eighteen
BITTERSWEET
2009-2011
No one really goes to prison alone. An invisible rope stretches from the heart and mind of a prisoner out through the bars of his cell, up into the sky, over hills and water, dropping back down to earth far away, inside the lives of the people he left behind. As the years pass—five, ten, twenty, thirty—the fibers of that rope become frayed, and sometimes they snap.
The inmates who get out are the ones whose hearts are already on the outside. They are the ones whose friends and family held on, took phone calls they couldn’t afford, hired lawyers instead of taking vacations, prayed, visited, and held their incarcerated loved ones aloft.
By the time Eddie Ramirez first met his wife, Lupe, inside San Quentin’s visiting room, he had been locked up for fifteen years. She hadn’t come to meet a murderer. She had come to support a friend who was visiting her husband. While giving her friend some privacy, Lupe and Eddie would talk in the visiting room about this and that. When Eddie realized they were getting close, “I told her, ‘to be involved with me is to be involved with a lot of pain, and you don’t need that.’ I told her to walk away. ‘There’s too much pain.’ She didn’t understand. By then I had been denied by the board six times. I didn’t want to put her through what more denials would mean.”
Now, years later, sitting together at their dining room table, Lupe says, “I don’t remember the exact time when it changed, but we became very close friends. He was someone I could share important things, confidential things with. Personal things I was going through as a single mother raising my two boys. He told me his family hadn’t visited in a while and I contacted them to try and get them to come see him. I reminded them he was that nice uncle and nephew that wrote. People in his family said at one time they believed he would come home, but year after year, when he kept getting denied, they couldn’t really believe it anymore. I can’t pinpoint a date when it changed. It just evolved and”—Lupe breaks into a gentle smile—“he liked me.”
“I felt close to her from the beginning,” Eddie says. “But you probably got an indication when I kissed you on your cheek. It shocked her. I remember that day. She was leaving and I just kissed her on the cheek. I was getting ready to duck for the right cross.” He laughs. “But she didn’t. She just looked at me. Her eyes were wide.”
“I was shocked,” Lupe says. “We had been friends. We hugged. I was just being careful. In fact, I tried not to visit as often, but my girlfriend really needed me.”
“After he kissed you on the cheek?” I ask.
“After I felt like I was falling in love with him,” Lupe says, “I tried to keep my distance. I wasn’t sure what kind of life that was going to bring me, so I would try not to visit. But my girlfriend, Ana Marie, would ask me to go with her so she could see her husband, Tony. I could never say no to her and there I would go again. Ed would tell me, ‘You don’t know what you’re getting into.’ I got scared for a while. I went home and thought about it. I got pressure from friends not to be involved with him. I had no idea.”
“Before I met Lupe, I would never go to visits,” Eddie says, “not even for family. Even though I wrote my family every other week, tons of letters, as the years went by, me and my family got further and further apart. Whenever they would bring up coming to visit me, I would tell them something, make an excuse why they shouldn’t. For me it was better to stay distant. That was my life in there and it had nothing to do with out here. It was a life of pain.”
“After we met, we went through a few board hearing denials,” Lupe says. “It was awful. Everyone who knew him would speak highly of him. For him to be denied, I couldn’t understand. We saw a pattern with the board and governor and realized it was going to be really hard.”
A few years into their courtship, Lupe and two dozen of Eddie’s family and friends pooled their money and raised $3,000 to hire Steve DeFilippis, a private attorney, to represent Eddie. As Eddie’s attorney, DeFilippis challenged the parole board’s denials in Marin County Superior Court. Eventually the court ordered the parole board to release Eddie, but the parole board fought back, appealing the court’s ruling to the state court of appeal. “It was back and forth,” Eddie says, “but it felt like for the first time, I could possibly go home.”
The following year, with his appeal hanging in the courts, Eddie went to another parole hearing, and again the board denied him parole.
The next time Eddie went to the board, in 2003, for the first time, the commissioners found him suitable. “The commissioners asked me, ‘We see no emotion in you. Don’t you want to go home?’ And I said, ‘Of course I want to go home, but I know there’s still a lot of red tape.’ And they said, ‘That’s smart.’ I said, ‘I’m not going to set myself up to be hurt. I’ve had too many hurts in my family and in my life and I’m not going to set myself up for that again.’ I called Lupe and left a message. I knew not to sound excited.”
“We thought, ‘He’s coming home,’” Lupe says. “But my dad was ill, and my best friend, Ana Marie, the person who connected us in the visiting room, had died from cancer. Thinking Eddie was coming home and he would parole to Southern California, I moved to Los Angeles to live closer to my family. Then I got the phone call that Governor Gray Davis had reversed Eddie’s parole date.”
“We were devastated,” Eddie says. “My attorney, Steve DeFilippis, would keep moving forward, holding the torch, filing appeals. Every setback he would file in the courts. The next time I went to the board, nearly a year later, they denied me parole. Steve couldn’t believe it.”
“It was getting hard,” Lupe says. “I had put a down payment on a home for the two of us in Los Angeles, and when he didn’t get out, I backed out of the deal too late and lost my down payment of $3,000. I was thinking of coming back up north. I had gone to San Jose State [University], and I wanted to get my administration credential. That’s when I told Edward I couldn’t do it anymore. He called and I said, ‘I can’t keep this relationship up. I’m raising two sons, working full-time, going to school, and have no time to visit.’ It was the hardest thing.” Lupe’s eyes fill with tears. “My heart was dying.”
Though he loved Lupe, Eddie could not bear to keep dragging her through year after year of hope, only to have their common dream crushed at the very last minute via a fax from the governor. If he wasn’t going to get out, he reasoned, at least Lupe should have a chance at a real life with someone else. “I really believed it was over,” Eddie remembers, “and I vowed to myself I wouldn’t have another relationship.”
They didn’t talk for months. Lupe says she missed Eddie and wanted him to call and write. Eddie didn’t see the point. “It was like a scab. The wall was still there. It was like I was intruding in her life.”
