Felon Angels: The 10-13 pages below is the true story and inception point of my new single, “Felon Angels”. Written, performed, produced, and to be released 20+ years later, this Friday, the 17th of July, 2026.

You certainly don’t need to read it all as it is part of a much longer story 38 chapters in. The last few pages should suffice. Feel free to read it all or none at all.

I hope you like the song out now on Spotify and YouTube… Search JT Catalano “Felon Angels”

Subchapter 38.1: One Shot, Wrong Guy

The crazy part is it really did feel like a honeymoon at first.
After the big confession night, things actually got better.

We were lighter.
No more half-fights about shit we weren’t naming.
No more crying every other day.

We talked about me visiting her in NYC once she got to FIT, her coming up to UConn when I finally made it there. These little fantasy weekends—me on the train to the city, her on the bus to some college town—like we were already living a “healthy young couple figuring it out” montage. Split-screen movie in my head: Huskies hoodie on my side, city lights on hers. Normal-person cosplay with good lighting.

I played less poker.
Skipped a few games.
Stayed in more.
Went to her work to pick her up.

She’d just gotten a job at the nicest steakhouse in town—started as hostess, moved up to waitress. Black dress. Hair done. Big smile at the front door, walking hedge funds and dentists to their tables. Her parents were proud.

“See? Our girl. City-bound,” you could hear them thinking.

For a minute, we looked dangerously close to normal.

Then Griffin walked into Tonelli’s.

I was mid-shift, smelling like dough and cheese, when he strolled in to say what’s up to his mom and I. 

Griffin and I hadn’t hung out properly in a while. Life had scattered us—jobs, girlfriends, crews—but when he walked in, it was like no time had passed.

And I’d already decided I was going to this party in Poughkeepsie that weekend.

Some college up there, one of those “friend of a friend” deals. There were like ten of us going. Big Mik was in town, he was coming. The rest of the gang lined up quick.

So when Griffin walked in, I invited him without even thinking.

“Yo, we’re rolling to Poughkeepsie this weekend,” I said. “You should come.”

He was in before I finished the sentence.

I didn’t know yet that that throwaway invite was one of those little forks-or-byways-in-the-road moves you only recognize in reverse.

I wish I could tell you the whole night, scene by scene.
I can’t.

Blackouts were already part of my package by then—ever since Silver Hill, it was like my brain had an eject button for anything past a certain level of intoxication. Lights on, body moving, memory recorder unplugged.

So the night goes like this in my memory:
We get there.
We drink.
We party.

Then smash cut.

I’m alone.

Walking down a street in Poughkeepsie by myself, blacked-out-but-still-standing mode. No idea where my friends are. No idea where I’m going. Just drunk autopilot. Street stink. Hot pavement. Somebody’s garbage can leaking summer.

Then I hear yelling.
Look up.

There’s a pack of kids—fifteen of them—running at me.

I don’t know what’s happening, but my body knows enough:
Fists up.

First kid gets to me and I flip him. Pure instinct. Land on top of him.

Once I’m there, I go full animal.
Headbutts.
Punches.

I’m beating on him like my life depends on it because at that exact second, it does.

The rest of them are on me—punching my ribs, kicking my back, catching my head and legs. It’s just impact and noise and rage and bone hitting bone.

By the time the lights show up—blue and red flashing—I’m still on top of the first kid, still throwing shots.

He’s screaming, “GET HIM OFF ME!”

So it looks exactly how they want it to look:
Me, the aggressor.
Them, the heroes trying to save their friend.

They sell that story hard when the cops come.

“We were trying to pull him off.”
“He just snapped.”
“He attacked us for no reason.”

I’m on the ground, bleeding, trying to get enough air to say,
“I was walking alone. They rushed me. I don’t know these kids. I’ve never seen them before.”

There’s fifteen of them.
There’s one of me.

Guess whose version wins.

They hit me with a breach of peace and cuff me.

I’m losing my mind.

Not just yelling, but saying shit to those cops you shouldn’t say to anyone holding your future and a taser.

“Check my ribs,” I kept saying. “Check my legs. Look at the lumps all over my body. Does this look like I jumped someone?”

They didn’t care.

