The Hustle

by Doug Merlino

  The first time I visit Myran in jail, on a Saturday morning, the bored-looking King County deputy at the entrance halfheartedly inspects my bag while I pass through a metal detector. I learn over the course of several visits, through comments made by some of the guards and short conversations with the families of other prisoners—something about waiting around in a jail seems to make people talkative—that everyone assumes I’m a lawyer.

  To get to the visitors’ waiting area, you walk up one flight of stairs from the entrance. To the right, as you enter the room, is a Formica shelf stacked with pink forms. You take a golf-pencil and fill in your name, your address, the name of the prisoner you want to visit, and your relationship to the prisoner. The first time I go to see Myran, I puzzle for a minute over what to put down. I consider “basketball teammate” but then decide against it, wondering how I would explain it if the guard asked me. “Acquaintance” doesn’t seem to capture it, either. Finally, I write “friend.”

  After you’ve finished the form, you walk up to the guard’s booth, which runs across one side of the room but is sealed off with bulletproof glass. The guards in the visitors’ area wear forest-green uniforms with gold trim that look very much like the outfits worn by National Park rangers. You speak through a small, round stainless steel grille set in the glass and slide your form and driver’s license through a slot at the bottom. The guard verifies the name on your license against what you have written on the slip, checks to make sure the prisoner you want to see has visiting hours, and then puts the form in a pneumatic tube and sends it up to the floor where your prisoner is being held. Then you wait on one of a line of bolted-together green plastic chairs. The people in the room are mostly women—mothers with young children who laugh and crash around the waiting area, women in skirts and cleavage-baring tops, old ladies who sit quietly with hands folded in their laps.

  A few minutes before ten thirty in the morning, the guard motions to everyone in the waiting room that it’s OK to get on the elevator and go up to our designated floors. I exit on the tenth into a small, gray-carpeted, triangular-shaped area. Directly in front of the elevators is a line of booths, painted—for some reason—aquamarine. Thick glass divides the prisoners’ area from where the visitors sit. Each side has a heavy black plastic phone connected to the wall by a cord wrapped in a flexible stainless-steel sheath. A small window to the far right lets in light. To the far left of the elevator, you can walk up to a window and peer into the jail. Directly in front is a circular control room, shielded from the rest of the jail by bulletproof glass, at which a guard sits at monitors. He presses a button and his amplified voice, crackly and a bit distorted, sounds through a speaker in the waiting area: “They’ll be out in a minute, folks.”

  Most visitors take a spot in one of the booths to wait. I hang back, standing near the wall. Before long, three prisoners—a black guy with cornrows, a young white guy who speaks in Russian with an older man I assume is his father, and a Latino man in his twenties—show up. They wear red jail outfits that look like pajamas and flip-flops. The guard punches another button and the door between the jail and their side of the visiting area slides open. They walk in and take their places in the booths across from their visitors. A minute later, another black man arrives and goes into a booth.

  I am beginning to wonder if Myran is coming when he walks in front of the control room. He’s a bit under six feet tall, thin, light-skinned, and his head is shaved bald. He wears small, rimless, rectangular glasses. When he sees me, he breaks into a smile and begins to energetically wave with his right hand. In his left hand he carries an extremely large Bible, about five inches thick and bound in soft black leather.

  He points to a booth and we sit down across from each other. The first thing I notice is that the bloat that was in his face when Damian and I saw him on the street is gone. His eyes look sharp. He is smiling. He looks just about the same as he did as a kid.

  We both pick up the phone. “Hey, it’s good to see you,” he says.

  It soon becomes clear that Myran is in a desperate situation. He had been placed in a work release program after his prior drug arrest, but, after ten days, he went AWOL, which resulted in a charge of second-degree escape. The age of the girl involved in the latest drug transaction as well as his prior record means that the prosecutor is seeking a sentence of 120 months. Myran tells me that the prosecutor has offered his public defender a plea bargain for ninety months, which Myran has refused. “If I go away for ninety months, I’m going to be with murderers, rapists, house robbers, people who just don’t care what happens to them,” he says. “And I’ll come out as a repeat offender, which means if I make one mistake, they’ll send me right back.”

  It’s hard to sort out all the charges in Myran’s record. “The defendant has been booked 28 times since 1990 and has 38 warrants,” reads one court document. Looking at the charges, almost all are misdemeanors, including—by my count—fourteen separate charges of driving without a license or driving with a suspended license. Others are for failures to appear in court. The oldest case is a juvenile-court drug charge from 1989. There are two felonies prior to his recent arrests. In 1998 Myran walked up to a woman from rural Washington who had parked at a gas station in the Central Area, near Garfield High School, to ask for directions. Myran ripped the necklace from her neck and ran away. He pled guilty to first-degree theft and got fifteen days in jail. In 1999 he pled guilty to being the middleman in a $40 crack deal, this one also set up by the narcotics cops. He was sentenced to twenty months in prison.

  Myran’s grandmother and I are the only two people who visit him in jail. Myran tells me that he is sure that my getting back in touch with him is an answer to his prayers for a change in his life. I can see how he would welcome any attention from outside. He has spoken on the phone with a private attorney, who has told him she could get the current charge of dealing with a minor dropped, but the lawyer wants $5,000 for the case, including $2,500 up front, an amount that neither Myran nor his grandmother can muster.