“When we talked on the phone, I had to be careful that I wasn’t warm and friendly,” Lupe says. “I always cried when I hung up with you. Then I realized I was going to be with Eddie whether or not he ever got out. But I never told Eddie.”
“I’m in there thinking it’s over,” Eddie says. “I saw the chaplain and I told him I didn’t think I could make it anymore. I’d lost Lupe and I’d lost my oldest sister, Patricia. After the governor took my date, she died of a drug overdose. I was at the bottom of my rope. I was on the yard and I asked God to let me die. The chaplain pulled me to him and hugged me and rubbed my head and cried. He didn’t preach to me or give me scriptures of hope, he just cried. It hurt him, too. It was like he was hugging his son. Somehow things started to feel better. It felt like a boost that I could go on. Just that much. After that I wasn’t depressed anymore. I was going to fight for myself.”
The next time Eddie went to the board, they found him suitable for a second time.
Lupe asks if I want to hear the message Eddie left on her answering machine.
“You still have the message from 2004?” I ask.
“I will never erase it,” she says, and walks over to press the play button on the machine. “Hello. This is just Eddie. I called earlier to let you know the good news: they gave me my date back. I’ll try to call you tomorrow. Bye-bye.”
“I said to myself,” Lupe says, clicking the answering machine off, “‘He still loves me.’”
One hundred fifty days later, Governor Schwarzenegger surprised everyone by signing Eddie’s parole papers. In California, of the nearly 5,000 lifers scheduled for parole board hearings in 2005, Eddie Ramirez would be one of only thirty-five the governor released on parole.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Eddie says.
He hurried to the prison pay phone to call Lupe. A few days later, when he finally stepped out of the parole officer’s car, he walked up to Lupe, put down the box he was carrying, and hugged her.
“And I gave him a big kiss. And that’s how he knew, ‘This is it!’” Lupe says. “It was great.”
With that kiss, Eddie says, “I knew all our plans could go on. We could continue. And we’ve been attached ever since. That was February 24, 2005. We got married a few months later on May 14th at a friend’s church.” It was a small wedding, just their immediate family, his sisters, Lupe’s parents, and Eddie’s Aunt Eloise and Uncle Beto. Since Eddie was on parole, they couldn’t really go anywhere, so they spent their honeymoon at a hotel in Redondo Beach. Someday they would take a real honeymoon in Hawaii.
For fifteen years, beginning in the early ’90s, Kathleen drove the twenty minutes from her home to the east gate of San Quentin. And nearly every weekend she came, Don submitted to a full-body cavity search so he could sit the required inches from Kathleen in the visiting room. There, inside the bare-walled room with barred windows, coin-operated snack machines and ice-cold water fountains, Kathleen and Don talked about their radically different lives: one incarcerated, the other free.
That wasn’t their only form of contact. In the middle of the day, before being locked up for count, Don would take his turn inside one of the phone booths down on North Block’s first tier and call Kathleen collect. Restricted to fifteen-minute phone calls, Don would make all of his calls to Kathleen.
Sitting at her kitchen table or out on her private deck, the arbor overhead dripping with sweet-scented purple wisteria, Kathleen would tell Don stories about her free life and work: all about caring for her sick mother and her upcoming travel to Italy, Hawaii, Alaska—always tempering her tales in a way that wouldn’t make it harder for Don to do time.
Sometimes at night, when it was his tier’s turn at the pay phones, Don would call Kathleen to talk about his evening thoughts and wishes. Taking the phone into bed with her, they would talk like lovers do.
Day or night, Kathleen counted on Don to soothe her unchecked private anxieties, and in turn, she comforted him.
Somehow they knew if Don ever got out they would fit together like a pair of misplaced gloves.
So it was when Don got out of prison after serving nearly twenty-eight years for murder; no one could have imagined a sweeter place for him to land than Kathleen’s world.
Still, back in April 2009, when the word was definite that Don was going to get out of prison, Kathleen says, it was scary. “I had always been able to do what I darn well pleased. Right before Don came home, I opened up my medicine cabinet,” she says, over a woman-to-woman chat a few months after Don got out, “and I got my toothpaste and looked at all my stuff in there and I thought, ‘Seriously, Kathleen. What is this going to be like to see a can of shaving cream and a razor? Won’t it be an invasion on your things?’” Kathleen stops and looks at me.
“But oh my God! Not one of those things have become an issue. He just fits like an old shoe. He’s just as neat and clean as I am.” Kathleen says with a chuckle. “He even comes up with better ideas about how to do something or store something. A few days after he moved in, I looked at the can of shaving cream. It’s perfect. The toothbrush isn’t icky. It’s perfect, too. My God, this man thinks the way I do. He’s not annoying to be around or have around. And he loves everything I cook.”
Kathleen is the ultimate homemaker. She loves to cook and clean. To her, holidays are one more opportunity to dress her childhood home in decorations that have been in the family for generations. And with all the generations around to keep an eye on their beloved sister, aunt, cousin, there were bound to be questions.
Where was Aunt Kathleen going every Saturday and Sunday? Did she have an unknown friend?
To quell their concerns over the years, Kathleen told her older brother (who lives next door) and most of her extended family about her “friend inside San Quentin” only on a “need to know” basis. But now that her friend was going to be living with her in the family home, she knew the questions wouldn’t be so easily shrugged off. She just hoped her family members would give themselves enough time to get to know Don for the man he had become, rather than judge him for his criminal past.
The trouble with the local doctor and Don’s parole agent didn’t help matters. With a GPS monitoring device on his ankle, there weren’t going to be any trips to the beach or the local pool, where anyone wearing full-length pants on a hot summer day might draw attention. So Don set about fixing their shared home, scraping, priming, and painting what was peeling; trimming rosebushes; and planting a vegetable garden in a small plot of land at the back of her brother’s yard.
