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Two excerpts from Temple of Doom: And Other Stories about Kids and Crime by Mike Sager

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Raised in Captivity

Gary Fannon lost the best years of his life to a trumped-up arrest, a crooked cop, and draconian drug-sentencing laws. The decade he spent in prison taught him lessons no man should ever have to learn. A campaign spearheaded by Rolling Stone magazine and the author help set him free.

He rode out to quarantine on a bus full of stinking guys, all of them under twenty-one, convicted as adults of felony crimes. He was going to Riverside to be processed, three hours away, in Ionia, Michigan. The town had four prisons. They pronounced it I-own-ya.

Gary Wayne Fannon Jr. pressed his nose to the vent by the window, seeking fresher air. He wanted to scream, to cry, to smash his head through the glass. The state of Michigan owned him now. He’d drawn the mandatory penalty for his crime: life in prison without parole. It was a death sentence, really—a long, slow death by natural causes.

He stepped off the bus, his wrists shackled to a belt around his waist, his legs chained together at the ankles. He shuffled forward in a single-file line, through a door marked Intake. They removed his shackles, locked the heavy gate behind him. They gave him his number, 189196. He bent over, spread his cheeks, and coughed. He got his blues. The shirts were too big; the pants were too small. The underwear was made by convicts in a factory for twenty-eight cents a day. Since it was summer—August 20, 1987, to be exact, his nineteenth birthday—they were giving out rubber flip-flops. He reached down into a huge laundry cart, held his breath against the smell. The rubber was worn, impressed with the toe prints of previous owners. Fuck it, thought Gary. Happy birthday to me.

One week, one month, two months, three. An eight-by-ten-foot cell, twenty-three hours a day. No TV, no radio, no roommate. If you needed to piss, you used a plastic bottle. If you needed to do more, you had to bang on the door and wait for the guard. Sometimes the guard wouldn’t come, and you’d have to use your trash can. Then you’d tie up the plastic liner bag and throw it out the window, into the courtyard.

The guards at the Riverside Correctional Facility liked Gary. He was polite and well-mannered. He was White, as were most of the guards. He seemed like a regular kid. How he had gotten here, how he had ended up with a life sentence—Gary wondered about that himself. Before all this happened, he had lived with his mom and little brother in an apartment complex in Westland, a blue-collar suburb northwest of Detroit. He played guitar, smoked pot, paid $120 a month on his black Mercury LN7, was a regular at the midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He graduated from high school by the skin of his teeth. He’d been in trouble with the law once: nabbed at age thirteen for shoplifting a pack of batteries. The cops never found the other item he’d taken, secreted in his coat pocket, a small ceramic statue of a blond guy in a striped prison suit, a ball and chain affixed to his ankle. Now it seemed like an episode of Tales From the Crypt, some eerie prophecy fulfilled.

Why me, oh Lord? Gary asked this many times. He made a list of everything he’d done wrong in his life, looking for a reason he was being punished like this now. When he was seven, he had broken a pinball machine in a bar his father had taken him to. When he was thirteen, he had smashed a window in the front door of an apartment complex. The manager had denied his mother an application; he had a policy against renting to divorcees with kids. When he was twelve, Gary fell in with a bad crowd. They jimmied apartment doors, stole spare change and radios, rearranged furniture. Later they stole car stereos and radar detectors. And there were the little things. Like the time he broke that girl’s virginity and then called her a blood witch. The time he hit his kid brother for squealing. The time he raised his fist to his mom, a selfless woman who slept on the sofa in the living room.

Because the guards liked Gary, they gave him the job of cleaning the courtyard. He didn’t get paid, but he did get to go outside by himself for an hour. He’d rake the shit bags into a pile and carry them to the dumpster. Then he’d mow the grass. At least it was something to do.

One day he was in his cell and there was nothing to do, he was going insane. He’d written all the letters he could, his hand was numb and there was nothing to do, he was going insane. He’d read as many books as he could, his eyes were killing him. There was nothing to do and the window was open and the sun was shining. He wanted to be outside. He was going insane.

A fly buzzed into his cell. It landed on the windowsill, on the bed, on the desk. Gary watched it.

The fly rubbed its legs together. It flitted around nervously. Gary inched toward it. Closer. Closer. He tried to quiet his body and his brain, to make himself still like deep water, like Caine in Kung Fu.

He snapped out his arm and caught the fly in his hand. He put it in a large Doritos bag, purchased in the prison store, contents devoured, bag kept folded on the shelf. He watched the fly buzz around inside the Doritos bag. Time passed.

A bee flew into the cell. Gary watched it. He concentrated, trying to send the bee a telepathic message. Come to me. Come to me. The bee settled on the back of his hand. He cupped it in his palm, put it in the Doritos bag; the bee on one end, sectioned off with a pencil, and then the fly, and then a book to seal the opening, all of it on top of the desk.

