I had to ground myself in small things or my thoughts scattered everywhere. The days went by unnoticed. My letters to Harry grew longer, until I was writing three pages. How he read through them was beyond me, but he was kind, never criticizing my pitiful confessionals but patiently laboring through the misspellings and bad grammar, responding always with friendly sympathy.
Although replete with religious principles, his letters conveyed not only empathy for my situation but also an optimistic faith that I could make a better human being of myself. Nobody else had ever believed in me or accepted me unconditionally. I began to record my memories and dreams in the notebooks Harry sent me. Every time I received a letter from him, I’d stay up at night pacing and sounding out words and rereading them to make sure they made sense. With writing, it seemed, if you opened one faucet of words, a hundred more would come on. I’d stay awake with my head filled with things I’d forgotten to add, things I wanted to say but couldn’t put my finger on exactly. It could go on and on and was simultaneously wonderful and awful.
If there wasn’t an actual person receiving what I was writing at the other end, it made writing harder. Writing for me was my connection to the streets, to someone out there. And although Theresa wasn’t my girlfriend anymore, it helped me to imagine she was going to read what I wrote. When I finally finished my first poem, I read it to Bonafide. It went:
There He stands Looking for the Dream that he lost.
She walked Away knowing little what it really cost.
He thought She was Really all his own.
But then he Looked around that had once been his happy home.
She had left and taken his Dream.
Yes she was so so keen.
But In time Someone will shatter her Dream.
She wears a pretty yellow bow in her hair.
She Also has a halo and skin so fair.
She walks so perfect like a doe prancing
Look at the stars and they may be dancing.
For my lovely Theresa walks very near
She so very kind she’d shed a tear
For the poor one.
Her eyes so lashing like moonlight on a lake
Her lips the m—
It was still too painful to finish. After seven years, the memory of her face was as clear in my mind as if I had just taken a Polaroid photograph of her in front of her white stucco house in her jeans and red shirt. And when I looked at the mental pictures, there was always an aching sadness.
Harry mentioned that my daily letters were overwhelming him and described how calm his days were. At sunrise he routinely opened the soup kitchen and cooked oatmeal with other Samaritan brothers to feed the homeless. Then he’d attend church services, and then go to his room and read the Bible until it was time to make and hand out bologna sandwiches. After cleaning up, he’d spend the rest of the evening in his room reading the Bible.
I was more interested in his life than in God, but since I could no longer dismiss his religious talk I took it on. Harry kept avoiding my experiences, denying that injustice existed at all. I told him God hadn’t done a thing for me. That God sat back while I lost my family and everything that went with having a family. That justice was abused by the rich; as proof, this prison had 90 percent poor Chicanos in it. I went on about poverty, violence, murder, abuse, and greed. We had been having a good correspondence until he wrote that my letters were troubling him. I told him I didn’t want to hurt his feelings or disparage his piety, just express my opinions.
His response a few days later was not what I expected. I’d thought he’d be mad or tell me off, but instead he wrote that we were all in one cage or another, him in a wheelchair, me in a cell, but the most serious cages were sins. Obeying God’s will, even though his body was in a wheelchair, allowed his spirit to soar. And even though I was in prison, I too could share in God’s grace and soar. He gave biblical examples of how other saints and martyrs had suffered and encouraged me to surrender my will to God. His explanations seemed to imply that I was a sinner and should repent, but I wasn’t going for that. He also hinted that there was nothing I could do to change my life; it was all in God’s hands, and there was a divine purpose behind these atrocities I experienced. Things had to work as they did for a reason beyond human understanding. I wrote him right away, and again I poured out all my doubts in a stream. I ended by saying that, to me, God was nature, the mountains, streams, rocks, and trees, the sun and moon and stars. That was my God and always would be.
Harry’s letters grew even more perplexed. His kindness was beginning to fray. I sensed that his tolerance was being taxed but I couldn’t help myself. Compelled as I was by having someone listen to me for the first time in my life, and take me and my views seriously, I kept writing every day. A little voice in my head was finally talking about what I had known all my life. With every word I was gulping fresh air and filling my lungs. I felt I was writing for my life.
