There is no changing the past—I had told myself this a thousand times, especially in the years after coming to prison. But time as a spiral transcends linear time, and yet contains it. And so there are moments—a thought, a touch, a way of seeing the world—that radiate from the present not only to the future but to the past as well.
Near the end of the Sunday visiting hours, inmates and visitors are separated and herded to opposite areas, the visitors into a sally port for exiting and the inmates to a hallway where they are strip searched. Just before this, in the act of parting, inmates and visitors are permitted to hug and kiss briefly.
We stood, my son and daughter and I. My thought was that my daughter had never found it difficult to express her feelings or show affection in these situations, but I was not sure how my son would react. Before this day, I had not seen him in nearly a decade, not since he was eight years old, and all through the visit I kept thinking how much he looked and acted like me, and therefore how much he looked and acted like my father. And so we stood and faced each other, and there were no tears in my son’s eyes nor in mine, and it was obvious that neither of us knew what to do with our hands . . . but then all three of us embraced, and suddenly it was so natural and easy for me to say how much I love him, how much I love them both. In that time-full moment, it occurred to me that my father was listening, that he had heard every word as clearly as though he were present.
FREEDOM
“Only so long as chains remain uninspected are they altogether binding, for freedom is the inescapable condition of self-consciousness.”
―Douglas Harding
One thing I’ve noticed all these years is that prisoners like to talk about the conditions in other prisons, as if by this comparison they might improve their mood or gain yet another reason to voice a complaint. I often hear about the available canteen items in faraway states such as Illinois or Georgia, or which facility has the worst cells and how many men are forced to live in them, where the best jobs are or how late the yard is open on summer nights in Oregon or Minnesota.
So when someone asks if I’ve done time before, and I answer that I once did a stretch in a Mexican prison, invariably they exclaim, “Oh man! What was that like?”
I have a stock answer: “Just like the film Midnight Express,” and I might also mention the bust by the Federales, the beatings and threats, the Napoleonic law that meant I was guilty until proven innocent. But this rarely suffices; almost always they want to know more about the conditions, what it was really like to live in a Mexican prison.
So I tell them about the stone walls and the ancient gun towers and how the cellblocks were Quonset style—a hundred men in each of those sweltering buildings with nothing more than a hole in the cement for a toilet, a pipe with running water for a shower.
And no cells. Instead, there were indoor shantytowns, cardboard and plywood shacks similar to those on the hills in Rio or behind the landfills in Mexico City, except miniaturized and crammed together into long rows. In the aisles between, the “buffaloes” roamed, the down-and-out who couldn’t afford the price of a shack, who paced all day and slept at night wherever they stopped.
There was no yard to speak of, only a cement patio called a “loma” fronting the cellblocks, so crowded at times that one could scarcely move. No gym, no weight pile, no track or ball fields, and one telephone for nearly a thousand men, an old metal hotel phone with no dial, incoming calls only. Should a man’s luck run out—the dreaded medical emergency—there was a small clinic in a room above the ad-seg building, with a half-dozen beds and one nurse. Once, a group of well-meaning nuns brought cauldrons of chicken mole to feed the entire population; everyone was sick for days, with long lines at both the clinic and the toilet holes. The nurse left, overwhelmed.
It was the stink of the place that got to me the most. The noise—the nearly continuous shouting, clanging, hammering, the din of tinny ranchero music blaring from dozens of portable radios—became oddly tolerable over time, likely because there was a semblance of peace each night after ten o’clock. But the stench, like the bedbugs, assaulted me all the more at night. Especially noxious was the shithole on evenings when it had rained and the sewer line had backed up; that, and the forty or fifty “buffaloes” sprawled in the aisle in their filthy clothing created a smell that more than once drove me to bury my face in my pillow in an effort to fall asleep.
When money arrived, my fall-partner and I built a plywood shack on stilts, above the fray. We installed a swamp cooler, built
wooden bunks, bought a TV and a stereo and an ice cooler for the occasional beer we could score from the guards. We hired a cook and a laundry man and paid a trustee to run errands between cellblocks during lock-up.
For if a man had money, this was a prison like no other, at least not in the States. Everything from tacos to toilet paper was sold at the prison store; for anything else, there were kids with bikes outside the front gate who would shop at the local mercado or any restaurant in town. A man could buy food, clothing, lumber, art supplies, appliances, drugs, booze, even prostitutes, for the right price.
But I soon learned that none of this worked for me. Nothing, no amount of temporary comfort, nothing I could buy or surround myself with could change the loathing I felt. I wanted out. I was obsessed with escape. It wasn’t that I was afraid for my life, for even there, a man who did his time and no one else’s was usually left alone. And I had a short sentence: only five years, less than four, with good-time. But I couldn’t stay a month, a week, an hour longer—for me, every minute in that hell-hole was worse than the beating suffered at the hands of the Federales.