Don says he is content to sit inside the house or outside on their back deck or front porch. The silence is sweet. Leaving the house, he says, is still disorienting. “I can’t seem to figure out direction,” he says, living in a valley among hills, “which way is north or west.” It will take time for him to get his bearings.
“Are you getting married?” I ask Don over a cup of tea in their kitchen, nearly eight months into their new life together. “Remember when you were inside, you said when you got out, you were going to get married right away. It’s been nearly a year. So, when’s the wedding?”
“I don’t know,” Don says. “When I was inside, making things official seemed important, but now that we’re together on the outside, I don’t feel it’s really all that necessary to rush into it. We have time and things are going really well. So, we’re not in a rush.”
“And Kathleen?” I ask. “How does she feel about it?”
“You should ask her,” Don says. “We haven’t really talked about it that much, but I think she feels the same way.”
A year after that conversation, Don and Kathleen—still engaged, not married—invite me and my husband over for a Saturday-night dinner to celebrate Don’s second year of freedom. When we arrive, Robert, Kathleen’s first cousin, is in the family kitchen cooking up an Italian storm. He’s stout, middle-aged, gregarious. His fondness for her is as clear as it is for Don. For three hours we eat and drink and watch the San Francisco Giants on the flat-screen TV Don has installed on an extendable arm on the kitchen wall, so it can be pushed out of the way. All night I watch Don, Kathleen, and “Robbie” move together, laughing, jabbing each other with jokes, easy. There are a couple of references to where Don’s been, and to San Quentin. I remember Kathleen’s request for me not to talk about Don around her brother, but it sounds like things are all out in the open with her family now. To be sure, a week later I ask Kathleen if it’s all right if I call Robert to ask him what he thinks about her relationship with Don.
“Sure,” she says. “Fine with me. Do you have his number?”
I call Robert at his office. He’s general counsel for an insurance company and has spent his career defending against worker’s compensation claims in Sacramento. He’s not someone easily fooled.
Robert says he knew for years that Kathleen was visiting a man she knew inside San Quentin but assumed she was just doing it to be nice. “I didn’t know it developed into something more than that,” he says. That all changed one night early in 2009. “I was out on the deck talking to her niece, Katy, and she said, ‘Don’s getting out,’ and blah blah blah. I said, ‘Well, what’s their relationship?’ Katy looked at me and goes, ‘You don’t know?’ I said, ‘I know it’s her friend.’ She said, ‘They’re boyfriend and girlfriend.’ I said, ‘Oh, okay. Okay.’ That was the first time I heard it. I didn’t know at the time he had been convicted of murder, but I found out real quick.”
Robert got on the Internet and Googled Don. When he found out about the crime, how there had been a bad deal, drugs, burglary, and Don ended up shooting someone, “it didn’t jive. I couldn’t see my cousin dating a guy who had committed a murder. The type of person who would do what he did, I couldn’t put the two of them together. It didn’t make sense.
“We met him almost right away, in May 2009, about a month after he got out. I go down to Kathleen’s every couple of months and my brother, who passed away last July 4th, used to go there, too. It was both of our birthdays, and Don was out. We were going to meet Don.
“We were all together for the whole weekend and we spent time together. My brother and I watched them interact. We considered at one point taking him aside and saying, ‘You fuck over or screw around with our cousin, and we aren’t going to be two happy campers.’
“But once we met him, we realized we didn’t have to do that. We could tell that he really loved Kathleen by the way he treated her. And he was not the type of guy you get concerned about. The only concern you have is how he could be so stupid when he was young and waste twenty-seven years of his life? It was sad because you could see he would have been a productive person if he hadn’t gotten into the stupid shit he got into when he was a kid. In the end, we both said, ‘He seems like the nicest guy in the world. If you told people his background, people probably wouldn’t believe you.’ ‘Come on. You got to be kidding me! He couldn’t do that!’ That’s the impression you get from Don. And he likes to eat and we’re a family that likes to eat. So if you like food and you like to eat and you have an interest in food, you’ve got one leg up on our family.”
Robert says one surprise is Don’s enthusiasm. “He’s so much fun to be around. He’s waited all this time to live life, so he’s enthusiastic about everything, whether it’s fishing or cooking a pork chop. We all get jaded as we get older and Don doesn’t seem to have that. He waited so long, and now he’s a hog in high cotton, and he’s loving it.”
It’s been eight months since Phillip Seiler got out of San Quentin. I’ve driven up to Sacramento to interview some state legislators, and we have plans to meet for lunch.
“What was the worst part of being locked up?” I ask him.
“Being away from my family. That’s the worst part. Not the cells. Not the food. Not the violence. Not being told what to do 24/7,” Phillip says, a haunting, empty look on his face. “It’s not being with your family. Of course, losing your freedom comes a very close second. But for me, it was not being with my family for twenty years. Missing all the wonderful things, the weddings, the births, all the wonderful things and not being there through the tough times when I could have helped out in one way. Family member getting older and needing help. Kids getting older. That’s the hardest part of doing time. That’s what I tell the kids: It’s not only [that] you come to prison and you’re locked up—the danger involved. You’re going to miss your family. You’re going to miss your mom and your brothers and sisters and friends and going to the movies and getting in your car and going to the park. That’s the biggest part for me: being so far away from my family and just having phone calls, or letters, or occasional visits that are so structured that they’re really limited visits. And all the crap they have to go through when they visit because of untrained officers being rude and disrespectful. Not all of them. There’s some really good staff inside CDC, but there’s also very bad staff, so our people have to suffer the indignities. I know there was a lot of really bad things that happened, that my family and friends didn’t want to ruin the visit by telling me what happened. For some people, over and over again, it gets so bad, they can’t do it anymore.”
