MY HANDS ARE BROKEN, MY RIBS ARE BROKEN, and I’m dope sick beyond belief, but I know the real pain is in the mail, deeper than broken bones. It’s about broken promises, broken hearts, and broken lives. The headlines in the newspapers are as black and bold as gunpowder. The Jackrabbit Stumbles: after thirteen years of freedom, thirteen years of a publicly redeemed life, I have gotten myself wired, robbed a bank, shot at policemen, and held two people hostage. A nightmare I can’t imagine away or hide from in sleep.
I collapse on my bunk and try to shut out the glare of the twenty-four hour light. Behind my eyelids life has become everything I can’t get back.
I’m forty-nine years old, married to one of the most interesting and beautiful women on the planet, and parent to two incredible pieces of magic, Sophie, who is ten, and Charlotte, seventeen. The forfeiture is unbearable. I see a clear plastic laundry bag lying in one corner of my cell. If I could only get it over my head, wind it tight, airtight, at the neck.
I keep the garbage bag clutched in my hand for five days, as I lie fetal, curled around that cavity that others call the centre of their being. I lie down with the pain and I sweat and I weep. Every five minutes I gather enough strength to do it, to place that bag over my head, and every five minutes and one second I gather enough strength not to do it.
By the weekend I can sit up. Another inmate brings me a plate of congealed stew with a biscuit. I manage to swallow a few plastic forkfuls of the stew, but I don’t manage for long. I charge for the toilet bowel and sell a Buick all over the corner of my cell.
The guy who brought me my dinner also helps me change clothes and clean up. That evening I sit on the edge of my bunk, sip a cup of water, and this time keep the biscuit down. I glance over at the plastic bag, now filled with sweaty socks and underwear. Who’d want to be sticking their head into that?
Susan visits. She’s been here on previous days but this is our first contact; I couldn’t get up to see her the other times. I measure the two guards assigned to escort me to the visiting area. The top of my head comes level with the epaulets on their cannon ball shoulders. I step carefully. I know I am in ‘roid country; nobody grows that big eating homemade bread.
They place me in a security booth and it is all Susan and I can do just to sit there, so numb and so saddened, and watch each other weep through that scratched-up sheet of plexiglass. And when we pick up those black forty-five pound telephones and hold them to our ears, all we can do is listen to that weeping until the hour has passed and the guards come for me.
Susan begins to visit every day. Our words come slowly, the trembling of my face, of my hands, lessens. Soon thereafter my lawyer, a good and kind friend, begins to show up for a series of consultations. Each time he comes I am led out to the interview room, and he is waiting, yellow legal pad in one hand, pen in the other, poised to take notes. Just the facts, ma’am. With my bones back in my body, my will to live barely restored, it is already time for me to help him to form a narrative of the crime, to gain an understanding of the facts. Good luck.
As I walk through it with him, recollecting the carnage, it is the faces that emerge most clearly. Bank employees, unfortunate customers, the innocent bystander, the elderly couple in their apartment: the fright in their eyes, the bewildered expressions. And finally, the masked and goggled Emergency Response Team. I didn’t ever see the actual faces of the ERT officers, but their feet left a lasting impression.
In the years prior to my arrest I had been both a volunteer and a paid worker in an area of what’s commonly referred to as Restorative Justice. I had served on numerous boards of directors for organizations such as the John Howard Society, LINC, B.C., Prison Arts Foundation, PEN Canada, Spirit of the People, and Journal of Prisoners on Prisons. I lectured to crime students, taught creative writing in prisons, and conducted victim empowerment workshops. I was a paid contract worker for Corrections Canada (I had Advanced Security Clearance), helping long-term offenders find their way back into the community. I’d prepared pre-sentence reports, moved prisoner’s wives into low-cost housing, driven their children to visits. I was an assistant at parole hearings, I refereed diversion programs for young offenders, moderated victim reconciliation sessions, and participated in healing circles.
