If Damon West has a story to tell, he’ll tell it to you quickly.

That’s because the former college quarterback has ground to recover — the seven-plus years he spent in the custody of the state of Texas.

That’s just for starters. There were years spent in drug addiction, alcohol abuse, crime, the many miles taken down wrong, one-way roads, outpacing the police, sometimes at breakneck speed and, in the process, leaving behind him the worthy life lessons imparted to him by good parents in a loving home.

Here’s a turnaround story for you: On May 18, 2009, a jury sentenced West, a one-time Port Arthur golden boy athlete with a limitless future, to 65 years in prison for a crime spree, fueled by his craving for meth, that came to a screeching halt in a Dallas County courtroom. That’s more prison time than most murderers get, more than most convicted child molesters or rapists ever see.

There was a time when Damon West looked in the mirror and saw a man who could outthink, out con, or simply charm enough people to last another day in his exhausting, whirlwind life of perpetual crime. What the jury saw when it looked at Damon West was a monster.

 

Full circle

On May 17, 2019 — in two months — the last day of a whirlwind decade of life since his criminal conviction, West will step forward to receive a master’s degree

in criminal justice from Lamar University. Here’s how full circle West’s life has come since Nov. 16, 2015, the day he left prison behind him:

• He’s started and retained a job as a paralegal with a prestigious law firm, Provost Umphrey, in Beaumont. He first gained the firm’s notice when he drafted his own appeal from prison, an effort that impressed the Beaumont attorneys who reviewed it. They offered him work before he left prison.
• He’s made some 300 presentations to high school and college athletic programs — Alabama and Clemson, among them — and to civic and church groups and more, warning people about the dangers of illegal, addictive drugs.
• He’ll complete his master’s program at Lamar within a calendar year.
• Come Saturday, he’ll sign copies of his first book, “The Change Agent,” at the Museum of the Gulf Coast, where his dad, former Port Arthur News sports editor Bob West, is enshrined in the Sports Hall of Fame. The book is selling briskly and a second book, co-authored with motivational speaker Jon Gordon, will be published later this year.

How’s that for a life of ups and downs and now ups, spent at breakneck speed?

“It’s hard to wrap your brain around the arc of my life,” he said this week.

 

Recovery begins

But there’s this, too: The moment that prison door slammed behind him in 2008, his recovery began. It was, he said, a life-changing moment, the cold slap of reality that drilled this truth into his meth-ridden skull: He’d been given enormous gifts — loving parents and brothers, a sharp mind, huge athletic skills, a charming disposition — and wasted them, all of them. He’d hurt others, sometimes immeasurably. He’d turned his back on God. There was only one way to go from the bottom of a living, fiery pit: Up.

West talked about that this week, leading up to the book signing that is scheduled at the Museum of the Gulf Coast, 700 Procter St., Port Arthur, from 2-4 p.m. Saturday. The museum has books stocked for sale.

“What I want people to understand is that addiction is disgusting, awful, and it affects everyone in the country,” he said in an interview this week. But prison’s no picnic either, as he illustrates starkly in his book, in which he is unsparing in his own self-assessment but hopeful in his outlook. That’s the dichotomy upon which so much of West’s story rests: Given what amount to a life’s sentence, he had to repair his life, polish his soul and, against all odds, hold hope in his heart for his future.

“The state of Texas took custody of my body but never got custody of my mind,” West recounted this week. “That happens to so many people in prison — if your mind and soul get incarcerated, you’re gone.”

 

Two messages

West held two messages emblazoned in his mind when he was transferred to the custody of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, where he spent most of his time in the Stiles Unit. One was from his mother, Genie, who warned him not to become in prison a man she would not recognize later, someone hardened by prison violence that leads to gang life. He had to get on God’s back, she said, and let his Heavenly Father carry him through the daunting, daily risks and hardships that awaited him.

The second came from “Mr. Jackson,” a lifer who’d chosen to follow Islam and laid out for him the reality of what rested ahead for him in incarceration. Much of prison life was dictated by race and violence, the prison-wise Jackson told him. West did not have to win all of his fights — and there would be fights in prison, Jackson assured him — but he had to show he was willing to fight. Hence, the story of the “coffee bean,” how West could operate neither from weakness nor cruelty in prison, but how he could beneficially change the atmosphere in which he would operate behind bars, to his benefit and to the benefit of those around him. The lesson rests in the title of his book.

“The Change Agent,” starkly honest, recounts how West disintegrated his own life, then reclaimed it. Its publication time for him, he said, depended upon his own recovery as an addict and as a man. He want to offer more than words, but deeds.

The book took shape in prison from his personal diary entries, which started one day during a lockdown in 2011, after the fog of addiction had cleared his mind. It progressed as he kept his solitary path in prison, forming a plan — and acting on it — to make his life meaningful. If nothing else, he decided, he could sound a warning to others about drugs and the misery they cause not only for the addict, but for those who love him.

 

New life

The book’s journey moves toward recovery, toward taking accountability for his actions, toward becoming the person he was supposed to be. What college athlete doesn’t dream of greater glory, when every day holds the promise of unbridled success?

Prison is a different reality. There, the inmate sits in his own misery, and yearns for the routine life — home, family, service — and the opportunity to become not the burden in society, but a solution: Somebody useful. West yearned for that.

In the end, “The Change Agent” makes it to the other side, moves past the cruelty of incarceration to becoming a normal guy — or as normal as a published author, successful employee, motivational speaker and educated man can be.

“I’ve made the transition from formerly incarcerated, a drug addict, a convicted felon, to a normal guy with a normal life,” he said this week. That was a long road.

A year ago, he said, he met Kendell Romero, a nurse practitioner who offered him his first caring, mature relationship and the opportunity to not just take but to share in a loving relationship.

“Once I found this life, it let me know I had arrived, after living in an environment that was so negative, so toxic.

“The life I have with Kendell,” he said, “is a life I didn’t know I’d ever get to have. But God has given me everything I could have ever dreamed of in this new life.”

For “The Change Agent,” life has changed.