It is so peaceful on the bank of the river, one can almost forget youth tick tick ticking its way into memory.
Coming to terms with time is a solitary, existential experience, forever the province of poets. Poets know time’s brevity, its repeats and deceits, and also how rhythm mimics time, how imagination cheats it. Loss of physical freedom compounds and intensifies these universal experiences, as Henry Johnson knows, viewing the Hudson from Sing Sing in “Sailboats”* excerpted above.
The state reduces the stuff of time, as it does the captured human, to number. It makes time the prisoner’s only possession, while emptying it. The state’s appropriation of human time and domination of its meaning is epitomized in the harshness of the “count,” for which prisoners must at regular intervals be locked in their cells. In “Counting Time” by M. D. Goldenberg (1985),* “The officers count / the prisoners / The prisoners count / the days / The days count / for nothing.” Doing time is also doing space, for the temporal distortion is paralleled by tyrannical control of space, as William Aberg’s poem “Reductions” hete discloses.
Like a sorry mathematician, Derrick Corley worries the impossible calculus of space and time, punishment and ctime. In “Cell” (1996),”‘ he notes that his is getting smaller: “I wonder how / they do that / taking a little more / each day.” Asked name in “Arrest,”* Corley says “Methuselah”; asked age, “a thousand.” They “thought me mad / when I was just so very — weary / to find myself yet again / made old by my actions.” Others recover human time and space in fragments of dream (like Jackie Ruzas in “Where or When”) or in a scrap of music or of fantasy (like M. A. Jones in two poems here). Some try to do time on their own terms. They triumph over the state’s possession of their years with irony, bravado, or a moment of pure rapture. Chuck Culhane does all three in “After Almost Twenty Years”; his darker poem “There Isn’t Enough Bread” registers the collapse of such resources. Roger Jaco’s “Killing Time” pits the recall of the world’s rich calendar against the flattened time of prison.
The possibility of doing “good time” to reduce one’s sentence and win parole sometimes enables the state to manipulate prisoners by appropriating their future. (“Lee’s Time” in Race, Chance, Change dramatizes the moral crises such control can generate.) Here Diane Hamill Metzger illuminates the tortuous effects on prisoners of a system that teases prisoners’ expectations through indeterminate sentences, the hope of clemency, or the phantom of parole. In the face of the growing movement to eliminate parole, however, Larry Bratt offers a sharply differing point of view from Metzger’s.
Exactly how J. R. Grindlay’s “Toledo Madman” expected the sparrows to help him escape remains a tantalizing mystery, and the author is dead. But the Madman finds “ultimate freedom” by electing insanity and becoming master of his own time.
William Aberg
Afternoons, in this plague
of flies and white, Sonoran heat, we rarely sing —
to be honest, not at
all- The porter unrolls the hose
and waters the dirt to keep it from blowing
up in our faces when the southern winds
hit. Crouched on the walk
outside our cells, we keep busy
lying about what we would do
if a woman appeared
to us, her lips a coarse violet
wanting each one of us
right now. Or how easily
we could distract the guard
from his perch on the guntower —
one fake fight
and wc would make it
over the tence before the count
officer found us missing. I remember
one cynic, locked up
twelve years, spat tobacco
in a paper cup, pushed up the brim
of his cap, and told us
the jagged range
of mountains outside the prison
fence marked the edge
of the world, and the sky
was .simply a revolving backdrop
someone painted with clouds
and stars. We laughed
but for him, it was the truth:
there could be no other world.
1982, Arizona State Prison-Santa
Rita Tucson, Arizona
Huddled under a tent with strangers,
my woolen clothes soaking wet.
Sharks swim undisturbed over cars, grass,
and concrete dividers.
Hiding in a tree I watch Mom argue with
the seltzer man. He enters my yard. I climb
down from the tree into — a prison yard
where Frankie “Bones” and Georgie Bates
are playing gin with comic size Alice in Wonderland
cards. Their bodies petrified, clay like
resembling Homo Antiquitus in the Hamburg Museum.
I pass them by.
The yard becomes a winding road, desolate.
I walk and walk as seasons fall behind me and
voices fill the night.
