PROLOGUE — I DON’T FUCKING LOSE

I DON’T FUCKING LOSE. Remember that. Tattoo it in your skull before you flip another page, because it’s the only goddamn thing that kept me alive.

This book isn’t polite. It isn’t bedtime reading. It’s not Netflix drama where bad things get wrapped up in forty-five minutes with a laugh track. This is stomach-turn shit. Language raw enough to peel skin. Stories that’ll crawl inside your head and fuck with you long after you set the book down. If words like “fuck,” “goddamn,” or “sadist motherfucker” make you twitch, slam the cover shut now. Because if you keep going, you’re stepping into my world, and in my world there was no mercy, no comfort, no “safe space.” There was only a Box, a humming floor, and lights that never shut the fuck off.

They called it “suicide watch.” I call it murder with paperwork.

Four steel walls. No clock, no window, no pen, no paper. Just a diaper-smock reeking of bleach and shame. They said it was for my safety. Bullshit. It was dignity prevention, a Velcro muzzle for the soul. Try sleeping with a strobe burning through your eyelids. Try meditating with fluorescent lights buzzing like a hive in your skull. That sound makes your jaw clench until the ache climbs into your temples. And if the lights didn’t get you, the floor would. It hummed under my bare feet like a machine with a grudge — four levels of invisible hell. Level one: dizzy, like cheap weed mixed with cheaper tequila. Level two: guts swinging until you’re seasick in your own skin. Level three: heart sprinting with no finish line. Level four? They’d juice you with some chemical, and suddenly you’re trapped in a coffin running a marathon with your own pulse. Seventy-two hours of adrenaline terror, every beat screaming *die, die, die*.

That’s where the mantra was born. Not a motivational speech. Not a bumper sticker. Just me, half-naked, wired to hell, screaming into the void: **I DON’T FUCKING LOSE.**

Time on the outside is birthdays and Netflix seasons. In the Box, time cooks down to torture. Seconds stretch like rubber bands. Minutes collapse into hallucinations. Nights stack crooked until you forget what a morning feels like. My calendar wasn’t months; it was piss water mopped into my cell, soap shaved thinner each commissary run, aces missing from my deck after “recreation.” Recreation — thirty minutes in a stinking hallway with western reruns I’d never touch outside. Inside, even a John Wayne grunt counted as salvation.

The kiosk was our so-called lifeline. A glowing altar that ate complaints and spat back one word: **UNSUBSTANTIATED.** “No meds for a month.” UNSUBSTANTIATED. “Blood sugar at 500, risk of coma.” UNSUBSTANTIATED. “Vision going gray, nerves on fire.” UNSUBSTANTIATED. It didn’t deny my pain; it erased me. I’d press my face close to that flickering screen and whisper, “Substantiate my pulse, you motherfuckers. Substantiate the piss water. Substantiate the fact I’m still breathing.” The kiosk never argued. It didn’t need to. Silence was the weapon.

And in between those denials, they ran the carnival: one hour Arctic blast, next hour sauna hell. You don’t sleep in that cycle. You twitch. You hallucinate. Rats in judge’s robes walk through your walls. Fluorescent tubes whisper grievance codes. Shower drains open into decades. They call it “environmental control.” I call it engineering psychosis.

326 days. Locked out of reality. Extreme force twice a day from guards wearing activated shock gloves. Every request pushed to the kiosk, every plea stamped UNSUBSTANTIATED. That was the routine. But routine wasn’t the worst. Sleep deprivation was.

THE SCIENCE OF BREAKING A BRAIN

Harvard proved it. The Navy trains through it. The CIA perfected it. Sleep deprivation isn’t just cruel; it’s a scalpel. Miss a night: groggy. Two: words slip. Three: the filter in your brain blows out. By day five? Dreams crash into waking life. Shadows grow teeth. The switchboard in your head — the thalamus — quits its job. Normally it sorts signal from noise. Under deprivation, everything leaks through. Your cortex tries to explain chaos the only way it knows how: by inventing ghosts.

Harvard kept people awake for 88 hours. By the fourth day, every subject hallucinated — lights, voices, bugs. Not some, not most. Every single one. The Navy’s Hell Week does the same thing. Five days awake and recruits start seeing dolphins in the surf, helicopters that vanish, voices giving phantom orders. Instructors laugh because it’s predictable. The CIA used it in black sites for the same reason: it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t bruise, it just scars the mind. By the fifth day you’re unreliable. By the tenth, you’re broken.