In the latter three forums the victim and the offender are brought together in an informal and neutral setting. The objective is to establish a moral relationship between the offender and the offence and to meet the needs of the victims. These sessions were where healing could begin to take place for the parties in conflict. It was an approach to criminal justice wherein anger, shame, and hurt could be transformed into fairness, generosity, and accountability. It was sometimes a way through the anger and the hate. It was often the beginning of hope.
One particular session left a clear impression on my mind. It was not the sad tale of addiction and violation that was unfolding before me — these were all too common — but as I sat there, comfortable in my own chair, a witness to the human clumsiness that passed between this victim and this offender, I experienced a sense of liberation. I felt confident that I would be forever beyond the sad and humbling awkward ritual of accountability. I was so sure in that moment that I would never again be brought before the brass rail, made to stand, and be confronted by my own criminal failure.
And hey, look at me now, I can’t even meet the eyes of my lawyer, my friend.
He writes it all down. He turns the pages as I peel off layer after fresh layer and sink deeper into the territory of my crime. It is like collaborating on a book: I draw images, he writes the text. Early in the draft I think — why couldn’t I have been an alcoholic instead of a doper? At least an alcoholic is blessed with blackouts and memory losses. But a cocaine psychosis is nothing short of a chilling distillate; it was as if I had memorized a Quentin Tarantino movie.
The queer part is that “me” — the “I” in the parade of events as they happened — had little or no emotional memory. Cocaine, in a full-blown psychosis, causes an utterly pure detachment. The moral relationship, ironically and sadly, belongs to the person I am this day. The moral compass, the remorse and the shame, are present in me through memory, through me reliving, reattaching myself to the events of that day. Unlike an insane person, I am responsible for my condition and unlike a psychopath I can attain an authentic sense of responsibility.
Still, I wish there existed a meat cleaver I could simply hand to some sort of metaphysical butcher who could lop off the part of me that committed these crimes, and who could send that part off packing to the stoney lonesome. Then the rest of me — the other ninety-nine percent — the part that is a devoted father, a decent neighbour, a dedicated husband, and a caring, useful member of my community could go home.
But it doesn’t work that way, and even if it did, who would choose what to cut? A psychiatrist might want my brain for analysis, a tribunal of judges would chop off my hands, the police I shot at, would, for sure, be clamouring for my oysters. And what about the heart? The heart of a parent? That overly mortgaged muscle? Would they drive a stake through it and then return it to my family?
But no, none of this will happen: it’s all up on the block and it’s all going. In criminal law, and much of life, we are our behaviour. I’ve offended wholly and I will pay wholly. The nature of this offence calls for a life bid, or at least enough years to pass as a lifetime. I know from experience that the calendar days of those years will march over me like an army of ants, each taking a uniform bite and carrying it down into the dark. But sympathy is not what I am looking for, even from myself. I have earned my incarceration. I just wish it weren’t so.
From jump street I had told my lawyer to enter “an offer of accountability.” On November 29th we had what was termed a “mini-trial” in regards to “specific” intent to attempt murder. Three of the charges were dismissed, reduced to careless and criminal intent; one attempted murder stuck.
Sentencing is set for December 20th. The Crown is asking for twenty years, my lawyer will ask for fourteen years — my original “offer of accountability”. Neither option feels much like Merry Christmas.
