In New York, while housed at MCC to be called to testify before the grand jury investigating Mailer and while researching the issue in the law library, I found case law that held a US judge could not immunize a potential witness and force them to testify if they were also facing charges in a foreign jurisdiction. Wonderful. Sometimes having several cases can work to one’s advantage. I was charged with over sixty defendants in a huge hash and marijuana smuggling prosecution in Canada. When I brought this to the attention of the judge overseeing the New York grand jury, much to the government’s chagrin, the writ ad testificandum was dismissed, and I was due to be shipped out of MCC. While the Bureau of Prisons puppet masters were still trying to figure out what to do with me, I was sent to Otisville in holdover status.
In fact, I was shipped out of MCC precipitously when I got caught allegedly having sex with a civilian female sociology professor in the education department. The supervisor of the education department claimed he walked in to one of the classrooms on the third floor and found me sitting on the teacher’s desk, with the teacher poised to give me head. What can I say? These things happen. You put men in prison and give them an opportunity to have sex with female staff members or contract civilian employees, and it’s bound to happen. Horniness prevails. Once at Otisville, I again gravitated to the education department. Not looking to get laid necessarily, but rather seeking to continue my education. In time, I would complete a bachelor’s degree program while in Bureau of Prisons custody.
This was before they shut down most higher education programs in federal prisons—another politically driven, counterproductive move on the part of our ill-advised government representatives. The major cause of crime in America is illiteracy, lack of a decent education, and lack of access to decent jobs that comes with some degree of secondary education. People who don’t know what they’re talking about believe it is wrong to give prisoners access to education programs. But you have to ask yourself: Whom do you want coming out of prison to be released back into the community? Most of these men and women are going to get out one day. Do you want someone who has been further brutalized, dehumanized, and educated only in how to continue their criminal careers to be let loose and move in down the block? Or do you want someone who has had their mind and character given a whole new positive dimension and new hope for integration back into society by exposure to an education program? It’s a no-brainer. And in the end, it saves taxpayers money. The rate of recidivism drops significantly for ex-cons who have participated in some educational programming while in custody.
As a sentenced federal prisoner one is required to work in order to earn what is known as meritorious good-time. It’s a joke, really; most of these prison jobs are just a way to keep convicts busy while they do their time. There is what is known as UNICOR, comprising real jobs in federal prison industries, a kind of modified version of slave labor. But I never signed up for that. I nearly always looked for some easy job in the education department where I might have access to a typewriter and be able to get some of my own work done. Or I looked to get a job in the recreation department so I could spend most of my day working out, playing tennis, or just hanging out in the yard picking up a few cigarette butts and pretending to be busy. And, whenever possible, I looked to get assigned to the prison law library to continue working on my own case as well as to help other prisoners with their various legal issues.
At Otisville, it wasn’t so much a job that brought me into contact with Naomi Klein in the education department. Because I wasn’t designated to that prison, I wasn’t required to work. But I wanted to stay busy, so I signed up each day to go to the education department. I got a pass from the guard assigned to my unit, and I went there to help out in any way I could—but primarily I went there to work on my novel and short stories, to use the typewriters whenever available, and to read or write in a relatively quiet environment.
And it was there while working on my novel that I met Naomi Klein. She’s an attractive, upbeat, intelligent, and compassionate woman—a ray of light in what can be a dark place. Naomi brought a lot of positive energy into the prison with her each day. She would smile when she said hello to us convicts, and she has a great smile. Her whole face lights up. That’s not something you see very often in prison, people smiling. Grimaces, yes, and leers, sneers, looks of disgust. Pained expressions. Hateful, angry looks. The bland, bored bureaucratic demeanor that says, “You are nothing to me.” The faces of men who seem void of emotion. But a real smile from a good-looking woman—that’s a good thing, a rare and good thing indeed in prison.
