Blue Shoes

Posted on May 7, 2013 by

I walk back to the unit after dinner, cutting through the middle of the yard, through the impromptu flea market where throngs of men gather to socialize and hawk their wares. Among the vendors: a black man pitching Reeboks for fifteen books an Asian passing out warm burritos from a mesh shoulder bag, a Mexican selling handmade Mother’s Day cards. I pass a Hispanic man holding out a Tupperware stacked with peanut brittle. “Amigo,” he calls. “You want candy? One stamp.” I shake my head. ” No, thank you.” My free-world politeness refuses to rub off.

Another bus arrived today, as they do every Tuesday. The compound seems smaller, louder this evening. You can tell the new guys by their feet; they wear the same shoes they arrived in–blue canvas slip-ons, flimsy and laceless so as not to pose a threat during transport. Occasionally you see an orange pair in the crowd, worn by the guys who have come from the penitentiary, but this evening I see only blue feet milling around the market. It astonishes me how easily these men fit in. They stepped off the bus not two hours ago and already they’re negotiating the price of burritos and jostling with old familiar faces. Prison, for many of them, is like a class reunion.

It was two years ago last month that I stepped onto the yard in my own blue shoes, which were too small and pinched my toes. I remember arriving at my cell, a blanket roll tucked beneath one arm, and opening my locker to find the dregs of previous occupant–an empty mayonnaise bottle, a single worn sneaker, and a mug with a broken handle that smelled of Ramen soup on the inside. How strange, I thought, to have my life’s possessions, which had once occupied a 900-square-foot apartment, stripped down to fit inside a 24-cubic-foot locker. That night I laid in my bunk wondering how I’d survive, if I even wanted to survive.

My father told me (I can’t remember if this was before or after my incarceration) that had I decided not to surrender, he would have helped me escape the country. I laughed at the time, unsure if he was serious. But I like to think he would have done it, because I think that’s what fathers are for: to give you all of the good, commonsense advice they can, but to stick by you when you decide to ignore their advice and do something stupid, even if it involves packing you in a create and shipping you across the border.

“What’s up?” I turn to see Bo walking beside me, fists clenched, head and shoulders pitched forward. He always walks as though he’s fighting a strong wind. “How ’bout this flea market?”

Ahead of us, dressed conspicuously in an over-sized jacket despite the mild weather, the Soap Man trudges up and down the walk belting out his familiar sales pitch: “Trash bags! Bleach! Dial soap! I got cherry! I got kiwi! I got tutti-frutti! Keep you clean and smellin’ good! Dial soap! Two stamps! Two stamps!

Bo brushes past him and sighs. “Do you ever look around and ask yourself, Why did I have to cheat? Why did I have to choose the easy way?” He laughs at the irony. “Turns out the easy way is really the hard way.”

I’m struck by Bo’s use of the word “cheat.” It’s certainly applicable to his own crime, armed bank robbery. But I wonder if maybe all crime, even my own, distilled to its basic elements, isn’t cheating.

“Every day,” I say to Bo. “I think about it every day.”

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Life Sentence

Posted on April 22, 2013 by

Oscar received his GED test scores today; he failed all five portions. His reading and social studies marks were abysmal, his essay was incomplete, and he scored a 320 in math–forty points lower than on his previous test. How does one’s score drop after two months of intense study? I was disappointed but not surprised; none of the men I’ve tutored within the past two years had gone on to receive his diploma.

The first student I taught was Ellis, a kind-faced man in his mid-forties who had trouble with math. I used his prior experience in construction as the basis for our studies and showed him how to convert inches into feet and feet into yards using proportions. I drew diagrams of bookshelves, storage sheds, and arbors on the chalkboard and taught him how to find perimeters, areas, and hypotenuses using geometry, and to calculate the amount of timber and gallons of paint needed to complete a job. He told me his dream was to one day start his own construction company.

A few months after his release, I ran into Ellis in the chapel after the Sunday service. We shook hands. I thought I was hallucinating.

“Ellis. . . ? What are you doing here?”

He grinned at his shoes. “Violation,” he said. “I failed a breathalyzer.”

He told me later that the drinking began soon after he boarded the bus home when a civilian sitting beside him pulled a case of beer from his bag and offered to share. He was drunk by the time he reached the halfway house.

I asked Ellis about his construction company. He grinned at his shoes.

“It be funny how you forget those things soon as you out that gate.”

