Doing Time (38 page)

I am dazed and shaken by this vision. I sit for a moment gripping the chair bottom with white-knuckled horror. Then I push the chair back gently, like a woman preparing to excuse herself from the dinner table and say softly, “May I leave, sir?”

“Certainly,” replies the captain, ever the gracious host. He smiles at me. I do not return the smile.

With the grace and ironclad composure that have saved me from humiliation since early childhood, I hold my head high as I walk through the outer office past the inquisitive stare of the duty sergeant. I close the big door quietly, and slip unnoticed around the corner of the building.

I lean against the sun-baked wall and struggle with a host of emotions I cannot put name to. I feel the wall burning my shoulders through my blue workshirt. My knees become suddenly and utterly incapable of supporting me. They fold up and I slide bonelessly down the wall, heedless of the way its pebbled surface scrapes at my back. My teeth are clenched, but my lips part and turn downward. From them comes an awful keening sound I do not recognize. My eyes sting with the threat of unwelcome tears, I beg them silently not to betray me. But they do, traitorous things, and a great wash of tears pours unchecked down my cheeks, off my chin, into my lap, a flood of them, pent up all those years when to cry was a sign of weakness and to be weak was to be a victim. I lay my forehead on my knees and drop my hands loosely to the blistering cement beside me, like useless weapons that would not fire when so much was at stake. I am dimly aware that I am crying in the brokenhearted way of a small child, a sort of hitching and breathless uh-uh-uh-uh-uh, complete with snot running down into my mouth. I feel naked and wounded, unmanned by grief and hopelessness.

Finally I can no longer hear the sounds of my own weeping. I turn my head to one side and feel the sun begin to evaporate the tears, leaving my face tight and dry. I spit on the fingertips of my hands and scrub away the trails they left, wipe my nose on my sleeve, and pull a small black comb from my back pocket. I take my sunglasses from the top of my head and run the comb briskly through the matted and dampened strands and stand up. Straight, Tall, Shoulders back. Chin up, I put the dark glasses on my face and the mantle of hard-ass prisoner on my soul.

I saunter nonchalantly around the corner, past the door marked CAPTAIN, onto the yard. An acquaintance approaches me and asks in an excited whisper, “So, what happened in there? “What's up?”

She is immediately joined by a second and a third and a fourth, all eager, questioning. I am comfortable now. This is my milieu, this is where I know exactly what is expected of me, precisely how to behave, what to do and say. I shove both hands jauntily into the hip pockets of my Levi's and allow a disdainful grin to own my face.

“Fuck him,” I say with contempt. “He can't touch this.”

We all laugh.

1991, Arizona State Prison Complex-Phoenix
Phoenix, Arizona

Behind the circus clowns, puffs of cotton candy, and taffy

sprinkled with saltwater and served with lopsided grins,

I spot you, the doe-eyed girl, in pigtails and overalls.

There is no mistaking you.

You are my eye's mirror,

my reflection in dark rooms,

my shadow in candlelight.

Two tigers pass, one resembles the other;

I think of you again:

young and full of mystery,

full of light and oceans

and gardens of roses and morning orchids.

I know you, little one, my trait is dominant, but to you

I am a grain of salt, a small spark lost in a blaze.

If I kneel and ask you to stare into my eyes,

what would you say? Would Father slip through your thin

lips?

Would your arms circle my neck? Would you kiss my cheek?

In dreams you smile at me

and ask me to recite old poems

that mean little to some

but the world to you. You

clap your hands to clouds and laugh at dawn's snowflakes.

Have I told you no flake is the same?

Have I told you no life is the same?

Have I told you no pain is the same?

There you go, slipping by the monkey cage and clowns.

I watch you go the way you never saw me arrive, face flush

and full of confusion. I may have given you life, may have been

that small angel who breathes life into puppets, but now I am

only a stranger, lost in his strange world of words and woes.

1996, Otisville Correctional Facility
Otisville, New York

among the everyday

pieces lost

a bright pink Indian cotton shirt

worn through months of
nursing, quickly unbuttoned
to bring the rooting baby to my breast
her head in its
soft, filmy folds

set adrift among the debris
of police searches, overturned lives
tossed into a pile of orphaned clothes
and taken to a tag sale

where my friend,
recognizing it,
bought it
to keep me close

and wore it one day
to bring my daughter for a visit,
greeting me cheerfully,
“Remember this?”

and I laughed,

scooping up my baby

to carry her into the

toy-filled playroom

where she rode me, her horsey

among the oversized stuffed animals

until visiting hours were over

when I stood at that great divide,

the visitor's exit gate,

and watched my shirt and my child

leave

with my friend

1996, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility
Bedford Hills, New York

History

has been unkind to you

Mayakovsky

making fools

or lunatics of

us

who chased the rainbow

blinded by its shimmering radiance

fading

like dreams disappearing

into morning

Your life a warning:

poets who would be prophets
may lose their lyrics

their lives

History's stern judgments:

he sold his soul to dictators

his craft to technocrats

he loved too much he loved too little

he gave in

he gave up

Today

the New World you championed

the dreams I fought for

are consigned to history books

written

in black and white

bereft of poems

A middle school teacher

in America

wraps it up neatly, to his pupils

in one simple sentence:

Communism was bad

from start to finish

bad and it lost.

A child

stands

hands on hips

chin out in challenge:

“That's your opinion

and too simple

My grandparents were Communists

It was an idea a dream

People tried

but they made mistakes

It's not so simple as good and bad.”

In the prison visiting room

the child looks her mother

in the eye. She says,

“Your intentions were good

but you went about them

wrongly.”