There was a song popular at the time, “Sweet Child of Mine,” sung by Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses. Naomi loved that song. Whenever it came on the radio in the education department, she turned up the volume and sang along. We became friends. She was interested in my literary efforts and helped me further them by giving me access to a typewriter, paper, carbon paper, and envelopes. Naomi read some of my work. By then, it looked like I might actually have a life as a professional witer after prison, and with my various appeals working their way through the courts, I had hope that I could actually be released before too much longer. Naomi gave me her home address and asked me to stay in touch.
I did, when I arrived at FCI Ashland and settled back in to a routine to complete my sentence. I wrote to Naomi and she wrote back. We began writing to each other regularly, several times a week, and as sometimes happens in jailhouse correspondences, the letters soon turned torrid with pent up lust. She was separated, not actually divorced because she had never been legally married, a mother of two young boys living in the country in a home on several acres of land with a large vegetable garden in Upstate New York. Naomi is a progressive intellectual, an activist, college educated and a college educator. She dresses in long, colorful skirts. She has a beautiful body and open, attractive face with that bright, engaging smile. She sent me her home phone number and I began to call her once or twice a week during those final months in prison.
But it was the letters that got to me—got to both of us. I wrote to her about the many and varied ways that I would fuck her. Yes, we would make love, I said, but we were also going to fuck, fuck seriously, fuck passionately, fuck long and hard, fuck gently and slowly—fuck all these years of not fucking out of me. She wrote back of the many ways she was going to receive me, take me into her soft places, her special places, and let me feel everything good and wonderful to be felt inside a woman. Those letters—love letters, sex letters, long letters about life and prison and literature, and a hoped-for time of freedom regained—I still have them in my voluminous hoard of prison correspondence.
Now it has happened, the longed-for release. Here I am at large. I am back in the world, a newly minted free man about to meet a woman with whom I carried on a provocative, X-rated correspondence. It seems only right and fitting that I—that we—should realize the full extent, the full dimension and sensational spectrum of the male-female relationship we envisioned, imagined, and described in such felt detail in those letters.
It is Monday, the second of July. I have been out of prison exactly one week. After over two years of writing to each other, talking on the phone, at last Naomi and I are to meet again face to face.
NAOMI DRIVES HER car into Brooklyn from Upstate. I meet her in the street outside the Mailers’ home in Brooklyn Heights. There she is, in the flesh, and looking every bit as lovely as I imagined her. I take her in my arms and we kiss. My cock immediately jumps to attention. But there are things to do, places to go, people to see before we spend time alone together. We leave her car parked in a garage and take the train into Manhattan, to Foley Square, to the federal courthouse where I am eager to follow results in the federal trial of my friend John Mulheren.
We sit through the government’s summation. Stock parking, which is what John is charged with, is a measure by which a broker arranges to sell shares to another party (supposedly Ivan Boesky, in John’s case) to reduce their position for disclosure d
eadlines, with the understanding that the original broker will purchase the shares back later at a profit to their receiving broker. The more serious charges of threatening to kill Boesky were dismissed prior to trial. Given the complexity of the alleged security violations, in an effort to try to explain to a lay jury what exactly John is accused of having done, the assistant United States attorney chooses to use a heroin conspiracy as an analogy. This, he posits, is how the stock transaction would have taken place if it were a heroin deal: Dealer Number One buys kilos of heroin for a set wholesale price. He then sells the kilos to Dealer Number Two at the same price he bought them for to appease the wholesaler by moving the product quickly. Both dealers then wait until the price of heroin goes up as supply becomes scarce. Dealer Number Two then sells the kilos of junk that Dealer Number One “parked” with him at the increased price, and in turn he shares the profits with Dealer Number One.
“Very subtle,” I say to John. “I’ve heard of junk bonds, but . . . how long have you been in the heroin business?” which provokes laughter from Mulheren’s team.
