No Suns Today

Bookman's was out of Sun Magazines, so I went with dictionaries, A Course in Miracles, Emmanuel's Book, and a book on creative non-fiction. Some of the guards thought Miracles was a bible.

I have to confess, I felt a little odd carrying woo woo stuff into the prison, like I am some sort of New-Age evangelist or something.

But on the other hand, I felt good bringing in books that the inmates had requested, was helping them along in their reading and writing. Some of the guys have gone deep into reading. One guy is reading Chaucer because he thinks he should know the canon of English literature. Chaucer in the pen... Another man wants to study journalism. More are taking correspondence courses in composition.

One inmate asked me for a book to help him "talk like you guys" about writing. He wanted "the words to explain" the type of writing, and some of the strategies to compose that, in the workshop.

Many of them carry a belief that knowledge about writing has to come from books, that writers have to take the path of the academy, that writers are elite, formally educated, and somehow "better" or "different" from them.

They don't see their experience as a valid source of content for their writing, or their voices as appropriate for telling their stories. They want to go out rather than in.

Of course, the path to good writing goes into good books as much as it goes into one's life experience, but it's hard to do both. One has to read and analyze as much as one has to reflect and own one's voice and experience. Writing is not an either/or proposition.

Still I am impressed and moved by the hunger the men feel for books, for guidance, for teaching.

Inmate Released

J. is out. Out of prison, that is.

After many years behind bars, the long-term member of the writing workshop was waiting for me outside my university writing class yesterday.

The man I was used to seeing on the yard was standing there in his government-issue jeans, flannel shirt, and starchy new black baseball cap, smiling. His sharp gaze, the perceptive eyes of an intellectual, musician, writer, one-time film student shone through self-consciousness. He looked uncomfortable in his new duds, but not at all like the prison type. He does not wear the sleeves and ink so often the mark of time in prison.

Neither of us could believe it. I brought him into the class and introduced him to students who were packing up, already off to their next class or job or other commitment.

I stood there between two worlds -- the world of university teaching and prison workshop. I could not reconcile them.

A lot has changed since he was first locked up. He has culture shock. He responds by trying harder, speaking a bit too fast, trying to anticipate the next phrase, thought, idea.

He wants to work, to have some purpose, to be left alone, to do something good.  He wants to shake off the con life, meet new people.

He doesn't know how to get there from here.

This free world is baffling, frustrating, strange. J. looks at things the way they are.

I wish I could help him. 

We talked about possible projects, jobs he might do. I said I would help him look for a place, and maybe some handyman work. I did not know if anything would come of my queries.

His life right now is the limbo of half-way houses, parole officers, and bureaucratic wrangling.

He walks a lot and has large blisters from the trips between the house and public health-care, social security, and reporting to overseers.

It's a life that saps confidence, that waits for a mess-up, a miss-step.

Prison looms over him, follows him everywhere.

The odds are stacked against him, but it is his life to make.

Freedom can be terrifying.

Transmutation

An inmate in the prison workshops sat in the back for months before speaking.  When he finally spoke, it was to challenge my take on one of the stories we were discussing. The story, to me, was a dead-end event of violence and the comforts of drugs. He disagreed, with thinly veiled contempt, with my recommendation that the writer consider an audience bigger than a prison audience, other inmates.

He said he didn't care what the "free world" thought or understood of prison life. He did not care if the story never incorporated some larger significance, went beyond the mere incident. Further, he called into question my authority to make any judgment about prison writing. I, after all, knew nothing of prison life.

He scared me, and that was the first time, doing the workshops, I had felt that way.

He was a "brother" in the AB, the Aryan Brotherhood, and had the tattoos to broadcast his status. He was also an imposing figure, a wrestler with the crushing hands, bulk, and neck of someone to steer clear of.

One time, during a lock-down, as chance would have it, he and I were the only two in the workshop. Face to face for two hours. I told him he scared me, the only inmate ever to do so. He smiled, and let down his guard a bit. He said he had a reputation to maintain and that he could not afford to be seen with me, or as anything like a teacher's pet, or even someone interested in something as effete as writing.

I got it, and we began to play out our roles as nerdy teacher and tough-guy disruptor with a little more humor. He began to write in ways that defied the AB code. He even wrote a piece about a Jewish guard saving the life of a skin-head. That piece was published recently in the The Sun, A Magazine of Ideas.

