In a conversation about this book’s design, William Aberg suggested it include a section on release. At first I thought he meant the kind of escape, imaginative or physical, that inmates dream and lie about together in his poem “Reductions” (Time and Its Terms) and that shape Johnson’s poem here, “Dream of Escape.” Imagination is always escape, as M. A. Jones’s poems pre- and postrelease testify. In “To Those Still Waiting,” he is surprised by the ache of longing that accompanies recall of prison, then by the persistent habit of dreaming of better, even when life is splendid.
But what Aberg had in mind was the difficulty of effecting changes one had promised oneself in prison, the reunion instead with the reprobate self, and the ensuing pain. On the phone, he read me “Devotions,” * in which his striking a match to cook his drug reminds him of his mother lighting votive candles to pray “that I might find / healing, keep healthy, have enough / to eat. That I know how much / she loves me. But that I never come home again.” In his poem “Stepping Away from My Father” here, Aberg takes on the grief he caused his father.
Writers wrestle to understand why getting out feels so little like release. In her poem “Stigma” (1996),* Allison Blake struggles to shake off the clinging monster the world imposes on the ex-convict. And with longer sentences and less training and education to prepare for release, it is harder than ever to counter the world’s inhospitality.
In “After All Those Years,” Ajamu C. B, Haki assesses the internal damage of institutionalization, showing how much easier it is to get out of prison than to get prison out of oneself. On the same theme, M. A. Jones writes in “Coming Out: The Man Who Fell to Earth”“‘: “To trust another man in prison was to risk my life. Outside it was different. Outside it was just as deadly not to trust, to remain apart. Because I didn’t understand that, I stayed apart from other students and after a while I felt as if I were fine. I was free, but I acted like I was doing time.” The responsibility of freedom so weighed on him that, unable to talk about his feelings, he returned to drugs — and prison. For others, after so many years, the social world of doing time has come to be the only one they understand.
For these and many other reasons, the exit from prison can be as menacing a portal as the entrance gate. In Robert Rutan’s richly ironic story, the protagonist, a “penal commuter,” exerts his will not to be taken back. Freedom for him is so bound up with disappointment, prison so identified with dreaming and story telling, that the final outcomes seems both surprising and inevitable.
The free side of the walls
Night, warmth, a parking lot.
But no keys.
You hear the sirens
shatter the fragile calm,
the yellow stench of fear,
thick and rolling in
like fog
filling every shadow.
The guards scurry out
in force
and they form a line,
their faces painted
beneath their SWAT caps,
brandishing imaginary guns
in the prison yard.
You decide to flee
through the dense woods,
where people line the trail
holding out cups of cold
vintage wine.
In front of you
a wood nymph
insinuates herself
between you and freedom,
promises pleasures
long denied.
You join her
for a few fierce seconds
of tenderness
in a clearing
hidden from all eyes
but the stars.
1987, Sing Sing Correctional Facility
Ossining, New York
After being punished
for 10, 15, 25, or more years,
do you think that you’ll want to leave?
Can you imagine anything more terrifying
than walking through those gates
without looking back at that great square wall
that kept you in all those years?
Punishing you and comforting you!
Punishing you and comforting you!
Do you think that you will at least miss it?
That somehow, inside, you loved being here
under the tooth mother’s wings?
You ain’t got to worry about a damn thing!
You ain’t got to worry about a damn thing!
You’re Amerikkka’s greatest son,
the tooth mother’s greatest capture.
She has taught you how to bend your knees,
stand up curved back and mop her welcoming floors,
given you paint to embellish her halls of terror —
more terrifying!
And you’ve been smiling all those years at her morbid green,
her institutional colors, her slavery that fits you.
So do you think after all those years of being trained
that you can just un-train yourself and leave?
That you can enjoy the wonderful colors you’ve only enjoyed
as a crayoning child?
After all those years behind these gray walls —
the monotony!
The Sunday pancakes, refried french toast, and greasy chicken,
the Mondays you wish they had something edible,
the Tuesday Yakasorbi murder burgers,
the Wednesday killer liver,
the Thursday everything from the last four days mixed
together,
the Friday lumpy oatmeal and fluorescent Kool-Aid,
the Saturday cold cuts you go down to the mess hall just to
look at.
