In the World

by Richard Stratton

  No, no, please, Stratton, don’t say that. Don’t even think such thoughts: that is a sure bet you are headed back to prison. This is just another test, another trial, and a mere hiccup in the great feast of life out here in the world. You’ve been through much worse. Stay strong. Just—as you have advised so many—put your head down, pull up your pants, tighten your belt, and figure this shit out. Come up with a game plan, a strategy, and resist, resist, always resist, even while appearing to go along to get along.

  I remind myself that I once stood trial in the Southern District of New York facing a possible life sentence without possibility of parole. That is serious: fighting for my life against the awesome power of the United States Department of Justice. This is a minor skirmish compared to that. Look on the bright side. They’re not going to lock me back up—or are they? Is that their objective, to see me fail at my reintegration into law-abiding society? What can they do if I refuse to get another job?

  Just to prove to myself if to no one else that I am in fact employed in the law offices of Ivan S. Fisher and intend to remain so employed, I take the train to Manhattan and check in at Ivan’s offices on the seventeenth floor at 425 Park Avenue. Charlie Kelly, Ivan’s investigator, is there. Charlie’s another ex-con, a former NYPD narcotics detective who got caught up in a big cop drug scandal and went to prison in the state system. Good guy, Charlie. Kept his mouth shut. Did his time. And now he works for Fisher. We hit it off immediately. Ivan’s secretary, Karen, tells me Fisher is in Florida on a case. When he calls in, she puts me on with him, and I tell him of my meeting with Lawless. Fisher agrees; if need be we will take it to court and let a judge decide. But in the meantime, he says he will call his probation officer, with whom he claims to have a good relationship, and see what he has to say.

  From Ivan’s office, I walk the few blocks to the Birch Lane Publishing Company on Madison Avenue. There I pick up ten copies of the bound galleys of my novel, Smack Goddess. My editor, Hillel Black, a veteran New York editor, isn’t in, but the rest of the staff could not have been more welcoming. I meet Hillel’s secretary, who gives me the galleys. She introduces me to Fern Edison, who is in charge of the publicity department. Fern wants to see if she can generate magazine articles to promote the book. She asks if I can send her copies of whatever news clippings I have on my criminal cases in Maine and New York. Another young editor congratulates me on my release and tells me, “You paid for the alleged sins of a generation of Americans.”

  From Birch Lane I continue on to Scott Meredith’s office, where I meet with my literary agent, Jack Scovil, and pick up a check for $9,000. The remaining $9,000 will be paid upon publication for a total of $20,000, minus the agent’s 10 percent. Scovil tells me he has agents working on selling foreign rights to the novel, as well as film rights. We discuss the collection of short stories I have in manuscript. Scovil wants to wait until the novel is published before taking the collection out to publishers. The day is definitely improving after my early morning meeting with my parole officer.

  My next stop is the Thurgood Marshall Federal Courthouse in Foley Square. It is here, in this majestic edifice named for one of the true heroes in the world of American jurisprudence—the first black man to be named a justice of the Supreme Court—that I stood trial before the Honorable Constance Baker Motley, who was the first African American woman appointed to the federal judiciary. I encounter a bevy of news reporters and cameramen jockeying for position behind police barricades as I mount the wide granite steps into the courthouse. I find the courtroom where John Mulheren, another friend I made while housed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, is on trial. I arrive just in time to hear Mulheren’s lawyer, Thomas Puccio, a former federal prosecutor who supervised the Abscam investigation, deliver his closing argument.

  When Puccio finishes his summation and court is adjourned, John gives me an enthusiastic welcome. He introduces me to his wife, Nancy, and his sister and father as well as Puccio, who is a close friend of Ivan Fisher. John is a legendary Wall Street bond trader whom I met the day he was locked up, charged with various white-collar crimes, something known as “stock parking,” and, more seriously, with allegedly plotting and actually being on his way to murder the infamous Wall Street trader Ivan Boesky.

  I was in the bullpen at MCC having just returned from court when John was brought in. John is a big man, over six feet, with a full head of thick iron-gray hair and a prominent brow that gives him an intense, brooding presence. When I first saw him on the day of his arrest, I made him for a prizefighter and never would have guessed he was a white-collar defendant until I spoke with him. Even then he put on no pretenses. The guards at the MCC claimed the elevators were out of order, and we were made to walk up the nine flights of stairs with guards in front of us and guards in back. In fact, I knew, there was a major rat move going on. The elevators were being used to take newly designated organized crime snitches from Nine South down to the third floor, where the Witness Protection Program houses cooperators whose lives may be in danger if they are kept in general population, or even in segregation.

  Mulheren and I began a conversation during the long trudge up the stairs. I had spent so much time on the ninth floor at MCC—more than two years while the courts decided an interlocutory appeal to determine if I could be tried a second time after already having been tried and convicted and sentenced on various marijuana-related charges—I had acquired a fair amount of influence on the unit. I was in a position to have minor housekeeping details as well as some other conveniences arranged. At that time, I was back in MCC on a subpoena ad testificandum while the government tried to force me to testify against Mailer before the grand jury. For John Mulheren’s brief stay with us on Nine North, I was able to get him assigned to a cell with another amenable white-collar crook. I got him some time on the phone, as well as a few basics from the commissary.

