The Dead Celebrities Club

by Susan Swan

  On the television screen, the CNN host mentions a poll that shows Earl is the preferred Republican candidate. How about that? Earl asks, staring at the camera. CNN wants me to run for president.

  In the lounge, a few men nearby stop playing cards and high-five one another. Several others shout out Earl’s name in rough, excited voices.

  Would you vote for Earl Lindquist? I ask my bunkmates.

  He be gangsta, B, Bailey says, sounding respectful. Bailey has taken to calling me B, and I go along because I’m told it’s an affectionate street term.

  He won’t get in, mate, Derek replies. He’s unpopular.

  I wouldn’t be so sure, I say as I lay down my aces. Listen. I’ve got an idea. I point at the television. We’ll run a dead pool on old celebrities, and put Earl Lindquist on our list. We could use some of your sad-sack child stars too, Bailey. I’m serious.

  B, you never serious!

  Derek looks thoughtful. You mean like those dead pools online where you win if your celebrity dies?

  When I nod, Bailey asks: How you gon make money on it, B?

  The prisoners will deposit a fee in my commissary account. Without the warden knowing.

  Derek winks at Bailey. The admin slaps an eight-dollar surcharge on every deposit, mate.

  And they don like us puttin’ money in another inmate’s account neither, Bailey adds. But don feel bad, B.’ You jes gettin’ acclimized here.

  Acclimated, you mean.

  Yo! Bailey starts cleaning his oversized prison spectacles with my hanky; it has come back from the laundry badly tattered. He sees where I’m look-ing and gives me one of his fanged smiles. You wan it back?

  It’s all yours. My girlfriend can bring me another.

  What if the warden finds out, mate? Derek asks.

  I’m going to talk to the warden. He’ll like the idea once I explain how it will help his boys.

  Bailey and Derek begin to hee-haw like donkeys.

  What is so amusing, pray tell?

  You talking to the warden, Derek says, and they burst out laughing again. Despite their ridicule, I find myself laughing too. There’s a sense of the Tao at work in any good scheme. A feeling of flow or confluence, as if the engines that move the universe are coming together effortlessly. It’s blue sky from here, as the boys in my office used to crow.

  21

  The American chestnut tree (Castanea dentata) grows to nearly one hundred feet tall and four feet in diameter with a broad, rounded crown. Like you, our saplings have a long way to go.

  — A NOTE FROM WARDEN NATHAN RICKARD ON THE

  ADMIN BUILDING BULLETIN BOARD, JULY 21, 2012

  THE WARDEN HAS sent for me. It’s high summer. In his backyard, a cardinal is hovering over a bird bath while marble dolphins playfully spit out frilly geysers of water. Nothing about the Alpine house suggests a prison warden lives there. Nathan Rickard obviously aspires to the grander things in life. A man after my bad, old heart.

  At the door, Patti Rickard, the warden’s wife, assesses me through a pair of tinted Gucci sunglasses, a hint of frilled panties flashing slyly beneath the pleats of her white tennis skirt. Immediately I feel ashamed of my over-laundered prison sweats. In the days when I was flush with coin, Caroline used to wear Gucci.

  Smiling nervously, Patti leads me into a large living room, where the warden sits spraddle-legged in a bulbous Naugahyde chair. He is off campus, so to speak, surrounded by homey comforts — the mountain pottery tea service with its encircling frieze of black bears, the spotless hardwood floors, and the black cooking pots hanging by the hearth.

  As she pours our tea, Patti gabs about her work with the Michael Jackson dancers and the politics she was obliged to play in order to copy an arts program from the state prisons. The warden and I listen while she rambles on about the life skills the men are learning, the astonishing drop in recidivism rates among her graduates. The warden smiles and half closes his eyes. No doubt he’s heard it all before. At last, he waves his hand good-naturedly, and when she leaves for her tennis lesson, he tells me about his life. His father died young. So he was obliged to drop his idea of becoming a professor of psychology. Instead he began to teach high school dropouts at the army base in Camp Shelby, Mississippi. From Camp Shelby, he went into administrative work in federal prisons, and now here he is, overseeing the kingdom of the unlucky.

