Dave
If I don’t arrive at least ten minutes early, Dave will already be there, comfortably seated at an outdoor table at the bakery, and he will have bought my Americano, and despite multiple entreaties not to do so, he will already have ordered a slab of chocolate cake that he insists we will share. We never do. This afternoon, as usual during these twice-monthly meetups, I watch him dig into the cake, forking in huge icing-slathered hunks with the gusto and lack of self-consciousness of an eight-year-old. The chocolate coats his teeth. The teeth are his tell. If you didn’t see the teeth, what you would see is a trim, fashionably bald, shiny-faced, clean-shaven, nattily dressed white man. But his teeth are gray and discolored. Missing bicuspids leave dark holes on the sides of his mouth. They are the teeth of a man who has not had the privilege of good (or any) dental care, a poor man, maybe, certainly not a man wearing slim-fitting black jeans and a tailored black sweater, stylish glasses, a thin gold necklace encircling his neck. In Dave’s case, they are the teeth of a man who has lived thirty-four of his sixty years in prison.
Dave had been a mystery to me through our years together in the writers’ group I ran at the penitentiary that had been his “home” for most of his adult life. He was one of the first three men to join the group. He came to just about every session for close to four years. He joined in the conversations. He did the homework. He responded to all the writing prompts. But, unlike the other men—the group eventually expanded to ten of them—he rarely wrote anything that revealed his inner thoughts. He was steadfastly outgoing without being in any way forthcoming, a combination that both confused and fascinated me. I plumbed his work for hints about his character, his persona, his past. Mostly, he chronicled and reported: his job, what he ate, the college classes he had taken. He once wrote a multipage account of the blueprint he had created for himself early into his long period of incarceration, a series of five-year plans, each segment devoted to another endeavor that would inch him closer to living a life outside the prison walls. But the overarching goal, really, was to stay sane by segmenting his time into imaginable chunks. Five years he could do. Thirty or thirty-five? That was inconceivable.
During his first five years, he wrote that he focused on education, earning a community college degree and then a bachelor’s. It was easier to accomplish this back when Dave first went inside than it is now. Back then there were Pell Grants available to help fund education for those behind bars, and there were more than three hundred post-secondary education programs established in American prisons, including the one that housed Dave. After 1994, when Congress banned incarcerated people from accessing these grants, these full-on, degree-granting programs dwindled to about a dozen. At some institutions individual classes might be offered, but to actually earn a degree could take fifteen or more years, assuming—a very big assumption—that the right classes happened to be offered in the right sequence, and that the institution was making it financially possible for inmates to afford tuition. Dave, starting his sentence in 1985, had better choices.
During the second five years, he wrote that he turned his attention to his mental health, taking advantage of what was offered in counseling and therapy (which wasn’t much), joining groups, and as he put it, “turning myself inside out.” He does not write about what he found “inside,” what he learned about himself that might have helped him untangle his past and understand and come to terms with his crime. In fact, he never mentions his crime. Or his family. His one and only reference to his past comes in response to a prompt I gave the group about describing a place they’d like to “transport” themselves to. Dave wrote about a restaurant in the town he grew up in.
Dave’s third chunk of time was devoted to gaining new work skills in the prison industries and saving money. What those skills were, he does not say. He spent years working in the prison’s commercial laundry and then in a call center. Saving money was an ongoing challenge given that prison jobs earn, at best, a dollar a day. Next came a period during which he paid attention to his legal case and, with the help of counsel, mounted a series of challenges and appeals and drafted letters and applications to the parole board.
The next stretch of time, which lasted until his release, was focused on personal finances, securing a credit card, exploring programs for first-time homeowners, making contacts with local banks and bankers, doing what he could from inside to set himself up for financial security once released. He read and reread Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In for inspiration and often ended his homework assignments with “Leaning in!” His optimism about his future, his discipline and focus, astonished me when I read this chronicle of self-motivation. This plan that had spanned more than three decades was extraordinary in its detail and rigor. His report was almost equally as unusual because, unlike the writing I was seeing from the other men in the group, it was reserved and impersonal. There was no emotional or psychological context for all he had done. Reading his work was like looking at a piece of cloth imprinted with an interesting design but no texture, no warp and weft to the fabric. Dave continued to be a mystery.
