Also by Leslie Schwartz
Angels Crest
Jumping the Green
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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New York, New York 10014
Photograph here courtesy Jan Burns
The verse quoted in the dedication is from Jack Gilbert’s “A Brief for the Defense.”
The poem here is from Twelve Moons by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 1972, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted with the permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2018 by Leslie Schwartz
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ISBN 9780525534631
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Version_1
For my family,
“We stand at the prow again of a small ship . . .”
&
for beautiful Qaneak
CONTENTS
Also by Leslie Schwartz
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Booklist
Prologue
CHAPTER ONE
Processing In
CHAPTER TWO
Pregnant Module
CHAPTER THREE
Pregnant Module
CHAPTER FOUR
Exit Module
CHAPTER FIVE
EBI Module: Dayroom
CHAPTER SIX
EBI Module: Lockup
CHAPTER SEVEN
EBI Module: Lockup
CHAPTER EIGHT
EBI Module: Last Days
CHAPTER NINE
Processing Out
Acknowledgments
About the Author
BOOKLIST
IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY AUTHOR’S LAST NAME
AA in Prison
The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings—Maya Angelou
Maggie and Me—Damian Barr
A History of Loneliness—John Boyne
The Night of the Gun—David Carr
When Things Fall Apart—Pema Chödrön
The House on Mango Street—Sandra Cisneros
A Tale of Two Cities—Charles Dickens
All the Light We Cannot See—Anthony Doerr
The Gathering—Anne Enright
Unbroken—Laura Hillenbrand
The Woman Warrior—Maxine Hong Kingston
One Hundred Years of Solitude—Gabriel García Márquez
Notes from the Song of Life—Tolbert McCarroll
The Children Act—Ian McEwan
New and Selected Poems, Volume One—Mary Oliver
A Tale for the Time Being—Ruth Ozeki
Dear Committee Members—Julie Schumacher
My Life as a Foreign Country—Brian Turner
Beautiful Ruins—Jess Walter
Ethan Frome—Edith Wharton
Prologue
One day, as I was crawling along the 10 Freeway heading to Santa Monica, I heard an amazing story on the radio. In 1980, a thirty-one-year-old Somali man, Mohamed Barud, wrote a letter complaining about the appalling conditions of his local hospital. At that time, Somalia was ruled by a military dictator named Siad Barre. When Barre’s government saw the letter, Barud was sentenced to life in prison. His charge: treason. He was arrested and incarcerated three months after his wedding to his beloved partner, Ismahan. Like countless others, Barud was sentenced to prison for his words.
While in prison, Barud was not allowed to speak to anyone. He paced his tiny cell all day and night, feeling like he was losing his mind. Aware that the government was pressuring the spouses of the imprisoned to divorce their husbands, Barud began to imagine his wife out there making love to other men, enjoying life to the fullest. The urge to kill himself presented itself with a force he never could have imagined, and soon the nightmares came: that he would attempt suicide, and at the last moment of consciousness, he’d realize he’d made a mistake.
Then one day, he heard a tap on the wall. It was from another prisoner in the cell next to him, Dr. Adan Abokor. Abokor was a doctor who worked at the hospital that Barud had complained about. Abokor, knowing that Barud was probably losing his mind, taught him the alphabet as a series of knocks and claps on the wall.
“I was trying to counsel him,” Abokor said. “I explained to him through the wall that he’s not going to go mad and he’s not going to die.”
So they began to talk, by knocks and claps. The letter “A” equaled one tap, “B,” two, and so on. Then one day as Abokor was getting a change of clothes, his first in two years, a guard transporting him back to his cell gave him a book. Abokor began to read that book to Barud through the wall. The book? Anna Karenina. Eight hundred pages, 350,000 words, two million letters, knocked and clapped into Barud’s ears one letter at a time.
It was that book that allowed Barud to find his salvation. He began to see, through the character of Anna, that not only was he suffering but so, too, was his wife.
“It helped me to survive,” Barud said. “You realize you cannot concentrate on yourself. Then you realize, I’m not alone in this very difficult situation.”
After eight years, Barud was freed into a different Somalia than the one under which he’d been imprisoned, a country now torn apart by civil war. He found Ismahan in a refugee camp. Despite the government’s pressure to divorce her husband, her resolve to stay married won out, and they are still married to this day. Barud says the book, and the act of Akobar reading it to him, saved not only his life but the love he had for Ismahan.
* * *
On January 12, 2014, I was sentenced to ninety days in Century Regional Detention Facility—Los Angeles County jail—for charges relating to driving drunk. I’d committed my offenses while in a 414-day relapse from double-digit years of sobriety. During that year and seven weeks, I was in a chronic state of blackout. I had fallen so profoundly into the mental illness that accompanies alcoholism that I was no longer able to work. I lost every job I had as a freelance writer and writing teacher. My family eventually moved away. My friends, no longer able to help me, left. I was totally alone. Even the dog was scared of me. She hid in the closet while I stumbled through the empty house.