After Ellis came Martin, a thirty-nine year old with a forth grade reading level. We’d meet in the library on weeknights and read back issues of Junior Scholastic together. The process wasn’t unlike how my mother taught me to read when I was a young boy–sounding out each syllable, skimming the page with one finger. I recall her patience and gentle corrections. My favorite book to read before bed was Jill Murphy’s Five Minutes’ Peace, about a mother elephant driven to her wit’s end by her nagging child.

Martin told me that his goal was to be able to read to his own children, without feeling embarrassed for not knowing all of the words. I asked if his parents read to him as a child. He shook his head.

“My daddy wasn’t around,” he said, “and my mamma always be working.”

We didn’t make much progress; not long after we began reading together, Martin was shipped to a yard in South Carolina. I asked Ellis if he wanted to continue working on geometry, but he declined, saying that he didn’t want to waste my time. He was eventually released after serving the final two months of his sentence.

I think of these men occasionally, as I do when considering my own future. I wonder what they’re up to: if Ellis ever started his construction business; if Martin ever got the opportunity to read to his children. And what of the men who proceeded them? Did they make it? I suppose it’s possible.

Oscar asked how he could improve his math score. I told him to give up. He laughed, deciding it was a joke, so I relented and encouraged him to practice. I admitted that I myself was never very good with numbers; it wasn’t until I reached college that I made my first A in algebra. “I couldn’t even do my connect-the-dots in elementary school,” I told him. “My mother made me practice. She painted dots on a sweater and numbered them with fabric pant. Before I could wear it, I’d have to connect the dots with a washable marker. The lines created a picture of a star and moon.”

Oscar stared over my shoulder at three inmates pushing grass clippers past the window, the old-fashioned kind without motors.

“My mom didn’t do those things,” he said.

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Cotton Swabs

Posted on March 28, 2013 by

Rod keeps a plastic soap dish filled with cotton swabs in his locker. I offered to refill it for him from a box of swabs I bought at commissary, but he insisted on doing it himself. “I like my Q-tips a certain way,” he said.

From the box he plucked a single swab and stuck it in his ear. With exaggerated scooping motions, as if he were spooning porridge from a bowl, he explained that if you rotate a swab the wrong way, the cotton will unravel. So before filling his soap dish, he tests a swab to determine the direction in which its tips are wound. Then, assuming the swabs are produced and packaged pointing in the same direction, he projects the results of the test onto the entire box and puts the swabs away with all counterclockwise ends pointing toward the back of his locker. Thus he can be assured that the next time he reaches for a Q-tip, the swab will be perfectly positioned to be rotated first clockwise in his right ear and then counterclockwise in his left, thereby eliminating any possibility of the cotton unraveling in his ear, which he says “feels funny.”

I asked Rod when his Q-tip compulsion began. He said it started after he came to prison. I wonder if, eight years from now, I’ll be arranging my own Q-tips.

There’s a deliberate and finely honed economy to everything Rod does: He showers every other day. He washes his work clothes once a month and his bed linen every two months. The cardboard shade he’s constructed for his window includes a tiny pull tab for easy removal. He arranges his shoes in a precise order: sneakers and shower sandals go beneath the bed with sneakers nearest the wall; work boots go under the locker, but not so far back that they’re difficult to reach. I know this because after cleaning the room one day, Rod pointed out that I put his shoes back incorrectly. “Now don’t let that happen again,” he said chuckling. But I knew he was genuinely annoyed, so I took to memorizing the exact arrangement of his shoes, including how far he like his chair from his bed.

It isn’t his habits that are disturbing; everyone has quirks (I like all product labels in my locker facing forward). What’s unsettling is the religious intensity with which Rod observes these habits, and the aggressive unease that comes with their interruption. I once witnessed him erupt over a misplaced marker which he accused an officer of confiscating. Later, he found the marker in a zipper bag along with the rest of his colors. The relief on his face was pitiful.

It’s depressing living with someone who’s spent fifteen years of his life incarcerated. Everything about Rod–every gesture, every tic, every glance, every remark, every intense habit–reminds me of danger. His eyes are like a bullfrog’s, always tracking the periphery. When shaking hands, he makes a note of which is dominant. He awakes every morning at 5:45 so he can be dressed and ready when the cell doors are unlocked, in case of an ambush.

It scares me to look at him.

