Hi there, It's Steve Fishman, and this may be a good time to mention that you can listen to all episodes of Get the Money and Run ad free by subscribing to True Crime Clubhouse on Apple just to ninety nine a month. So today we've got a treat. We've got Joe Lawyer with us to answer your questions in mine and thanks to those of you who sent questions in just to add some sense of Joe these days. After nearly a decade in prison, Joe went on to
write a book about his life. It's called The Man Who Outgrew his Prison Cell, and the New Yorker called it thrilling. Joe also turned himself into a consultant for Hollywood, writing scripts and consulting on bank robbery movies like Baby Driver and the upcoming Baby Driver Too. All right, let's jump into it.
I'm you know, it's unfortunate. You know, I did a lot of shit, so a lot of things. I was raised a peacher's son, so that gave me a whole sense of like how to tell stories with some moral depth. And then I was a storyteller, so I got me. Since I was a little kid, I was been telling little Bible stories. So I've perfected I feel like my storytelling style. So I feel like that's the trick. You have to be you. You have to be authentic, and then that's what works. And I think it and I
think that. The other thing too is I like to fucking laugh, and I liked to watch other people laugh, and I just fucking love I am so like that to me is that's my sweet spot. I want to be as vulgar and tell crazy, wild, violent, bloody, baroquely but bloody stories. But I also want to tell you all these absurd things that people do and I've seen do and weird shit and that'll make you laugh. So I'm like, that's I have to tell you. Joe.
You know, one of your great talents is you make you make bank robbery seem like a lot of fun. All right, so let me jump in now. So uh uh uh, you just make me think bank robbery was fun.
Question mark, Okay, let's be clear. Bank robbery in retrospect is fun. You know, like I can walk in a lot of rooms and I'm the bank robbery. It makes me kind of unimpeachably cool in some ways, even as an old man. It's like, oh, that dude rub the banks, thirty banks. So there's something about that makes it like I can tell these stories with humor. But in order to get to these stories, you remember, I had to do seven years in federal penitentiary and that was no fun.
And you can't parse out bank robbery without that, because there is a fucking thing that goes with it, and that's the doing the time to get you to reflect on these stories. So I get to the fun part of the red. You know, looking back at crime stories, I mean bank robbery, when are you're when you're in it, you know, it's compulsion, it's it's uh, it's disassociation in many ways. I mean, if we're being like right where you are in it, it's not fun, it's it's fulfilling
in that you. I am my most I was my most effect effective self. I was the least effectual male I ever was when I was robbing banks, because I was the most effective I've ever did. I married my greed, my rage, put it together, went in there, got the money, walked out, and and did what I wanted to do,
and oftentimes several times a day. So that made me feel purposeful and that made me feel complete, But fun was not the part of it, especially when you're running away with smoke billowing out of a bag because a die pack has exploded and you and you got and
you have tear gas in your eyes. It's not necessarily fun that in that regard, but in retrospect, when you can put in all the different ironies, like the time that the cops picked me up and I got away with it, and all the different things that I saw that I can laugh about now, like the woman who I went to robber and she immediately just started giving money before I was even finished with my spiel.
To me.
That was funny in retrospect because I thought, why did she give it? I didn't even tell her, and then she started giving me the big bills first. So I'm thinking later, like, you know, it's funny. Your boyfriend probably say, hey man, I'm going to send this guy named Sancho in and he's gonna come to rob you, and when he doesn't, just give him all the money, give him
the big bills first. I felt like she miss like mistook me for a guy who was part of another came for that was supposed to go on after me. Because she just saw me. I came up and she just started handing me the money when I said, this is a bank robbery. So like in retrospect, certainly those things are funny to me because I can impose, you know, some story on it. But it was peculiar, certainly peculiar, Like that was wild.
Joe, did you feel that you were this could go on forever or did you feel did you come to know that you were going to get caught?
This is a good question because I think that what it implies is that the regular frame of mind is in play, so that you know when you're when you and I are sitting here, we're thinking what's going to happen tomorrow. I'm going to do this thing tomorrow, and I better I better make sure I have enough gas because I'm going to go to Oregon. Like we plan day to day, week to week. And when you're asking
that question, you're asking it from that place. But you have to understand one of the reasons I was able to do what I was able to do. I have no feel for the future, none at all, no posterity. Most criminals don't, which is what makes them impulsive. Because if we thought about the future. We don't want to go to prison, we don't want to spend ten to fifteen years. Who does Nobody chooses that. But we're always
on the route there. So how do you get to the route there if you don't want to be there. The way you do is you don't think about it. And the way you don't think about it is you think I could die tomorrow. I don't give a fuck. I could die when I go rob this bank. I don't know, and you don't care. Nobody's putting away money for the ten years when you're treasury bund you will, you know, will yield your money. Nobody gives a fuck about that. We're not talking about people, and certainly not me,
who has any grasp of the future. The one thing I don't want to do is sit down there and be a drag on my initiative by thinking, oh, what happens if I get caught? Who fuck that? There's none of that which allows me to just be living in the moment, in the present. I'm mad I get fucked.
