THERE WAS Brendan D., a recovering coke addict who’d done five years for possession and for stealing thousands and thousands of dollars to buy that white powder he could no longer go a day without. He was born the same year I was and had grown up the son of a banker. He was raised in a shiny world of shiny things, he said, and it was at his private high school on acres of protected green that he discovered the rush of snorting white lines up his nose that put him in a soft white world where everything made sense and he was never at a loss for words.
“I just couldn’t not be high anymore.” Brendan told me this on a Wednesday or Thursday night after all the counseling sessions and recovery meetings were through. I was making my rounds, and he stood near his bunk folding clothes he’d just pulled from the center’s dryer down in the basement. He was in a white T-shirt and institutional green pajama bottoms, a pair he must’ve gotten in rehab somewhere. His roommate, Hernando, was taking a shower in the bathroom down the hall. These were the last two on my head-count sheet, so I leaned my shoulder against the doorjamb and waited for Hernando.
“These meetings keep reminding me of that, Andre. Sometimes you forget.”
I asked Brendan if he still had the craving for it. He nodded, placed folded jeans on his mattress, and reached for a shirt. “But not enough to do time again.”
Maybe there was something in my face that made him talk more. Maybe it was how close we were in age, I didn’t know, but he began telling me how scared he was his first months inside. How it took him a while to learn the rules, that you never take a favor or even a cigarette from anyone or you’ll owe a debt and if you don’t pay it, you’re fair game. That as a fish, a new prisoner, you’re fair game anyway. Especially when you’re eighteen years old, like he was, with a smooth face and lean body. That was the first thing he had to do, prove he wouldn’t be taken easily. His first week behind the walls, a big con in the commissary said in a loud voice that he was going to make Brendan his little punk. Brendan turned and told him just as loud to fuck off. There were C.O.’s there, so nothing happened, but the next morning just before stepping out into the corridor for formation to the mess hall, a con from next door pushed a rolled newspaper at him.
“I thought he was giving me something to read.” Brendan smiled and shook his head. Inside the paper was a shank, a broken length of aluminum from the machine shop that had been sharpened to a point on one end, the other folded back on itself for a handle. “Stick them papers under your clothes ’fore you fight.”
Then the formation was moving down the corridor, men in front of him and behind him, and as Brendan walked along to keep up he pushed the shank into the waistband of his prison-issue pants and began stuffing pages of the newspaper up under his shirt over his chest and abdomen, then around the back to cover his kidneys. The formation started down the stairs and he pulled the shank away from his skin and pushed it between the newspaper and his pants, and he wanted to thank the inmate who was helping him, but he already knew that you can’t show that kind of softness, and he prayed he didn’t owe him anything for this.
In the mess hall he sat at a long crowded table, a bowl of watery oatmeal in front of him he couldn’t eat. His mouth was dry and he kept scanning the tables for the big loud one who would make him his punk.
He looked for him for weeks.
“What happened?”
“The C.O.’s heard what he said. They moved him.”
“Anyone else come after you?” I felt nosy, like hearing someone young has died and asking the bereaved how it happened.
“No, people knew I was shivved up now. There were other fish in the sea.”
“Did you ever have to fight?”
“No. I’ve never been in a fight in my life.” Brendan was looking straight at me. “How old are you, Andre?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Me too. You go to college?”
“Yeah.”
“What years?”
I told him.
“The same years I was in the joint. Good for you for staying out of trouble.” He dropped a folded towel on his mattress beside the small neat pile of what he wore and used, and I wanted to tell him about trouble, that I hadn’t stayed out of it. Not at all.
