A Place to Stand

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  Lori broke the stiff silence. ‘They allowed us only an hour.”

  “Did you come from New Mexico?”

  “Yeah, we’re on our way to San Francisco, to visit her parents. You okay?”

  “I’m writing,” I said, which seemed a stupid thing to say to them.

  “Are you reading anyone?” Lori asked.

  It was strange to be talking about this stuff. I didn’t want to talk about reading or writing but about Mieyo, my brother, whom I missed and loved. But it was like we had no words. At some point as kids, physical movement, competitive sports and partying and getting high, had replaced talking to each other, and now, when we couldn’t do any of that, we had to look silently into each other’s eyes, speechless.

  Mieyo said vehemently, “I’m going to get you out of this place! I’ll get you a good lawyer, pay off the judge—do it one way or another.”

  He had good intentions but didn’t fulfill them. How was I to tell him that I was a ghost of the brother he had known? That I had left broken fragments of the previous Jimmy on the floor in the isolation hole, while other pieces of my former self were scattered on the ground where I smashed the black guy’s head and still other parts were dripping in the drain in the kitchen where I cut the other guy?

  He asked about my release date, and I told him I had a little over two years left. To change the subject, I asked, “Are you engaged?” I gave Lori a warm look as she innocently clutched Mieyo’s hand. I took it to mean yes. I asked what he was doing these days.

  “I’m a housing contractor. I’m going to be rich, Jim, rich.”

  Since he’d been a child he always said he was going to be rich. It didn’t mean much, but I guess it reassured him in some way. He always dressed in fine clothes, tall and handsome, and usually he had a great smile. Now it was strained as he pretended things were fine.

  “So, how you doing in here, Jim? How you doing?”

  I reflected a second on the dungeon and thought how he could never imagine it. He must have sensed some sadness in me.

  He smiled. “Martina had another baby—her third. She bought another new house.”

  I didn’t ask about our mother and father, because I knew he didn’t want to talk about them.

  “You okay?” he asked again.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” I hid the hurt of sensing how much distance was really between us. I was different, harder, and Mieyo could see it.

  Our conversation started and stopped as we awkwardly probed, not wanting to say the wrong thing, touch on a wound.

  He asked, “You need anything?”

  I kidded. “Yeah, an old secondhand typewriter.”

  The guard leaned in to us and said, “Visit’s over.”

  Mieyo’s eyes grew dark with anger and Lori pulled him back. She trembled, on the verge of weeping in sympathy. I was forbidden to reach over and embrace them. It was a tough moment that wrenched my heart. Without endearments, I rose and turned and offered my arms to Mad Dog Madril as he came in. I went one way and they went the other. But before they left, I turned and called out, “Get ahold of Theresa! Ask her to come visit me!”

  “I will! I promise!” Mieyo yelled back.

  A couple of weeks later an old Royal manual typewriter arrived, along with an acoustic guitar, radio, lamp, and a letter from Lori, saying she hoped the gifts would help me pass the time. I later found out my personal account was credited with fifty dollars she had sent. But I never saw either of them again for the rest of the time I was in prison.

  I don’t remember how much time passed after that. All I did was type and play the guitar. I was in heaven. Poetry and music blocked out all other life. I was in my own world, swirling in the magic of language and imagination. Days, weeks, and months went by, but I hardly recognized them. Only my writing marked the passage of time.

  Then my number was called for another visit. When I entered and saw Theresa I remained standing but then finally sat down, trembling and embarrassed to have her see me like this. She was tanned very dark, shimmering with lotion. She wore jean shorts cut high to her crotch, halter-top yellow blouse, red fingernails, red lipstick, necklace, and jewels, and when she took off her sunglasses I could see her eyes were glazed with drugs. She was high. She looked gaudy, worn, and drugged, angular from lack of nourishment; I could smell her cheap hair spray and perfume. Despite it all, she was beautiful.

