I’M RIDING THE BENCH OPPOSITE A GUY who tells me he has a spider up his ass. In the other cage, by himself, is a delicately built native with Lola Falana bangs and 34 B-cup breasts poking out of a grey standard issue T-shirt. He/she has fresh gauze dressing wrapped around both wrists and has been talking non-stop dingbat since we scooped her from the infirmary. I hear motors engaging and a long meshed gate sliding open. The Corrections Services transfer van lurches forward and we enter the sally port of the Regional Psychiatric Centre.
Prison is about waiting. The guy with the spider up his ass does his quietly, chin resting in cupped hands, long hair falling like bad string over his face. But Raven — she insists on being referred to as a woman — waits for no man, dives right into her story. They just don’t get me. I’m no drag queen, I’m a transgender. A work-in-progress. Do you know how much money nip and tuck operations, botox treatment, silicon, and collagen injections cost? I do. And after all that they refuse to give me the surgical procedure. Then they go, “Oh Raven, why are you slashing up?” Like get a brain, dude!
Raven’s vagina monologues are starting to make my teeth hurt. I’m more interested in the guy opposite me. But before I can begin to coax it out of him — the story not the spider — the van pulls forward and parks in front of Admissions and Discharge.
Raven is taken out first. She minces and gingers to the amusement of her escorts. The rear doors open and I start to slide along the bench, my leg chains scraping the dimpled steel floor panels, but the waiting officer holds up one palm and motions the Spider Man forward. The doors slam shut again. I am left in the semi-darkness with no other story than my own.
At the age of fifty, I’m facing the front end of a fresh eighteenyear sentence.
In the dictionary escape is at best “a temporary relief from circumstances.” In trying to figure out how to pass the next eighteen years, I discovered the Intensive Therapy Violent Offender Program, a gruelling horror show in which sixteen of the most dangerous offenders are culled from seven regional prisons and forced to endure a year of masochistic and humiliating psychodynamic therapy. I volunteered.
I’m carrying a new bedroll and a whole lot of apprehension towards a two-storey cellblock, which from the air would look a lot like the Pentagon, only smaller, with one wing missing. This is the world of VHF radios, handcuffs, and fear, not the safest of therapeutic environments. I have pictures in my head of dungeons filled with men screaming or sobbing on their knees — somewhere between Jerry Springer and the Inquisition.
The door to the main dome area opens and the pitch of madness hits my ears. Once considered dangerous and unstable, the men here, who walk as if their arms have been stapled to their sides, have been chemically shackled. Everything that was violent, and all that was human, seems now absent in them. My escort urges me up the stairs where I’m to be housed separately, on the second floor, the Programs Wing.
Upstairs appears eerily quiet; the cell doors have been left hanging open as if there had been some sort of hurried evacuation. The door to the cleaner’s closet bangs wide and out pops a kid who looks more like he should be mowing his parents’ lawn than mopping a prison floor.
The youngster abandons his mop and morphs into an overeager one-man welcome wagon. His name is D, short for what I don’t ask, but when I offer my hand, his face turns crimson. His hand goes reluctantly into my grip, boney, and deformed in the shape of a lobster claw. He quickly tucks it back behind him in a habit as practised as it is tender.
D gives me the lowdown — the other guys that make up our group, I’m the last to arrive, my cell second from the end, anything I need just ask, and oh by the way, could I score him some tobacco from the commissary?
My cell is the same as the countless others I have inhabited over the years — bunk, desk, toilet, and a razor wire view. By the time I have the corners of my blanket tucked in I learn that D is doing a life minimum seven sentence behind a manslaughter conviction while he was still a juvenile. Hence his request — he’s asked me to boot for him because he isn’t old enough to buy cigarettes.
I know I will eventually have to acclimatize myself to this new-wave-new-age-crack criminal-television-talk-show mentality that encourages the outpouring of explicit and personal details at such breakneck speed. But who wants to hear about a wrecked childhood, a girlfriend’s fetishes, or a homicidal act from a person five minutes after you’ve learned he even exists on the same planet?
In D’s case it’s forgivable: he’s young, nervous, scared, and even though he hasn’t said it yet I know he’s seen me on the six o’clock news. I’m his idea of a major criminal; for him making Number One on a Most Wanted list is analogous to winning on American Idol. The fact that I feel more busted than brazen won’t faze D much; like most young people he is more interested in his idea of a person than the human reality. I leave the tier to get his cigarettes.
