The Motions

The prison I visit is only a few miles from Interstate 15. It is the deadliest highway in the United States, and the surrounding land, far as you can see, is flat and dry and desolate. Sagebrush is about all that grows here and even it is sparse. Summers hit 110 or better. Winters bring torrential rains and dangerous floods, but the highway itself is straight and well paved, no sudden twists or turns; the road is not the cause of the many collisions and casualties. Blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the drivers, most rushing to Vegas, anxious to test their luck. Others are returning home, hungover from the night before, guilt-ridden and angry for all they’ve gambled away, and if they’re from San Bernardino, it’s likely they didn’t have it to lose.

We are just behind Detroit as the poorest city in America. Thirty-five percent of the residents live in poverty. Forty-six percent receive welfare, and according to FBI statistics we have the third-highest gang population of any county in the nation. In visiting the prison I am walking into a microcosm of the violent culture that exists outside these walls. San Bernardino is among the top thirty cities in the United States with the highest murder rates. In California, it typically ranks beneath Fresno and Oakland. Aggravated assault is generally more than three times the national average, and robberies and carjackings are so common as to be daily, mundane occurrences. Wherever you are in this city, but especially at night, you best watch your back.

I go with a friend, Sam, armed with books and literature from Alcoholics Anonymous, a stack of court cards, and schedules of support meetings for those soon to be released. We are armed, too, with a belief that we can make a difference in the lives of these men. But it is a fragile belief. We are veterans of a guerrilla war that can’t be won and we steel ourselves against the overwhelming odds of helping others help themselves. We cling to the hope that we’ll connect with a handful of the hundreds we’ve seen in our many visits. We cling to the hope that we’re planting the seed for change and we keep our expectations low. Sometimes, it seems, we’re just going through the motions.

These men remind us of who we were and where we’ve been and who we could so easily become again if we take our sobriety for granted. Sam is a former infantryman, and when he returned from Vietnam he took a job as a carney, traveling with a circus across the country, pumped up on speed and booze for nearly twenty years, until, finally, inevitably, he crashed and burned. First thing they did, when he checked himself into rehab at the VA, was pull all his teeth. Meth had rotted them black to the root. Now in his midfifties he works in the produce section of a grocery store and attends seminary two nights a week. He’s studying to be a pastor, but I’ve never seen him impose his religious beliefs on anyone.

I admire him for that.

I admire him also for speaking regularly to youth groups, serving meals to the homeless at the Salvation Army, leading meetings at A.A., sponsoring and mentoring other alcoholics and addicts, all while pulling down forty plus hours a week at the grocery store. The same dedication holds true for Tod, another friend and devoted member of A.A. who often accompanies us, but he is taking a well-deserved vacation this month, gone fishing in Idaho.

I take this commitment on the advice of my sponsor after I reach my first year of sobriety. Because I did my Fifth Step with him, because he knows about the crimes I committed as a teenager, Nick thinks I’m a perfect candidate for the job. “Since you have some solid time under your belt,” he says, “you need to start helping others, especially those in a place you could’ve wound up yourself.” And so, though I’m nervous about it, feeling that a year clean hardly qualifies me as any sort of authority on sobriety, I now find myself meeting Sam in the parking lot at the prison on Friday nights twice a month. It’s usually ten to fifteen degrees warmer in the flatlands of San Bernardino than it is where we live in the mountains, and given that I’m used to the cooler climate, it feels warm this autumn night. I’m early, with ten minutes to spare, so I light up a cigarette and then empty my pockets into the glove compartment. A lock-blade knife sharp enough to shave the hair on my arm. Nickels and dimes and pennies. A Bic lighter. I remove my driver’s license and stow my wallet, too. All we’re allowed to take into the prison, aside from our A.A. literature, is the key to our car. Our licenses, we turn them over to the guard before entering.