1985, Sing Sing Correctional Facility
Ossining, New York
Something in the darkness
has given birth to a sky
spinning with a fierce impossible light. Here
night and day have different sounds,
the seasons varying textures. We could say
it’s October. On a sidewalk
that goes somewhere blue plaid sweaters
float above the hands of lovers
dampening the crisp air. They sweep
past walls privileged with windows,
transparence lit with small faces, a hush
a hand opening. This story begins
and ends in separate places, with interruptions
where sun-veiled women step out
of themselves, fall
then lift andante, continuing …in this story
there’s always the possibility of morning,a chance
that the screams which drip down at midnight
are not really threatening
but wishing us well,
wishing us a life
in another story.
1979, Arizona State Prison-Florence
Florence, Arizona
for William Aberg
Maybe nothing can save us tonight,
not love or religion
or the needle that comes to us
in sleep and flowers in our veins.
Maybe none of those things:
lawyers, guns, the blonde
we imagine waiting
beyond the gates, her hair lifting
the wilted air, the heat of her body
or the perfume that still sleeps
in our sleep. Maybe not even
her hand on our leg, the single word
we thought would once stop our hearts
or start them again, that we were certain
would change us. Maybe nothing changes
and maybe not even blood
splashed across this concrete
would make a difference, would buy
our way back. Maybe there’s no currency
they’ll take, no promise
they’ll believe. Maybe not even
death can get us out this time,
and maybe it’s finally too late
for us, brother, maybe what remains
is just a little static on your radio,
a music that plays on the far side
of these bars, something we confuse
for church bells, a child singing,
a shadow that steps to meet us in the dark.
1982, Arizona State Prison-Perryville
Buckeye, Arizona
| Memorial Day | This dusty May I sit in yesterday’s kitchen watching the rain pound against windows that reflect poverty. Pa says the corn will grow higher than a Georgia pine and Ma sighs with relief carefully placing her knife on a mound of potato peelings. Strange how I long for those days when I was free from luxury. |
| After Independence Day | Revolving doors: Feeling alone again and as empty as my bare cell. Longing for the hatred to return and justify my wrongs. Knowing that revenge never works. Trapped in the game waiting for my turn. Ad infinitum. |
| Labor Day | I sit in silence listening to the katydids of a good ol’ September. Somewhere in the sweaty night a whippoorwill disturbs the noises of nostalgia and Kathy’s freckled face returns haunting my cell, whispering softly, “Please don’t rob again. We can make it.” I crush my cigarette, stretch out on my bunk, and bleed to sleep. |
| After Thanksgiving | Monday in prison, I live steel thoughts and the concrete reality of time. Keys jangle and I rise. Standing barefoot in my cell I watch Jimmy come shuffling by, shaved head, escorted by guards, followed by priest, making his way toward eternity’s chair. Briefly our eyes meet and exchange a thousand screaming words: Life is too short to burn. |
| Easter | With captured friends beneath the dull coolness of a concrete sky I sit and sweat inwardly. Drenched in bitterness, smelling of remorse, we tug and strain under laden backpacks of unwanted time. God, if only, damn it if only we could give it to the dead we could all be resurrected. |
1979, Rustburg Correctional Unit 9
Rustburg, Virginia
for Judge Rose Bird*
This is getting difficult.
Perhaps there’s another formula for happiness and contentment I haven’t explored or exhausted yet.
But I talk to birds.
I have to put in my partial plates tho
w/tip of index finger fanning wet lips
do it!
the sound near-identical which amazes me.
Recently the birds woke me up
with their clamorous love wings beating around the bars and glass in animated flight jailbirds in the rush of lusty spring.
I was barely awake, grumbling at my broken sleep then somehow drawn out
into the quiet light
sitting on the side of my bed.
And there they were
two of em
beaking it up!
Oh! I could’ve fallen into curled glee
* Chief Judge of the California Supreme Court, voted out of office in 1986 after frequently reversing death sentences.
wound with the spring’s redemption. And the nest already built
under the highest beam in the block.
1988, Sing Sing Correctional Facility Ossining, New York
With the small birds
the sparrows and the grackles
there seemed enough bread
to stave off the fighting and death.
Then the gulls came
hollow desperate and shrieking
replacing the peaceful feeding rituals
with survival’s bare wings
beating at the windows.
1981, Attica Correctional Facility Attica, New York
Diane Hamill Metzger
If you are serving a life sentence in Pennsylvania’s prison system, you should be well acquainted with the game I’m about to describe. [f not, it’s not hard to learn. The only rules arc to have enough hope in happy endings (o lie gullible and to want something so badly that you’ll gr.tsp at any straw. The game is called the Manipulation Game, and this is how it goes.