Coming out of the commissary I catch sight of D going into the laundry room and give him the sign for the come-and-get-it. I don’t make it another fifty paces down the strip before I am confronted by a correctional officer wearing black leather gloves. His jaw juts out dramatically; I want to tell him that he shaves really, really well but instead I answer his question about what was in the bag I just handed off to the kid. Jack Foote — it’s on his tag — reminds me we are in a maximum security psychiatric facility and he’ll brook no bullcrap on his watch. He knows exactly who I am and says I won’t be getting any special treatment around here. Which really means I will be getting special treatment. His belt radio erupts into static, then a few bursts of a language only people in uniforms can understand. It’s for me — I’m wanted up in psych assessment for intake testing.
Upstairs in the program area, a middle-aged woman in a track suit ushers me through a doorway marked Assessment Clinic. I feel I have entered a scene in A Clockwork Orange. Christina, who is the programs clerk, places a blue file folder and three golf pencils on the table in front of me. She explains these tests will determine my risk factors, measure anger quotients, and help identify my crime cycles.
Most of the tests are short and I begin to rack them up. On a scale of one to five, one being Does Not Apply and five being That’s Me To The Nines, circle your choice to each of the following statements. (A) When I become angry I throw things. (B) I like to watch fires. Etcetera etcetera. Essentially they are asking you to admit you are a lunatic.
I am the first to arrive at our group’s introductory psycho-dynamic therapy session. The same Clockwork Orange room, but no table, nor trace of Christina. The group begins to drift in, filling the thinly padded chairs arranged along the walls. Although I’ve had glimpses, this is my first opportunity to scope my fellow thugs en masse. No real surprises. A few mullet cuts, three shaved heads, a ponytail, another braided, an oiled pompadour — lots of macho body language.
Most everyone in the room is either quiet or having bus stop conversations with the person(s) closest to them. It’s all filler while we wait for a staff member to arrive. No way am I doing any of that psycho drama shit. I hear the blonde facilitator is a bitch. I don’t give a rat’s ass. If you give the croaker here a story, it’s easy to get sleepers. I ain’t never getting out anyway. Maybe it’s white to show up the blood when I coldcock one of these cocksuckers. I’m up for parole almost right after we finish. The trick is not to talk too much, but not to be too quiet either.
Our two facilitators appear and everything goes still. The young woman points first to one corner where the walls and the ceiling meet, and then to the other. Her partner, an earthy looking guy with a bald pate, has his hands in both pockets while he rocks on his heels. By now every thug in the room is trying to recall what he said to the person sitting next to him in the last twenty minutes. There’s a tiny camera lens peeking out from each corner.
Alyssa, blonde and white, introduces herself. The affable looking Teal speaks with an authority that belies his appearance. “On paper you guys stink. I have read every one of your files and I wouldn’t want you living in my neighborhood. You have all made a lot of bad choices in your lives. We’re here to change that. And we hope you are too.”
Alyssa, in perfect tag team fashion says, “This program is based in REBT, rational emotive behaviour therapy. It is about identifying the relationship between your thoughts, your feelings, and your behaviour. Can anyone tell me how they are feeling right now? How about you? Yes, you.”
I must have been smirking out of the side of my face because I realize too late it is me she has transfixed in those fierce blue eyes. All I can come up with is, “Those cameras make me feel like I’ve been ambushed.”
“Wrong! Firstly no one can make you feel anything. Secondly, being ambushed is not a feeling, you probably feel angry or resentful. We will get into identifying our feelings later, for now I want all you men to remember this — you choose to feel the way you do.”
Teal breaks in to tell us how the program is structured. “For now you will go back to your cell and write a life autobiography. It can be as long or as short as you like. You have the rest of the week to finish it.”
The guy sitting near the door — I’m pretty sure it’s Buster Longines, a genuine hardcase out of Ontario — rises to his full five foot, five inches, stretches, and says, “I don’t give a rat’s ass what he wants, I’m going to the weight pit.” Buster’s a thoroughbred alpha male, a prison wheel that’s done a gang of hole time. He ambles out the door like an aging fireplug.
Alyssa beckons to me. “We need to talk to you, we haven’t done your initial treatment team meeting yet.”
Teal bids me to stay seated. “Two things,” he begins, “We don’t think you were entirely straightforward in your answers, which is common in self-reporting tests. Also, the program psychologist has read your file and diagnosed you with an antisocial personality disorder.”
Nothing gets by these guys. My file is only filled with thirty years of robberies, heroin, and mayhem.
Morgan, an older con who wears a wooden cross around the neck, is hanging out with D near my cell door. They are looking for some writerly advice on how to get their autobiographies started. “Keep the pencil moving,” is all I can tell them. I head down to the library to sign out a book on Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy.
