If many of my memories of Michael’s time in prison involve coaching him over the phone through his writings about canonical texts, a good portion of the rest involve long visits with him and, most often, with my aunt Karen, in Norco’s barebones visiting room and prison yard. These visits possessed an emotional rhythm: the sense of steeling yourself against the difficult as you started the early morning drive from L.A., the rising anticipation as you got closer; the quiet joy of the visit; and the aching disappointment that inevitably came with departure, with leaving one’s loved one still inside.
Once one arrived at the prison, visits had an intensely ritualistic quality, the underlying purpose of which is control. You might want to say control of the inmates or control of their families, but that wouldn’t seem quite right. The target of the rituals felt more indiscriminate. The object is simply control in its own right.
As Michael, known to the system as K-10033, wrote, inmates went by numbers, not names, and visiting days were allocated to sets of numbers. Half of the evens on one Saturday. Half of the odds on Sunday. The other halves of each set the following week. Before you could even begin to visit, you first had to apply for permission to enter. You had to get your name “on the list.” This could take months. And then the visits themselves were odysseys. We generally set out at about four or five in the morning, in the half-dark of predawn, and drove straight toward the rising sun, in order to get to the prison by 6:30 A.M. There we would join the line of waiting cars snaking from the parking lot past a row of suburban baseball fields that bordered the prison. This was a good time for heart-to-hearts between Karen and me. What were her aspirations for her ministry? Who did she have living on her couch and why? What was happening with my marriage to Bob? There was a funny story about an earthquake hitting while she was high from a time, decades earlier, before she’d gotten sober. If we went on a Saturday, there would often be Little League games in play as we drove away past the fields in the afternoon.
AERIAL PHOTO OF CALIFORNIA REHABILITATION CENTER–NORCO
At 7:30 A.M. the guards would let a parade of Kias and Hyundais, Chevys and Dodges, into the parking lot, and then you would sign in at a lectern at the front of a canopied structure with wooden benches that looked something like a tent revival meeting. Hosts of mainly black and brown women, but white women, too, and many children, and some men, flitted in the shadows under the canopy. We could take in up to $30 in quarters or singles in plastic Baggies, and we always took the maximum. The point of this was to purchase treats for the inmates from the row of vending machines dispensing, as it turned out, quite disgusting microwaveable cheeseburgers and burritos along with mystery meat plates.
It also mattered how you dressed. You couldn’t wear blue denim because that’s what the inmates wore. You couldn’t wear beige or khaki because that’s what the guards wore. You couldn’t wear tight clothes or clothes that showed cleavage or skirts shorter than two inches above the knee or sleeves shorter than two inches below the shoulder. If you were dressed wrong, you weren’t let in. You always took a backup set of clothes, just in case.
If there was a focal point of the control, I suppose it was the attempt to target desire. The lines of women who lined the benches under the canopy of the faux revivalist meeting pushed back. In an inmate family chat room, one wife wrote:
I always dress up like i am going on a hot date . . . cause i am. . . with my hubby!!! :D I usually wear a dress and high heels . . . just make sure the dress is no more than two inches above the knee . . . this is true even if you wear leggings underneath. When i wear pants, I usually go with dark black jeans or black or chocolate color slacks or pedal pushers (they show off the heels real good;)) with a pretty top. Pink and purple are always safe choices. I wear red a lot. . . . Do your lips right before your process in and he will be drooling the second he lays eyes on you!!;) Have fun lady!!:
And another chimed in:
I must say I agree with Hisprettygirl and Jackjack—I always dress to impress because I like to remind him what he’s got waitin for him at home;)
Karen and I always kept it pretty basic and simple, loose-fitting pants and comfortable T-shirts or sweaters. We weren’t really the objects of the policy. We were there to see a son, a cousin, not a lover.
After the waiting, the signing in, and the clothing check, one waited again until a guard called the number of the inmate you happened to be visiting. Then, all at once, the eight-foot-tall metal gates underneath the front guard tower would roll open, clanging, and let you into a small pen.
The gates would then clang again, snapping behind you now, like a drawbridge, and then another set of gates in front of you would open, to let you onto a short walkway that led into the nondescript processing room, a stand-alone hut-like structure, its interior like any other undecorated, institutional waiting room. There you’d wait again and then hand over your ID and your Baggie filled with coins and single bills to be checked, before receiving your pass and proceeding through a metal detector into the prison yard, a scant place with little vegetation and scraggly grass, to cross over a short walkway to the visiting hall.
Entering the hall, the smell of bleach would wash over you. To your right was another guard station, this one a raised booth. There was a row of vending machines directly across from the guard station. You’d reach up to the guards to hand over your pass, and they would phone the dormitories to call your inmate for his visit. If you’d gotten into the line of cars early, the room would be empty, filled with only low round tables and small chairs, like the kind they have in kindergartens. If you’d gotten into the line of cars late, you’d enter a room already swimming with men in blue jeans, blue shirts, and tattoos, each with a little circle of color surrounding him, the whole space incongruously like a small Italian piazza full of merrily buzzing café tables.
You’d spend your time talking, trying to avoid eating crap, or, if the weather was decent, you’d spend the time outside, walking in tight circles in the yard or sitting at a picnic table. Sometimes you would get your picture taken all together by a guard serving as prison photographer, who stood on duty snapping one Polaroid after another. There were a handful of board games around for the kids. Now and then the loudspeaker would sound for the count—every inmate in the prison had to be counted every so often—and all the men would file off, emptying the room, only to return twenty or thirty minutes later. You would stay for three or four hours and it would feel like a blink of an eye when they called your inmate back to his cell.
Then you would reverse your itinerary to the exit. Past the vending machines and raised guard station. Out the door. Across the scraggly grass. Through the metal detector. Wave to the guards in the processing room. Wait for the guards up above to open the pen. Into the pen. Wait for the guards up above to close the gate behind you and open the gate in front of you. Listen to it clank behind you, the drawbridge shutting yet again. I’m not sure if we ever waved at the guards in the front tower. I don’t think so. But maybe we did now and then.
In the early afternoon, you would drive away past the baseball games, echoing with the cheers of what looked like happy suburbanites, and if you had managed to avoid eating any of the microwaveable junk from the vending machines, you’d turn the corner from the prison and drive a couple of blocks into town to have a meal at Wendy’s or Burger King. They were a major step up from what was on offer in Norco. And then you would head back to Los Angeles, quiet most of the way, drained and defeated once again.
You never once would have seen the lake beside which the luxury hotel was built in 1928, although they were both still there. The hotel now serves as the women’s prison, visible up on the hill above the parking lot and looking grand, like some old-time mansion.
By this point in his incarceration, Michael seemed “secure in himself” to Karen. His mother could tell that he was proud of his accomplishment with his college classes, and she was relieved that he never turned into a tough. “No, he didn’t get tough in prison,” she recalled, adding, “Later he got tough for the lifestyle he wanted to live; but in prison he was still gentle, smiling, Michael.” He got tough during his second stint, for his parole violation, and in those final months of his life. But in Norco, not yet.
Michael did become, Karen says, “a little more lax, less wound up, a little cocky.” She tells a story about one disappointing visit. “I’ll never forget, they’ll call him in for a count. He goes out. I wait and he doesn’t show. One of his buddies tells me, he’s not coming back out because he had chewing gum in his mouth.” She lost the rest of her visit with her son that day because he’d gotten cocky.
But he never turned into a tough, although there were plenty of those to be seen in that visiting room.