In 2006 the Urban Institute released a report, “Understanding the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry: Research Findings from the Urban Institute’s Prisoner Reentry Portfolio.” It’s a long title, but the information in the report makes a lot of sense. For instance, the authors report, “In recent years, research has found that strengthening the family network and maintaining supportive family contact can improve outcomes for both family members and prisoners. In fact, maintaining family connections through letters, phone calls, and personal visits has shown to reduce recidivism rates. Yet given the challenges of maintaining this contact—including visiting regulations, transportation costs to distant corrections facilities, other financial barriers, and emotional strains—more than half of incarcerated parents report never having received a personal visit from their children.”
Phillip says he tells the teens he speaks to that he has been able to fit back into society because he spent twenty years laying the groundwork to come home. He kept in contact with his law-abiding family and friends. He cut off the friends who didn’t follow the law. He kept in contact with his former employers, “so everybody that I know, except the people I’ve met since I’ve been out, know my whole history. They know I was in prison. They know why I was in prison. They know what I’m about, what I do, who I am, and how I am. And people that I meet find out real quickly that I was in prison for murder, because I think it’s important. If I meet a woman I want to date, very early on I let that woman know who she’s looking across the table at, because I think it’s my responsibility. I’m not just some average Joe who is dating. I was in prison for twenty years and, yeah, I killed somebody. So I think that’s important for someone you’re going to spend some time with to know early on.”
“Has anyone said, ‘Oh, forget it’?” I ask, wondering if once they discover his past, the women don’t want anything more to do with him.
“Yeah. I never heard from her again,” Phillip says. “A couple, yeah. Two. But most, they’ll be set back a little bit. But I say, ‘Ask anything you want.’ It’s not like I went to prison for writing bad checks. It’s a very serious thing. So I think it’s important to let whoever it is, really early on, to let them know this is who I am and this is what I did and this is your chance to burn rubber. This is your chance to escape, exit stage left. It’s not who I am now but it’s in my past and this is something I did. So everybody I know, knows my history.”
“Was it hard to be apart from women for so long?”
Phillip makes a gasping sound. “Yeah. Hard.”
“So, are you dating?”
“Yep.”
“Do you have a lot of girlfriends?” I ask gently. Phillip’s response is laughter—a silly, upbeat, I’ve-got-a-secret sort of laugh.
“How many?” I ask.
“A few. I have a few. I don’t keep numbers,” he says, his voice soft, low, “but more than a dozen.”
“More than a dozen? Are you kidding?”
“No,” he says, slightly proud.
“What about your friend who was waiting for you that day you got out?” I ask.
“We’re still friends,” Phillip says matter-of-factly. “She’s way up in Portland, so we talk on the phone all the time. Talked to her just a few days ago.”
“Does she have a special place,” I ask, “because she was the first one you saw when you got out?”
“All my friends have a special place for different types of reasons. But I really think if I don’t have a year of playing the field, so to speak, I will regret it. There was one woman. We really hit it off and it was starting to get more serious. We had to break it off. But, yeah, it’s really amazing. I think I’m getting close to wanting to settle down. I want to be in a steady relationship. I just want to keep my promise to myself.”
Back in prison, Phillip says, he made a pledge to himself that if and when he ever got out, he wasn’t going to get into a serious relationship for at least a year. He knew it would be healthy to have some time to be free, to figure things out.
“My year’s not up yet,” he says. “So, I’m going camping this weekend for the first time and she’s got all this camping stuff, so it’s totally cool. I’m doing what I can do, but she’s doing most of it. She’s camped and hiked before. Then I’m going kayaking the following week down the American River. I used to go river rafting all the time before prison. But this was just some people I met at the river a few weeks ago. They had kayaks and I was talking to them and they said, ‘You wanna check it out?’ And I said, “Yeah.’ So they let me try it out and they said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna go to the river in a few weeks. If you want, we have an extra boat.’ So I’m going to do that in a couple of weeks.”
Turns out, for a good-looking, healthy, active man like Phillip, remaining single may be one challenge he hadn’t really counted on. “There are so many women out here,” Phillip says, his eyes like those of a kid in a toy store. “I went on a date with a woman I met at the city library, and another woman I met down at the park along the river.”
Driving home from Sacramento, with more than an hour to ponder our conversation, I wonder: Would I date someone if he told me he had been in prison for twenty-plus years for committing a murder ? If I answer yes, is that a positive reflection on my character, or should my instincts be more discerning? Maybe if I knew the man before he went to prison, from high school or college. If I had a history with him and knew how the murder happened. I hope I would have an open mind.
So, I take it one step further. I know Phillip. What if I had met him in the library, or down on the beach at the river, and we had talked? It’s possible. I may have been surprised to hear about his past. Maybe that would have ended any possibility for a date right then and there. Or maybe not.
A month later, nearly nine months into his freedom, Phillip calls. He’s practically singing into the phone. “I’ve met someone.”
“You’ve met someone? I know,” I jest. “You’ve met a lot of someones !”
“No, this is different,” he says. “I’m in love. She’s amazing. Her name is Desiree.”
I don’t even try to hide my surprise. “I thought you were going to wait. It isn’t a year yet. What about all the other women you were dating?”
“I know. I know.” Phillip laughs at himself. “I tried. Nine months is pretty good. About three weeks ago I was facilitating a training for IPP [Insight Prison Project] in Marin. We met and just hit it off. She has been working with IPP inside prison, working with the restorative justice program for a while.”
“Is that okay? I mean, is it okay if you date someone who is volunteering inside a prison?” I ask, a bit worried. “I thought there were rules about that.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s kind of on the low. We’re not broadcasting it. But I thought you would want to know.”
“Are you happy? Is this what you want?”
“You know,” he says, “I never thought I’d meet someone like Desiree. It’s still pretty new but we’ve been spending all our time together. She comes up here for weekends.”
“Where does she live?”
“That’s a bit of a problem. She lives south of San Francisco near the ocean. . . .” His voice trails off. “And that means I have to get a pass to go see her. She’s been coming to Sacramento. So far, it isn’t a problem. We’re taking it slow—just see how things develop. Who knows, maybe I’ll move to the beach.”