  I felt frustrated as a young man, he says in his low, soft voice. Heck, I guess you can understand frustration.

  Oh, I know thwarted. It is not pleasant.

  I still graduated from college, Dale Paul. So what if it was night school. You ever heard of Bergler?

  I say no.

  Someday I’ll show you my MA thesis. Edmund Bergler had a theory that the gambler gambles to lose, not win.

  I sip my tea, waiting.

  The pleasures of displeasure, get it?

  When I shake my head, his face opens in a smile. Let me explain. As a kid, you learn to like the thrill of being scared … you know the feeling you get when your dad’s about to punish you? The worst is about to happen, right? Some of my boys get hooked on that sensation.

  Are you trying to tell me something, Mr. Rickard?

  Me tell you something! Ha. I’m saying Bergler’s theories explain my boys who are into self-damage. He locks his hands behind his head and stares out at the prisoners planting chestnut saplings by the side of the prison road. On the way over, Martino told me how the warden has personally bought the chestnut saplings the scofflaws are planting. Possibly Nathan Rickard is imagining his chestnut trees grown to adult size, the leafy arch of their boughs filtering the afternoon light while the prison vans pass underneath.

  Does Bergler have anything to say about recidivism?

  He gives me the fish eye.

  I hear your prison has a high rate of men returning. Look, I’m not criticizing how you do things. It’s just that I think I know how to help your problem.

  Oh, yeah? He snorts.

  I have an idea, good sir. I’ll give a workshop using a fake monetary system involving celebrities. The men will learn how to determine the economic value of something and how to make a transaction based on that economic value …

  How do celebrities come into this?

  Referencing popular culture will work at the level of the prisoners’ interest. I pause, wondering how much I should divulge. He glances at his watch, so I quicken my pace: The men will bet on which one of the celebrities will die and they’ll monitor the health of these celebrities like a stock going up or down. Celebrity dead pools are very popular online.

  He breaks into guffaws.

  I struggle to keep a poker face. I can feel it coming, the sad dramatic finish to my little scheme.

  Heck, that’s original! Betting on the death of old celebrities. But, lookit, I can’t green-light some hare-brained project just because you have a public profile. He wags his head when he sees my disappointed face. Okay, Dale Paul, I’m aware my boys bet at cards, and I tell the C.O.s to turn a blind eye. But gambling is illegal inside the facility.

  I start to tell him about the studies in the law library that claim gambling is able to help prisoners get back on their feet. I cite Brewster’s report in 2005 that states leisure experience contributes to rehabilitation, and gambling under the right circumstances is recreational. I also mention Worthington’s paper in 2006 supporting Brewster’s view, but the warden waves his hand dismissively and rises to his feet, the leather of his massive chair squeaking.

  I’ll think about your workshop idea, Dale Paul. The boys could use some financial skills. But forget celebrities. It’s too far-fetched. How’s the mentoring going?

  I stand up, too. Well enough.

  Good. Patti wanted me to ask you over. She used to follow your stock tips in “Talk Like a Broker.”

  He is referencing my column for the Wal
l Street Journal, where, before I was unfairly repurposed, I explained financial terms without lapsing into market parlance.

  He pumps my hand. But it won’t happen again. No special privileges for you or anybody else, understand?

  While I stand looking down at the warden, I recall reading something in the Times about the aggression of short men: according to the article, it’s tall men such as myself who are more likely to lose their tempers and hit you back.

  When I leave the room, I bump into Martino, who has been listening behind the door.

  Old celebrities, Martino mutters. You gotta be kidding me.

  22

  THE TERSE WORDS on the postcard Caroline has sent from London send a chill through my bad, old heart: We need to talk soon, really talk, as ever, Caroline.

  Why is her card so short? Is she planning on dumping me? From Inmate dot com, the term my fellow inmates use for their gossip mill, I know all about the wives and girlfriends who abandon their men when they go to jail. Surely that won’t happen with Caroline! After all, she has scribbled an x and o next to as ever. So perhaps I am over-thinking. Possibly I have grown used to things taking unpredictable turns, direc-tions that steer me toward unforeseen disasters that burst into the news and make me out to be the anti-golem of the shareholder, a predatory pariah who bears no relation to the well-intentioned man I know myself to be.