This year my friend Patrick is putting up our tree; Tim is stringing the outside lights; Dano is buying my children’s gifts for me; Michael and Marilyn are walking my family through Butchart’s Gardens to see the Christmas lights. My mother-in-law isn’t making her annual batch of Nanaimo bars and is worried no one will finish up the yams at our family Christmas dinner. My older daughter wants to leave for Mexico or L.A. — just to be anywhere but here for the first Christmas. My younger daughter seems more hope-filled. She tells me on the phone, “It’ll get better, Dad, as more Christmases go by, but we’ll still go through phases, you know.” She is a wise young girl who has learned to separate what her dad has done from who her dad is, something even her dad has yet to learn. When she visits, which is every Monday night at six-thirty, I watch her through the plexiglass as she draws pictures on a pad the guard has given her. She draws me, or my pop cans, lifting her eyes only occasionally. I watch as she carries her art over to the visiting area supervisor, as a present, and I see a ten-year-old girl who will be walking up to receive her high school diploma before I’m eligible for parole. Yes, there will be a lot of phases. I ordered the book she is reading, Island of the Blue Dolphin, so we can have our own private book club. I watch her favourite TV shows — I, Too and Sabrina the Young Witch. She is filling a time capsule for me with stickers and art and letters. She wants to buy me Christmas presents and save them all up for me to open when I come home.
My older daughter, who will graduate from high school this year, is also under the legal visiting age and has to visit me with Susan or with her boyfriend. She puts her arm around her mother’s shoulder in court and holds her up in the hallways on particularly trying days. She answers the phone and fends off the media. She makes dinner when Susan visits me in the evenings, or takes her sister to a movie when Susan needs an empty house. I watch her support whoever needs it, including me. Charlotte seems the strongest of the four of us but the crime is, at seventeen she shouldn’t have to be.
During the last stage of my sentencing hearing, good friends and good neighbours got up on the witness stand: most swore on the Holy Book, and they all described a man they loved, a stranger to the events described during the trial stage of my hearing. That process was characterized by a National Post columnist as a eulogy. Everyone should be afforded the privilege I had to hear the love of friends before his funeral.
My wife was the last witness of the day, and in her trademark grace and humour she described the pain and the joy of our thirteen-year marriage, and I loved her all the harder.
Both children have insisted on appearing on my behalf. I reacted with an emphatic no — they’ve been through enough — but as in most things with children, a compromise was struck. They have each made a video.
All that is left of the sentencing hearing is to see these videos and listen to the testimony of BC’s chief forensic psychiatrist. I have read Dr. Lohrasbe’s report. He says I empathize and have understanding of the impact of my actions on the victims of my offence. He judges my remorse to be genuine. He’s right. He also expresses the opinion that an extended period of sexual interference from my childhood is a significant factor in my life-long battle with addiction. Whether or not he’s right, we both agree it’s not an excuse for criminal behaviour. But it may give me a handle, something to hold on to, a place to begin again in my quest to become whole. I am determined to go wherever I have to go, to take it as deep as it is deep, to do whatever it is I have to do to become whole, to never commit another offence, to never again get addicted. To become, finally and forever, the man my many friends and family described that day from the witness box.
My previous incarceration lasted fourteen and a half years. Most of my adult life has been spent in some of the toughest maximum security prisons here and in America. Many of those years were spent in solitary confinement. When I think back to those endless days of silence, lying there curled around that emptiness, it at least made sense then. It was designed that way: alone in a cell, separate from all that’s human, I was supposed to feel alone. But years after my release, a release I had worked so hard towards, changed so much to accomplish, standing in the middle of a room with my family, that emptiness would return. I felt so inhumanely alone, and it felt so unfair. Surrounded by the people I loved and who obviously loved me, the emptiness didn’t make sense anymore.
No human being lives in any state close to constant grace. I had moments when grace visited. It came unexpectedly, and remained ever so briefly. Sometimes, when I produced my life and inhabited it fully, like early in the morning, up witnessing the dawn and hearing the first bird clearing its throat, or over a candle-lit dinner watching Susan drink slowly, the legs of a red, red wine reflecting the flame between us: these times I would be in awe of the world.
These are the moments that as I learn once more to meditate and make prayer, I hope will return for a visit.
This morning, when the judge drops his gavel, my chin will probably be on my chest, and as I so often do when I stand alone and afraid, I will probably be rocking my body back and forth. But I hope that as his arithmetic reaches my ears I will be tilting forward, and thus follow through, begin a new fall, this time towards grace.