Doing Time (44 page)

She leans forward on the table, close to him now, as if to reveal a secret.

“Then let me tell you what you bought. Thirteen years, and I've had no home and no friends, because possessions and relationships can be merciless, when they're taken away. I have nightmares. I see things. Sometimes hooded faces with eyes like yours. I see all sorts of things, like auras and halos and even events before they happen. I'm afraid most of the time. I have this idea, as crazy as it sounds, that I'm worth shooting. That no matter what I do or who I become, I should be punished. So I compensate — sometimes I'm cruel, usually I'm blunt, unforgiving. Does any of that sound right to you? Is that what you wanted?”

But Alex Pitts does not respond. He sits there, looking at her, hardly breathing. He should leave, she thinks. Why doesn't he leave? A chorus of “Happy Birthday” begins at a table in the center of the room. The old prisoner with white hair flamboyantly opens a bag of popcorn and dumps it on the table, and everyone cheers and claps. The sound echoes off the walls and ceiling, reverberates in the sterile air above her head. Mel feels herself dwindling, folding into herself, losing her sense of time and space.

But then across the room she sees Angie and her father rise, hug for a second, and slowly head for the door. Suddenly Mel wants out; she is tired of feeling trapped, she knows in her heart she was wrong: that the power was never his, was hers all along. She feels ridiculous — for trying, for talking to this man, for even coming here. She also has an urge to cry, something she has not done since before the crime.

She stands, steadies herself for a moment — she is lightheaded, sweating now — and walks to the desk, asks the guard where the bathrooms are. On her way she stops and tells Angie to wait — not to hitchhike, please don't hitchhike, she'll be glad to drive her home — and then finds the women's room where at the sink she runs cold water on her wrists, cups her hands and splashes it on her cheeks, her neck. But this time she does not look at herself in the mirror, worried that she will see there the face from the past, unchanged, the face in the mirror at her father's house all those years ago. Still Melody.

In the visiting room again she walks directly to the table to tell Alex Pitts she is leaving, but as she arrives he stands and hands her the sheet of paper, folded. He lingers a second, blinks as though he wishes to say something, then starts across the room. At the desk he hands the pencil to the guard, and as he turns for the door Mel sees his light — a symbol of blue, clear and close to the body, but wispy, flickering, as though starved for fuel, a pale blue flame in the wind — and then he is gone, through the door and into the interior of the prison, Mel looks at the guard, who shrugs as if to say, “You know how it is, lady,” and then she joins Angie who waits for her at the entrance to the sally port.

Outside, Mel and Angie are silent as they walk to the parking lot. The sky is cloudless, the sun high and unusually brilliant in the crisp air above the foothills to the west. It is a winter day, cold and fixed, and yet there is a hint of spring in this light, a fragile notion. At the car Mel fishes the keys from her pocket, but before she unlocks the door she unfolds the paper in her hand. “I'm sorry . ..” it begins.

1993 Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility
Canon City, Colorado

In a conversation about this book's design, William Aberg suggested it include a section on release. At first I thought he meant the kind of escape, imaginative or physical, that inmates dream and lie about together in his poem “Reductions” (Time and
Its
Terms) and that shape Johnson's poem here, “Dream of Escape.” Imagination is always escape, as M. A. Jones's poems pre- and postrelease testify. In “To Those Still Waiting,” he is surprised by the ache of longing that accompanies recall of prison, then by the persistent habit of dreaming of better, even when life is splendid.

But what Aberg had in mind was the difficulty of effecting changes one had promised oneself in prison, the reunion instead with the reprobate self, and the ensuing pain. On the phone, he read me “Devotions,” * in which his striking a match to cook his drug reminds him of his mother lighting votive candles to pray “that I might find / healing, keep healthy, have enough / to eat. That I know how much / she loves me. But that I never come home again.” In his poem “Stepping Away from My Father” here, Aberg takes on the grief he caused his father.

