My letters grew longer. For months, almost all of the writing I did was for Longo. After the Times had finished investigating my articles, several magazines, including National Geographic Adventure, were again willing to publish my work. But I had no desire to take any assignments. Instead, I lived off my savings and devoted myself full-time to the Longo project. Sometimes I’d spend an entire day doing little else but writing to him. I virtually stopped keeping a journal; my letters to Longo, each of which I photocopied, essentially became my journal.
I always composed the letters in a single draft, in pen, without any particular objective except to allow Longo into my life—and, I hoped, to inspire him to reciprocate in kind. “I’m just spitting out what’s in my head,” I explained, “[with] no attempt to strain anything out.”
I included in the letters copies of my articles, all the ones I didn’t think he’d previously read. I sent him crossword puzzles and initiated a game of chess, one move per letter, with schoolyard-style taunts accompanying each move. I shared the details of some of my dreams—“often I now dream at night about sleeping in trees”—and occasionally made light of Longo’s confinement. “I’m not lucky like you,” I wrote after pausing my letter to cook breakfast; “nobody brings me food.” I mailed what I called “cell-warming gifts”—photos to hang on his walls from my trips to Niger, Mali, Afghanistan, Panama, China, Thailand, and Japan.
Not all I wrote had a jovial tone. I described to him the body-heavy weariness that overcame me when I dwelled on my firing. There were moments, I admitted, when I so fiercely missed the adrenal buzz of a big-story pursuit that the Montana town I lived in, which I’d always adored, had begun to feel like an outpost I’d been banished to.
I also told Longo about my girlfriend. My convalescence had given me the chance to pursue a genuine romance for the first time in years, and I started dating a professor in the math department of Montana State University, named Jill Barker. We’d first attempted to date during my Times days; the connection between us, I’d found, had been dauntingly powerful, but the liaison had ended up, as did all my affairs of that period—my attention span erratic, my fidelity intermittent—as an utter disaster.
Shortly after my firing, though, Jill offered me another chance. I kept Longo fully informed, sparing him none of my struggles. “Jill and I have had a few arguments lately,” I wrote. “What about? Gosh, mostly about how committed I am to the relationship. Chris, I have to tell you—I’m really somewhat of a failure when it comes to women. I’m 33 years old; I’d really like to have a family one day—but I can scarcely hold down a girlfriend.”
As I was writing these letters, I knew that confiding the details of my love life to a man awaiting trial for murdering his wife and children was probably inappropriate. But my letters to him seemed to have a life of their own, one resistant to self-editing. Writing to Longo had become strangely freeing. Whatever I told him seemed safe; even if my letters were being scanned by jailhouse officers, his being locked away gave me the sensation of depositing my words into a vault. And by writing to Longo about my struggles with women, and egotism, and honesty—by digging at my issues until I’d grasped them ably enough to put into words—I at least felt like I was learning something about myself. So I refused to hold much of anything back. If it was on my mind, I usually put it in a letter.
Longo responded to my efforts. He did not follow through on his threat of silence—he just halted his life story. He referred to me as “the ultimate pen pal,” and then, as if inspired by the challenge, proceeded to outdo me. He drew a detailed picture of his cell, indicating precisely how his toiletries were lined up on his shelf. He outlined the routine he was forced to perform during a strip-search: “Hands through hair, flip ears, open & say ahh, finger around gums, arms up, sack up, stick up, turn around, pray for mercy, spread ’em & cough, twice.” He reported on events at the jail: fights, suicide attempts, homosexual sex, and a failed escape attempt involving a pair of nail clippers and twelve bedsheets. He insisted that none of these activities involved his own participation.
He described his morning exercise routine: curling his bed mattress, then lifting a pillowcase filled with books. He provided instructions for making no-bake cookies using items available from the jail commissary—oatmeal, peanut butter, and hot-chocolate mix. He studied Spanish, he wrote, by watching the talk show Despierta América on television.
