This Is Not My Life

by Diane Schoemperlen

  Angela and I had only had to show our ID and walk through the metal detector. I knew that entering now as a visitor, there would be more to it than that. This was not camp, this was medium security. This was serious. There were more rules. I must bring my change for the vending machines in a Ziploc bag rather than the leather change purse I’d used at Frontenac. I must leave my cigarettes in my purse in the trunk of the car. In May 2008, smoking had been banned anywhere on prison property inside and out, for inmates and staff alike. Tobacco had thus become contraband, elevated now to the same level as drugs inside. Shane had warned me that there might or might not be a drug dog on duty. There had been no dogs at Frontenac.

  I put my car keys in a locker and carefully watched the other two women go through security ahead of me, so I could see what was involved. There was no drug dog today. While I waited, I spied something else in the glassed-in control room that I hadn’t noticed when I went in with Angela. Mounted on the back wall was a collection of at least two dozen pairs of handcuffs, tidily arranged in order from the smallest, which would fit around my skinny wrists, to the largest, which would surely fit around my thighs.

  The other two women passed through the security steps and were then let out of the entry area through two more locked doors to cross over to the building where the visiting room was located. Now it was my turn.

  I put my driver’s licence, my bag of change, my locker key, and an unopened pocket pack of Kleenex on the counter. I’d brought this last as a bit of a joke, because on the phone the night before, we’d agreed there was bound to be some crying at this first visit. The female officer nudged the Kleenex pack with one finger as if it might detonate and looked at me over her glasses. I blathered on, trying to explain, but she was not amused. Her already pinched-looking face curled up even tighter. She picked up the phone, punched in a few numbers, and said into the receiver without preamble, “So, are we letting Kleenex in now?” No, apparently they were not. Kleenex was contraband. She pointed a long finger at the lockers, as pleased with herself as if she’d caught me trying to bring in a gun in a cake. I put the Kleenex in the locker with my car keys. She studied my driver’s licence and my bag of change for what seemed like a very long time. She turned to the ion scanner and snapped on a pair of black latex gloves, not at all, I noted, like the pretty blue ones they used at Frontenac. She plucked the little square cloth from the box beside the machine, then rubbed it on the buttons down the front of my suede jacket. She inserted the cloth into the mouth of the machine and waited, staring at the screen. I couldn’t see it from my vantage point. The machine was silent. Thank God.

  But wait. Now she was writing in a large ledger, checking the screen again, then typing rapidly on the computer keyboard.

  I asked, “Is there something wrong?”

  She ignored me and kept typing. Other visitors were coming in now, crowding into the small entry area. She ignored them too. She did another test, this time rubbing the cloth down the right sleeve of my jacket. With her back to me, she studied the screen of the ion scanner, wrote in the ledger, then picked up the phone again. This time I couldn’t hear what she was saying. She hung up, typed some more, then finally deigned to look at me.

  “Take a seat,” she said, pointing at the single chair in the small space. I sat.

  I sat and watched the clock on the wall for twenty-five minutes while she processed more visitors and didn’t once look in my direction or offer anything by way of explanation.

  Then two male officers, one in the light blue shirt of a keeper, appeared and took me to another room to be interviewed. As it turned out, the ion scanner at Bath was not set to sound an alarm when it detected the presence of drugs. Here it delivered its verdict silently. And I, the keeper said, had hit positive for morphine. As it also turned out, the word interview was a euphemism for interrogation, also known in CSC language as a Threat Risk Assessment (TRA). The keeper proceeded to pepper me with questions about my drug use as the other officer looked on silently. I said I didn’t use drugs. I said it many times. I did not yet understand that in prison the fundamental principle of “innocent until proven guilty” does not apply. Now I was guilty until proven innocent. Now I was in the land of “We think, we feel, we believe”—a land where I could be declared guilty on the basis of suspicion alone. I could not prove my innocence, and they didn’t have to prove anything to declare me guilty. I could not give a reasonable explanation as to why I might have morphine on my jacket. I could not do anything. So I cried and hated myself for it.

