I was grateful for that book, though, because I could not predict when my books would arrive. Everyone was telling me they would not get there for a month. (They were wrong about that, thank God.) Cracking it open, I begin my habit, one that will stay with me even after I’m released, of reading slowly. It is like mindful eating, where every morsel is chewed with intention to glean flavor and gratitude. How long, I wonder, have I ignored the abundance of my life, by rushing through it—eating, reading, sleeping, making love—to get to the next thing. Go slow. I say to myself. Forgive yourself. Remember your blessings.
* * *
The next Tuesday, a week or so in, three books and five letters arrive. The books are so beautiful. Dazzling. All the Light We Cannot See. New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver. The Big Book. I pick up Mary Oliver’s book. When I have it in my hands, I hold it to my chest and I feel that my heart is literally pounding with love. One of the letters I receive is from myself. In it, suspecting that I might need the words, I tell myself I am not a criminal, that there are people who love me, people who think I am brave. I asked Greg to send it to me once he had my booking number. (Inmates do not receive money or mail without booking numbers.)
Duckie is down in Dayroom in jail school when my first three books arrive. Her burping and farting and singing and grunting have left the cell, strangely, too quiet. The door stays slightly ajar, a benefit I receive while she is in school. Those two inches of air make the entire difference between claustrophobia and freedom.
I open up Mary Oliver and smell the pages. New. Like paste and rain. I lay the book for a moment open on my chest and stare at the bunk above me where someone has scrawled a quote from the Bible: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” I want to scratch that out. Over time I am able to blot it all out using the fruit stickers that come stuck on my apples and bananas. One fruit sticker at a time until it is gone. How can anyone have a god that doesn’t think they are perfect exactly as they are? It seems obvious to me that a just God would know we are human. Even my husband doesn’t pick on me for my mistakes. Why would a loving God stoop lower than him, a mere mortal?
I turn to a random page in the book. “Bone Poem.” I recognize immediately that Oliver is writing about the predator and its prey, the owl and the rat. Who, she posits, is really the more powerful? It’s a Hegelian construct. The slave becomes the master, the master the slave. She speaks about falling back to the center, and in a sense, she affirms the idea that things always bounce back from inequity. If you are patient enough, the poem tells us, reversals will take place; the underdog will not just triumph, but be understood.
I settle myself into that poem. It is the bed I lie in.
I ponder the way the poem speaks of the long and painful turning back to equilibrium, that place that is balanced and steady, and most of all just. When I read the words “the long fall back to the center,” I wonder when that fall will begin for me. Is there even such a thing? I didn’t think so then. And when would I, this rat I had become, learn to fly like the owl, as Oliver promises in the poem? It hurts to read and contemplate the hopeful notion that reckoning and readjustment always happen because, as I sit in my cell, knowing what really happened during the arrest that put me here, I do not believe this is true. I believe that the powerful always win. And I don’t like that I think of myself as that rat whose bones, as Oliver writes in his poem, are eaten with relish by the majestic owl that lords over the rodent’s puny life.
What is it, I wonder, about the rat—dirty, filthy, disease carrying? Is it just our revulsion of that hairless spiral of a tail, or the rat-a-tat of its claw-feet scurrying through bushes, that blinds us to the rat’s ingenuity, shrewdness, and intelligence?
* * *
Mary Oliver and I have a couple of things in common. For starters, we both began writing poetry when we were fourteen. I stopped writing poems, though, and she didn’t. We part company there, along with her particular genius for her craft—oh, and her Nobel, her Pulitzer, her many published books, the list goes on.
But on the earthly plain, we are also both walkers. I probably walk, on a good day, six miles. I walk on trails. I walk along the Los Angeles River. I walk around lakes. The first thing I do when I go out of town, whether it’s Iowa City or Jerusalem, is find the best walking trails. I will walk anywhere. Once, in Tel Aviv, I walked eleven miles in one day, along the Mediterranean Sea, to the walled city of Jaffa, darting in and out of its ancient alleyways, then through the White City and Neve Tzedek, where the old buildings muted the sounds around me, showing me I am small and insignificant in a centuries-old world.
Oliver’s stomping grounds were nature. Once, she said, she found herself walking in the woods with no pen. After that, she hid pencils in the trees so she would always be able to stop and write. Pencils in the trees—better, I think, than gold nuggets. It’s ingenious. I can’t count the number of times out walking somewhere when I’ve been inspired but had no paper, no pen. I can’t use a phone, that small hell-machine. Oliver walks with a notebook, hand sewn. I do, too, when I remember to bring it, but mine is a crappy one, an artifact from the ninety-nine-cent bin at the drugstore.
