Everything seemed to stop. The moon was wavering out the window, almost like it was being held loosely on the branch of a tree. I couldn’t be sure if I was still hallucinating, but I could clearly see the dark sky and the play of planetary light. I thought it was beautiful and I wondered where the moon had gone in the past year and seven weeks of my relapse when I had been in a constant blackout. I had no recollection of seeing the moon or the stars in ages. Hello, moon, I said. Where have you been for the last year? It was then, out of the blue, that the thought came to me that I should stop looking for happiness. That it was the pursuit of happiness, and professional and material success, that had deposited me right there in the center of my hell in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Somehow I knew that what I needed in order to survive was to learn, really learn, how to stop thinking about myself and to love, really love, other people.
I don’t know why I had this moment of awareness, but it became infinitely clear to me that if I was going to live through this and all future indignities—I had no idea at that moment how horrible my life was about to become; that one day I would be going to jail because of my wreckage—then I would have to find some way to mitigate my affliction and the anguish it had caused. And somehow I understood this to mean that I would have to search for something else in life, something that would transcend my slavish devotion to immediate gratification and the worldly acquisition of stuff, particularly the preservation of my career and the capitulation to my ego. Except for the moon, everything around me was dark and I was terrified. It didn’t last long, but I suspect it was the first time in my life I’d experienced an awakening, the transcendence of myself.
* * *
Louie sat in that boat, furious. Fucking sharks. He didn’t say that, but I did. I hated them, and it’s a testament to Hillenbrand’s evocative writing, her wry, crafty humor, that swept me up into Louie’s dilemma. He decided, “If the sharks were going to try to eat him, he was going to try to eat them.”
What followed was a hilariously told story about his plan to beat the sharks at their own game. His initial attempt nearly killed him. The plan was weak, by his own admission. He had leaned over and grabbed the tail of a big shark. That was a mistake. The shark beelined for the water, with Louie attached, and when it hit, the wave sent water up Louie’s nose and into his mouth, nearly drowning him. He got back onto the raft, with no memory of how he had done so.
The thought of starting smaller occurred to him. Take the enemy in increments and defeat him slowly over time. He and Phil worked together, dangling bait, luring the shark, and then Louie grabbed the creature around the tail and dragged it into the raft. Moving quickly, Phil smashed the flare cartridge into the shark’s mouth while Louie used the pliers to stab the screwdriver end into the boneless monster’s eyes. The shark’s death was instantaneous.
So it is with addiction. In the first thirty days, when all you can think about is simultaneously giving up or staying the course—an agonizing medley of urges—you do what Louie did. You take a sharp object and you plunge it into all your old ideas about your monsters. And then you eat them.
When I read that, I felt brave. I knew that all the sharks in the world could not take me down anymore. They could journey with me, but I had a choice; and once I’d made my decision to try something else, to seek out spiritual answers for my problems, I never had to invite them on board again. The thing I learned in recovery, which was confirmed for me in jail—and that Hillenbrand so eloquently and metaphorically detailed about Louie’s experience—is that the monsters are always there. But we survive in spite of them because we know they have no power over us unless we give it to them.
* * *
It turns out Johnnie and I like each other and can make each other laugh. I am relieved she is smart, and I enjoy how rogue and scabrous her humor is. One day she and I are sitting around in our cell, falling under the torpid weight of boredom. I decide to get a conversation going. Anything to push back death by tedium.
“So, Johnnie . . .”
Her eyes soften. She is so incredibly young when she softens. So beautiful.
“Johnnie’s my ho name,” she says.
“Why do you call yourself a ho? That’s . . . it’s awful.”
“Because I am a ho.”
“Jesus,” I say. “So what’s your real name, then?”
It was as if she were confessing some shameful thing, and it made me very sad.
“Wynell.”
“Well, thanks for telling me. I hated that I called you by your ‘ho’ name.”
“Wynell is a boy’s name,” she says.
It wasn’t a huge mystery why someone—someone whose otherness had always been part of her American experience—would change her name, but it intrigued me that she had chosen a boy’s name for her street identity, when she was also embarrassed that her given name had a masculine feel. But people adopt new names for all kinds of reasons. They are an assertion of belonging, but one of exclusion, too. I once read that nineteenth-century writer Nathaniel Hawthorne added the “w” to his name to distance himself from his family’s involvement in the Salem witch trials, most especially his relation to John Hathorne. Hathorne was the only judge involved in the trials who did not apologize for his part in the deaths of innocents, probably because apologizing meant he’d have to admit he was wrong.
Once Wynell told me her real name, I began to see the island in our friendship. When Duckie gave me the exclusive right to use her street name, we were family. When Wynell told me her given name, we were friends. I was touched that I had experienced this trust. Over time, she became my best friend in Lynwood.
One day out of the blue she said, “I hate white girls.”
Not even a second passed. “I don’t hate black girls. Except you for saying that.”
We howled. Hysterical laughter.
Wynell’s world of “ho-ing,” as the prostitutes called their livelihood, was a world I knew nothing about. My feelings for Wynell grew to pure love when I learned about the horrors in her life, and the daily struggle she faced, her choice of companions, and the tragedy of her impossible upbringing. She had been locked up five times by the age of twenty-one, a truth that devastated me.