The cycle begins again on Sunday;
and you’ve gone to the mess hall for every meal,
didn’t miss a single meal in all those years.
Now why do you think that you can get used to real food?
Home cooking, a gourmet restaurant,
after you’ve only had seven minutes to eat
and an ulcer bigger than your heart.
After all those years you still think that you can just leave?
Well, maybe, but remember — even though you leave the
prison the prison will never leave you.
1996, Sing Sing Correctional Facility
Ossining, New York
My father leans toward the green, electric
dials of the transceiver, clicking the Morse key
between thumb and forefinger, talking in dashes and dots
with a man in Magadan, far
eastern Siberia, about how they put fire pots
all night beneath running truck engines to keep the gas
and oil from freezing. How the Sea of Okhotsk,
even now, in late March, is a plateau
passable only in the wake of icebreakers.
My father tells him how an early Maryland spring
has teased the flowers and trees into a bloom
that could still be murdered
by frost. This could be
the conversation of two men in a local
hardware store, arms folded across their chests
as they stand beside the snow shovels and salt shacks
and grouse about insurance, doctor’s bills,
the motions of clouds and sun.
My father’s face is warm, animate,
his lips silently forming the words
he taps out in code, the signals
flashing over the Atlantic, the skies of Europe,
over the snowy steppe and taiga of Holy Russia.
I, who have stood by the door
waking to ask for a loan, back quietly
into the hall, not wanting to startle him
out of his easier intimacy with strangers, nor sense
the fear in his eyes when he sees his addict son.
1997, Federal Correctional Institute La Tuna
Anthony, Texas
In Boston, this first October Sunday
I’ve never felt so far
from where I started, yellow concrete room
looking out over barbed wire, Arizona desert
and out on the prison yard those men I called
brother still play handball, argue drug deals and
imagine a way out. How can I
explain to them this distance, how I’ve fled
to a city where people move casually
down streets lined with brownstones, maples
and in another week the leaves will flame orange, red.
To those still waiting
where there are no trees and the sunlight
touches reluctantly, how do I describe
the air that enters the window and blouses
the curtains, how in the next room
a woman makes coffee, and stepping
toward me her blue robe falls
open, the light catching a moment
on her breast. She sings a little as she
turns away and I don’t think that she
understands much of this, how certain mornings
a part of me drifts back and wants
to sit all day in a yellow room and say
nothing, while believing in a world
that waits elegantly
just out of reach, some place I’d
invent for them if they asked and swear
were true, something more tangible
than the light that falls through the curtains
on an October morning, a woman’s voice
that rises from another room,
these things around which my life settles.
1997, Recalling all the prisoners the author has known
Clutching the rope and hook in his worn and wizened hands, the old man crawled on his elbows and knees through the wet grass toward the wall. Craning his neck and looking up, up along the wall, up past the guard tower that sat upon it like a mythical monster, a multi-eyed sentinel whose cones of light pierced the darkened prison yard, he saw the gray clouds part and the moon emerge. The moonlight didn’t bother him for, as long as he made it to the wall safely, it would make visibility poor within the steam when the time came.
The wet grass had surprised him, and that caused him some irritation: All the years he had watched the steam being blown off from the nearby prison powerhouse, it should have occurred to him that the condensation would dampen the grass. But it hadn’t, and he considered his lack of foresight a bad omen. He tightened his grip around the rope and hook and crawled on, on to the base of the wall. Reaching it, leaning against it, he rested, for he was already tired.
The ground and the wall vibrated slightly, carrying the rumble of the huge boilers in the powerhouse. Off in the distance, a barge sounded on the river, its engines droning evenly as it slid through the night. The air was colder than he first thought; he zipped up his jacket and tugged the sleeves to his wrists. Lying on his back, he pulled the rope and hook to his chest and concentrated on the climb he’d have to make. Could he do it? He was an old man, but a determined one: He was going over and that was that. He had been a bull of a man once; now, wintered and weakened, he cursed his decrepitude and longed for his former strength. But he had two things in his favor — a good rope and a good hook.