In Oliver’s poem “Rain,” divided into seven parts, I read about myself. It is a winding poem, bleak in some places, but Mary Oliver can’t help but be optimistic. It is just that sometimes she chooses the less starry-eyed map to show us our journeys. I am pulled into Part 2 because it is about incarceration and escape, at least superficially. Ultimately the poem declares that it takes courage not just to escape the literal bars of barbed wire and detention, but the deeper, more oppressive jail of poverty, disease, hunger and isolation. In the poem Oliver asks the reader to imagine what it feels like to be forced to clutch by the handful the barbed wire that surrounds you as though your life depends on it. The contemplation for me is this: Is it possible to endure physical and emotional pain even when you know the freedom on the other side isn’t guaranteed?
Would it be too easy for me to hold this poem up as the ballad for my circumstances? And yet, it is just that. She is speaking of that wild country of pain. But it is more than that. In the poem she is careful to point out how it is only when we walk through that pain (or climb the fences over it) that we find abundance and joy and fearlessness. Defeat is not the end. It is, she seems to say, only the beginning. There is another freedom on the other side. Literal poverty, isolation, addiction, and incarceration are not crimes. The crime is giving up on our personal liberty. We must bleed before we find freedom.
What can I say about myself struggling against the bankruptcy of lockup and, worse, my paucity of spirit? Do I want to be sent back to the camp inside—that treacherous place where my mind wants to whisper the lies to me—that I am worthless, depraved, useless to myself and others? Or should I carry forth, mired in bog, prey to alligators and anaconda, to find as in the poem the food to sustain me, the beauty of the natural world to remind me of joy. Even wheat must be transformed into bread. It is not picked from the earth, a perfect thing, but it must endure and tolerate the transformation into its useful incarnation.
What Oliver doesn’t say, but that I understand, is that the swamp on the other side of the wire that we must also cross to get to freedom is not what we think it is. The stinging nettles, skunkweed, and black widows of the swamp give way to the bald eagle, the black bear, the great blue heron. Nobility, an idea learned only in times of hardship, lives in our minds. Even if, for a long while, we cannot see past the poison oak and the hungry crocodile to the flowering dogwood, whose brilliance alights in spring, it will nevertheless always arrive. It lives within us. It blooms over and over again, despite its harsh surroundings.
In jail, I clutch the handfuls of rage, of sorrow, of despair and shame like my life depends on it.
Locked up, the past mutates. You don’t think about yesterday; sameness and anomie obliterate the day before. But you think about years ago, each memory
coming alive. And with it, entire patches of arcane detail you thought you’d forgotten: the names of your undergraduate professors; that weird Christian Science kid you kissed as a high school freshman, and regretted; the exact layout of your brothers’ tree fort; where you hid your precious beach finds, shells and sea glass, as a child. And younger still, you remember the bird, drunk on firethorn berries, that dove into your bedroom window over and over again until it killed itself. You recall the patch of scarlet feathers under its wings when you poked it with a stick and mourned its suicide.
Time is broken into these compartments. The distant past. The endless present. And the only future is your release date. Everyone keeps a calendar. They draw the months out and cross off the days. Eventually, I succumb, too. The first thing anyone asks you is “How much time do you have?” As if time is currency, which I will learn in some ways it is. If you are fighting a case—say, a murder charge—you will be in jail for years before you are finally sentenced to prison, because in spite of what everyone thinks, there are no speedy trials. Not for the poor. Not for people of color. Which means not for their victims, either. The victims of your crime will live, sometimes for years, in a state of suspense and disbelief. And because of such relatively long, hard time in county jail, you are given perks. You get to sleep in the Dayroom, where three-tiered bunks are lined up against the walls because overcrowding means there aren’t enough cells for housing prisoners. Dayroom gives you access to movement. To less incarceration. More time, ironically, equals more freedom, so the more violent your crime, the better off your circumstances of incarceration.
More time means you can be a “trustee.” This means you work, and work passes time. You serve the food and delegate toilet cleaning to your fellow prisoners. You get first stab at the clean blues, blankets, underwear, sheets, and socks that come once a week. You are first for commissary. You aren’t locked up all day, and you watch over your fellow prisoners. You are in with the deputies. For this reason, I call them “kapos,” the name given to the Jewish prisoners in the Holocaust who received moderately better treatment than their doomed fellow Jews because they worked for the Nazis. For instance, they threw the dead bodies of their neighbors, brothers, and sisters into the incinerators after they were gassed. For all their treachery to their own people, most of the kapos were killed in the end anyway.
* * *
Every week, a box from Amazon arrives. Every day, the letters. They perforate the monotony, the dullness that seeps into everything. If I get one letter, I save it, maybe for after lunch. If two or more letters arrive in one day, I spread them out on my metal slab and gaze at them. They are priceless. My record in one day was seven letters. I remember that number because in jail you count and count and count. I reread every letter several times. Almost always, the first sentence of every letter is: “I cannot begin to imagine what it feels like . . .”
One of the people who wrote to me every single day was a writing student of mine named Vicki. In fact, all my students from the same writing class wrote to me. I’d begun teaching the class a few weeks before I’d found out that I was going to be prosecuted and sent to jail.