ALAN D. called the inmates many things: animals, nut jobs, whackos, bad people. He was tall and broad-shouldered and wore brightly colored sweaters over his shirts, the collar tucked in close to his throat. He worked the day shift and always had a big smile for me when I came in to relieve him at 4:45 p.m. He’d shake my hand, then shut both office doors to brief me on anyone I should keep an eye on. Unlike the case managers whose job it was to counsel inmates, our job was to keep them in line. At least that’s how Alan saw it. When he spoke of the inmates, it was with a tone I remembered hearing as a kid from some of the cops back in Haverhill, that we were lowlifes, punks, and scum. Alan used that tone even when he talked to them, even the very dangerous like Dozer and Harlan G., both of whom would give him a look he didn’t seem to see, that they were very much looking forward to the day or night they’d find him outside of this place, outside of his job, outside of their parole. A day they were counting on coming.
“THE INMATES like you too much.” Duane was the director of this halfway house and the even bigger one in Denver. He weighed over 350 pounds and wore ties under v-necked sweaters that strained at his chest, shoulders, and gut. He had a whiskey-raw voice, and there was a haunted and intelligent light in his eyes above cheeks of broken purple capillaries. It was Monday, my off day, and he’d called me to come see him for a quick chat. We were in his office on the second floor. He sat behind his desk leaning back in an upholstered chair, and from where I sat in front of him I could see outside his window the bare branches of an oak tree, the pitched roof of a frat house on the other side of the street.
“Is that not good?”
Duane laughed. “No, that is not good. These are cons, kid. Once they get close, they’ll con you. You want them to respect you, not like you.”
But I found myself liking them, these people who’d done terrible things. “So what do I do?”
“You need to stop acting like you’re one of them.”
Heat crawled up my face and forehead; it was as if I were standing naked on a city street. “All right.”
“That’s all. It’s your day off. Go have some fun.”
I thanked him and shook his hand and left his office. At the base of the stairwell, Old Frances was dusting the treads, a hump in her back. She smiled up at me as I passed, this woman who’d been beaten and terrorized by her husband for three decades until one summer night she finally broke and took one of his many handguns, walked up to him as he sat at the dinner table, and shot him five times in the face.
Alan D. would call her a murderer, and legally speaking—and maybe even morally speaking—he was right. But as I smiled back at Frances, something I was going to have to stop doing so regularly now, I knew I didn’t see her quite that way; I saw a woman who’d been hurt and hurt and hurt till she was so full of it she could only do two things: die of it, or push it all back out into the face of another. It was a nearly unavoidable flow of bad feeling, and as I stepped out into the cool spring air of this city in the foothills, I knew that’s what joined me to these offenders, that shared ability to turn a wound into a wounding, one that might even kill another, the one who deserved it.
I HAD another job, too. On my off days and nights I worked for a private investigator who sometimes brought in wanted men for the bounty on their heads. For this work he used more than one name and months earlier had given me a new one. It’s what I used when he introduced me in meetings with state and federal agents in a high-rise building in Denver. It’s where the U.S. marshalls all looked in shape and wore crisp shirts and expensive ties, well-oiled handguns clipped to their belts above ironed pants. The agents from the New York office of the DEA wore sweaters or open-collared shirts, and they talked fast and chewed gum and one of them kept looking me up and down, t
his twenty-three-year-old in corduroys and a leather jacket, this kid my boss introduced as his “associate.” The CBI agent was undercover, a big Latino in a dark T-shirt, his arms wrapped in tattoos, and he sometimes glanced over at me in these meetings as if I were a potted plant in the corner somebody should water but not him.
I didn’t like my new name. It was monosyllabic and too common, but I was glad to have it. My boss had a few aliases, but his real name was Christof. At thirty-five he was over six feet and a sloping 230 pounds. He wore a thick Western mustache and had dark circles under his eyes from kidney damage he’d suffered in a car accident years before, and he lived in the canyons above Boulder and drove a 1953 black Buick Skylark he’d named Beulah.