I went on a diet and lost forty pounds so I could fit in a trash barrel, hoping to be carted out with the garbage, but the plan fell through. I paid the guards to take me to a dentist downtown, arranged for a friend to kidnap me, but the friend never showed. I faked a fall in the cellblock and spent three weeks crapping on newspaper shut away in my stilt-house, pretending I couldn’t walk. When the guards finally took me to a hospital, it was the wrong one. I had paid two thousand dollars to a man who claimed his brother was a doctor at a hospital where I was surely to be taken; from there I was to be hustled to a rear exit and a waiting car, it was all arranged. All along I half knew it was a setup, that I was the mark, but what did I care?—even the slimmest of chances brought hope.
So I planned a tunnel, smuggling in a drill and moving from
the stilt-house to a better location in another cellblock with other Americans, four of us constructing false walls and ceilings in our shacks to hold dirt and rocks, and in one room, a trick bed that when disassembled exposed the work area beneath it. Months passed, drilling that foot-thick cement floor, worried sick that the noise would alert the guards or other inmates who would tell on us.
For we knew about the water-hole, a five-by-five concrete box with only one barred window near the ceiling; the guards would drop a man in via a trap door on the roof and fill it up to his neck with water. A man could spend days in there, hanging on the bars of that window, sleepless, shitting and pissing in the water, watching the bugs float past his chin.
And then one day not eighteen months into my sentence I walked out of that place and got into a car and left for the U.S., as simple as that. A wealthy Mexican drug lord, a convict with as much power as the warden but who couldn’t escape because his family lived in town, brought me to his luxury cell and dressed me in a suit, fitted me with a wig and remade my face with tanning cream and a phony mustache, then handed me a briefcase and sent me out the front gate as his visiting attorney, right past the guards. And it didn’t cost a dime. He wanted me to wholesale his pot in the States, and I did that for a while, but it was low-grade and hard to sell, so I moved on to better deals.
And so my prison experience in Mexico was over, less than two years after it had begun. My partner was still there, however, still drilling tiny holes in that square of cement under the bed. He broke through, eventually, and little
by little over the next six months he and the others managed to dig a narrow tunnel nearly a hundred feet under two walls to the street. I was there with a crew and a van when they came out on a Sunday morning, and the exhilaration was every bit as intense as the day I’d left via the front door.
Today, I no longer think about escape. After years in a U.S. prison, the rush is long gone. Men ask me why I had risked my life back then, or why I was so crazy as to return for my partner—were the conditions really that bad? I guess I once thought they were. But then one day years later I got to thinking that, in Mexico at least, I had conjugal visits: every Thursday my wife could stay five hours in my shack, while those with no visit had to leave the cellblock and remain on the loma. And there, at least, I could wear my own clothes, cook what I wanted, move freely throughout the prison without the humiliation of pat-searches and strip-outs, carry money and ID in my own wallet. There were rules but not petty rules; there was not the daily threat of a write-up for a minor infraction such as an extra sheet in a cell or a cookie dropped into a pocket leaving the chowhall. There, at least, I was an individual with a name, not a stat with a number.
So it is true that here in the States the punishment is beyond physical confinement. It is more psychological. It is de-personalizing, dehumanizing. It is subtle and thorough and lasting—not a day goes by when I am not reminded of who I am, or by extension, of who I am not.
Which, paradoxically, is why I no longer think about escape. You could say that I’ve been broken, but I would describe it as “disappeared,” and not for the worse. When I was in that Mexican prison I thought freedom was somewhere else, anywhere but there. More than anything, more than life, I wanted out. And when it happened, after the rush, what I discovered was not freedom but an overwhelming sense of emptiness and disappointment. There was a hollowness at my core that I never could have predicted, and I was desperate to fill it.
I took it personally. I worked harder, and worried more. I flew into rages. I left my wife and children, took risks I hadn’t taken before. I thought it was a matter of more: more money, more possessions, more excitement. Freedom became a matter of distraction, anything that replaced the increasing certainty that there was no such thing as freedom, that there was, in fact, no way out of this greater prison I called my life.
The world felt heavier with each day, and I grew resentful in
proportion. I assaulted total strangers, as if to take from them by force the innocence and contentment I could not conjure for myself. And I grew afraid. I thought I’d gone crazy, and in an effort to hide it I feigned normalcy with a precision that frightened me all the more. I became a phony even to myself.
Eventually, there seemed no cure but to kill myself or miraculously start over. And it was my arrest and this new experience of prison, this time in the States, that was the crucifixion, the beginning of the end of my beleaguered psyche. With the bad also went everything else, leaving me with nothing except what I could construct anew.