Paperwork said one thing.
Fifteen kids said the same thing.

So I spent the night in a cell.

No shoes.
No belt.
No answers.

Just concrete, the smell of old piss, and the hum of fluorescent lights that never shut off.

My friends looked for me everywhere.
Hit the hospital. No Jeff.

Eventually someone thought: jail or hospital.

Big Mik checked his phone and found the voicemail I’d somehow left before they took me in. He came down, paid the hundred bucks, and bailed me out.

They popped the cell.

“Catalano, you’re out,” the guard said.

I walked down the hallway past holding rooms, still foggy, body screaming in twelve different places.

As I passed one open door, I glanced left and locked eyes with a kid sitting inside one of the rooms.

He was staring at me like he’d been waiting.

His face was absolutely mangled.
Both cheekbones stitched.
Eyes swollen to slits.
Nose flattened.
Lips blown up like balloons.

I stared.

Holy shit, I whispered to myself.
Part of me thought, well, at least I didn’t have that happen.

Even in there, that old spell kicked in:
It could always be worse. It wasn’t that bad.

I signed my papers, got my bag of belongings, and walked outside with Mik, telling him the story as best I could.

No memory before the rush.
No idea who those kids were.
Just pain and confusion.

We were halfway to the car when I heard my reality start to crack at the seems.

The station doors burst open.
Two cops ran out, guns drawn.

“PUT YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD!”
“GET ON YOUR KNEES!”
“ON THE GROUND, NOW!”

I froze with my hand on the door handle, then slowly did what they said.

Face in the gravel.
Hands behind my head.

I tried to talk.
“What the fuck is happening?”

“Shut up,” one said.

They cuffed me again, harder this time, hauled me back inside.

Same Miranda script, but different charge.

“You are being arrested for gang assault.”

Gang. Assault.

I went off.

Screaming.
Cursing.
Losing my mind in that special way where every fear you’ve ever had volunteers to come true at once.

I was completely powerless.

Every nightmare I’d had since Silver Hill and Fishkill about the system grabbing me and not letting go was suddenly a day on the calendar.

And the worst part?

I was blacked out for half of it.

So as the days went by and they transferred me to the county on $100,000 bail—seven years on the table—I started thinking, maybe I did do that. Maybe I did mangle that kid that bad and my brain hit delete.

That’s the thing about blackouts: they don’t prove you’re innocent or guilty. They just prove your hippocampus left the campus before you did.

How the fuck do you argue with missing film?

I called my parents.
Told them as much as I could without sounding more insane than I already did.

Next visit, my dad showed up at the county.

Orange jumper on me.
He was on the other side of the glass, holding the plastic phone. That plastic phone smell—warm rubber and other people’s spit.

He asked me straight:
“Did you do this?”

And all I could say—the most honest thing I had—was,
“I really don’t know. I remember walking alone. I remember them rushing me. I remember getting beat. I don’t remember anything that looks like the kid I saw in that room.”

He believed me.
Or at least, he believed I believed it.

But he’s not stupid.

He knew the bail amount.
He knew the charge.
He knew “I don’t remember” doesn’t do much for a judge.

“I’ll talk to an attorney,” he said. “We’ll see what we’re looking at.”

But there was nothing about, “Don’t worry, we’ll get you out tomorrow.”

How do you put your house up when your son can’t even tell you yes or no?

Meanwhile, out in the real world, the truth was already walking around in bloody clothes.

Turns out, while I was stumbling through Poughkeepsie, Griffin and Mik were on the side of the road throwing bags of leaves at passing cars.

Literally.

Trash bags full of leaves.
Car drives by.
Bag hits.
Explodes into a million pieces.
Leaves everywhere.

Nobody really gets hurt.
Unless maybe you’re a big angry kid driving with your girlfriend, and suddenly your windshield is covered in dead foliage.

That kid slammed on the brakes.
Gets out.
Walks around and knocks Mik out cold with one punch. Mik was double the size of Griffin.

But, Griffin does what Griffin does.

His nickname was—and still is—One Shot Griffotte.

His knuckles look like God started to make Wolverine and then changed His mind halfway through. Bone pushed forward, sharp as hell, like four little weapons sticking out with an inch indent in between them.