He was transferred  after about two years in the workshop, and I was sad to see him go. I missed the energy he brought to our meetings, the incentive he gave me to stay alert and on my teaching toes.

After the piece in The Sun came out, I heard that he was beaten nearly to death, and had many bones in his face broken. The last news I heard was that he was under protective custody. I don't know the motive behind the assault, or who the perpetrators were, but doubt and disloyalty in certain groups is not tolerated.

I also do not know it he ever saw the pieces I published in our inmate magazine or if he ever received his copies of The Sun. I do know that he had the guts to speak words that might get him shunned or worse, that he found a way transmute some of his hate into a harsh and beautiful truth.

I will take copies of his story in to workshop this week and will see how the inmates respond.  I will let the truth speak for itself.

Here is a short version of the piece:

Skin

            A few years back I served time in the State Penitentiary in Winslow, Arizona.  They moved a middle-aged man into my cell who called himself Tattoo D.

            The first time we went to the shower I noticed the swastika tattoo on his chest, and when I asked about it, he confirmed that he was a skinhead.  D. was nice enough to me, but he had a habit of heckling the Correctional Officers, especially if the C.O.’s name plate above their badge read “Cohen” or “Rosenberg.”  There was one C.O. in particular that Tattoo loved to hate.  His name was Goldberg.  D. would swear at C.O. Goldberg for the most trivial infractions C.O.s are expected to follow.

            About six months after D. and I were cellies he overdosed on heroin.  He was not conscious or breathing, and I could not find a pulse.  His lips, eyes and nose were the blue of death.  I panicked and did the only thing I could think of; I started kicking the cell door like a donkey and yelled “MAN DOWN!!” out into the cluster.  When the C.O. came and looked into my cell, I thought his eyes were going to jump out of his skull.  He popped the cell door and began CPR on my corpse of a cellie.  Then more C.O.s came and watched the scene unfold for a few minutes, until I heard one of them say something I will never forget.  He said, “Hey, Goldberg, give it up, man, let that Nazi die.”

            Goldberg did not give up. He performed CPR on Tattoo D. alone for the entire 45 minutes it took to get the medical staff to my cell.  When a female nurse finally took over for C.O. Goldberg and he stood up, he looked exhausted¾his hair was messed up, he was dripping sweat, and his glasses were at an odd angle.  All he said as I was being locked back down in my cell was, “I couldn’t stop.  I don’t think it would’ve been right.  Maybe he’ll change his mind about some things . . . if he lives.”

            I heard D. did live, although I haven’t run into him or Goldberg again throughout my years in the system.  I can’t say whether or not a Jewish C.O. changed a skinhead’s mind about some things, but he sure as hell changed mine.

 

Inmate B

Like many who come to the workshop, Inmate B saw himself as a bad-ass. He came trailing a reputation for quick kicks tied to a short fuse. From what I heard, it was well-deserved.

He had brought something to read and let me know that he wanted to go first.

After I went through greetings, introductions for  the newbies, announcements, passed out writing pads, pens, a few books, magazines, thesauri, dictionaries, and gave a brief assignment, it was time to read. Inmate B sat up, held his writing pad in front, and adjusted his glasses.

"Forget my name/Forget my face/ Forget my arms/ My strong embrace" and on and on.

Quartets. Rhyming. Self pity. Ugh.

The rest of the guys in the workshop looked to me. They didn't want to say anything.

Uncomfortable silence.

I took an indirect path.

"So, what kind of piece is this?"

"A poem," one man volunteered.

"That's right. What kind of poem?"

"A rhyming verse poem," someone else added.

Inmate B seemed satisfied so far.

"What do you guys think about that form?"

"It's good for Hallmark Cards," another inmate offered, almost apologetically.

"Yes, it's a familiar form for love poems or family occasions, that kind of thing."

"They are usually too sappy and sentimental," a big black inmate said.

"And they feel forced. The words get jammed together and take over what you are trying to say."

Couldn't have said it better.

Inmate B stirred in his chair. I saw his knuckles go white with a strong squeeze. But he took notes.

The inmates began to offer up sharp observations about inverted structures, excessive abstraction, lack of sensory details, vividness of image, and general overload of sentiment.

Inmate B sat still and hard as a stone, except for his pen, which kept moving.

"Anything else?" He said.

