In the World

by Richard Stratton

  But Lawless won’t budge. It’s become personal for her. She does not want me to prevail and make her look bad, so she is determined to force me to give up my job and find new employment. Now she has come up with a different rationale to deny my appeal. She claims that while working in Ivan’s offices, in addition to coming in contact with others engaged in or charged with engaging in criminal activity, I will also have access to confidential client files and information about ongoing criminal cases that I might be inclined to share with others.

  Fuck her, this is bullshit. Let her try to lock me back up. I’m not going to give up this job. I’ll take it to court. We’ll let a judge decide what to do with me. I’ll go back to prison before I cave in and look for other employment. Lawless wants to make it difficult for me, okay, I’ll fight her every step of the way. I like my job. It pays well. And I’m not about to give it up and look for another shitty job I will end up hating and soon find myself in even more trouble with the government. Lawless and I are clearly on a collision course regarding my future.

  Why should I give up this job? I have a nice office overlooking Park Avenue with a view of Central Park through the Manhattan cityscape. I am fond of Ivan, and I am sufficiently intrigued by the law to keep me engaged in my work while I continue to pursue a career as a writer. It’s all about words: the language of the law or of writing fiction. So much of the work I do depends on composing a compelling statement of facts, being able to tell an engaging story and capture the judges’ interest. I have been considering going to law school and taking the bar exam. New York is one of a few states where convicted felons can go through a process known as “relief from civil disabilities,” meaning being allowed to regain some of the privileges of citizenship that are revoked upon a felony conviction. After a thorough vetting, it may be possible for an ex-con to become accepted as a member of the bar. The lawyer licensing process goes beyond competence to evaluate character and fitness. I note that “revelation or discovery of unlawful conduct should be treated as cause for further inquiry before the bar decides whether the applicant possesses the character and fitness to practice law.” My charges and convictions are all related to the importation and distribution of vegetable matter, that is, cannabis.

  But of course, I know all this might well be just a distraction to keep me from concentrating on what I really want to do, which is to support myself as a professional writer. The conditions of my parole require that I have steady employment with a verifiable and approved employer; being a freelance writer is not acceptable. The job with Ivan is meant to satisfy the parole employment requirement while allowing me the time and opportunity to pursue my true calling. Now that I am embroiled in this dispute with Lawless over my job with Ivan, I must not let that distract me from pursuing a career as a writer. Meanwhile there have been some positive developments in my nascent writing career.

  Ivan shares office space with another famous criminal defense attorney, Michael Kennedy, perhaps the nation’s foremost attorney advocate for marijuana decriminalization and legalization. Michael represented my former sometimes partner, the founder of High Times magazine, Tom Forcade. Tom was a dope smuggler turned publisher, a brilliant manic-depressive who killed himself, blew his brains out not long after he launched the magazine. Michael is the trustee of the family trust Tom set up to retain ownership of Trans High Corporation, publisher of High Times. Michael is aware of my relationship with Tom and the magazine prior to my arrest. He read Smack Goddess and loved it. Michael offers me a position writing a monthly column and occasional feature for High Times.

  And then there is the novel, Smack Goddess, with an imminent publication date. I am at work proofing the edited galleys. My career as a professional writer may actually offer real possibilities as a remunerative occupation. So what am I to do? I admit to experiencing critical internal conflict over this question of what career to pursue—how to spend my days for the rest of this brief stay on planet earth.

  Do I go to law school, take the bar exam, endeavor to become a licensed attorney, and write briefs and argue cases in court? Could be interesting, especially given my background and contacts in the prison system and criminal underground. Ultimately, however, knowing me, I would use the very real demands of the legal profession as an excuse for not embracing the more risky alternative of working to support myself as a writer. Are the two occupations mutually exclusive? No, not necessarily. John Grisham and Scott Turow, to name a couple of the better-known lawyer novelists, do or did both. But understanding how I am, if I were to choose to study and then to practice law, I would devote myself to the profession with the same monomaniacal zeal that characterized my career as a dope smuggler. I would take on more and more challenging cases. I would revel in legal combat with the government, and inevitably my creative writing would suffer, atrophy, and ultimately cease altogether. I’d end up drinking heavily, sitting in bars half shitfaced talking about the books I was going to write, and deeply frustrated that I did not pursue my true passion. I am reminded of what Sigmund Freud said to his student, Theodor Reik. “You want to be a big man, piss in one spot.”