I began to jot down external observations. Small things: describing the quiet of the tier; the way the sun at dawn slowly lit the dungeon, creeping along the floor, reaching the cells like a timid snow leopard prowling up the bars. Fragments, one-line thoughts, and paragraphs of memories stirred up emotions in me that forced my hurt to the surface. Opening old wounds was not my intent, it just seemed to be one of the side effects of writing, and it often left me reeling in anger or self-pity. Too much self-absorption was dangerous. I knew that cons who got too deep into themselves usually ended up on Nut Run, the tier for the wackos.
God had come between Harry and me, and after months of writing, Harry still couldn’t accept the reality of my life. His letters came less often. He didn’t like my questioning God. We’d been writing for about seven months when he wrote me one last letter, saying he would not write again. Ours was not an acrimonious parting, but one based on respect despite our differences. He had made me feel like my opinions meant something, and to this day I feel a great sense of gratitude to him.
I had lost a compassionate friend because of my growing convictions. The bleakness I felt after alienating Harry made me wonder whether writing was worth it. Maybe I should have just played along and kept things to myself. In hindsight, I think Harry understood how the world was opening up to me through writing and reading. He also knew how impulsive I was, at twenty-four years of age, how I had to question everything and was contrary to a fault, someone he couldn’t convince wasn’t already in hell.
I began to compose sentimental poems. I discovered that good and bad experiences had hibernated in me, and when they awoke they did so without warning and with the velocity of a sniper bullet, making me shake and choke up. In return for cigarettes and coffee, I’d write chicks for the cons in the dungeon. Bonafide was my steady client. Getting the chicks to write and send nude photos was the goal. He’d get their addresses from porn magazines. As we’d sit on the floor against the wall separating our cells and hold mirrors out the bars so we could see each other’s faces, he told me what he wanted to say.
“You’re not really going to say you’re a lawyer and own an Arabian ranch in Malibu, are you?” I asked.
“Naw, put that I’m a Colombian drug lord.”
“And why not add you’re a born-again Christian?” I kidded.
He grinned. “Anything to get that perfumed letter and a picture of her naked ass.”
Because of our frequent collaboration, I thought I knew Bonafide as well as one could. I could tell he was not the psycho that everybody claimed he was. I looked up to Bonafide, thinking he was right about how he lived.
Then one morning after breakfast a new face showed up on the tier, a black dude carrying his carton box containing personal items: clothes, books, toiletries, stationery. He stood in front of Bonafide’s cell. He was built like a heavyweight boxer, at least a foot taller than Bonafide. The cell opened and closed. I was sitting on my bunk reading when I heard a muffled violence. It sounded like a ferocious tiger tearing apart a small dog. I paused in my writing�
�actually, I stopped cold—when I heard another voice come out of Bonafide, not his normal one but one filled with a murderous rage to kill.
“Fucking bitch!” Bonafide roared, with such power and velocity that it stunned the whole tier into silence.
And then I heard squeals and whimpers and repeated blows to the body, anguished groans, and teeth-gritting yelps of pain. Bonafide was raping the man, pulverizing him to nothing but a crumpled and bloody writhing heap of meat without mind or soul. The guards came and carried the man away. I couldn’t believe that lurking within Bonafide was a monster that had just devoured a human being. This totally bowled me off the track, to think that this whole time I thought I knew him, and there was another man inside him totally alien to me.
Being almost naked all the time didn’t alleviate the 100-degree-plus summer heat in the dungeon. I can’t remember much happening except a relentless tedium. I occupied my time reading and writing and exercising twice a week. During those long hot days, I found myself comparing Bonafide and Harry. After that rape, and even though I knew he had no choice, I realized that Bonafide’s approach to things was not what I wanted for myself. Had he not done what he did, it would have been done to him. The guys on the tier would have thought he was weak. Still, it filled me with bitter awareness that being in prison could turn a man into a monster.