You’re arrested for the crime of murder in the first or second degree. It really doesn’t matter if you did it or not, or what your degree of involvement was, because when you go to court, chances are good that you’ll be convicted, let’s lace it: Any selt-respecting jury member knows that if the cops sc/y you did it, you did ir. So, the verdict comes in and, with it, a sentence of lilt; in prison, mandatory in Pennsylvania. (Father that or death — are the two diflerent?) And now, my friend, you are a statistic. You can never have work release. You can never have a furlough, not even at Christmas, even though your buddy with ten to twenty for ihird-degree murder (“plca-bar-g.jin murder”) just won one. You are the best player on the prison Softball team, hut don’t expect togo to any away games (though rhose tiot doing life are going). You have earned your college degree, but don’t expect to go to graduation (although the baby-killer with ten to twenty went to hers). Your mate may be doing tune in another prison, but don’t ever expect visits. Your whole family may die, but don’t expect to go to the funerals. Hut, if you’ve got to go to court to get more time, they’ll sure let you oft ot the prison grounds lor that! Or if you’re breaking your back at eighteen cents an hour on the prison farm crew, that’s different! After all, you are a l.lt’hk! That label makes you more “dangerous,” more of a risk than any other kind of prisoner — no matter what the others are here for, or plea-bargained their semences down to. None of die good you’ve ever done, are doing, or will do will change that. If you are innocent of the crime, in the eyes of the state and society you are guilty. If you are guilty, the remorse you may feel, the desire to change your life around — they don’t mat ter, either. You owe time to the state. An infinite rime. In Pennsylvania, that time amounts to an average of twenty-three years, usually more. The average is going up, and the slogan “Life means life” is becoming a chilling reality. As a Pennsylvania lifer, you are now four times more likely to die in prison than to ever be released. After all, by taking your life and turning it into a living death, the state and society will give meaning to the life of your alleged victim: an eye for an eye, a tragedy for a tragedy… right? You begin to consider taking drastic measures — maybe suicide, maybe escape, maybe a descent into madness…
But wait! They tell you that you have hope. Your lawyer can put in an appeal with the Pennsylvania Superior Court. So you wait…
You’ve been in prison seven years now. Your appeal has been denied. But wait! They tell you that your appeal can go to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and you can win a new trial. So you wait… You really want to do the right thing. You have patience.
You’ve been in prison for nine years now. They say the wheels of justice grind slowly. You heard from your lawyer today: Your appeal was denied. It’s time to look at alternatives, drastic alternatives. But wait! They tell you not to be a fool. You have nine years in, nine “good” years. File a P.C.R.A [Post Conviction Relief Act]! Get back into court. So you do; you have a hearing and you wait…
You’ve been in prison for twelve years now. Oh yeah, your P.C.R.A. was denied some time back. Thoughts of taking your future back enter your mind… but wait! They tell you to file for commutation of sentence with the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons. So you begin the long, soul-killing process of applying for clemency.
Your case was heard by the Board of Pardons for the second time. You were denied, again. You look back on the fourteen years you’ve wasted, years you can never get back… But wait! Don’t be a fool, they tell you. You’ve put in fourteen years now, and it would be crazy to throw them all away. You’re always turned down for commutation the first couple of times. Try again in another couple of years. So you wait…
You’ve been in prison eighteen years now. You’ve been denied by the Board of Pardons for the third and fourth times. This has gone far enough; it’s time to do things your way now. But wait. They ask you how you could even consider throwing away eighteen years. Try commutation again in a couple of years. When you have twenty years in, you’ll have a real good shot. So you wait…
You’ve been in prison twenty years now. The Board of Pardons denied you again. They want more time out of you. After all, you’re asking for mercy. When you first came to prison, the average time done on a life sentence was between eleven and fifteen years; it’s almost double that now. You’ve done all that was expected of you, and more, but they’ve kept changing the rules on you. Maybe you’re too tired to think of alternatives now… but no, damn it, you’ve had enough. But wait! Twenty years! You’re almost there, they tell you. Don’t throw it all away! So you wait…
How long do you wait? When should the waiting end? At seven years, fifteen years, twenty years? Your children are grown now. Your parents have passed away. Everything out there has changed, and you’re just too damned tired and empty to start all over again, and maybe too old…
The manipulation game is an insidious game. Its perpetrators are those in power, maybe even your own family and friends play their parts, and the object of the game is to dangle the carrot, that hope of freedom, endlessly, until with each passing year it seems more and more foolish to risk blowing the time you have accumulated, the time you have wasted…
Hope is a beautiful thing, // you are one of the very few lucky ones in this game of political roulette and you make it out. But if hope turns out to be fruitless, then it becomes destructive — a tool used by the vicious to control the helpless.
