The Hustle (21 page)

“As I've gotten older it's more just that masculine, kind of testosterone-driven thing, you know, I'm not into that, I'm not into winners and losers and proving I'm better than somebody else,” Maitland says. “That's the way I try to live my life these days. I try not to feel the need to try to prove to someone that I'm right and they're wrong, and I'm better and you're worse. As long as it stays within the realms of the game, the sport, I'm fine with that. I just don't personally get a kick out of it.”

Whenever Maitland came up in a conversation with any of my other teammates, the reaction was similar. Mait was a rock—stoic and solid, a good guy. Maitland, perhaps through his silence more than anything, seemed to have things pretty together. Willie Jr., especially, remembers him with fondness, recalling things they did together as the sons of the team's organizers, such as the time when Will, his dad, and Damian took a trip with Maitland and Randy to a cabin the Finleys owned on the Oregon coast, where Randy took everybody out in a boat to go crabbing.

“I got real close to Mait,” Will says. “I remember I used to call him on the phone when I was at Prep and he'd talk me through my homework.”

Maitland looks shocked when I relay Will's words to him. “I don't remember helping Willie out all that much,” he says. “I have good memories of him, definitely. But at that point in time, I was a pretty quiet, shy guy. It took a lot to get me to open up.”

The pressure at Lakeside to excel academically, socially, and in sports, Maitland says, made it difficult to tell anyone he was struggling. “It was hard to admit any problems period, because people are expected to be very good if not perfect,” he says. “I never felt like things worked very well for me at Lakeside; I think I would have been better off probably elsewhere.”

Maitland tells me he remembers feeling anxious, not wanting to talk to anyone, being on the outside and observing. “That social anxiety and depression made it hard for me to follow any friendship,” he says. “A lot of people mistook me for being even-keel, and just slightly aloof and unemotional. That was just the way that I dealt with my problems. It was better to shut down, turn around, and not deal with things—be unemotional.”

In the years since school, Maitland has tracked his own path as much as anyone from our basketball team—moving away from Seattle, living a rural life, rethinking the lessons about masculinity we learned as kids. He also has dealt with depression, for which he has found that medication has helped. “I think most of my problem is just a chemical imbalance, because it's just like a switch off or on,” Maitland says.

Over the years, he says, he's worked on coming to terms with his dad's very large shadow. “He's a very intense guy. It took a long time to learn how to deal with him and be myself and not just acquiesce,” he says. “There's enough that we butted heads about, but by and large we both have our mutual respect at this point.”

That evening, we return to Maitland's home. From inside, looking out the windows into the dark, it feels a long way from anywhere. The night seems to have coated the shack like a layer of syrup.

There is only one chair in the small living room—a padded armchair upholstered with black vinyl. I sit in it and Maitland on a beanbag. Sangi—named for Sangiovese, the Italian grape—runs inside and leaps onto my lap, leaving mud all over my jeans. Maitland lightly scolds the dog, grabs it, and cleans its paws with a wad of paper towels.

A chess set sits on a folding stand in a corner. The TV is piled with instructional yoga videotapes, and a bookshelf holds works on wine, yoga, and chemistry. Jugs of homemade beer sit under a table near the door.

Maitland tells me he was surprised to run into Chris a few years ago. Chris, at least in his hard-core playing style, was about the opposite of Maitland—during practices in high school at Lakeside, Maitland was given the punishing job of defending him. “He's turned into a pretty interesting person, not what you might necessarily have expected,” Maitland says. “I think a lot of what you saw was just a product of where he came from and his family.”

Maitland says that the long days making wine are tiring. “Part of getting into the wine industry for a lot of people is an issue of quality of life and the romance of winemaking and all of that, but for a lot of us, it doesn't end up being that way at all. It's just a lot of hard work. You're doing things that you like and love, but I'd like to be able to find just a slightly more sustainable work position.”

He tells me he likes the variety of the job and the way it involves coming up with practical solutions. “You got all sorts of things you gotta do. There's problem-solving: How do we move this wine from here to there? Driving a forklift is kind of the same situation, a geometric puzzle: How do I get to this pallet, dig this out? It's not the same thing day in, day out. There's variety. You solve a problem and there's a tangible result. It's good, physical, hands-on labor and troubleshooting.

