I served six months in the Severton Correctional Institution.A half year is a long time when you are sixteen. It’s crazy how many times when you are growing up, you use a word like “jail.” “They put him in jail,” you’d say about a criminal. Or about the drugs: “They’d fine you but they’d never put you in jail.” Or my father talking about some corporate sleaze who was ripping off the public: “Someone should put that bastard in jail. Lock him up.”
Locked up. In jail. No matter how you phrased it, that was where I was. Institution sounds grand, doesn’t it? “Where’s Michael?” “Oh, he’s working at the Institution.” Working cleaning toilets. That was my first job at the institution.That and learning who I could trust: no one.And who I needed to stay away from: just about everyone.
Correctional was the other word that didn’t fit. How was I being corrected? How was I going to be punished and then fixed and then somehow let back out into the world when I was older – after my life was stolen from me?
I heard what they had said about me. There wasn’t much I missed. “Lock him up and throw away the key.” “He shouldn’t be allowed to live.” Let me remind you that I was charged and convicted of murder, but in the public mind I was also guilty of rape. I was a monster, as far as everyone was concerned. Everyone except my parents. They never stopped believing I was innocent.
My mother prayed for me through the trial and continued praying for me after I was incarcerated. I heard her prayer sometimes, or thought I did, as I lay on my bed in Severton. “Please, God, please help Michael. Please show him love and please find a way to prove his innocence. And please let him know that I still love him and believe in him. Please, God, do this.”
Maybe it was God who did set me free. Something happened. Something made the true killer confess.
And my father. He lost his job. Who wants to buy insurance from a man whose son is a murderer? A murderer and a rapist?
I was destroying their lives. They were going down with me. All we had going for us was my mother’s prayers. And I didn’t have much faith they would do any good.
Please, God: just let this all be over. That was my prayer. I didn’t exactly know what “over” meant. Just anything that would make the nightmare stop, anything that would make the anger and the hurt go away.
I had my own “room” at the institution. The guards were supposed to watch out for me. I was at risk, they said. Suicide maybe. Or victim to some violent offender in the institution who might want to harm me. A lot of people who knew nothing about me wanted me to be beaten up. Or raped. Or murdered. Or all three in that order.
So it got me my own room. With a toilet. And a light to read by. I thought reading might save me. It helped. It made the hours of the day move along. It took me into the nighttime until I could fall asleep. I read books on religion and books about dying and the afterlife. Books about near death experience and people back from the dead and books about travel and nature. I read dozens of novels and I even read poetry.
A rapist and a murderer sitting in his cell reading Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth. And Russian novels. It seems odd, doesn’t it? Weird maybe. Crazy.
I’m trying to convey how strange it all was. I’m trying to make you understand what it was like. One day, you are sitting in French class in high school, watching the sunlight dance on the hair of a girl across the aisle from you. The hair of a girl you have fallen in love with.You are daydreaming about her, about the afternoon ahead, about the times you have kissed her, made love to her. The teacher is droning on about French verbs. The girl turns and smiles at you.You melt and die–there, I’ve used that word again. You die of… well… of happiness. Something so alien to your system that it makes everything seem like a fantasy. But it isn’t.
A month later you realize it was a fantasy. A blip in the continuum of unhappiness leading up to pure horror.
I need to tell you as much as I can about Lisa but it has to come out in small parcels. It’s too sad to tell you everything at once. I need to tell you about Miranda too and about the drugs. And about jealousy. I didn’t know anything about jealousy.
I remember Dr. Kaufman asking me a question: “When was the first time that you realized you were on the wrong path?” In life, he meant. During a session with my parents, he had asked them,“When was the first time you realized there was something… different… about Michael?” What I think he meant was, “When was the first time you realized there was something wrong with Michael?” When did he start to turn bad?
Maybe it was this. I was thirteen at the time. I was caught stealing cigarettes from someone’s car. The window was down. They were there. I had just started smoking. Cigarettes were expensive. It was easy.
My grandmother was a smoker. My father’s mother. Phyllis Grove.“Grandma” and “Granny” never fit easily, so we all called her Phyllis. Phyllis gave me my first cigarette. She was that kind of grandmother.
