To conceal my shame and embarrassment, I faked a smile. “She’s just another chick.” I crushed the letter up and threw it in the trash can.
For a second, I angrily blamed Rick aloud. “Fucking snitch!”
The counselor already knew all about it, because he added, “Galvan’s put the word out that he ratted. They’ll take him out in the joint.”
But it wasn’t only Rick. My sister had turned me down. Lonnie and Carey became lovers behind my back. They had all been there when they wanted something but had turned their backs on me now. I never thought Lonnie would do that. I was too proud to admit that any of it hurt; too proud to think even for a second it could faze me. I’d bury their deceptions and lies where I buried all the rest, in a dark place in my heart where I would never have to think about them.
Since I had no money to retain competent counsel, I was stuck with the court-appointed lackey. A week earlier he’d come by: a blue-eyed, blond-haired man, wearing a gray suit. He’d handed me a Mormon’s Bible from his briefcase and I told him to keep it. Then he summed up my situation bluntly. “Plead guilty to the charges and they’ll go easy. Don’t, and you haven’t a prayer in hell. This is what they want.”
He’d handed me a list of charges written in longhand on yellow legal pad paper. I stared at the page as if I knew what I was reading.
“You picked the wrong time to get busted,” he said. “It’s reelection time, and you’re the judge’s ride to a second term.”
“What do you mean?”
“With all the play you got in the papers, you’re going to be made an example, put behind bars, so voters’ll feel safer from criminals like you. The court’ll be lenient if you waive your right to trial and plead guilty, but if you persist in your innocence, the DA’ll tack on more time.”
I didn’t understand what he was saying. I was ignorant of court procedure and intimidated by legal jargon. The truth was, I was more panicked by having rights than losing them. Dreading what he threatened they might do to me, I felt there was no way out. And I was wearied by the mounting apprehension of not knowing what was going to happen, so I shrugged. “Do whatever you think best.”
I’d gone over the recent past, trying to understand how it all happened. After I’d turned myself in in Albuquerque, my fantasies of starting over anew were a distant memory and the reality of prison life had become second nature to me. It hadn’t been the smoothest of reintroductions. I had shown up at the Albuquerque police station, believing that the misunderstanding would be cleared up. I was willing to describe the events in Yuma, the shootout, ready to explain that I hadn’t done anything, I was just in the place when the deal went down. But everything backfired. After the officer checked the wanted files, he stepped out from behind his desk without giving me a chance to explain anything, drew his pistol from his holster, and ordered me to turn around and place my palms flat on the wall.
Minutes later, several detectives dressed in identical blue suits, black shoes, and sunglasses dashed out of the elevator and begin to kick and pistol-whip me. They handcuffed and dragged me in an elevator up to an office to be interrogated, then pummeled me more until I couldn’t feel the blows or see out of my eyes. My jaw was on fire as I forced myself to swallow blood, gagging on bits of flesh and teeth chips. Later, I was taken out through a basement exit and shoved into an unmarked car and driven away. I was beaten back and forth between two detectives in the backseat until we reached the outskirts of Albuquerque. The detective to my right clambered over into the front seat, turned around, and flung the door open so I could see the road blurring beneath and feel the wind on my face. The detective to my left had braced his back against his door and had started kicking me to force me out where a police cruiser behind us could run over me on the road. Still handcuffed, I had hunched up, propping my foot against the doorframe and floor, turned my head toward the guy kicking me, and barreled into him with all my force. Through the welter of blows, all my efforts were on keeping my head against the detective’s belly, pushing as hard as I could against him to keep from being thrown out of the car.
Things didn’t let up for the next few weeks. They were extra hard on me because they thought I had set up the FBI agent, and even though the agent wounded in the shootout hadn’t died, he was still in serious condition in the hospital. Guards would visit my cell at night and threaten to take me out and shoot me. They’d terrify me with sudden earsplitting batterings on my steel cell door in the middle of the night, and day-shift goons would curse me every time they passed my cell. I lost track of time and days. I would look out the port window of my cell and see prisoners marching to and from chow. I could hardly stand, my legs bruised blue from being hit with batons and my heels whacked by leather straps. Yet when I stood or tried to walk, I welcomed my body’s pain; it grounded me during a time when nothing else seemed real. Life had little value now. I was irrational; one moment I panicked, the next I didn’t care if I lived or died. One moment my previous life was real, the next it didn’t seem like I had lived it. With frayed nerves and body aching with welts and wounds, I did everything I could to keep myself together, mostly by thinking of the preceding two years, which seemed like a dream. I couldn’t hold a thought for more than a second. On my bunk, my eyes closed, Lonnie and I would be riding happily in the car one moment, and the next her memory would scatter into unrecognizable images that I’d only imagined.