Gary watched the bee. He watched the fly. Every once in a while, he’d remove the pencil, open up the sections, make them meet so they would fight. But they wouldn’t. They just buzzed and walked around.

Time passed. A wasp flew into the cell. The shit bags in the courtyard were like magnets for all these bugs. It was a regular insect zoo. Gary stalked the wasp across the room, caught it in a Styrofoam cup. He put it in the Doritos bag.

He watched some more. He set up fights between the wasp and the fly, the wasp and the bee. The bee and the fly wouldn’t fight, but the wasp, he would fight anybody. Gary took turns pitting the wasp against the fly and the wasp against the bee. That was the best match, the wasp against the bee. Lots of buzzing and stinging. Just hours of amusement, you know.

In the end, the fly got crushed. The bee suffocated. The wasp drowned in the Styrofoam cup.

By then it was time for chow.

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Temple of Doom

Police were baffled when eight Thai Buddhist monks and one nun were killed execution-style in a temple outside Phoenix—the worst mass murder in Arizona history. Nobody wanted to believe the crime had been committed by a pair of gung-ho ROTC students from the local high school.

It was to be a special day at the temple, so Chawee Borders arrived early, a bouquet of flowers in her hands. August in Arizona, the flat valley west of Phoenix. By ten a.m. the temperature was already pushing triple digits. Chawee squinted into the blazing sun, shook her head, made a noise behind her teeth, tsktsk. Heat eddied through the rubber soles of her shoes: It felt like walking through a skillet. No matter how long she lived here, Chawee couldn’t quite get over the idea that they called this the monsoon season. Baked earth and cotton fields, battered Chevys, migrant pickers, mountains rising in the distance, barren and craggy against a wan blue sky. Half a world away, in her native Thailand, it was also the season of monsoons, all lush and wet and green, the time of rains and contemplations, of Buddhist retreat.

In Thailand, it is said, there is a temple on every corner, and every summer, 1 percent of all males become monks. In Phoenix, there is only one temple, Wat Promkunaram, an L-shaped stucco building with a red ceramic roof on five acres of lonely scrub in the western part of Maricopa County. This year, two boys had entered the temple. Matthew Miller, 17, had just arrived. David Doody, 14, had just left. The celebration tonight was for them.

Along with Matthew, there were six monks, a nun, and a young acolyte living in the Wat. Matthew was the son of an American Air Force vet and his Thai wife. Born in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Matthew spoke Thai but had never been to Thailand. He was a friendly kid who played electric guitar, called his buddies “dude.” Cooked part-time in a Chinese restaurant. His nickname was GQ, earned for the thrift-store three-piece suits he painstakingly ironed and accessorized. None of the other kids wore suits to school. It was Matthew’s own style, part of his need to be his own person. Half Thai, half American, he’d found something special in his difference, was in the teenage process of puzzling himself together with pieces from many worlds.

Lately, Matthew had become more curious about his roots, something his mother traced to his Grandma Foy. Foy Sripanpiaserf was a youthful seventy-one, one of the few mothers who had followed their daughters to America. Though she had learned to love hot Ovaltine and pro wrestling, she still spoke no English. After years of farming rice paddies, raising water buffalo and chickens along with children, picking her roots and vegetables from the ground free of charge, she found Phoenix a very strange place to live. She worried that when she died, her spirit would inhabit an English-speaking place, too.

The Temple was thus a great comfort to Grandma Foy; she spent most of her time there—cooking, cleaning, gossiping, giving advice. Often Matthew came along. It surprised no one this summer, when Grandma Foy declared her intention to become a nun, that Matthew decided to follow.

Matthew planned to stay in the temple about a month. He didn’t want to spend his whole vacation sitting around acting holy, and this was fine with the abbot. When a man becomes a Buddhist monk, he can stay for a few weeks or a lifetime. He can leave and return. It is honorable to be a monk for any length of service; they are living icons of the highest spiritual pursuit.

The first monk was Guatama Buddha, a Hindu prince born in the sixth century B.C. Buddha understood life as a complete universe of endless rebirth, with many heavens above, many hells below, one lifetime affecting the next. Buddha taught that a person could build merit for his fortunes in each successive life by practicing right thoughts and good deeds, by keeping a pure heart. Beyond this, there is the ultimate reward, Nirvana. Reaching Nirvana, he said, entails study, meditation, simple labors, a removal from material concerns. The key is coming to understand the truth: “The way things really are.” When the truth becomes clear, suffering ends. The soul leaves the cycle of rebirth and rejoins the universe, much as a drop of water rejoins the ocean.