  The situation with Davie is more serious still. Will he drop out of Harvard? He hasn’t written, so I have no way of knowing what he is thinking, but I have left phone messages urging him to go back to school. My last message said: I know you are upset with me, and my circumstances, and I understand how my situation must seem. I have done many unfortunate things, but I am not a criminal. Please, son, for your own good, continue your education.

  I realize the end of my message sounded too forceful: Why won’t you call me back? Just you wait, Davie, just you wait until you have a boy of your own.

  23

  I HAVE SOMETHING to confess. Davie has been unhappy with me since the day he found out about the charges.

  It was his twentieth birthday, and my son walked in a few minutes early. From Esther, Davie has inherited blond hair and hopeful blue eyes with something Ashkenazi about his nose and upper lip.

  I hadn’t seen him since Christmas, and he seemed more sullen than before. I made delighted welcoming noises; then we went into the solarium, where I had set up a replica of the battle at Gettysburg. He walked around the table, picking up the new lead soldiers Dieter had bought on eBay. Years before, Pater had given me a full set — complete with Con-federate and Union cavalry officers, the Confederate infantrymen with flags, and Union standard-bearers. The figures I had asked Dieter to order were a little pricier: a Union soldier playing a harmonica and a Confederate soldier firing his musket from behind a very life-like dead horse. Davie picked up the soldier lying behind the horse and turned it over in his hands. He looked quizzically at me and set it down. I knew Davie was worrying about the horses. The subject always came up when we discussed the Civil War. The hapless slaughter of the animals that so valiantly supported the troops. I have tried to tell my boy that nobody thought much about animal rights in the days of the Civil War, but I never get very far when we tackle the history of how the horses were treated. Davie is on his computer day and night, rounding up signatures for groups protesting the inhumane treatment of animals.

  Unable to wait for the ritual of present opening, I gave my boy his gift, an edition of Ken Burns’s series on the Civil War. Davie looked it over wordlessly before I put on the DVD about Pickett’s Charge.

  Side by side on the sofa we sat, but something told me Davie wasn’t absorbing the film’s magnificent diorama of General Lee’s first major blunder. There was my favourite historian, Shelby Foote, confiding that Lee, the most rational and purposeful of men, had got his dander up. I agreed with Foote’s view that Lee ignored common sense that humid July morning when he sent Pickett’s men to die on the farmers’ fields near Little Big Top.

  When we reached the part about Pickett, I heard Davie sigh.

  How’s college? I asked, turning off the dvd player.

  Oh, you know, he replied.

  Your mother says you’re not enjoying your courses.

  I know what you’re going to say, Dad. Some barfy stuff about why I need an MBA, so I can be top of my field.

  I opened the coffee table drawer where I kept a cache of weed for unsettling conversations. Barfy? I asked. Is that even a word, good sir?

  Hey, Dad, no grammar lesson. It’s my birthday, okay?

  When I lit up, he rose to his feet, and for an uneasy moment, his eyes caught mine; then he turned his back and gazed out at the sound. He didn’t approve. Smoking dope usurped a prerogative of his generation.

  I considered bringing up what I had done for him. Unfortunately, children, even soft-hearted boys like Davie, don’t recall parental sacrifices except in a vague, general way, and I felt sure he had forgotten the hours we spent together staring at Mathew Brady’s photographs of the innocent, lonesome faces of the men who had fought in the Civil War. As I sat there wondering how to talk Davie into staying at Harvard, my thoughtstravelled back to the day a younger Davie and I had walked down the Gettysburg battlefield while Esther stayed home to nurse a bad case of the flu.

