At MCC, I was surrounded by human wreckage and devastation, which infused every waking moment with heaviness and fear. At Lewisburg, we all have fewer than ten years left in our sentences. To be at a camp, you can’t have violence on your record, or be a full-fledged gang member, or have committed a sex crime. So the population combines doctors and lawyers and judges who have committed white-collar crimes, and low-level drug dealers. We’re all going home, and that’s the prevailing attitude.
The first few days, a lot of people come up to me, inviting me to join various teams, and at this point I’m a joiner, signing up for softball and volleyball. There’s an openness and inclusiveness here that I won’t fully appreciate until later. The press coverage about my cooperation has preceded me here, and some people give me the cold shoulder, but if you’re at a camp, the overwhelming odds are that you cooperated, and most people are friendly.
* * *
—
My routine starts to take shape. When I wake up, I bring a handful of commissary-bought groceries to the dayroom, where I use the 190-degree hot water tap to make coffee and a bowl of oatmeal with peanut butter, powdered milk, and honey.
My job assignment, when it comes, is an inside sanitation detail, working 7:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., five days a week, mopping floors, emptying trash, cleaning toilets, wiping down tables and microwave ovens, and vacuuming in and around Warden Bledsoe’s office, for $11 a month.
Other inmates work for Unicorp, which makes license plates, wires, cables, and lingerie. It’s slave labor that affects the economy on the street. Inmates earn pennies, while the BOP takes contracts that would otherwise go to wage-paying factories out in the world. And Unicorp jobs are considered the good ones. They pay better than non-Unicorp jobs and are in demand.
As I come to understand how relatively benign this place is, I begin to feel more confident and to find my niche. I work out twice a day with another recent arrival, Sebastian, a painter and sculptor from Philly who graduated from Rutgers and got seventy months for marijuana distribution. He’s Jewish, grew up in Spain, and is more intellectual than I am but equally confident and unafraid. We’ve traveled in some of the same circles. He’s been to parties I’ve played at. A month in, I get permission to move to Unit 2, where Sebastian lives, and we become cubies.
I’m feeling optimistic. Nine months after kicking my heroin addiction, my body has normalized, and I’m finally sleeping well. I’m looking forward to getting into RDAP and then going home. I like looking at the expiration dates on my commissary picante sauce and granola bars and Yoo-hoo soda and thinking: I’ll be out before this goes bad. (When I’m feeling blue, I look at the dates on other items and think: Shit, this will go bad before I get out of here.) When I do get out, my family and friends keep telling me, I can do whatever I put my mind to.
Erin is back living with her parents in their Pennsylvania hometown, not far from Lewisburg, waitressing at a local restaurant and getting an online master’s degree in entertainment business from Full Sail University. My trust is helping support her financially, and Erin continues to be my lifeline to the outside world. She writes to me every day, updating me on her life, asking about mine, providing news about mutual friends, including some of my fellow inmate friends, with whom she’s struck up independent correspondences. She sends me books and magazines and articles about my family and other topics she thinks I’d be interested in. She’s taking care of our dogs, and she spends a good chunk of every letter updating me on their health, moods, and foibles, often enclosing a stack of photos of them. We talk about the future: maybe we’ll get a Winnebago and drive around the country.
* * *
—
One evening during a softball game, I’m sitting next to my teammate Matt, a kid from Detroit with a Vandyke beard, and he tells me about the Inipi ceremony, a Lakota Sioux ritual he takes part in. I’ve always had a lightweight fascination with Native American culture. I have a pair of war feathers tattooed on my lower arm, and I wear a bear-bone necklace my friend Santos gave me. Matt invites me to a sweat lodge the coming weekend.