So when I say I was awake for five straight days, pissing blood, begging for insulin, vision fading, EMT telling me, “If I thought you needed a hospital, I’d call an ambulance” — and the phone didn’t even have a fucking 911 button — don’t call it exaggeration. I was right in the window Harvard mapped, the same one the Navy exploits, the one the CIA weaponized. Williamson County ran the playbook on me.

And once you see the science, you see the intent. Sleep deprivation isn’t oversight. It’s engineered. Dial the vent to freeze me one night, crank the heat to roast me the next. Lights buzzing. Strobe flickering. Kiosk laughing UNSUBSTANTIATED. That’s not chaos. That’s design. That’s a lab, running under a red, white, and blue flag.

THE HALLUCINATIONS

You know the science now, so don’t call it madness. Call it evidence.

It starts small. A western freezes on a grin, too long, like someone pressed pause just for me. The vent whispers numbers I’d typed into the kiosk: “M-22… UNSUBSTANTIATED.” I could map the hour by it — vent hiss, TV grin, missing card. Repeat. Judges in rat robes stroll through my walls, gavel hands clicking like typewriters, reading my life like a docket: missed meds, delayed meds, “refusals.” The shower drain becomes a projector, spilling ghosts of my parents, of a younger me who thought lawyers meant safety. Blue light surgeries cut me open in dreams, threading wires into my nerves, rewriting organs like sheet music. Tactile ants crawl electric across my calves. Auditory voices order me not to move, not to eat, not to take meds. I obey, tray snatched away, punished with three weeks of Johnny Sacks — four stale slices of bread, two slabs of green-rimmed meat, soggy cookies, maybe a bruised apple. Punishment disguised as nutrition.

The cruelest part? Hallucinations became predictable. Cold blast plus strobe = TV grin. TV grin plus missing cards = grievance denied. Pattern recognition kept me sane. I charted them in my head like a scientist, ledgering triggers and timestamps. That ledger became my shield. Because when memory is a battlefield, notes are ammunition.

And they weaponized the predictability. Cameras caught the breaks, then they’d use my complaints as proof I was “unreliable.” Tell a jury about rat-judges? Psychotic. Tell a lawyer the TV grinned? Embellishing. The machine was elegant: create the hallucination, wait for the complaint, stamp UNSUBSTANTIATED, erase the witness.

But I don’t fucking lose. I memorized. I documented. I learned to turn even ghosts into exhibits.

FLASHBACK — ROUND ROCK, 2019

If you think this war started in the Box, you’re late to the party. It started seven years earlier.

New county, new wife, new baby, new house. I thought I was building a future. Two in the morning, dead quiet after a backyard day of barbecue, beer, and laughing like we’d finally made it. Two pillows slide off the bed. OCD meltdown. “Calm down,” I tell her. Next thing I know, I’m staring down the barrel of a nine millimeter. That’s how fast a life flips.

She called 911. Ten minutes later, my street lit up like Baghdad. Fifty cops, armored vehicle with a loudspeaker in my driveway, helicopter slicing circles overhead, dogs barking, snipers posted on roofs, neighbors yanked out of bed. Austin media camped on my lawn like it was the fucking Super Bowl. And the sheriff? Sitting in his cruiser tweeting like it was play-by-play.

They even dragged a mobile interrogation van into my cul-de-sac and stuffed my mom and sister inside. Guantánamo on wheels, Round Rock edition. For what? A domestic fight that should’ve stayed in the bedroom. The DA dropped it. “Not enough evidence.” All that theater, all that money, and nothing to prosecute. But the damage was done. My name branded in NCIC and TCIC like ink you can’t scrub. I stopped being LeRoy Nellis, citizen. I became Joker — their target practice.

When that circus didn’t win, they staged Act Two. Jared Dawson’s roadside ambush — unmarked cars, AR-15s, intimidation theater. Then the mushroom grow “discovery” in my garage, a photo-op crime scene. Every act the same script: build a headline, erode my credibility, make the plea look like mercy later. They didn’t win, but they kept the play rolling. And by December 2023, when all my past charges had been dropped and my record was clear, they hit reset. New arrest. New intake. New Box.

