One lifer here, who goes by the initials M.C., received his first parole hearing for a homicide three years ago, but now sees little chance of ever getting out. It has affected his spirit: “As long as a man has hope, the authorities have control. They destroyed hope. Unfortunately in time they may learn a man with no hope becomes a desperate soul,” he told me.
Michael Tully, serving a life sentence for homicide, has had an even worse time. Since Glendening’s announcement, Tully has lost his family support group. His wife has asked for a divorce, and he has lost all contact with his family. If not for the support of his friends in prison, who’ve encouraged him not to lose hope, as he says, “I would have flipped out and resorted to ancient self-destructive habits.”
That is something all of us should pray never happens. If it does, our state’s prisons are going to become pits of despair thar make conditions today look mild: rampant drug use, assaults, even murders will become commonplace. Both prisoners and officers will live in jeopardy. We shouldn’t forget that the majority of the prisoners I live with, maybe not the lifers but the others, will someday be released. And we should think carefully about what we want to teach them before that day arrives.
1996, Maryland Correctional Institution-Hagerstown Hagerstown, Maryland
Myths of Darkness:
The Toledo Madman and the
Ultimate Freedom
J. R. Grindlay
Before the darkness fell, I used to sir on the edge of my bed looking out at the starless sky pondering meaningless abstractions, sipping halfheartedly at my instant coffee and reading the prophecies in The Book of Doom. I’ve always been moody — it seemed a proper state of mind for an artist. Except when I was being Dylan Thomas or Norman Mailer — then there were always parties and shouting and loud music. It’s difficult to carry on when you have to view each action through the eyes of a future biographer. Have to keep it interesting, yes, you owe that to generations of future readers. There’s nothing worse than reading those dead, dry biographies of men whose bodies crumbled to dust and ash long before they ever died. Now that the darkness has come, it’s all a lot easier: Nobody can read in the darkness, ergo, I am free.
So strange, to stumble across freedom in the darkness — the way you’d trip over the coffee table in the room while fumbling for the light switch… Actually, it wasn’t that simple — for me, anyway. I’ve always been a little slow at such reasoning. The Toledo Madman explained it all to me, one day sitting out on the yard, throwing pebbles at the fence. The Toledo Madman isn’t really a madman, that’s just the disguise he wears to help him serve his time. But since he’s serving two consecutive life sentences, it’s a role he has a lot of time to perfect. Sometime, not so long ago, he had another name, and once in a while a new hack in the cellblock will try to call him that. But he never answers to it. The rest of us just call him Toledo or Madman. Most of us have forgotten his old name anyway. What’s the use of saving up scraps of dead information?
We used to go out on the yard to exercise and run the track, just to keep in shape. After that, we’d sit around on the grass, talking and throwing pebbles at the fence. Everyone throws pebbles at the fence. They’ve got little mercury switches on the fence that set off an alarm in the towers when something jiggles it. When you hit it just right with a pebble, the tower hacks slide back their windows and pop their heads out, looking up and down the wire, suspiciously eying the sparrows perched on it, as if wondering, maybe, if the sparrows and robins are working with us in some great conspiracy.
The Toledo Madman actually did have a plot worked out for an escape, using the sparrows. He took bread out on the yard every other day for six months, once, feeding the sparrows, coaxing them. We tried to tell him, but you can’t tell the Madman anything, once he’s got an idea in his head. He just kept feeding them and coaxing them. And they kept taking his bread and looking serious, then laughing at him behind his back — little groups of them would gather over on the fence after he’d gone back inside, you could see them talking it over and laughing. He got the idea from the Polack. The Polack caught a bumblebee in between his window and screen. When it had finally exhausted itself, trying to batter down the window, he slipped a loop of thread around it. If you’ve never seen a bumblebee on a ten-foot thread leash, you won’t really appreciate the commotion it caused when he walked into the dayroom with it. The Polack loved commotion, anyway. He used to fashion fake turds out of wet toilet paper, using dirt to dye them brown, and leave them on the hacks’ chairs or in the chow hall or next to the TV in the dayroom. The Toledo Madman fed the sparrows for six months, getting ready to try his plan. Finally the day came and he made his try. It had a limited, partial success. The sparrows all escaped okay. The hacks took the Toledo Madman off to the hole for six months. Now he throws pebbles at the fence and at the sparrows. They sit on the fence, mostly out of range, and laugh at him. But he told me that he’s been practicing in secret, in his cell at night, getting his arm in shape for longer throws. The sparrows’ days, he assures me, are numbered.