He lit that kid up.
Mangled his face right there in front of the girlfriend.

It was dark. She was crying. She never got out of the car.

As soon as Mik came back around, they ran.

Later that night, Griffin got a ride home back to Danbury straight to my place that I shared with three roommates—JacAttack, Cowboy Chris, and the Tinman. Shows up with blood all over his clothes, knuckles torn up, telling them the story like it’s just another “you won’t believe what happened” night.

No one knows I’m in jail yet.

They give him clean clothes. Probably mine.
He throws the bloody ones in our dumpster.

Out of sight.

Somewhere in that window, the girlfriend starts leading a manhunt.

She’d seen Griffin and I together at a party earlier. Same build back then. Same energy.

When her boyfriend gets wrecked, she goes looking for Griffin—and decides I’m Griffin enough.

Back to me stumbling around Poughkeepsie with the lights out.
“There he is.”

Wrong guy.
Right target, as far as her emotions are concerned.

So they rushed me.

Fast forward: the “gang assault” victim in the next room.
Gang assault charge on my paperwork.
Me in orange, trying to convince myself I’m not insane.

When my friends finally find out I’m in jail for this, everything snaps into focus.

No phone calls.

They just drive straight to my parents’ house.
Knock on the door.

These are the kids my parents thought were perfect. Solid. Responsible. The ones they’d whisper about like, why can’t you be more like them?

Tinman.
Cowboy.
JacAttack.
Big Mic.
They were Varsity Blues before the movie came out.

They stand in my parents’ living room and tell them the truth.

The leaves.
The car.
The punch.
The “one shot.”
The bloody clothes.

Mik backs it up.

They didn’t know I was locked up when they handed Griffin a fresh T-shirt and let him dump his evidence in our dumpster.

But once they did, they did the thing that counted:
They came clean.

Meanwhile, I was two weeks deep in county.

A hundred-thousand-dollar bail hanging over my head.
Seven years at Fishkill hanging in the air like a sentence someone had already started reading.

Every night, lying on that thin mat, all I could think about was the life I wasn’t going to have.

With my first love.
With anyone.

The hour of sleep I got around 4 a.m. came with nightmares. Fishkill again—not as a “scared straight” field trip this time, but with my name on the door.

Forks in the road everywhere.

The diamond heist I almost did.
The bottle in Salem.
The bench girls.
Now this.

Every bad choice, every almost, every “it wasn’t that bad” moment lined up on the other side of the glass and watched me realize what it looks like when they finally add up.

I didn’t know yet about the inner city boxer I was about to meet in there, or the fight-to-the-death moment that almost happened.

Right then, all I knew was:

I might actually be gone this time.

And if I am, it’s not going to be because I was a monster.

It’s going to be because I kept putting myself in the wrong environments with the wrong people wearing the wrong suits the world handed me—bad boy, legend, victim, wild card—until I couldn’t remember where the costume stopped and my actual skin began.

Intent and environment had been playing chicken for years; this was the first time I believed environment might win.

Then the block opened for rec— and I learned what “to the death” actually means in a place where nobody’s impressed by your street fights.

Subchapter 38.2: Fallen Angel

I got to talk to her once while I was there.
One collect call.

Hearing her voice on that phone, with the echo and the background noise and some other guy yelling at a CO three tables away, felt like somebody had taken our whole relationship and put it in a blender.

She cried.
I tried not to.

I could hear her trying to picture where I was, what I looked like, and I hated it.

I didn’t want her to see me in the orange suit. Didn’t want her coming through that door and seeing me behind glass like her own personal Scared Straight episode.

So I told my dad after that visit:
“Tell her I love her and I’m sorry. And tell her not to come here.”

He nodded. He didn’t argue. He knew I meant it.

Loving her from behind bulletproof glass felt worse than not seeing her at all.

County was its own little planet.

They had me on a block that was basically overflow from the real hells—New York City, long sentences, stacked charges.

Me and one other Hell’s Angel-looking dude were the only white guys on that tier. Everyone else was from the city or close enough—Bronx, Harlem, Brooklyn, Queens—waiting for trial, waiting on bail, or already convicted and waiting to get shipped upstate to start counting life sentences.

