CREDIT: Brian Howell photo Authors Mike Oulton (left) and Ed Griffin collaborated on Dystopia, which chronicles Oulton's life as a convicted drug smuggler and Griffin's past as a former priest who teaches prisoners how to write.

He didn't just walk into the classroom, Mike Oulton made an entrance that fully satisfied what he calls his COA, the "centre of attention" syndrome that has made him a people-magnet, from the druggy streets of Victoria to a filthy Mexican jail and, at that moment eight years ago, a small room with desks and cinder-block walls at the max-security lockup in Matsqui.

The instructor of the creative-writing class, Ed Griffin, didn't know what to make of the loud pounding at the door and the stocky, dark-haired guy who then slid into the centre of the room and waved his arms with flare, like a rock star on stage.

"We were in the middle of class," recalls Griffin, "and I was teaching the students about exclamation points and how they're not needed, and here was this walking, talking exclamation point who'd entered the room."

They didn't know it at the time but Oulton's memorable intro was the start of an unlikely friendship between a cocky, charismatic would-be boxer, who'd been caught running drugs a couple years previous, and a socially conservative former priest who taught convicts the finer points of writing. Today, the 30-ish Oulton and Griffin, who's well into what others call their retirement years, have collaborated to write an engaging and entertaining book that nicely dovetails their experiences in jail and with the Canadian prison system that frustrates and angers them.

A good slice of Dystopia spins Oulton's hard-life tale, from foster homes to juvie-detention centres, hustling bottles of Ritalin at school to unloading half-gram "spitballs" of cocaine -- not-so-sweet work for a 16-year-old. His street-corner drug-dealing escalated to a botched plan of running 15 keys of coke, "hidden" in a car's passenger-side airbag compartment, northbound to the Tijuana-San Diego border and on to Canada.

"I've made a lot of bad decisions in my life," Oulton says, "and that was one of them. The theme of my life, from the beginning to right now, could be summed up as bad choices, bad decisions and putting myself at risk for no reason."

Two years spent in a Mexican prison was, not surprisingly, not much fun for Oulton, who kept his sanity by writing in a journal. He boxed a little, too, going two-for-three with a couple KOs, triumphant front-page photos in the local paper and, on the unethical side, a thrown fight that made him good money but couldn't buy his way out of solitary confinement in a dark, overheated pit, or a lengthy, stomach-churning bout of gastritis. Transferred to a Canadian prison, Oulton eventually found his way to Griffin's creative-writing class and discovered a gift that had apparently been inside him all along.

The American-born Griffin, who has 40 years on his co-author and friend, travelled a jail-free path to Canada. In the 1960s, inspired by Martin Luther King's civil-rights movement, the Catholic young man answered the call to march at Selma, Alabama -- an act that shocked his parishioners back in white, suburban Cleveland and put him at odds with the church he'd leave just five years into his priesthood. In the Reagan years, he and his wife, Cathy, uprooted their family from Milwaukee, where he was elected to city council, and moved across the border and west to Cloverdale to continue in the greenhouse business. But what grew was Griffin's passion for writing, to the point of teaching in prisons, founding the Surrey Writer's Conference and authoring several books of fiction.

No pay for teaching prisoners

Griffin now volunteers his time to teach writing at Matsqui after being told last September that the authorities could no longer pay for his services. "I have a master's degree," Griffin says ruefully, "but no teaching certificate, so I'm out. It's OK, it's fine. I'm still going."

This week, he's one session into teaching his latest Introduction to Creative Writing class at Semiahmoo Secondary in South Surrey. But it's this month's launch of Dystopia that is most pressing for Griffin, who is losing an unfair fight with prostate cancer. All things considered, it might be his final, and most memorable, book. "I went into prison trying to start a revolution, that writing could change lives, and I found a friend," he says.

Their collaboration began as a book called Inside Out, which had Oulton (the insider) riffing on the value of the Canadian prison system and Griffin (the outsider) railing against it -- what he calls the "rip-off" of putting convicts in a "warehouse" with few resources for true rehabilitation. Over time, the younger author began to understand and embrace Griffin's views, thanks to an incident involving a fellow prisoner's cellphone being found in a sock. Oulton was denied parole because he wouldn't rat out the guy, and spent 15 additional months in jail because of it. "That's when we changed the whole book around," Oulton says, "including the title."

At Matsqui and, later, Ferndale, Oulton was told to forget his dream of becoming a writer.

"The psychologist said writing was unrealistic and that I should focus more on construction or a labour job of some kind," Oulton recalls. "If you have a dream or some kind of talent -- and I really believe I can be some kind of writer -- they don't support that in prisons.... I even had one PO (parole officer) suggest I go on welfare. That was just ridiculous, but (ex-prisoners) will actually do that because the PO said so and they'll get free money and leach off the system. It's retarded."

In prison, he says, convicts might be schooled in, say, welding and actually later get a job doing that on the outside, but they aren't given life skills such as how to open a bank account or use the internet. "The prison system doesn't set people up to succeed, it sets them up to fail," Oulton says as Griffin nods his agreement while seated at the kitchen table of his North Surrey home.

Eight years of jail behind him and recently free from the burden of a halfway house, Oulton now lives in Coquitlam and works as a pub DJ five nights a week. During the day, he gets his writing fix with an eye on getting into the entertainment biz. He's already written dozens of scripts for TV and big-screen movies, including one based on Dystopia.

The book, put out by the on-demand Trafford publishing house in Victoria, is not without some typos and grammatical gaffs -- and Oulton is smart enough to know it. "It would have been better to have an editor," he says with a groan.

The well-mannered ex-con's dream of becoming a boxer is all but dead, thanks to an aging body that no longer responds well to prolonged workouts.

"I've hung up my gloves -- undefeated, I might add," he says, ignoring the fight he threw for $500 back in Mexico, which bought him food and other jail-life comforts.

Bravely, in pursuit of a fresh start and clean life, he says he's cut all ties to his drug-dealing, no-good cronies on Vancouver Island.

Long ago, one of his pals in prison was Ricardo Scarpino, the known gangster who was gunned down in a vehicle outside a Vancouver steakhouse in January on the night of his engagement party. In fact, while jailed at Matsqui, Scarpino was the one who introduced Oulton to Griffin's creative-writing class.

"Both of them were dynamos, very creative, good writers," Griffin recalls. "Scarpino went one way, though, and Mike has gone another."

Griffin went to Scarpino's funeral, but Oulton did not.

"Surrounding yourself with good people is key," Oulton told the Now last week. "Since I've gotten out (of jail), I've really avoided the people who've dragged me down my whole life, who led me to make bad decisions. Now I just associate myself with good people, like Ed.

"We complement each other," he continues, "but we're totally different, personality-wise. He doesn't like to act out in public and then there's me -- he allows me to act out in public for him. I'm the entertainer, the talker, the showman, and Ed is the observer who sits back and takes it all in. He laughs at my jokes and I like making him laugh, because he really needs it. We're good friends and that's out of necessity in some ways. We both need each other."

- Mike Oulton and Ed Griffin will launch and sign copies of Dystopia at a Rainwriters event Saturday, February 16 from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Chapters store at Strawberry Hill, at 72nd Avenue near Scott Road in Surrey. For more details, see www.rainwriters.com or www.edgriffin.net. Dystopia is also available online at amazon.ca for $19.49.