cancer News Journal cemented his belief in a dietary approach. I m -mediately he began taking advantage of every available nutrient in the facility. Cancer might still have the upper hand, he thought, but his forces were growing and his delight came from learning how to use them.

He took up yoga, and began practicing visualization and imagery techniques he'd read about. " T h e white cells are horsemen on white steeds carrying carrot spears and asparagus clubs," he wrote. " T h e y ride roughshod over sickly cancer cells whose feet are mired in peanut butter and do not stand a chance."

Instead of dying in 90 days as predicted, Neil Scott became T D C ' s first cancer patient in 17 years to outlive his prognosis. In March 1980, he stopped all chemotherapy, without having lost a blade of hair or known a moment of nausea. Then in June, Scott learned his cancer had gone into remission.

But in the fall in 1980, Scott's good fortune began to wane. T h e T D C farms, which supplied the fresh vegetables that fueled him, were forced to cut back on production. Furthermore, T D C refused to buy any food specially for cancer patients or to allow inmates any "outside"

food.

In September, fearing for his life, Scott petitioned then-Governor William Clements for a medical reprieve, with provisional parole for medical reasons. Although sympathetic, the governor turned him down.

Scott had no better luck the following May with the chairman of the Texas Board of Paroles and Pardons, Ruben Torres. "I would advise you to keep the Board informed should your condition worsen, and at that time reapply for a medical reprieve," wrote Torres.

With his cancer active again by April 1981, Scott's despair led him to broaden his contacts beyond Huntsville Prison's walls. Barred from the telephone by T D C regulations and bereft of an attorney, he turned to the mail as his only lifeline to the world outside. In May and June, he sent a letter describing his plight to scores of magazines. Nowhere was it received with more concern that at the East West Journal, a small alternative-lifestyles national magazine published in Brookline.

164

T h e East West Journal believed that cancer was caused by diet and attitude. To then-editor Alex Jack and prison correspondent Frank Salvati, the dreaded disease was the body's natural response to abysmal conditions created by its occupant. Therefore, if one could acquire balanced food and balanced thought, the cancer could disappear as naturally as it came.

This philosophy, known as macrobiotics, taught that each food, as well as lifestyle habits, contained expansive and contractive pro-perties, known as yin and yang. T h u s each cancer, depending upon its cause, had to be approached individually.

Given the nature of Scott's cancer, as they deduced it, Salvati and Jack made specific dietary recommendations. To his exercise regimen they added Taoist yoga, which was designed to strengthen his organs.

And to augment his knowledge, they sent him back issues of the magazine, plus books by Michio Kushi, the magazine's founder, and George Ohsawa, Kushi's teacher.

Within weeks, Neil Scott had embraced the macrobiotic message;

finding no words "to express my gratitude or define the change in my personal outlook. I am so overwhelmingly impressed with the macro-biotic way," he wrote Salvati in August. "Were I to commit another crime, I would be better off dead."

Meanwhile, with T D C "unable" to supply whole grains, Scott fed off Bran Flakes, Wheat Chex, and white rice. But as he ate, he looked beyond the additives in his fare to the golden fields and lush green earth from which they came.

Gradually, as he read, wrote, and ate, he came to view cancer as a consequence of his former way of life. No longer the nemesis from without, he now saw it as the enemy within; the offspring of a life of crime and inner rust.

Yet despite Scott's new outlook, an abdominal scan in December 1982 revealed a tumor massing in his liver. Again he turned down chemotherapy. But he was losing weight and was too weak to work.

Doubts about making due with his T D C diet led to fears that his battle was lost.

Back in Boston, Alex Jack and Frank Salvati were worried. Either Neil was discharging deadly toxins enroute to recovery, in accordance with macrobiotic theories, or he was dying. On March 7, Jack

dispat-ched a writer to investigate; but when he arrived in Texas, T D C officials not only refused him access to Scott, but they would not even discuss the case. T h e writer returned to Boston without Scott ever having known he was there.

Then, in mid-April, Scott wrote that he was feeling better. T h e latest tests on his liver and blood showed no trace of cancer and his energy had returned.

For the next two years, Neil Scott continued his campaign against T D C treatment of cancer patients. Unable to meet with the news media in person, he used pen and postage stamp to tell of dying inmates being forced to polish brass or sweep floors. And he continued his correspondence with Frank Salvati and Alex Jack, as well as 150 other inmates, cancer patients, and friends from America and Australia.

Refusing physical labor, Scott again met the wrath of the T D C . He was placed in Four Building, the dowdy quarters where inmates wait for reassignment. There, exposed to a series of cellmates stricken with tuberculosis, he contracted the disease and was hospitalized for three weeks. " I t amounts to slow legal murder," he lamented in a letter.

Shortly after Scott's recovery and return to Four Building, the Texas State Legislature passed a bill adding "good time" to inmates with no disciplinary infractions. Scott learned his parole eligibility date might be moved up from 1985 to 1984.

On March 7, 1984, a month from the ninth anniversary of the Cushing bank job, Neil Scott walked out of Huntsville Prison a free man. He had walked from other prisons at other times only to return in shackles. But now, at age 56, his plan was to give back to those left behind some of what others have given to him.

Arriving in Boston after several months with friends on a North Dakota farm, Neil Scott was greeted by the macrobiotic community as a hero. Scott's triumph was a credit to their cause. Here, in the flesh, was the man whose life they had helped save and whose freedom they had in part secured.

Lecturing at macrobiotic study houses, at the East West Journal, at prison reform meetings, and even at a local college, Scott scored high marks with his peers. He got involved in a prison project designed to set up an inmate correspondence center and a halfway house. And there was talk of a nationwide speaking tour.

166

But for Scott, living on a small pension from Social Security and the Navy each month wasn't enough. T h e macrobiotic community, for all its good karma, had little cash to cover his efforts.

By November, Scott was under considerable stress. And by Christ-mas, torn between making enough money to survive and carrying forth the message that had saved him, he began to look for part-time jobs to pay his way.

T h e n in January, with his morale continuing to slide, Japan Publi-cations offered Scott a book contract to tell his story. To Scott, it was like the reprieve he'd never gotten in Texas.

"All I've wanted to do in Boston and throughout the country is to express what I have learned from experience and pass it on to fellow cancer patients and prisoners," he says. "Maybe I can help. Maybe I cannot. But at least I will not do any harm."

Of that Neil Scott is sure.

Neil Scott is the author of Eating with Angels, Japan Publications, 1986.

Powhatan: T h e Story of Chuck Fai-Goon