I can only explain my decision to drink again in this way: I had found myself stuck in sobriety. My spirit felt dry and depressed. I couldn’t see any way out of a sense of confusion and unhappiness that had come on when I turned fifty. There weren’t any crises, there wasn’t any one reason; I was just sad, isolated, and lonely. So I drank. That’s what alcoholics without a solution do. You could say that one drink led me all the way to Century Regional, known in the vernacular as Lynwood. Of those ninety days, I would serve half the time, minus eight days for time served previously as per California’s sentencing laws. Thirty-seven days.
Obviously, compared to
Barud, and the countless number of human beings in jails and prisons throughout the world, I did only a breath of time and, unlike Barud, I had committed a real crime. But incarceration isn’t even appropriate for animals. The experience of being caged was soul crushing. Some days the shame and loneliness I felt was so bad I’d have to check out mentally. By the time I had accepted a plea bargain, I was six months sober, something people usually celebrate, but my experience, which was colored by the inequitable outcomes of a broken and corrupt criminal system, put a daily weight on that hard-won sobriety. I was finished with drugs and alcohol, but like Barud I hadn’t yet ruled out the thought of taking my own life.
Living through this experience exposed me to new levels of human cruelty. During my time, I saw ghastly things. I saw deputies fuck women in the Dayroom bathroom in exchange for drugs, so imperious they made little effort to hide it. (On September 14, 2017, a ten-year veteran of the LA County Sheriff’s Department named Giancarlo Scotti was arrested for “oral copulation” and “rape under color of authority” at Lynwood. There are so many more like him who will never be arrested.) I saw women being beaten for keeping extra hair ties in their cells. I saw women who’d been raped in the streets being forced to suffer the lingering hands of male guards “searching them” for contraband in their bras and crotches. One day I saw a deputy, pissed off for no apparent reason, take away a woman’s court-sanctioned extra mattress. She had a disability. “You’re a fat slob,” he told her. “You don’t need this, you need to get off your fat ass.”
I watched countless times as human beings failed us in jail, over and over again, with shattering cruelty. But like Barud, it was literature that saved me. The books that I had requested from family and friends and that arrived new from the bookstore every week were the balm to my endless hurt. Those precious stories, priceless gifts, restored me. They brought me back from the shock and hopelessness I’d experienced from my massive case of self-destruction and the grim consequences that followed.
In jail, I was allowed to receive three books a week from the outside. Over the course of my six weeks of incarceration, I managed to receive twenty-one books, three over the limit, which gives me some satisfaction. I love that three extra books, which might have earned me a stay in the hole, got past those sadistic guards who scorned the rules themselves when they opened our mail and arbitrarily decided whether we would get it on any given day. Often I would see my books sitting on the deputy’s counter for days, as if to taunt me. There was no measure to the fury and impotence I felt at being tortured like that.
All told, between the books sent to me by friends and family, and those I read that were left behind by other inmates, I read about a book a day during my incarceration. I have always been a voracious reader, but my lapse from sobriety had extinguished that side of me. My experience at Lynwood reignited my love for books in a way that was visceral, elemental. While reading, I was able to forget, for just a little while, the shame I had about destroying my life by taking that one drink. They united me with people. One such book brought me to the person who changed my life forever. Two books in particular forged a friendship that shouldn’t have happened and wouldn’t have anywhere else on Earth. Another eased me into myself, then pushed me away from myself so that I found my freedom. Not all the books I received had a lasting impact on me or changed my perceptions of my life and the awfulness of my situation. But a surprising number not only enlightened me, they transformed me in ways that would permanently change me.
Strangely, too, each one of those books that reconstructed my worldview, magically, coincidentally, arrived unbidden, at precisely the moment I needed it. It was as if a wizard conducted the exact delivery of each book so that it exactly matched the challenge I was currently experiencing. Like Barud, who learned from Anna Karenina that in love, there is suffering, each book I received had a destiny. Each taught me what I needed to learn at the moment, most especially when it came to rising above the challenges and cruelty of county jail. Without them, I may have fallen apart, and I surely would have left there a lesser person.
From the books I read in jail, a slow hope began to grow. I started to yearn for something new—a different kind of life, one less concerned with outside appearances and the backwash left by my giant ego. The characters in my books had found humility, I reasoned, so why couldn’t I? I thirsted for freedom, not from jail—that would come soon enough—but in a more expansive way, from myself. And what I wanted more than anything else was an ordinary god, one that had nothing to do with religion. Books could give me that wisdom and show me the way out of darkness.