Tell me, where do you draw the line?
1994, State Correctional Institute Muncy Muncy, Pennsylvania
The jury deliberated for fifty minutes before delivering their guilty verdict against me. With their decision thirteen years ago, I was convicted of murder and sentenced to spend the rest of my life behind bars.
Since then, I have witnessed the ugliest side of what prison life can be about: the fear and mistrust, the violence and chaos, the isolation and emptiness, the hollowness of spirit that at one point brought me to contemplate suicide. But in these last few months, a setback of the worst kind has gripped me. Maryland governor Parris Glendening has said that, except in extraordinary circumstances, he will not consider parole for violent offenders who have received life sentences. He may not realize it, but in the eight months since he rendered that decision, the governor has drained the state’s prison culture of a crucial, if intangible, element: its sense of hope.
This may seem insignificant to those on the outside, but in the steel-and-concrete world of the Maryland penitentiary system, it is everything. The tension and fears that have been set off since Glendening’s decision are almost palpable, not just among those of us serving life sentences, but even among other prisoners who, strange as it may sound, have come to look upon us lifers as role models.
From the perspective of those inside the prison, it seems like there’s a new breed of mean-spiritedness among politicians, and more of a concern with public opinion polls than tehabilitating criminals. The problem is that, if the governor’s goal is really to reduce crime and target those most apt to commit it, Glendening wouldn’t be going after lifers. Why? Because, perhaps surprisingly, we’re not the most dangerous felons behind these walls.
Indeed, according to research conducted by the Maryland Department of Corrections, young felons go through a natural maturation process. By the time they reach their late thirties to early forties, these once-radical youngsters tend to drift away from criminal behavior. For those who committed a violent act when they were young and have been in prison a long time, there is often a realization that bucking the system is futile.
I see this in my own life, and the statistics bear it out. Recidivism rates are much lower for felons who serve ten or more years at one time than they are for those repeat offenders who do life on the installment plan — serving numerous shorter sentences over a long stretch of time. In fact, from 1978 to 1987, seventy lifers were paroled in Maryland; only five returned to prison, according to the correction department’s Parole Release Rates for Life Sentenced Inmates. According to the state’s Department of Public Safety, this compares with a recidivism rate of 47 percent for the prison population as a whole.
So why isn’t this kind of data reflected in the policies that emerge from the governor’s mansion? It’s hard to find any plausible answer except politics: The public wants to feel safe, and politicians offer up simple solutions.
I know from my own experience that most lifers who have spent twelve or more years behind bars are no longer even thinking about crime. Most of us have taken the initiative and are motivated, despite our tribulations past and present, to transform ourselves into mature, productive human beings. We’ve been told that if we worked hard, and followed the rules, that the system would work fairly for us, as it does equally for law-abiding citizens outside these walls. We had to earn parole, they told us. But it was possible, something to work for.
Now that’s changed. Since Glendening’s new policy was announced hist fall, none of the 1 10 liters living here at the Maryland Correctional Insiiimion in I lagersiown have won parole. And though then’ is less hope, we haven’t reacted with auger and rage at being betrayed by the system. There is still the possibility of parole under special circumstances, for the very old or terminally ill, for example, bur the chance of any of us winning parole is greatly diminished, since the parole commission can release anyone serving a limited sentence, but any parole ol a felon serving life must be approved by ilie governor.
In my case, I was convicted ot a double homicide in 1983 and am scheduled to have my first parole hearing m 2006. Although I maintain my innocence, 1 readily confess that my life on the streets was undisciplined, unfocused, and out of control. And I accept that i am in prison for being a threat to society, and to myself, lint having been incarcerated now for fourteen years, I can say unequivocally that I want to change my life. I have remorse not only tor the wasted years of my youth (I’m now fifty-four) but for the deaths of the two people 1 was convicted of killing. And as a result of these feelings, 1 have made a commitment ro never again repeat a malicious act.