And that was important. Years ago, when he was doing a ten-year bit in Menard — or was it Statesville? he wasn’t sure — he and two others planned a break. He fished his memory for their names but caught nothing. The plan they had was simple, and they kept it to themselves, executing each step with cautious precision. Using an array of excuses, they manipulated the prison administration into housing them in the same cellblock. Once there, they acquired hacksaw blades from a retiring guard who charged them fifty dollars per blade. Each man sawed the bars of his cell almost but not completely through; then, caulking in the outcuts with putty, they repainted them. Next, in similar fashion, they sawed the window bars of the cellblock barber shop. The cooperation of the inmate barber cost another hundred dollars, but it was well worth it as the window led to the prison yard. They made a rope and a hook. From the hospital, they contrabanded skin-tone surgical gloves and three pairs of white pajamas.
Then they waited.
One January night, during a driving snowstorm, they made their move. Each man placed an ingenious dummy in his bed after the cell-house guard finished the 2 a.m. count. The dummy heads, papier-mache skulls pasted with human hair, were covered with blankets up to the hairline, while next to them, curled in repose on the pillows, the surgical gloves, filled with water and tied off like balloons, were left exposed, appearing remarkably lifelike. Pants and shirts, stuffed with rags and dirty laundry, lay bodylike under the covers from which feet, formed with toilet paper and covered with socks, extended. After first yanking out their bars with vice grips, they stole to the barber shop, slipped the doorlock, and yanked out the bars there. On the yard, unseen in the whirling snow, wearing the white pajamas over their prison denims, they dropped into a drainage ditch and crawled the fifty yards to the thirty-foot wall. One of the other men, a tall farmboy from Missouri with a glass eye {his name was on the tip of his tongue) tossed the hook up and over the wall; it bit into the opposite side and held true. They were on their way. The other man, the smallest of the three, started up. The rope stretched against his weight, but held. Using the footholds they had tied into the rope, he climbed up the wall; ten feet, twenty feet, almost to the top, when suddenly, irrevocably — the rope snapped,
The old man lay against the wall, shivering, trying to remember the names of the two men. Off in the night he heard another barge laboring against the current. He pressed himself to the wall, seeking warmth. Out of the murky waters of his subconscious two names washed up: Jerry Dayton and Roy Bollinger. That’s who they were! He saw their faces clearly, but only for a moment as they slipped back into the dark waters of memory. They didn’t make them like that anymore. Pieces of information bobbed up to him: Dayton was killed by the police during a robbery at Springfield; Bollinger died in the electric chair at the old Cook County Jail for the murder of a minor politician. Or was it Dayton who got the chair and Bollinger who was shot in the holdup? It didn’t matter. The names were right. After so many prisons, so many jails and reformatories, it was hard to keep things straight, and if he got things screwed up now and then, what difference did it make? He knew hundreds of stories grounded on his long experience as a prisoner and a convict which he enjoyed telling despite his inability to keep facts straight, and the way he saw it, if he tacked on a little embellishment over the years, or if he had the wrong characters in the wrong story, or if he distorted the truth once in awhile so that he hardly knew the truth himself, what difference did k make? And who, now, would know? Or care?
He enjoyed telling his stories; they were his only wealth, and he had hoped to pass them to the boy. The cold night air caught him up, and he winked. Shifting closer against the wall, he listened to the increasing rumble of the boilers. The time was near.
He’d spent many years in this prison, and during his many stays had often watched the steam being blown off. Except for the newer additions, the prison was steam heated. The ancient, enormous boilers sat squat and Buddha-like on concrete slabs in the red-brick powerhouse close to the main wall. The three boilers, all alike and two stories high, rumbled violently, hissed enigmatically, and succeeded in giving the impression that explosion was imminent. At noon, when the convicts were eating in the prison industrial area, the boilers were blown off to let the excess steam escape. At night, the prisoners secured in their cells, the steam was bled every two hours.
From the dining room at noon, or from his cell at night, the old man had often watched the process. It fascinated him. On the black tar roof of the powerhouse, three openings were cut, from which the great steam stacks of the boilers piled seventy feet in the air. The three stacks, thick at their bases and starting flush in their openings, were made of sheeted steel that had been seamed together to rise cylindri-cally to the sky. When the steam blew, the hot jets rose like vaporous ejaculations whose high density lent them shape, substance, and color. The wail of the steam whistles was a perfect accompaniment, matching pitch with the velocity of the spewing steam. At first the steam rose in single pillars, then mushroomed into distinct caps and stalks. The caps sucked the stalks up, forming balls of steam that turned to clouds of steam that merged eventually to one single cloud that migrated toward the river. As the cloud drifted, gravity and the cooling air brought it down until it hung on the wall, enshrouding it. Only a few minutes passed from the time the whistles blew until the cloud dissipated completely.