  Eventually the keeper decided he’d let me in to see Shane despite my now-questionable character. He would not send me home. He would not order a strip search. He would not call the police. He would not put us on a closed visit, which would have meant the two of us seated across from each other in a tiny booth with a sheet of Plexiglas between us, just like on TV. He would allow us to visit today on “designated seating,” which meant that I must be escorted to and from V&C by an officer, that Shane and I must sit at a table right beside the bubble, that we couldn’t go outside to the visiting yard, that we couldn’t leave the table at the same time to go to the vending machines or the washrooms. He said my case would be put before the Visitor Review Board (VRB), which would determine what risk I might present “for the security of the penitentiary or the safety of any individual” and what would happen next.

  The young female guard who escorted me to V&C was a petite pretty blonde who didn’t speak to or look at me. As she led me to the designated table, the other visitors and inmates already in the room, including the two women I’d met at the gate, took a quick look at me, then turned their heads. Whether this was because they were obeying the “mind your own business” visiting room rule or because they wanted nothing to do with me for fear of tarnishing their own visiting status, I had no way of knowing.

  When Shane got to the table and hugged me, I cried on his chest and wished for my pocket pack of Kleenex, now safely stowed in the locker out front.

  “Never mind, never mind, never mind,” he said, stroking my hair. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

  When I went to the ladies’ bathroom to wipe away my tears, I found myself facing yet another locked door with another buzzer. Throwing caution to the wind—I was already in trouble, so what difference did it make?—I pressed the buzzer. And found it didn’t work. So I waited at the bathroom door until someone inside the bubble finally noticed me and unlocked it from there. So far this place was nothing like Frontenac. Only the toilet paper, single ply so thin it was almost transparent, and the paper towels, stiff, brown, and scratchy as sandpaper, were the same.

  The paperwork from my encounter with the ion scanner was brought to our table by another female guard, this one much kinder than any of the others I’d met so far. She set down two pages titled “Positive Indication Using Non-Intrusive Search Tools” with a big X beside the word Morphine on the long list of drugs the ion scanner had to choose from.

  The officer patted me on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry. This happens all the time. Everything will be fine.”

  I was desperate to believe her. She flipped to the second page, where it explained that I now had five working days to send a letter on my own behalf that would be considered by the VRB in their decision. It gave the name of the person I should write to: Brian Shepherd, Corrections Manager, V&C.

  Once we had recovered from the shock of this inauspicious beginning, Shane and I could get down to the business at hand: our happy reunion. Other than at the hearing in August, we had not seen each other in ten months. There were more tears, happy tears this time, first him, then me, then him again. The stress of our separation and all that had preceded it had visibly affected us both. He was still pale and walking with a cane. I had lost twenty pounds; he had gained that much or more. We both looked much older. My hair was greyer. His was still gone. I didn’t mind the shaved head, but I was just as happy when he let his hair grow back in the coming months. Holding hands a
cross the table that day, we couldn’t stop smiling. The rules about physical contact being much stricter here, there could be no kissing. But there were no rules about talking, and it seemed we couldn’t stop. Even after all the letters and phone calls of the past six weeks, there was still so much to say.

  Joyful as I was to be getting back together, I also felt that I was re-entering this relationship with my eyes wide open and a firm resolve to get it right this time. I had shed my naïveté and replaced it with knowledge and determination. On that very first day, I warned him, as I already had in my recent letters, that I was not the same as I had been—that this time we were going to do things differently. This time we were both going to learn how to have a healthy and happy relationship.

  He said he couldn’t believe how lucky he was that I had come back to him. He said he’d hoped, dreamed, prayed that we would be together again someday but had never really believed it would happen. And now here we were.

  He said, “I will do anything—absolutely anything—to make this work.”

  I said, “Yes, you will.”

  He said, “I will be a better man.”

