A Place to Stand

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  It was the first I permitted myself to think about how much time I had left. When I went to the dungeon, poetry had come into my life and fully absorbed me. As long as I was writing or reading, time passed by quickly. When I first arrived, I vowed that I would not think about time because I knew keeping my mind inside the walls, in the present, was going to keep me alive. I didn’t have a wristwatch or calendar to mark off days. I never thought about how much time I had done or how much I had left. After doing half my sentence, I should have felt like I was over the hump, but each day was as indistinguishable as the previous one. When I had first walked through the main gates, I had cut all ties to my past and connections to the outside. I didn’t have to appear for parole release before the Parole Board. I never had pin-up Playboy centerfolds or photographs of girlfriends taped to my cell wall. I had five flat years to do, and from the beginning to the end I had resigned myself to doing them day for day. The days never hurried or slowed, they settled like heat waves at dawn that evaporated like mist at dusk. Whether it was Friday or Monday, March or December, one year or three, it didn’t matter. But now, looking down at the new convicts, I realized that in a few months I was going to be free.

  I had nothing out there, no one and nothing waiting for me. But freedom meant that I wouldn’t be living in a six-by-nine cage and guards wouldn’t have the freedom to order me about every minute of the day. Could I make it out there? I felt a mixture of trepidation and excitement stirring in my heart, a subdued anticipation beginning to take shape and growing with each day.

  Back in the old cell block, my cell cleaned and in order, I spent my time standing at the bars on Baker Run and writing letters. Virginia and I had been corresponding for months. Her letters alleviated the tedium and, even more important, made me feel like a man again. She was a poet with three published books. At first our correspondence was literary in nature, but it had evolved into a passionate romance. Every day at mail call I waited for Captain Avenitti to deliver the mail. I liked officer Avenitti. I had written a poem for his daughter’s First Communion, and he was so grateful he had smuggled in green chili for me. When I heard him coming down the tier, my heart would race and I’d stand at the bars. Virginia and I had given each other intimate nicknames—she was Mariposa, the butterfly, and I was Colibri, the hummingbird. Her letters were perfumed, and hummingbirds and butterflies were sketched on the envelopes with colored pencils. Sitting on my bunk, I’d inhale the perfume again and again, retrace every delightful line, and imagine making love to her. I imagined walking with her in the woods around her house in North Carolina or sitting on our bed after supper and reading poems to each other. I suggested to her, because of my previous disasters with Theresa and Lonnie, that she write a series of poems on what a woman needed, how a woman felt, what she dreamed, and what she wanted in a man. I, in turn, would write of a man’s deepest secrets. Our letters, often two a week crisscrossing each other, grew from a page or two, to ten pages, to fifteen and twenty pages, each one filled with an erotic hunger for what we were going to do to each other when we finally met.

  She described her place in the woods, and the rustic life appealed to me. Ponds and woods surrounded her cabin in the Piedmont foothills, and I could stay home and write all day if it pleased me. I could fish as I wanted and use her father’s canoe to float around the pond behind his house, reading a book of poetry, my fishing line loosely floating on the water until a fish took the bait. Slowly, I’d mend the psychic ruptures incurred during my imprisonment.

  She wrote ten- to twenty-page poem-letters, all about a woman’s desires, her dreams, what parts of her body could be stimulated to give the woman different kinds of orgasm. She dove into the feminine depths, into the female soul and her many labyrinthine emerald lagoons and coves to reveal her jewels, fashioned by age-old tides of earth and moon cycles. Her poem-letters revealed exquisite mysteries of a woman’s spirit and indulged equally in lusty debaucheries. I clung to each word like puppet silhouettes flitting behind a paper curtain, believing it to be her flesh. I was insatiable. I didn’t want to waste time with park-bench talk and holding-hands romance. I was possessed with a deep hunger to understand womankind, to know a bit about the darkness of lust, the spiraling jettison of blind love so many talked about, about motherly sweetness and the wench’s cruelty.