For most of the men in our group, serving time kindles a singular construct; for them the world is the thing they stand on. But between these shelves, amongst living books, the shape of your world can shift a thousand times, once for each title, or be changed forever in a single page. In its own way, the prison library is more dangerous than the big yard.
At the end of the row, in a blind corner, I almost trip over Raven, kneeling between the legs of a pink-skinned guy sprawled across an armchair. I recognize him from group — the Duke — a lightweight with a mullet cut. I want to ask Raven what they did with the Spider Man but I can see she’s got her mouth full.
I keep moving. After the reality of catching Raven in honeysuckle heaven I need some other worldly self-help, even poetry. I spend a half hour pouring over books on crystals and angels, guides for the twelve different stairways to heaven, recipes for dharma cookies, and chicken soup for everyone but the chickens. Books to help you recover everything from your inner predator to your authentic self.
On the way to the door I nudge out a slim volume by Rilke. The librarian with a huge frown on her face is staring at a Maxim magazine centerfold. “All these faces they’ve been . . . interfered with. Women, men, even the dogs. They’ve all been . . . ” She shows me the magazine. Someone has been doing eyeball surgery with a razor blade.
Outside the library I almost bump into Raven again. This time she appears to be on the losing end of a heated exchange with the Duke. Her lower lip is trembling. “Men,” she says before spinning in her elevated loafers and clomping off in her exaggerated way.
“Raven!” I call after her, “What did they do with the Spider Man?”
“He’s in the big yard,” she throws back, her ass still chewing bubble gum down the strip.
The Spider Man is lying on his belly in the outfield of the ball diamond, absorbed in a patch of grass six inches from his face. I flop down next to him. An ant teeters by. Eventually I have to ask how he suitcased a spider.
“I cut off a cigar tube and put him inside it. Someone’s got to look after the little guys, don’t you think? They were going to spray paint my cell when I left.”
“Does he have a name?”
“You mean like a daddy long legs or a wolf spider or what not?”
“No, I mean like Itsy Bitsy or Norman. Like a name.”
Spider Man looks at me as if I’m the one who’s nuts. “He’s a spider for godsake.” Then he falls quiet for a while before adding, “but I think he’s the last Jesus I know of.”
Back on the tier I close my door and go on deadlock, I’d had enough for the day. I try reading Rilke, I pace, I lie down to sleep but there’s too much bad mail being opened. Finally, I go to my desk, take a yellow legal pad from my drawer.
I don’t try to capital-W Write. I push me out of the way and write from the first realm of thought. The pages begin to fly, the pencil literally pushing through the paper. I seize on to the memory of a time long buried and withheld from grief. All night, black letters pour on to yellow paper and I write out those things no child should ever have been made to know.
When my head comes up, and I set the pencil down, the sun is climbing over the razor wire. I lie on my bunk and watch the shadows of the bars fall across my body, fragmenting my self. I stare up at the ceiling and, like Rilke, let the past break out in my heart.
Monday, back in group, I do a quick survey and count only fifteen heads. Before I can ask who is missing, Morgan throws up his hand and volunteers to present his autobiography. For two hours, in a matter-of-fact tone, he describes never knowing his parents, the brutal foster homes, a runaway adolescence, a skid row adulthood, culminating in this current offence, a triple homicide — the details of which he is told to save for our next — our crime biography — phase.
Next up is a biker named Vance who was raised on the back of a Harley, left on the doorstep of an alcoholic aunt after his Dad met up with a semi pulling out on to a prairie road. He joined a gang at sixteen and at the age of thirty-two has been a full time criminal for more than half his life.
D informs me that evening that the nervous guy with the acne scarred face was caught by The Foote last night — in his cell, wolfing back a bowl full of paper eyes — so they moved him to downstairs.
Over the next few weeks we stay in this same pattern. One person presents their story each day; no one has to be Sigmund Freud to figure out these were men who grew so tired of being wounded, they went out and wounded something else.
My turn to share my scribblings from my own night of the long knives, and I do so in as steady a voice as I can muster. It is the first time I have spoken these things out loud, and it leaves me feeling fragile, less than certain I have done the right thing.
Buster shows up on the last day of the life bios with a page and a half that is as poignant as it is brief. It is the tale of a kid, who at the age of nine, leaves the front gate unlatched and the family dog gets hit by a car. For three days, as a “lesson”, Buster is made to lie in a shallow earthen pit under the house with the body of his pet. With weekends and days off it’s taken a month and a half and all I have learned so far is, that for a lot of people in this room, their first bad choice was their parents.