Being a practical religion, Buddhism recognizes that everyone can’t be a monk. For one thing, monks are celibate. For another, they’re not supposed to cook or work for money. Most people, therefore, take for granted that other lifetimes are in store. Meanwhile, they seek karmic merit by serving the monks.

Since Chawee Borders lived right down the dirt road that led to the temple, she cooked lunch every day for the monks. Like Matthew’s mother, like many of the women in a community of 2,000 Thais who settled in this unlikely outpost near Luke Air Force Base, Chawee was a Vietnam-era war bride. Beginning in the late sixties, the Thai population of Phoenix had burgeoned. GI brides, working-class families, professional men, they set up housekeeping and surgical practices, went to work in factories, opened restaurants and businesses. By 1983, the only thing missing was a temple. A committee of wives was formed. Letters were written to Thailand, requesting monks for a spiritual center. To raise money, the women sold eggrolls, hosted a beauty pageant, recycled cans. Finally, five years ago, Wat Promkunaram was built.

Now, on the morning of Saturday, August 10, 1991, Chawee shut her car door, walked with her friend Premchit Hash across the parking lot toward the temple kitchen. Just shy of the grass, the women stopped. The grounds were flooded. The monks hadn’t turned off the irrigation. “Why would they forget?” Chawee wondered out loud. Premchit shrugged. Her arms were laden with trays of food. The two women circumnavigated, seeking a drier entrance.

At the east side, as was custom, they removed their shoes, stepped into the ceremonial hall. As Chawee padded toward the altar, she was struck by the silence. So quiet. The monks should have been up now for hours. But then again, she’d known the monks to sleep late. She put a finger to her lips, “Shhhhh,” she urged Premchit, speaking in Thai, a language with no plurals. “The monk sleeping.”

The monks were pampered and beloved figures, led by their abbot, Phra Maha Pairat Kanthong. Phra means something like Father or Reverend. Maha is a title denoting rank. Pairat, as he was called, was thirty-six years old. He’d been in Phoenix since the beginning of the Wat. To an American mind, he conjured the image of Spencer Tracy in Boys Town, known for his enthusiasm, his strength, his devotion to boxing, gardening, and TV news.

Though he liked to tease and laugh, some say Pairat was troubled. The congregation was thin, the coffers were low. The children, almost all of them half American, didn’t attend very often. Sometimes, on Sundays, the congregation sparse, he almost despaired. He knew his concerns were earthly, unworthy for a monk. Yet still he worried—a human with responsibilities, a holy man, still a man.

As there were others under his charge, Pairat did his best to show a good face. Suthichai Annutaro, 32, was the eldest of a large family with a history of producing monks. Boonchuay Cahiyathammo, 37, was from Chang Mai, the poppy growing area in the north of Thailand known as part of the Golden Triangle, the heroin center of Asia. Somsak Sopha, 47, had lectured on Buddhism, worked among the hill tribesmen of Thailand, traveled to Taiwan, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Siang Mahapanyo, 28, was an artist, sculptor, inventor, and toy maker. Chalern Kittipattaro was twenty-nine. Little else about him was known. A monk can be collegial or choose to keep to himself. Like the rest, Chalern’s main duty was to seek personal enlightenment, help others along the path.

Also under Pairat’s care this summer was Chirasak Chirapong. Known affectionately as Boy, he was the abbot’s nephew, 21, the longhaired son of a wealthy branch of his family. Chirasak had not entered the monkhood; he was just vacationing. He’d made friends with David Doody and with his older brother, Jonathan. The American Thai boys had turned him on to malls, Slurpees, Arnold the Terminator, Boyz n the Hood. Boy bragged of having more than $2,000 in a small safe in his room. He spent it freely, financing all the outings.

Now, on the morning of the celebration for the novices, Chawee placed her flowers on the altar, bowed to the six-foot brass and gold leaf Buddha. She and Premchit passed behind the altar, into the kitchen. They busied themselves unwrapping platters. Maybe the monks were outside somewhere. No doubt they’d be back soon.

Then the telephone rang. There was a pay phone right next to the kitchen. Chawee picked it up, heard a click, then silence. Thinking she might have answered the wrong phone, she walked out of the kitchen a few steps, over to the private line. The cord was cut.

Puzzled, Chawee turned, surveyed the living room. Over in the middle, beyond the sofa, she could see all the monks sleeping on the floor. She’d known the monks to sleep on the floor. It wasn’t too unusual. But then she noticed someone wearing white. Nuns dressed in white. Grandma Foy was sleeping with the monks! This was not allowed.

“Wake up!” she called gently, “Wake up, my monk.” She took a cautious step forward.

“My monk!”

Matthew, Boy, Grandma Foy, Pairat, the monks …

All of them were dead.

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Temple of Doom: And Other Stories of Kids and Crime is available in ebook and print.