  I was nervously trying to think of something to say, and I finally asked, “How’s your mother?” But not waiting for her answer, I blurted out, “I still love you!”

  She said nothing, just stared at me as if disappointed and frustrated. Her dark hair had been gathered up in a sexy bunch at the back, and she let it loose to fall erotically around her bare shoulders.

  “I only want you,” I said, which brought a grimace to her lips. My heart sank.

  “Live your life, Jimmy. For heaven’s sake, live your life. Quit screwing around.”

  “I left Albuquerque because I love you so much. I just couldn’t stand to see you with other guys.”

  She became defensive. “Don’t blame me that you’re in here. It’s not my fault. The warden says you’re making things worse for yourself! Why do you have to be your own worst enemy?”

  “I know,” I said. “I know. It’s my fault.”

  She went on. “Maybe this place will do you good, help you get your life straightened out. And then when you get out, you’ll find somebody who will love you the way you want. I can’t do it. I’m not the woman for you.”

  I said, “I dream of you. I had to go away to California, you know, after we broke up.”

  She said, “I saw other people. I was partying and having fun.”

  It was as if she said it to hurt me. I wanted to tell her how much I had learned. I knew how to love her now.

  She gave me another hard stare and sighed impatiently. “It won’t work! Jimmy, you can’t even get along here”

  As she spoke I wanted to tell her about my poetry and how I had so many memories I wanted to share with her.

  She asked, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  I was caught off guard by her anger.

  “What you mean?” I asked.

  “The warden says you refuse to follow the rules. How do you ever expect to get out of here if you don’t follow the rules?”

  I wanted to tell her that we could still live together, love each other, make plans for the future when I got out, talk about us getting back together, but it was all turning out terribly wrong.

  She repeated sarcastically, “Don’t you ever want to get out? You better work if you want to get out. I just don’t understand you—at all! You’ll never change, will you?”

  “I’m trying,” I said.

  She leaned forward. “I come all this way to help you and you haven’t even been trying to do right? You sit there not saying a word, wanting me like always to read your mind, do things just for you! Expecting me to feel sorry for you! You’re not the only one in the world.” She stood to leave.

  “Please don’t,” I pleaded. “Just sit down and I’ll try to explain why I’m doing what I am. It’s hard, sitting here, when you tell me everything I’m doing is wrong.”

  But she said good-bye and was gone. I sat there as the visiting-room guard called in his walkie-talkie for Mad Dog Madril to escort me back to my cell.

  TEN

  I’d just written a journal entry on the last page on my second spiral notebook when a guard came by and placed a letter on the bars. It was from Lori, informing me that Mieyo, after the visit, had gone on a wild drunk and ruined their plans for visiting her parents in San Francisco. Though she still loved Mieyo, it had destroyed their relationship, and they weren’t seeing each other anymore. The news was difficult to accept. I wanted Mieyo to have someone love him, but he knew nothing about love and sustaining a relationship, or about honesty and commitment. He was motivated by one dream—to be rich. He would talk about how he was going to buy race cars and a mansion, but he
never talked about what he felt about the past or our parents. Since becoming a drunk at the age of nine, he had developed lots of secrets, and he was good at keeping them.

  Mieyo, like me, had been taught it was better to live a lie than tell the truth. To live with guilt rather than do something about it. Disappointed at himself, he lived quietly in isolation, never trusting to convey to anyone what he really felt, drinking himself into oblivion. I couldn’t say why my anger at him had been replaced, while doing time in prison, by a feeling of sadness. Lori’s departure was going to be hard for him, and I found myself writing, trying to understand his suffering, my words shaped by my heart as a little brother, not as a person who had moved ahead and become a stranger to him.