Three months later, in the early evening warmth of an August night, I drive with my husband through the valleys of West Marin and up into the thick, forested hills of San Geronimo. Up, up, and around I follow the twists and turns of the single-lane road until I reach the house, just below the top of a ridge at the end of a rutted dirt lane. Parking my car along a high, worn redwood fence, we cross the road and enter a secret, herbed garden of rosemary and lavender. It’s quite a place to celebrate a paroled lifer’s first year of freedom.
A small pond here, a bench under a cherry tree there, and a choice of stone paths lead to a dark-shingled, meandering cabin, with its windows lit up. So this is where San Quentin’s dedicated volunteers recover?
An open door leads to a warm, bustling kitchen filled with people who have just had their first glass of wine and are moving, talking, laughing, cooking. I say my hellos and keep moving. Like my big shepherd dog, I like to get a feeling for the whole layout of the place before I settle down. Beyond the kitchen, past steaming pots of noodles and sensory-overload stir-fry, I make my way out past small groups to a big wooden deck that stretches out beneath a towering redwood tree. The fresh-air escape offers a seductive view of the canyon below and mountains in the distance. Back inside, I continue wandering.
Just around the corner from the comfy, arts and crafts living room, I catch sight of Phillip. He’s in the kitchen standing intimately close to a woman about a head shorter than him with long, dark, wavy hair, full lips, and deep, sincere eyes. That must be Desiree. Phillip sees me and waves.
“Nancy! This is Desiree,” he says, wrapping his arm around her shoulder.
She smiles and reaches out her hand. “So good to meet you. Phillip’s told me a lot about you.”
Desiree is not a flippant, superficial person looking for a quick romance. She is a grown woman over forty with a history and a life all her own. I’m fascinated. She puts her arm comfortably around Phillip’s waist. Is this it? How can you tell when people meet and are meant for each other? When they have that special tongue-and-groove sort of compatibility? We stand chatting like people do at parties, with no real depth to the conversation but establishing the first, early grounds for later get-togethers. I watch Desiree and Phillip out of the corner of my eye all night—curious.
Just before hostess Rochelle Edwards, a volunteer with the IPP program Phillip worked with inside San Quentin, announces dinner, Phillip takes my arm, leans in, and whispers in my ear, “After dessert, don’t leave. I have a little thing I’m doing and I want you to be here.”
“Sure. I’ll stay,” I whisper back. “What is it?”
“I can’t tell you, but I want you to be here,” he says, looking me in the eyes. “It’s just a little something.”
Everyone picks up a colorful plate and fills it with curry and spicy dishes hand-flavored by friends. Some sit around picnic tables out on the deck; others scatter around the house, taking seats in comfortable couches and chairs with breathtaking views.
Like a secret society made of the rare American with access to the real lives of people locked up behind bars, they share stories about things happening inside Q without worrying they have to explain their insight. There are updates on programs and the latest news on lifers, those who have gotten a parole date, been denied one, or lost their dates to the governor. It has been a year since the California Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence, and now judges throughout the state are more frequently issuing orders to free lifers who have been found suitable for parole and have either been denied parole by the Board of Parole Hearings or had their parole date reversed by the governor. There aren’t many gatherings like this, where card-carrying volunteers can comfortably share their stories and anecdotes about the men they all know inside. Over and over, throughout dinner and dessert, names are called out with the refrain, “Did you hear about Stone?” A chorus of voices follows: “No. What?” That’s when everyone within earshot stops and waits for the announcement: “He got a date,” or “His date was taken,” or the most desired of all, “He’s getting out.”
With nearly 20,000 lifers in state prison serving sentences of life with the possibility of parole, there is always the possibility there will be good news. More familiar is the dull groan, followed by “How long was his denial?”
People turn, pick up their forks, and take a bite of the food waiting in front of them, hoping the taste will take the sting away. But with Phillip bouncing around the party, smiling and laughing, it’s hard to stay down for long. He’s proof it works. All the programs and classes and letter campaigns to the governor—it all works because here he is, free at last.
With the sun setting and a long drive down the dark mountain road ahead of me, I finish my dessert and begin to make my rounds to say good-bye, starting with Phillip.
“No,” he says, a look of panic on his face. “Wait. I have my little surprise. Don’t go yet. Help me get everyone in the living room.”
“Sure.”
Word spreads. By the look on everyone’s faces, it appears nobody knows about Phillip’s “little surprise.” I ask Phillip if I can record whatever is going to happen. “I don’t know. I guess it’s okay.”
Like a slow-moving cloud, everyone moves from their candlelight conversations into the living room, scrunching together on couches, sitting in pairs on chairs, or standing before the west-facing window, the last of the sun’s golden rays beaming onto the faces of the widening circle surrounding Phillip.
A sweet ripple of anticipating laughter runs around the circle. These friends and coworkers know one another—well. They are all devoted to the common purpose of helping men inside get the help they need to transform their once-criminal lives into lives committed to healing the gulfs of pain floating in a society troubled by crime. Over time, through persistence and patience, they have maneuvered through the web of prison rules and regulations to get as reliable as possible access to an exclusively inaccessible population. Being with Phillip on the outside tonight is a high point in their often anguished work. Someone in the circle asks everyone to hold hands. Like a conduit, a spark moves hand to hand. A prayer is said. Amen.
“First I want to say to everybody thank you so much for this wonderful night,” Phillip says. “This feels beautiful. This will probably take me weeks, maybe months to take this all in, to be a part of this gathering. It’s not just something for me, it’s for all of us.”
Then he turns to face Desiree. “I just want to say a couple nice things to Desiree in front of everybody,” Phillip says, his voice rising and falling like a little roller coaster. “One of the things I wanted to say to you, sweetheart, is ever since I saw you at the training—I thought to myself you were beautiful, and you were at a VOEG training, so she has a beautiful heart—and we got to talk a little bit, and I thought, ‘She’s wise. She’s got a beautiful mind. And she’s talking to me!’” Everyone laughs. “So that was the start. And I really know that this is right. It’s been three months, everyone. Fast but we’ve talked about a lot of things. And it is something I know in my heart, that I want to spend the rest of my life with you, baby.”