Somewhere deep inside myself I knew that, put in the wrong place at the wrong time, Bonafide would have tried to rape me. The rage that came out of him was the kind of rage that transcends friendship. It’s the kind of rage that can only be created in prison. The seeds of that rage are nourished by prison brutality and fertilized by fear and the law of survival of the fittest. It grows and grows, hidden deep in souls that have died from too many beatings, too many jail cells, and bottomless despair, contained like a ticking bomb. And this kind of firestorm wrath crushed even the divine rules of Harry’s God, because once a man has it in him, the man, when the rage comes out, becomes god.
The way Harry was, if the same thing had happened to him, he would have given up the cell and lost his manhood. A guy like Harry would be killed in this place. Bonafide upheld the convict code as much as Harry followed the Ten Commandments. Bonafide had passion and no God; he took life to survive, while Harry’s excessive piety respected life and drained it of passion.
Bonafide’s attack on the guy brought prison reality back to me with full force. A month or so later, something else happened that really disturbed me. A new tough kid was brought in, and while the guard went to the other side of the block to get the bull to open one of the empty cells, the kid waited out on the tier. JJ and Snake were out for a shower, and when they saw the kid standing there all alone, they ripped his throat out with a homemade meat hook.
After this, I wanted to find refuge in something, or at least find a place where I felt safe and could believe the world wasn’t crazy all the time. Maybe faith and reverence for human life were the answers. I would have liked to preach and believe in a doctrine of peace, but I knew prison wouldn’t allow that. Harry’s world had nothing to do with me. But neither did Bonafide’s.
At the time, I didn’t believe in anything or anyone. I drifted between choices, between hoping for freedom and resigning myself to being a convict. I didn’t want anyone preaching to me or anyone messing with me. I ate in silence, read and wrote in my journals, exercised in my cell, and went to bed. I wouldn’t talk to anyone. I kept a low profile and existed almost invisibly. But I know now that even if I couldn’t actually touch or see the insidious process that criminalizes a man and makes him more violent, the process was taking place in me. Spilled blood and real death and choices that sometimes had to be made in here kept us alive but often stripped us of humanity. The man who backed down still lost his soul— and in a humiliating way, which was the worst way. It was a no-win situation. And all the books in the world and all the poetry ever written couldn’t help you get out, because this was prison, and prison had its own bizarre and cruel codes.
On a cold February morning I was called back to the Reclassification Committee, held in a corridor two gates out of the dungeon in a small landing. I was escorted in chains by two guards before a small folding table with three officers sitting behind it on steel chairs: Mad Dog Madril, the counselor, and the black sergeant.
“Three-two-five-eight-one, you’re ordered to work detail—” Mad Dog Madril began irritably.
I cut in. “I refuse, unless I’m allowed to—”
“Put his ass back,” Mad Dog ordered, and closed my folder.
I had never been able to reach an agreement with the prison administration. Their impression of me was that I was nothing more than a troublemaker. For the time being, though, I wasn’t so much disappointed as relieved. Even though I missed the sunshine and going out to the exercise field, I had the feeling that I was doing the right thing. Yes, I missed being in general population and the freedom that went with it. But in the dungeon I had my own cell, and I enjoyed my privacy and the time I had to write and read. Because of drastic overpopulation, few cons in the prison had their own cells, and hundreds were sleeping on the floor in dormitories.
This time, no sooner had I entered my cell and settled in to read than a con showed up carrying his box. His escort barked my cell number to the cage guard and left him standing in front of the bars.
“Yeah, man, I don’t want anybody celling with me,” I told him.
“I’m just doing what the warden told me to do,” he said.
“Why do you have to do what the warden says? Just refuse to move in. Stick with the cons, not the warden.”
Instinctively, I followed Bonafide’s example, but not to his extreme. When the guard racked my cell, I leaped out and hit the guy. The guards must have been expecting it, because as the inmate was picking himself off the floor, Mad Dog Madril and some guards rushed through the gate and hauled me off to the hole.