  Davie had taken my hand, and we’d trudged together along the neatly mowed path, following in the footsteps of the soldiers. A few minutes later, a spring thunderstorm broke. Davie took off his shoes and ran around barefoot, trying to catch the raindrops on his tongue. Shivering and wet, I thought about the unlucky young men buried on the ridge nearby while my own happy-go-lucky boy was frolicking in front of me. Davie — my one and only son. A kind-hearted man-child with his head of yellow Rumpelstiltskin hair. Yet I had my boy figured wrong. He isn’t the happy-go-lucky type at all.

  My cellphone rang. It was my assistant, Bip, urging me in a frantic voice to turn on CNN. I followed his instructions, and Davie and I listened in stunned silence while a fuzzy-headed news anchor said I was being indicted on criminal charges, including securities fraud (irresponsible nonsense) and falsifying documents (a load of demented tripe). I clicked off the television.

  Dad, Davie cried. Is this true?

  Of course not, I snapped. The landline began to ring. Davie watched anxiously while I reached down, grimacing, and unplugged it. Outside, a vehicle was driving along Half Moon Lane, and for one loony, delusional moment, I imagined a squad of fbi agents breaking down the door and swarming in, their guns blazing just as they do in the movies. It was only a grocery van delivering our weekly basket of organic vegetables from a Long Island farm.

  24

  THE AIR IN the common room is steamy with delectable cooking smells: chicken baking in peanut butter and dessert wraps covered with hot chocolate syrup and granola. For a bunch of shiftless ne’er-do-wells, it is more than a little surprising how many recipes they know. Still others are making chai tea from the hot water cooler. Do the scofflaws worry about their families as much as I worry about Davie? Maybe so.

  There is a sudden hubbub; Martino stands at the door with the mailbag. When I amble over, the men part like the Red Sea, their faces friendly or menacing, and the C.O. hands me an envelope addressed in familiar, loping handwriting. I tear it open, embarrassed by my eagerness.

  Aug 12, 2012

  Dear Dad:

  Please stop leaving me phone messages. You are a taker. Mom and Meredith think so too, although they are too kind to tell you. And there is no point sending me a letter either. I don’t want to hear your florid views on prison life. I think what you did was crap if you want to know the truth.

  David

  I sink into a chair, clutching the letter. A taker! Surely Davie doesn’t mean those harsh words. Is he trying to hurt me? It’s true I didn’t see much of my son after the divorce. I was working hard at Quaestus
Capital so I could pay Esther child support.

  Florid views, indeed.

  Bailey sits down beside me, looking concerned. What’s crackin’, B?

  My son. He doesn’t want to hear from me.

  All boys say mean tings to their daddies. Bailey wags his head disapprovingly. He gon be nice soon.

  I hope so, Bailey. I hope so.

  The next day, I call Meredith.

  Look, calm down, she says. I know it hurts, but David is having trouble accepting your situation. We all are. In her husky voice, she explains that my own child thinks there is something underhanded about my manouevres, a catch that no one can find, unless they are as shrewd as myself.

  I take a gulp of air. Can you persuade him to come here?

  You really think that will help?

  When I don’t respond, she groans. Okay. I’ll work on Davie. I know how much you care about him.

  Meredith, what would I do without you? And will you bring up my brush pens? The ones I keep in the drawer by my bed? I think she answers yes, although I can’t be certain because, by then, she has hung up.

  25

  Tim Nugent

  THINGS ARE LOOKING up. After months of waiting, the warden is letting Tim see Dale Paul. The Bureau of Prisons dislikes publicity, and the warden has been suspicious of Tim since the morning the guard learned Tim was a journalist. Tim was asked to submit letters of reference proving he was a reputable writer, and Dale Paul signed a form saying he won’t make a profit from the published memoir if Dale Paul is still in prison. Tim isn’t sure how long that will be. He’s heard that white-collar criminals get fast-tracked through the system because their crimes aren’t violent. Chances are Dale Paul won’t be in for long, despite his twelve-year sentence.

  Tim is travelling north on the bus with Meredith and Dale Paul’s son, Davie. Meredith invited Tim to come so he could interview her about Dale Paul. She said it would be killing two birds with one stone. They are going by bus because Davie says that a bus uses less fossil fuel per person than going by car. The son is a more sensitive kettle of fish than the dad, Tim is learning.