  Without money, he doesn’t have much leverage. Myran is essentially engaged in a game of chicken with the legal system. He refuses to take the deal the public defender suggests he accept, figuring that the state will eventually come up with a better offer if he holds out, simply to save the expense and effort of going to trial. If not, and his case does end up before a jury, Myran tells me he will explain things himself. He is convinced that the jury will hear how he was set up by the police, realize that it was unfair, and let him off.

  Everything is speculation on Myran’s part. He asks my advice, but I tell him that I’m not the person to offer opinions on his legal situation. His court-assigned lawyer keeps telling him to take the deal. I phone his public defender several times and leave messages asking if he will talk with me to clarify the charges against Myran, but the lawyer never returns my calls. He also fails to call back Myran’s grandmother, cementing Myran’s belief that his public defender is just processing him through the system without even looking at the details of his case.

  “He told me that I shouldn’t be out on Third Avenue if I don’t want to go to prison,” Myran says to me one day. “I told him, ‘I know that. What do you want me to say? I relapsed.’ ”

  Myran tells me that since he was about ten years old, he’s had mood swings. For a few days, he’ll feel fine, and then a switch will flip and he’ll get angry. “A lot had to do with what was going on at home. My family, when there was a problem, would just close the curtains to the outside world,” he says. “There were no male figures. It was all women, so I walked all over them.”

  At school, he would get in fights for no real reason. One day, he lists several elementary, middle, and high schools he attended (in the South End as well as the North End, when his mom was in residential drug rehab). “I got kicked out of all of them,” he says. After that, he started spending time on the streets. “I just went down and hung out,” he says.

  Since he’s been in jail,
he’s been on antidepressants and mood stabilizers. One morning he tells me, “I just took a pill, so I’m on my ‘A’ game. At about two, I’ll start to get tired until I take another one.” Without the drugs, he says, things get fuzzy. “My mind starts to close, like this,” he says. He holds up his right hand with his fingers formed in a circle, and, in a motion like the shutting of an aperture on a camera, closes the circle down to a fist. “You can be talking to me, but I just don’t take anything in.” When I ask if he remembers the day that Damian and I pulled up next to him on Second Avenue, he shakes his head. “You guys talked to me? Really? See, that’s what I mean. I don’t remember that at all.”

  Myran’s moods swing widely from visit to visit. One day, he’s upbeat and almost jovial, sure that he is about to get out and everything is looking up. The next time, he begins to cry when talking about his case, tears running out of his eyes before he snaps back and tries to act cheerful again. Some days everything he says seems totally rational, and at other times he rambles from one topic to the next, going into lengthy digressions on the Bible.

  Myran says that, on the outside, he has been able to get things together for short spells. A few years earlier, he says, he had a good job at a local hospital. Although he’d never been taught how to use a computer, he got on the one at his grandmother’s house and made a résumé full of fake experience, dressed up for the interview, and landed the job. He worked in the storeroom in the basement, ferrying parts like IV pumps around the hospital when a doctor or nurse called down. He tells me he got paid $14 an hour and even had a pager so he could be on call. “That was a really good job. I really liked that,” he says. When I ask him what happened, he shakes his head. “I stopped going.” His ups and downs have also made it hard to maintain relationships, including those with his girlfriend and children.

  When other players on our team talked about what they remembered from playing together, everyone brought up, in one form or another, Myran “acting crazy.” Usually that just meant Myran talking, capping on other guys, and running his mouth off, most of the time making everyone laugh through the sheer outrageousness of what he had to say. Some days, Myran seemed totally good-natured; on others, there was an edge. But someone, like Will, Tyrell, or Coach McClain, always kept him under control. I linked Myran in my mind to Richard Pryor—I had a tape of Live on the Sunset Strip I listened to repeatedly—whom Myran resembled in his ability to do imitations and say things no one else would.

  In jail, Myran often makes me laugh in spite of the serious trouble he faces. Most of his jokes are at the expense of his defense lawyer. He tells me how one day the lawyer came in to talk to him and Myran, who says he spends most of his time in jail studying the Bible, asked, “Do you believe Jesus Christ manifested himself in the flesh?”

  Myran takes on the persona of a middle-aged white lawyer, pursing his lips and furrowing his brow. “ ‘I’m not going to discuss my religious beliefs with you!’ ” Myran says in a nasal voice.

  Myran obviously enjoys performing, seeming happy if he can get a reaction. Just like when we were kids, his stories are so out there it’s hard not to laugh.

  One day he makes a whole routine out of a recent court appearance, playing the roles of the judge, the prosecutor, his defense lawyer, and the guards. In his effort to have his lawyer removed from his case, Myran told the judge that the attorney was making sexual advances at him. Myran mimics his lawyer looking angry and the judge shaking his head and asking, “What do you mean? He’s obviously completely hetero.”