  I wrote until my fingers cramped, pouring all my frustration into my journal. Thinking of him as I sat on my bunk, I remembered how meticulous he was in his carpentry work. He would have known every hairline crack in my cell’s concrete floor; by looking at the swirl of the mason’s trowel on the wall, he would have known the competency of the mason. I studied the oxidation on the bars, where the welder put too much or not enough flame, the chips in the thick lead-based paint, how sweaty hands had rubbed off the paint in places by gripping them. Coffee, blood, and urine stained the ripped mattress cloth; the section of concrete directly below the cot where men rose in the morning and set their bare feet had a lighter discoloration; the small rounded dents where a man vented his rage and beat his fist against the steel cot surface; the grooves in the mattress where a man masturbated in the same position every night for years. Mieyo, like myself, would have been sick of the male stench of prison bodies, the vile odor of men living in cages, the noise of slamming iron gates; nauseated by confining walls, the graffiti of despair and vengeance, cockroaches on the cell bars, contentious cons, arrogant guards, gun towers, and razor wire. At heart, Mieyo and I were both decent men, famished for affection and eager to live in a decent manner. And while I was slowly rebuilding my life with books and writing, Mieyo, on the other hand, was casting himself out into deeper and deeper isolation, into a place where I could not help him as I once did as a kid brother.

  Early one morning we were pulled out of our cells and ordered to stand down the tier against a wall before a cardboard Christmas tree for a holiday photo to send home. I glared at the camera. I hadn’t looked at myself in years, and when the photographer handed me the Polaroid I hardly recognized myself. I was almost twenty-five years old, and the three-plus years I had done in prison showed on my features—I had an impenetrable indifference, an impudent disdain. My brown eyes were antagonistic, my stance confrontational. I couldn’t send it to anyone—it was too disturbing. You could see the anger in my face. But it would serve as a reminder to me to fight against what prison was doing.

  Around this time, Harry sent me a Christmas card, along with a note that he had passed my name along to the director of a writers’ group in Phoenix. She had written in turn to a poet, asking if he’d write me, and Harry had enclosed a copy of her letter. It read:

  12-30-76.

  Dear Norman—

  A day off work—holiday—I’ve been taking it easy, except for talking with a couple of estimators re some roof work. Someday I will get this house “cocooned” and be able to relax.

  Re the prisoner, he is Jimmy Santiago Baca, Box B 32581, Arizona State Prison, Florence, AZ 85232. Do mention my name when you write to him. Harry, a friend, asked me to find a writer for him to write to. I plan to write to him that I have given you his address, but I will not give him your address unless you want me to. You can write to him directly on whatever basis you prefer.

  I don’t know his age, crime, etc. I do know that he is doing hard time, on the Ad Seg unit in the dungeon. I don’t know whether you understand the terminology, but I gather that he is trouble. I think he has a few years remaining on his sentence, which I believe he feels was unfair. I have not tried to pry with Harry, so I report only in general what he has confided in me. Thank you for being willing to write him. Harry says he has pleaded for friendship and appreciates any correspondence. (I sent him a clipping of poems—some by prison poets—in the New Times campus paper, and it was labeled as contraband.) Apparently, his condition seems non-rehabilitative. Be careful. Keep in touch, and Happy New Year.

  Gertrude Halpren

  At the end of January 1977,1 received a letter from Norman, who was writing me while driving from New York to Berkeley in a beat-up ‘56 Chevy. His letters were abbreviated scribbles on motel stationery, café napkins, and grocery bags. We began our correspondence, averaging a letter a week. I sent him a sampling of early and later poems so he could measure my progress.

  3 JANUARY 1977

  Thought

  is the vibrating cane

  of the blind,

  poking there

  and feeling here

  for the flower.

  9 JANUARY 1977

  A leaf blew in my cell

  through the bars

  and the veins on the leaves

  were like the cheekbones

  of very old people.

  11 JANUARY 1977

  How desires to love her

  turn this night

  into salt water

  and my loneliness a wound.

  12 JANUARY 1977

  Addicts

  lay

  on beds

  in soft black rooms,

  And the tapered flames of life

  fingering your heart

  do not awe

  your round warm mouths

  anymore.