Up, Joe, just to get to some details that you know we've had come in here. Well went through your head when you were picking out your first disguise for Dora, trench code, sunglasses.
If you look at the bank robbery photos, there might be seven that are out there, and most of them if you could see, I'm like just wearing clothes that I had. The first bank robbery iore, I wore jeans with ripped, ripped jeans and a Mickey Mouse t shirt like the first one I did in nineteen eighty eight. I just wore what I was and I never wore a mask, never wore like a disguise, like so you couldn't see it was it wasn't me, right, I didn't I didn't care, So it wasn't like I was wearing
a disguise. I was just wearing clothes, and the nicer clothes I got, like I had a look. I liked to dress nicely. I wore suspenders, I wore cloks. I wore cohon loafers with cassels. So you see the most iconic one of me is walking out there with my suit, my trenchcoat, my my loafers, and I just robbed a vault.
But yeah, someone once or twice it were for Dora. Well, you know, sometimes I wore sunglasses, but it wasn't really like I was trying to disguise myself in that regard, but I was always trying Towards the end, I was trying to wear nice clothes.
So you got married when you got out of prison, right, Yeah. People were wondering just about your relationship with your wife around your past. So did she get tired of hearing about it? Did she get tired of Joe Lawyer the bank rubber? Or did maybe she thought it was just sexy as hell.
Yeah, But one of the reasons I liked liked her was when I got out of prison. Obviously, Hollywood can't call it. Oh, can you come and talk to us for doing a movie? What do you think about this? And you know, there was a sense in which I felt like I was Joe the bank robber, but I was trying to turn myself into Joe the writer. So I was writing op eds and I was doing that kind of thing. But my wife was introduced to me through my best friend at the time. She was a
woman in offe uh. And my wife was not so interested in the bank robberies that she was interested that My writing mentor was Richard Rodriguez. Rich rod was kind of a controversial figure in the Mexican American community, Latino Mexican American human, mostly because he had been a SKay guy who had been Catholic, gay guy who was against a firntive action and English is a second language teacher. He was like a conservative Mexicine. But he was my mentor.
We would had a two year correspondence in prison, and he was well known. He was a great writer, like published in Harper's and everything that was more fascinating to her, and so my bank rubbery. Actually really she wasn't that interested. When we got we would start getting to say, Hey, how's your dad, how's your brother? What? She never asked about what I was writing about anything. She's just and I remember a couple of years later, within a couple
of years, still we would go to parties. I would hear her people to how many banks Robin. I could hear her say, I don't know, I think seven or her age. Never she didn't know how many years I was in prison. I subsequently, you know, my wife and I were separated now now after about twenty years, but being together. But I've had girlfriends who like they're meticulous about understanding my biography right, and a lot of friends who knew it, but my wife, she just wanted to
know who I was. She cared for me for me, and that was one of the reason I was hugely attracted in the beginning, because the bankrut yourself just missed her. She was like, yeah, okay, I know who you are as a new man, as a reformed guy. You know that's cool?
And how about you doing? You have one kid?
I have a nineteen year old daughter right now.
Yeah, so what did you explain to her about your past?
And when just a good question. I like this question. Well, kids are really smart in ways that we forget because we're so far away from being little kids. But kids pick up stuff in the air. And right when she was about seven, she started asking me questions like we saw a Brinks truck out front of a Safeware the morning. She's like, what what is what is that? Is? Is that the thing that has money? I was like, yeah, do you know anyone who's ever robbed them those kind
of things? And I looked at her like, why, what where did that come from? I She's seven. So finally, at age seven, when this comes up, I realized she started bringing up like robbery. A couple of times, and I told my wife, I say, I think she knows something. She must have heard something for somebody's parents at school, or somebody's somebody's kid who heard their parents talking about me. Who knows how she got it in her head about bank robby. So my wife and I we took her
out to have froyo, her favorite froyo. We went apart. We did the thing where we were all like when when at that age it's all yummy, you know, it's like you're just with the family, it's a great day. And then I sat her down and say, hey, you know, I got somebody to tell you. You know, you know I always go in prisons, and you know I'm a writer.