He learned how to fish. He carefully pulled a thread out of his mattress, tied a comb to one end, and tossed it out the gap beneath his cell’s thick wooden door. He’d battle other inmates to rake in candy bars that one of them had pushed into the common area outside the cells.
Fellow inmates in the jail’s maximum security wing—the “Maxmen,” Longo called them—became characters in his letters, including Carlos the acid-making, rap-singing Seventh-day Adventist and Dave the skinhead Wiccan vegan. At first, he said, the inmates taunted him and called him a child-killer, but soon they grew to like him. “People see who you really are after a few days,” he wrote. He had heard rumors of a $500 bounty on his head at the Oregon State Penitentiary, the prison he’d likely be sent if he were found guilty. There was also a $100 prize for the first person to rape him.
Any interaction Longo had with other inmates, even through a sealed door, violated his segregation status, and he was continually reprimanded by guards for communicating. The usual way to talk was by standing on his toilet and shouting through the vents—“vental conversation,” he called it, or sometimes the “vent-phone.” He was able to contact people ten cells away, though of course the nine inmates between could listen in. For a more private chat, he’d lie on his stomach on the concrete floor and speak with his neighbor underneath the door.
During many of the conversations, he said, he acted as a sort of inmate therapist—aiding Dave the skinhead with his anger, and Carlos the acid maker with his negativity. The counselors available in the jail, Longo noted, were second-rate. “They might want to go back to school,” he wrote. He felt he did a better job ministering to the inmates’ needs.
When he was caught for these activities, he was typically punished by being kept in his cell for twenty-three hours a day, rather than the usual twenty-one—normally he spent two hours in the day room, where he could watch television or make a phone call, and one in the exercise room. Even when he was allowed out, though, he was still kept alone. Sometimes inmates teased him by singing a rendition of the song “All By Myself” through the vent-phone.
Jailhouse food was a constant topic in his letters: “chicken casserole tinted green by the peas”; “mushy spaghetti with beef pebbles”; “already-been-chewed fruit medley.” He revealed the jailhouse nickname his fellow inmates bestowed upon him: Shortstop. (The opposite of Long-Go.) He once admitted that he’d illegally acquired a pen. “A fine friend,” he called it, “well maybe medium, if you get my point.” He responded to my weather updates with tongue-in-cheek reports of his own—“today is mild & bright w/ a temperature of about 70°, and no noticeable wind, but I’m not sure what it’s like outside.” He described the “Donkey Express,” a method of transporting written notes from one cell to another via inmate janitors, who hid the correspondence in their broom handles.
Much of his time was spent reading. He finished seventy-three novels, he said, in his first hundred days in jail. After that he stopped counting. To combat boredom, he fiddled with the cracks in his cell window. “Some meditate in the lotus position,” he wrote, “I picked at my window.”
Longo even offered advice about my girlfriend. In one letter, he compared the cultivating of a new love affair with the growing of a garden. “Give it a chance,” he wrote me in regard to Jill. “A real chance w/ careful planting, watering, etc.”
After a while, Longo and I had become so comfortable with each other that our continued contact seemed assured. As the summer of 2002 eased into fall, with his trial still to come, I felt the time had arrived to refocus attention on my writing project. In
a letter to Longo, I stated, in the most forthright terms possible, that I wanted him to continue with his life story, but that I would not be able to pay him for it.
Longo quickly responded. “I do greatly appreciate your honesty w/ regard to the potential book monies,” he wrote. He said he had no plans to initiate a conversation with anyone else. He said he’d drop his demand for money and carry on with his story. “I think you understand,” he wrote, “that I have committed to you.”
TWENTY-ONE
A FEW MONTHS after MaryJane Baker house-sat for the Longos, a dozen members of the Golfside Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses went on a ski trip to Mount Brighton, in eastern Michigan. Baker and Chris Longo were among them; Baker’s boyfriend was not.
Longo had never been skiing before, but this didn’t stop him from attempting the area’s most difficult run. While trying to slow himself down, Longo smacked his face with the top of his ski pole, opening a gash above his right eye. When he reached the bottom, Baker spotted him, bleeding heavily, and brought him to the first-aid station. He was patched up and instructed to go to the hospital for stitches.
