Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 126

DISCOVERIES GOT A BENT FOR NEON? THE W1NNS WILL STRAIGHTEN YOU OUT i III paragraphs such as this: "From the empty spaces of his lone wolfishness he actually really admired and loved our little bourgeois world as something solid and secure, as the home and peace which must ever remain far and unattainable, with no road leading from him to them." He underlined the words "home" and "peace" twice and wrote in the margin: "It is true, still, and always." Hundreds of prison guards have talked to Steppenwolf, shaken him down, checked him for rule violations. But none has known him; he has made sure of that. "There's an emotional distance," he says, even between him and his boss, a guard with whom he jokes and feels at ease. "He never gets overfamiliar and is always a little leery of how to deal with me. That's a good position to have him in." He doesn't bother anymore to associate with short-term prisoners.

"Most of the people on my rock (his floor, which houses 37 men) I don't talk to, unless they've been here more than two years. Or for some reason they have imposed themselves on me. Because I figure, you're probably not gonna be here very long anyway, and if you're here after two years, then there's a fair chance you'll be here for a while, so then I'll go out of my way." Friendship for a month or two "doesn't serve any purpose. Because everybody you learn to care about leaves. Think about that: every relationship you form, you lose it.

It's gone. So after so many years, you just say, whoa, whoa, whoa! I don't need that Because you can start caring about people in prison. I've met a lot of people that are my kind of people. But I'm not gonna get this thing" he thumps his heart with his fist "ripped up and stepped on every time some clown wants to get a parole." His women have known him in the most narrow sense. The scenery is always the same.

They never see where he sleeps, eats and writes. He spent both honeymoons in the visiting room, "trying to see what we could get away with." Because the human told him that when he fell asleep, the muscles in his neck would relax and the string would choke him to death. It didn't work; he couldn't sleep. Though he was a hard-liner on drugs (he believed marijuana could lead a man to heroin and a violent death), he drank spud juice prison hooch made from potatoes with the best of them. He nurtured a brutal image.

He grew his hair long, all over his face and his head. He is not a big man just 5-f oot-7 but he appears larger and in the early years weighed as much as 237 pounds, lifting weights to work himself into intimidating proportions. Eventually, he lost the weight, fasting on nothing but black coffee for 29 days. Still, he says, he frightened everyone. He had killed five times and could be counted on to do it again if compelled.

"People made it clear to me from the start that I was different, unique, dangerous, not to be messed with, not to be hassled at all, and I really never was. But the mindtrip of trying to grow into those shoes!" "Look, I can tell you precisely how it feels to stab someone, run a knife right through their heart and right out their back. I've never done it. But I can describe it in blood-curdling detail that would make you believe I've done it, and believe I'd do it again. "A lotta people don't know I've never hurt anybody.

A lotta people believe I've killed people since I've been in prison. Most people believe I'm a hit man, a Mafia hit man. It's a rumor that got started years ago, and I've just never done anything to kill it." "I had made up my mind I was gonna be a hit man. That's a lucrative profession in here: taking people out. As far as I was concerned, if I gotta be in here forever, well damn it, I'm gonna live good in here.

"But I'd never cut anyone. Shoving a knife into someone, it's not easy. I didn't know if I could do it or not. So I had to find out. There was this kid that worked down the hall (Continued on Page 16.) brain is crafty and the body eager, his first marriage ultimately was consummated, in the upstairs public visiting room at the Ionia Reformatory, "25 or 30 feet from the nearest human being, 50 feet from the nearest screw (guard)." "Feet must remain on the floor," according to the Jackson Prison-North Complex rulebook, and "Coats are not to be draped over laps." Despite the rules, anything is possible, he says, though he shies away from it now: "It's disrespectful to my woman." Instead, his love affairs are built on talk and fantasy.

"One of the tricks to doing time, one of the key essential tricks, is you never leave here in your mind. You stay here. You bring women to you. You bring things to you. "If I'm fantasizing in my cell about a woman, for example, she's gonna be in my cell.

I 'm gonna ask her to sit down: 'Wanna sit on the bed? Go ahead. Kick back. Let's It all takes place here, and when somebody leaves it's her, not me. I send kerhome, outside the walls. That's important.

Psychologically, you can screw yourself up by going in and out, in and out, in and out. It gets crazy. "I knew that within the first two years." 1 19, a new con, he was shy, in- I troverted, brush-cut, clean-shaven, well-publicized and determined to kill himself. The whispers from the other cons the first day he walked into the joint haunted him: They knew who he was and expected him to prove he was a killer. Larry Lee Ranes tried to check out.

He smashed light bulbs and slipped slivers of glass into gelatin capsules that he swallowed at bedtime. He woke up, disappointed, the next morning. He drank lacquer thinner, acquired from the wood shop. "The burp was horrible," he says, but it didn't kill him. He tried a trick with a heavy book, tying contraband string around it and around his neck, then hanging the book over the edge of the bed.

Advisers had Ross Winn, left, and nephew Chris Winn fulfill custom neon fantasies. it," he says. "I wanted to find out how it was done. The more I found out, the more I wanted to do it." He and Chris, his nephew, got their initial training in Windsor and Minneapolis and opened their Detroit business in February. Impulse buyers take note: Prices for a custom neon piece begin at $100.

But unless your cat tips over your neon flamingo, it will last 25 to 30 years before needing a new shot of neon. Creative Neea, 12104 Moc-ana, Detreit. Plieae S3-3730. Hours: 9-0 weekdays, 10-3 Sat. ome things you need.

Others, you just want. Take neon signs, for example. You could probably live a long and productive life without your own neon pink flamingo, at once tawdry and hypnotic. But would you want to? Creative Neon owners Ross and Chris Winn are betting that want will beat out need. They offer custom neon creations in any shape you or they can dream up.

Working for private as well as business customers, they have bent neon tubing into playing cards, steaming doughnuts, palm trees, cocktail glasses, car emblems, moons, cacti and free-form shapes. Ross Winn, a former hospital worker, was lured into the business of making neon by his fascination with the medium. "I saw some nice work in the past and was intrigued by.