“Michael, you should forget about all that bullshit they say about cigarettes.There are people out there who don’t want you to have any fun. Some people can’t handle cigarettes. I can. I smoke four a day. No more.” She held out a lit cigarette, some kind of extra–long variety. She traced her finger along the paper.“Right there.The trick is to smoke only two–thirds of the cigarette. Right to there. And then put it out. Avoid breathing the smoke when you snuff it. All the toxins stay in the last third. Forget about the filter. Filters have more chemicals in them than the tobacco. It’s avoiding that last third of tobacco that will save your lungs.”
I watched intently as she inhaled deeply and her eyes seemed to roll back a little as she enjoyed the smoke. Then she coughed out loud and laughed. That’s what I liked best about my grandmother. Her laugh. She could laugh at anything.Any time, any place. She was a laugher.
“Your grandfather never smoked,” she told me.“And he died young. He used to lecture me about smoking, about my health.” The laugh again. An infection that started out as a cut in my grandfather’s foot killed him when I was only nine. I missed him. So did she.
Phyllis had an unnerving habit of asking me the age–old question,“What do you want to be when you grow up?” But she said it this way: “What do you want to be when you grow up… this week?” Because I had a different answer for her each time.
At nine I wanted to be a doctor. At ten, a policeman. At eleven, a lawyer, at twelve an oceanographer, at thirteen a doctor, at fourteen a designer of video games. Of course, there were a lot of other oddball professions in between I wanted to be but didn’t really know much about.At fifteen it was starting to get fuzzy. And by sixteen, it had gone to hell. I didn’t really want to grow up to be anything. But that’s not quite right.
“What do you want to be when you grow up this week?”
“I want to run away with Lisa and live in a cabin somewhere in the north. I want to live alone with her. We’ll grow our own food and be self–sufficient and stay there. Never set foot in a shopping mall again, never watch TV, never have to put up with people watching us.”
“Is that your idea or Lisa’s?”
“Hers,” I admitted, but I wanted to go along with it.
Phyllis studied the nicotine stains on her index finger and thumb. My guess is that she had long since given up on the four smokes a day.“Why do you want to remove yourself from society like that?”
“Because society sucks,” I said. “I watch the news. I see what’s going on.”
“That it does. But some of us are stuck here, I guess, trying to make the best of it.”
When I was twelve, my grandmother became a criminal. She was working for a charitable organization called the United Appeal. She was a fund–raiser and a good one. So good that she decided to keep part of what she raised for herself.
“The term is embezzlement,” Phyllis said, looking down.“I knew it was wrong but I did it anyway.And got caught.” She let out a long sigh.“I just felt that all my life I’d never been able to buy the things I wanted. Everybody else came first. And here was this chance.” She looked up at me.“I intended to pay it back and I thought I could do that before anyone would notice. But I was wrong.”
Unlike me, my grandmother didn’t do any time. She had to turn over the money and she had to pay a fine and see a counselor. She performed “community service,” a term she loathed.“Community service,my ass,” she’d say.
Phyllis gave a talk at schools about the importance of honesty. She had to repent of her crime and use herself as an example of someone who had taken the wrong path. She even spoke at my school.“That’s your grandmother?” kids would ask, incredulous.As if a grandmother could not steal from a charity.
“When your grandfather died, Michael, I felt like everything was unfair. It was like there was no justice in the world and there were no rules. I started seeing things differently. It changed me. In some ways I was better off for it.” Phyllis said this to me, not to the kids in the schools. She worked hard to undo her community service when she had her heart–to–heart talks with me.
One day, less than a month before Lisa died, I was mowing my grandmother’s lawn. It was a warm day and I was quite sweaty when I finished. Phyllis offered me a cigarette as usual and then a beer. “You should run away with that girl, Michael. Get the hell out of here.”
“You’re crazy,” I said and laughed.
“Michael, the world is crazy.You’ll have to work hard to hold onto your sanity.”
“I don’t think I could just run away.”
“I know. It would break your father’s heart.”
But we should have run away. We should have moved up north into a cabin. It was almost like my grandmother knew something bad was going to happen.
Phyllis was the other person who never ever doubted my innocence. The trial and the publicity nearly destroyed her though. She aged ten years overnight. When I was declared guilty of murder, Phyllis stood up and cursed long and hard at the judge and jury until she was removed from the courtroom.
For three days I felt numb. I felt dead. And then the pain returned. The agony of my loss and the anger at being blamed for killing Lisa.