Heathco

I wait for the bus after I pass through the sally port of the Main Gate at the prison. The day is a prickly one -- heat pressing down and squeezing sweat out my arms, face, and back. A stream of it runs down my back under my shirt.

But these days are lovely in a way. Curtains of rain obscure the Santa Rita mountains to the south, and the hope of rain, of cool, fresh rain hums in the heat. I hear thunder, see ragged sticks of lightning in the distance.

I don't mind standing out in the sun when the vista is like this.

Even the concrete beneath my feet glistens with humidity. Patient wildflowers have defied the scraped discipline of the prison and sprung up in the lower washes. The puddles left over from last night's storm hold blue sky and reddish sediment.

A bus passes, but is not the one that will take me to Santa Rita. I wave at the driver and he nods. I would have taken his bus, but that unit is locked down. Another staff assault coupled with a staffing shortage keeps those inmates in their cells today. We won't get a chance to talk about their entries for the Pen Prison Writing Contest. The deadline for that is only a few weeks away.

Nothing to do about it. I can't go in and they can't come out.

My bus pulls into the roundabout and I wait for the officers to disembark. It's shift change time and the bus is packed with uniformed, badge and weapon wielding men and women who smile and joke as they step down, glad that their Saturday shift is over.

I see evidence of flood when we pass over the culverts on the way to Santa Rita. Water ran last night, under the bridges; it smoothed out the sand, sculpted it into meandering beds. The sand tells the story of being carried through the darkness, left in a new place, waiting for the next flood to travel again.

Once I have my radio and am through the electric gates of the Santa Rita yard, I pass men waiting in line for "meds" or some other appointment. A few look sick, in pain. I feel their eyes on me, appraising, sizing me up, trying to place me. One asks how he can get into the workshop. I stop and explain the process of submitting a "kite," as a guard signals for me to follow him to the education wing where he unlocks a door to an air conditioned room.

He leaves me to set up.

I wait. The thunder continues. I hear laughter from the visitation area on the other side of the wall. No one comes.

After forty five minutes I knock on the thick window of the control room. I ask that they turn the men out for the workshops. The guard looks annoyed or embarrassed and makes the calls.

When the men show up, we have only half an hour left.

I ask if anyone wants to read.

Heathco, one of the regulars of the workshop, speaks up and says he wants to read first.

"My father died three weeks ago," he says. "In the last year, we kinda ... reconnected. We been writing back and forth and he even sent me a story about how he found who he was, how nature helped that, one time when he shot a bird, an Indian hen, when he was only about ten years old. That got me to write more to him about what my life has been....I want to read a poem I wrote to him before he died, one I know he received and read the day he passed."

He reads three pieces: the poem, the story his father wrote to him, about a time he shot and killed a sacred bird, and a reflection on the two other pieces.

He is moved. The other men are quiet. Rain falls. We can hear thunder, close now.

"I never was much what I would call spiritual, but I have to say that I have seen someone out the corner of my eye lately, and that person looks like my father. When I turn to see him straight on, he's not there."

We talk some more, but run out of time. A guard comes into the room and assumes a wide stance. The men get quiet as I give them an assignment for the next workshop.

They leave and I pack up my tub. I make my way out past the window, turn in my radio, and pass though the gates.

I wait again for the bus, now in the rain. I don't mind. I am not worried about lightning.

On the bus, one of the guards asks me, in a sardonic, knowing tone, "Any masterpieces today?"

"You might be surprised," I tell him.

I look out the window and think I hear answers rising from the patterns in the sand, the sand left stripped by the rapture and memory of rain, the water that runs at night.

Not Just Black and White

Tuesday March 1, 2011

3:00 Tucson
We, Ken Lamberton the ex-prisoner, Jerry Marzinsky, the retired prison staffer, and I, a prison volunteer, met in Tucson at UA Poetry Center to carpool up to Tempe for our talk at “Not Just Black and White,” an art installation on the subject of incarceration. Ken carried a box full of Walking Rain Reviews (the prison literary magazine?, copies of his own books , and some articles published by the Poetry Center Ex-Prisoner Workshop.  Jerry had a folder with copies of his latest essay. I had my book bag with a copy of Richard Shelton’s book Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer along with, ever the teacher, some writing activities for the evening.

On my way to meet these guys I had passed through the Little Chapel of All Nations to check on some submissions to the new prison magazine. Constance, one of the Little Chapel staff, had asked about the event up at ASU. She knew about as much as I did, that it was an art installation about prison put together by visiting art professor Gregory Sales. She remarked to another staffer that I was going up to see the installation.

“Not quite,” I said, “I am going up to BE the installation.”

And so it was.

We did not know what to expect, how many people would show up, what materials we would have, whether or not the audience would be friendly or hostile. Just like a prison workshop, I thought, always shifting, dynamic, subject to lockdowns, room changes, roll-ups, and missed chances — but also full of the possibility of magic.

5:30 ASU Art Museum
We arrived at ASU, where we were met in the ASU Art Museum gallery with paper, pencils, books, and the desire to express; we had the ingredients. Gregory had even provided a white board and dry-erase markers. Ah, now this is the life, I thought.

As people filtered in, I recognized Sherry Rankins-Robertson, the ASU Instructor and PhD candidate who has put together a program that provides inmates with on line feedback on their writing by pairing university English students with inmates. There was Joe Lockard, an ASU literature professor who gives classes at the state prison in Florence, Gregory Sale, the mastermind behind the show, Kristin Valentine, a 40-year-plus prison volunteer. Then there were also students and interested folks from the community.

We began by invoking Richard Shelton.  I read a passage from his book “Crossing the Yard,” in which he tells the story of one man who entered prison illiterate, but who went on to earn an AA degree in psychology and counseling. At one point, Richard asks the man “What’s it like to be illiterate?” The man replies “It’s bad… It’s like being inside a big dark box. All you know is what you need – food, water, drugs, sex. You don’t know what’s outside the box and you don’t know how to find out. You’re scared all the time” (29). He continues to tell the story of this man who beat all the odds and ended up being pardoned by a rare and perceptive governor. The odds were a million to one.

Richard calls this “too hideous a gamble.”  But he also calls it a miracle. He writes “I call for more miracles, but we shouldn’t have to send our children to prison to teach them to read and write”(30).

Then Ken read an excerpt from his prison memoir and essay collection Wilderness and Razorwire.  His account of becoming a writer  — how that happened because of the prison workshops  — drove home the possibilities inherent in a workshop. Jerry followed with a harrowing  account of a “cell extraction” that involved sadistic guards and an inmate suffering from, but strengthened by, a psychotic break. He silenced the hall. After he read, we began to workshop his essay.  The group shared the common task of responding in dialogue about the ideas and presentation of Jerry’s essay. Critiques and responses were offered and writers bent to their work. Consistency of point of view, vivid, prison-specific language, reportorial pacing all made their way into the conversation. The better angels of literacy and human desire to say it well powered our conversation as the clock ticked away.

Finally, we collaborated to compose a surrealist poem using the “Exquisite Corpse” exercise. Lines were written, papers were folded, and chuckles punctuated the writing. We were a group of writers sharing the task of finding new connections and associations.

As participants read the work of the group, the process was complete. In the space of two hours, we had come together, had created a container of shared creation, poignancy, horror, and laughter. We were writers marveling at our humanity and trying to make sense of it all.

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."