"Keep working on it. But try free verse next time," I offered.

I find that free verse elicits more honest emotion, complexity, immediacy, surprise. It sometimes takes a while to stop wanting to be like and sound like Shelly or Longfellow and start sounding like one's self. As my running coach once said, "You can't be anywhere other than where you are, no matter how much you want might want to be."

Inmate B did not return to the workshop for a couple of months, but when he did, he brought a story about moonshine in Kentucky, and his conscription into the family business when he turned eleven. It wasn't perfect, but it resonated with the smells, sights, and language of the Appalachians. I published a revised version of the story in the prison magazine.

Since then, he has compiled a book length collection of stories and free verse poems.

I don't like all of them. I find many of them still bigoted, harsh, and smugly puerile. Others, however, offer a view into white poverty, closed family secrets, stunted opportunity, and a seething anger at institutions or intellectuals.

"I would have gotten mad a few years ago," he said to me recently, after finding a Post It on one his drafts that said "Low Priority. I don't much like this piece."

I had written that as directions to the volunteer typist, and she had forgotten to remove it.

"But now I can take it. I know you eggheads are full of shit." he smiled, a not completely ironic smile.

"It's true," I said. "I didn't like that piece. It is loaded with cliche and pointless, irritating meanness."

"But I keep coming back, don't I?"

" Yes you do. Me too" I said, knowing that pronoun was grammatically wrong, but right for the moment.

Sultan

They call him Curly. He has no hair. Most of his front teeth are gone too.

But he has dentures that he puts in for the workshop. He smiles often. Talks a lot.

He has a mind of his own, and holds up a hand-written sign that says "I refuse" when I ask him to do an assignment. He wants to write about his religion, about perseverance, overcoming odds, acceptance, taking the hard path rather than the garden variety of drugs, hookers, and violence.

Most often, the writing comes across as religious jargon, but lately he has been infusing his spiritual message with image. "Your life is not a problem/ hiding behind limousine/ tinted windows," one poem begins. "Wow!" I say. "If life is not a problem hiding behind tinted limousine windows, what is it?"

He is working at answering that one.

The change has been a long slog. We wrangle about his poems almost every Saturday. He is confident in what he has to say, but not so confident in how he says it. He doesn't want to listen to some university-trained white guy critique his street poetry, especially if that white guy's first name is Norman. That just doesn't fly.

We have known each other for about five years now, and I have spent more time with him than with many of my closest friends or even family. He has become a friend of sorts. I find myself thinking about him during my work week, and he has written letters about writing to the students in my classes, especially the ones who are struggling, who are first generation college students, students who come from some of the same parts of town as he did, who face the same challenges, the same temptations.

When I taught high school, a very bright student once asked me, in all sincerity "Why should I listen to what you have to say about writing and stuff, when I can make twice what you make dealing with my homies?"

I answered that money was not the only part of success and that prison was likely part of the gang and drug equation. I suspect that I did not have much cred, cred that Sultan likely would have had.

He shrugged, crossed his arms, and dropped out a few days later.

So, here is Sultan, the man on the other end on that road, learning to write poetry. He has time, lots of time. And he reads. I brought him in an anthology of Rumi's poetry, along with some Hafiz and some critical essays. He reads these books and applies their messages.

He sits at my side in the workshop. He laughs hard and often, sometimes with teeth, sometimes without. He listens to the other men in the workshop read. He listens more closely than I do, and he is learning how to respond in ways that they might hear. He tries not to offend or to alienate, but to reach and connect.

He applies his spiritual beliefs.

Sometimes he takes what he calls "a hiatus." These breaks can last a month or a year. I can't expect that he will ever come back, and I don't know know what function these breaks from the workshop fulfill.

I suspect that he assimilates, broods, ruminates. He sits with his demons for all I know. I feel the same way sometimes, but do not have the will to break away and take the time let the swirling debris of my mind and my life settle.

When Sultan returns, he brings his usual fire, but now writes with more depth and clarity. He has taken the insights into how to live a step further. I can see it in the ideas. He is becoming a teacher, a minister, and in a less flattering sense, a preacher.

It's too bad that preaching and poetry do not mix well, so we butt heads, again. 

He does not want to be told what to do and still holds up his hand-written sign, usually with a toothy smile: "I refuse."