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Anecdote

Posted on March 9, 2013 by

Fatal Attraction came on last night, reminding me of Lyle. It was one of many movies we had rented over the course of the indictment, I suppose as a way of keeping our minds occupied. In one scene, Michael Douglas warns an unstable Glenn Close to leave his family alone and stop calling, to which she responds pointedly, and with a touch of hysteria: “I will not be ignored, Dan.” Something in the line’s delivery–its cadence or fervor–had struck us as funny, and we went on to use it whenever we felt the other wasn’t paying attention.

I’ve been trying to reach Lyle for the past week, but he doesn’t answer his phone. I hear through mutual friends that he’s changed quite a bit. He follows a new crowd and spends his weeknights dressing up in drag and patronizing gay bars, things he never did while we were together but which, when I think about it, seem to fit. I can easily picture Lyle (or is it “Lynda”?) hanging from a bar stool, in a bad wig, gesturing with a cosmopolitan as he rehashes to a rapt audience the time his boyfriend (“ex-boyfriend,” he’d emphasize) went to prison for child pornography. There’d be gasps all around. “Oh, honey! You poor thing, you!” And Lyle would wave the condolences away with a bangled hand and declare, bravely, that he is fine, he has moved on with his life, he is so over it.

Scrutinizing his rouged face in a compact, he might add: “It just goes to show you never really know a person.”

I suspect I’ve become an anecdote for a lot of people, my old coworkers especially. I can see them standing around the Kuerig, filling in the new intern:

“And then there was that one guy, what’s-his-face. . . .

“Oh! Let Jim tell it! Jim’s great at telling it . . . he does the voice. . . . “

“So we had this one kid–real quiet guy–on the interface team, right? . . .”

“Boy, what a fiasco that was! . . .”

“HR had to escort him out of the building. . . .”

“I always said it–didn’t I, Audrey?–I always said there was something weird about that guy.”

I suppose the reason I’ve been trying to call Lyle is because I want to hear he misses me. Ideally, I’d like for his life to be falling apart without me. In that way, I could be reassured that I am not simply an anecdote to be trotted out at dinner parties, that despite whatever faults I might have, I did something good in our relationship, something worth pointing to: “Well, he might have liked kiddie porn, but he was a damned good cook.”

Unfortunately, his not answering the phone would suggest that he’s doing just fine; his life, sadly, is not falling apart. Still, I’m tempted to write him a small note, if not for a reply then to at least make him smile. I was good at making him smile. The note would read: “I will not be ignored.“

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Piss Test

Posted on February 7, 2013 by

Steve taught me how to cheat a piss test by filling a latex glove with warm salt water and adding just a pinch of instant coffee “for Color.” The result is essentially a bladder that you then conceal inside your pants. “The tricky part,” he said, “is popping a hole in the glove–I like to use a thumbtack–and filling the cup without getting caught.”

The clerk who runs the library’s circulation desk offered another less involved method: simply rub a bit of liquid soap along your finger and let the piss run off it. He couldn’t explain the chemistry except to confirm that it has indeed worked for him on several pressing occasions. (The same clerk told me that a sympathetic officer once pissed for him after he admitted he couldn’t pass the test himself.)

On Friday I was summoned to the lieutenant’s office for a random drug test. Fortunately, never having used drugs, there was no need for deception. After signing and initialing some paperwork, I was marshaled into a bathroom where I was directed to wash my hands, without soap, before surrendering my sample. The result, which appears on the cup’s indicator in under ten minutes, returned negative.

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M. L. K.

Posted on January 21, 2013 by

1

“Any idea what’s for lunch?”

Rod sat at our desk flipping through a Dick Blick catalog.

“I don’t know,” I said, cringing.

“Well, ” he said turning a page, “seeing as it’s Nigger’s Day, they’ll probably feed us fried chicken and watermelon.”

H was right, despite his malice. We did indeed have fried chicken for lunch–fried chicken and waffles–but with carrot cake, not watermelon, for dessert. Had we lived in the North, the meal might have been construed as a racist gag, but in Mississippi, serving fried chicken on Martin Luther King Day is simply an appeal to the regional palette.

I asked South what he thought of the meal.

“They just be trying to please everyone. Gotta give the niggers their chicken and the whites their carrot cake.”

“Do white people like carrot cake?” I asked, surprised. I thought everyone liked carrot cake.

“Shit. No black person gonna put no carrot in no cake.”

2

CO Smith has been the source of many complaints for her abuses in the kitchen–yelling and harassing inmates, serving spoiled food, and on one occasion I witnessed her throw a food tray at a dish washer. I myself incurred her wrath once when I made the mistake of reaching out for a bag of chips to avoid having it tossed on my tray and into my food. “Git yo damn hand down!” I looked at her, confused. “Don’t gimme dat look! Git you muh-fuh gay face off my line!”