  “A Skyline Turkey,” the story that won the PEN Prison Writing Award for fiction, is to be published in Fortune News, the publication of the Fortune Society, an organization devoted to helping people released from prison to find their way in the free world. I have been invited to attend a meeting of the writers asked to read at the PEN Prison Writing Awards Ceremony. “A Skyline Turkey” is also to be anthologized in a collection of prison writings called Doing Time.

  It is not unrealistic to think that this writing gig could actually turn into a real paying vocation. Isn’t this what I always wanted? Going back to a postgraduate year I spent at Wilbraham Academy after a near fatal motorcycle accident my senior year in high school, it was my English teacher at Wilbraham, a man named Dudley Cloud, a former editor of the esteemed Atlantic Monthly magazine, who encouraged me to write. He complimented me on an essay I had written, and he urged me to continue to pursue the craft. During my freshman year at Arizona State University, when I told my faculty advisor what I wanted to do with my life, he advised me to quit college, read everything I could get my hands on, and go live in Europe for a while like Hemingway and Fitzgerald. “Just write,” he told me. “And live a life worth writing about.” He confessed to being a frustrated novelist himself, and he warned me to avoid the trap of academia.

  Like most monomaniacs, however, I have a deeply divided nature and am always seeking unity, trying to find compromise between the man of action and the contemplative artist. I immerse myself in whatever I am doing with single-mindedness in an effort to quell the other rebellious half of my nature yammering for attention. Write—or live the outlaw life. Write—or become a trial lawyer and take on the government. I heeded my college faculty advisor’s advice and spent two years writing short stories while living in England and later in Spain on the Mediterranean Island of Mallorca, where I met my first wife. When I returned to the US, I enrolled in a summer creative writing program at Harvard. Again, the professor, a lovely Lithuanian named Vida Chesnulis, encouraged me to pursue creative writing. By then I had published a short story, “The Artists of Déya,” in a respected literary magazine. I applied for and was granted a writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

  In Provincetown, while a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, I was again confronted with this internal conflict. I had vowed to quit smuggling pot and focus on writing after a failed off-load from a sailboat of three thousand pounds of Jamaican ganja resulted in several arrests. I tried and was unable to give up the outlaw life. I needed the money, and I was addicted to the adrenaline rush of smuggling marijuana and hashish. Even in prison I couldn’t control the evil twin in my head, the doppelganger who demands a divided attention, and who always seems to want me to risk it all and possibly fall short and fail at whatever I am attempting to accomplish just as the effort seems on the verge of success. Call it
self-sabotage. Call it a need to continually test myself. Call it disdain for convention. Fear and loathing of mediocrity. Call it lack of confidence or too much confidence—hubris. A sense of unworthiness, a feeling somewhere deep inside that I was a bad kid who became an adult criminal, an ingrate who had no excuse for seeking a life of crime and so deserve to fuck up everything I attempt to do, get arrested, get sentenced to a shitload of time, and molder in a prison cell.

  Ah, yes, that’s the problem, Dickhead Stratton. The problem is that I refuse to abide by the rules. Always been that way. A juvenile delinquent kicked out of junior high school for getting into a fistfight with the student gym teacher. A rebel without a cause. From a good home, with a good education, but way too much TV, watching episodes of The Untouchables and Dragnet and relating to the criminals instead of the supposed good guys. Sent off to do a year on Thompson’s Island in Boston Harbor, a kind of junior Alcatraz for wayward boys where there was no television. And that rock ’n’ roll music I listen to, that’s the devil’s music. That shit I smoke, that wacky weed . . . no wonder I became a career outlaw thumbing my nose at any number of criminal statutes. I even smuggled pot and burned herb on a fairly regular basis all the while I was locked up. Good Jesus, will I never learn to obey the law? What the fuck is wrong with me? And now that I’m finally out of prison, free after all those years of longing for freedom, I seem hell-bent to defy the rules and regulations of the terms of my parole or supervised release or whatever it is and say, “Fuck you. Send me back to jail.”