Writers wrestle to understand why getting out feels so little like release. In her poem “Stigma” (1996),* Allison Blake struggles to shake off the clinging monster the world imposes on the ex-convict. And with longer sentences and less training and education to prepare for release, it is harder than ever to counter the world's inhospitality.

In “After All Those Years,” Ajamu C. B, Haki assesses the internal damage of institutionalization, showing how much easier it is to get out of prison than to get prison out of oneself. On the same theme, M. A. Jones writes in “Coming Out: The Man Who Fell to Earth”“‘: “To trust another man in prison was to risk my life. Outside it was different. Outside it was just as deadly not to trust, to remain apart. Because I didn't understand that, I stayed apart from other students and after a while I felt as if I were fine. I was free, but I acted like I was doing time.” The responsibility of freedom so weighed on him that, unable to talk about his feelings, he returned to drugs — and prison. For others, after so many years, the social world of doing time has come to be the only one they understand.

For these and many other reasons, the exit from prison can be as menacing a portal as the entrance gate. In Robert Rutan's richly ironic story, the protagonist, a “penal commuter,” exerts his will not to be taken back. Freedom for him is so bound up with disappointment, prison so identified with dreaming and story telling, that the final outcomes seems both surprising and inevitable.

The free side of the walls
Night, warmth, a parking lot.

But no keys.

You hear the sirens
shatter the fragile calm,

the yellow stench of fear,
thick and rolling in
like fog

filling every shadow.

The guards scurry out
in force
and they form a line,

their faces painted
beneath their SWAT caps,

brandishing imaginary guns
in the prison yard.

You decide to flee
through the dense woods,
where people line the trail

holding out cups of cold
vintage wine.

In front of you
a wood nymph

insinuates herself
between you and freedom,
promises pleasures

long denied.

You join her
for a few fierce seconds
of tenderness

in a clearing
hidden from all eyes

but the stars.

1987, Sing Sing Correctional Facility
Ossining, New York

After being punished
for 10, 15, 25, or more years,
do you think that you'll want to leave?
Can you imagine anything more terrifying
than walking through those gates
without looking back at that great square wall
that kept you in all those years?
Punishing you and comforting you!
Punishing you and comforting you!
Do you think that you will at least miss it?
That somehow, inside, you loved being here
under the tooth mother's wings?
You ain't got to worry about a damn thing!
You ain't got to worry about a damn thing!
You're Amerikkka's greatest son,
the tooth mother's greatest capture.
She has taught you how to bend your knees,
stand up curved back and mop her welcoming floors,
given you paint to embellish her halls of terror —
more terrifying!

And you've been smiling all those years at her morbid green,
her institutional colors, her slavery that fits you.
So do you think after all those years of being trained
that you can just un-train yourself and leave?
That you can enjoy the wonderful colors you've only enjoyed
as a crayoning child?
After all those years behind these gray walls —
the monotony!
The Sunday pancakes, refried french toast, and greasy chicken,
the Mondays you wish they had something edible,
the Tuesday Yakasorbi murder burgers,
the Wednesday killer liver,
the Thursday everything from the last four days mixed
together,
the Friday lumpy oatmeal and fluorescent Kool-Aid,
the Saturday cold cuts you go down to the mess hall just to
look at.
The cycle begins again on Sunday;
and you've gone to the mess hall for every meal,
didn't miss a single meal in all those years.
Now why do you think that you can get used to real food?
Home cooking, a gourmet restaurant,
after you've only had seven minutes to eat
and an ulcer bigger than your heart.
After all those years you still think that you can just leave?
Well, maybe, but remember — even though you leave the
prison the prison will never leave you.