And so, when the time comes, I think I should be considered for parole, and so, apparently, did the judge who sentenced me or he wouldn’t have allowed for the possibility. In 2006, when I will have the opportunity though by no means the certainty of parole, I will be sixty-four years old and will have served twenty-three years in prison. And for every year I’ve been in, I’ve been sustained by the hope that I might one day earn my release — until now.
Like many others, I’m simply trying to show I’m worth a second chance. Even when the rules were changed midstream, most of us have continued to work on our rehabilitation, through education, vocational training, psychological counseling, whatever we can find. In effect, our faith and perseverance demonstrates our iron will to change our lives. It is perhaps this strength of character among lifers that has turned us into positive role models and mentors to those inside the Wall. People on the outside don’t realize this, and clearly the governor doesn’t, but it’s true.
The lifers I live with in Hagerstown are involved in all kinds of projects to better themselves and the community. Obviously, they have made terrible mistakes in their lives and some have been convicted of heinous crimes. It’s also true that not every lifer is sincerely committed to getting back on track. But by and large, my experience shows, a lot are. Douglas Scott Arcy single-handedly puts out the prison newsletter that serves as the center of information for our corn lrumiiy. He’s also the only prisoner in the state who earned a master’s degree while in prison. Jeffrey Kersey, another liter, aets as our in-house social activist by working with members of a prisoner sell help organization — Lifestyles — and by writing letters on behalf of lifers to politicians and community groups throughout the state. Another man, David Helton, has written a book about his conversion to Christianity and continues ro serve as a guiding force in the institution’s drug and alcohol abuse programs. I, myself, have chosen a more spiritual path of resistance. Through yoga and meditation I have discovered that kindness is a virtue respected by others and not a weak ness.
By doing all this, lifers have effectively challenged younger pris oners to become the kind of men who command rather than demand respect. We help the younger men pursue their education, resist negative peer pressure, and gain sell awareness and understanding.
I, for one, plan to continue on with my struggle. What I worry about is whether other lifers, who for two or more decades have-worked to rehabilitate themselves, will simply surrender to the loss of hope. With the reality of no parole for lifers and the possibility of no parole for violent crime offenders, what could life inside the prison be like?
One lifer here, who goes by the initials M.C., received his first parole hearing for a homicide three years ago, but now sees little chance of ever getting out. It has affected his spirit: “As long as a man has hope, the authorities have control. They destroyed hope. Unfortunately in time they may learn a man with no hope becomes a desperate soul,” he told me.
Michael Tully, serving a life sentence for homicide, has had an even worse time. Since Glendening’s announcement, Tully has lost his family support group. His wife has asked for a divorce, and he has lost all contact with his family. If not for the support of his friends in prison, who’ve encouraged him not to lose hope, as he says, “I would have flipped out and resorted to ancient self-destructive habits.”
That is something all of us should pray never happens. If it does, our state’s prisons are going to become pits of despair thar make conditions today look mild: rampant drug use, assaults, even murders will become commonplace. Both prisoners and officers will live in jeopardy. We shouldn’t forget that the majority of the prisoners I live with, maybe not the lifers but the others, will someday be released. And we should think carefully about what we want to teach them before that day arrives.
1996, Maryland Correctional Institution-Hagerstown Hagerstown, Maryland
Before the darkness fell, I used to sir on the edge of my bed looking out at the starless sky pondering meaningless abstractions, sipping halfheartedly at my instant coffee and reading the prophecies in The Book of Doom. I’ve always been moody — it seemed a proper state of mind for an artist. Except when I was being Dylan Thomas or Norman Mailer — then there were always parties and shouting and loud music. It’s difficult to carry on when you have to view each action through the eyes of a future biographer. Have to keep it interesting, yes, you owe that to generations of future readers. There’s nothing worse than reading those dead, dry biographies of men whose bodies crumbled to dust and ash long before they ever died. Now that the darkness has come, it’s all a lot easier: Nobody can read in the darkness, ergo, I am free.