  13 JANUARY 1977

  My words

  sound

  like rusty siding

  on a country chicken coop,

  flapping, rattling, clattering.

  Solitude walks

  in the sand-blowing wind and weeds,

  roaming the ghost town of my heart,

  digging up bones of the past.

  Other than Norman’s exciting letters about his bohemian poet’s life in California, time went by in a continuous ream of uneventful days that fell away in dreary routine, until one day when a con came up and dropped his carton before my cell. He was Chicano, solid and muscled, with a tattoo on his forearm that read Boxer. I shook my head at him, meaning that no one was going to cell with me. He went down the tier, and then JJ called out.

  “Let him in, Cyclone—for a day. He’s with us. Just for now. We’ll get back with you—cigarettes, coffee.” They had given me the nickname Cyclone because when I fought I’d jump in and wreak havoc without uttering a word.

  “Can’t do it. I don’t want anybody in my cell,” I said.

  Boxer kept reassuring me. “I’m here for a day, nothing more. I won’t bug you. Just business and I’m gone.”

  As soon as he came in, he said the typing bothered him and told me to stop. Then he changed the channel on my little radio to his station, and that evening he said he couldn’t sleep and wanted me to turn off my reading lamp. He stood at the bars talking in Chicano code slang to JJ and Snake about drugs and money. My life had been pretty calm, and I wanted to keep it that way. When he was let out for a shower, I crouched in the corner by the bars on my haunches to talk to Bonafide.

  “What do I do?” I asked.

  Bonafide said, “He’s an eMe shot-caller, with a crew of fifty soldiers.”

  “I don’t care how many are in his posse, I want him out of my cell,” I said.

  “Bring it to him then. Don’t let him shine you on. Bring it. Bring it or get off the fucking tier!” I could see Bonafide’s square face in the shaving mirror he was holding outside the bars, and he could see my face. “I’ll watch your back. No one’s gonna blindside you. You just do what you gotta do—bring it to him and keep bringing it.”

  The next day was hot and sunny. We were out in the exercise cage behind the block. A guard sat just outside by the fence gate, and two bulls on the catwalk never took their eyes off us. Boxer was in the corner doing his warm-ups,
his arms out in front of him as he squatted up and down; then he dropped and pumped off push-ups and then back up, squatting up and down.

  Bonafide grouped the cons at the opposite corner and was entertaining them with one of his crime stories, and I was pacing back and forth, trying to get the courage to tell Boxer to get out of my cell.

  I stopped in front of him, to his right, and asked, “Can I talk to you?”

  “What do you want?” he asked, exhaling without pausing his squats.

  “I want you out of my cell,” I said, wishing immediately I had said it with more conviction.

  “Go fuck your mother,” he said.

  I repeated, “I want you out of my cell.”

  He cursed me again. When he said he wanted me out of my own cell, a firestorm of fury detonated in my brain and rage rushed through me. My eyes filled with bright flashes. When he went down for a squat again, my fist caught him under the ear on the right side. In a split second I followed with a left hook to the opposite side, then another right. I hit him with every ounce of strength I had, and it was doubled in force by my surging adrenaline. He went down, staggered to his knees, and fell back. He was partially unconscious, stunned, bleeding from a cracked cheekbone. He took out a shank he’d hidden beneath his sock and I grabbed it. I was standing over him, my feet planted on each side of his shoulders. In that moment, all I could see was his face, the blood pouring out from a wound in his cheek where a bone was exposed. In that moment, everything seemed so calm and quiet. I gripped the shank to stab him. For a second, every horrible thing that had happened to me in my life exploded to the surface as if had been building up to this moment. The blade in my hand, my legs spread over his chest, I loomed over him, staring into his eyes and then at his heart. While the desire to murder him was strong, so were the voices of Neruda and Lorca that passed through my mind, praising life as sacred and challenging me: How can you kill and still be a poet? How can you ever write another poem if you disrespect life in this manner? Do you know you will forever be changed by this act? It will haunt you to your dying breath.