Lying on his back, listening to the boilers, he shivered almost uncontrollably as the night cold crept into his bones. He remembered when he was a boy and had fled from an orphanage to take a job on a river-boat, an old sternwheeler that plied the Upper Mississippi between St. Louis and Davenport. Unless the weather was exceptionally cold for an extended period, the river stayed clear throughout the winter. The cold earth below him now triggered the memory of the bone-chilling winter river. He had told the boy about the riverboats and about the men and women who rode and worked them. He told the boy about the river itself, calling it his river and telling him how it wound in a childish scrawl, down through Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri, brown and milky and always contemptuous of its banks, to its confluence with the Missouri River at St, Charles and then down, all the way through the South to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. The thought of the boy was depressing; he forced it from his mind and concentrated on the rumble of the boilers as best he could.
The boy, his daughter’s only child, didn’t like the old man. On one of his many paroles, he had lived with her and her son, Jimmy. He had been determined to make a friend out of the boy, not only for his daughter’s sake and for the harmony of the household, but for his own sake too, as he knew he was old and close to death. Filled with the loneliness of the old that sprang from the inescapable self-alienation of one who wanted to live on despite the realization of approaching death, he saw his chance to do so through the boy. Jimmy, however, a hostile redheaded ten-year-old, resisted him from the start. The boy made it clear that he disbelieved the old man’s stories, and the old man, much to his alarm, found himself disliking the youth, a realization that embarrassed him; yet, he persisted in his attempt to win the boy over, telling him wild stories of bank robberies, prohibition, prison riots, great escapes, gangsters, and shoot-outs until he exhausted his repertoire, while the boy, unimpressed, listened with undisguised boredom. He took the boy on walks, on trips to the zoo, to the movies, and to wherever else he thought a boy that age might want to go. Jimmy, an unwilling participant on these expeditions, went only under the admonishments of his mother, who was glad to have them both out of the house. Once, the old man succeeded in taking him fishing.
They fished in a small stream not far from home, and, sitting on the bank in the morning sun, the old man surveyed the stream: beer cans and bottles glinted from the creek bed, their reflections shimmering on the surface; old discarded tires and inner tubes lay filmed in silt, mouthing Os of protest against their abandonment; and no fish, fit to eat, lived there.
He shook his head, saying, “A goddamn shame.” He baited his hook with a bloodfat nightcrawler and tried to show the boy how to do the same. But the boy, displaying an irritating squeamishness, refused to follow the old man’s lead and lapsed into a sulk, so the old man fished alone. Eventually he caught a small bullhead; its white belly flashed with an oily iridescence as he pulled it from the muddy water. As he elevated his pole the fish swung crazily toward him, dancing on its tail; he reached for it with a slow uncoordinated hand and succeeded only in deflecting it. The fish spun away as he groped after it. The boy laughed at his effort — a deep howling, self-indulgent laughter. The old man turned and saw the boy’s face, and the derision and mockery published there. The boy’s dull-witted viciousness scared him; yet, at the same time it served to cancel his desire for rapport, and there was some solace in that. He turned from him, gathered the fish in, unhooked it, and tossed it back into the stream where it darted for safety in series of jerks, dissolving in the alluvial depth. Kicking over the can of worms, he tossed his pole and the boy’s in some scrub and said, “Let’s go.” They walked home in silence.
One night, not long after that, he went to a neighborhood bar, got drunk, loud, and cantankerous. The management asked him to leave; he refused; they threatened to call the police, and he responded by throwing a full beer stein at an expensive mirror. The beer leapt in the air and hung momentarily as a droopy mustache of foam that fell with a slosh to the floor. The stein exploded into the mirror, and each burst to slivers and shards that tinkled musically to the countertop running below the mirror. The bartender called the police, who arrived in ten minutes with theatrical verve, having arrested the old man for similar misadventures. The old man, inimical to anything wearing a badge, stood ready to fight. When the first cop drew in range, the old man looped a left hook, but it flew like a hawk on the wing: swooping slowly, banking out and down, and the cop, fifty years younger, simply pulled his head back and let the hawk-hook glide by. The man fell flat on his face. The police dragged him from the bar, but only after he put up a resistance that belied his age, hollering over and over, “Oink, oink, oink.”