After about the tenth letter from Vicki, I took a moment to fully comprehend her gift to me, and the gift of that class, and how it came to be that my students, all upstanding Jewish citizens, wrote to their jailed writing teacher with such fierce loyalty. Some even sent me their stories to edit and I was grateful for the chance to occupy myself with work I loved to do.
It happened this way: I was a couple months sober and had no idea I would be prosecuted the way I was, when out of the blue I received a call from Lisa Rosenbaum, a writer who I’d once worked with in a critique group. She was now working at the Jewish Women’s Theatre at The Braid, a nonprofit theater in Santa Monica. In addition to the theater events they sponsored and created, Ronda, The Braid’s artistic director and cofounder, wanted to launch creative writing classes. They needed a teacher. Would I do it?
I jumped at the chance and said I would. I was sober, my family was slowly repairing, and I was cleaning up my life, one tiny bit at a time. I had not yet even been to court, but I spoke to my attorney and he assured me I would not do jail time. I would probably get a lot of community service, he said, a year of DUI classes, and maybe drug testing. So I took the job.
The first day of class went a thousand miles to improving my self-esteem. The students were all women, most of whom were older than me, but like me, Jewish in a mainly secular way. They were glorious, beautiful women, familiar to me, people I knew in my heart. I remember Greg had to drive me across town every class because my license had been revoked, and he met Vicki. He said, “She’s a saucy one.” He loved her. And all the others, mostly because he saw how happy they made me, and how wonderful I felt teaching again, when none of my former employers, like UCLA, would give me another chance. They were women from the tribe, with mannerisms and language smattered with Yiddish, and a Jewish worldview that was familiar and comfortable to me.
The Braid felt like home.
When I was sentenced to jail, to my surprise and heartbreak, I knew I would have to tell both Lisa and Ronda. I didn’t know what that would mean for the class, though my attorney assured me repeatedly I’d be out in four days. There was no reason anymore to believe a word out of his mouth—by then I couldn’t stand the guy for all his bullshit—but hope does strange things to one’s grasp on reality. If that were true, I reasoned, I’d miss only one day.
I called and spoke first to Lisa, who was surprised by the news, but entirely calm and understanding; the kind of response you’d like from someone during an earthquake or a bank robbery. I said I wanted to tell my students in person; they deserved that much. But when Ronda heard she was, understandably, very unhappy, and thinking at first that I had taken the job knowing I’d have to go to jail, she had different idea for the way things would go. I was to write a letter to my students and she would attach a postscript. Eventually Ronda, who in every respect is a visionary artist and compassionate woman, came to see that I had not lied. At first, though, things were tense, and of course, I didn’t blame her for being upset. I did as she asked and wrote a long letter to my dear students. I left nothing out. It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.
Ronda attached a note in the email, with an apology on behalf of The Braid. She provided the students with three choices. First, they could continue the class, with a break till I was released. Second, we could do the remaining two sessions before I left and receive a refund for the remainder, or third, we’d end now, and they would get 80 percent of their money back. The Braid would proceed based on the decision of the group. She gave them a day to decide.
It is impossible to describe what it felt like reading that email when it appeared in my in-box. I remember lying on the couch in my office afterward, crestfallen and sick with self-hatred. My friend Anadel was there, as always, and I remember telling her how bad I felt for once again screwing up other people’s lives. Even in sobriety, it seemed like I was doing everything wrong.
Then my email pinged. Then it pinged again. And again, and again. Ten times. One after the other. I got up to look, and to my amazement, every single one of my students had responded within minutes of receiving the letter. Almost all at the same time, in one giant reply-all email.
I read the first email that I could see, but it was really the fifth in a series.
Dear Lisa and Leslie,
We bonded the first night we met. Leslie spoke of being honest, digging deep, having the courage to tell our stories. You have done just that, Leslie, with this beautiful note you’ve written. I would also vote for continuing the class and pausing for whatever period of time required. I feel you, Leslie, fit my ideal of a writing teacher and I don’t want to let go of this opportunity to work with you! And I want to quickly add that I already feel we, as a class, have established a level of trust and compassion and determination that is ra
re. So onward ho with the writing class!
We will be with you, Leslie, as you go through this passage in your life.
I look forward to seeing everyone again—tomorrow evening?
All Best Wishes,
Cely
“Anadel,” I said. “Look.”
She leaned over and looked at the long thread of emails, pages and pages of letters from my students expressing their love, their allegiance, their devotion, their acceptance, their desire to continue and wait for me no matter how long I would be locked up.
Anadel and I looked at each other, and then at the same time, we both fell apart, holding each other and crying. I realized at that moment that my students had invited me back to my Jewishness. Not back to teaching, not back to work, but back to God.
* * *
In lockup, when I receive letters, I always break from reading my books to write back to everyone who has written. I am forced, like a five-year-old, to write with an itty-bitty golf pencil on brown recycled paper, all purchased for 50 percent more than their value from commissary
The Lost Chapters Page 4