And then I show on my book I wrote about how this time when I was young, I messed up and I robbed banks and I went to prey and then she says, you did you have to pee in a pot? Said no, I said I wasn't in a French medieval, seventeenth century medieval in prison. No, that regular chilett. And we laughed and we laughed, and then it was gone. Like she was she was young. I didn't need to sit with it heavy with her in that moment to vulge Ermany, I just said, so, I wrote this book,
I changed my life. I met your mommy, I came out of prison. And as you go older, let's begin of the conversation. We'll talk about it more. As you have questions, just ask me. And that's how it happened. And they said, okay, can we go play or do something else? And we did.
Wow, that's a great story. It's a little parenting tip. So jumping around, Joe, people want to know about Baby Driver. So you are hired as a consultant on Baby Driver, and I'm just curious, like, do you have to say, well, what do you guys say or do you need to course correct or give me some sense of the dynamic there with you the expert.
To be honest with you is It's funny. I think the way I met Edgar may it made it easy for me because when I met Edgar, they called me first and they said, hey, there's a young writer who needs he's stuck on a piece. He's like fifty pages in the script. It's about to get Away Driver. And I was like, all right, cool, I'll talk to him, and they said cool, and they sent me up I'm coming Alan next week. They say, great, you can meet him. I'm an hour from LA from the conference on there,
so you're going to be meet Edgar Wright. At this time, I'm like, wait, wait, wait, this is Edgar Wright, like one of my favorite directors. They didn't tell me who it was. They just said, like some young writer. I'm thinking some little, you know, first script writer kind of thing. And this is baby, this is Edgar who had done already Shana the Dead and Hot Fuzzs and Hot Fuzzs one of my favorite movies. I'm going to see him. When I get there. We start talking movies. All we're
talking to movies because he's he loves movies. I love movies. And we just start talking movies and we're talking movies and we're talking We're not even talking about a script, we're not even talking about any of that. We're talking movies, movies, movies, and we just we just connect like like as movie lovers. And then at one point I'm like, hey, dude, we could sit here and talk still, or I could just take you some banks I rob and you can see how I got away. And he was like, I said,
which one. He's like the latter, let's do that. And so I took him and so I get to show him who I was. Do. I take him out of the car. I did this, I came here. They walked out, and I followed me. I I scared them. I just I show him how I how I did it, like how I did it, what I was thinking on. And that's what earned me his trust that when it came to this, I'm not some guy who did it, and I know how it relates to movies, and I know the cinematic quality of what I'm preparing him to look
at it that way. So he says, well, I'm going to start sending you my script. I'm going to start sending you writing, and like pretty quickly, two three days later, he starts sending me writing. So I'm on a script consultant. I'm a technical consultant. I'm doing all the things. And basically I would tell him this, you're looking for this character to be this from what I read, I would hold his standard up. You say, he's this guy, he's
a shot caller. Well, if you have these guys under here always saying shit to him, he can't be a shot caller. They will diminish him. A shot caller would. If one guy just says one thing, he's gotta slam him down, so all the other ones look and say, oh shah, we don't want to do that, and fuck you, you're stupid for trying. Like I was trying to show him the dynamics of it, which he had no feel for. He's a sweet guy from the world, you know, England, so it's a great filmmaker. But so I would do.
I would tell him, here's the standard you've said that you want for him, and these things don't meet that standard. You have to have these characters around to be this, and he would make all these such an adjustment. And then when technically one of the third bank robbery, he Sony came back and said, does it have to be a bank robbery where they have two? And he said,
I don't know, what do you think, Joe? And I said, well, I'll give you a bank robbery that I'll give you a robbery of a post office that I wanted to do. And that way, if it ever, if I ever backslide, I won't go be able to rob that because it'll be the robbery that I wanted to do. So I actually, let's have rob a post office, and they did. He gave me the gig to play the guard who ends up getting shot in that by Jamie Fox. I actually was I actually played that role.
Yeah fantastic. So uh and you you ended up being fan. I mean people who have listened to get the money and run one of the things they wanted to know about baby Drivers. You ended up being a fan of the final product absolutely, Like is there a movie that just has gotten the heist totally wrong? Like one that's laughable in how it understands bank robbery.