Smog does stunning things to the sky when the sun sets, filling it with swirls of orange, yellow, blue, and faint shades of purple, and while I’m leaning against my car, smoking and taking in the beautiful desert skyline, Sam drives into the lot. We each grab a cardboard box stuffed with literature from the bed of his truck and walk to the guard’s booth. The officer working behind the bulletproof glass has seen us so often that he collects our licenses, slips our name tags through the same slot, and buzzes us through the steel gate without a word. Once the first gate locks behind us, he buzzes open the second.

Twenty-foot-high chain-link fences topped with barbed wire protect the entire perimeter of the prison. The first time I came here, I expected to find the same dirt, sand, and rock inside the prison grounds as the land that surrounds it, but instead it was as if I’d entered a meticulously well-kept park. The sprawling green lawns are neatly mown and perfectly edged. The hanging branches of the many elm trees are uniformly pruned and cut to match the others. Randomly spaced around the grounds are aluminum picnic benches, and the walkways are carefully swept, the concrete white and clean. It’s all the more impressive because this prison opened a half century ago, and though originally designed to hold a hundred male inmates, through the years, with expansion and remodeling, it now houses over a thousand. An adjacent facility is home to three hundred women.

But for all the neatly groomed lawns, trees, and spotless walkways, there’s no mistaking what this place is about. As Sam and I make our way to the main dorm, we pass the exercise yard for the maximum security unit, nicknamed “The Pumpkin Patch.” The general prison population is issued blue, hospital-style scrubs, but the ones here must wear bright-orange jumpsuits, identifying them as having committed more heinous crimes, and so they are also more strictly confined. Their exercise yard is a chain-link cage with a basketball court, two pull-up bars, another for dips, and it’s noisy. It’s loud. The cage is full of young men and they’re shouting and laughing. Some shoot hoops. Some toss around a football. Others wait in line to use the pull-up and dip bars, but most lean against the walls, talking and joking. A tall lanky kid stands by himself away from the crowds, and I catch his eye. He’s staring me down, and I can feel it, his anger. I’d smile if I didn’t think it would set him off, but anything short of looking away is pointless.

They self-segregate. Brown with brown. Black with black. White with white. The majority is brown, followed by black, and the whites, maybe a dozen, are in the corner of the yard. They’re in formation, one straight row, on the ground, doing push-ups. An older inmate, I’m guessing around forty, paces back and forth in front of the line. His head is shaved. His neck and arms are heavily tatted.

“Thirty-one,” he shouts, “thirty-two, thirty-three . . .”

A former student of mine could’ve been that lanky kid staring me down or one of those in the formation doing push-ups. He was in The Pumpkin Patch for two years, this student, and he wrote me a letter, sent it to the university, and in it he asked if I could visit him. He was young and thought highly of me and he used to drop by during my office hours to talk about stories and writing. There was a depth and maturity to his work that I rarely see from the students in my classes, and as we came to know each other better he confided in me that he had a problem with methamphetamine and alcohol, it was why he sometimes missed class or turned in a late assignment. I confided in him that I understood. That I struggled myself and had started going to A.A. I kept falling short, but I’d collect clean time, thirty days here or there, sometimes longer, often less, and then, inevitably it seemed, I’d backslide. His pattern was the same as mine, and we’d talk about it, encourage each other, but when he wrote me from prison I was going through a divorce and drinking and using heavily. I threw his letter in my office trash can. I couldn’t think about him. I couldn’t think about anybody or anything but myself and where my next drink or drug was coming from. I think of him now, though, and it is with guilt and regret for failing to honor the simple request of a former student when he needed me most.

Sam and I reach the dorms, the medium security facility, and again we’re stopped by a guard. The front door is open and the noise spills out. Shouting. Talking. Laughter. A couple hundred men are housed in here.

Sam has to raise his voice.

“We’re with A.A.,” he says. “You want us to meet the guys inside or out tonight, sir?”

“You picked a lousy time,” the guard says.