1996, Sing Sing Correctional Facility
Ossining, New York

My father leans toward the green, electric
dials of the transceiver, clicking the Morse key
between thumb and forefinger, talking in dashes and dots
with a man in Magadan, far
eastern Siberia, about how they put fire pots
all night beneath running truck engines to keep the gas
and oil from freezing. How the Sea of Okhotsk,
even now, in late March, is a plateau
passable only in the wake of icebreakers.
My father tells him how an early Maryland spring
has teased the flowers and trees into a bloom
that could still be murdered
by frost. This could be
the conversation of two men in a local
hardware store, arms folded across their chests
as they stand beside the snow shovels and salt shacks
and grouse about insurance, doctor's bills,
the motions of clouds and sun.
My father's face is warm, animate,
his lips silently forming the words
he taps out in code, the signals
flashing over the Atlantic, the skies of Europe,
over the snowy steppe and taiga of Holy Russia.
I, who have stood by the door
waking to ask for a loan, back quietly
into the hall, not wanting to startle him
out of his easier intimacy with strangers, nor sense
the fear in his eyes when he sees his addict son.

1997, Federal Correctional Institute La Tuna
Anthony, Texas

In Boston, this first October Sunday
I've never felt so far
from where I started, yellow concrete room
looking out over barbed wire, Arizona desert
and out on the prison yard those men I called
brother still play handball, argue drug deals and
imagine a way out. How can I
explain to them this distance, how I've fled
to a city where people move casually
down streets lined with brownstones, maples
and in another week the leaves will flame orange, red.

To those still waiting
where there are no trees and the sunlight
touches reluctantly, how do I describe
the air that enters the window and blouses
the curtains, how in the next room
a woman makes coffee, and stepping
toward me her blue robe falls
open, the light catching a moment
on her breast. She sings a little as she
turns away and I don't think that she
understands much of this, how certain mornings
a part of me drifts back and wants
to sit all day in a yellow room and say
nothing, while believing in a world
that waits elegantly
just out of reach, some place I'd
invent for them if they asked and swear
were true, something more tangible
than the light that falls through the curtains
on an October morning, a woman's voice
that rises from another room,
these things around which my life settles.

1997, Recalling all the prisoners the author has known

Clutching the rope and hook in his worn and wizened hands, the old man crawled on his elbows and knees through the wet grass toward the wall. Craning his neck and looking up, up along the wall, up past the guard tower that sat upon it like a mythical monster, a multi-eyed sentinel whose cones of light pierced the darkened prison yard, he saw the gray clouds part and the moon emerge. The moonlight didn't bother him for, as long as he made it to the wall safely, it would make visibility poor within the steam when the time came.

The wet grass had surprised him, and that caused him some irritation: All the years he had watched the steam being blown off from the nearby prison powerhouse, it should have occurred to him that the condensation would dampen the grass. But it hadn't, and he considered his lack of foresight a bad omen. He tightened his grip around the rope and hook and crawled on, on to the base of the wall. Reaching it, leaning against it, he rested, for he was already tired.

The ground and the wall vibrated slightly, carrying the rumble of the huge boilers in the powerhouse. Off in the distance, a barge sounded on the river, its engines droning evenly as it slid through the night. The air was colder than he first thought; he zipped up his jacket and tugged the sleeves to his wrists. Lying on his back, he pulled the rope and hook to his chest and concentrated on the climb he'd have to make. Could he do it? He was an old man, but a determined one: He was going over and that was that. He had been a bull of a man once; now, wintered and weakened, he cursed his decrepitude and longed for his former strength. But he had two things in his favor — a good rope and a good hook.

And that was important. Years ago, when he was doing a ten-year bit in Menard — or was it Statesville? he wasn't sure — he and two others planned a break. He fished his memory for their names but caught nothing. The plan they had was simple, and they kept it to themselves, executing each step with cautious precision. Using an array of excuses, they manipulated the prison administration into housing them in the same cellblock. Once there, they acquired hacksaw blades from a retiring guard who charged them fifty dollars per blade. Each man sawed the bars of his cell almost but not completely through; then, caulking in the outcuts with putty, they repainted them. Next, in similar fashion, they sawed the window bars of the cellblock barber shop. The cooperation of the inmate barber cost another hundred dollars, but it was well worth it as the window led to the prison yard. They made a rope and a hook. From the hospital, they contrabanded skin-tone surgical gloves and three pairs of white pajamas.