I’d met him at the center where we both watched over men like Dozer and Manny and Harlan G. Christof was friends with the supervisor, and he’d asked him for a few shifts a week. We both started as correctional technicians the same night. Christof probably needed the extra income, or was keeping an eye on an inmate involved in a case he was working on, I didn’t know. But I liked how directly he spoke to everyone, how he looked people in the eye deeper than anyone I’d ever seen before. This made some people nervous, including me, but especially Alan D.
Briefing me and Christof in the closed office, Alan D. had a hard time looking straight at him. Cristof would already be leaning back in the chair at the main desk, a damp mukluk crossed over one knee, and he’d give Alan his entire attention, his eyes narrowed slightly above those dark rings above that thick mustache and pursed lips. Then he’d nod his head, and Alan would turn to me and his cheeks would flush as if he’d just been revealed in some way.
Christof gave the inmates that direct gaze too. It was a look that said he knew what they were capable of, both the good and the bad, but he also knew they could grow free of the bad, could rise to the higher parts of themselves he was seeing too. This seemed to scare the shit out of them. Most had a hard time looking him in the eye, and they’d sign in quickly at the half-door of the front office and head to their rooms. But I noticed, too, that on the nights he worked, far more inmates than usual dropped by. They’d knock on the door casing or stand there quietly before asking about their latest chore assignment or the time of their next case manager or AA meeting, or when they were to meet again with their P.O. down in Denver. These were questions most of them had the answer to already, and he would invite them into the office and have them sit on the chair in the corner facing him. He’d give them that look and start asking questions about their lives, and even cons like Harlan G. would start talking about being a kid again, just a kid who never thought this is what he would have become.
I’d leave the office around then because I knew what was coming next. Christof would pull his chair closer. His voice would deepen and he would get them to keep looking at his face and he’d somehow take them to places inside themselves that were broken and had been left like that for far too long. Sometimes I’d stand just outside the office and listen. It was hard to hear the actual words, but the sounds were clear; Christof’s voice would be low, careful, and focused, the inmate’s resisting, often defiant, a tone that seemed to have inherent flaws in it, fissures Christof moved into until there was a pause, then a yielding, then the inmate’s voice would become higher and anguished, as if a small boy had been buried for years beneath the muscle and scarred flesh of a man who had finally turned around to see him standing there, looking up at him, waiting.
Later, I’d see a change in these people. It was subtle but the very air around them appeared cleaner and lighter, and they moved through it with a newly discovered purpose I could only call hope. Old Frances, the woman who’d shot her husband in the face, said Christof was a godly man, that God was talking through him.
I didn’t know much about God, but I was learning more about mysteries. This came largely in the form of images, those in my daily writing, and those in the waking world that for me now were rarely as clear as the ones I dreamed. But I was learning, too, that some images on the page are mirages, that you can work hard as ever to make them real, reaching for the right words which are always the truest words, and still what you’ve written is some kind of lie, though you’ve told it well; I’d want to write about a man on a job site, but an old woman on the street would show up instead. I’d barely see her at all, just feel her outside the walls of the house my character was building, and I began to learn that that’s where the story was, with that old woman I didn’t even want to write about. I began to learn that some images were simply projections of what I hoped to write, and that what I wanted was completely beside the point anyway, that these things had a destiny of their own and my job was to find them. It took a while for me to start seeing it this way, and I resisted for this meant cutting weeks or months of work; but more than that, it meant falling into the unknown.
But it’s what I’d done on my fourth day in Madison, Wisconsin. I walked to the office of the man who ran the department of Marxist social science, and I quit.
I drove straight to Austin and spent three weeks living with Kourosh in a small house he was renting not far from campus. I’d write every morning, then walk to the gym and lift weights, but it was different now. I didn’t think much anymore about having to fight anyone. Fear and rage used to help me push that iron bar off my chest, but now it was just a good way to sweep all those words and sentences out of my head. The harder I worked in the gym, the emptier my head got, and the next morning seemed to go better. Writing was becoming as ingrained a habit as workouts, a private and necessary thing I had to do, but I did not see this as my work or my purpose. I didn’t even appear to be any good at it, and whenever Kourosh asked me what I was doing with my life, I’d shrug my shoulders and say, “Man nehmiedoonam.” I do not know.