It’s our regular time. It’s our regular day. If it’s a lousy time, then why weren’t we told earlier at the main gate? But I keep my mouth shut. We need to stay on good terms with the guards, always addressing them as sir, and never complaining, or even asking for a reason if they want us to leave. Our being here is a privilege, not a right, and it can be revoked at any time. Through the open door I see a long row of prisoners, all stripped to the waist, lined up against the wall. One guard watches while another wearing latex gloves goes from inmate to inmate, carefully running his hands up and down their legs.

“You want us to cancel?”

“Hang on, let me call the sergeant first. Why don’t you guys wait in the yard,” he says. “I’ll let you know what’s up in a minute.”

We walk back to the yard and set the boxes of literature on the grass and take a seat at one of the picnic benches.

“Something’s going down,” I say.

“They’re probably looking for a shank.”

“Or dope.”

“They might kick us out if they don’t find it, whatever it is. Tell you the truth,” Sam says, “I wouldn’t mind. I’m exhausted tonight.”

“I don’t know how you do it,” I say. “Working and going to seminary school and hitting meetings and then all this volunteer stuff.”

“Shit,” he says. “I spent a lot more time getting fucked up in bars and dope houses than I ever did trying to help anybody.”

Between getting wasted, thinking about getting wasted, tracking down the stuff that gets you wasted, and recuperating from being wasted so we could get wasted again, Sam and I are neck and neck in throwing our lives away. Like me, he burned through a marriage and lost precious sober and sane years when he should have been raising his kids.

The guard at the dorms shouts to the inmates.

“A.A. outside . . . A.A. outside.”

So the meeting is on. Sam and I drag two picnic benches together and unpack the boxes. We set out stacks of paperback Big Books, A.A. schedules for inmates with release dates coming up, court cards for ones busted for narcotics, multiple DUIs, or both, and a bunch of different pamphlets on alcoholism, including one called A.A. for Prisoners.

Sometimes only a handful show.

Sometimes we get a dozen or so. But tonight, maybe because of the pat down, the prisoners need to cool off, need to get away from the guards for a while, and so they swarm us. It’s the biggest crowd we’ve ever had, and for the next ten minutes all I do is sign court cards, fill out ones for new inmates, and sign those, too. They’ll need them as evidence of their willingness to stay clean and sober when they go for their parole hearings. Whether they’re sincere or not is anyone’s guess.

Sam hands out pamphlets and Big Books.

“Who needs a Spanish edition?” he says. We only have a few and they go quick.

Prisoners are fanned out across the yard. Some sit with their legs crossed. Some stretch out on the grass, heads propped up on one elbow. Others stand with their arms folded over their chest. They’re all dressed in blue scrubs. The top is a V-neck, and you can see the T-shirts they wear underneath with their prison call numbers written in black felt pen along the collar. As usual they group together according to race. This I expect, but two things that always strike me, no matter how many times I visit here, is the age of the inmates and how they’ve inked themselves. The majority are in their twenties, some their teens, and nearly all have shaved heads marred with tattoos. Many have inked their faces, too.

Cheeks.

Chins.

Foreheads. One young man has Fuck You, Motherfucker written across his neck in Old English–style lettering. I don’t see this kid working at McDonald’s anytime soon.

Sam nudges me.

“You want to lead tonight?”

“Sure.”

I read out loud the first part of the A.A. Preamble, then call on a prisoner to read the second part. When he’s done, I look into the crowd.

“My name is Jim,” I say, “and I’m an alcoholic.”

Many of the prisoners are familiar with the A.A. drill, that the leader shares his story first, and that they’re supposed to repeat my name in unison.

“Hey, Jim,” they say.

Wearing blue scrubs means they’re medium security inmates, and although most are drug and alcohol offenders, they know as well as I do that you only do time for the crime you’re busted for. And not by a long shot does that mean you didn’t commit a whole bunch of others before then. Who knows how many belong in The Pumpkin Patch?

Someone in the back shouts.

“Yo, dog, you yolked. How much you bench?”

Some of the men laugh.

“Three-twenty on a good day,” I say. “Let me see a show of hands. Who here’s done something illegal, B&E, strong-arm, whatever, when you were wasted? I’m talking something you wouldn’t have done if you weren’t fucked up?”