The room itself was a long rectangle.

On one wall: overflow bunks. Metal double-deckers, lined up like dominos. No privacy, just bodies stacked.

Down the middle: cafeteria tables bolted to the floor.

On the other wall: the real cages. Actual barred cells with doors that slammed shut and stayed shut. Those were for the fully sentenced—murderers, rapists, the guys whose paperwork weighed more than I did.

Once a day, for about an hour, they’d let everybody mix.
Convicted and not.
Overflow bunks and locked cells.

One big social hour in hell.

My plan was simple:
No eye contact.
Talk to nobody.
If something goes down, do what you have to and hope you survive long enough to regret it.

But prison doesn’t care about your plans.

The guy on the bunk north of me started talking anyway.

Every night, when the lights dimmed and the volume dropped, he’d ask me something small.

“Where you from?”
“First time in?”

I gave short answers at first.
“Bethel.”
“Yeah.”

He didn’t push.

Older African American dude, probably in his late forties. Calm eyes. Calm voice. Looked like he’d been carved out of something hard and then left in the sun too long.

I figured he’d killed somebody.

Turns out, nah.

He was in for life on a third-strike crack charge.
Possession. Smoking. Holding. Selling. One or all of those.

The whole “you blow three whistles and the game is over” bullshit, except the game is your life.

Can you fucking believe that?

Some guy rapes and murders someone and gets life.
This guy smoked the rock the government pumped into his neighborhood in the eighties and got… the same. Rockefeller really rocked; and locked the fella.

We talked more as the nights went on.
Slowly. Respectfully.

He’d been a champion boxer when he was younger. Real titles. Real wins.

Then the fights stopped. The outlet vanished. Whatever pain he’d been punching out in the ring came back and knocked on the door.

Crack answered.
Homelessness.
Arrests.
Strikes.

And then: third one.

Game over.

Lifer in county, just waiting for the state to decide which box he’d die in.

There was another guy in there too—a different category of monster.

He was waiting to get transferred on eight life sentences. Multiple girls, NYC. Murder and rape and combinations of both.

He looked eerily close to the baddest man on the planet, yours truly, Mike Tyson. I’m not exaggerating. Same build, same head, same eyes that made you feel like you were already hurt just by being looked at.

Every day, during that one-hour mix, I could feel him staring at the side of my head.

Like pure hatred, concentrated into a laser.

He had nothing to lose.

If I get in a fight in county and “win,” all I get is extra charges. Nobody’s writing self-defense on my saint card. It’s just “inmate assaulted inmate,” add another stripe to the file.

If he gets in a fight and kills me? They just add one more life sentence onto the stack he’s never going to finish anyway.

He hated my energy. I could feel it. The boxer could too.

I kept the code:
No eye contact.
No talking.

Except with the boxer.

He was the one person I let in.

One night, he brought it up.

“You know that dude that just stares at you every day?” he said.

I laughed. “Yeah. I think I noticed.”

“He’s a bad man,” the boxer said. “Evil. They got him for eight lifetimes.”

Then he explained how fights go down in there.

“If it jumps off on the other side of the room, the COs are gonna look over there first. If he ever grabs you and pulls you into one of them cells and that door closes? You fight for your survival. You understand?”

He said it like he was telling me how to make a sandwich.

I nodded. “Guess… thanks?”

He smiled.

“Just keep your eyes where they are,” he said. “I see enough for both of us.”

A couple days go by. Same routine. Same stare burning a hole in my cheek during rec.

Then one afternoon, it gets surreal.

OutKast comes on the TV.
The “Roses” video.

First twenty seconds, everybody’s trying to stay hard.
Then shoulders start bouncing.
Heads start nodding.

You can’t help it. It’s OutKast. The beat cuts through concrete.

Within forty seconds we’ve got something that looks like a Jailhouse Rock—guys humming, mouthing the chorus, tapping along on the tables.

Even me.

For one second, I thought, maybe I don’t mind dying in Fishkill if we at least get OutKast before lights out.

Murder Dude did not agree.

You could see the rage boiling up in his face. The room was having a moment of joy and it offended his entire being.

