After Michael got out of the hole in the fall of 2002, he gave his Indiana University college course another try. By six months in, just past spring break season, Michael was making good progress—worrying about his upcoming midterm like any other college student. With regard to jobs inside prison, though, he’d gotten stuck. He had been trying to put himself forward for the better jobs, desk jobs instead of kitchen jobs or physical labor. In quick succession, for reasons he didn’t know, he’d failed to get two jobs that he really wanted. But somehow in the course of those efforts, he learned from a supervisor that he might be eligible for the inmate firefighting crew that Norco sponsored for the California Department of Forestry. The inmates were trained to tackle California’s fearsome wildfires, and joining the fire camp would mean time outside the prison.
Only “Level 1” inmates, however, could be assigned to fire camp. These were inmates without a “violent” code in their file, and Michael was not one of these. He’d been coded “violent” when he first went to prison because of the nature of his offense. But an attentive supervisor helped him realize that, on account of his youthfulness upon arrest and his behavior since he had been in prison, he ought to be eligible to get the “violent” code removed. And so it transpired that in May of 2003, at his annual review, Michael was downgraded. His spirit leapt. For the first time in a long time, he had something to look forward to.
Days later, Michael got to go outside. He got assigned to fire camp on May 19, 2003, his first day outside of prison or a prison transport vehicle in almost eight years. The training involved learning to hike in and out of canyons, how to cut “firelines,” the breaks in fuel sources that are supposed to stop a greedy fire in its tracks. He learned how to use shovels and rakes for this work, and learned crew roles like captain, swamper, and dragspoon. He recorded those first four days.
5-19-03
Day 1–I felt real dizzy. I’ve always thought I would be acutely aware of everything on that first day. I felt myself panic. For an instant I even wanted to run back inside. The free air had me coughing alot. Going up the mountain I saw the sky was noticeably different from in prison. Even though it has been the same sky since the beginning of time. I really started to take a lot in going down the mountain. Yellow small flowers lined the trail. There were purple ones as well.
Day 2–I noticed the trees this time. I saw them on day 1 but this morning they seemed to speak to me “look at me.” My mouth actually watered in desire never to leave the trees’ side. When I got up the mountain I noticed people were around. I was in awe observing life outside of prison. I pictured people going to work, school, or even shopping. It made me groan inside.
5-21-03
Day 3–I saw people horse riding. Other guys were laughing because the ladies were overweight and they mocked feeling sorry for the horse. I felt sick because these guys were making jokes as if they were better than them. I thought at least they can do what they want when they want.
5-22-03
Day 4–I was irritated and partly distracted as a result of eating prunes earlier this morning. I won’t do that again. On the way back I found myself feeling depressed. Even as I write I feel my eyes teary. It is a blessing to be able to leave and come back. But, it hurts to leave knowing I’ll come back.
During this stretch of time, something else big happened. Michael fell in love. I remember a phone call. I can’t remember precisely when it was. But I remember his words, “I’ve met someone, Danielle. She’s beautiful.” I remember my sense of utter confusion. “Met someone? How? Where?” I couldn’t compute how Michael could have met a woman. Was it a guard he’d met? There were women guards in the visiting room whom I’d gotten to know over my visits. But in some sort of fumbling way, we came to understand each other. Michael had fallen in love with a fellow inmate, a man named Isaiah with implants or hormone-induced breasts who dressed and lived as Bree. She was, he said, unquestionably the most beautiful woman in the prison.
He hadn’t told his mother, but he told me, and he wanted me to promise to say nothing. He knew his mother would be upset and he feared she would judge him. He hoped I wouldn’t.
I didn’t judge him. I suppose there was a twinge of surprise, but I didn’t really reflect on the specifics of the relationship. I loved my lesbian aunt, Big Ros, and her partner had done my hair throughout my middle school years. I was used to going with the flow of people’s sexual identities. Nor did I ask about what Bree had done to land in Norco. Michael and I never spoke about what any of his fellow inmates had done to land in prison and this case was no exception. I didn’t learn until after Michael’s death what Bree was in for. I just accepted that Michael had found someone inside who seemed to mean something to him and make him happy and I was glad. I didn’t address any of my reflections to any sort of imagined future. I reacted only to the present, and Michael’s voice on the phone was content in a way that I had never heard. I wanted him to have that.
Like freedom, desire was dizzying to Michael. A month later, Michael sent me a piece of writing unlike anything else he ever sent me. “The world has change and brothas far from the same,” he rapped and continued:
Am I losing my mind
No; I think I found it
Realizing greatness in one’s self is very astounding
and truth be told, I recognize a King
cause when I look in the mirror all I see is me
And us, so please trust, we can’t be touch
standing together forever is a necessary must.
Soon enough, he sent me Bree’s annual prison shot. She was posed as a woman, lying on the floor like a sports pinup, made up and in colorful clothing. Bree was beautiful or, at least, in that territory, and certainly ready to compete with Hisprettygirl and Jackjack, the women who sought to turn the prison visiting room into the site of their “hot dates.” I don’t have that picture anymore, but I do have Michael’s words describing, I think, the impression that Bree made on him. He shared the experience in the form of an essay that he had just written about “The Knight’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale” from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. He called his essay “Two Tales and Four Desires.”
In “The Knight’s Tale,” two cousins of royal blood have both been imprisoned for life in a tower. One of them, Palamon, glimpses a lady, Emily, walking in the garden near the prison. “Desire immediately sets in,” Michael wrote and added, quoting Chaucer, “and Palamon wants Emily. He cries out in pain ‘he blenched and gave a cry as though he had been stabbed, and to the heart.’” Like me, the cousin, Arcite, thinks Palamon’s distress is caused by his imprisonment and chides him to endure. But “Palamon tells Arcite that prison has nothing to do with his distress but it is from a lady that he sees wandering in a garden below the tower.” Arcite looks out the window “and he is also hurt by her beauty.”
If “The Knight’s Tale” tells the story of aristocrats in love, Michael wrote, “The Miller’s Tale” tells a story of peasants in love, but a shared theme of desire’s power unites the two tales. He concluded, “Desire is powerful and it creates a lot of other emotions. It makes men do things that they probably would not normally do.” He expressed his core point this way: “In both tales, we could not predict the decisions that men filled by longing and desire would make. Nor could we correctly guess the outcome of their decisions.”
Michael spoke oracular words. He prophesied. He knew, without knowing that he knew it, the course his life would take.
I was oblivious. I thought the essay was about Chaucer. No one could have guessed the final outcome of Michael’s life because none of us took into account his most dizzying desire.