Reaching in his pocket, Phillip pulls out a small square box. Gasps of surprise escape from mouths; eyes stretch open. Phillip looks around the circle at the expectant faces and drops to one knee. Taking her left hand in his, he looks up into Desiree’s eyes. “Desiree, please marry me.”
Desiree’s face is equal parts surprise and shock. Watching her, I’m not sure whether Phillip is going to get the answer he is hoping for. Unlike a younger woman who might feel pressured to accept in front of all their friends, even if it isn’t the right answer, Desiree is a once-married, now wiser woman. Does she want to marry Phillip? Are they ready for this step? Some people get engaged after three weeks of romance, but Phillip isn’t just any man. For a moment, it’s painful. He has made a public declaration of his new love. He has exposed himself to the possibility she might deny him. How can she deny him now? That’s the beauty of the moment. Phillip loves Desiree for being the steady, mature woman she has become. No one in this room of professionally trained counselors and therapists wants Desiree to compromise, to agree to a marriage before she’s ready. But the unspoken pressure swirling around the circle is palpable. Is it possible she loves Phillip enough to say yes? Is she willing on this summer night to commit the rest of her life to Phillip, to share the long-term baggage of his past?
“Phillip,” Desiree says, “I’m going to kill you. In front of all these people!”
“That’s not an answer,” Phillip says, standing up, his heart laid out, exposed for all to see.
“So, let me say a couple of words,” Desiree says, her voice present, emotional. “The thing I love about you the most is you take absolutely nothing for granted. So when I’m with you, it’s almost like I’m seeing life again with younger eyes. I like that. You make me feel so alive and so happy and you’re so sincere and beautiful. I’m still scared. This is very fast.”
I look around the circle, then back at Phillip. Like many in the group, I lower my eyes to avoid watching the emotional train wreck. It probably is too early, but saying no now to such an early love with the potential for something greater could be catastrophic. What can she do? A conditional promise. One second. Two. The room is still, waiting while Desiree carries Phillip’s hope and promise, and makes a decision.
“Provided that this will be a long engagement”—Desiree laughs a little—“I’m going to say . . . yes.”
The room erupts in yelps of released happiness; hope and relief fill the room as Phillip slips the bright, shiny diamond ring onto Desiree’s left ring finger. “She said yes!” Phillip yells. “She said yes!”
What a difference a year makes.
Part of a lifer’s reintegration into the free, stimulus-rich world he left so long ago involves pacing himself, taking one measured step at a time. Unlike Don Cronk, who has Kathleen to provide plenty of time to adjust and lots of steady, reliable support, Jesse Reed has to hit the ground running, alert. The stakes are high. Taking too long to translate the mixed signals in his neighborhood or inside his addiction-infected family has proved to be, and most likely will continue to be, risky.
It’s been months since Jesse got out of prison, and unlike Don, who really has to think only about himself, Jesse has his brothers and sisters, his nieces and nephews, and their children to think about. After twenty-five years inside prison, there are big expectations and big pieces to pick up. Jesse wants his brothers and sisters to change their ways. He knows some of them are using drugs and even suspects his brother might be dealing drugs. “My mother is blind to the risks,” he says.
At his mother’s house, he has moved into one of a maze of rooms downstairs, and with some money his family has pooled together has bought some new clothes, starting with a smooth black leather jacket and some button-down shirts.
“You like these?” he asks, waiting for me on the sidewalk outside his mom’s house, a massive smile spreading across his face.
We’ve made plans to have lunch but he isn’t sure where to go. “It’s all changed since before I went in,” he says, looking down the block. “I don’t know where to go now.”
“We’ll just take a drive around,” I suggest, “and pick a place.”
Before heading out, he offers to give me a tour of his room. Pushing through the short white metal gate, we walk back along the side of the house past a broken swing set and a too-pruned apricot tree to the large, unkempt backyard.
Pulling a single key out of his pocket, Jesse steps up to a small, square pad of cement outside a bare door and turns the key. Inside, the room is dark. A heavy set of maroon curtains has been pulled across the single sliding-glass window, blocking out any and all natural light. Jesse reaches up and flicks on a bare bulb high up on the wall. It takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. It’s a good-size room, maybe twelve by fifteen feet. A queen-size bed set up high on a dark frame in the center of the room doesn’t leave much floor space to walk around. On a small computer table just to the left of the door is a coffeemaker and not-too-new computer. “I know it’s not much,” Jesse says, “but it’s been a good place for us to land.”
That’s when my eyes lock on the bottle of perfume sitting on one of the end tables. “Us?”
“Yeah,” Jesse says. “You know, Lisa’s living here with me.”
“Lisa?” Hm. My mind sifts through images, faces. “Was she at your celebration picnic?”
“Yeah, she was there.”
“Right? And she was . . . ” I put it together. Jesse is in a behind-the-scenes relationship with Lisa. But why? Lisa is a beautiful woman. Why not just put it out there for all to see? I pepper him with questions: “How long have you known each other? Did you know her before you went in?”
“No,” Jesse says, “we only met about five years ago.”
“So you met each other inside, before you got out?” I ask, wondering how that was possible. “And now you’re living together? Already ?” I have to admit, I’m a little disappointed. Jesse gets out of prison after almost twenty-five years in a shared cell and immediately moves into a basement bedroom with a woman he met inside. Is he really giving himself enough time to get adjusted?
“I don’t know. We’re not staying here for long.” He walks back out the door. “We want to get our own place. It’s just that we don’t have enough money saved yet. And there are complications,” he whispers, pointing to the door leading to the rest of the bedrooms on the first floor. “I’ll tell you about it while we eat lunch.”