Then, in response to a prompt I gave the group about friendship, he wrote about a neighbor on his cell block that began with a deeply observant description of the man, his hazel eyes with flecks of green and blue that changed depending on the light. He commented on the man’s “star power” and his graceful physicality, which reminded Dave of the Olympic diver Greg Louganis. Given the norms of Dave’s caged world, the hypermasculine posturing, this description was unusual. I wondered if it meant something or if I was just reading into it. I wondered too about his handwriting. It was a severely back-slanted, left-leaning scrawl. I’d never seen handwriting like that before. Searching for clues about what made him tick, I explored what the “science” of graphology would say about such penmanship. Supposedly, a graphologist, analyzing the characteristics and patterns of a person’s handwriting, could offer insights into the writer’s persona and psychological state. I knew this was probably nonsense, but I sought out explanations from various websites. This one struck me: “The writer represses impulses and needs for affection and contact.” Was this what Dave was doing? Did this explain why, despite so many opportunities to do so in writing, he never revealed much about his inner life?
And yet he apparently wanted me to know. One day, after maybe a year and a half into the writers’ group, he handed me a very thick folder, his personnel file, with various commendations and certificates, letters of support, legal documents, and several psych reports. The folder also included a letter from his original lawyer detailing the story that underlay Dave’s crime, the context in which it took place. It was a story, the lawyer explained in this letter, that he did not introduce in court. Reading this letter from the original lawyer is how and when I found out about Dave’s crime: he murdered his father and his brother and then set the house on fire. The story presented at his trial was that Dave had met a girl visiting from Japan and wanted to marry her. He needed money to bring her over to the United States. His father refused, and Dave murdered him for the life insurance money. Maybe the brother witnessed this and had to be dispatched as well. The fire was to cover up the murders.
The very different story Dave’s original trial lawyer wrote about in the letter in his file went like this: Dave, a “homosexual,” a distinctly “feminine” man, a hairdresser, grew up in a small, conservative town. His father and brother were ex-military. They bullied him relentlessly. They made his life miserable. They made him ashamed. So he killed them. The lawyer wrote that he felt he couldn’t use this in the trial because the attitude of the judge and jury would be so virulently antigay that this would hurt his case. This was 1985. AIDS had become a full-blown epidemic, igniting intense fear and ramping up entrenched homophobia. Dave was convicted of aggravated murder and arson and sentenced to life, so it’s hard to see how much worse the sentence could have been had antigay bias entered into the verdict. The lawyer’s explanation of Dave’s state of mind is not an excuse. Murder is murder. But the story that led to his conviction, killing for insurance money, is calculated and cold-hearted and more chilling than the backstory sketched in by the lawyer.
I don’t know the details of the real story—only Dave knows that, and he’s not telling. But it is not difficult to imagine the pain of growing up effeminate in that household, in a sleepy, rural town of 17,000, in the 1970s. It is not difficult to imagine the bullying, the name-calling, the shaming. It might have begun early in his life. The research on bullying suggests that it is as psychologically damaging as physical abuse, that the effects persist into adulthood, that it is linked to depression, anxiety, anger, and hostility (also suicide). What drove Dave to the desperate act of murder? Was there a tipping point, a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back moment? Had he examined this, with or without the help of any therapy or counseling he was able to get in prison? Did he, sitting across from me now, a free man, almost swooning over his chocolate cake, know himself? Nothing in his writing or in our scores of conversations over coffee and baked goods revealed answers. These were secrets long kept, still kept.
Inside and now outside of prison, Dave was mild mannered and polite. His affect was friendly, a little overly eager to please, but in no way creepy. I detected no banked anger, in fact no deep passion or fire. Today he looked as elegant as a bald, sixty-year-old man could look, all in fashionable black. A few weeks earlier he had come attired in snowy white, from sweater to slacks to shoes. Often he wore pastels, a sort of Miami Vice look accented by the gold choker necklace. The freedom to not wear prison blues must be intoxicating. The thrill of choice, of purposeful self-presentation, of, essentially, outing yourself through fashion. It was, I thought, a kind of bravery for someone who had spent thirty-four years being as cautious as he could be to not attract the wrong kind of attention. He was learning to be who he was. He was leaning in.