The story has a happy ending solely because of Jennifer. She was my salvation. We met when I was first released. In the few weeks before the US Court of Appeal for the 9th Circuit reversed my conviction, I'd been in a halfway house. Jennifer was my counselor. She was twenty-four and looked like a seventeen-yeat old personification of the "California" girl: tall, slender, blonde, .111 upper middle-class University of Southern California sorority girl. When my name was discussed at a staff meeting before my arrival, she said she knew of me from my essays in the Nation. I could scarcely believe it when this beautiful young woman introduced herself and said, "I'm your counselor."
Counselor! Unbelievable! The lamb would counsel the wolf.
It was a month until the court-ordered reversal came through. We became friends. She was interested in literature and philosophy. When I was out of the halfway house we met twice for coffee and when I left Los Angeles I gave her my address and wrote one letter in two years. Romance never went through my mind. Not only was she married, but I can't imagine a metaphor to convey the difference in our backgrounds. I doubt that she'd ever met anyone who had spent a night in jad, much less eighteen years in America's toughest prisons, with much of that in the hole. As a teenager she had a horse; I had a fat rat running across my macaroni sandwich in the hole of the LA county jad.
When I saw her again, she was in the process of getting a divorce — and romance did blossom. The difference in our backgrounds was the same, so I was pretty certain, although silent about it, that it was a star-crossed romance and would not last. I would try to leave good memories, and I was sure I could play a sort of Pygmalion. She loved books and was a college graduate, but public schools, even in an upper-class enclave, leave vast gaps in what a truly educated person should know about history and literature and myriad other things, gaps I could fill. On the other hand, she helped to civilize me, and was so obviously a nice girl that those I might make nervous, or even scare, would look at us and think: "He can't be that dangerous if she is with him." I anticipated that this odd romance would last a year, perhaps two, before the glamour wore off for her — or I got bored.
Neither came to pass, and after two decades it seems likely we'll be together until I die. Even more unlikely from my perspective, at sixty-five I'm the father of a handsome, extremely bright and rambunctious five-year-old, my pride and joy. Who knows what he will think of his father, but the cards we dealt him are infinitely better than what fate dealt me. I could have played them better, no doubt, and there are things of which I am ashamed, but when I look in the mirror, I am proud of what I am. The traits that made me fight the world are also those that allowed me to prevail.
Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade Page 45