  Yep, that’s right. Figure it out. This supervised release shit is worse than being in the joint. At least there I knew where I stood—firmly on the side of the convict. Give and get respect from staff and prisoner alike or there will be serious consequences. Out here, anything goes. People have no respect. They act like there are no consequences for rude behavior. Better be careful whom you disrespect.

  Just the other day I took the Mailers’ dog for his morning walk. He’s an ugly little brute, a pug named Hubert for his resemblance to Hubert Humphrey. Leave it to Norman to name his dog after a politician. Hubert and I were in front of Mailer’s brownstone on Columbia Heights when the dog decided to lift his leg and pee on the lower section of the balustrade. An irate neighbor verbally attacked me. Who did I think I was to allow my dog to pee on his steps? Apparently, this guy didn’t recognize Hubert as the Mailers’ dog. He assumed I was some interloper from another building allowing my dog to piss where we don’t belong. Instantly, without a moment’s hesitation I went into hardcore convict mode, zero to sixty not in a fight-or-flight response but in the fight-or-die response of a convict. I got right up in his face. I shoved him against the stoop, grabbed him by his lapels and told him to back off before I broke his neck. The guy was stunned. He looked like he was ready to shit his pants. I was appalled by my sudden lack of self-control and reversion to the hardcore convict mindset.

  What am I going to do? Beat the shit out of some hapless citizen? Kill some poor fool who doesn’t realize he’s confronting a man who has just survived years in the penitentiary? I recalled my case manager at FCI Ashland had advised me to seek counseling. I thought I could handle the transition. Now I have to wonder.

  How am I ever gonna make it out here?

  IT’S TIME FOR a visit with my friend and mentor, Norman Mailer. In fact, I’m long overdue. If anyone can understand my malaise, it is Mailer, author of the classic essay “The White Negro,” which might as well be about me. I first became interested in Mailer’s work not as a writer but as a filmmaker. I was living in Wellesley, Massachusetts, when I read in the Boston underground press that Mailer’s film Beyond the Law, about a long night in a New York City police precinct, was to be screened at Brandeis University in nearby Waltham. I went to see the film, and it inspired me to read The Naked and the Dead and then everything Mailer had written up until then, most notably The Armies of the Night, his nonfiction novel about the the October 1967 march on the Pentagon and anti–Vietnam War rally in Washington, DC. I wrote Mailer a letter after reading another of his essays about the death of Benny “Kid” Paret at the hands of Emile Griffith in a fight Mailer attended at Madison Square Garden. Mailer wrote back and invited me to visit him if I were ever in Provincetown. It was some years later, in 1970, while I was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, that Mailer called me, and I took him up on his invitation to watch Monday Night Football at his home.

  We became close friends practically overnight. Mailer had written “General Marijuana,” perhaps the first confessional essay about smoking pot by a reputable writer. Mailer believed that we all have two complete personalities in our psyches that manifest in our contrary impulses and aspirations. Clearly, this is what I was experiencing. I wonder then if, after having struggled with his own divided psyche, thought about it deeply, written about it extensively, Norman might have some advice for me. But first I had to get permission from my parole officer to leave the district.