Baker offered to escort him. With her half sister, Karyn, and a friend named Deb Palmer, she took Longo to the hospital—“a glorious hour away,” he wrote. Palmer drove, and Baker sat in the back, playing nurse. Longo practically forgot about the pain. “I was busy being excited at having MJ next to me,” he wrote. “I was extremely drawn to her.” Even so, he knew that she was “untouchable.” She was nearly twenty-five; he’d just turned seventeen.
The ski trip ended without romance, but Longo and Baker soon began spending a lot more time together. Baker usually devoted Wednesdays to performing what Witnesses call “field service”—proselytizing door-to-door. Field service is typically done in groups of four or five: a carload traveling together, two at a time going up to a house, the rest waiting behind in the car. By this point, Longo had completed his homeschooling and was working at a camera shop in the Briarwood Mall. He, too, arranged to have Wednesdays off. Most weeks, Longo and Baker and a few other Witnesses spent all day in the same vehicle, driving the neighborhoods of Ypsilanti.
“There couldn’t have been a better venue to get to know someone,” wrote Longo. In the car, Wednesday after Wednesday, he studied Baker. He noticed the way she moved her hands when she spoke, and how easily she seemed to work with whomever she was paired, and the deftness with which she handled strangers who were less than pleased to find Witnesses at the door. Within her, he felt, was an “infinite, unfluctuating kindness.” He memorized every curl and wave in her hair. He celebrated “her smile, her joy, & her ankles.” She brought alive to him, he said, the meaning of the Bible’s Song of Solomon (“You are altogether beautiful…you have made my heart beat”). He wrote that he “practically worshipped her.”
Yet he was not blind to their differences. “She had a propensity for seeing the worst of everything & concentrating, even worrying about what could go wrong,” he wrote. “I was the polar opposite, always being, probably over confident, that everything would be fine.” He sensed a sadness in her. Her smile, while radiant, appeared to require a conscious effort to maintain. She could be “strangely passive” and “too docile” and “sometimes cool & remote.” She possessed, he wrote, “the curious amenability of a victim.” And of course she was seven years older—he was, as he expressed it, “just a kid to her womanhood.”
Late in 1991 the territory lines of the Witness assemblies in Ypsilanti were redrawn, due to an imbalance of members. Longo learned that Baker would be attending a different Kingdom Hall. They had known each other for a year. “My heart hurt,” Longo wrote. He quit doing field service on Wednesdays.
They didn’t see each other for a while. Then, the following winter, they went skiing again on a group trip. This time, rather than trying to show off, Longo skied with Baker. For a few hours, they managed to separate from the others. Conversation flowed easily; “we seemed to bond,” wrote Longo. They helped each other up when they fell. Baker mentioned, casually, that things with her boyfriend hadn’t worked out. They went into the lodge and bought hot chocolates and sat by the fire. Until this day, Longo had assumed that Baker thought of him as a kind of friendly little brother. Now, he wrote, they seemed to be on “an unofficial date.”
A few weeks later, in late January of 1992, Baker’s friend Deb Palmer called Longo at work—he was still at the camera shop—and told him that she and Baker were coming to the mall. She said that Baker wanted to discuss something important with him.
“I became extremely flustered,” wrote Longo. Perhaps this would be an official date. He retreated to the store’s back room and checked himself in the mirror “umpteen times.” During a break, he visited a florist and purchased a single long-stemmed red rose. Then he became paranoid that the rose was too much—maybe this wasn’t a date at all; maybe they just wanted to invite him to a party. How foolish would he look then, holding a rose? He decided to hide the flower in the tiny dorm fridge in the back room, though he had to trim several inches off the stem to make it fit.
When he saw Baker approaching the store, along with Palmer, she seemed to be holding something behind her back. Maybe, thought Longo, it was something for him, so he dashed into the back room once again, took out his shortened rose, and held it behind his back. He feared that he was about to make a fool of himself, but it was too late. Baker walked in, grinning, and from behind her back she produced a gift. It was a single long-stemmed red rose.