  I said, laughing, “Oh yes, you will, my love.”

  THE NEXT DAY, WITH MUCH ASSISTANCE from Shane by phone, I composed my letter to Mr. Shepherd. I explained what had happened with the ion scanner, noting that the day before I’d given a reading at the Brockville Courthouse, wearing the same jacket. Many of the people who attended were elderly. Many of them had hugged me and shook my hand afterwards. Perhaps I’d come into contact with something there? At Shane’s suggestion, I included the information that in visiting him at Frontenac well over a hundred times, the only time the ion scanner went off was when Lorne Matheson set it to do so for a joke. Shane said this would let Brian Shepherd know this was not my first rodeo and that I knew the machine could be tampered with by staff to achieve the desired result. Shane was convinced this was what had happened in this case—to cause problems for him. “Mr. Paranoid Pants,” I teased, but I put it in the letter.

  I concluded with an extremely officious paragraph in which I explained my position as a writer well known and respected not only in Kingston but nationally and internationally as well. I listed a number of my accomplishments and noted that I had been commended by and socialized with many top-level politicians including Governor General Roméo LeBlanc, Speaker of the House of Commons Peter Milliken, and James Bartleman, former Lieutenant Governor of Ontario. Henceforth, Shane and I referred to this as my “Do you know who I am?” letter, harking back to that much-coveted T-shirt at Vinnie’s.

  Whether this letter had any effect on the outcome or not, the VRB decided we must remain on designated seating for thirty days, at which point my visiting status was reviewed, and we were allowed to have regular visits.

  BECAUSE SHANE WAS NOW in a medium-security institution, he had no passes out, no work releases, no weekends home. The only time he was allowed to leave the prison was for medical appointments. We would be able to see each other only when I visited. Almost every weekend, I went on both Saturday and Sunday, arriving at 8:30 a.m. and staying until the end of visiting hours at 3:30 p.m. I soon saw how prison could come to feel, even for a visitor, more real than the real world. Now I understood why for some of the women in the prison group, it seemed to be all prison all the time. I noticed how often I too now said, “When we were at Frontenac . . .” or “Now that we’re at Bath . . .” We were now faced with the challenge of rebuilding our relationship here and only here in this locked room, with no opportunity ever to interact anywhere else except on the phone.

  I had since reconnected with Rosemary from CFCN, and Brenda and Tammy from the prison group. They were the only people I knew who were genuinely happy to hear that Shane and I were back together. We began meeting informally once a month for lunch at a Chinese place that featured an unlimited and delicious buffet for under ten dollars. Sometimes we ended up sitting there all afternoon talking about our prison experiences. They’d been doing this a lot longer than I had, and I knew that this time around, I needed them for support, both emotional and practical.

  After my first ill-fated experience of trying to get into Bath, they gave me detailed advice on how to prepare properly for going inside. This involved an increasingly complicated cleaning routine. Prior to that first visit, I had done nothing but wash my driver’s licence as I always had before going to Frontenac.

  Now I began washing my glasses and my earrings too. Better to keep the jewellery to a minimum, Brenda and Tammy advised, and leave your watch at home unless it is waterproof and can also be washed thoroughly. Leave the suede jacket in the closet. Buy a washable jacket for visiting. Wash it every Friday night, then hang it somewhere where it doesn’t touch anything else—not a bad idea to wash it again on Saturday night in preparation for the Sunday visit. In fact, wear all freshly laundered clothes for every visit. (Better not to wear an underwire bra.) Upon leaving the house in the morning, drive directly to the prison with no stops lest you become contaminated somewhere along the way. Carry hand sanitizer in the glove compartment for last-minute touch-ups before going in.

  So habituated did I become to performing the cleaning routine over the next thirteen months that I often caught myself putting my earrings and my driver’s licence into the sink full of soapy water even when I was getting ready to go for groceries or lunch with my friends. The inmates are not the only ones who become institutionalized.

