Confessions of a dangerous mind

The fact that Loya, now 43 years old -- reformed, planning a book tour, and grinning at me from across the table -- also happens to be a gifted wordsmith doesn't make the unsparing portrait of himself he paints in the memoir any more palatable. "If people trusted me, they deserved to get burned," he writes, and goes on to detail his "intricate intrigues to separate a man from his money, patiently cultivating friendship before fleecing him."

Loya is no longer a criminal, but the clearing up of a blackened heart is much more difficult to prove than a blackened record. Not yet ready to ask him if he's ever tried to fleece me, I turn instead for more details about his transformation, and how, to quote from the book, his "thoughtless life of crime ended" and "life of remorse" began.

"It wasn't one thing," he says. "I was in solitary confinement, and trying to keep from going crazy. And I had time, lots of time to think about how I'd gotten to this place, and how much of a scared little boy I still was underneath all my bluster."

He also rediscovered his earlier childhood love for literature. Throughout his two-year stint in solitary confinement under a murder investigation of a former cellmate (the killer was never found), Loya wrote and read incessantly: Martin Luther, Thomas Aquinas and, fittingly, St. Augustine. One night in 1994, at the age of 33, after leaving solitary confinement to return to the general population, he found his very own Norman Mailer on PBS: Richard Rodriguez, the essayist and commentator on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Loya wrote to Rodriguez, and the two began a correspondence that helped him develop his ear throughout the rest of his sentence.

The letters between Loya and Rodriguez form some of the most lyrical passages in the book -- but they are hardly proof of the honey-tongued prisoner's progress. (During the course of the correspondence, Loya stabbed a fellow inmate for cutting in front of him in line.) Loya's release in 1996 -- the book ends on his first day of freedom -- is indeed a cliffhanger.

A "free man" in only the crudest material sense of the world, Loya barely even left his brother's house for the first three months after getting out of prison. According to statistics, he tells me, half of ex-cons go back within 90 days, and he was fighting that statistic the only way he knew how, by staying inside. He was fearful of the day-to-day confrontations -- a bumped shoulder, a long line, a cutoff on the highway, which ordinary citizens take for granted, but which can lead to violence in prison. He was fearful of passing by banks and succumbing once more to their allure. Ten thousand dollars in 10 minutes. That's what he used to tell himself, proudly, in his bank-robbing days: I can make $10,000 in 10 minutes. Now he had to be content with whatever he could earn as a writer, and none of his hard-won prison-yard respect could do him any good.

He was tired all the time, just as he'd been in prison, just as he'd been during his teens and 20s -- but not just tired; chronically exhausted, almost narcoleptic. It had never occurred to him that there might be a chemical reason for his fatigue, but a girlfriend suggested he visit a therapist, who took just one session to diagnose him with depression and write out a life-changing prescription to Wellbutrin. The medication did wonders for him, as he tells me now in between sips of Tsingtao. "I began to walk a little more comfortably, less afraid that with every step the ground might be taken out from beneath me," he says. "Honestly, it's as close to redemption as I'm ever going to get."

Next Page: His new self-knowledge led to a phone call to his father: "Hey, Dad, whyd you beat the shit out of me?"

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