Better Than Fiction

by Lonely Planet

  I was safer here in the cell block because of the abundance of other, younger women in the group. To the inmates, some of whom had already glimpsed them, the criminology students must have looked like high school girls. Their presence in this grim place was a kind of outrage, a provocation; it would arouse excitement, frustration, incredulity, wrath. Adroitly I’d maneuvered myself to the front of the line, just behind the lieutenant. I would walk just behind him ‘around the block’ – I would not make the mistake of holding back and coming late in the line. For at the start of the walk, the inmates whose cells we passed wouldn’t quite grasp the situation as we walked quickly by; but by the time the fourth or fifth visitor passed a cell, all the prisoners would have been alerted by shouts and whistles. There would be a nightmare, but it would be a contained nightmare and it would not be mine this time.

  The lieutenant warned: ‘Walk fast – move along. Don’t stare into the cells. Don’t get too close to the cells. Walk as far to the left as you can. If they can reach you, if they grab you, you might be seriously hurt. And the prison might go into lockdown.’

  Several of the criminology students were asking if they could stay behind, if they could just wait and rejoin the group after the walk-around-the-block. Their voices were plaintive and pleading but the lieutenant explained that this was not possible.

  ‘The tour takes us through Cell-Block C. We are all going to “walk around the block” together.’

  Quietly enough the walk began along a walkway that spanned the full length of the first tier of cells. I was close behind the lieutenant and I was not going to look into the cells for I did not want to make ‘eye-contact’ with an inmate whose desire at that moment might be to reach grunting through the bars and grab me and not let go until guards swarmed to his cell. I did not have that sort of curiosity – I was determined to walk fast, and to keep in motion. And so, as I passed the cells, one after another after another, the men inside had but a blurred awareness of me, as, at the periphery of my vision, they were but a blurred presence to me, though I glimpsed enough to be aware of the cramped living conditions: bunk beds so close to the wall that inmates would have to pass sideways between the bunks and the walls, and a cell size of about nine by twelve feet. I was very nervous, and I was perspiring; I could hear, behind us, the uplifted voices of men, shouts, whistles, whooping noises of elation, derision. I would have liked to press my hands over my ears. I did not glance back, at the terrified young women, forced to walk this gauntlet as close as possible to the wall, away from the prison bars. I knew what they were feeling, as I’d had to run a gauntlet of a kind in Trenton.

  But I’d been alone in my misery, in Trenton. For there, by chance, I’d been the single female in the guided tour, a much smaller group than that at San Quentin, only about five or six people. The Trenton prison had not seemed so ‘secure’ as San Quentin and the tour guide not so experienced, but that might have been a misconception.

  In a haze of discomfort, I followed the lieutenant in the ‘walk-around-the-block.’ I did not inflame any inmate by passing too near his cell, or looking overtly into it; but I was aware of the rippling, rising excitement in my wake, as the young women were forced to march past the cells, one by one by one. The slumberous hive was being roused, shaken; the buzzing hum rose to crude shouts, whistles, whoops. But I am spared, this time.

  When we left the cell block, to return to the outside air, the tour group was abashed, shaken. What a relief to get outside, to breathe! Especially the young women had been made to realize how little their femininity was valued, in such a place; to be pretty here, to suggest sexual empowerment here, was to invite the most primitive and pitiless violence, as in an atavistic revenge of the male against the female. Civilization protects the female against the male, essentially: This is a hard, crude truth to ponder.

  The meaning of the walk-around-the-block is to make a woman understand this simple biological fact. Yet there are political overtones.

  The meaning of the walk-around-the-block is to make both men and women understand: You must be protected from your fellow man, by rifles. And if you don’t think so, you are very naïve, or a fool

  Or, you’re dead.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  We were exhausted by the cell block gauntlet and we were eager for the tour to end, but there was a final destination awaiting.

  Not Death Row: ‘We don’t take visitors to Death Row.’