My mind was riddled with misgivings and suspicions. I was second-guessing everything. The last year with Marcos and Lonnie seemed so far away and vague. I tried again and again to conjure up a portrait of her: Lonnie cooking supper or us sitting behind the house, her soft voice when she whispered me awake at dawn, the plans we’d written out of how we’d decorate our house, the list of names we’d chosen for our first baby. All those images swirled in a void with no reference to my life, memories splashed like black paint on a white canvas with no meaning or structure. From time to time, my dreaming was interrupted by chilling screams from jail cells, solid steel doors slamming, keys jangling, guards yelling. I hadn’t talked to anyone in a long time. I was locked away in my sullen silence, afraid of what was happening to me, my memories of life before jail being slowly sucked out of existence. Perhaps my mind was playing tricks on me because of the severe stress and shock from the shootout. The beatings had traumatized me, and any coherent sense of my recent history was beyond my grasp, leaving me a mental invalid on my bunk, picking at scabs on my face, trying to sift through my elusive experience, guessing at what was real and what was not.
I’d managed, however, to get through not only their beatings but also their two previous attempts at extradition to Arizona. It was the law that you had to extradite someone within ninety days. On the two other appearances, the judge had taken issue with the Arizona marshals for failing to produce evidence to justify my extradition. He told them not to waste his time with hearsay and sent them away. Arizona had to provide legitimate proof to extradite me, and their time had almost expired. I knew that if they couldn’t do it soon the judge would have to let me go. I reasoned they couldn’t have any proof because I hadn’t sold any heroin to the narc that night. I was expecting to be set free when, on the eighty-ninth day of confinement in the Albuquerque county jail, I’d limped into the courtroom for my last extradition hearing. Though I was handcuffed and hobbled, my spirits were high as I sat in the hard-backed chair in the jury box in my orange jumpsuit and shower thongs.
I was ashamed to meet my sister’s gaze in the public seating section beyond the railing. She’d had enough pain in her life without my piling on more, but I’d forced myself to search for her. When our eyes met, her gaze went to her hands, wringing a paper tissue in her lap. She was dressed like the sister I once knew, in a white sweater and head veil, a blue blouse and long black skirt. We forced ourselves to smile, hoping with all our hearts that this would be the last hour of my confinement.
The bailiff escorted me to the bench. I waited anxiously to hear the words tha
t I was free. Once I was out, I’d never again get into any trouble. When my case number was called, two Arizona marshals approached the bench. They handed a sworn statement to the judge, signed by Governor Babbitt of Arizona. Rick, testifying under oath, had sworn that I had sold him drugs, that I was a big heroin dealer, and that I’d masterminded the deal the night of the shootout. When I heard the words “Extradition granted,” I couldn’t believe my ears. I fought down the despair that was overwhelming me. I disconnected myself from the courtroom, the people, my sister, and the marshals and focused my eyes on the wall plaque behind the judge, which read, TRUST IN GOD. The courtroom had turned quiet. I felt people’s eyes on me; the hot fluorescent lights penetrated beneath my jumpsuit, clawed under my skin, burning intense as an interrogation light. Disengaging myself from the judge’s words and spectators’ eyes, I stared like a blind man at the plaque. This wasn’t happening, this couldn’t happen. My eyes watered at the corners and I turned my head sideways and wiped them against my sleeve. I resumed staring at the wall plaque, as if I were deaf and the words didn’t mean anything. I didn’t want anyone to see me cry. All they were entitled to was a glassy stare—a deep unwavering stare of anger and defiance.