On Saturday morning, I walk out to the Inipi area. It’s ringed by low hedges, and at the center of it is the structure I saw from a distance on my first night at Lewisburg. It’s now covered with canvas tarps. Ten paces to the east, a bonfire blazes. There are seven other guys. Pud, a well-liked fat dude with long hair that’s shaved on the sides, is an actual Mohawk from a reservation. Most of us are white, including the kid I sat next to on the bus from Canaan. Our leader is Tomás, who looks white but is from a native tribe in Puerto Rico.
Tomás steps inside the tent and offers prayers to the six directions—north, south, east, west, Mother Earth, Father Sky—while the rest of us stand around outside saying, “A-ho!” after each prayer. Then one by one we bow low and enter the tent from the east side, giving thanks and taking a seat around a mound where hot rocks are already giving off steam. There’s a fragrant smell of sweet grass. We’re sitting in a circle now, as Tomás sprinkles water on the rocks, and the air becomes scorchingly hot.
The last time I was in a sweat lodge, five years ago, was at the rehab clinic in Sedona. Halfway through, I spent a weekend in Scottsdale with Erin and her cousin, drinking heavily. When I got back to the clinic and did a sweat lodge the next day, my face puffed up, maybe because of the toxins I’d put into my body. I was afraid I’d get kicked out but managed to complete the 30-day program.
At Lewisburg we sit cross-legged for four hours, sweating in darkness over the hot stones. Periodically, we pass a pipe filled with the traditional kinnikinnick, a mixture of tobacco and other leaves, and offer prayers in the six directions, breaking after each one to open a flap and let light and air in. Then a designated helper replenishes the hot rocks and reloads the pipe, and the next round begins. We thank the north for its purifying winds and the cleansing snow, and the south as the origin and end of all life, where ancestors’ spirits reside. We thank the east as the source of the rising sun and of wisdom, heralding new beginnings and life, and the west for its cleansing rains. We thank the heavens above us and the providing earth below. We sing songs.
Lay-u-ha chey-wank-e-yea lo…
Kola-lay-chay-say ik-cho-wo…
The heat is punishing, and it’s not easy to go the six rounds. But the ritual appeals to me with its simplicity and lack of dogma. I like the philosophy of atonement through endurance, of giving something to gain something, of seeing the divine in the natural world, of praying while sacrificing. For a moment, I feel outside the prison.
Walking back to the unit, Matt explains that the summer solstice is coming up, and if I want to take part, I need to formally list my religious preference with the prison as Native American. I do, and next Sunday I join the group for this annual event. The Inipi frame stays up year-round, but once a year, at the start of summer, we are allowed to gather new rocks for the fire. A couple of the guys have licenses to drive on the compound, and they take us in pickup trucks to a creek on the outskirts of the property that is normally off-limits to inmates. We gather new stones. We cut saplings, pliable but strong, to rebuild both our Inipi and the one behind the wall. We carve our initials on an old wooden bridge that spans the creek, just beyond the perimeter. We swim in the water, splashing each other. It feels like summer camp, and for a moment we can forget where we are.
* * *
—
I’m starting to rebuild myself. Part of my bond with Sebastian is a shared anguish about our predicament and thirst for some measure of peace. Beyond the weekly Inipi, I open myself to other traditions, reading theosophical tracts and Eckhart Tolle, whose insights have the ring of deep truth, resounding because I recognize them as things I already somehow innately know. I write down a quote from Francis Bacon, the Renaissance philosopher, and hold it close to me: “Seek not to have life happen the way that you choose, but rather choose that it happens as it does, and you shall live prosperously.”
I meditate briefly every mornin
g. I do an active meditation, where I recite a mantra and visualize traits I want to embody, and a passive meditation where I clear my head and watch my breath. Sebastian, who’s asking himself similar questions, carries a laminated list of the twelve archangels in his shoes, so that, as he likes to say, he’s “walking with the angels.” At Sebastian’s urging, I read Shantaram, the 936-page cult novel about the fugitive years of an Australian escaped prisoner who establishes himself in the Bombay underworld and battles in Afghanistan alongside the mujahideen. It’s strewn with philosophical jewels, and I read it with a highlighter. At this moment in my life, this book speaks to me. Sebastian and I spend many evenings talking about Shantaram and its exploration of guilt and redemption and right and wrong. The book talks about an ethics based on the universe’s progression toward complexity, positing that anything that helps this progression is good, and anything that hinders it is evil.