The warden’s purpose in sending him down was to move me out. For the next five weeks, I’d go from Reclass to my cell, fight, then to the hole for a day, then back in the dungeon and back to Reclass. But it wasn’t bad; the hole was more like a meditation place for me now. Each time I came back into the dungeon, the tier would hoot and jive me in a friendly manner, telling me I was crazy and encouraging me to never give up.
The only thing that really bothered me was when the guards tore up all my journals and confiscated my books. However, the cons on death row on the other side of the block heard about what was happening and began to send me good books. I started training myself to remember poems, so that in the hole I could study and go over them. I remembered lines and stanzas from Neruda, Emily Dickinson, and Rilke. I’d go over plots, characters, styles, and descriptions of landscapes in novels by Hemingway and Faulkner. I grew into the habit of lying down on my back and putting a towel over my eyes and crossing my arms over the towel so I was in pitch blackness. I would recount what I’d read, hear the rhyme or see the line, and mesmerize myself by repeating the words until I was asleep.
Every Saturday morning Bonafide and I played chess. We set the board and pieces outside the bars and crouched against the wall between our cells and played and talked, smoked cigarettes, and drank coffee. One morning, a guard pushing the meds cart and handing out pill packets stopped in front of my cell.
Let’s go, ‘Three-two-five-eight-one! Visit!”
Bonafide said, “You got the wrong number. He never gets visits.”
He was right. In three years I’d never had a visit. I didn’t expect one either. Other cons hollered that the guard was wrong, but he insisted I get dressed and rack out.
“I don’t give a shit. It says here he’s got a visit.”
Even if it was a mix-up, it would be nice to go out on the yard for a walk. I put on my pants, shirt, and brogans, which felt strange because I almost never wore them. Mad Dog Madril arrived, chained me up, and we made the long walk through the various sections of the basement lockups.
Outside, the brigh
t sunshine made me squint. The open space was breathtaking. Maybe it didn’t interest others, or maybe they were indifferent to it, but being in the dungeon so long I could taste and smell it like a ripe desert fruit. Passionate blue air swallowed me up. I could see motes of dust floating an inch above the ground. My heart was beating wildly and for an instant I felt revitalized, light as the sparrows and prairie doves that gracefully scaled the walls and played back and forth on their razor-wire perches.
At the visiting room by the main gates, Mad Dog Madril unchained me and left. Two guards, standing opposite each other, scanned the cons. Surrounded with lovers, wives, and families, I felt anxious, disconnected, like a monk who has spent too long in a cell. Not knowing what gestures to give people, what to say or do, I just took it all in with my senses—the colors, the perfumes, the women. I sat down at a long table, visitors on one side and convicts on the other side. I was sweating and chewing my fingernails, picking at my skin, looking around at visitors engaged in a steady low hum of conversation. I sat and waited, wondering who I would see.
There was a child about four years old who kept leaping up trying to get a drink of water at the fountain. He pressed the button, the stream of water curled up, he jumped up to drink, and the water went down. His father and mother were busy talking. I got up and walked over and lifted him and he drank. His father immediately came over and pushed me aside, eyeing me with a hostile glare. I took a drink and went back to my chair, and just as I sat down my brother walked in with a woman.
With a tense smile he introduced her as Lori, his girlfriend. He held himself stiffly, his black hair combed back, his body muscular and tanned, looking every inch the playboy he wanted to be in his trendy jeans and red cowboy shirt. She was elegant and gentle and a bit tentative. I wanted to make them feel comfortable but that was impossible; this was a maximum-security state prison. I wanted to give them the impression that I was doing fine and tried to smile, but I could tell, as I remained staring at them from my chair, that they were worried by my gauntness. My appearance brought a worried look to Mieyo’s face, and he shot a sharp glance at the guard behind me and murmured curses.
A Place to Stand Page 21