Again, John and his wife Nancy invite me, and now Naomi, to their home in New Jersey. Again, I must decline the invitation. One can only violate so many different conditions of one’s parole on any given day. As I know it is a violation for me to have prolonged social contact with someone I met while in prison, that is, Naomi, I can only imagine how dear Ms. Lawless and her supervisor would react to my having a romantic relationship with a former Bureau of Prisons contract employee, cohabiting with her however briefly in the home of another alleged criminal I met while at the MCC, and at the same time leaving the borough of Manhattan without written permission. This would undoubtedly constitute a parole violation overload that would necessarily call for an immediate return to custody.
We choose instead to dine at a Vietnamese restaurant in Chinatown near the courthouse. This time is all about prolonging the anticipation of how the day will end, filling the hours with errands—I buy an address book; we take a copy of the Smack Goddess galleys uptown to deliver to Ivan—before we return to Brooklyn Heights for the long-anticipated, years-in-the-making hours of intimacy.
Back at Mailer’s we get no further than Norman’s writing studio on the floor below his loft apartment before we stop to undress each other. It’s not the frenzied ripping off of clothes one sees in movies. Rather each slowly disrobes the other, taking time to delight in the gradual revelation of the other’s longed-for naked body. I’m awkward at first but Naomi is the ideal lover companion for a man not sure of himself. It’s not a question of performance; my long-neglected dick is as stiff as a cue stick. It’s more a matter of remembering one’s way around something as mysterious and delightful as a female’s body. One must not rush these things. It’s akin to a pilgrimage, like entering a new land, a holy place, and a whole new continent with unfamiliar yet sensational topography. I’m ready to move into this land and take up residence. But when you’ve been so long in the wasteland, so long in the cold, empty places, you must first familiarize yourself with all the hot nooks and crannies, the hidden erogenous zones, the veiled moist valleys, and the engorged promontories: the ridges, lips, vulva; the secret spots. Good to be here with someone who knows the way and is in no hurry to show me where to discover and how to cherish each new territory of sensation, to communicate feelings without speaking but rather with subtle moves, gestures, utterances of delight: grunts, moans, whimpers. These are my lips. Kiss them. These are my breasts. Suck them. This is my pussy. Eat it.
Hours go by, and we climb back up out of slumber to look around and visit this new land of love all over again.
“You good?” I ask her.
“I’m fine,” she says.
“Yes. Yes, Naomi Klein, you are fine. . . . Thank you.”
“Believe me when I tell you it was—it is my pleasure,” Naomi tells me. “I am honored to be your first in so long. It’s like . . . like being virgins and yet knowing all there is to know.”
“I feel like I learned some things I never knew.”
We have a late dinner at an Italian restaurant, and then return to the studio to make love all over again. Saturday morning before breakfast, more fucking, harder this time, with gusto, and each time it keeps getting better.
MY FIRST CALL Saturday is from my encumbered employer, Ivan Fisher. I am to start work for him Monday morning despite the ultimatum from my parole officer that I seek and secure new employment. Ivan says he has two jobs he wants me to begin working on immediately. I am to research Eleventh Circuit Appellate Court cases on exigent circumstances. Then I am to draft a motion to suppress to be submitted in district court in Tampa, Florida, in hopes of getting the judge to grant an evidentiary hearing. Ivan is at home in Manhattan; he’s due to go back to Tampa on Monday and says he needs the suppression motion no later than Wednesday. He is of the opinion that I have a month in which I am obliged to find a new job before my parole officer will have cause to reprimand me and possibly charge me with a violation of the terms of my parole—the parole I was never supposed to be on. So for now I continue to work for Ivan even as I plot my counterattack and appear to go through the moves of adhering to Ms. Lawless’s demand that I seek alternative employment.