My workouts are further toughening my body. I’ve been getting stronger and leaner, and now I begin to add definition, too. When friends and family visit, they comment on my healthy appearance, suggesting prison has been good for me. For them, coming to a bucolic minimum-security camp in the Allegheny Mountains is almost a joy, compared with MCC. The visiting room here is relaxed and informal. Mom has moved to New York, where she lives with her boyfriend Paolo and Imara, and shares joint custody of Hawk and Hudson with their father. She visits me regularly with my young half sister and -brothers, one time surprising me with a visit when I’m in the middle of a softball game. Dad visits with Dylan and Carys, and another time with Catherine, and another time with Jojo and Granny. She looks older but is still elegant and sharp. Her letters to me have been unfailingly encouraging. She has always supported my acting, and in nearly every letter she makes a remark about it. She’s worried about me but full of love, and in my lowest moments her words buoy me. “Keep on with it”—my journal-keeping—“even if you find it boring,” she writes in one letter. “This is a good time to probe your inner feelings, and reexamine some convictions to see if they still apply. Be totally honest as to how you feel NOW—it’ll be interesting for you to read years later.”
Mom’s fragile détente with Dad has come to an end. Two months after my sentencing, she sued him over the profits from Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Though her lawyer had advised her she was entitled to the money under the terms of their divorce settlement, and Mom had recently lost a lot of money investing with two different Ponzi schemers—Kenneth I. Starr and Bernard Madoff—Dad’s lawyer has painted her as greedy, and that’s the storyline the tabloids run with.
* * *
—
In my phone calls with Meg, my lawyer with benefits, she insists that we have graphically explicit phone sex. This makes me uncomfortable, since the institutional phones are all recorded, as she knows. The officials who monitor prison calls hear this kind of thing all the time, but she’s a lawyer. She’s my lawyer. I’m surprised by how gung-ho she is, but she seems to get turned on by it. I figure that if she feels comfortable doing it, I’ll go along with it. Mostly I just listen, throwing in a couple of encouraging words here or there. She’s the one getting off in private.
In early July, she visits. We kiss, then sit at a picnic table in a fenced-in area outside, holding hands.
“I have something to tell you,” she says. “Carlos and Gabriel were arrested.”
They were busted in California on the same day I arrived at Lewisburg. “They’re going to be indicted in the next few days.”
This is terrible news. I thought I’d never have to testify against them, because they’d fled to Mexico and would never be caught, much less indicted.
“You’ll have to testify if there’s a trial,” Meg says, “but it’s very unlikely there will be one.”
“You really think it’s unlikely?” I ask.
“I do,” she says. “They’d be crazy not to plead out.”
I really don’t want to be a witness against them.
* * *
—
Though I’ve embraced self-improvement to a degree, I still have a foot in the past. One consequence of the relaxed vibe at Lewisburg is that an enormous volume of contraband floods into the camp. Since the duties of the grounds crew require them to cut grass out to the distant fringes of the compound, they’re in a position to pick up packages left there, and they control much of the camp economy.
I can get lobster if I want. Big steaks come in. Everyone has a cell phone. From my first day at the camp I’ve been offered cigarettes, vodka, and drugs. Commissary mackerel is the currency of choice in minimum-security federal prisons, and a pack of cigarettes costs seven pouches (or $21, the price of a single cigarette in a higher-security prison). A small water bottle full of vodka goes for $40.