“And in the end you're hopeful you have helped to make something that people will enjoy. Whether it's the greatest wine in the world doesn't matter, just as long as someone somewhere appreciates it.”

When we wake up the next morning at five, the house is completely fogged in. Maitland turns on NPR, and the sedate voices of
Morning Edition
tell of new bombings in Iraq. I pack up my sleeping bag, and Maitland brews some coffee.

The night was cold. I stumble out to warm up the engine of my car and flip on the parking lights, which glow in the mist. Maitland rounds up Sangi, who has been frolicking in the dark. I follow the taillights of his pickup down the hill. We turn right at the dead oak and drive through the deserted roads on the way to the winery. Maitland drives slow, at twenty-five miles an hour, to avoid hitting any deer that might wander into our path.

I can't see any farther than the cab of his truck. Inside, I make out the back of Maitland's head. Next to him, Sangi pokes hers out the window as we silently cut a line through the fog and the fields.

The System

The evening of January 21, 2006, was a festive Saturday night in Seattle. The next day the Seahawks were scheduled to play the Carolina Panthers in the NFC Championship game. If the Seahawks won, the team would reach the Super Bowl for the first time in its thirty-year history. The clubs downtown were crowded with people getting a start on the next day's merriment.

The parking lot next to Déjà Vu, a strip club near the entrance to the Pike Place Market, one of Seattle's top tourist attractions, was packed with cars and people. At eleven
P.M.
, Myran Barnes was wandering among them. He had on a black baseball hat, a black jacket, and black jeans. Two undercover cops standing in front of the strip joint—a garish, brightly lit place with a pink-and-black color scheme and a logo of two crossed female legs in fishnet stockings on the wall next to the door—saw Myran talking to a man sitting in an SUV.

As Myran walked away from the vehicle, one of the cops approached him.

“Anything going on?” he asked Myran.

“What are you looking for?”

“Forty.”

“Who you with?”

The cop pointed at his partner.

Myran asked who had the money. The cop said his friend did.

“I'll take you to it, but one of you has to wait here,” Myran said. The cop said he would stay behind, and Myran walked off with his partner.

The pair headed two blocks east on Pike Street. When they got to Third Avenue, Myran told the cop to hold on. He walked over to a man standing near a bus stop, who called over a girl who was waiting inside the shelter. The three conferred, and the girl walked back to the bus shelter. When she returned, she handed a bag of crack cocaine to Myran. Myran returned to the officer, handed him the drugs, and accepted $40.

The man and the girl who had given Myran the drugs headed north up Third Avenue before a team of cops sprang on them, putting them facedown on the sidewalk and handcuffing them. Myran, who had walked in the other direction, turned around, saw them, and took off running. A bus happened to stop, and Myran climbed on. For a moment he thought he was in the clear, until he saw that several police officers had boarded behind him. Myran took the two $20 bills out of his pocket and held them out. “Here's your marked money,” he said.

This was far from Myran's first arrest. A little more than a year earlier, he'd been busted in similar circumstances. An undercover female officer had approached Myran and asked him for some “cream.” Myran told her he had to make a phone call. He then gave the officer his driver's license and a $5 bill to hold while he went off. When he came back several minutes later, he handed the officer 0.1 gram of crack cocaine. The officer gave him a marked $20 bill. The arrest team moved in a few minutes later.

It was a little different this time. The girl who had supplied the crack was searched and found to be carrying 11 grams of cocaine. She was only sixteen years old. The cops booked Myran for violation of the Uniform Controlled Substances Act and for using a minor as a drug courier. The girl's involvement, whether Myran knew her or not, raised the seriousness of the alleged crime to a level III drug offense, the highest in the state of Washington. As the cops booked him into the King County jail that night, Myran was facing the prospect of a decade in prison.

As you drive through downtown Seattle on Interstate 5, the King County Correctional Facility is just west of the freeway. A twelve-story concrete building coated with beige paint, it could be easily mistaken for a parking garage. At any one time, there are about 1,350 prisoners inside. The main entrance is on Fifth Avenue. When prisoners need to appear in King County Court, they walk through a windowless sky bridge that spans from the jail, over the top of the King County administration building across the street, and into the courthouse, which takes up the block between Third and Fourth avenues.