Johnny Depp and Public Enemies, and he makes it look on sexy. He comes over the counter. He's got his coat flint said Fedora on he's got his Tommy gun like and then that looks like like that looks like it could be a robbery. Closer robbery would look like I do remember I was watching that movie Public Enemies, and Johnny Depp jumps over that counter, so it's a famous scene. Puts one hand over the counter, hops over. He looks like a cape crusader because his coat's coming over.
And I looked at that and I remember, I swear to God this happened I was like, God, damn, that's so sexy. That's a sexy thing. And then I was like, wait a fucking minute, man, that was me. I was like thinking, like, man, it'd be cool to be a bank robber, and I'd forgotten for a split second that that was me, that I wore the trench coat at the Fedra I was a bank robber, because it was
like so so far from my experience. Now, you know that, for a minute, I forgot that I actually owned that fucking status, that fucking moment, you know.
Yeah, all right. So one of the things in Get the Money and Run is you capture so beautifully and frighteningly, frankly, the rage that you used, you harnessed and kind of recreated is the superpower.
What I'm wondering is.
Does that rage ever surface today?
Yeah, it's it's it's not like that. I'm not young and dumb and full of cum kind of thing like you. Like I said, I don't have that impulsivity. I have a family. You know, I think I've made too many choices about my future. I've had to invest a lot of times again, things done so that another thing could happened, or that thing could come to fruition and open up door like i've I've already danced with my posterity well for many, many years, and I made a commitment to
try and be a better human being. So I did a lot of work on my soyle so that that unadulterated, pristine, crystal clear diamond fucking sharp rage doesn't exist in me an expression anymore. What it did, it became diffuse, And so I eat my feelings because I know one thing. My body knows one thing and will never forget this. My body never forgets that if someone was coming to me, I'd go right at them just I knew that. I
don't care. I'm fearless. I'm gonna go at you. I'm gonna try and take out your I'm gonna stab you, I'm gonna imprison you have to like be this person. My body doesn't forget all the years that I spent committeing violence, treachery, innocent. So I know there's a lot of things that I know it can do. It knows it can do and has done. So what what that means is I came out into a world where I can't do that, and my body has to live with that.
If I've described it as imagine you come into the community. You're driving with your nice fast car that can go, that's already gone like one hundred and sixty on the Autobahn, and you're driving this community. It's like, uh uh, the cops pull you over. You got to park that right here. You can't drive that. We all take up these really small, slow battery powered like golf cart, slow things like a little bus. That's how we all travel, or we walk.
And you know you have speed right there, and these roads could handle your speed, but you have to do what everyone else does. You got to line up in a line and get these slow moving things that everybody else does. That's what it feels like to be me, because I was able to once just plow through with this power of mine drive and by my rage. So that has made it hard on me at several moments in time when my body was like, Joe, we can do this, let's do let's let's do this, and I
had to override it with my morality. Now you know, I have to say I don't do that. Well, this thing comes up and revs so high in me, and it takes so much to shove that shit down just. I'm talking a handful of times over the twenty nine years I've been out, but it's been a handful of times. It's been the dark knight of the soul where I was like fuck and by the time it was over, I just fucking just. I did not treat myself. I was like, live with shame, embarrassment, I felt like a
coward whatever. And so over the years, I feel like I've just eaten my feet. I think that the eighty pounds overweight I am is because there's five men walking around who don't have any holes in them. That's why I have eighty pounds on me. And I feel like I feel like I can't do what I used to do and feel the feel, the agency and the power of that because I've committed to this life. That said, there is a way, you know, pressure busts of pipe.
So I have to get rid of that somehow. So I write some really dark fucking crime stories and I commit a lot of mayhem to my characters on the page a lot. And like I said, I'm baroque fucking shit, primitive, fucking shit, medieval all day long. I'm one of the scenes in Queen of the South is in the episode. The episode I wrote was that that there's a scene that I wrote was at the there's just one a
guy who was like a Luca Brozi guy. He goes out to kill someone, he gets killed, and his boss who sent him out to kill the enemy, ends up with the enemy who survived, and he's offering them tacos, and our guy scared, like, oh shit, I sent my Luca Bronzi. I don't know where my Luca Bronzi is. And this guy now is alive and he's trying to be friendly to me. What the fuck is this? Well,
the focos he's giving him. When he looks at the spit through the clouds and the scenes that he's making them shaving out the got an different some meat for him, he realizes that that thing has boots on it and it's his Luca Bronzi's is on the spit, spinty, and they're shaving his fresh off him. So that's where my rage goes. My rage goes to scenes like this that are really dark and terrible and violent and vulgar and
scary and full of horror and terror. But also, you know, I write comedy stuff, but.