The Toledo Madman used to hang with Burnout — they were road-dogs for years, like flawed carbons of the same copy. Except that Burnout had a habit of looking like a demented Chinaman. He had a silk robe with a huge dragon flying across the back, imprinted over a yin-yang, its tail curled like a spiked whip. You’d walk by his cell and he’d be sitting in the dark, reading by the light reflected off his shaved head. He used to shave his eyebrows, too. Not completely, just at each end, tapering them to points. And his Fu Manchu mustache and scrag-gly gook beard. He took a secret delight in sitting there, where the darkness hid him, in a full lotus, looking for all the world like some inscrutable, insane old Buddhist monk.
You’d see the two of them walking off to chow, heads together — the shaven inscrutable head nodding to meet the nodding flurry of the Madman’s head. And the piercing cackle of their laughs, like two old cannibals reminiscing over the succulent child-flesh of their past. An unnerving pair, wild eyes hidden behind dark glasses. Like brothers of a different flesh.
Then, one spring, you could see a new wildness in Burnout’s eyes — like an eagle that’s caught sight of a mouse in an open field. He began to circle. It was plain to all of us, and most painfully to the Toledo Madman, just what sights were lurking behind those wild eyes and stares. There was a new earnestness and depth to the way the two of them talked. You could see the madman goading Burnout into strange laughs and wary answers. In the back of the library, they argued at loud length about unheard subjects. Finally, in desperation, the Toledo Madman smuggled his pet mouse, in his kite-can cage, down to Burnout’s cell. As time went by, I’d get up in the middle of the night and walk to the front of my cell to take a leak. And across the way, there was a strange aurora of light and color in Burnout’s cell, emanating from those mad eyes. And I could feel and hear Toledo standing there, in the cell next to mine, helplessly watching for hours on end.
After they pulled Burnout off the fence the first time, they sent him out to lunch — put him on Thorazine, those huge doses they forcefeed you like a turkey before Thanksgiving. The zombies are everywhere, the smile, the blank-eyed stare, you go out to lunch and wake up in some distant someday when you’re ready for release.
But Burnout wasn’t just another zombie, he was a crafty old Chinaman trapped in a strange body. He managed to vomit up a dose, one day. And went to the Toledo Madman for help. Toledo agonized, but zombies don’t have road-dogs in their hazy dreamworlds. So to help was better than letting them trash Burnout’s mind.
Every day for a week, Burnout was there with a smile when they came to pump him full of his Thorazine. And an hour later, the Toledo Madman would appear at Burnout’s cell with a handful of Dexedrine. You could see the mad glint in those eyes again, fiery and confident, floating like a song of love in the summer air, as he paced his cell for hours. The air was as thick and electric as the hour before a thunderstorm, that week, while Burnout kindled a fire in his mind and a
rage in his body, beyond knowing.
They never had to pull him off the fence, that second time. His body leaped and danced up off of it and landed like a lost rag doll a few feet away. And he crawled over and grasped the wire in both hands, trying to pull himself up, while the hack fired at him and people were scattering like ducks I stood there next to the Toledo Madman, watching his shoulder bunch up and tremble under the strain of standing there like it was all happening in a movie a thousand miles away, beyond the reach of any arms to help and hold. When the jeeps pulled up outside the fence and the tower hacks stopped shooting, he turned and looked at me across all the many miles, with his eyes shining behind the dark glasses, as if all the world was plain to see and nothing he could say would add a lick to it. Then he walked off, back to his cell, stopping on the way to retrieve Hercules, his mouse, from Burnout’s cell.
