This Is Not My Life

by Diane Schoemperlen

  Then there were issues with the counselling itself. Edward had devised a plan for us, a sequence of topics to discuss with him and a series of assignments for Shane and me to think and talk about between sessions. But more often than not, whatever we had intended to work on at any given session was derailed—usually by something else that Shane was angry and upset about. Often this involved some part of the daily prison drama: an argument at breakfast with a guard or a guy, or perhaps the disgusting quality of breakfast itself.

  Sometimes it was problems with his parole officer. His constant conflicts with Dennis Walker meant there was always something to be upset about: Dennis wouldn’t see him, Dennis wouldn’t do his paperwork, Dennis was always accusing him of something, Dennis still wouldn’t let him apply for passes.

  Sometimes it was problems with his cellmate. He could not cope with being double-bunked. Each cellmate was worse than the last, it seemed. The first one never showered. The second was a thief. The third was dealing drugs. The fourth was a schizophrenic off his meds. The fifth was always trying to get into his pants. He repeatedly requested to be moved to a single cell. But each time one became available, it was given to someone else, and he became more and more enraged.

  Sometimes the problems were political. Just three weeks after we began our counselling with Edward, Stephen Harper was re-elected—with a majority government this time. We spent our next two sessions being collectively upset about that.

  Whatever we might have been learning from Edward was mostly lost in the commotion. And yet we persisted for seven or eight months. It would look bad if we quit, Shane said, they would use it against him. I wondered if he’d only pushed so hard for this counselling because he thought it would make him look good—not because he really wanted help. It seemed he was no more willing or able to accept help than he’d ever been.

  THERE WAS ME SAYING, “I’ve always wanted people to like me.”

  We were in the visiting room on a Sunday morning, and I was upset because I hadn’t been invited to a party everyone else I knew had gone to the night before. The truth was, I didn’t much like parties anyway, but still I felt hurt, left out, excluded, shunned. All my old fears that I didn’t belong, that nobody liked me, that nobody wanted me around, that nobody loved me except him, had gone into overdrive. I wasn’t exactly crying, was stuck somewhere between whimpering and snivelling—which made me feel even more pathetic.

  There was me saying, “I’ve always just wanted to be liked.”

  There was him saying, “Me too.”

  I couldn’t for the life of me see how this was true. Was he being sarcastic? Or maybe he was imitating Alex, who had a habit of saying, “Me too,” whenever I complained of a headache, an upset stomach, a sore throat. I found this endearing, took it as his own brand of shorthand empathy.

  But no, Shane was being sincere. In all the years I’d known him, it seemed he’d been inclined to go out of his way to make people dislike him, then to complain bitterly when they did. Maybe now he was referring back to some much earlier time, long before I knew him, when he really did want people to like him, a time before he decided it wasn’t worth trying to please anyone, that it was much easier and possibly more enjoyable to piss them off instead. I’d seen him do it often enough. And once he’d succeeded in pissing someone off, he’d then flash a sneer of triumph, followed by a surge of anger at them for being pissed off at him. Surely it was even harder being Shane than it was trying to understand him.

  I could never figure out how much of the way he behaved was the result of his having been in prison for so long and how much of it was just him being him. How could I possibly separate the two? Perhaps still not comprehending the full implications of institutionalization, I did now understand, at least superficially, the damage thirty years in prison was likely to do to a person. I kept thinking he didn’t know any better—how could he? I was in love with the wonderful person I had seen flashes of from the very beginning, the person he could be, would be someday as long as I stood strong beside him. I knew other people thought this was impossible, but I was determined to prove they were mistaken.

  I have always been reluctant to abandon a project—or a person—despite all evidence pointing to the fact that I should. Was this pride—me being so unwilling to admit I was wrong, to just cut my losses and give up? Was this chronic contrariness on my part? Was I all the way to perverse in responding to phrases like “You can’t do that” or “That will never work” the way a bull responds to a red flag? Perhaps I was so busy reacting to those red flags that I missed all the more important ones I should have been paying attention to. I still cannot fully explain why I continued to remain loyal to Shane for all those difficult years. I still cannot make sense of it in a way that sticks. Perhaps the bottom line is that like many things we humans do, especially in the name of love, it doesn’t make sense.

  I am stubborn, and I am not a quitter. I am not one to back down from a challenge. I am also a hoper. These are qualities that have served me well in many areas of my life, especially in my writing. In retrospect, I can see they didn’t serve me well in my relationship with Shane. I am such a hoper that sometimes I can’t see what’s right in front of my face.

  Sometimes it seemed that Shane wanted to prove the naysayers right: “So you think I’m a miserable bastard? I’ll show you. I’ll show you just how much of a miserable bastard I can be. You ain’t seen nothing yet.” Perhaps it was the “yaysayers,” including me, that he most wanted to prove wrong. I thought my love could fix him, and he seemed determined to show me that it could not. Did he hate me for loving him? Did he want to prove that he could not and should not be loved?