  TO APPEASE MS. Lawless’s demand that I seek employment in another lawyer’s offices, I contact two other lawyers I know and ask them to write letters to the parole commission to the effect that although they find me qualified to do the work I’m doing for Mr. Fisher, they are not in a position to hire me at this time. This is designed to document another step that I have taken to at least attempt to find comparable employment. Next, I compose my own letter describing my duties for Mr. Fisher, explaining that my role as a forensic specialist does not require me to come into contact with Ivan’s clients. (This is not true; I often meet with clients to discuss their cases.) Further, I write that I occupy an office at the rear of the suite and away from where I might chance to meet clients who are or have been involved in criminal activity. (This is also a lie; yes, my office is well away from Ivan’s office, but I am frequently in his office with him during client meetings.) I ignore the claim that my job will give me access to confidential attorney-­client correspondence. (Of course it will; that’s the nature of the work.) Finally, I maintain that Fisher himself has read and approved of my letter to Lawless and her supervisor, United States Parole Officer Dorbacher. (This is a boldfaced lie. Ivan is out of the country. He has not seen the letter, he does not even know that I have written it, and he won’t be back for at least a week.)

  The letter is delivered to Lawless without Ivan having reviewed it. I receive permission to leave the district and travel to Massachusetts. I take a bus upstate to New Paltz where Naomi meets me. We spend the night at her home, set out early the next day, first for Wellesley to see my parents and then on to Provincetown to visit Mailer.

  By the time we arrive in Wellesley, calls from Ivan looking for me have already begun. I’ve been found out. I know I am in trouble. How could I have done this? Why tell a lie in a letter to the parole commission, the authorities charged with supervising not only my release but also Ivan’s probation? What the fuck was I thinking? Part of me, that defiant outlaw personality I have come to recognize as my evil twin, clearly doesn’t give a shit. Yet, the part of my character that wants to belong, that wants to be accepted and respected and even loved, is appalled. You did it again, asshole! You are in deep shit not only with the parole people but also with your friend and employer who has gone out of his way to be good to you. I am beset by guilt and self-loathing throughout the trip.

  Things begin to look up when we arrive at Norman’s. The Mailers’ big brick mansion on the Cape Cod Bay is filled with family and friends. At dinner that evening in a Provincetown restaurant, before a large gathering, Norman tells a ribald story, as is his wont. He says that on Marlon Brando’s first visit to Hollywood after his spectacular success on Broadway, Brando was surrounded by publicists, studio flacks, assistants, and gofers anxious to service his every desire. The actor had brought his pet chimpanzee along to Hollywood with him. The ape was agitated by all the attention, he kept leaping about, screeching, tugging at Brando’s arms and legs trying to lead him away from the crowd of admirers. Asked over and over agai
n what they could do for him, how to please him during his visit to Hollywood, Brando thought about it for a bit, and then he said, “Get my monkey laid.”

  Norman and I have a heart-to-heart over a nightcap in the bar in his home just off the deck as the waves at high tide sluice in and wash against the pilings. I don’t even need to ask him. I know what he will say: “Obey the risk.” He has lived his whole life that way. Norman Mailer is the bravest man I’ve ever known. He is intellectually brave, not afraid to embrace and expound on—often brilliantly, always eloquently—controversial, even unpopular ideas. He is physically brave to the point of never backing down from a potentially dangerous or even violent confrontation with authority; witness The Armies of the Night. And he is artistically brave in that he is never satisfied with convention, never content to rest on his successes, always eager to try new approaches to his art. He’s had his own experience with convicts who find it difficult to adjust to the free world. He tells me details of the harrowing weeks with ex-con Jack Henry Abbott, how unprepared Abbott was for the world, and the world for Abbott.

  “Stay focused on the work, Rick,” Mailer tells me. “The work is its own reward. You don’t want to be a lawyer. That’s not who you are. You’ve got a novel coming out. You’re a professional writer. Embrace it.”

  WHEN I MEET with Ivan in his office after the weekend, he is sympathetic. He tells me that Linda Sheffield, a lawyer he works with who specializes in postconviction remedies and in dealing with the parole commission, advised him to fire me for composing and submitting the letter without his prior approval. But Ivan says he understands how one could easily form a habit of giving the authorities false information in order to get by in prison. He then emphasizes how dangerous it is to continue these jailhouse practices and habits and to revert to the convict mindset once one is released, and especially while working in a law office where every communication is subject to legal restrictions and review. He tells me he is capable of getting himself in enough trouble and so he doesn’t need any help from me.