I kept thinking of Liz in Colorado, kept seeing her under the sun in that parking lot in Boston. That night I called her, told her I missed her, asked if I could come see her awhile. Her tone went from cheerful to guarded to reluctantly yielding, but she said I could come stay with her and her roommate till I found a place of my own.
Six months later, Liz had dropped out and moved to California and I was living in a motel in the shadow of the Flat Irons working for Christof. There was the feeling I’d displaced her, had shown up and derailed her dream of getting educated in the Western mountains. In that time we drank too much, didn’t talk enough, took refuge too often in our warm bodies till they cooled, her sweet roommate forgotten.
My room at the motel had a desk, a bed, a shower and toilet. No TV or radio. No shelves or pictures on the wall. I bought a coffeemaker that brewed one cup at a time, and each morning I’d drip some and stare out my window at the back of the pancake house, its blue dumpster set against a graying plank fence. On the other side was the street, the traffic slow and easy, beyond that a shopping plaza, then a rise of ground where split-level homes were set into the aspens and columbine, then the steep climb of the Flat Irons, these massive slabs of stone under a cold blue sky.
I’d pull the musty curtain closed and sit and sharpen my pencil and stare at what I’d written the day before. So much of this seemed to be staring, waiting really, waiting for something true, no matter how small, to reveal itself. I’d write the wrong words, the false or slightly false, and nothing substantial would come. I’d cross it out, this act of cutting a gesture of good faith that somehow summoned the glimpse of something real: the front tire of a red tricycle, a woman hanging up the receiver in a phone booth, a car pulling too fast out of a driveway—then there were only a few seconds to find the words to catch those images before they faded and I’d be left staring again. But if I caught one, then that thing led to the next to the next and some days it was hard to stop though I knew I had to; there should be something left in the well for the following day.
Ever since I was a boy running from other boys, I’d been making myself into a man who did not flee, a man who planted his feet and waited for that moment when throwing a punch was
the only thing to do, waited for that invisible membrane around me to fall away and I’d gather once again the nerve and will to shatter another’s. But I had discovered a new membrane now. The one between what we think and what we see, between what we believe and what is.
ONE LATE morning, sitting alone at the desk in my motel room, I pushed aside what I’d been writing. All my staring and waiting had brought scenes that led to other scenes, but I’d felt little to nothing about the people in them and I didn’t know why until I read The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. It was clear Pancake not only knew the West Virginia hollows he was evoking so well on the page, he became the men and women and kids living in them. Maybe he even loved them. And he showed this by writing in a simple, naked style that drew the reader’s eye not to him but to them. It’s what I had not been doing. Somewhere along the way I had started trying to sound like a real writer, something I did not see myself as, a contradiction between my actions and my desire that seemed to put me in the worst stance possible for writing honestly: I was staring at myself as much as I was staring at the page; I had one eye on the mirror to see how I was doing.
Years later I would read this definition of sincerity in Nadine Gordimer’s novel A Son’s Story: “Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.” I was still the boy who could not bear being perceived a certain way, a boy who’d learned to fight and get hurt or worse just so he would not be seen as weak. But what did being seen have to do with writing well? It was time to start seeing. I sat at that desk feeling small and self-absorbed and with little ability to do this one thing I felt pulled to do. But this negative self-scrutiny was just another form of insincerity; I had to disappear altogether.
It took a few days or a week or longer, but I seemed to be staring at the page from someplace emptier than before, a place lower to the ground and more open to whatever or whoever might come. And it was an inmate, fresh out of prison and out on a date with a woman for the first time in years. He’s sipping coffee, listening to her talk, behind this moment all those thousands and thousands of caged moments leading to this one, and he can’t keep them from entering the present with this woman just inches away.
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