Smith committed her latest offense this past week when a Hispanic inmate declined the chicken noodle casserole in favor of the heart-healthy alternative. Slamming a scoop of cottage cheese on his tray, Smith, an African American, told the inmate, a Mexican American, that if he didn’t like the food here he should go back to his own damn country.

3

“‘Anthony has an odd-shaped plot of grass that he would like to border with a hedge.’” I point to the figure below the problem. “‘How many feet long is the border of the plot rounded to the nearest foot?’”

Dannis sets to work scribbling and pecking at a sheet of scratch paper, his fingers flexing to a numerical tune inside his head. I notice he has the same rash on his hands as me–a splatter of red freckles, like little ant bites. The culprit is a dysfunctional laundry system in which clothes come back dirty and wet and smelling of mildew. I assume his rash, like mine, also extends to the backs of the legs and beneath the arms and around the waist and ankles and to other places where clothing tends to cling and rub.

“I have a question,” Dannis says looking up from his work. “Do I have to convert my answer from feet to foots?”

I close the textbook and suggest we switch to reading.

Surprisingly, math is Dannis’s strength, but this morning, and for the better part of the last month, his focus and determination have waned. When asked to calculate perimeter, he erroneously calculates area; when presented with an exponent, he multiplies the base by its power. Even the fundamentals–carrying when adding, regrouping when subtracting–slip through his grasp. He’s failed the GED twice now.

Thumbing through a booklet, I ask Dannis if he’s been keeping up with his reading. As with most of the Hispanics I tutor, it’s his weakest and least favorite subject. He shuts his eyes and crops his head to his chest, feigning death.

“You need to read, Dannis. You can’t improve your reading if you don’t read.”

“I do read–I read the Word.”

“That’s not enough.”

This small blasphemy satisfies me. Earlier he had the gall to tell me that it was God’s will that my transfer back home to Texas be denied; his own transfer was granted. “We can’t argue with God’s plan,” he said. He leaves for Georgia in a week.

“Here.” I pass him the booklet. “Read about the Boston Tea Party. And I want you answers in complete sentences. Don’t look at me like that. You need to practice your writing.”

“Why>’ he scoffs. “When will I ever have to write anything?”

“Are you serious> How are you going to get a job out there if you can’t write? How are you going to fill out job applications and write a résumé?”

Dannis laughs. “My people don’t work with pens and paper; we work with paintbrushes and ladders.”

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The Law of Seriality

Posted on January 15, 2013 by

I just finished reading Arthur Koestler’s The Case of the Midwife Toad, the account of Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer’s experiments in evolution and his colleagues’ ruthless efforts to discredit his findings and destroy his career which (possibly coupled with female troubles) eventually led to his suicide in 1926.In a note left in his pocket, he expressed his wish that his body be donated to a university for dissection and study. “Perhaps my worthy colleagues,” he wrote, “will discover in my brain a trace of the qualities they found absent from the manifestations of my mental activities while I was alive.”

Aside from an interest in evolution, Kammerer was a collector of coincidences. He began his collection at the age of twenty and recorded hundreds of cases over a period of at least nineteen years:

(2a) My brother-in-law, E. von W., attended on November 4, 1910, a concert in the Bösendorf Saal (Vienna); he had seat No. 9 and his cloakroom ticket also showed No. 9.

(2b) On November 5, that is, the next day, we both attended the concert at the Philharmonic Orchestra in the Musikvereinsal (Vienna); he had seat No. 21 (given to him by a colleague, Herr R.) and cloakroom ticket No. 21.

In 1919, Kammerer published Das Gesetz der Serie in which he postulates that coincidences aren’t coincidences at all but the result of an invisible force in nature that–like gravity, magnetism, symbiosis, and so on–favors unity, symmetry, and coherence. He named his theory the law of seriality.

I was reminded of Kammerer’s law of seriality this past Wednesday when at lunch we were served hamburgers and I was handed a tray with no bun. I passed it back and pointed “Pan,” I said to the line worker, and he promptly replaced the missing bread. Not until I sat down at the table did I notice he had also forgotten the tomato.

Later that evening we had bologna sandwiches for dinner. Immediately after taking my seat, the two people beside me offered me their tomato. I thought it peculiar that my earlier deficit should be reconciled so wholly; I went from no tomato to three slices. My mood improved considerably, that is, until I began constructing my sandwich and discovered that I again had no bread.

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