After the day when Damian and I ran into Myran on the street, it had seemed just a matter of time before he was picked up. The areas where he tended to hang out—downtown near the Pike Place Market and a little bit north, up in Belltown—are the targets of constant stings by the narcotics police. For someone involved in the lowest level of the cocaine trade, they are the most obvious places to go to turn a quick deal. If you sell drugs in those areas, it is almost guaranteed you will be caught before too long.

The first time I visit Myran in jail, on a Saturday morning, the bored-looking King County deputy at the entrance halfheartedly inspects my bag while I pass through a metal detector. I learn over the course of several visits, through comments made by some of the guards and short conversations with the families of other prisoners—something about waiting around in a jail seems to make people talkative—that everyone assumes I'm a lawyer.

To get to the visitors' waiting area, you walk up one flight of stairs from the entrance. To the right, as you enter the room, is a Formica shelf stacked with pink forms. You take a golf-pencil and fill in your name, your address, the name of the prisoner you want to visit, and your relationship to the prisoner. The first time I go to see Myran, I puzzle for a minute over what to put down. I consider “basketball teammate” but then decide against it, wondering how I would explain it if the guard asked me. “Acquaintance” doesn't seem to capture it, either. Finally, I write “friend.”

After you've finished the form, you walk up to the guard's booth, which runs across one side of the room but is sealed off with bulletproof glass. The guards in the visitors' area wear forest-green uniforms with gold trim that look very much like the outfits worn by National Park rangers. You speak through a small, round stainless steel grille set in the glass and slide your form and driver's license through a slot at the bottom. The guard verifies the name on your license against what you have written on the slip, checks to make sure the prisoner you want to see has visiting hours, and then puts the form in a pneumatic tube and sends it up to the floor where your prisoner is being held. Then you wait on one of a line of bolted-together green plastic chairs. The people in the room are mostly women—mothers with young children who laugh and crash around the waiting area, women in skirts and cleavage-baring tops, old ladies who sit quietly with hands folded in their laps.

A few minutes before ten thirty in the morning, the guard motions to everyone in the waiting room that it's OK to get on the elevator and go up to our designated floors. I exit on the tenth into a small, gray-carpeted, triangular-shaped area. Directly in front of the elevators is a line of booths, painted—for some reason—aquamarine. Thick glass divides the prisoners' area from where the visitors sit. Each side has a heavy black plastic phone connected to the wall by a cord wrapped in a flexible stainless-steel sheath. A small window to the far right lets in light. To the far left of the elevator, you can walk up to a window and peer into the jail. Directly in front is a circular control room, shielded from the rest of the jail by bulletproof glass, at which a guard sits at monitors. He presses a button and his amplified voice, crackly and a bit distorted, sounds through a speaker in the waiting area: “They'll be out in a minute, folks.”

Most visitors take a spot in one of the booths to wait. I hang back, standing near the wall. Before long, three prisoners—a black guy with cornrows, a young white guy who speaks in Russian with an older man I assume is his father, and a Latino man in his twenties—show up. They wear red jail outfits that look like pajamas and flip-flops. The guard punches another button and the door between the jail and their side of the visiting area slides open. They walk in and take their places in the booths across from their visitors. A minute later, another black man arrives and goes into a booth.

I am beginning to wonder if Myran is coming when he walks in front of the control room. He's a bit under six feet tall, thin, light-skinned, and his head is shaved bald. He wears small, rimless, rectangular glasses. When he sees me, he breaks into a smile and begins to energetically wave with his right hand. In his left hand he carries an extremely large Bible, about five inches thick and bound in soft black leather.

He points to a booth and we sit down across from each other. The first thing I notice is that the bloat that was in his face when Damian and I saw him on the street is gone. His eyes look sharp. He is smiling. He looks just about the same as he did as a kid.

We both pick up the phone. “Hey, it's good to see you,” he says.

It soon becomes clear that Myran is in a desperate situation. He had been placed in a work release program after his prior drug arrest, but, after ten days, he went AWOL, which resulted in a charge of second-degree escape. The age of the girl involved in the latest drug transaction as well as his prior record means that the prosecutor is seeking a sentence of 120 months. Myran tells me that the prosecutor has offered his public defender a plea bargain for ninety months, which Myran has refused. “If I go away for ninety months, I'm going to be with murderers, rapists, house robbers, people who just don't care what happens to them,” he says. “And I'll come out as a repeat offender, which means if I make one mistake, they'll send me right back.”