  John wasn’t with us for long, a couple of days. He made bail and was released to a private psychiatric facility, where he was to be examined and treated for a long-standing manic-depressive condition while awaiting trial. During the brief time we spent together at MCC we became friends. John told me that while succumbing to a manic episode, after having foregone his usual regimen of lithium, he loaded a high-powered rifle into his car and set out to kill Boesky. He claimed Boesky had falsely implicated him in an allegedly illegal stock transaction in order to make a deal with the prosecution to lessen his own exposure. I know all about that drill. I counseled John on the inner workings of the federal criminal justice system based on my by then quite extensive experience. Criminal lawyers may know a lot about how the law works, but someone who has been through multiple arrests, prosecutions, federal criminal trials, and years of imprisonment and had a mind to study the process and the law from the inside can gain and impart invaluable understanding of how the system really works: the day-to-day machinations, the intimidations, frustrations, calculations, falsifications, and the petty and not-so-petty bullshit one has to put up with in order to survive and stay sane during the process.

  We stayed in touch after John was released on bail and I shipped back out to Ashland, Kentucky, for the remainder of my bid. When I tell John of the difficulty I was having with the parole office, he immediately offers me a job. “Why not come work on the exchange?” he asks. “What do you want to do? Just let me know, whatever you want, we’ll find you something.”

  John says he is offering me the job for selfish reasons. “It’s hard to find people who will stick by you.”

  I’m not sure how that would go over with Ms. Lawless, and anyway, I have no inclination to work in the financial world. John invites me to join him and his family, catch the helicopter back to his home on the Jersey Shore for dinner. But I tell him I need written permission from my parole officer to leave the five boroughs, and I doubt they would give me permission to visit with another former resident of Nine North at the MCC.

  Once the Mulheren party departs for the heliport, I can’t
resist the urge to take a walk around the neighborhood. This is the bastion of federal law enforcement power in New York City. The FBI’s monolithic New York headquarters faces the courthouse from the west side of Foley Square. I pass by and gaze up at the federal lockup, MCC, also known as the rock ’n’ roll jail. MCC is attached to the courthouse by an elevated walkway that serves to deliver a fresh supply of prisoners into the courthouse building without their ever having to step outside. The jail is a grim, brooding, concrete, fortress-like structure with barred windows and a rooftop recreation area covered with steel netting strung with fat round obstructions to keep prisoners from escaping by helicopter. I remember the many days and months and years that I lived in that building—more uninterrupted time than I spent in any other structure in my entire life. I recall the hours spent gazing out the windows at the streets of New York City, so near and yet a world away, and where I now stand as a free man—well, almost free, still partially under the auspices of my keepers. And to be here on the outside alone, with no guards or deputy US marshals escorting me, no chains on my ankles or handcuffs on my wrists, standing in these longed-for city streets and looking back at that building—I am overwhelmed with a whole new sense of relief.

  Yes, damn it, I did it! I made it out. I got my skinny white ass out of prison. This is nothing less than a waking dream come true, an imagined future that has now become reality.

  Chapter Two

  GET MY MONKEY LAID

  COME ON, STRATTON—LET’S get to the sex. A horny motherfucker like you, man, when are you gonna get your dick wet?

  Not so fast.

  You have got to think these things through. You can’t be impetuous when it comes to something as important as making love to a woman, not after eight years of enforced celibacy, not ever. I consult my mental checklist of things to do upon release from prison. First on the list: visit my parents. Okay, I did that. It was a deeply moving reunion with family. It was a nostalgic trip back to my childhood environs that I am still internalizing and will continue to reflect upon as I seek to understand who I am now in relation to who I was before my arrest and imprisonment, and in relation to who my family and loved ones still are.

  Next: check in with my parole officer. Also done. This was and still is a frustrating and upsetting encounter with the agents of authority that I am still entangled with, still seeking a workable resolution to an essentially antagonistic relationship. Then: visit my employer. Okay, did that as well. I haven’t actually seen Ivan yet, but I did speak with him on the phone. It’s touch and go whether I’ll be allowed to continue working for Ivan given the situation with the parole commission. We will see how that plays out. There is no way I’m going to knuckle under and give up without a fight. I may be forced to take the issue before a judge. And there are other alternatives to consider if that doesn’t work.

  Next: stop by my publishers to pick up copies of the bound galleys of my novel. That was unequivocally a hugely gratifying experience, without doubt the best possible result of having spent all those years in prison next to actually getting myself out. I wrote the book while I was locked up—not an easy thing to do. Yes, you have plenty of time as a prisoner, but almost no privacy, no opportunity to do something that requires as much concentration as writing. Now the book is on schedule to be published—that in itself is amazing. And as part of that good fortune, I picked up a check for nine grand from my agent. Fucking wonderful! To get paid for doing something I love doing, what could be better? Next on the list: gather together all my prison writings. Also done. And, finally: find and secure somewhere to live—a place of my own. I’m working on it.

  Nowhere on my list do I see: get laid.