I stayed in my cell most of the next week, as if food and death were hard to swallow at the same time. And the idea of going back on the yard right away seemed obscene, like fondling your best friend’s mother. The Toledo Madman, on the other hand, was the same as ever. He even was on the crew that raked and sifted the dirt where Burnout got wasted, to get rid of the bloodstains. Me, I sat in my cell, tasting the horror and trying to fit it into poems.
Eventually, you hit the gearshift and find it all remains the same. It wasn’t anything when I came up out of hiding, just the same old shit. None of the James Cagney anger seeping through the place, building up to a cry for vengeance. Just card games and working out and walking the yard.
It was somewhere around there that I was sitting on the yard, rapping with the Toledo Madman, throwing pebbles at the fence, and he told me about freedom. Not the usual jabber about hitting the street to be free, because a man can be more free inside the fence than any square John out there can ever understand or begin to suspect.
You take a place, a hard-nosed max joint like our happy little home, with all the security systems they’ve been able to figure out, all the nice electrical gadgetry and Big Brotherhood, where you can’t help but hate the hack and you get nothing more than the minimal requirements of survival. Nobody expects anything of you and there’s not a thing they can take from you. That’s freedom. The things that bind and prison a man are his own hopes and fears. When you’ve surrendered them, there’s no way they can ever hold you, there’s just no way for them to grab hold of you.
So it’s all a question of sitting out the darkness, sitting here in the cell that’s a cave and a dark womb, knowing the darkness that lives like a sad fire on an empty hillside where the gathered masses have at last fallen silent and the dead past has no more reality than all the songs trailing across the air.
The Toledo Madman is gone now. Eventually he became so free of all this lurking darkness that he sat in the back corner of his cell for hours, then days, at a time, radiating a warmth and brightness that pushed back the edges of the night and all of us here in the cellblock could begin to see. The hacks began to tremble a little, just to have to walk past his cell; to meet the placid smile and feel the glow of his eyes on them. They finally took him back there for two weeks — guy coming out of there said the hacks were beating him every night, trying to put out his lights. Anyone in the place could’ve told them they were throwing water at the sun, but they never bothered to ask.
Two weeks of that was enough — that infuriating smile that branded them while they were breaking their shitsticks over his shoulders and head, they couldn’t take that — a knife in the balloon. It’s hard to hit a man who doesn’t cringe or cry out or at least hate you. They called it madness — the Toledo Madman in the full radiant glory of his time-disguise! —and shipped him off to a place where the shrinks could look at him and not feel the eyes of a hundred cons like shanks pressing at their backs, questioning them every second.
I got a letter from him yesterday. He said the damn sparrows followed him up there and they sit on the fence, laughing at him still. And he asked about Hercules — who I flushed down my toilet two days after they shipped the Madman out. This is no life for a cute little mouse like that.
1975, London Correctional Institution London, Ohio
Routines and Ruptures
Learning to do time, according to PEN writers, is to weather a series of harsh lessons. New prisoners often refuse to accept their actual surroundings and cling emotionally to lost realities — for men, typically, the world of the streets, for women the family. The dream of early release — through legal relief or otherwise — dies hard and typically leaves depression in its wake.
By stages prisoners acknowledge their new surroundings and adapt to prison culture. When they settle in, many — especially long-termers — survive by structuring their lives around religion or some other productive or creative activity. For some men, doing time means aggressively pursuing their appeals or entering into lawsuits protesting their conditions. For others, it means, according to one writer, “giving in or buying in to the jailin’ lifestyle of pumping iron, hanging with gangs, kicking back.” Women take to the courts less frequently. And, where men find protection, identity, a sense of belonging, and companionship in gangs, women find these more often in multigenerational surrogate families.