They took him to jail and charged him with public drunkenness and desttuction of private property. The next morning he went to coutt, his clothes soiled from jail and the fight. The young assistant prosecutor apprised the court of the charges pending, calling the court’s attention to the fact that the defendant was a parolee on a life sentence, and though blind, Justice was attentive: With judicious economy the court dismissed the charges and revoked the parole.
That afternoon he was back in prison.
He had been paroled many times. When first convicted of armed robbery some forty years ago, he was tried as an habitual criminal, and as his record was already extensive then, his conviction netted him a mandatory life sentence. (The state’s criminal code has since been revised. One of the revisions served to erase the mandatory life sentence clause of the robbery statute; however, the state’s supreme court held that the revisions were not retroactive.) The parole board, on the other hand, was sympathetic toward him: his sentence was excessive; he was old, harmless; he had served more time than anyone in the prison system; his prison record was fairly good; and, probably more than anything else, he was a living anachronism, something left over from another age, and they simply felt sorry for him. Hence he was granted a lot of paroles, which, for one reason or another, he would violate and return to prison where he would stay until his next scheduled meeting with the parole board, which usually dispatched him on another pilgrimage to society. He became a veritable penal commuter, shuttling to and fro, from prison to society and back again, and he came to deeply resent the game, the pattern that society chose for him. He became determined to break the chains of conditioning that had held him for so long. But he was quite unable to do that, for the interminable years in prison had thoroughly institutionalized him. He had been polarized by prison steel, and no matter what he did or tried, it drew him like a magnet. Yet, the more it drew him, the more determined he was to exercise his will upon it, and now he had finally found a way. He doubted that there would be any more returns to prison or paroles from prison, for he knew his death was near. Whenever, in the last few yeats, he did make a parole, he stayed, not with his daughtet and the boy, for he knew that they did not really want him, but at a rooming house near the prison and near the river. It was convenient.
He lay against the wall, opening and closing his hands, fighting the numbing cold. This time they would not take him back. He turned up his collar and wished he had a watch. The steam should have blown by now. Yet, despite his waiting, despite his preparation, when the steam whistles shrieked through the night with their deafening howl, he was caught off guard. His heart grew big in his chest and beat wildly. He tried to get up but found that he couldn’t move, that he was frozen in the moment. Then it passed, and he scrambled to his feet. He was going over. That was that.
Letting the rope uncoil and fall to the ground, he held the loose end in one hand, with the hook poised in the other. The grappling hook had been wound with gauze and then rewound with electrical tape in the hope that k would hit the wall with a muted thud. He looked up the side of the wall, realized he was too close, stepped back, and locking his elbow and keeping his arm relaxed, he gave the hook a few imaginary practice pitches; then mightily, with every fiber of his being, he let it fly: It sailed into the night and arched magnificently over. The hook bounced on the other side and sent a tattoo of vibration to his hand. Slowly, he pulled it up. A few times it snagged on the rough contour of the wall, but jiggling his end a bit, he got it started again, until finally, two of the steel fangs bit resolutely into the slate lip that capped the wall. A good hold: This rope would not snap. But he had to hurry, for high above the gray, vaporous caps and stalks of the steam, mushrooms appeared against the darkened sky. The moon had vanished.
From the start he felt he wasn’t going to make it. He had knotted the rope every eighteen inches which permitted him to stand on a knot, to reach up and to grab hold of the highest knot he could, and to pull himself up to stand on a higher knot. But the going was rough. He had only gone a few knots when the pain began to burn through his arms. His breathing came in shallow gasps, and he had to rest. He started up again: a knot; another. His feet slipped off a knot, and he hung from the rope, his arms stretching in their sockets. The pain raced up and down his shoulders, and his lungs ached to scream. His feet groped wildly for the knot. He turned on the rope, his back to the wall, and the rope came to him. He caught it with his knees, and his feet found the knot. Turning, he started up again. Up and up he climbed. The pain, like fire now, rolled over his back in waves, burned hot and sandy in his lungs, and surged through his legs and arms. It emanated from his chest where his heart pounded erratically, a chaotic drum to whose intense beat the pain quickstepped to every part of his body. Yet, up and up he climbed until, exhausted, he turned his back to the wall and rested, hanging squat and deadweighted, his feet quivering on a knot, sweat beading his forehead.