  In his reenactment, Myran gestures around the courtroom. “Oh, I see how it is. You, you, and you”—he points at the judge, the prosecutor, and the defense lawyer—“are all in this together!” He tells me he looked back at the guards, who were rolling their eyes and looking at him like he was crazy. Next, Myran imitates his lawyer talking with him after the session in court: “ ‘You better apologize to me for that little stunt you just pulled or I’m not going to do anything for your little ass!’ ”

  Myran laughs when he tells the story and, though I try to stop myself, I can’t help a chuckle. Of course, it doesn’t seem like a good idea to antagonize the people who will decide his fate. I only later realize that, in Myran’s situation, messing with the system might make some sense. He has no money, no power, and hardly any information about his legal situation besides what the defense lawyer chooses to tell him. He doesn’t really have control of his fate, or much to lose.

  One day, when we are speaking through the phones, Myran becomes wistful. He tells me that our conversations have gotten him to thinking about the old days. “I was just remembering team picture day, you know, just hanging out and having your picture taken, things like that,” he says. “Back when we were kids, there were angels watching over us. When you get older, it’s not like that anymore.”

  I know that Myran is talking, literally, about angels, but when he says it, I have different associations. My mind goes to people like Willie McClain and Randy Finley, men who were there as a backstop in the days we played sports. Behind them, of course, if you were lucky, there were parents, relatives, teachers, and other adults who kept an eye out to make sure you were headed in the right direction. They were practical angels—forces in the background helping you stay on track. You took them for granted. Sitting across from Myran, I begin to think about what it would be like if you were on your own.

  In at least one sense, Myran has a lot of company. In 1980, some 500,000 people were incarcerated in prisons and jails in the United States. That number has grown to 2.3 million. Of those, 40 percent are black and 20 percent are Hispanic. The United States leads the world in imprisonment, with 762 out of every 100,000 people behind bars (second-place Russia lags behind with 635). The rise in incarceration has been largely fueled by laws imposing “mandatory minimums” for drug offenses, many of which were enacted in the heat of the “war on drugs” in the 1980s; about 1 in 4 inmates is now in on drug charges, compared to 1 in 10 in 1983. Although African Americans and whites use illegal drugs at about the same rates, blacks make up some 53 percent of people going to prison for drug crimes despite making up only 12 percent of the overall population. Much of this comes from a focus on busting street-level drug sales while dealing done in private residences and off the streets is pursued much less aggressively. Another way of putting it is that one out of every 131 Americans is locked up, but, unless you are poor and black, there’s a good chance you don’t know any of them.

  The increase in the number of prisoners has resulted in what some call the “prison-industrial complex,” an economy worth tens of billions of dollars a year. There is a lot of money to be made from jailing people—someone has to provide the bulletproof glass, blastproof doors, closed-circuit TV systems, handcuffs, uniforms, telecom services, and thousands of other products specially designed for jails and prisons. The Corrections Corporation of America, one of several private companies operating prisons for profit, runs sixty-four correctional facilities and detention centers across the country and employs seventeen thousand people. In rural America, where prisons are now almost always located, the facilities offer badly needed sources of employment. The other side of the equation is made up of prisoners like Myran, a vast army of people with little education; possible mental health issues; negligible job skills; and, after their incarcerations, felony criminal records.

  Though there are various proposals for the decriminalization or legalization of drugs floating around in policy circles—former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper is one of the most vocal national advocates of legalization—it would take a massive change in policy and a redirection of public spending to shift the priority from jailing people like Myran toward treating them. The system of mass incarceration that has developed over the past three decades has its own logic: When you put people in prison, you know exactly what you are getting. Treatment is hard—people backslide and otherwise screw up, and no politician wants to be accused of funneling money to the “undeservi
ng” and “irresponsible.” Imprisonment takes of a whole class of people who, even if they were clean, would then have substantial problems finding work that provided a living wage, and places them out of sight. The people who suffer the most under the current system are those with the least ability to press for change.

  …

  “Oh, that’s really sad,” Sean O’Donnell says when I tell him that Myran is locked up on drug charges. “It’s a bad rut, once you’re in the system. For some people the system—I mean by ‘system’ prison or jail—actually gives them some stability, gives them some predictability. But too many folks like Myran turn up in the system and you see them all the time.”

  As a King County prosecutor, Sean occupies the opposite end of the system as Myran, sometimes literally—he tells me that he’s occasionally gone out with undercover cops to observe “buy-bust” operations in exactly the same area where Myran was arrested. “It helps you to know what’s going on,” he says. “You see these guys down on Second or Third Avenue and you sit up on a roof with binoculars looking down, you’re listening to communication from the undercover officers doing the buying. It’s sort of pathetic—twenty dollars’ worth of rock cocaine. It’s pathetic but at the same time it’s its own little structure, its own little business model. You got the guy with the drugs, you got the buyer, you got the cluck in the middle who facilitates the transaction.”

  We are speaking in Sean’s office, only two blocks from where Myran is locked up. It’s a Sunday afternoon, and Sean is doing some last-minute preparation for a trial—the police have broken up a prostitution ring run by a gang based out of southwest Seattle. Five of the accused pimps have already taken an offer and pled guilty. The sixth, a nineteen-year-old who goes by the nickname “Cash Money,” decided to go to trial. It starts in the morning.