Guards too.

They came over and shut the TV off like it was a direct threat to security.

No more smiles.
No more music.

Back to ham-and-bread sandwiches and the sound of people chewing.

I went back to staring at my tray.

A minute later, he sits down directly across from me.

Just staring.

I kept chewing.
Kept my eyes down.

He got up, walked over to the games, grabbed the chess set.
Came back, set it up, yelled for someone to sit across from him.

They laid out the board and realized they were short a piece.

Something in him snapped.

“Who the fuck did this?” he exploded. “I’m sick of this shit. One of you motherfuckers is dead.”

I kept chewing.

He grabbed the clear garbage bag out of the can, lifted it up.
There, at the bottom, was the missing chess piece.

He held it up like evidence.

“That motherfucker right there did it! I saw his bitch ass,” he said, pointing straight at me.

I kept my eyes on the table.

I knew I didn’t throw the piece out. I also knew that didn’t matter.

Facts are optional in a place where reputation is currency.

“I’m talking to you, motherfucker,” he said, stomping back and slamming his fists on the table.

The whole room went quiet.

I didn’t change my rhythm.
Chew.
Swallow.
Breathe.

I didn’t look at his face. Just watched his chest and his hands in my peripheral, mentally preparing for the feeling of metal or fists or both.

If he tried dragging me toward those cells and that door closed I thought..
I’m not scared to die, not scared to fight, just horrified about never getting out of there..

Then, from right behind me, I heard:
“I did it. I threw it out. What you wanna do about it?!”

The whole room held its breath.

Murder Mike looked stunned for half a second.
So was I.

We all knew who said it.

The boxer.

The lifer on three-strikes crack charges.
The one man on that block everybody knew not to test unless you were truly ready.

Murder Dude looked at him, then back at me, then back at him.

He knew.

He knew he was the one who’d tossed the piece, or at least, he knew he’d picked me as the scapegoat just to have an excuse to crack my head.

He took his fists off the table.

“You lucky, motherfucker! “Must have a felon angel.”

Then he walked back to the trash, fished out the chess piece, sat down, and started playing like nothing happened.

That night, back on the bunks, I asked the boxer,
“Why did you do that?”

He shrugged like it was obvious.

“I told you,” he said. “You remind me of someone. White women that helped me for no reason, long time ago. Gave me a fresh start. You got the same soul.” 

He paused, looked me over the way a coach scans a fighter.

“And I ain’t on that shit no more,” he said. “I got my weight back. My hands still work. He knows that.”

He nodded toward the cage of the murderous chess monster.

“He don’t want that smoke. So I used what I got.”

Guardian angel in a DOC-issued jumpsuit. Felon angel. Never heard that one before.

A warrior who got swallowed by addiction when he lost the only healthy outlet he had.

A man doing life because of a law that punished his coping mechanism like it was somebody else’s corpse.

Music had cracked the room open for a second. OutKast came on, and for twenty seconds a bunch of men who’d done terrible things or had terrible things done to them got to remember they were still human.

The system hated that. The guards killed it.

But that little joy wave was enough for one guy to see me, really see me, and decide I was worth stepping in front of another man’s rage for.

Even in hell, the right song and the right soul can bend the script.

That was my felon angel in a cage.

Proof that the world I’d been dropped into wasn’t just monsters and victims.

It was monsters who used to be boxers.
Angels with felonies.
And a kid from Bethel, still trying to figure out which one he was going to turn into.
All the while trying to fall asleep to the uncomfortable feeling that I couldn’t shake.
I reminded him of a nice white woman… Hmm..  

The very next morning a CO said the only sentence I cared about: “Pack up. You made bail.”

Up to that point in my life I think that was the best feeling I had ever had. I shook hands with the boxer and pulled him in a little closer. You may have changed the trajectory of my life yesterday in a big way. I’m not going to lie though, I hope I never see you again. If I do it’ll mean I lose this case and meet you in Fishkill. Then I whispered, just in case, don’t tell anybody I remind you of nice white women….

We both lost it laughing harder than I think either of us had in a long time.

I owe you one. Thank you man…

……And END CHAPTER

20 years later I wrote….. FELON ANGELS