  I was also doing other writing. Long after the rest of the cons in the block were sleeping, I’d be answering letters to Norman and my Tia Jesusita, trying to decide which poems to send to Timber-line Press in Missouri or Rock Bottom Press in Santa Barbara. The two small presses had each asked for a small collection of poems to publish as a chapbook. This filled me with tremendous excitement and self-esteem. Most of the poems had grown out of my commissary needs: cigarettes, coffee, paper, and pencils. That is, I wrote special poems for prisoners in exchange for things I needed. I composed sentimental poems for cons missing family holidays, nostalgic regrets for being absent from a son’s birthday, sweet affirmations for anniversaries, devout gratitude for Mother’s Day, and other poems of personal significance to prisoners. Although they were written for others, the poems expressed my own dreams and fears. My intellectual and emotional growth was also evident in their increasing literacy and the deeper understanding of myself that they revealed.

  Macaron had come back to prison and was celling in CB. Chelo also had managed to get a cell on Baker Run with Tish, and he turned me on to Aztec and Chicano poetry. He emphasized the importance of reading poems aloud, exhorting me to recite my poems through the bars to him as he stood listening intently, nodding his head when a verse line was good and wrinkling his brow when it was bad. He had a critic’s instinct for knowing a good poem; this talent came from his motto, NEVER BACK UP. He had put his life on the line so many times that he had an uncanny sense of what’s real and what’s not. There was no room for academic foreplay or pretentiousness. His convictions came by standing his ground in the trenches, face-to-face, chest-to-chest, and eye-to-eye with the enemy. He said I was still too serious and to lighten up, and one day, to tease him, I wrote this fun poem, which gave him a big grin.

  It was the night of Friday

  And all through the town

  Not a hooker was working,

  No nares were around.

  The joints were all rolled

  And put into stacks

  In hopes that we’d soon be

  Stoned to the max.

  When all of a sudden

  There came a loud knock

  And everyone yelled

  It’s a cop! It’s a cop!

  We went to the door to

  See who was there,

  To see who it was

  That gave us a scare.

  And what to our glossy red eyes

  Should appear

  But a pound of Colombian

  And two cases of beer.

  The guy standing by

  Was wearing a smile

  So we invited him in

  To party awhile.

  He spoke not a word

  But started to roll,

  Opened a beer,

  And lit up a bowl.

  By two in the morning

  All had gone well.

  The people were happy

  And screwed up as hell.

  We heard that guy say

  As he waved us good buy,

  “Marijuana to all,

  And to all a good high.”

  I wrote poems for convicts, and the poems belonged to them. However, in another notebook I kept poems for magazine submissions, and for a year now I had been writing established poets by submitting work to magazines. Norman Moser, editor and publisher of Illuminations; Denise Levertov, poetry editor for Mother Jones; Joseph Bruchac, editor and publisher of the Greenfield Review; and the Chapel Hill journal, The Sun, when it was little more than a handout; also Seer’s Catalogue from Albuquerque and Akwasasne Notes, up in Canada. PEN in New York sent me poetry chapbooks and poetry newsletters. Richard Shelton had been
(and still is) conducting a writing workshop for prisoners here in Florence, and since I wasn’t allowed to attend I sent him my poetry and he read it and wrote me back with helpful suggestions. Another poet, Rex Veeder, helped me to improve by inspiring me with the confidence that I really could write poetry. They were all wonderful people and I could never have managed without their help.

  One morning, Baker Run was racked out and we all lined up in the landing in twos, to go to chow. We were marched out the back of the block and lined up single file at the back doors to the chow hall. At the doors I grabbed my tray and moved slowly forward with the line.

  The chow hall was huge; besides the field, it was the only place where a crowd of cons could mingle loosely. Guards were stationed at various points. You couldn’t see their eyes because even indoors they wore aviator sunglasses. I slid my tray on the stainless steel counter past the servers, offering it under a plastic divider to the kitchen help, who heaped it with mashed potatoes, pork chops, corn, and green beans. At the soft drink machine I was filling up my cup with Kool-Aid when someone behind me said, “Been a while.”

  I turned. It was Carey.

