In The Shawshank Redemption, there’s a scene I love in which Andy Dufresne—the banker wrongly convicted of killing his wife—is talking to his friend and fellow prisoner, Brooks Hatlen. Andy wants to build a better library for the inmates at Shawshank, but money is an obstacle. He tells Brooks he’s going to ask the warden for funds.
Brooks laughs. He laughs because he sees Andy as almost childishly naive, and Brooks knows better. He politely explains: “Son, I’ve had six wardens through here during my tenure, and I have learned one great immutable truth of the universe: Ain’t one of ‘em been born whose asshole don’t pucker up tight as a snare drum when you ask for funds.”
Brooks and Andy are prison friends, but also opposites in the direction their lives took. Andy is innocent, and he later engineered a daring escape, leaving a trail for another friend, Red, to follow. Andy embodies the “redemption” in the movie’s name. Brooks’ fate, however, a tale of misfortune and tragedy.
Brooks is paroled before Andy. But while he is free, he remains imprisoned by his circumstances. Not long after his release, hopelessness overtakes him. He decides he’s done playing “society’s game”—no more asking “The Man” for permission to take a piss only to be told to get back to work. He pens a letter to his friends, saying a few things like this: “Dear fellas. I can’t believe how fast things move on the outside… I have trouble sleeping at night. I have bad dreams, like I’m falling. I wake up scared. Sometimes it takes me a while to remember where I am… I don’t like it here. I’m tired of being afraid all the time. I’ve decided not to stay.”
Alone in the world, Brooks decides the only way to unlearn a lifetime of institutionalization is to hang himself. “I doubt they’ll kick up a fuss. Not for an old crook like me.” He carves “Brooks was here” into a wooden beam, then steps off the chair.
These two fictional outlaws are unforgettable: two humans being human, perpetually trying to overcome the “something,” with two outcomes that couldn’t be more different. Had Brooks been released with friends waiting for him in the world, there might have been a happy ending for him too. But that wasn’t his luck. Call it fate, or blame the writer, because Brooks wasn’t a main character in Andy’s story.
In the end, though, they all escape. No more being treated like dogs, counted five times a day like objects in a factory. That’s what matters.
My own Shawshank story
I’ve spent most of my life collecting outlaw friends, the special ones, because I admire their spirit, willfulness and uniqueness. I’ve always been drawn to the flawed humanity of the good bad guys of movies, like Richard Riddick, who’d rather fight to the death than be conquered. People who fiercely resist control are rare. Whenever I spot one, I get a rush from recognizing it. And if I can help them, play some small role in their anti-hero’s journey, I do.
Let me tell you a short story about finding one of these caged spirits, how we became friends, and what I learned from him.
Rage Machine is a stocky, 175-pound genetic freak—a powerhouse kid who probably leaves testosterone residue in his fingerprints. Rage comes from Coaldale, an old coal-mining town near the armpit of Pennsylvania, long forgotten and deep in decline.
Rage and I met in prison, one of those low-budget, locked-down, no-movement, stir-crazy holes that shouldn’t exist. He couldn’t have been older than 21. I had a few years on him but was still in my 20s. We gravitated toward each other by default; the demographics were limited.
We became workout partners. Rage wasn’t much for talking, though he’d try. He sat across from me in the dayroom with a reluctant look until he got going, then started telling me stories: fights he’d had, an incident with his drunk uncle when they blew up someone else’s cow (that’s what landed him in prison). He described a foot chase—running from police, evading them until he hits the river.
“I knew they wouldn’t follow me into the water,” he told me. “And the cops knew it too, so they tased my ass. I felt the prongs stick in my back. Zap. I’m leg-deep in the river. I thought I was fucked and gonna go down right there and drown.”
But that’s not what happened. The taser only made him run faster. His legs kept going on auto pilot and he got away.
As weeks passed, I watched Rage slowly come out of his shell. We improvised workouts. We did biceps curls with a mop stick and bags of books hanging off the ends. Once we tried boxing drills—I held mitts barehanded while calling out punch combinations. Rage didn’t know how to pull punches; he burst blood vessels in my hands, so we moved on to other things.
Rage did abnormal shit almost daily: climbing from the bottom tier of our building to the top like Spider Man, using only a steel support beam, making it look easy. Push-kicking his cell door open, somersaulting into the dayroom, pretending to mow down a table of card-playing homies in a Call of Duty-style ambush. Ballsy and hilarious.
The ballsiest might be the racist songs he belted out to the entire tier at night—lying on the concrete, singing in a fake country twang from under his door about us all being white on the bottoms of our feet. Everybody—Black, white, Latino—cracked up. They all saw what I did: a fearless kid, brazen and good-natured enough to be himself, chips falling where they may. Everybody liked him.
It was obvious Rage was crazy as hell. But he was young and smart, with serious potential. He should have been an athlete, a fighter or a gladiator in another era. Instead, he was in prison with me because he had nothing else to do but get drunk, fight, blow up cows, and run from the cops.