So strange, to stumble across freedom in the darkness — the way you’d trip over the coffee table in the room while fumbling for the light switch… Actually, it wasn’t that simple — for me, anyway. I’ve always been a little slow at such reasoning. The Toledo Madman explained it all to me, one day sitting out on the yard, throwing pebbles at the fence. The Toledo Madman isn’t really a madman, that’s just the disguise he wears to help him serve his time. But since he’s serving two consecutive life sentences, it’s a role he has a lot of time to perfect. Sometime, not so long ago, he had another name, and once in a while a new hack in the cellblock will try to call him that. But he never answers to it. The rest of us just call him Toledo or Madman. Most of us have forgotten his old name anyway. What’s the use of saving up scraps of dead information?
We used to go out on the yard to exercise and run the track, just to keep in shape. After that, we’d sit around on the grass, talking and throwing pebbles at the fence. Everyone throws pebbles at the fence. They’ve got little mercury switches on the fence that set off an alarm in the towers when something jiggles it. When you hit it just right with a pebble, the tower hacks slide back their windows and pop their heads out, looking up and down the wire, suspiciously eying the sparrows perched on it, as if wondering, maybe, if the sparrows and robins are working with us in some great conspiracy.
The Toledo Madman actually did have a plot worked out for an escape, using the sparrows. He took bread out on the yard every other day for six months, once, feeding the sparrows, coaxing them. We tried to tell him, but you can’t tell the Madman anything, once he’s got an idea in his head. He just kept feeding them and coaxing them. And they kept taking his bread and looking serious, then laughing at him behind his back — little groups of them would gather over on the fence after he’d gone back inside, you could see them talking it over and laughing. He got the idea from the Polack. The Polack caught a bumblebee in between his window and screen. When it had finally exhausted itself, trying to batter down the window, he slipped a loop of thread around it. If you’ve never seen a bumblebee on a ten-foot thread leash, you won’t really appreciate the commotion it caused when he walked into the dayroom with it. The Polack loved commotion, anyway. He used to fashion fake turds out of wet toilet paper, using dirt to dye them brown, and leave them on the hacks’ chairs or in the chow hall or next to the TV in the dayroom. The Toledo Madman fed the sparrows for six months, getting ready to try his plan. Finally the day came and he made his try. It had a limited, partial success. The sparrows all escaped okay. The hacks took the Toledo Madman off to the hole for six months. Now he throws pebbles at the fence and at the sparrows. They sit on the fence, mostly out of range, and laugh at him. But he told me that he’s been practicing in secret, in his cell at night, getting his arm in shape for longer throws. The sparrows’ days, he assures me, are numbered.
The Toledo Madman used to hang with Burnout — they were road-dogs for years, like flawed carbons of the same copy. Except that Burnout had a habit of looking like a demented Chinaman. He had a silk robe with a huge dragon flying across the back, imprinted over a yin-yang, its tail curled like a spiked whip. You’d walk by his cell and he’d be sitting in the dark, reading by the light reflected off his shaved head. He used to shave his eyebrows, too. Not completely, just at each end, tapering them to points. And his Fu Manchu mustache and scrag-gly gook beard. He took a secret delight in sitting there, where the darkness hid him, in a full lotus, looking for all the world like some inscrutable, insane old Buddhist monk.
You’d see the two of them walking off to chow, heads together — the shaven inscrutable head nodding to meet the nodding flurry of the Madman’s head. And the piercing cackle of their laughs, like two old cannibals reminiscing over the succulent child-flesh of their past. An unnerving pair, wild eyes hidden behind dark glasses. Like brothers of a different flesh.
Then, one spring, you could see a new wildness in Burnout’s eyes — like an eagle that’s caught sight of a mouse in an open field. He began to circle. It was plain to all of us, and most painfully to the Toledo Madman, just what sights were lurking behind those wild eyes and stares. There was a new earnestness and depth to the way the two of them talked. You could see the madman goading Burnout into strange laughs and wary answers. In the back of the library, they argued at loud length about unheard subjects. Finally, in desperation, the Toledo Madman smuggled his pet mouse, in his kite-can cage, down to Burnout’s cell. As time went by, I’d get up in the middle of the night and walk to the front of my cell to take a leak. And across the way, there was a strange aurora of light and color in Burnout’s cell, emanating from those mad eyes. And I could feel and hear Toledo standing there, in the cell next to mine, helplessly watching for hours on end.
After they pulled Burnout off the fence the first time, they sent him out to lunch — put him on Thorazine, those huge doses they forcefeed you like a turkey before Thanksgiving. The zombies are everywhere, the smile, the blank-eyed stare, you go out to lunch and wake up in some distant someday when you’re ready for release.