One day, during my incarceration, I remembered a particularly devastating moment in my childhood. My parents, feuding again while drunk, upended the dinner table one night, and while dishes flew and broke, my mom and dad raged like twin tempests around my brothers and me. My youngest brother and I fled for the hall closet, my hiding place that I’d outfitted with scores of candy, books, and a flashlight. I used that hideout many times. I followed my brother in, but not before grabbing a book called The Little House. Written by Virginia Lee Burton, the Caldecott Medal–winning book was about a house with a sweet face made of windows and a door. Eventually the house was abandoned while the city grew up around it. All the noise and pollution destroyed the spirit of that house until, one day, a new family fell in love with it and moved it to the country. I read it to my brother there, in the closet, with the flashlight, and I believed for the both of us that in time we would find that house, that everything would be all right.
In Lynwood, a place known for people doing the hardest time anyone will ever do in the state of California, including in comparison to state prison, I held on to my books with white knuckles. Sometimes it felt like I turned the pages with the power of sheer sadness alone. Other times, with joy. And over the days I spent there, I was softened, the way my brother and I had been eased by the spirit of hope that resides in the pages of every great book. What I found there, in that place, as I shared my books and my fellow inmates shared theirs with me, was a disposition of boundless humanity among the incarcerated women there. The biggest miracle, of course, is that I found a way to forgive myself for the pain and suffering I had ushered into the lives of the people who loved me. As much as anything else, I credit stories for that; for making me feel whole in a place where the carcasses of addiction were so evident, and the temptation to otherwise return to the old life of an addict was suspended each day, one word at a time.
CHAPTER ONE
Processing In
Day two of processing in. I have not yet had anything to drink or eat. We stand there—a line of twelve women—in a freezing open warehouse that is so huge you could put a volleyball court inside of it. We are nude while deputies with guns order us to squat and cough while they shine flashlights up our asses and vaginas. The woman next to me, probably in her forties, is on her period.
“I’m bleeding,” she says. She is crying softly.
“Shut up and squat,” her deputy says.
I watch her menstrual blood flow to the floor.
A rabbi who I spoke to for comfort in the days leading up to my surrender to Century Regional Detention Facility said, “They can take your clothes, but they can’t take your dignity.”
He was wrong.
I know this now as I comply with orders in this barnlike structure. It is intolerably cold and dark and cavernous. I am not afraid. I am outraged.
After they shine their flashlight up me, hands on their guns, then order me to give up my clothes and put their plastic underwear and size triple-X blues on, the God I think I know is incinerated. A rogue hatred settles into my spirit and makes a rat’s nest of that small part of me where I store such things. Even in the years to come, I cannot release the memory of such indignity, the exposure of my most private body, under threat of gun and billy club, to people who collect a paycheck for probing me there.
There is a reason p
eople use the cattle metaphor when speaking about jails. When I am dressed in my blues and shoes two sizes too large for me, I am marched back with the others, again, into the holding cell. Except when in the strip-search area, I have been in this holding cell for nearly two days, stuffed full of women sitting on the urine-soaked floor. The cell is packed. There must be a hundred of us shoved into a space the size of a garden shed. The other three “holding” cells are also exploding with bodies, so many that the barred doors—throwback to an earlier time before steel firewalled doors—cannot be locked. I still have not eaten. I have not had a drink. I don’t know what time it is. The clock on the wall is stuck at 2:37.
Hours pass by, each minute an entire anthem to human depravity. At one point, a young woman scowls at a huge, butchy guard. The guard tells her, “Wipe that off your face.” The young woman says, “Fuck you.” It happens so fast—she is dragged from the holding cell and handcuffed. She kicks out, flailing, and is tased and hauled away. I have seen people discard trash with more sensitivity. In that moment, the memory of my last arrest, the violence of it, comes to the surface. I am momentarily unable to breathe as I shove it down and away, to be dealt with later.
While in holding, one woman braids my hair for me. She is very thin and frail. Another offers to trade shoes. Hers are too small for her, but they fit me perfectly. A third offers me a spot on the bench, moving over to make room for my tiny body. In jail, where overcrowding is the norm, it pays to be small. When lukewarm milk and plastic-wrapped meat-product burritos arrive, my stomach turns. I give mine to the prostitute next to me.
I am almost six months’ clean and sober and I spend the time in holding staring in amazement at the junkies and prostitutes, thinking about how I got here. It is not easy, because due to the blackout all I remember of it is the beating I took at the hands of LAPD—a relentless memory that invades my thinking with a stubborn regularity, like a drumbeat that never stops. For 414 days until, miraculously, I stopped drinking and using, I lived in a state of chronic blackout. According to neuroscientists, the alcohol- and drug-induced blackout is not simply a case of memory loss. People who suffer from blackouts never retrieve their memories because there are no memories to retrieve. The mind-altering substances in high doses interfere with the way the brain processes and makes memories. In a blackout, because of the drugs and/or alcohol, no memories are ever recorded by the brain. It is as if your life never happened.
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