  But we were led past a tall ugly building – the ‘Condemned Unit’ – which housed over seven hundred men awaiting execution. (Condemned women, of whom there are far fewer, are housed at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla.) The lieutenant spoke to us with a sort of grim boastfulness of the famous inmates who’d been executed at San Quentin: Caryl Chessman, William Bonin (the ‘Freeway Killer’), Clarence Ray Allen (at seventy-six, the ‘oldest person ever executed in California,’ in 2006) among many others. And there were those awaiting execution: pregnant-wife-killer Scott Peterson, serial killer-sadist Charles Ng, Richard Ramirez, the ‘Night Stalker’ of the 1980s. In a perverse way, the San Quentin authority was proud of its list of executed and condemned prisoners and proud of its distinction as the sole Death Row for men in the state of California.

  When I’d asked the lieutenant which part of the prison he had most liked to work in, without hesitation he’d said Death Row.

  This was a surprise to me. I asked him why and he said that the Death Row inmate was ‘more settled.’

  The Death Row inmate had ‘come to accept’ that he was going to die and some of them had acquired ‘wisdom.’

  Of course, some of them were hoping for reprieves. Many were involved with Legal Defense lawyers and anti-capital punishment volunteers working to get their death-sentences commuted. But the ones the lieutenant had liked to work with, he said, were the older men, that were ‘settled’ in their minds.

  The lieutenant had not talked so much to any one of us, or so warmly.

  He led us now to a nondescript building that housed the ‘execution chamber.’ With a key he unlocked the door that led directly into the chamber and so we did not have to pass through another checkpoint. We were not very enthusiastic about entering the ‘execution chamber’ but there was no escape.

  ‘When the Death Warrant is signed, the clock starts ticking for the condemned man. When it’s time, the Death Team comes for him and brings him here.’

  The room was not large, windowless and dimly lighted. There was a feeling here of underground. Plain straight-back wooden chairs arranged in a semicircle in an incongruously ordinary space except that, at the front of the room, was a bathosphere.

  A bathosphere! Painted robin’s-egg blue.

  The lieutenant explained that the prison had purchased a ‘deep-sea diving bell’ from a marine carnival some years ago, when execution was by cyanide gas. The diving bell was airproof, and efficient.

  Slowly we shuffled inside. There was a bad odor here. The lieutenant was trying to seat us in ‘witness’s chairs’ at the front of the room, that provided an intimate look through the slotted windows of the diving bell into the interior where what appeared to be a hospital gurney, outfitted with straps, was prominent.

  ‘In the days when there was gas, it was practical to execute two at a time. Now, with lethal injection, they don’t do that. And when we had an electric chair, they had just the one chair, not two.’

  ‘Two men executed at once?’

  ‘Yes, sir. When there was gas.’

  But now, the lieutenant explained, gas had been declared cruel and unusual punishment. So there was just lethal injection – ’People think it’s some easy way to die. But it ain’t.’

  A few of the young women students were sitting, weakly. But not at the front of the room; no one wanted to sit in these chairs which brought witnesses within mere inches of the diving-bell windows. (The chairs were so bizarrely close; a witness’s knees would be pressed against the exterior of the diving-bell.) Most of us did
not want to sit down at all, as if to remain standing might be to accelerate the visit, and our escape.

  The plain wooden chairs so arranged suggested amateur theatrics – very amateur, as in a middle school. The (somewhat dingy) robin’s-egg blue diving bell suggested sport, recreation, carny fun. But inside the bell, the death-apparatus with its sinister black straps suggested a makeshift operation room, as in a cheap horror film.

  The lieutenant was indicating those front-row chairs reserved for ‘family members of the victim.’ Beside these were chairs for the warden and other prison officials and law enforcement officers who’d apprehended the inmate; in the second row were chairs for other professionals and interested parties; in the back row, chairs for the ‘press.’

  Someone asked if executions were televised or recorded. The lieutenant shook his head with a frown – ‘No.’