Winter Solstice at the Prison

Standing in the cold, beneath a half moon, wind blowing from the north, waiting for a bus, Dick and I make small talk. I want to tell him I am in awe of what he does with the inmates in the writing workshop. He would not think it appropriate and would shrug it off. We are carrying empty plastic tubs. When we came in, they were full of books, pads, pens, and magazines.

Dick’s hair has grown out and started to curl. It’s the color of a baby’s, the lightest shade red hair can have, but Dick is no baby. He has been at this for a long time.

We met earlier tonight in the parking lot in front of the main guard house. He gave me the heavier of the two tubs, explaining that he had pulled muscle along his rib cage and could not breathe all that well. We make small talk as we pass through the metal detectors and then entered the sally port. We had badges from the Arizona Department of Corrections or Prisons. A bus wearing the a sign for Santa Rita sped it seemed out of nowhere, out of the darkness and all but screeched to a stop. It exhaled hot air as the doors opened and an inmate greeted us.

The race with invisible competitors began and I hung on to my tub, glad that I had seat.

Santa Rita’s doors are right next to the bus stop making it look more like a hospital than a prison. We entered and were let in to the visitors room through electric doors. The lighting was bad, but the tables were set up in orderly pattern, on the diagonal, with plastic chairs.

“You think we could get more light?” I asked, noticing that about half of the inmates would be sitting in the dark.

Dick tried the switch. All of the lights went out. He turned it back on. They stayed off. “Oh Shit,” he said, “now we’re really in the dark.”

I tried the switch. Same result. I asked to be let through the electric doors back to the guard house and was given permission to do so. “Do you know how to turn on the lights?” Shrug.

I went back and we searched but to no avail.

Then I noticed that one of the bulbs was flickering back on. Must be one of those fluorescent lights I muttered. As a few of them came back on we noticed that there were no inmates.

Back though the electric doors. “Of they’re under ICS. Someone found some clothes in a dumpster, so they have to do a count.”

“How long will that take?”

Shrug.

OK let’s wait, I say to no one in particular.

Dick and I sit and talk about this and that. He tells me he visited Emily Dickinson’s house while on tour with his new book. “She lived in a mansion. Twenty acres at least, and a huge house.”

We go on about Whitman and Simic and  Sam Hamill. I won’t tell you what he said about Sam.

An hour passes. I am relieved to think we might be leaving.

Then the first of the inmates shows up. Then a flood of orange jumpsuits and jackets comes through the door. “Good evening Mr. Shelton.” "Hey Mr. Shelton.”  “How you doin Mr. Shelton?” The air is immediately congenial, relaxed, almost playful.

The guys take seats around the table. Dick calls out names and distributes folders. The inmates talk about the assignments they have done. "Take one line: 'it is raining' and then we compose a vignette," one of them says to me, referring to a poem read the in the previous week's workshop. 

After that initial draft, they will economize, will cut some of the repeated phrases. 

He asks if some of them want to read. They do. They read well. John and Steve and Mr. Garcia.  After the reading there are comments. Dick puts me on the spot a few times. I zero in. They seem to think it’s OK, but I am not so sure. Doesn’t matter anyway. I’m just going to do the best I can.

“Let’s hear that again.” “Pass that up here and let me take a look at it.” "Take that back and re-work and bring it in again.”

Then a man reads about his crack cocaine addiction. The piece ends with some “Glory to God” comment, more fitted for a revival meeting than a writing workshop.

“The ending might be unnecessary,” Dick says.

“I knew you were going to say that,” the inmate laughs. “I knew it.”

“Well it is rather abstract and maybe unnecessary.”

“It is an important piece though, a breakthrough of sorts.” What I hear is that the content for the man is much more important the quality of the writing here. This piece requires a different kind of response.

Another man reads. This one is lovely, is read as a poem and takes the term from temperature, to emotional state, to spiritual hunger and soul’s despair.

“Let me see how that is written,” Dick says.

The man passes it to the front of the table. All eyes are listening. Dick reads them again. He points out that the lines of the poem are really sentences and that the piece might be better read as a prose piece. He mentions “The Bus to Vera Cruz” as an example of something he was working on, but that would not fit as a poem.

“I am convinced that any piece of writing can be successful if you can find the right form.”

Silence. I think we are all aware that there this is some great advice. I am taken by the simple profundity of the line and its implications for any student of writing.