It has been so long since Jesse went out to eat, he doesn’t know where to go or what to suggest. We drive around scanning the neighborhood, looking for the right combination of good food and lunchtime ambience. One place is mid-lunch empty. Another is too loud. We finally settle on a seafood restaurant at the far end of a mixed-use strip mall, just around the corner from Pottery Barn and IKEA.
Sliding into the dark, padded booth, Jesse struggles to order.
“Does this look good to you?” I ask, wanting it to be his choice.
“Everything looks great,” he says. “Why don’t you order for me?”
“I don’t know what you want.” I remember the trouble Don had with ordering when we went out for lunch, and I recognize the signs. There must be a hundred choices on the triple-fold-out glossy menu. He’s panicking a bit, turning the menu around in his hands, opening it and closing it, mumbling a little under his breath, “I don’t know,” over and over. Jesse wants it to be perfect but he doesn’t know what “perfect” looks like or tastes like. I order the standard fish and chips. From experience I reason fish and chips in a seafood restaurant is sort of like potatoes and eggs at a diner. There’s an unspoken agreement between customer and proprietor not to screw up something so basic. Jesse sees it all very differently. He doesn’t want to make a bad choice, and now everything and anything is possible. I’m probably not helping when I say, “Choose anything you want. It’s on me.”
A few waitress walk-bys later, Jesse settles on sweet potato fries, warm and spicy artichoke dip, and shrimp and chicken jambalaya. I order an Italian soda.
“What’s that?” Jesse asks. I explain it’s sparkling water with a touch of syrup. “I’ll have one of those, too,” he says.
“It takes your breath. You’re so used to disappointment that when the good news comes, they really said I’m really goin’. Like that!” Jesse snaps his fingers. “You’re finally overjoyed it’s not bad news. Then when you do get out of the gate it takes time to wrap your arms around it, see it for what it is. Then it’s like, what do I do now?”
When Jesse talks about prison, he uses the full name, “San Quentin.” I look around, worried people nearby will hear it and be anxious. If they are, they keep it to themselves.
“It’s wild. There’s so much going on,” he says.
And there’s so much food left over at the end of the meal, Jesse packs it up to eat later back at his mom’s house, where he can savor it alone, without the pressure to finish at the restaurant.
After lunch we drive out to the Marina Park, a spit of land that juts out into the wide waters of the San Francisco Bay. It’s a glorious midweek summer day, and no one is around, save for some retired power-walkers. We sit together on a park bench, looking west across the sparkling waters. The warm sun shines across Jesse’s upturned face, turning his cheeks and forehead a deep, golden black.
“This is beautiful,” Jesse says, “except for that.” I follow his eyes across the glint of the water to the far northern tip of the bay. There they are: the telltale sand-colored buildings of San Quentin State Prison.
“There it is,” he says. “Man. I spent twenty-five years inside those buildings. Man. You know, it’s great being out, being free. But that’s the thing: I can’t get the guys still there out of my mind. It’s survivor’s guilt. I was locked up there and now I’m out here. But all the guys I know are still in there. It stays with me.”
“And that was a close call with the Emeryville police,” I say. “How are things with your family? Are you still giving them rides?”
“No.” He blurts the word flat out, like an edict from a higher power. “No. No. No. I was terrified. I told my family they’ll have to find their own rides. They don’t understand what it means to be on parole. I mean”—he stops himself—“they think they understand but they don’t. Some of them have done a night here or there in the county jail, but they don’t know what it’s like to do twenty-four-plus years inside prison. They have no idea.”
“What’s it like at home?”
“It’s bad. My brother is using. My mother is in denial. He was even storing large boxes of drugs at the house.” He says he suspects Jayvonce was dealing drugs from the house. “I told my mom, ‘This has got to stop.’ He said he wasn’t going to do it anymore, but I saw a big bag of it down in his room. I gotta get out of there.”
“If your parole agent knew about that, would your parole be at risk?” I ask.
“Absolutely. That’s why I’m moving out. I can’t take a chance anymore.”
“Where are you moving to?”
“That’s the question. It’s expensive. When I got out, they gave me $200. That’s it. That’s if they’ll even rent to someone like me. I really want to get my own place so I can have some peace and quiet.”
“Are you and Lisa going to find a place together?”
“Oh brother. That’s a can of worms. I mean, I think Lisa’s great. But man, it’s hard. She freaks out,” he says. “Sometimes I just don’t know what to expect. It seems to be going along great, then she blows up. But I can’t afford to move out by myself. It takes first and last [months’ rent] and security [deposit]. I went to a few places and so far nothing’s come through.”
I tell Jesse that I heard from another lifer who had just gotten out of San Quentin that after being turned down by one apartment manager after another, he finally got as far as an interview with a company managing some apartment buildings in San Leandro, a middle-class community in the East Bay flatlands, before he was turned down. He said, “When I told her I’d done twenty-three years in prison for homicide, she closed the folder on top of her desk, pushed her chair back as far as she could before hitting the wall, and said, ‘You need to go find a felony-friendly apartment building.’”
“That’s exactly it!” Jesse says. “They just close the door on us. But we have one place we’re going to go look at where they said they would still talk to me, so maybe that’ll work out. I just can’t stay at my mother’s house. It’s too dangerous.”
“How did you and Lisa meet?” I ask, changing the subject.
“We met inside. She was a nurse inside San Quentin’s hospital. Still is. I was working as a janitor. I saw her and thought she looked good. So we hooked up. We really hit it off.”
“Love at first sight?”
“Pretty much,” Jesse says, laughing. “It started fairly slow, then we got to know each other more.”
“But how much time can you really spend together inside? I mean, people are always around. You can’t really do anything. . . . ”
“You’d be surprised,” Jesse says. “There are all kinds of nooks and crannies around the prison where you can be alone. We fooled around quite a bit. It was a relationship.”
“So how much can you get away with? I mean, you didn’t have sex, right?”