  I was wondering how the family of the victim could bear to sit so close to the diving bell, to peer through the narrow windows at the writhings of a dying man only inches away. Was this a way of assuaging grief, horror? Was this a way of providing ‘closure’? I thought rather it must be another element of nightmare, a stark and irremediable image to set beside other, horrific images of loss and degradation. Yet it seemed to be an honored custom that the family of a murderer’s victim was invited to the execution. Perhaps in older, less civilized societies the murderer’s heart was also given to the victim’s family, to do with it what they would.

  But maybe it isn’t given to us to understand, who have not suffered such losses, who cannot comprehend the appetite for blood, for revenge, for a settling of ‘injustice’ that so fueled ancient Greek tragedies, as the great revenge tragedies of the Renaissance amid which Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the surpassing model.

  Yet, I don’t think I would want to ‘witness.’ Probably, I could not forgive, and I could not forget – but I would not want to ‘witness’ another’s death, even for the sake of revenge.

  The lieutenant was telling us that no one had been executed at San Quentin since 2006 – ‘There’s some court case pending.’ But, he said, in a neutral voice that nonetheless suggested optimism, that was going to change soon – ‘In another year or two, executions will be resumed.’

  In the meantime, the numbers of the condemned were increasing in the ‘Condemned Unit.’

  ‘Now ladies, gentlemen – how would you choose to die?’

  It was a jaunty, friendly question posed to us by the tour guide. Of course, it was a ritual question: You could assume that the lieutenant had asked it many times before.

  ‘Gas, or lethal injection? Or – electrocution, hanging, firing squad? All were approved methods at one time.’

  At first no one spoke. It was a disconcerting question and there seemed no good answer.

  More fancifully the lieutenant said: ‘Or maybe – hit by a truck? Jump off Golden Gate Bridge?’

  Then, there were hesitant answers. The criminology students and their female professor volunteered: ‘Lethal injection.’

  The newest way of execution must always seem the most humane, I supposed. At one time, hanging. Or firing squad. Then, electrocution. Then gas. And now, with its suggestion of hospital care gone just slightly wrong – ‘lethal injection.’

  I said, I would start with one way of being executed and if I didn’t like it, I’d switch to another.

  It was an awkward sort of joke. It was the sort of joke a bright, brash ninth-grade boy might make to startle and impress his teacher. Why I said this, when I was feeling in no way like joking, I have no idea.

  Except I resented the tour-guide quizzing us in this way. I resented the tour-guide punishing us, in his not so subtle prison-authority contempt for civilians.

  No one laughed at my joke. The lieutenant frowned at me. ‘But you have to choose,’ he said. ‘Gas, electrocution, lethal injection, hanging —’

  I could not seem to reply. My awkward joke had been a surprise to me. Another party said, as I should have said, that he wouldn’t choose – he would not participate in his own death. The lieutenant objected: If you don’t choose, the warden will choose for you. But the man persisted: He would not participate in his own death.

  This was a good answer, I thought. But really there was no good answer to the lieutenant’s question.

  It is said that, if you are resolutely against capital punishment, you should not educate yourself in the sorts of crimes for which the ‘condemned’ are executed. ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ – originally, this was a liberal principle, to discourage disproportionate punishments, and punishments against relatives of the alleged criminal. It was not considered harsh but rather a reasonable and equitable punishment.

  By this time I’d begun to feel very strange. My sense of myself was shrinking like a light made dim, dimmer – about to be extinguished. In a panic I thought, Not here! I can’t faint here.

  Somehow I made my way outside, into fresh air. Or maybe the tour was ending now. I was careful not to trip and fall, lose my balance and fall, for I did not want to attract attention, and I did not want to be ‘weak.’ It was my impression that the women in the group did not want to appear ‘weak.’ We had managed to get through the tour, and we were all still standing, though exhausted, and light-headed. A prison facility will suck the oxygen from your brain: You are left dazed and depleted and depressed and the depression will not lighten but in fact increase for several days as you think back over the experience; then, the depression will begin to fade, as even the worst memories will fade.