But Burnout wasn’t just another zombie, he was a crafty old Chinaman trapped in a strange body. He managed to vomit up a dose, one day. And went to the Toledo Madman for help. Toledo agonized, but zombies don’t have road-dogs in their hazy dreamworlds. So to help was better than letting them trash Burnout’s mind.
Every day for a week, Burnout was there with a smile when they came to pump him full of his Thorazine. And an hour later, the Toledo Madman would appear at Burnout’s cell with a handful of Dexedrine. You could see the mad glint in those eyes again, fiery and confident, floating like a song of love in the summer air, as he paced his cell for hours. The air was as thick and electric as the hour before a thunderstorm, that week, while Burnout kindled a fire in his mind and a rage in his body, beyond knowing.
They never had to pull him off the fence, that second time. His body leaped and danced up off of it and landed like a lost rag doll a few feet away. And he crawled over and grasped the wire in both hands, trying to pull himself up, while the hack fired at him and people were scattering like ducks I stood there next to the Toledo Madman, watching his shoulder bunch up and tremble under the strain of standing there like it was all happening in a movie a thousand miles away, beyond the reach of any arms to help and hold. When the jeeps pulled up outside the fence and the tower hacks stopped shooting, he turned and looked at me across all the many miles, with his eyes shining behind the dark glasses, as if all the world was plain to see and nothing he could say would add a lick to it. Then he walked off, back to his cell, stopping on the way to retrieve Hercules, his mouse, from Burnout’s cell.
I stayed in my cell most of the next week, as if food and death were hard to swallow at the same time. And the idea of going back on the yard right away seemed obscene, like fondling your best friend’s mother. The Toledo Madman, on the other hand, was the same as ever. He even was on the crew that raked and sifted the dirt where Burnout got wasted, to get rid of the bloodstains. Me, I sat in my cell, tasting the horror and trying to fit it into poems.
Eventually, you hit the gearshift and find it all remains the same. It wasn’t anything when I came up out of hiding, just the same old shit. None of the James Cagney anger seeping through the place, building up to a cry for vengeance. Just card games and working out and walking the yard.
It was somewhere around there that I was sitting on the yard, rapping with the Toledo Madman, throwing pebbles at the fence, and he told me about freedom. Not the usual jabber about hitting the street to be free, because a man can be more free inside the fence than any square John out there can ever understand or begin to suspect.
You take a place, a hard-nosed max joint like our happy little home, with all the security systems they’ve been able to figure out, all the nice electrical gadgetry and Big Brotherhood, where you can’t help but hate the hack and you get nothing more than the minimal requirements of survival. Nobody expects anything of you and there’s not a thing they can take from you. That’s freedom. The things that bind and prison a man are his own hopes and fears. When you’ve surrendered them, there’s no way they can ever hold you, there’s just no way for them to grab hold of you.
So it’s all a question of sitting out the darkness, sitting here in the cell that’s a cave and a dark womb, knowing the darkness that lives like a sad fire on an empty hillside where the gathered masses have at last fallen silent and the dead past has no more reality than all the songs trailing across the air.
The Toledo Madman is gone now. Eventually he became so free of all this lurking darkness that he sat in the back corner of his cell for hours, then days, at a time, radiating a warmth and brightness that pushed back the edges of the night and all of us here in the cellblock could begin to see. The hacks began to tremble a little, just to have to walk past his cell; to meet the placid smile and feel the glow of his eyes on them. They finally took him back there for two weeks — guy coming out of there said the hacks were beating him every night, trying to put out his lights. Anyone in the place could’ve told them they were throwing water at the sun, but they never bothered to ask.
Two weeks of that was enough — that infuriating smile that branded them while they were breaking their shitsticks over his shoulders and head, they couldn’t take that — a knife in the balloon. It’s hard to hit a man who doesn’t cringe or cry out or at least hate you. They called it madness — the Toledo Madman in the full radiant glory of his time-disguise! —and shipped him off to a place where the shrinks could look at him and not feel the eyes of a hundred cons like shanks pressing at their backs, questioning them every second.
I got a letter from him yesterday. He said the damn sparrows followed him up there and they sit on the fence, laughing at him still. And he asked about Hercules — who I flushed down my toilet two days after they shipped the Madman out. This is no life for a cute little mouse like that.
1975, London Correctional Institution London, Ohio