“Take this back and re-work it as a prose piece and then let’s look at it again.”

A man reads a piece he has written before. It is a scene of domestic tension, of trying to stay out of a spat with an irate wife. The men laugh at places that ring too true, maybe too familiar.

“It’s a nice scene. There is some tension there, some good dialogue. What do you think Erec?"

“I like it when Steve tells us his thoughts about wanting to avoid conflict, and how it seems inevitable given the portrayal of the woman.” Then changing track a little, I go to the content. “It’s a good idea sometimes to just head for the bomb shelter and close the hatch until the destruction is over.”

“You know,” says Dick, “Some men can avoid the conflicts by stepping aside, others by leaving, and still others attack.” He makes a gestures of surging forward with a sword. The guys nod in agreement.

“When I was doing the women’s workshop, the one I did for about seven years, I had one woman who was very flirtatious, very good looking and I was taken with her.”

“I bet Mrs. Shelton didn’t hear about this,” one of the guys snickered, conspiratorially. A few others nodded.

“Then, two other women took me aside one day and said ‘Dick, you know that she did not just kill one, but TWO of her husbands.’ “

The table laughed and deep laugh of delight. There was more at work, of course, than humor here.

“Shall we continue? Who else wants to read?”

Another man reads a poem that stops us all in our tracks. It is about love and self deception, about helplessness and sleep. “Beer bottles fall from our drunken hands and crash to the floor. We do not know if they fell or if we dropped them.” The lines drift out into the circle of men and then hang there in a raw truth and sharp beauty. I am stunned. All of us are stunned.

“I think it is brilliant,” Dick says. “What do you think, Erec?”

“I think it’s ready to publish.”

“Give that to me and I’ll get it re-typed.” The Holy Grail of the workshop, the destination, the ringing bell of accomplishment usher in the moment of royalty. This is magic I think to myself. Our surroundings are poor. Materials primitive. Yet, the atmosphere of learning, motivation, and collegiality is charged with intensity.

“Can you help with the tables?” Dick asks when it is time to go. I join in moving the tables. We set them back into the ordered pattern, under the dim lights. We are again back in prison, but not before shaking hands, wishing a happy holiday, and gathering up the sign up sheets.

The electric doors slide open to let us out into the cold night air. A wind is building out of the north. A cold front is coming in. I carry the warmth of the room, the excitement of the talk with me into the night. We stand under a light, hoping the driver will see us, will appear of darkness, surge to a stop, swing open the door with its blast of heat.

I want to tell him that I see. I am still trying to find the words.

Bus Ride in the Rain

Lightning strikes a couple of hundred yards away and the peal of thunder is immediate. Rain travels across the bleak yard in a grey curtain while wind rips and lifts water from the streams that have formed in the ditches. I better get inside I tell myself but continue to stand under the overhang as rain blows under. Yard after yard fills with the flood. The visitor bus driver sees me under the awning and veers off the main road and down the drive to Santa Rita. He speeds through the rising waters and sends a graceful wing of spray out from the keel of the wheels. He is loving it.

I am soaked to the skin immediately as I enter the downpour but walk with the tubs. I shiver but feel good to be cold. 

The driver is a young guy with holes on his ear where plugs used to be. No jewelry here. He has cranked up a heavy metal station on the radio, but that cannot compete with the peals of thunder all around us. He smiles. I see he is as wet as I am, his orange shirt  clinging to his muscled shoulders and back. 

“Just did shift change,” he says explaining why he is wet. His hand is on the lever and he waits until I sit down to swing the door shut. I sit on the plastic tandem seat beneath a blast of A/C. We head over the maximum security unit where we will pick some other straggling visitors. 

Two old women wait under the overhang. One removes her sandals to cross the flooded walkway. It is up to her ankles, but she does not complain. Instead, she moves like a schoolgirl, soaking in the lusciously warm runoff. The other keeps on her sandals and tiptoes. They climb in with help from the driver.

They chat with the driver like we are on holiday with him as the young tour guide.

“Yeah, when it rains out here, the rivers run deep and fast.  All that water has to go somewhere.” He speaks with the calm authority of the local, the native, the one with the inside scoop. We could be in Greece or Nepal but for the razor wire and memory of division between the free and the imprisoned.  For just a minute our roles evaporate and we are just people on a bus traveling through the rain.