“I was ecstatic & almost floored,” wrote Longo. “But the best part was having the satisfaction of seeing her smile broaden even more after opening slightly in splendid shock at seeing what I presented from behind my back.”
Palmer left them alone, and Longo spent his forty-five-minute lunch break with Baker at the mall’s coffee shop. They talked, openly, for the first time. Longo admitted that he’d fantasized about her when she was house-sitting. She’d had fantasies too, she said, and these fantasies had eventually ruined the relationship she was in. They joked about Longo’s frequent visits home during that week, and their obvious intent; he’d even offered to do Baker’s laundry. “Like I was going to let you wash my underwear,” she said.
The conversation turned serious. “I put on my spiritual hat & discussed the fact that I would only date her w/ a mind to a future marriage,” wrote Longo. He asked her if their age difference bothered her.
She admitted that for a time she’d been confused, having strong feelings for someone so much younger, but as she got to know Longo better she was impressed by his maturity. Their ages didn’t matter, she told him; she thought he was more mature than anyone she’d ever considered dating. She had no doubts, she said, about their compatibility.
Longo was dizzy with excitement. “I knew that this was the first forty-five minutes of the rest of my life,” he wrote. “My infatuation was being given an opportunity to turn into something real & permanent.” When it was time to part, they even hugged one another. Longo couldn’t wait to tell everyone about his new girlfriend; his parents, he hoped, would be as happy as he was.
“My parents,” wrote Longo, “blew a gasket.” He was certainly not past the bloom of youth, they said, and in no way ready to begin courting. They were shocked by the age difference; they were angered that Chris had pursued such a relationship behind their backs. Joy Longo, always more temperamental than Joe, became so heated that she finally unleashed an ultimatum. She told Chris that he could either obey their rules or move out of the house.
Chris asked his mom if she was serious. She said she was. His dad nodded his assent. There was no yelling, no throwing of objects, just words at an impasse. “In those split seconds,” Longo wrote, “I made up my mind & resolved that I would not let anything stand in the way of a future life containing MJ & I.” It was January 31, 1992. Eight days earlier, Longo had turned eighteen; by his reckoning, he was an adult, he was mature, and he was making the right choice. He was going to show his parents
“at any cost, & by whatever means necessary” that their opinions about him were “dead wrong.”
And so, a few days later—days in which a cold silence settled over the house—Chris loaded his belongings into his Chevy and moved into the guest room at the home of his friends Peter and Debbie Estey. Joy Longo later said that it was the most upsetting day of her life. Chris wrote that it was “the only bad memory of life w/ my parents & it’s the one that ended the strong relationship.”
According to Chris, Baker fully supported his decision to leave home. When, she wondered, would his parents consider him past the bloom of youth? Age twenty-five, Longo said. There’s no way, Baker pointed out, that they’d be able to ignore each other for so long. There was bound to be a schism sooner or later, and it was best to get it out of the way now. The worst, she said, was over.
Longo lived with the Esteys for a few weeks, then moved into an apartment with two roommates. He saw Baker every day. They ate lunch together, and went to the movies, and strolled in Gallup Park. Baker’s half sister, Karyn, usually acted as chaperone—the couple, obeying Witness edicts, kept the relationship platonic. They did not even hold hands. There was, however, no shortage of what Longo described as “romantic gazes where the unmistakable thoughts jumped between us.”
One evening, Baker and Longo were invited to the Esteys’ house to see a movie. They sat on the floor watching Robin Hood, starring Kevin Costner. They leaned against one another, shoulder to shoulder, and then, during the climactic scene in which Robin Hood and Maid Marian expressed their attraction while Bryan Adams’s “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” played on the sound-track, the moment became “unresistably romantic.” Longo whispered to Baker that this should be their song. Everything he’d do, he said, he’d do it for her. Baker turned to face him, and they continued to lean into one another, and their lips met. “I was truly, deeply in love,” wrote Longo, “& I knew in that moment that we would be together forever.”
True Story Page 12