  But he was different now. He had Aryan Nation tattoos on his arms, neck, and chest, where part of a big chest tattoo spread up to his pecks. He looked a lot older. We sat at an empty table with four seats. A guard moved close to our table, monitoring us because it wasn’t that often that a Chicano and an Aryan skinhead shared a table.

  “It’s been a while,” I said, lost for words. “You and Lonnie still together?”

  “Yeah.” He was stiff and cold. “How come you been locked up on Ad Seg all this time? You got problems with people? Can’t you handle being on the yard?”

  His question implied that I was a coward.

  “I think it’s bullshit,” he said.

  “The warden and me had a standoff, that’s what happened. But what happened to you? I can’t believe you joined the Aryans. We were fall partners, running dogs, and we can’t even talk now.”

  “It happens,” he said flatly.

  The tables were immovable, the round steel seats welded to the table’s center pole driven into concrete and bolted down. But I felt there was so much anger in Carey that, if he wished, he could have ripped the table apart.

  “I just wanted to tell you that I think it’s bullshit!”

  I didn’t remind him that four years ago my trouble started with saving Rick’s life because he had asked me to.

  “You’re leaving soon, aren’t you. I shot that FBI and saved your life and you’re getting out while I’ve got a shitload of more years,” he declared. “I’m glad, because if you weren’t I’d probably have to kill you.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t say anything as he got up and joined other Aryan skinheads at another table. I got my tray, deposited it at the wash window, and went out at the other end of the chow hall.

  For days afterward, his words kept repeating themselves in my mind. I shot that FBI for you, and you’re getting out. I felt ashamed and guilty. I was partly at fault for the destruction of his life. There was nothing I could do to make up for it. But at least he had Lonnie. She’d been released a year and a half ago, and she was probably living in Phoenix and coming up to visit him on weekends. I had no choice but to accept and live with his hatred for me.

  Around this time, just after I saw Carey, it was growing harder to do time because I was counting down the days as my release date got closer and closer. Toward the end of February 1978, I received a notice to appear before the Parole Board. I tried to explain to the escort officer that I wasn’t supposed to see the Parole Board, I was a flat-timer, doing day for day. He didn’t know anything, just that I was wanted in the parole office. I went, thinking that, once there, I would explain to the committee that I had no parole.

  When I entered the small room by the entrance to the main gates and sat down before the committee, I saw the warden standing behind them.

  Before I could say anything, he began. “Three-two-five-eight-one has consistently broken every rule in the book and has conducted a campaign of disruption since his arrival.”

  The chairman looked at him. “I don’t have his records here. I’m sorry.” He motioned the guard to take me away.

  I assumed they had the paperwork mixed up and had faith that they would straighten it out. I left it at that and, since I was so close to leaving, took myself out of my books and writing and resumed my running around the field. I ran under the sun, happy to be alive. I lay on the grass and stared up at the blue sky, inhaling the dirt smell and the sage and prairie scents that stimulated every nerve.

  A week later, I was again called out. Again, the warden was present. The board was murmuring among themselves, with the warden whispering something about my refusal to work. With glum faces they ticked tongues and sighed and told me to leave. They still hadn’t cleared up the paperwork. I reminded them that I was doing flat time, five years flat, and I was not supposed to have a parole hearing; my time was day for day, no good time, no two-days-for-one; that other cons were doing just day by day too and I was almost done. But all my explanation did was confirm their belief that I was a troublemaker.

  April 17, my release date, finally arrived. I had my boxes packed, and I sat in my cell the whole day waiting for someone to come and get me, but nobody did. Then, toward the end of the day, a guard came to escort me to the Parole Board room. They had finally figured it out. But when I got to the door, the warden met me. Before I could walk in, he said it was the wrong day and ordered Mad Dog Madril to return me to my cell. Where the Parole Board usually sat, the seats were empty.

  The warden was fucking with me. For days I said nothing, did nothing. I went to eat and then back to my cell. I was trying to hold myself together. I got another slip to appear before the Board for the following morning. All night I tossed, eyes wide open, staring into the cavernous cell-block space and wondering if I was ever going to get out.