Teal claps his hands, tells us all what a great job we have done. Now it’s time to return to our cells and begin our crime biographies.
Morgan is again waiting for me at my cell door, fingering his cross with great distress. He wants to know what he should do, go through the motions or be completely honest. I ask him what Jesus would do and he nods, as if I just gave him sage advice.
I close my door and begin to write about my index offence. I draw the word images for a sea of frightened faces inside the bank, describe the cop chase and the ammunition fired, the commandeering of an elderly couple in their apartment. I write down my crimes as uncut documentary, unadorned by story or convenient amnesia. By the grace of God there were no bodies, only shocked victims, in the wake of my violence.
Then I enter the misery of addiction, the betrayal of self, love, and family. I write on up to the moment of my arrest. I know if I leave one memory unscraped, one regret unacknowledged, then it will simply stay as if it were a recurring stuck dream that goes on delivering its inescapable blows.
We are back in the white room the final morning of our crime biographies. Most of us by now are through presenting. Buster had to default on his because of an alcohol-induced blackout at the time, so we got the antiseptic transcript version of a double attempted murder with a hunting knife. Vance had stumbled his way through a home invasion where he tied a woman to a combination wall safe. D had wept as he recounted killing his best friend with a hammer as the guy slept. When D wiped his tears and thought he was finished, Teal said now tell us why. For a hundred hits of ecstasy and half a pound of weed.
As person after person, day after day, has read aloud, the details have become soul numbing. This is Hollywood unpeeled. Characters who use hammers, kitchen knives, weight bars, baseball bats, tire irons, rocks, and guns. Victims left crawling across linoleum, strangled in duct tape, dragged by the hair into the basement, stuffed in the trunk, or carried, limb by limb, into the woods and burned under a pile of leaves. And just when I think I’ve heard all I can take, Morgan gets up to read his crime biography.
In a killing spree across northern Alberta, Morgan visits farmhouses the way normal people go to ATMs. They begin as robberies but by the third farm in as many days he shoots a young couple because they resisted. Morgan sets the house on fire unaware two kids are hiding in an upstairs closet. One of them, he learns after his arrest, made it out. But even his arrest doesn’t come in time. He’s at another farmhouse late the following night and he’s got a single occupant on his hands, and she’s fighting him hard so he flattens her with a glass ashtray. When he realizes she’s probably dead he loads the body in the backseat, drives a few miles down the road, parks, and drags her into a stand of poplars. He goes back to the car for a shovel. Returning, he says, “I can’t figure out what came over me, but there she was lying with her dress, like all up around her waist.” Morgan stops, his face flushed and lined in anguish. “Afterward, I dug a hole and pushed her into it. Then I started filling it up and that’s when she coughed.” Morgan buried that woman alive. She was seventy-two years old, coughing out that northern Alberta dirt almost as fast as he was throwing it in.
Morgan is the last to present, and when he finishes no one looks at him. Maybe it is the accumulation of all our carnage, maybe it is the fathomless nature of Morgan’s crime, but in that moment I think we all know, as the poet said, that there is nothing one man will not do to another.
Later that evening I find Morgan in the chapel, kneeling on a purple carpet beneath a life-sized icon of Jesus. His hands clasped, praying incoherently, he is incapable of even acknowledging my presence.
Not knowing what else to do I simply stay with him. I sit on a pew and witness as a man quakes and heaves his way down to a final and spent madness. Perhaps there are crimes better left covered by the dirt. The buzzer for count sounds. I take my leave, knowing the guards will find him soon enough.
Alyssa awaits the arrival of the whole group before announcing that Teal has a heart condition and will be taking some time off. In two weeks it will be Christmas break so we will resume in the new year.
The last two weeks have been, anyway, strangely anti-climactic. There have been no outbursts, no throwing of chairs, little that is authentic or meaningful, and no breakthroughs.
There are two reasons. After we lost Morgan, and of course the nervous guy who ate the eyes, everyone became cautious. The remaining apostles entered into a no-risk zone. The second is Buster. Each time one of the younger guys takes a chance and starts with something real, Buster growls him down with, “I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think.” After a hundred promising starts were rubbed out by a rat’s ass, it became a joke behind Buster’s back. Need to borrow a pencil? I don’t give a rat’s ass. It’s supposed to snow tomorrow. I don’t give a rat’s ass.
I’m on my way to the big yard when I run into Raven. I ask her how life is without a boyfriend and she tells me she’s sworn off relationships; she now plans to focus more on herself. Raven looks like, well, Raven, but her presence seems more substantial. When I ask for an update on Spider Man and Morgan, she tells me Spider is Spider and Morgan is still incoherent and four pointed to the bed in the Chinese cell at the back of A wing.