When the marshals turned me around, my sister was weeping, her teary face smeared with makeup. Long black rivulets of eyeliner ran down her cheeks. Her black tears gave her a frightful expression. She was superstitious and religious in the extreme, and I knew that when I left the courtroom, she’d go to Saint Mary’s down the street and light candles for me and pray before the La Virgen de Guadalupe, pleading with her to reverse this bad fortune and protect my soul. She’d visit the palm reader and the psychic, and they’d tell her what she wanted to hear. Later, she’d tell my mother what happened, and my mother would convince her that I needed to go to prison.
It didn’t seem to matter that Rick was the guilty one—he had ratted on us, done the drug deal, taken the stand against us, and committed perjury by saying that we were all big-time shot-callers. The marshals had trumped up a paper saying I had sold heroin to Rick, and Rick had signed it. He was a state witness; according to the snitch, I’d been dealing heroin to him for years. The truth was I’d only met him a few times when I had gone to pick up Carey, and I had never given him so much as a seed of marijuana.
The morning after my hearing I was driven from Albuquerque to the Yuma County Jail. For a week or so, I wasn’t allowed out of my cell. I’d been in plenty of cells, but the Yuma County Jail cell beat them all with its horrid smell. The rusting bunk was anchored to a shit-smeared wall, and the putrid commode was barely attached to the wall with rotten bolts. Every time someone in another cell flushed their toilet, particles of sewage bubbled up from my commode and puddled on the floor. Most of the day, I stood at the bars rapping with the porters. Holding the steel tray outside the bars with one hand, I ate with the other, balancing each spoonful of lumpy oatmeal through the bars. I deciphered the graffiti on walls and checked the six-by-nine cell for a way to escape. Luckily, a day-shift guard had recognized me from La Zona and made me a trusty. I hung out at the kitchen and visiting room, even going outside to empty the trash, where the guard and I would lean against the wall in the shade, smoking cigarettes. I’d see a truck rumbling by with its bed bulging with clipped branches and mown grass, and I’d think of Marcos. While the guard rambled on about titty bars he’d visited with his buddies, I’d hear an NFL game coming from a cell, which reminded me of how Marcos and I would sit in the living room, rooting for our Oakland Raiders.
My situation contrasted painfully to life just a few months ago and I continued to struggle to make sense of the dreamlike quality of my memories. I’d wake up at 6 A.M., my head filled with memories of Lonnie and me walking hand in hand across the fields, following dirt paths made by kids on bikes. I’d point out what were good omens: two hummingbirds flitting in the sagebrush; a coyote and her young pups in the distance; red anthills and an upturned centipede in our path. After a tasteless breakfast, I’d scrub a tier by a window that opened to the streets, and passing cars and pedestrian voices drew my mind from the suds and mop pail to foamy wind spray on the beach, Lonnie waving away seagulls from the reefs in San Diego, blowing dust and the stormy horizon threatening a downpour as we snuggled close, face-to-face, and she’d ask if I loved her.
As I looked back from behind bars on the life I tried to make with Lonnie, it seemed my efforts had been nothing more than useless illusions. At night in my cot, when the lights went off, I’d stare at the ceiling and realize that everything I had said to Lonnie was partially to suppress memories of Theresa. At the time, our lives had seemed to be leading Lonnie and me toward true love and marriage. But now my heart was pulsing out memories of Theresa. I’d drift back to recollections of Lonnie and realize, in the quiet night, that it wasn’t Lonnie I had dreamed of but Theresa. Along with the dreams came the pain of those times, and the disconsolate longing. I was back in the world I belonged in. I had altered the superficial details of my life, but nothing had really changed—I was still the same confused, hurt, angry man underneath. The same foul stink and cell bars surrounded me that I’d left behind when I moved to San Diego.
Had I been allowed to leave the jail, I would have gone to see Theresa, not Lonnie. Every morning, standing at my cell bars, waiting to be let out to porter, the bright dawn and sparse clouds through the cell windows made me want to talk with Theresa.