  The execution chamber was the last stop at San Quentin. The lieutenant led us around a maze of buildings to the inner checkpoint and through the courtyard where the American flag flew at perpetual half-mast and so to the first, outer checkpoint and to freedom outside the gates. We dispersed, we were eager to be free of one another, hurrying in the parking lot to our vehicles, wind whipping our hair.

  I felt the surge of relief and joy I’d felt in Trenton, exiting the prison there after what had seemed several hours of misery, but had been only a little more than a single hour. Never again!

  On San Francisco Bay, sun glittered in dazzling ripples in slate-blue water.

  On My Way Home

  BY LLOYD JONES

  Lloyd Jones is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. Among his published works are The Book of Fame, Mister Pip and Hand Me Down World. He studied politics at Victoria University, Wellington, from where he received an Honorary Doctorate in Literature in 2010. He has travelled extensively, particularly in Europe, the USA and the Pacific.

  I sat in the bus, face pressed to the window, and her face in the very pink of youth gazed up at me; then the bus began to move and her face slid from one side of the window to the other.

  For weeks, months actually, my expired visa had hung over our happy life in San Francisco. We lived in a walk-up apartment on McAllister, opposite a black Baptist church and above a black barber who never knew what to do with my straight licks, and so circled the problem with his clippers and yakked about a time during the war when he had visited Sydney, Australia. Sydney, Australia, he said, and it sounded odd and quite cool to hear it qualified in this way – Sydney, Australia – to the extent that it sounded like it might be a different place from the Sydney I knew, and undoubtedly was, because the barber had visited it before I was born.

  Anyway, above the barbers and across from the Baptist church where on any Sunday night crowds of the faithful glowing with goodwill and love and certainty in their redemption spilled out onto the street, we went on living in a state of stubborn denial. One day I would have to leave. We both knew it. Now it was happening, the parting we had talked about, though always as an event cloaked in unvisited time, like Sydney, Australia. She waved up at the bus window, and I replied with a self-conscious crowd-pleasing wave.

  The bus moved across a judder bar and eased across like a huge slug into the seedy downtown area of San Francisco. There came another sickening bump as the bus moved
onto the freeway.

  I should have gotten off that Greyhound bus, I should have, and in my regret I had a moment of clarity about the kind of fatal mistake that had led to any one of those flopped-out lives on the street I used to marvel at, seeing as how they appeared to have been flung so far from the epicentre of another life, which I imagine at some point had included a mother, a classroom, playing fields, and the bright promise of a future.

  Between San Francisco and LA I lost my hearing. I wondered if medication for a head cold was responsible. But this deafness wasn’t the muffled hearing that comes with a head cold. I was stone deaf. I couldn’t hear a thing. The couple in the next seat were chipping away at one another but I couldn’t hear any of it. I just watched their fish mouths twitching.

  The silence spread to LA. In and around the Greyhound station downtown cars pushed and shoved into silent lanes, the sidewalks were packed, but all silent, under silent skies. Cars slipped out of shadows. Hispanic faces lit up with laughter. I didn’t hear any of it.

  The neighbourhood felt familiar. In those days, and those days need to be qualified – this was more than thirty years ago, a different world in so many ways – my line into the world was wholly and solely literature. I couldn’t get enough of the Black Sparrow Press writers, John Fante and in particular Charles Bukowski, whose novels Post Office and Factotum mapped the desperate kind of neighbourhood I now found myself in and suddenly had no appetite for.

  So I hurried back to the station and caught a bus to San Diego. It would be just as easy as spending a night in LA. In the morning I would catch the bus back up there for my flight back home. And that’s how it turned out; the next day I whizzed back up on the Greyhound and caught the night flight across the Pacific.

  I need to say something about that night in San Diego. Because all misery aside, heartbreak and deafness, San Diego provided a moment that has outlasted the heartache of leaving everything behind.

  It was dark by the time the bus rolled in. I couldn’t be bothered with hunting down a budget hotel; not that where I stayed was any great shakes, but it did have a doorman and air conditioning. I changed out of my bus clothes and showered. I didn’t have my hearing back but I felt more solid, more my old self.