I’d made my limited supply of smuggled Xanax last by breaking them into pieces, but eventually I’d run out, and the old familiar unease that has always dogged me began to creep back. Heroin is readily available in the camp, but I resisted its pull for a while. Of course, I worried about getting re-addicted. My withdrawal symptoms had only recently, finally, abated. It had felt good to be able to say, truthfully, that I was clean, and for my parents’ belief in my sobriety to have a basis in reality for once. Heroin was the thing that had led me to this place. Was I really going to toss away my painfully earned freedom from addiction and go back to the sorry state I’d been in when I was arrested? But I figured I’d deal with that issue later. Right now, it’s going to be great and feel really good. I deserve it. Look at everything I’ve gone through. The Garcia case has me extremely stressed, and the heroin will help with my anxiety. I’m going to finish up my time at Lewisburg with nine months of drug treatment anyway, so what does it matter if in the meantime I use something to take the edge off? I’ve only used heroin to right a chemical imbalance in my brain, to medicate away my intense social anxiety, and now I’m expected to spend years in a hostile, captive environment with nothing to ease my discomfort? If the BOP is going to refuse to fill my legal prescription, then it’s only prudent for me to take care of myself with the medicine that is available. I’ll be judicious about how much I use. Anyway, I’ve become so disciplined in so many ways, it’s okay if I backslide in this one area. I’ll make sure I don’t let it get out of control, so it won’t be hard to quit.
Eventually this thinking ate through my resolve like acid. So now, every afternoon when I finish my workout, I head to the bathroom, where I get high. Truth is, I’m not that conflicted about it. I’d known, in my bones, that I wasn’t done with heroin.
One day I’m sweeping the Inipi area when I hear “Douglas.” I look over and see Mr. Johnson, the cigar-chomping cop who I’ve developed a rapport with, standing outside the hedge ring at a respectful remove from the ceremonial area. He motions for me to come over.
“Douglas, you know you burned that test the other day.” I’d had to give a urine sample. “It came up hot for opiates.”
I make up something about my medications.
“Here’s what I’m going to tell you,” he says. “It may be your lucky day, ’cause it turns out the SIS guy is out of town”—SIS is the Bureau of Prisons’ version of Internal Affairs—“and I don’t think it’s going to be something he’ll worry about when he gets back.” He’s telling me, without telling me, that he’s giving me a break this time.
25
2010: Cancer
Two weekends after her last visit, Meg drives down again from New York. She tells me she just received a call from the MCC administrator who was kind to my family, giving her a heads-up that the BOP has started an investigation into her visits with me.
Meg is laughing as she tells the story. In the past, I’ve reassured her that I told no one about her bringing in Xanax for me, despite my having shared some of the pills with Dave and Eddie. Now I tell her that my cellmate must have seen me with the Xanax and informed on me.
My heart is in my stomach, but I also know the prosecutors have nothing, and if
Meg denies everything, we’ll be fine. “I swallowed the only physical evidence they could have, Meg. That means all they have is stool pigeons looking to try to get time cut off their sentences. That’s not going to hold up against your word. So you have to stick to the script.”
“Of course,” she says, “of course.” But she’s smiling. She seems to be taking the whole thing lightly. She’s smart, a graduate of Columbia Law School employed by a prestigious firm, and has sat in rooms with federal agents and prosecutors. She should know the system through and through. But she comes from a strict Middle Eastern family, grew up sheltered, and is naive. She’s never been in the government’s crosshairs, which is a whole other ballgame. And something about our relationship makes her leave her wits at the door.
“Listen, Meg, if they come at you, they’re going to try to scare you. You have to deny it. I’m going to deny it on my end.”
The next evening, I call her and ask about her drive home. She interrupts: “I actually can’t talk to you.” She won’t say why. I keep asking. Finally she says, “I thought maybe you already knew that I couldn’t talk to you.”
What? How would I know? I’m getting upset. “Who told you that?”
“My lawyer,” she says. She starts sobbing, quietly at first, and then the sobs become a jagged, hysterical weeping.
“It’s going to be okay,” I say. “Meg, I promise it’s going to be okay.”
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