chapter six

WALLET ON THE BEACH

1996

 

After I left the prison, I drove to a nearby McDonald’s to reconstruct the interview. I found a corner booth and as I started to scribble notes, I picked up enough snippets of conversation from surrounding tables to realize that the people around me eating burgers had also been visiting inmates at Frontera. There seemed to be an equal number who’d been visiting the nearby men’s prison. But these friends and relatives displayed none of the emotion I thought I saw in the faces and body language in the parking lot. “Betty seemed to be in a good mood today,” said one man who, I assumed from his age, was the father of an inmate. That was as intense as it got. But later, as I started to pack up my stuff to leave, I overheard a couple sitting at the next table talk about someone I presumed to be their son. The woman was weeping.

“He’s lost so much weight,” she said.

“Honey, he’s okay. He’ll be okay,” the man said. “You’ve got to stop worrying.”

This was an echo of long-ago endless conversations between my parents in the early days of my brother’s incarceration in the very same prison: my mother’s chronic worry and her resulting insomnia; my father’s concern for her alternating with his irritation at her fretting; his own worry about my brother mixed with his fury at the crime he had committed.

When I first visited my brother, he was in the maximum-security section. I went there alone because it was midweek and my parents were both working. I was eighteen, a sophomore at the University of California at Berkeley. We sat face-to-face, a heavy glass partition between us, and talked through a telephone. My tall, handsome brother, confident in the eyes of the outside world, seemed diminished, shriveled by the surroundings. He professed to be fine, just fine. In his first letter to me from prison he’d quoted the seventeenth-century poet Richard Lovelace, “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage” (“To Althea, From Prison”). But no matter what he claimed, it was clear that the stone walls of this prison were very thick indeed. He’d lost a lot of weight and his fingernails were pitted, eaten up by psoriasis. Before he went to prison, this disease had been mild. Now there was nothing mild about his disfigured fingernails.

I hadn’t seen him since the summer before. It had been a rough summer. Actually, his relationship with my parents had been tumultuous since he had dropped out of college a few years before. He’d been living in an apartment in Hollywood with friends and working on and off at a string of low-paying jobs. In short, my parents’ dreams for him had not panned out. He had a girlfriend who they didn’t think was of his caliber, though at that point no one knew exactly what that caliber was, and whatever it was he seemed determined to click it down as far below their expectations as he could.

My role in our family was to be my brother’s advocate, his defender. I loved him steadfastly but anxiously, and every time he got into a brawl with my parents and stormed out of the house I worried that I would never see him again. And then one night, the brawl was so loud and so intense that I was sure I would never see him again. He had come for dinner, and we’d almost made it to dessert when all hell broke loose. I can’t remember what the fight was about. I just remember I backed out of the dining room and into my bedroom and put Ray Charles on my record player, turning the volume up to drown out the shouting. Then, the shouting stopped and I heard a knock on my door.

When I opened it, my brother’s eyes were fiery with rage, but he was also tearful. “Good-bye, sis,” he said, putting his arms around me. There was a finality in his voice that frightened me. I was right to be frightened. He stopped calling home. After a few weeks, my mother, who was ill from sleeplessness, finally called him. His phone had been disconnected. My father drove by his apartment in Hollywood. It was one of those stucco multiplexes with names like Palm Gardens or Bougainvillea Plaza. The manager said that he’d moved out owing rent and had left no forwarding address. My father was a special agent for the Internal Revenue Service and pretty good at finding people, but he couldn’t find my brother.

That was June. Then, one Saturday in August, I came home to find a Santa Monica police officer in the living room talking to my parents. My brother’s wallet had been found on the beach in Santa Monica, miles away from his apartment in Hollywood; my parents’ address in Silver Lake was on his driver’s license. The next morning, I woke up to the sound of my mother crying. My parents were in the kitchen. My father was cooking scrambled eggs.

“Sweetheart,” my father said, “I know he’s fine. He probably just lost his wallet.” My mother worried out loud that he was dead. I worried, too, but for some reason I felt that expressing it would be disloyal to my brother. I feigned confidence that he was fine and, along with my father, adopted a you worry too much attitude with my overwrought mother. By the time I returned to school in Berkeley in the fall, there was still no word.

On my eighteenth birthday at the end of September, girls on my floor at Davidson Hall gathered in my room to eat the German chocolate cake my mother had sent. Just as one of my friends lit the candles the phone rang.

“It’s your brother,” my roommate said, “he wants to wish you a happy birthday.”