SOUTHSIDE — FUCKERY BY DESIGN

The door slammed like a shotgun and told me time didn’t matter anymore. Southside wasn’t chaos. It was punishment engineered down to the details.

The smell hit first: piss-drain rot, mildew, mold climbing the shower up to my hips, spores puffing every time water ran. Trustees mopped with piss water and called it “cleaning.” Requests for bleach? Denied. Requests for rags? Denied. Hygiene wasn’t an option. Infection was policy.

The TV was another weapon. One night we had a sixty-inch screen. Next morning? Thirty-six. Horizon collapsed. They blamed “maintenance.” I called it psychological warfare. Static storms timed exactly when I sat down to watch. Reruns of PG daytime trash. News loops a week late. Weather reports from another month. Even the screen itself seemed to look back — freeze a face, twitch a grin, hold me under its eye. Surveillance disguised as entertainment.

If the TV didn’t get you, the kiosk would. Hit “L,” you’d get “M.” Three presses before a key stuck. No copy-paste. Messages sabotaged until they looked like drunken gibberish. And every response the same: **UNSUBSTANTIATED.** No meds. UNSUBSTANTIATED. Blood sugar at 500. UNSUBSTANTIATED. Blindness setting in. UNSUBSTANTIATED. The system wasn’t broken; it was built to gaslight.

Phones were worse. Every handset stamped NCIC. Ghost voices bleeding into the line. Static slicing conversations with my lawyer. Distortion chopping calls with my mom. Too perfect, too consistent to be “bad tech.” Surveillance disguised as malfunction.

And commissary? Another carnival of cruelty. Thirty bucks dropped on soap and food, and trustees skimmed it before it hit my hand. Soap shaved down. Food stolen. Toothpaste watered. Cards missing — always the aces, so even solitaire turned into paranoia. Theft wasn’t about value. It was about trust. Break it until you don’t even trust a deck of cards.

The cuffs were their favorite toy. Deputies Lee, Beth, Jamal. Cuffs weren’t restraints; they were weapons. They twisted wrists on removal, torqued tendons until my hand screamed. My right wrist still clicks years later, invisible injury carved in cartilage. They called it “escort protocol.” I call it sadism.

SURVIVAL DOCTRINES

You survive engineered misery by writing your own code. Mine was the Nellis Miranda:

“Any and all, not limited to, everything passed from December of 2023 to present and future, made by me, Leroy William Nellis II, shall be deemed false and fabricated. Any and all information is made up and may not be used in a court of law. All honesty will resume as soon as I step foot physically in a court of law.”

They laughed. I didn’t. That doctrine was armor. It meant the circus couldn’t use my broken words as testimony against me. The truth would testify in court, not through their surveillance.

The other doctrine was simpler: Zero Doctrine. Zero ass, zero favors, zero fucks. Don’t bend. Don’t beg. Don’t barter. They can steal your soap, twist your cuffs, flood your lungs with mold, but they can’t steal your will unless you hand it over. Zero Doctrine was the firewall.

MANIFESTO CLOSE

Southside was a machine. Every shaved soap bar, every missing ace, every cuff twist, every kiosk denial — all gears in the same device. A machine designed to grind you until you signed the plea, confessed to lies, begged for mercy. Williamson County wasn’t jail. It was a black-site lab with better branding, running the CIA’s playbook under a Texas flag. They called it suicide watch. It was murder by bureaucracy, engineered psychosis for profit.

Here’s the kicker: every day they held me, the county got paid. A hundred bucks from the feds, fifty from the state. Costs per inmate maybe fifty a day. Net profit: a hundred-plus, multiplied by headcount. Add dual sovereignty — the feds charge you for the same crime the state does, no double jeopardy defense — and you’ve got an endless revenue stream. Flesh-for-cash economics. The longer you rot, the fatter the ledger.

So understand this: when I say I DON’T FUCKING LOSE, it’s not bravado. It’s survival. It’s ledger against ledger. They tried to steal my witness, erase my memory, rewrite my sanity. But I turned hallucinations into exhibits, commissary theft into testimony, cuff scars into evidence. I memorized. I documented. I lived to tell it.  

And when the lights finally shut off and the machine collapses under its own corruption, I’ll still be standing.  

Because I don’t fucking lose.