  I ARRIVED AT THE PRISON ON A FRIDAY MORNING in early June with my little blue bag in hand. We had now completed our three twenty-four-hour PFVs as required, and this was to be our first forty-eight. At the horseshoe, they waved me down to V&C as usual. Passing the offices in the hallway, I could see John Logan was on duty, so I stopped and briefly chatted with him. His wife had died two months ago, and I’d sent him a sympathy card. To me this was a simple gesture of condolence and respect. Shane wasn’t sure the card was a good idea, worried that it would somehow come back on him, but it didn’t. Today John told me about a vacation he was planning to take next month with his son and his family. Then I went on down the hall to V&C.

  As usual, Grant went through the contents of my bag and then called for the dog handler, Dwayne. Although we’d never talked directly about the car sweep incident, he had one day said, “I have to do what my dog says,” and I had replied, “I know.” So we were over it now and got along well enough. The dog sniffed the contents of my bag. Dwayne looked at the books I’d brought. He said he didn’t read much, but his wife did. I still tended to hold my breath while the dog gave me the once-over, but I was almost used to all this by now, no longer much bothered by having first a man and then a dog checking out my underwear, no longer struck by the incongruity of the search being conducted in the children’s play area in front of a pink plastic stove and two Fisher-Price high chairs, all under the watchful eye of Talking Elmo. I was hardly even rattled anymore by the cognitive dissonance of the prison world. Even at the time, I realized this was not necessarily a good thing.

  Dwayne and his dog left, Grant went back into the bubble, and I gathered up my bag and sat at a table to wait for Shane to be called down. An inmate came in and sat down with a man in a suit—his lawyer, no doubt. Another inmate with a noisy bucket of water on wheels and a disgusting string mop proceeded to swab out the bathrooms. There was a great deal of activity in the hallway between V&C and the horseshoe, but from where I sat, I couldn’t see what was happening. Being well inured by now to the “mind your own business” rule, I didn’t think it would be wise to move to another table for a better look. I waited. I stared at the clock. I sat there for over half an hour. It shouldn’t be taking this long. Grant came out of the bubble, went down the hallway, returned after a few minutes, and went back in
to the bubble, all without looking at me. This couldn’t be good. I waited some more.

  Grant came out of the bubble again, directly to my table this time. Apologizing for the delay, he said there was a problem, but they’d get it sorted out shortly. Like the rest of the staff, he had an excellent poker face. He asked me if there had been any trouble between Shane and me lately. I knew better than to ask what kind of trouble.

  “No,” I said.

  “Okay, good, I didn’t think so,” he said and went back down the hallway.

  More time passed. Grant returned and told me I would have to be interviewed by the acting MAI—the Manager of Assessments and Interventions—a new acronym to me, not to be confused with MIA, Missing in Action. Grant led me down the hallway to a small conference room on the left. The person waiting for me there was none other than Jerry Anderson.

  Momentarily flushed with relief at seeing a familiar face, I asked, “What the hell is going on?” I knew Jerry was working at Frontenac now, but this was the first time I’d seen him since the revocation hearing at Bath two years ago. He said they’d received a “kite,” an unsigned note, indicating that Shane was planning to harm me during this PFV. I reminded Jerry that he had been there with us through the worst of it, before Shane got sent back, and that difficult though it had been, there had never been any actual or threatened physical violence. Yes, I had been briefly fearful in that circumstance because of Shane’s erratic behaviour, but I was not fearful now. Jerry assured me that he didn’t believe Shane would ever hurt me and that this sort of thing happened all the time, one inmate waging a vendetta against another who had somehow offended, insulted, or otherwise rubbed him the wrong way. But still, he said, according to policy, they must investigate further.

  The interview went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. Several times Jerry referred to “a member of the public.”

  Finally I asked, “Who? Who are you talking about?”

  “You!” he said. “You are a member of the public, and we must ensure your safety and security.”

  Even at the time, this struck me as funny. I had, after all, been deemed “a threat to the institution” by both the ion scanner and the dog. In my experience so far, “security” was only about keeping drugs, weapons, and other contraband out while also keeping the inmates in and safe from each other. But now I was “a member of the public” who needed their protection.

  Finally Jerry said our PFV would have to be cancelled until he could get to the bottom of this. We would be allowed a few minutes together before I went home, and I’d be permitted to take the perishable food items with me. He led me back to V&C. Shane and Jimmy, the chair of the Inmate Committee, were brought in by John Logan. As I had expected, Shane was apopleptic. I wasn’t sure if Jimmy was there to advise him of his rights in this situation or to keep him from losing control completely. Before leaving us to our brief discussion, John Logan said we should remain calm; it would all be figured out quickly, and we could probably have our PFV next weekend instead. This was reassuring. But I was hardly surprised when it didn’t happen that way.

  THE DISTRESS OF LOSING OUR PFV was mitigated somewhat by the fact that on the same day Shane was finally approved for a work release. He would have a real job this time, a paying job not in the prison but in the community. He and several other inmates had been hired by the local call centre of an organization raising money in support of youth safety charities, drug awareness groups, and teen suicide prevention programs. Shane would be a telemarketer, soliciting donations for these worthy causes from people not only in the Kingston area, but also across Canada and the United States. Other than the fact that he loved talking on the phone, with no office experience and only minimal computer skills, Shane had no qualifications whatsoever for this type of work.