I love people like Rage. I eat that rebellion shit up, breathing it in like fresh air in a sulfurous hell. He is a kindred reprobate like me. We became friends and stayed in touch after I transferred to another prison.
In my absence, Rage worked out; paced his cell; leapt five feet from floor to top bunk, landing in a squat; or stared at his reflection in the night-blackened window and punched himself in the face repeatedly—to thicken the bones in his face. Too much idle time, and too much deprivation turned him into a self-loathing war machine.
But he eventually caught a break and transferred to low-security dorm where there was more freedom, then got involved with idiots running bare-knuckle fights for commissary bets. He won his fights but ended up in the hole.
One day I got a letter from him—forwarded verbally through my mother. He told her about the fights, about being sent to the hole, then casually mentioned kicking his segregation cell window repeatedly until it broke. Not to escape—just to see if he could. The prison gave him a deadline to pay for it or face an escape-attempt charge. He mentioned the amount owed but never asked for help.
He didn’t need to. I know how to be a friend. So does my mother. She sent the money right away. Problem solved.
Fast-forward 10 years. I’m semi-free, building a life. My girlfriend was in the hospital giving birth to our second child—a boy. The next day I was running errands while she recovered. Rage called while I was heading back. We talked; he sounded uncharacteristically somber.
“I fucked up,” he said. “I was out with Brit, got drunk, and knocked a guy out at the bar for disrespecting my lady.”
His newish girlfriend Brittany was pregnant too, but everything was falling apart. He’d been doing well—finally in a healthy relationship after years in a toxic one that had been driving him insane. I heard the change in his voice. He was growing up. Regret, vulnerability—things I’d never heard from him before.
“I feel like shit,” he said. “My arrest hit the local paper. Brit’s landlord saw it, evicted her because he doesn’t want me around. Now she’s pregnant and homeless because of me. I tried talking to the guy, but he won’t listen. We’re working it out with our parents, putting money together for a new place.”
“How much more do you need?” I asked.
“Six hundred.”
“Then come get it. Meet me at the hospital. Visit, meet my son, meet my girl. Grab the money while you’re here.”
He accepted. As the sun set, I greeted Rage and Brit in the hospital parking lot. They smiled when they saw me. Rage looked happy for a change. Maybe it was love, maybe hope, maybe knowing people cared enough to help him financially when his chips were down. I recognized the look.
They came in with me to meet my newborn son, Chance, and his mother. Later I walked them out and saw them off. Mission accomplished.
The real Brooks is me
Fast-forward another four years.
I was back in prison, almost two years in. Rage had been busy with his life but noticed I was gone. He reached out.
“I figured you were locked up again when you disappeared from social media,” he said, then fills me in. “Everything’s great now, bro. I got married. My wife goes to church. We have our own place, both working, making decent money. My daughter is four already. She’s amazing. You gotta meet her. We miss you, brother.”
When you’re locked up, words like that cut deep: “We miss you, brother.” But not hearing them is worse.
My friend turned his life around while I was hitting new lows. I realized Rage was teaching me something by example.
If there’s a parallel in all this, it’s this: Rage became the Andy. I was turning into Brooks—the hopeless tragedy who can’t hack it outside, who can’t figure it out.
Self-objectivity is the hardest thing in the world. It’s a lifelong process; every inch gained vanishes the moment you relax.
It has taken me a lifetime, but I’m starting to see why people change—and what makes the difference. A million variables separate one person from another, but the parallels matter. I’d bet they have everything to do with friends, with the people we have around us.
Andy Dufresne had the machismo to out-bad the bad guys and pull out of his nosedive alone—but that was the movies. In the real world, that resolve plus luck is rare. More common are the fates of Andy’s friends: Red starts anew only because a path is laid for him. Brooks can’t figure it out alone. Too old to restart, he chooses death.
Rage had good people around him. Fatherhood and his support network made the difference. Family and friends encouraged him to care about himself. That’s the crux, the paradox: learning to care about yourself—whether for someone else or finally for yourself. Without it, there is no redemption.
Caring about myself more is something I realized I needed to work on, along with being a better man, a better friend, a better father. If I want to escape the “something” forever in my way, I need to get out of my own way.
My redemption story arc depends on it.
None of these people or stories would be interesting if they’d merely followed the rules. But to what end? There must be a way out. Maybe writing will be mine.
All I know is I need to get the fuck out—one way or another. Because my friends and family are waiting for me out there, on a beach somewhere. A beach with a church on it.
I wrote this story in 2024, and dedicated it to my friend Steve Vanwhy (Rage Machine), and all the semi-peaceful, good-natured troublemakers out there. Today, I am semi-free as well, in a halfway house and trying to figure out how to follow in Steve’s footsteps.
First published on Tony’s Substack.