During the day Naomi and I go over to SoHo to meet my friend Shane and another ex-con, Robert Sterling, for a three-way parole violation luncheon and the makings of what might be perceived as a new conspiracy, given that all three of us were convicted of the rarefied crime of “operating a continuing criminal enterprise” under United States Code Title 21, Section 848, whereas we thought we were smuggling cannabis, pot, weed, herb, reefer, dope, merely trying to meet a demand and to supply millions of Americans with a substance meant only to provide enjoyment and relaxation. Sterling says he’s hoping to get back into the movie business, and not the marijuana business; he was a producer on the film Winter Kills. Shane hands me three thick files given him by my mother; they are filled with newspaper clippings on my arrest and two federal trials and are to be provided to my publisher’s publicity department.
After lunch Naomi and I return to the apartment for some afternoon delight. More sexual healing for the libido. Fortunately, Naomi is as horny and energetic in her performance as I am. We spend a quiet evening in Brooklyn Heights, have dinner and margaritas at a Mexican restaurant, then back to bed for more lovemaking. It just keeps getting better. By that evening, it’s nothing short of wonderful, as though we have been lovers for years and yet we still can’t get enough of each other.
SUNDAY MORNING I get a phone call from Richard Goodwin. When I met Goodwin, he had left politics and withdrawn to his farm in Kingfield, Maine, to write a play and practice shooting his collection of handguns in a homemade pistol range. Goodwin is also a lawyer. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard Law School. For a time, he acted as my attorney. The film Quiz Show with Robert Redford is based on Goodwin’s book Remembering America. Now he has a project he says might interest me. He wants to introduce me to a producer who is putting together a film project based on the career of singer/songwriter and philanthropist Harry Chapin, who died in an automobile accident on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The producer is looking for someone to do research, interview Chapin’s widow and family, and write a treatment for the film on the singer’s life and career. Dick says it pays a grand a week. Sure, I say, have the guy call me.
After Naomi leaves to go back to her home and job upstate, I immediately call Nora, another woman contract employee, a professor of sociology I met while taking courses at the MCC. It was the fellatio interuptus with Nora that brought about my abrupt transfer to Otisville. We make plans to get together tomorrow night. I’m like an addict after a long withdrawal. I got that first taste, and now I just want more.
LIFE IS GOOD, more or less, though not without challenges, obviously the first being my questionable employment status in the view of the US Parole and Probation Department. I am gainfully employed as a “forensic specialist” in the
offices of criminal defense attorney Ivan S. Fisher located on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan. What I do is study the facts of various criminal cases, research the relevant law, and then draft pleadings, briefs, motions, letters, and memoranda as a self-educated jailhouse lawyer.
This is real work, not some bogus no-show job simply to bamboozle the parole people. Ivan represented one of my co-defendants in the New York prosecution, and he helped me in my self-representation at trial. Years later he argued the appeal I wrote before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that resulted in my ultimately being released from prison after eight years rather than having to serve close to twenty. The appellate court’s decision and my eventual release were based on legal work I did in the prison law library researching and writing my own brief and then litigating with the Bureau of Prisons to force them to give me a new release date. That work convinced Ivan to hire me.
Lawless denies my appeal for reconsideration of her decision not to approve my employment. She refuses to approve my working for Ivan on the grounds that he is on probation. So what? How is that supposed to affect me? She says she does not object to me working for a lawyer, just not a lawyer who is also under supervision. Then she out-and-out lies. She tells me that her supervisor, Ivan’s probation officer, some guy named Dorbacher, reached the decision with her. That’s not true; I know for a fact that Dorbacher had no part in her decision. Dorbacher told Ivan he is not against my working for him. Ivan went to see Dorbacher, who told him that, to make it look good and give Lawless a way out, Ivan should refer me to another lawyer, one of his associates who will become my official employer while I in fact continue to work for Ivan. In other words, he advised that I lie and cheat the system. Which reminds me of nothing so much as the way we convicts were able to get around the rules and regulations while in prison: just tell them what they want to hear, and then go about your business. Never mind the rules and regulations; that’s all nonsense.
In the World Page 5