It’s Saturday night and I’m sitting on my bunk listening to Garrison Keillor and all would be right with the world, except for the obvious little detail that I have 50 roommates and none of us can move more than 50 yards in any direction. When you think about how many people go ballistic over the habits and behaviors of one roommate with whom they share, say a two-bedroom apartment, it does put things in perspective, doesn’t it? It begs the question, not why are prisons so violent, but rather, how are they so relatively non-violent? In the month (almost) I have been in this dorm, there has been one fight among two hundred men. I bet the statistics are better than those of military barracks during basic training.
Last night, in fact, the black men in my corner of B-wing, (frankly a generally nice group that has considerably altered my attitudes about young African-American men) got tipsy on a big batch of “Pruno” (homemade prison wine) that had been fermenting all week. They didn’t get rowdy, but took advantage of “late night” to hang out and swap stories and laugh a lot. I took advantage of having a ¼ Seraquil left and not having to start the new porter job unit tomorrow (Sunday). But poor Earl was up rather late, telling me this morning that he was too afraid to go to the bathroom all night. I told him I thought the fear baseless, but after talking to him, it turned out not to be a new fear he was experiencing, but an old one. Evidently there were nights Earl, as a child, would go to the bathroom when his father was drunk. Nights he was lucky to make it to the back to his bedroom unscathed.
I used to think that abuse of whatever kind occurred in a minority of families. I am starting to think the true minority consists of those families in which abuse of any kind does not occur. I heard a report on NPR about rape victims, who, as an act of empowerment, have started insisting on being publically identified. Why, it was asked, are we encouraging a sense of shame on the part of the victim?
Shame is so toxic. And so pervasive. The second most difficult part of this experience for me, after the grief I caused my family, is the sense of shame that is inescapable even though I sincerely feel that the laws which convicted me are unjust and will one day be repealed as archaic and backward. (Though I do admit guilt, on all counts).
One of the side effects of Seraquil was that I had a lovely morning and afternoon drifting in and out of sleep. The kind of daytime dream-filled sleep that to me, feels almost like a meditation. During one of the waking hours, I heard a show on—you guessed it, NPR— from the humorist Michael Feldman (I think) that was taped in Charleston, West Virginia. I can’t begin to tell you how attractive he made the state seem, and I relearned a lesson I periodically forget; that the populations not living in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles are generally doing so unapologetically. There are plenty of things to do, local culture, and intellectual stimulation all over the country, and often a much better quality of life to boot. Not a bad lesson to relearn, of course, as I eye a future in Albuquerque.
So I drifted into a dream in which the dorm was being renovated, from former horse stables that allowed for a marvelous expansion, privacy and creative construction. Hell, it was practically loft living. Then somehow I went for a walk along a winding road that looked like bucolic New England but I knew was somewhere in West Virginia. At one point a fantastic glider appeared over a house, and I somehow felt I had had something to do with its design, and it folded itself into marvelous shapes, even a beautiful box, that floated gently out of the blue to the ground. Then a limo pushed by me, and a front gate opened, and the car went up the drive to a lovely white ranch house, and I thought ‘These are rich democrats, friends of Bill Clinton. There’s hidden money in these parts, lots of it.’ And I thought I could probably join them for cocktails and they would welcome me, and find me interesting and witty, and not care that I lived in the prison down the road.
I was awakened gently by the announcement of afternoon meds, and retained the feeling of the dream as I went to Pill Call. Every day, swarms of men pour out of the dorms like bats, most of them going to the much longer separate line for psych meds. I go to a shorter line for “other.” Next to a similar line for diabetics, of whom there are a surprising number.
I had Earl next to me, bitching about his bunkie Scott, who is an interesting case (there will be a character sketch of him sooner or later) and I found myself explaining Scott’s passive/aggressive behavior to Earl and and two other inmates in line, Moses and Jersey II. (Moses is Earl’s neighbor, older, black, generous and wise, and Jersey II is also black, but young, white-teethed and handsome, and personifies the word “dapper,” even inmate garb. He’s rather the opposite of Jersey I, the white guy).
Anyway, both Moses and Jersey II had worked with Scott, the passive/aggressive bunkie, in the laundry, and nodded in agreement at my detailing of the pathology of his behavior. Soon, Frank (a minor supporting character, for now) was listening and I threw in a few jokes, and they all laughed. I had the marvelous feeling of having broken past the tension of semi-anonymity, the kind that you feel when you go to a party and don’t know anyone, as opposed to when you’re immediately called over to join a group who’s been waiting for you to arrive.
Because there was a new tech distributing drugs, who was very slow, I got back late from Pill Call, and was locked out. I simply sat on a ledge, awaiting unlock, and struck up a conversation with a young black guy in which we ended up discussing the horrific waste of food we’d both witnessed daily at County Jail, all the more sickening because Twin Towers is located in an impoverished area and the food they throw out could easily supply enough to feed the very families of some of the incarcerated men. Then the doors opened for chow, and I walked to it with Lynn, who is turning out to be the bearer of a personality both effervescent and pedestrian. She is fairly talkative but says little of substance, all the while cracking a lot of bad jokes. But she has her repertoire of one-liners that she has put together over the years to deflect the invariable remarks directed her way. She actually gets a lot of attention—attention that is fairly ambiguous. It actually reminds me of walking with Cheri—a black female roommate I lived and worked with for years in New York. The catcalls from construction workers, the slightly hostile remarks from men of color who objected to my light complexion. Was this good or bad attention? Did they want to sleep with her or beat me up or both? Or did they simply crave the attention they got from their buddies by making us an object of their catcalls?
In making these denizens of my world here objects of your attention, I am humanizing some individuals who would never have penetrated your consciousness otherwise. That is not a reproach, but perhaps a reminder. By my being here, suddenly there’s a face in the crowd that you recognize; and my giving faces to others in the crowd brings on an awareness that there are so many people we conveniently wall off from our consciousness as somehow having earned anonymity by breaking the law, being mentally ill, or by being poor and a step away from shame. This awareness is moves these faces into the light.
Love from the shadows till November.
MCO 2004