So Joe let me ask the bank robberies in h I mean, we go through probably half a dozen of them and get the money and run, and they just they do seem like capers. And there's a fun aspect in part because of the way you tell it. You know, you're always kind of laughing, obviously in retrospect, but it seems almost like it was a golden age of bank robbery.
At the technology was, in comparison, really low tech. I mean, could you ever be a bank robber of the same accomplishment today given what's out there?
Yeah? No, I mean the reason it was easy for me is there was very little bandit glass, right, very little all right. I may have walked into one bank or two in all that fourteen months I was rubbing banks in the late eighties in which that was up and I had to walk out there is so now you go into most of them and they have that, right,
that's just that's a regular thing. So no, that you know at the counter is not as as as easy as it was, though there are still a lot of banks that don't have it, so people are still out there robbing it that way. But it was a golden age in la like that when I came out, I would sometimes be in banks. I was like, yeah, I ain't trying to row. I would never rob. Even if I got mad and said fuck it, I'm not gonna do that. I'm going to go to crime, it would not be the row banks. So let me ask you.
I mean, another thing was as a successful bank robber, you were had pockets full of cash, and everybody around you, your family, your dad, your brother, stepmother, at some point they almost have known that you were that you weren't a cook at Crocodile Cafe in Pasadena.
Well, by the way I covered that was remember I was a fugitive in Mexico before I got arrested the first time, and so I told them I hoped that with some really interesting people there, I committed a couple of big time crimes and they held my money for me and I'm living off that. That's all you need to know, and nobody said anything, you know.
I mean, a very central point of get the money and run. It's bookended by your relationship with your father. At the beginning, the abusive relationship, and at the end he's sitting by the door of I guess your bedroom, not letting you out. It's the last episode that we call fatal peril. What is your relationship with your father?
Like now? So, my dad's eighty nobody, six or four this year, and he is alone. He lives in Ourhambra. We we get along really good. I talked to him three times a week, like I talked to him last night. We were laughing our asson. He's funny, he's got a good sense of humor. It's about him. So we take care of him. We love him. My brother calls him three nights a week. I call him three nights a week. I don't know very many sons who are as close
to their father as my father and I are. And we have a fucking terrible history, and so we overcame so much. My dad gets so much love. It's really simple. I'll tell you how it is. We look at it this way, my brother and I. My mother loved my dad. We love my mother. We love and respect the death the memory of my dead mother. My mother saw something in my father that my brother and I know is at bottom of My Dad's a sweet man. He was harassed by his demons, and he fucked up, and he
didn't fuck up. Twenty four to seven he just fucked up in cinematic style several times a year, really bad. But he gave us a lot of good. We are artists, my brother's a musician, I'm a writer, I'm a thinker. I own all the things I am because of my dad, and he worked hard to give us a lot of advantages that we have. We're in private schools. When we were on like, we are who we are and we are loving people as we are. And I was able to heal myself because excuse of my dad gave me.
So we look at it this way, Dad, on your this is your endgame, on your way out, We're just gonna love you on the way out of the way. Mommy is not here to love you. Our mommy is not here to love you. And so that's how we that's our ethos. And now we just talk all the good things about his life that we love about him.
Well, I mean, I hated the man so much in episodes one and two. It was crazy that that ability to forgive is just I guess one of the miracles of get the money and run. It's crazy the way that happens. One thing that somebody wanted to know about the prison hierarchy. How were you as a bank robber considered in prison.
A bank robbery When I got there, it was pretty high on the hierarchy because it's violent crime and some money crime. Low crimes are like, you know, obviously sex trafficking across lines because I was a federal prisoner. Drug crimes are low, you know, but we are considered violent men who took our agency into a place, took over an institution, got the money. Like there's there's some something to it, and I believe part of it. Most of the guys that matter where bank robbers are a bunch
of lames. They had just graduated from selling drugs, so now they got so fucked up on their own product. They now need to go make money. So they started robbing banks, and they were you know, and they got caught after four or five or three or two whatever.