And I

her mother

who grew up

dancing

to your rhythms and rhymes

Mayakovsky

then plunged

from poetry

to war

find my way back

to you

Reading your rebellious lyrics

I contemplate your end

Mayakovsky

caught

in the iron jaws of history

and your own intimate demons

This I know:

despite my failures and defeats

my sorry solitude

the burden of guilt

and the death of dreams

despite the cold of a winter morning

waking to cinderblock walls and

rows of barbed wire

robbed

of every warm blanket

of illusion

Still

I crave life

Mayakovsky

child

poems

dreams

1993, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility
Bedford Hills, New York

for my son on turning 18

I.

The day approaches

when I begin

my yearly pilgrimage

back in time,

the present no longer important,

only the exact hour and minutes on a clock.

They will bring me to that moment

when you began

the longest journey

man ever makes,

out of the sea that

rocked you and bathed you,

out of the darkness and warmth

that caressed you,

out of the space

that you stretched like the skin of a drum

until it could no longer hold you

and you journeyed through my tunnel

with its twists and turns,

propelling yourself

on and on until

your two feet danced into brightness

and you taught me

the meaning

of miracles.

II.

Somewhere in the middle of the country

you are driving a car,

sitting straight, seat belt tight across your well-exercised chest,

looking into the horizon,

the hum of the engine dwarfed by the

laughter of your companions.

You are driving toward 18.

Two sets of parents

on each side of the continent

await your arrival,

anxiously,

And you leave them astounded

by that drive,

always part of you,

to grow up as soon as possible.

You move toward the point

that as parents we both celebrate and dread,

foreshadowed by leavings that take place

over and over again.

That leaving for kindergarten,

that leaving for camp,

that leaving parents home on a Saturday night.

Until that time when you really leave,

which is the point of it all,

And the sweet sadness.

III.

My atlas sits

on a makeshift desk,

a drawing board

between two lock-boxes.

It was a hard-fought-for item,

always suspect in the prison environment

as if I couid slide into its multicolored shapes

and take a journey.

In front of me is the United States

spread across two pages.

I search for Route 80,

a thin red line

and imagine you,

a dot moving along it.

You, an explorer now.

Davenport, Iowa; Cheyenne, Wyoming; then Utah; Nevada;

until you reach

the Sierras, looking down on the golden land.

Roads once traveled by your father and me.

As I struggle within myself to let you go,

and it is only within,

for you
will
go,

I am lifted out of the limits

of this jail cell,

and on the road

with you, my son,

who more than any map or dream

extends my world.

My freedom may be limited,

but I am your passenger.

 

1998, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility
Bedford Hills, New York

“The real world” some prisoners call it ironically. Some say, as our soldiers did in Vietnam, “back in the world.” Extracted from it, prisoners have a unique perspective on “the world.”

In Paul St. John's 1994 story “Behind the Mirror's Face” (Reading and Writing), the narrator asserts that prison marks most inmate writing, and for the worse. “A con may write fiction, but everybody will know where it comes from. His fiction wears the stink of prison for a belt. Her fiction is pregnant with loss disguised as possibility. His outlaws always get the better of a wicked status quo. Her heroines grope through a jungle of shame for their stolen womanhood, and perhaps a piece of heaven.” Certainly a portion of PEN contest entries support this charge. Every year men send pieces about the perfect crime, the foiled execution, the superhero's ultimately satisfying revenge; and the “stink of prison” is inescapable in the uncen-sored wet dreams and virulent misogynist fantasies (sometimes merged} sent to the contest. Some of the writing by women is freighted with longing; some return relentlessly to scenes of loss and betrayal.

With a passion born of desperation, St. John's narrator cries, “Take this goddamned place out of your art is what I am trying to tell you all.” The best writing about “the world” is neither stuck in the groove of crime-guilt-loss-revenge nor wheeling free in the fantasy of might-have-been. Not imprisoned, it yet bears the mark of the journey the prisoner has taken. Writers who have come to terms with who and where they are effect a triumph over those conditions. They use insight gained in “that goddamned place” to engage and illuminate the so-called real world outside — neither in an exculpatory nor an accusatory way, but by naming the human bonds that link us all. Thus, in “Prisons of Our World,” Allison Blake's bid in prison gives her piercing insight into the social and psychological captivity her “free” neighbors cannot see. Robert Moriarty's “Pilots in the War on Drugs” draws us into the romantic cockpit of perilous entrepreneur-ship and goes on to show how everything in our disingenuous war on drugs has driven pilots first to the air and, if they survive, to prison, scapegoats for a problem he can see, but the general public can't or won't.

The world seen through the prism of incarceration is cleansed of illusions and often startlingly unconventional. The hiphop poem by J. L. Wise Jr., “No Brownstones, Just Alleyways 5c Corner Pockets Full,” renders the cauldron of a St. Louis ghetto summer night, where lurking disaster coexists with resilient vitality. In “Americans,” Jon Schillaci celebrates our polyglot, postmodern society for its very confusions. In “For Sam Manzie,” his empathy becomes an ethical challenge to media-dulled citizens; it is the poet's searing response to a
Newsweek
article about boy-killer Sam Manzie, who had himself been seduced over the Internet. “Diner at Midnight,” an Edward Hopper-like sketch by David Taber, limns a moment of failed empathy. In a retake of the diner scene in “The Film,” the protagonist willfully wipes out feeling for both waitress and himself, as he fashions himself, in a sinisterly all-American way, the hero in a typical thriller. And the late Henry Johnson, a saxophone player, offers a thrilling riff on a real murder (of jazz musician Lee Morgan by his ex-wife in Slug's Saloon), set in a glamorized “5-Spot Cafe.”