It's hard to sort out all the charges in Myran's record. “The defendant has been booked 28 times since 1990 and has 38 warrants,” reads one court document. Looking at the charges, almost all are misdemeanors, including—by my count—fourteen separate charges of driving without a license or driving with a suspended license. Others are for failures to appear in court. The oldest case is a juvenile-court drug charge from 1989. There are two felonies prior to his recent arrests. In 1998 Myran walked up to a woman from rural Washington who had parked at a gas station in the Central Area, near Garfield High School, to ask for directions. Myran ripped the necklace from her neck and ran away. He pled guilty to first-degree theft and got fifteen days in jail. In 1999 he pled guilty to being the middleman in a $40 crack deal, this one also set up by the narcotics cops. He was sentenced to twenty months in prison.

Myran's grandmother and I are the only two people who visit him in jail. Myran tells me that he is sure that my getting back in touch with him is an answer to his prayers for a change in his life. I can see how he would welcome any attention from outside. He has spoken on the phone with a private attorney, who has told him she could get the current charge of dealing with a minor dropped, but the lawyer wants $5,000 for the case, including $2,500 up front, an amount that neither Myran nor his grandmother can muster.

Without money, he doesn't have much leverage. Myran is essentially engaged in a game of chicken with the legal system. He refuses to take the deal the public defender suggests he accept, figuring that the state will eventually come up with a better offer if he holds out, simply to save the expense and effort of going to trial. If not, and his case does end up before a jury, Myran tells me he will explain things himself. He is convinced that the jury will hear how he was set up by the police, realize that it was unfair, and let him off.

Everything is speculation on Myran's part. He asks my advice, but I tell him that I'm not the person to offer opinions on his legal situation. His court-assigned lawyer keeps telling him to take the deal. I phone his public defender several times and leave messages asking if he will talk with me to clarify the charges against Myran, but the lawyer never returns my calls. He also fails to call back Myran's grandmother, cementing Myran's belief that his public defender is just processing him through the system without even looking at the details of his case.

“He told me that I shouldn't be out on Third Avenue if I don't want to go to prison,” Myran says to me one day. “I told him, ‘I know that. What do you want me to say? I relapsed.' ”

Myran tells me that since he was about ten years old, he's had mood swings. For a few days, he'll feel fine, and then a switch will flip and he'll get angry. “A lot had to do with what was going on at home. My family, when there was a problem, would just close the curtains to the outside world,” he says. “There were no male figures. It was all women, so I walked all over them.”

At school, he would get in fights for no real reason. One day, he lists several elementary, middle, and high schools he attended (in the South End as well as the North End, when his mom was in residential drug rehab). “I got kicked out of all of them,” he says. After that, he started spending time on the streets. “I just went down and hung out,” he says.

Since he's been in jail, he's been on antidepressants and mood stabilizers. One morning he tells me, “I just took a pill, so I'm on my ‘A' game. At about two, I'll start to get tired until I take another one.” Without the drugs, he says, things get fuzzy. “My mind starts to close, like this,” he says. He holds up his right hand with his fingers formed in a circle, and, in a motion like the shutting of an aperture on a camera, closes the circle down to a fist. “You can be talking to me, but I just don't take anything in.” When I ask if he remembers the day that Damian and I pulled up next to him on Second Avenue, he shakes his head. “You guys talked to me? Really? See, that's what I mean. I don't remember that at all.”

Myran's moods swing widely from visit to visit. One day, he's upbeat and almost jovial, sure that he is about to get out and everything is looking up. The next time, he begins to cry when talking about his case, tears running out of his eyes before he snaps back and tries to act cheerful again. Some days everything he says seems totally rational, and at other times he rambles from one topic to the next, going into lengthy digressions on the Bible.

Myran says that, on the outside, he has been able to get things together for short spells. A few years earlier, he says, he had a good job at a local hospital. Although he'd never been taught how to use a computer, he got on the one at his grandmother's house and made a résumé full of fake experience, dressed up for the interview, and landed the job. He worked in the storeroom in the basement, ferrying parts like IV pumps around the hospital when a doctor or nurse called down. He tells me he got paid $14 an hour and even had a pager so he could be on call. “That was a really good job. I really liked that,” he says. When I ask him what happened, he shakes his head. “I stopped going.” His ups and downs have also made it hard to maintain relationships, including those with his girlfriend and children.