I wasn't. I didn't. I didn't have the respect for bank rubbers a lot of the society does, because I feel like society has a sense of the bank rubber and a more a more Hollywood sort of view of it, which which is which is also more mythologized, meaning in the depression, those bank rubber the Depression era bank robbers. They were folk heroes. Yeah, they were folk heroes, right, they were. They were the guys who would go into
a bank like baby like a babyface Nelson. He would go into the banks and banks in those days obviously there's nothing digital, nothing, nothing like that copied. So he would go into banks and he would not only rob them, he would burn the files that had all the mortgages for the farmers. So then he would say, fuck you, you've been fucking over everyone. We're gonna like, we're not only robbing you for us to make money, we're robbing you because it's a social fucking thing we're doing. Now.
The other thing that is important about that, to make the myth grow larger, is every Hollywood hunk since then has played a bank rubber. They've made it so like not even Hollywood hunks have to do it. They got that little kid who played Mark Zuckerberg. They had him may a bank robber. They had on the Ansari like comic little Towrpy nerdy dudes play. They have little girls
robbing banks like you used to be. Once upon a time it was like, you know, like al Pacino and de Niro and Robert Radford and Paul new and those are the bank robbers, right, But no, now they have everybody played so and they come up with highschovies all day long. But there was a time when I think that people thought bank robbery was resistance crime, and they had the mythology the folklore of the depression era thing,
and I think that lingered. By the time I got there in the late eighties, there were still sort of like, we are the outlaw, we are the epitome of the outlaw. So then the hierarchy bank robbers had like, you know, made you say you're a bank rubber, like, oh, okay, cool, that's a respectable fucking crime. That's how I look at That's what I think. I mean, I didn't feel like that was how I was treated, you know, like, oh shit, bank robber.
All right, all right, last question, just I want you to say something about your book. It got wonderful reviews, A great accomplish Schmidt. You know, you turn yourself, as you said, into a good person. You also turn yourself into a writer. How hard was that?
I was disciplined. That was actually one of the reasons that could change my life because one of the things my dad taught me. My dad taught himself Greek and Hebrew. Right, my dad was disciplined. He has a disciplined mind, and he would put in the rigger. My brother taught himself
piano and guitar, never took lessons. And so while I was in prison for the last two and a half years, every day I was writing, and every day I was reading good writers, and I would highlight their words, and then I would copy paragraphs down hole, you know, read copy, read copy, and follow their thinking and follow their ideas the flow. If it has something in the sentence that was surprising, that was provocative, that was new a word,
a novel word, I would write it. And because I wanted to be influenced by different minds that were where there were sharp that I found interesting to me. So I did that. I've sat with many writer friends of mine and they were they were also the same. I wish I had that kind of time, like solitary gave me time, and prison gave me time to sit there for hours and do the thing that writers want to do, which is we want to just swim and live and
seem in solitary. I remember I got picked up for solitary a little bit later for stabbing a man in prison, and I was in there for three months on investigation. Oh man, I made it work for me. When I would get up make my bed, I would just write. I just didn't have to listen anyone, didn't have talked to anyone, and I had the luxury of like being fed three times a day, doing an ava wreck, showering only three times a week. It was It wasn't that hard to do it. It was just a lot of work.
And fortunately for me, I was that kind of work when you're doing what you really want to be doing, feels like play. And so when you say how hard was it, it wasn't hard. I was having that was that was enjoyable. Ryan. The book was hard because I had to live a lot of PTSD. I didn't know what PTSD was at the time, and so I would go into these things like, oh, I'm going to write all these details for you guys, and then I would
write them on I'd be sitting there afterwards, devastated. And that was the hard part, was technically writing the traumatic scenes in my memoir.
You make solitary confinement sound like a National Endowment for the arts grant.
That's interesting you say that, because obviously the best solitary was the best thing that ever happened to me, solitary conversy. And this is where paradox is alive. Solitary was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I'm still fucked up psychologically for that. I saved nightmares periodically because of that. I still carry so much fucking fractured shit because of that, because of the way I was treated, handcuffed by guards, beaten by guard like that kind of stuff that happens.
What are you gonna do with that? But on the other hand, it created an occasion for me to really experienced myself and experience they have an experience that profoundly, profoundly sharpened by vision and sparked my imagination so that I, like this, was awakened to the new me. And so that's who's here. And that happened because of a hallucination in solitary confinement.
Wow, that's an amazing moment staring at that wall and starting to hallucinate. And you know, one of the things I think about you, Joe, is that you put us there and not that I could necessarily feel what you felt, but I could imagine staring at that wall and kind of going crazy, and I think that's one of the real talents that you have as a writer but also as a storyteller, and I hope that Get the Money
and Run really captures that. I think it does, so Joe, thanks so much much for spending the time with us.
Thanks man, great m