Guy Roberts answers to Moose. His mustache is in the horseshoe, or “biker,” style, and he wears a leather vest covered in patches. The decor in his man-cave includes nunchaku.
He works at Wee Willie’s as a dishwasher. In the past, he was a bodyguard in Indianapolis, a bomb builder in the Navy, and a member of the Army National Guard.
He makes and sells jewelry boxes.
Roberts started making them in 1997 after meeting a man who was in prison in Oklahoma. The man made jewelry boxes out of tightly rolled strips of newspaper and cracker boxes. Prison art. The work interested Roberts, who was in prison in Indiana, and he asked him how to do it.
The Oklahoman died six months after Roberts started making his own jewelry boxes.
“I wanted to continue on doing what he was doing,” Roberts says.
The thought to make his hobby a business was there from the beginning.
According to Roberts, there is a demand for quality products handcrafted by prisoners. The demand for his “hobo art” remained, even after he was out of prison.
“Nobody has ever seen anything that I make,” Roberts says. He adds that no one is doing anything similar in the area either. “If they do it, they’re not voicing what they’re doing.”
He hand-rolls the “logs,” using old newspapers and glue. He cuts three of the four sides out of a small box and uses the remaining side as the jewelry box’s hinge. The logs cover the four sides of the box. He adds colonial corners, a common technique used in the construction of houses, to hide any imperfections. Then, he paints them.
Each box takes about nine hours to build. More complicated projects take longer.
Mostly, he sells them through word of mouth.
“A lot of people have to have a picture in their head before they can draw it,” Roberts says. “Well, I’m the same way. I have to get my mind right.”
He carries a notepad and pen in a pocket on the inside of his vest. When an idea strikes him, he writes it down. For complicated projects like his Ferris wheel, he retreats to the man cave to draw out the plans.
During the planning stages, he draws on his experience building three of the houses in which he lived. Ultimately, he wants to use those skills to build scale log cabins out of found materials based on diagrams he’s seen in housing catalogues.
“It’s only a matter of time,” Roberts says. “When I get something on my mind, I go for broke.”
He was struggling, sleeping on friends’ couches in Bloomington, Indiana, when he started going to House of Prayer. He describes himself as being trapped in a deep hole then, and says the church helped dig him out.
“I’m not completely out of the hole, but I can breathe,” he says.
He credits God for everything he has now. Each of the jewelry boxes he sells will have a Bible verse inside. Spreading the Word is his way of giving back.
Roberts sees a bright future for himself. He envisions a life in which he sells jewelry boxes, instructional DVDs with jewelry box kits and scale log cabins. He’s already made it from prison to a two-bedroom duplex, and he doesn’t see any reason he can’t keep going.
So it’s no surprise his favorite verse is Matthew 19:26.
“With man this is impossible, but with God anything is possible.”
Originally published in Ellettsville Journal, 2016. Republished here for archival and portfolio purposes.