What came of this was the realization that freedom had nothing to do with the conditions and circumstances of my world. Mexico showed me the worst; there was an honesty in that revelation. It was crowded and filthy and dangerous, much like my thinking, and I yearned to be elsewhere. True, I was allowed to keep my identity, but it was an identity that was poisonous, and it took this long stretch of psychological deprivation in the U.S. to provide the ultimate wake-up call, the ontological slap in the face. The direction was clear: freedom was not out there, it was in here, inside me. What I had been yearning for all along was not a change in location but a change in outlook, and the solution would be found prior to my expectations, prior even to my beliefs. All I had to do was to see them for what they were: lies, mostly, recycled history, and most definitely obstructions to peace and contentment and compassion for others. I reasoned that, if I change, the world would reflect that change, and it has, even here.
So I am grateful for the time in that Mexican prison, and just as grateful for the long years in this state prison, strange as that may sound. And when a fellow convict asks if I’ve done time before and I tell him my little story about Mexico, I check closely for his reaction. It is not shock or revulsion I am looking for, it is desperation—how badly does he want it, how far will he go for his freedom, and in what direction?
For there is no formula for this turnaround. It happens to some, and not to most. Usually, they shake their heads and maybe whistle through their teeth, and then like every other day, they go their way and I go mine.
Although I wish it were otherwise.
LEAF
The guards told me about you when they led me to my cell. They called you Old Max because even their fathers who worked here before them couldn’t remember when you arrived. They said you were as cold as time, hardened by these stone walls that held you all those years. They told me to stay away from you.
I remember the day I approached your cell, offering strong coffee in my deepest voice to impress you. I thought you were asleep with your eyes open—there on your metal bunk in that empty room, your thick, crusted arms at your sides like the rotting limbs of a fallen oak. You would not look at me. You did not move or speak . . . and yet I heard you; I heard you as clearly as if you had shouted. “Tell me about the trees,” you said, “tell me about the trees”—over and over until I fled, searching for a way to stop the clamor of your gnarled voice in my head.
I did not understand, then. I thought you were mad. I avoided you, hiding throughout the long summer months in my tiny, boiling cell, sweating memories. There were young loves to recall. There were fast cars and quick deals, cool nights with hot money. There was the wild movie of my life, the fire of exploding youth—and you wanted to know about trees.
But the pictures of my past, like distant flashes of lightning in a passing storm, grew faint with the pale, crisp days of October. There was nothing then—nothing but the cold clank of iron doors, the angry glare of naked bulbs on white cement. For the first time, I felt compelled to leave the building and visit the paved yard next to the cellhouse. For the first time, I wanted to see the sky.
I heard the wind that day, long before it arrived, thundering down the valley, scouring the fields nearby. Suddenly, pushing an army of leaves, it tumbled over the wall, then scurried wildly around the compound, spraying the woody scent of freedom carried from an alien and fenceless land beyond. And then it vanished as quickly as it had appeared, leaving only its secret.
Somehow I knew the message was for you, and when I looked at your window, open on its rusty hinges, I knew you were no longer there in the darkness of your cell. “Tell me . . . ,” you said, your voice the last gasp of breeze slipping past the wall, “. . . tell me about the trees.”
I ran, blinded by the stillness that followed; I ran as if the world had stopped and I had been shot forward by the momentum. I remember sprinting to the cellhouse door, then racing up the metal stairs to the third tier—each step a year of your past and a year of my future, each breath a scream of disbelief, refusing the certainty that the end for you was the beginning for me.
You were sprawled on the tier, face down, your outstretched arm thrust rigidly through the bars of my cell. “Gone,” the guard said, pressing his hand to your neck. He looked at me, then reached through the bars and plucked the dead leaf from your lifeless fingers. It was an oak leaf, a mirage of clouded amber through my tears, the color of trapped time. He held it by the stem, turning it from side to side, then passed it to me. “Must have blown in with the wind,” he said.
Thirty years have passed since that day. The leaf has long since crumbled and returned to dust. And yet the memory of your face, your voice, lives on in the clanging, grinding emptiness of this penitentiary. It is cold in this cell. Even though it is May, winter lurks in these dark rooms, refusing to leave. I have grown old lying on this hard bed, scratching the days on the wall, each successive mark a crude symbol of the present, a circular trail of endless moments penciled into concentric
rings, a record of my age. They bring food to me, and years ago, they tried to coax me outside, but now they leave me alone. They think I am mad.
This morning a young convict, a newcomer to the prison, stopped and stared at me through the bars. I could see he wanted to talk; he wanted to tell me his tall tales of wild nights on the streets—or perhaps he wanted advice, words of wisdom from “Old Max.”
But I could not listen to this boy’s shallow dreams, and I had little to offer: I know less now about this prison than when I arrived. I stopped him before he started. I wanted to hear about cold streams on clear mornings, about endless fields of purple wildflowers, about grass. I wanted to know about the forests, especially the trees, great quilts of warm green trees.
I asked him, silently, to tell me about the trees.
PART TWO
HEADLESSNESS
“Why just ask the donkey in me
To speak to the donkey in you
When I have so many other beautiful animals
And brilliant colored birds inside that are longing to say something wonderful and exciting to your heart?
Let's open all the locked doors upon our eyes
Coming to Nothing and Finding Everything Page 2