A young man on the sidelines raises his hand. Another looks around the crowd and then slowly, tentatively, does the same. Soon, of the thirty or so here, most of them are holding their hands up.

I raise mine too.

I tell them a small part of my story, crime-wise, mostly just burglaries when I’m a kid, and where it starts for me with drugs, when I’m nine with marijuana. Booze comes at twelve and by fourteen it’s everything and anything I can get my hands on. But it’s meth, I add, that delivers the knockout blow in my forties. “I probably had a few more years of drinking left in me,” I say, “if I didn’t come across that shit.” I tell them, too, about my brother and sister drinking and killing themselves, my mother doing hard time, and my father, for the most part, MIA as I’m growing up. The idea is to be open and honest so that they feel more comfortable being open and honest when I ask them to share. I don’t expect them to talk about their crimes. I just want to drive home the connection between drinking and using and the fucked-up choices we make because of it.

“Let’s open this meeting up,” I say.

I point to a Hispanic kid sitting in the middle of the group.

“You got something to say?”

He has three dots tattooed in a triangle under the corner of his eye. It can mean any number of things, from the harmless mi vida loca to a symbol of those firmly committed to thug life, representing the three places gang members openly and proudly accept as their fate. Time in prison. Time in hospitals. Or an early grave.

“I’ll pass, man.”

I nod to the guy next to him.

“How about you?”

He has 909 tatted on his forehead. San Bernardino area code. Not the best tat if he bumps into the wrong gentlemen in the 213, downtown LA.

“Fuck it, why not? I’m Rafael and I’m an alcoholic and an addict. I started drinking when I was six. My uncles, they used to throw these big-ass parties and it was always ‘get me another beer, mijo, get me another beer.’ So I did, no problem, but I had to take some sips coming back, right, so I wouldn’t spill, right.” Some of the men grin. “They knew what I was up to and pretty soon everybody’d be laughing. ‘Hey, check out little Rafi.’ I’d be stumbling and shit. It was cool. I felt special, but fuck, man, that party never ended.” He nods at me. “Like you, booze and meth. First time I took a hit of crystal, fucking A, it was on. I was twenty and my tio got me in the union, driving forklift. Had a wife, too, but the bitch left me.” He shrugs. “Can’t blame her. I was bringing in big bucks and smoking and drinking it all away. She’s banging some other dude now, and I don’t care, seriously, because you know what hurts, what really hurts? Today’s my baby girl’s birthday. And where am I? In the fucking la penta. She’s three and I ain’t seen her since she was two months.”

He’s quiet.

That’s the cue for the group to applaud in support and empathy, and most do, though many remain stone-faced. Showing emotion is a sign of weakness, and for Rafael to pour his heart out probably disgusts them.

Sam calls to him.

“Hey, when do you get out?”

“In twenty-two days.”

“Where you going?”

“Back to Hesperia,” he says, “and I’m scared, homes. I don’t want to pick up no more.”

Hesperia is a neighboring desert city as well-known as San Bernardino for its poverty, crime, and drugs. Sam takes a pamphlet from the table and hands it to the prisoner standing next to him. It’s an A.A. listing of meetings in our desert communities.

“Pass that back to him,” he says. Then he looks at Rafael. “First thing you do, first day you’re out, is get your ass to a meeting. The chances of staying clean go up about fifty percent if you do, and it’s about eighty percent you’ll be back here in about a year if you don’t.”

Where he gets his figures, I have no idea, and whether they’re correct or not doesn’t really matter. The point is Rafael needs all the support he can get. While you’re locked up, your friends don’t necessarily stop using and drinking, and when you’re released, there’s a very good chance they’ll want to celebrate your homecoming. All it takes is one drink, one line, one hit off the pipe, and the party that began when Rafael was six can easily pick up right where it left off.

Another prisoner raises his hand.

“I’m Vic and I’m an addict.”