Meanwhile, daily institutional routines — like the count, work shifts, meals, yard time — supplant habits and expectations people bring from the world outside. For better or for worse, they order the prisoner’s day. But some routines, like the delivery of mail, permit a recipient like Jimmy Santiago Baca a fleeting transcendence of all constraint.
Nature, too, has routines that can’t be entirely locked away. New seasons, breaking the routines of old seasons, also color prison routine and may convert a prison guard into a dreaming fisherman, as in Michael Hogan’s “Spring.”
Prisoners’ performances, displays of personality by which they assure themselves of their own humanity and put their personal stamp on their surroundings, can also be called routines. Thus a new inmate, like Lori McLuckie’s “Trina Marie,” flaunts her style in an effort to navigate the enigmatic new society and discover whom she can trust, while clinging to fantasies of happiness. In “After Lights Out,” Barbara Saunders sets such brave performances against the real — and routine — threat of predators. Doing time is made of uneasy combinations of such competing routines.
Music can evoke familiar worlds of freedom and their cherished routines. The beat of a conga drummer in D Yard stirs the answering rhythms of poet Raymond Ringo Fernandez. “Contratiempo con el ttempo” — one beat, one time, one way of doing time calls up another, and the dissonance of a lone instrument in “culturally deprived” Attica plays against the many-voiced harmonies of a Nuyorican jam-session and home. “Lies and gossip”* (as Fernandez characterizes prison discourse in another poem) are routines that help domesticate steel-and-concrete corridors, “In the Big Yard,” by Reginald S. Lewis, catalogues the competing routines of yard gossip circa 1988. His poem ends with a tribute to Pops, the runner who has seen it all and acts as guide. But by 1997, the survival of a similar old con is menaced by the heedless young in Patrick Nolan’s poem “Old Man Motown.”
Inherent in all routine is the possibility of its rupture. Prison routines are shadowed by the mental mutinies that would destroy them. Hostility between prisoner and guard becomes reflexive, along with the repression of rage — and other feeling — in both. In Scott Antworth’s “The Tower Pig,” institutional routine is ruptured by a brief venture of keeper and kept into free air; the encounter between these two very different prison-hardened characters permits a slight but crucial opening, a moment of surprising recognition. In Daniel Roseboom’s “The Night the Owl Interrupted,” an alternative Utopian solidarity briefly emerges with the near-miraculous intervention of nature. It provides the men inner fortification against the return to institutional routine.
Spring
Michael Hogan
Ice has been cracking all day
and small boys on the shore
pretending it is the booming of artillery
lie prone clutching imaginary carbines.
Inside the compound returning birds
peck at bread scraps from the mess hall.
Old cons shiver in cloth jackets
as they cross the naked quadrangle.
They know the inside perimeter is exactly
two thousand eighty-four steps
and they can walk it five more times
before a steam whistle blows for count.
Above them a tower guard dips his rifle
then raises it again dreamily.
He imagines a speckled trout
coming up shining and raging with life.
1975, Arizona State Prison-Florence Florence, Arizona
Autumn Yard
Chuck Culhane
I sit bundled in the peaceful sun.
To my right, a slip of colored sail goes downriver behind the old death house.
Two prisoners circle a dirt path bordering a green field double-fenced and walled with liberal layers of barbed wire.
Buck, a Lifer, works on the bars doing chins and dips building his house trim and strong against the long years.
George, hands scrunched in wordless pockets walks with recent loss of his young brother. We nod hello, and faded pennants snap in the wind along the fencetop.
1985, Sing Sing Correctional Facility Ossining, New York
Letters Come to Prison
Jimmy Santiago Baca
From the cold hands of guards
Flocks of white doves
Handed to us through the bars,
Our hands like nests hold them
As we unfold the wings
They crash upward through
Layers of ice around our hearts,
Doing Time Page 8