The whistles shrieked on, on into the night, but their shrillness was gone now, replaced by a tremulous wail that scaled down with the diminishing velocity of the steam. A film of moisture covered him as the steam settled on the wail, already dissipating,
He got off the wall and started climbing again. A knot, another, and another. The great pain, never gone but somewhat abated, returned instantly and fired him anew. But he climbed on. Now he saw the top, but he could hardly grasp the last knot as the angle of the rope and the wall was acute. He worked his hand behind the rope, burning his skin, and pulled himself up so that his eyes were level with the top. With a great final effort he threw his hand, arm, and elbow up and on the surfaced top and pulled himself onto it.
He lay on the wall, the pain pummeling his body, trying to breathe. The top of the wall was wet and slick with the rapidly condensing steam. A new wave of pain fired in his chest, and death edged closer. The cloud had become a thin mist. He had to get down before it vanished. Now. But he couldn’t move; he had to rest.
Looking off, he saw the river. His river. At night it held a special appeal for him. It lay quiet and still, hushed in its banks, sliding slowly and silkenly, a lover’s hand, sliding yet, ever gently, ever southward, winding down and down, tracing softly in its childish scrawl the way to the warmth of its design: its delta. The moon emerged and caught the river; out, out in its deepest channel, it quicksilvered and shuddered, and from high on the wall, the old man watched with an appreciative eye.
But the river was dying too. Once, running free and wild with a deep and fierce independence, it had had an autonomy that had not escaped his notice, but now, dammed and sluiced, polluted and spoiled, under the indifferent care of the Army Corps of Engineers, subjected daily to the flagrant abuse of industry and the apathy of a disinterested public, it was dying. In the hazy collage of his memory he saw the sickly bullhead and its oily iridescence. He dismissed the image, but the boy’s face surfaced. He had left no mark on the kid. When the old man died, everything about him would die too. He had nothing to leave the boy who had rejected the legacy of the stories, and so, with a strange and comforting simplicity, known only to the very young and very old, he willed the boy his river and thought of him no more.
The mist had all but evaporated, but he remained lying on the wall, exhausted. He felt he could take one deep breath, and with its expiration, he could let his life escape from him. But he had known too many Jerry Daytons and Roy Bollingers, too many gangsters and colorful characters to go out like that — it was no way to end a story. What had once run deep in the river still ran deep in him.
He got up quickly. Pulling the rope up, he unhooked it, removed the grappling hook from one side of the slate top, and rehooked it on the Up of the other side. He dropped the rope down the opposite side of the wall and climbed down with a long forgotten sprightliness. When he got close to the ground, which was higher on this side, he dropped to his feet, almost falling. There was no gtass on this side, only cinders, and they crunched and shifted familiarly beneath his feet.
Suddenly, in the nearest tower to him, the door flew open, banging against the guardrail that ran around its platform; instantly, all along the line of the wall, all the tower doors flew open, and before he could step from the shallow shadow of the wall, the spotlights had him — an ancient moth, caught in the cones of light. Just above him, to his right, from the near tower, a shotgun shell jacked into its chamber with a terrifying, metallic finality. The sound of the bolts going home to their chambers was repeated all along the line.
“Halt!” the guard in the tower above him yelled. The old man kept on walking. “Hallttt!!!” the tower guard screamed.
Unafraid, the man kept walking. The cones of light made a garish escort. He knew they wouldn’t shoot. Not now. Not going in this direction. Reaching the harsh daytime glare of the inner prison yard, the cones left him as though he was no longer of interest. The inmates who worked nights in the powerhouse, alerted by the jacking shells, came outside and watched, stupefied. The old man continued to walk toward his old cellblock, wondering vaguely what old friends he might see, what stories he might tell, and selecting one of his favorites, he dusted it off a bit and added a twist here and there. A barge sounded on the river. The even hum of its engines told him it was going downstream.
1978, Iowa State Penitentiary
Fort Madison, Iowa