An old native guy in street clothes and a felt cowboy hat approaches us. Raven introduces me to Cecil Johnny, a native Elder who visits this prison. Cecil says he is building a new lodge here and I’m welcome to attend a sweat. I let him know that I’ll think about it; Cecil gives me sweet grass before leaving.
By the time the treatment team meeting rolls around Morgan has gone for tests to the Provincial Mental Hospital at Riverview. Alyssa and Christina tell me they are pleased with my level of participation in group though the psychologist who studies us through the camera has added “some narcissistic traits” to my profile.
I want to diagnose the psychologist as a voyeuristic crank but I leave it there knowing he is, of course, right. What he doesn’t know is that I may be the only narcissist in the world with a case of unrequited self-love.
Christmas Eve The Foote shows up with his crew for a surprise shakedown on the tier. They toss our cells, making a mess, then depart going, “Ho Ho Ho.” The rest of the holiday season passes with Sally Ann Sunshine Bags, attempted suicides, and dark chocolate.
Teal returns in the new year, noticeably thinner, but the ABC’s of REBT are growing old. I already have what I need from this program, I’m just occupying a chair, and like Buster and all the other guys, waiting for graduation day. Still, if I hear one more rat’s ass I think I’m going to commit homicide. Then it comes, a response to a youngster’s complaint of depression.
Buster is all over him, “I don’t give a rat’s ass. You sleep all day, watch TV. Never work out. You’re not depressed, you’re weak.” The kid clams up. Buster is about half right on this one but that’s hardly the point anymore.
The next morning in group I begin, “I believe the saddest thing I know would be a man in his fifties, my age, who has no sense of humour, has never learned to laugh at himself, and whose power over other people leaves the room when he does.” I’m not even looking at Buster, but he and everyone in the room, knows who I’m talking to.
“Nobody here gives a rat’s ass what you believe.” Buster doesn’t backwater, I have to give him that.
Later, I see Buster in the bathroom, both hands on the sink, staring down. I figure I better get this over with so I walk in and tell him not to take it personally. Buster doesn’t say anything, I don’t know where this is going and I’m worried I’ve pushed him too hard.
Buster doesn’t lift his gaze from the sink when he asks, “They all laugh at me, don’t they?”
“They’re just scared of you is all. It’s chow time. Let’s eat.” But Buster isn’t letting go his grip on the sink.
“We are down to our last few weeks of group, fellas.”
Teal’s words are ones I’d longed to hear, although group has become not half bad. Buster’s still not giving a rat’s ass, but now he’s saying it in a good way. A few of the guys are making jokes and even Alyssa’s eyes have turned a kinder shade of blue. If we’re not careful it’s liable to get downright warm and fuzzy.
Buster, D, and me take a turn in the big yard. It’s the spring equinox. Morgan is back from Riverview. He’s walking right ahead of us, a little shaky but on recovery row. D bounds off to do a workout; he has put on about thirty pounds of cut muscle and is going to be all right wherever he goes.
The Spider Man is still lying lost in his grassy world. We come around the corner of the track and Raven is hanging off the gate waving me and Buster in. Cecil Johnny wants our help over on the sweat lodge grounds. We are led to a fenced-in security area behind the hospital. A guard lets us in and snaps the gate shut behind us.
Cecil shows us where he wants the willows to be placed in the ground, how to bend and tie them together with red strips of cloth.
Buster loves a project and he’s been barking like a straw foreman since we started. I tell him I don’t give a rat’s ass what piece of red cloth he wants me to hand him next.
Cecil directs us to drape heavy canvas tarpaulins over the skeleton frame, then with everything pulled and tucked to his satisfaction, we sit on the ground exhausted and admire our lodge.
“Want to try a sweat?” Cecil asks, holding out towels towards me and Buster. Buster strips down to his boxers; I follow and we grab pitchforks to help Raven carry the rocks and place them in the pit in the center of the lodge.
Cecil sits at the back of the lodge facing the small doorway as we crawl in on our hands and knees. He directs Raven, “because you are two-spirited, my dear” to sit in the north, to his left, and for me and Buster to take the southern side. We sit cross-legged, facing the glowing rocks. Cecil lights the pipe and then Raven drops the flap down over the doorway plunging us into blackness.
There is the hiss of steam. This is the earth’s womb: warm and moist and too dark to see. Cecil the Elder launches into a song as old and far-seeing as the wind.