“Sure, we did,” Jesse says.
“More than once?” I ask, openly surprised.
“Of course.”
“Where?”
“Exam rooms, offices. Everywhere,” Jesse says. “The problem is now that we’re living together on the outside, it’s all different. Things have changed. She always wants to know where I am and when I’m going to be home. It’s like checking in at Four Post [the officer’s post inside San Quentin where inmates check in on their way to the chapel]. ‘Where you going?’ ‘What time you going to be back?’ Sometimes I feel like I’ve just exchanged one cell for another! Knowing her inside, I never knew this would happen. I wish I could just live by myself, but there’s no way.”
Listening to Jesse, I see options. “But why don’t you stay at your mom’s a little longer, until you save enough money to rent an apartment all by yourself?”
“Can’t. It’s too dangerous,” he says. “And I have nowhere else to go. Don’t worry. It’ll be okay with Lisa. We’ll work things out.” I wonder if life will ever look like more than a frying pan and a fire to Jesse.
It’s raining the day Jesse moves. I stop by, curious to see what $900 a month will get you in Oakland in 2010. Over the Bay Bridge, through a maze of freeway interchanges, I follow Google maps, drive down an off-ramp, make a couple of quick rights and park, the freeway visible through the tall hedges. On one side of the street there are trees and turn-of-the-twentieth-century houses turned into apartment buildings, their wood-framed windows and open porches a reminder of another, gentler time in Oakland. On Jesse’s side, a series of four-story, poorly designed, slapped-together apartment buildings line the block, black steel gates and a call box preventing anyone from entering who doesn’t know the code or the name of someone who will buzz them in. Stepping up to the security front door, I search the long list of names, the white plastic letters pushed together in a row . . . Reed. There it is. I push “star,” then his code. There’s a loud dial tone followed by a cackling ring. “Hello?”
“Jesse, it’s Nancy.”
“Nancy!” his voice brightens, booming through the speaker. “You found it! I’ll come down and get you.”
While I wait, a beat-up truck stops in the middle of the street in front of Jesse’s building. Piled high in the back of the flatbed is a collection of brand-new couches, chairs, and an ottoman, each piece wrapped in sheets of thick, clear plastic, the ends taped closed. Two men, one in his seventies and feeble, the other younger, the brawn of the duo, stand outside the truck, looking up at the building. From inside the thick glass door, Jesse appears. He tries to cover the anxiety of the moment with his reliable smile, but there’s just too much going on. He’s got furniture coming. And now he’s got debt.
“Is that yours?” I ask.
“I think it probably is,” he says, looking out at the truck parked in the rain-drenched street. Meeting the older of the two delivery men halfway up the steps, Jesse points to the parking area under the building and indicates his apartment number. “I’ll meet you there,” he tells the man.
It’s a big day. Jesse is moving into the first home of his own after prison. We turn. Jesse walks ahead, up some open tiered steps, around a smudged wall, and down a wide walkway past identical black mesh–covered security doors, each spaced twenty feet apart, to his apartment. While I wait for him to unlock the security gate, I step back and look up. Above us are five stories of tiered walkways leading to rows of apartment doors. It looks so familiar.
Security gate open, Jesse invites me in. Immediately to the left is a shiny, clean bathroom, with a small floral carpet on the floor and an array of towels draped evenly over the bars. Straight ahead is the bedroom Jesse will share with Lisa. It all smells sweetly of Jesse and his signature cologne. To the right of the front door, a white galley kitchen wraps around to a living room, which, in anticipation of the yet-to-arrive furniture, is bare—except, that is, for a big forty-two-inch flat-screen television. Today Jesse is watching an old Perry Mason. “I like to figure out what’s going to happen before the end. If I’d had Perry Mason, I probably wouldn’t have done twenty-five years.”
On the far side of the living room, a curtain of plastic vertical blinds covers a large, double-wide sliding glass door. Like a dog checking out entrances and exits before settling down in a new home, I pull back the blinds, unlock the sliding door, and walk out onto the cemented five-by-fifteen-foot walled patio, the apartments high above in the courtyard looking down on Jesse’s little bit of escape. Back inside, the two delivery men have already managed to carry the sectional sofa, coffee table, and ottoman inside, and have gone back to their truck for the last piece, a chair.
“This is just great, Jesse,” I offer, a bit excited to see the parcels unwrapped. “Do you have scissors? We could take the plastic off!”
“Yeah. Let’s do it,” Jesse says, sorting through some papers scattered on the top of the computer table and coming up with a big pair of scissors, he hands them to me. “Here.”
Cutting and ripping, we expose the sectional couch and place it just the way he wants it, against the far wall, the long end in front of the television. He unwraps two red, gold, and green designer pillows and places them carefully in the opposite corners of the couch, a brown throw blanket over the long end. Picture perfect.
“The last piece is the chair,” Jesse says, looking down, “but it’s not the chair. It’s just a chair for now. I couldn’t afford the chair I wanted. But I’ll get it. Eventually, I’ll get it.”
“What was the chair like?” I ask.
“Well, it was red and it leaned back so you could relax in it. I’ve always wanted a chair like that,” he says. “But we already spent too much on all this, so I couldn’t get the chair.”
“How did you buy all this?”
“We bought it on credit. I didn’t have any credit cards, so I thought if we buy this, I’ll start to build my credit up. It’s expensive, though.” He winces. “Man. Everything costs so much.”
They went to a furniture store, he says, that didn’t require a good credit report. The interest rate was high, but they’ll pay it off and then he’ll have credit. “Now I’ve got one secured credit card,” he says as the movers maneuver the unwanted, not perfect chair into the room behind him.
The movers gone, we sit on Jesse’s brand-new furniture and chat about his mom and Lisa, the two women bookending his life. He has just walked away from one and moved in with the other. “It’s so bad right now. I’ve just spent all this money moving in to this apartment and now I’m broke.”
Dreaming about being free and actually being free are two very different pictures.