  The best thing about this job was that he would be paid the current Ontario minimum wage of almost nine dollars an hour. Although the United Nations standards state that prisoners shall not be used as labourers without equitable pay, the wage for jobs inside the prisons was between five and seven dollars a day. Even after CSC took their 25 per cent off the top for room and board, in an eight-hour shift at the call centre, Shane would make more money in one day than he’d been making at his prison job in two weeks.

  As the partner of a prisoner, the prospect of this job made me happy. Not only would Shane have enough to buy whatever he needed at the canteen and keep his phone card topped up, but also he would send the rest of the money to me to help with the household expenses.

  As a “member of the public,” however, I had some reservations. Irritated as people already are by the incessant calling of telemarketers, how would they feel if they knew that the person calling and asking for their credit card number just as they were sitting down to dinner was a federal inmate—a convicted bank robber and murderer no less?

  Shane had some reservations about the job too. The call centre was located on the second floor of a small office building just four short blocks from my house. Situated on the southeast corner of the main intersection leading into and out of my neighbourhood, it was across the street on one side from the apartment building where he had briefly lived and, on the other, from the Tim Hortons where I went every day. With no sign anywhere to indicate its existence, I’d had no idea it was even there. Shane said they were testing him by placing him so close to my house, putting us both squarely in the path of temptation, hoping he’d sneak away for an afternoon quickie or maybe I’d slide over to see him at work, to bring him some lunch or a coffee or something more sinister. He was sure they were setting him up. At an earlier stage in our relationship, this would have had me calling him “Mr. Paranoid Pants,” but now I thought he might well be right. We agreed that to be on the safe side, we would be extremely careful. Whenever possible I would avoid that intersection and take another route, even though it meant driving ten blocks out of my way. I would go to a different Tim Hortons for my daily French Vanilla, even though it meant changing my routine of a dozen years. If I did happen to be driving by and saw him on the street, I would just wave and keep going—even if, I teased, he was stark naked, crying his eyes out, and throwing himself on the hood of my car.

  Only three days into the job, Shane was having reservations of another sort. For one thing, he’d been told by the boss not to use his real name when making calls. He did anyway. For another thing, it bothered him that many of the people he was calling and asking for donations were elderly, some of whom, he said, were so lonely they kept him on the line just to have someone to talk to. He felt like he was being paid to prey on these vulnerable and defenceless people. He was beginning to feel suspicious about the whole operation. There were so many things that just didn’t feel right, just didn’t add up. He gave me the website address and asked me to have a look. What I saw appeared to be professional and legitimate, but all the links were dead.

  When the phone rang just before noon on Friday, Shane’s eighth day on the job, I could see by the call display that it was him, calling from Frontenac at a time when he should have been at work.

  In his sheepish little-boy voice, he said, “Don’t be mad at me.”

  In my cranky big-mommy voice, I said, “What did you do?”

  He said, “I got fired.”

  During yesterday’s lunch break, he said, he was standing outside the front of the building with two or three other non-inmate employees. They were all smoking. A Frontenac staff member happened to be driving by at that very moment.

  This morning, Shane said, he’d been taken to work with the other inmates as usual, but within an hour, he was picked up and returned to the prison. He’d lost his job for smoking. He admitted that yes, he was smoking, but no, he said he didn’t know he was no longer allowed to smoke while away from the institution on a work release. Maybe he knew, maybe he didn’t. That was never quite clear to me. But I certainly hadn’t imagined that CSC’s no-smoking policy now extended beyond the boundaries of prison property. Did they actually have the p
ower to prohibit an inmate from smoking anywhere in the free world? Did this mean that if Shane had been coming to my house on UTAs the way he used to, he wouldn’t have been allowed to smoke in my car, my house, or my backyard? Apparently it did. Just as he wasn’t allowed to drink or do drugs anywhere at any time, now he was also not allowed to smoke—ever.

  Of course I understood the need for conditions prohibiting the use of drugs and alcohol that were imposed on most prisoners and parolees. For most of them, including Shane, drinking and drugs were significant factors in their offences and might well trigger the commission of more crimes if they started using again. But smoking? As a smoker myself, it seems to me that more crimes are likely to be committed for the lack of nicotine than for having freedom of access to it.

  Upset as we both were about the loss of this job for such a flimsy reason, within four months it turned out to have been a blessing in disguise—as blessings so often tend to be.

  ON THE LAST FRIDAY OF JULY, it was raining lightly when I got up. The previous afternoon I’d been to the dentist for my regular check up, and we bemoaned the fact that we’d had no rain to speak of for weeks. In my yard, the grass was dying, the ground beneath so hard and dry, it was cracking like a desert. An avid and award-winning gardener, my dentist said he didn’t know how much longer his plants could bear up under these drought conditions. As I was leaving, he joked that he was going to do a rain dance when he got home from work. Maybe that would do the trick.