This guy is older. I’d say he’s in his early forties, and I peg him for a junkie at first sight. He has the classic sunken cheeks and his neck is so thin it makes his head seem abnormally large. But it isn’t shaved. I don’t see any tats, either. He’s probably a fish, what prisoners call a new inmate, because I’ve seen so many arrive in his condition, skinny and weak, and after a month of regular meals, no dope, and exercise they begin to fill out.

“My girlfriend,” he says, “is in the women’s block. It was an act of God we were busted. Divine fucking intervention. Heroin is our drug, and we were on a hard run, I mean we were dying, seriously, not eating or drinking, these ugly fucking sores all over, and the thing is we didn’t care.” Vic is sitting on the lawn and he picks at a blade of grass. “I’ve been in prison in Mexico and Canada, but never in America. I mean till now. And every time I’ve been arrested, they always beat the shit out of me. Always. So this last time, when they light me up and I get out of the car, I just cover my head and tell the cop ‘go on, get it over with, but please, officer, don’t hurt my girl.’ And you know what he says? ‘Sir, you’re so sick I don’t even want to touch you. You and your friend need a doctor.’ Can you believe he took us straight to the hospital first? The doc told me the abscesses on my left arm were so infected they’d have to amputate if the antibiotics didn’t work.” He plucks the blade of grass and rolls it between his fingers. “They say God works in mysterious ways and he was working through that cop that day. I owe a cop my fucking arm. I owe a cop my fucking life. Unbelievable,” he says. “Fucking unbelievable.” He flicks the blade of grass away like you would a cigarette butt. “My girl and me, if we go on another run, we won’t make it back.”

A handful of the stone-faced men break from the group and start back to the dorms. They’ve heard enough of what I imagine they consider bullshit, especially the God stuff, which so many of them resent. I was the same way most of my life. Some of the other inmates, however, look genuinely moved, and Vic earns strong applause.

I always wish an addict’s vow to quit is his last, and maybe it is with this guy. One thing is for certain, given all my own failed vows and promises to never drink or drug again, I’m no one to talk. But it’s what he didn’t say that suggests he might be up against more than he lets on. To be busted in Mexico and Canada, and only once in America, signals to me that he might be a mule, a smuggler. If he had a decent track record, junkie or not, the people he worked for will want him back, and if he was busted with a load, he owes them for the loss. And if he owes, he can’t just announce he found God, get clean, and walk out of prison a free man.

After a few others share their stories, it’s time to close the meeting. Sam opens a copy of the Big Book and reads The Promises.

“. . . If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor . . .”

When he finishes we form a circle and join hands with the prisoners.

“God . . .” he says.

They join in, reciting in chorus.

“. . . Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can . . .”

I close my eyes. I don’t suppose that most here believe. Not in God. Certainly not in Alcoholics Anonymous. They think we’re some kind of cult and maybe they’re right. That’s where I started, too, going through the motions, not believing in anybody or anything, but then something happened. It turned into something else, and when the prayer ends, I open my eyes.

The floodlights come on, bathing the yard in bright white light. It’s a signal for the prisoners to return to the dormitories. As they trail off, one man lingers until the others are gone, so he can be alone with Sam. I don’t recall seeing him in the crowd, he’s just another face among many, and I only catch the end of their conversation. I’m busy putting our books and pamphlets back into the boxes we brought them in.

“You don’t have to believe in anything right now,” Sam says. “Just keep dreaming.”

“About what?”

“A better life.” He nods at the dormitories. “You don’t have to live like this.”

The floodlights flash off, then on again, and the young man hurries to join the others who are waiting in line to go back inside. The guards will probably bark at him for not returning right away. They’ll probably give him a warning, maybe even write him up if he gets mouthy, but maybe it’s worth it. That he felt the need to linger and talk with Sam. It’s a good sign.

One by one the men disappear inside, until it’s Sam and I, alone in the yard.

I look away.

I look beyond the dormitories. I look beyond my own expectations for why I’m here. I look beyond myself and the flood lamps and this prison and its fences topped with barbed wire into the vastness of the desert surrounding us, fading into the darkening sky.