On November 16, I changed my original plea from innocent to a plea bargain of guilty of possession of heroin with intent to distribute. When I first balked at pleading guilty, my PD hadn’t even pretended an interest in my innocence. “Plead guilty,” he had said, “and stop wasting everyone’s time.” Nor was he bothered by the fact that I couldn’t read the papers I had signed. I was a negligible nuisance to him. He was in a hurry for me to agree so he could leave right away. By the chummy way he laughed and talked with the prosecutor, it was obvious they were good buddies and the least of their concerns was a twenty-one-year-old illiterate Chicano kid. When the judge entered, I recognized him as the guy who owned the Texaco gas station where I used to fill up the truck once a week. He usually had on oily overalls and greasy cap instead of a black robe, with a socket wrench instead of a gavel. He gave no indication, however, that he’d ever seen me. After I pled guilty, he set a sentencing date and I was led back to jail.
To keep my mind from worrying what my sentence might be, I kept busy scouring the drunk tanks, slapping lice from rancid mattresses with a broom, scrubbing spit and blood off grime-caked walls, and carrying blankets stiff with urine and vomit to the laundry room. In the afternoon I’d mop tiers, cart meals to cons on lockdown, hand out toiletries, and run notes, or “kites,” from one con to another.
I’d been flirting with this blond-haired girl, Tara, a clerk at the booking desk who worked the graveyard shift. She’d mentioned that she was going to college, and I thought she was pretty cool until one night when I was dusting the filing cabinets. Two detectives had come in, roughly shoving a drunk Chicano to the booking desk. I didn’t like being around them so I started to leave, but Tara asked me to put away the wax bottles and roll the cord up on the big buffing machine. Meanwhile, they’d stripped the drunk down, but he’d resisted their efforts to take off the talisman pouch around his neck. I knew it was considered magic to protect his soul and ward off evil. He howled in terror but they laughed, as they ripped it off. Tara joined in their fun, chuckling over the drunk’s superstitions. After locking the drunk up, the detectives went into the bathroom to wash their hands. When Tara turned to get the Chicano’s file from the record cabinets, I reached through the bars, swiped one of her college textbooks, and hid it under my jail overalls. After putting the mop and buffer away, I told the duty guard that I was done for the evening, and he escorted me to my cell.
Sitting on my cot, I smoked a cigarette, opened the big hardcover book, and leafed through it. Parts of the text were highlighted with yellow, and on page margins she’d s
cribbled notes in red ink. I set my cigarette down on the concrete floor and murmured the words, sounding out the letters deliberately to see if I could understand them. I had trouble. It seemed each letter was fighting me. Reading was frustrating because each letter slowed me down. While sounding them out, I had to remember what they meant when combined. It was a lot harder than I expected. As I struggled, time, jail noise, cells, and walls all vanished. I was engrossed in the simple story of a man and his pond. How he spent his days there. How he loved to watch the birds. How he sat on its bank and meditated. How he compared the water’s sensuous currents to making love with a woman.
Each letter had its own voice, and as I put the sounds together to make words, they told a story. The more I read the more I thought about the pond in Estancia. I put my finger under each word, sounding them out all the way to the bottom of the page. It was confusing, but I’d gathered it was about a man named Wordsworth and Cool-ridge. Word cool, cool word. Wool. Coolo. I smiled because coolo in slang meant “stingy chump.” Farther down, breaking off from the rest of the long-lined text, about the middle of the page, were shorter lines called a poem. I spent a long time figuring it out, until I was interrupted by my neighbor, Enrique. He asked me to brew some coffee, and I took out the red Folger’s coffee can I’d found in one of the vacated cells and filled it with water. I tore some pages out of the book and lit them to heat the water. I crouched on my haunches and watched the words burn on the page, the balled-up paper unwrinkling into dark ash.
I saw the thirty-dollar hardcover price. No matter how much I liked the story, I would never spend money on a book. Guys like me hung out and bullshitted all day. We told stories but they didn’t mean much; they were just to pass the time behind a drugstore or on a street corner. I’d never owned a book and had no desire to own one. But still, I did enjoy this one, if for no other reason than it alleviated the boredom of waiting. I hadn’t forgotten, though, that I took it to hurt her for laughing at the man who could’ve been my father. To my way of thinking, books had always been used to hurt and inflict pain. Books separated me from people like her and those two detectives, who used lawbooks to perpetrate wanton violence against poor people, and from greedy lawyers, who used lawbooks to twist the truth. There were only two ways to learn things: on the street, fighting to prove you were right, or sharing a fifth of whiskey or a six-pack and hanging out with homies and listening to their stories.
A Place to Stand Page 11
