Vulnerable to affection
Sweat had slimmed considerably, down nearly thirty pounds from six months of preparing their escape. It was a big drop for a fit man of five feet and ten inches who had been a solid 210 pounds, with as little body fat as a lean cut of lamb. The loss accentuated his high cheekbones, the only noticeable trace of his Blackfoot and Cherokee bloodlines. (The thirty-four-yearold appeared more Irish or English than anything else. Anglo ancestry ran on his paternal side, although the surname Sweat was taken from his mother’s first husband, to whom he was not related and had never met.) His unblemished, unlined face held a certain undefinable charm; a blondish brow hung strongly over his deep-set hazel eyes, made greener against the dark leafy hue of his prison button up. A light brown goatee, at times supported by a beard, framed a pair of lips that, when parted, revealed a set of white, mostly straight teeth. These features worked particularly well together when he smiled, complementing the boyish, endearing humor for which he was known. (In his pre-Clinton life, teen girls often sought his advances, and he would entertain their interests by spraying Tommy Hilfiger cologne on his neck before performing a Keith Sweat love ballad — “no relation,” he would joke.) Traces of his youth existed in the form of three black letters on three different fingers of his right hand — I on the ring, F on the middle, and B on the index — etched with Indian ink to form the acronym “IFB,” which stood for “IrishItalian Fate Brothers,” a club of sorts that he and a few other boys from Binghamton had once founded. Across the upper part of his left arm the word REBEL was also inscribed, another relic from his adolescence, underscored with a line that curled on either end. (At fourteen, he had ventured out to a party with his cousin Jeffrey Nabinger and Jeff’s brother, Mike Benedict, who had given him the tattoos. He received two others on his arm that evening, another “IFB” and, above it, a rebel flag. These, however, have faded to only a pattern of dots that, with some imagination, resemble John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.) In Clinton, he had even given a few guys body art, and was particularly proud of a sizable dragon he had drawn on the upper left shoulder and down the bicep of a fellow inmate. (A guard had seen him scoring the man’s skin. The CO was about to reprimand them when, as Sweat recalled, he rolled up his shirt sleeve and said, “I’m next!”)
His artistic skills had improved since meeting Matt, a self-proclaimed copy artist who could recreate nearly any photograph. (Matt had sketched and painted the faces of many politicians, actors, and other celebrities over the years, including Julia Roberts, Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Marilyn Monroe, Oprah Winfrey, and fictional gangster Tony Soprano, which was bought by a woman on eBay for $2,000.) Matt’s canvas work of a young brown and white basset hound — where each brushstroke of fur on its floppy ears held a lifelike weight and texture — had so impressed Sweat that he soon took up the craft. “Painting is about feeling and mood,” he would later say. “I can