  This time, the parole hearing was conducted as if they were really considering my parole. They hardly asked me any questions at all. Sitting with the board members behind the desk, it was the warden who spoke, saying that my defiance was a personal affront not only to him but to the members of the Parole Board.

  “Three-two-five-eight-one,” he declared, “you have never worked, you have disobeyed the rules of this institution, ignored every regulation, and it is the decision of this esteemed committee to deny your parole—”

  “I have no parole, I’m doing flat timer I cried out, exasperated.

  Mad Dog Madril grabbed me and took me out. I went willingly, without struggle. I didn’t know what they were doing. I was supposed to be free. It was a mistake and I still clung desperately to the hope that they would find it and correct it.

  I tried not to let it get to me, but my nerves were going. Then sometime in late April, at night, the shakedown goon squad came through the cell block late at night and took me out of my cell and made me stand in the dark corridor by the main guard cage at the entrance. I was scared to death that they were going to set me up with contraband and give me more time. But after an hour of waiting, I was returned to my cell.

  On the field I ambled aimlessly around. I was falling deeper and deeper into melancholy. The warden has finally won, I thought; he has finally broken my spirit. I was thinking of things I wouldn’t ordinarily entertain. There was a certain convict who had taken a baseball bat and beaten a Chicano over the head. I had been playing handball when I saw it happen at the far end of the field. After finishing the game with Macaron, I walked over to the convict and told him that if I didn’t get out, I was coming for him.

  About this time a beautiful boy by the name of Chiquita had come to my cell and asked if I would be her sugar daddy. I had never messed around with a guy, fearing that it might ruin the pleasure I found in being with women. But now, thinking I might never get out, I told her that if I didn’t make my Board, we’d talk, and in the meantime, I’d keep
her under my wing and make sure nobody raped her. I’d never talked to fags in prison. But as Chiquita began to sit at my table in the chow hall, and as I listened to her talk, for the first time in my life I realized that some men really had female spirits. When I spoke to her, I was speaking to a woman.

  I was called to the Board again in May. When I appeared before them, they dismissed me within minutes, saying they were reviewing the warden’s order superseding the court’s sentence. I was shocked that it was under review. It made me lose all hope. I went to the cell block, borrowed a shank from Wedo, tied it to my inner thigh, and went out to the field to look for the guy.

  He was not there.

  I went to the cell block. He was not in his cell.

  I went to the chow hall and there he was, sitting with his Aryan skinhead brothers. I walked past the tables with cons eating, staring directly at him. I was within a yard of reaching him, when at the corner of my eye I saw this friend of mine, Mascara (Mask because of his burned, disfigured face), get there first. I couldn’t have been more than two feet away when Mascara stabbed the guy. I kept moving. Guards rushed Mascara and took him away.

  Later, I sent a kite to Mascara asking him why he did what he did. He wrote me back a kite saying he was already doing life and wanted to spare me the same. He wrote that I didn’t belong in prison, that I needed to be out there writing for people like him, telling the truth about the life that prisoners have to endure. Mascara would walk with me around the field and we would talk. He was short and tough, not someone to mess with. He had a brave heart. The apartment he and his sister and mother lived in had caught on fire. As the flames engulfed the house, he woke up and called for his mother, but she was dead on the couch. He was on fire, but he grabbed his little sister and dragged her out. She was dead too, from smoke inhalation. He blamed himself for her death. After he saved me, I wrote three poems dedicated to him.

  By the beginning of June, I was cracking up. I had lost a lot of weight and I had sleeplessness circles under my eyes. I was belligerent and surly because I was supposed to be free but was still sitting in prison. I was already beginning to think that I might have to stay indefinitely or do my sentence over, when one night around 4 A.M. Captain Avenitti appeared at my cell. He startled me at first. To have a guard appear at your cell in the middle of the night usually meant you were being taken out to get beat up or worse. He had a flashlight and he shined it in my face. I blinked, still half asleep, not sure what I was hearing.