  Brenda and Tammy also coached me on how to deal with the drug dog. Face the wall and cross your hands on your chest. Assume the position, breathe calmly and deeply, and wait for the dog to be brought in. Do not flinch when he sniffs your behind. Turn around when the handler tells you to. Do not talk to or make eye contact with the dog. Do not recoil when he sniffs your crotch. If the dog sits down beside you, do not say, “Oh look, he likes me.” Sitting down is how the dog indicates to his handler that he has detected drugs on your person.

  Despite my best cleaning efforts, I hit positive on the ion scanner twice more in the coming months—once more for morphine and then, after a problem-free stretch in which it looked like I’d finally kicked that pesky morphine habit, for LSD. Every time a visitor sets off the ion scanner, it is recorded on the inmate’s permanent record. This information can and will be used against him.

  After each of these incidents, I ramped up my cleaning routine, until I was a frenzied Lady Macbeth muttering, “Out, damn spot! Out, I say!” while trying to eradicate not blood but microscopic drug residue that might or might not be there anyway. Deep down I knew it was futile, that even if I dipped my entire body in bleach and went in stark naked, that damn machine would find something. I much preferred the dog, a large brown lab named Charlie, who proved over time to be far more reliable and intelligent, so much more human after all. In fact, my favourite officer at Bath was the dog handler, who was always respectful, professional, and loved to talk about books. Charlie was also respectful and professional and extremely well trained, although not much of a reader. I always thought Charlie liked me as much as I liked him, but not, fortunately, well enough ever to sit down beside me.

  AT BATH THE VISITING ROOM was much bigger and brighter, with a wall of windows and a glass door leading directly to the outside visiting yard, which was encircled by a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire and, at regular intervals, cameras. Several feet beyond this fence was another exactly the same with a grassy berm between. As at Frontenac, both the visiting room and the visiting yard were entirely removed from the actual working parts of the prison, well out of sight of any bars or cells or other inmates not receiving visits, but here it was impossible ever to forget that we were in a prison.

  Once we were taken off designated seating, we sat at the same table each time, the one in the corner close to the vending machines, from where we could see the whole rest of the room and the yard too. There were a few more guards in the bubble watching the room here, but, as at Frontenac, they w
ere neither menacing nor armed. The population of Bath was almost triple that of Frontenac, but here it was also the same two dozen or so men who got visits each weekend. They looked just like the Frontenac inmates: men of all ages, shapes, sizes, and colours, dressed not in orange jumpsuits but in ordinary clothes of varying styles and quality, most of them not likely recognizable as criminals if you were to someday meet them on the street.

  The rest of the inmates, hundreds in this case, received no visits at all. Shane said he met one man in his late seventies who’d had no contact with the outside world—no visits, no phone calls, no mail—for over five years. This man was one of several who died of cancer or other medical issues during the time Shane was there. Just as prison is not a good place to grow up, it is also not a good place to grow old. One in five federal inmates is now over the age of fifty and facing all the same problems of aging as the rest of us, problems that cannot adequately be addressed or accommodated within the institutional setting. No country for old men indeed. Each of these deaths amplified Shane’s fear of dying in prison alone. He often said sadly, “Live by the sword, die of cancer like everybody else.” Later, on a form provided by the prison, he would draw up a living will naming me as the person to ensure that his wish not to be kept alive by any artificial means was carried out. He also specified that after his death, his body should be released to me, and I would take care of the arrangements as he had instructed. This eased his anxiety somewhat.

  In the Bath visiting room, there were no large wooden tables with comfortable chairs. Here the tables were round white laminated particleboard, and the chairs were hard purple plastic. Here the rules about how we must sit were clearly outlined in the information sheet I had received when my visiting application was approved. Visitors and inmates must sit up on the chairs and must remain in the chairs turned towards the table with their feet on the floor. The chairs are not to be used as footstools. Sitting with legs wrapped around the torso, limbs, or lap of the other person is prohibited, also hands inside the clothing. Lying on the floor is not permitted.