  Good to know I am keeping my priorities straight. Still, eight years without the love of a woman, it was rough, it was lonely as hell; it hurt, it was physically and emotionally painful. Enforced celibacy, reluctant onanism is no fun. Being denied the company of women is psychological torture. The loneliness is soul killing. It does bad things to one’s character. Much as I may love my male friends, including and even especially some of the men I met in prison, it’s not the same as the deep, intimate love I feel for the women in my life. I am not sexually attracted to other men. What happens in prison—I am talking about men’s prisons here; from all I’m told it’s different in women’s prisons—sexuality becomes perverted. It’s not about love and tenderness; it’s about dominance and power. Judging by what I saw during my time in prison, I would have to say that there is a lot less sex in men’s prisons than one might imagine having watched prison life depicted in the movies and on TV. I was in federal prison; people tell me buggery is more prevalent in state joints. Maybe so. The point is, I think most men doing a long bid just shut down emotionally and close off the whole side of their nature that thrives on interaction with women as most intimately experienced in making love. Sex becomes relegated to the imagination. Sure, you may jerk off from time to time, but even that is awkward, given that one is almost never alone. Prison is aptly described as the loneliest place in the world, where you are never alone but always surrounded by other men. Even in the Hole, in solitary confinement, the guards are watching.

  For an ex-con, everything about being free is measured against what it was like to be in custody, how it feels to be deprived of fundamental liberties we take for granted. It’s the shock of release after imprisonment that is at the center of my life right now, and how to deal with this radical change. Basic freedoms such as the ability to move in space as one chooses as opposed to being locked behind bars, confined to an eight-by-ten-foot cell; having your dignity and self-respect constantly demeaned; forfeiting all privacy, even the privacy of your asshole; and to be lonely, deeply lonely, lonely in your bones: that is the prison experience. You are forced to shut down and cauterize a whole range of human experience and emotion; you are forced to embrace a code of conduct where to show weakness or vulnerability is to start down a path that leads to total subjugation and humiliation. You live under a regime that seeks to diminish your humanity, thwart your individuality. And so you are forced to live by a set of values that rewards dishonesty and subterfuge to survive in a perverse world.

  As I taste life anew, I’m not going to dine at the nearest greasy spoon or pig out on junk food. No way, Jose. I’m going to eat well. I’m going to dine in as many good restaurants as I possibly can. And I’m not going to take up residence in the men’s room at Pennsylvania Station, which is, out here in the world, the closest example I can give of what it’s like to live in jail. You are confined to one giant fucking men’s toilet with some weird dudes hanging around and measuring you. I’m going to seek a clean, well-lighted place to live and work in solitude—not loneliness but solitude—and to do my work in privacy. So it makes sense that while imagining and dreaming of the long-anticipated return to the land of men and women, the last thing I desire, and the last thing I longed for while dreaming of love while in prison is a quickie wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am with a virtual stranger. I never was good at one-night stands. I’m into intimacy. Sex without love, without real physical attraction and more—the desire to know someone deeply—does not excite me. So I know that coming out of prison my first intimate connection with a woman is not going to be with a pro, not going to be a rushed chance random encounter, not even a mercy fuck. I’m in no hurry. I just want to take my time, enjoy the realm of possibilities, see how things play out, give it to God, and experience what life in the world of men and women has in store for me. This, however, does not preclude me from making some phone calls.

  THE FIRST WOMAN I call I met while in prison. Her name is Naomi Klein. She’s a civilian who worked as director of the college education program at the FCI in Otisville, New York.

  Just eighty miles north of the city, FCI Otisville was for much of the time I was locked up considered to be one of the better stops on the Bureau of Prisons national tour—a preferred place to do time for anyone from New York or New England. My friend Shane did most of his b
id at Otisville. I tried a few times to get transferred to Otisville, but my security level was too high. Once the federal prison system became enormously overcrowded during the crack epidemic at the height of the war on drugs in the mid- and late 1980s, when the MCC in Manhattan could no longer house all the prisoners awaiting trial in New York, and before they opened the huge new federal jail in Brooklyn, the Metropolitan Detention Center, known as MDC, they turned Otisville into half a transit stop where prisoners were housed while awaiting transfer to a permanent institution or while awaiting a trial date in one of New York City’s federal district courts. There were still a couple of units for prisoners designated to Otisville as a work cadre when I arrived, and there was also one whole separate unit specifically for Witness Security (WITSEC) prisoners: high-level government snitches either doing time or awaiting their day to testify in court.

  Because of the WITSEC unit, security at Otisville was high: controlled movement, meaning prisoners could go only from the housing units to the yard or mess hall or education department on the hour during the ten minutes allotted for prisoner moves; regular cell shakedowns; impromptu asshole inspections; and uptight guards and Bureau of Prisons staff with an attitude. But still it was a lot better than doing time at MCC, where one rarely, if ever, got to see the light of day other than through a barred window. Otisville had a big, open recreation yard and fully equipped weight pile. The housing units had large, two-man cells. The food was decent and the commissary exceptional. All of this one might attribute to the number of New York City heavyweight mafiosi doing time at Otisville.