Tough, wise Wynell taught me how to do my time by losing her patience with me. It happened like this: One day as I stood by the window fuming because they weren’t letting us out to program again, she said to me, “Girl, you got to learn to do your time. You are going to make me crazy with your crazy-ass motherfucking crazy-lady noises over there by that door. You ain’t in here alone and you are fucking with my serenity.”
For whatever reason, I heard that. I am not sure how, but that day I accepted fully and without reservation the four walls in the eight-by-ten cell I shared with Wynell. They never again felt like they were closing in on me. I still hated them, but, of course, you don’t have to allow that which you hate to lord over you. I was grateful to her for leveling with me and making no bones about how I was fucking up her tranquility.
She and I stayed up late laughing every night, recapping our favorite episodes from the TV show The First 48. Both of us, ironically, loved this police procedural and, it turned out, both of us knew every detail of every episode we shared with each other. Talking about the different stories was almost like watching TV, only more fun because we each added our own opinions or acted out various scenes, making detective and gangster voices. Wynell was hilarious and generous with her impressions, especially of the criminals. And it occurred to me then how powerful our memory and imagination can be when they need to be. No one needs TV, I thought one night after we’d exhausted ourselves telling stories. We have our brains and the capacity not just to reiterate narrative but to make it come alive as we go along.
She had not yet told me everything about her life—that would come over time—but the little details she let loose showed me that she was tough. Wynell was a woman who r
an the streets, took rape as a matter of course, drowned her sorrows with E&J (good old Easy Jesus), and when she wasn’t living with a drunken, sallow sixty-five-year-old man, worked her nights in flea-infested motels turning tricks. But for every time she was hard and cold and mean, I saw moments of great vulnerability. I was surprised the first time she cried; I began to love her like she was my daughter.
One day, a prostitute that Wynell knew from where they turned tricks came by our cell. Cookie was a trustee. She and Wynell would joke around at the door all the time. But Cookie was crazy. She must have had ADHD, which I think so many of the women inside suffer from. And if Wynell hated white girls, Cookie’s eyes blazed with rage toward me.
That day, Cookie was angling for a new bunkie. She was about to get locked up in a cell because she was too disruptive in Dayroom. She came to the door.
“Hey, J, leave that white girl. Come bunk with me.”
Wynell laughed.
“Come on, girl, I don’t want some bitch in there with me.”
“Nah,” Wynell said.
Cookie couldn’t believe it. “Oh, are you lez-be-ans?”
“Get the fuck out. I ain’t moving,” Wynell said.
“Serious? You gonna stay with that?”
“Yeah, I’m staying with her.”
It was so strange to see Cookie turn and walk away, all her bravado sunk. And it was a shock to me—and a relief—that Wynell turned one of her homegirls away for the old white lady she was currently bunking with.
I know that I found our time locked up together peaceful. I think she did, too, but I can’t ever be 100 percent sure. She wore some things close. Yet, every day, she would get up, stand by the window, and say, “I am at peace because I choose to be at peace,” to which I would reply, “Shut the fuck up.”
One time, she came to the cell fuming. She’d been getting into it with this crazy inmate for days, brooding over the way the woman kept asking for her food and taunting her, as if to get into it with her.
“I am gonna beat that bitch down.”
And she really was. I said, “Wynell, you can’t do that. You are crying every night to get out of here.”
She wouldn’t let go. Her anger was so dog-on-a-mailman.
I spent ten minutes talking her down. I said, “You can’t reason with the untreated mentally ill.”
I don’t know why that was the one argument I had that she was able to hear. I suppose all of us inside had known crazy on an intimate level—addiction does that to you, but so does a traumatic upbringing. Maybe it is wrong for me to talk about “us” in a general way, but I came to know that whatever the circumstances of our individual upbringing, there was among us collectively a sense of not knowing how to be regular people. As if all our lives we had been parroting “normal,” though we desperately wanted to be normal.
From then on, following any encounter with the crazy inmate, Wynell just turned and walked away from her. I was glad because Wynell had a temper and I wanted her to get out as much as she herself wanted to get out. We all had two release dates; our state-sanctioned release date and a later one in case you earned more time for bad behavior while locked up. One trip to solitary could mean a longer sentence. But in all honesty, I can admit that my pleas to her were also of a selfish nature. My fear of time in jail was eclipsed only by my fear of being alone doing time with myself in jail. I did not want her to be sent away. I already knew that her release date was a week earlier than mine and whenever I thought of that, I would panic.
“Please don’t do anything to get into trouble,” I would say. “I don’t want to be left behind. Please.” I like to think that she also heard that plea, that it motivated her somehow, as arrogant as that seems. But I know that Wynell had a big heart. She liked to pretend she didn’t, but it was there.
More so than being alone, I didn’t want a different bunkie because, while I had been lucky so far, there were truly difficult women in there. Violent women. Women who really did need lockup, especially in the absence of mental health services. Some, it seemed, were well beyond sanity and I was glad they were not free. One trustee, Miss Mouse, was in for cutting her drug connect up into itty-bitty pieces.
During this segment of my incarceration, Duckie ended up in Exit Dorm. She had fought with someone at the water faucet and was moved out of Pregnant Dorm shortly thereafter.
“I took a broom and beat her around the head,” she told me.
Something about self-defense.
I was amazed that Duckie wasn’t in lockdown. She wasn’t taking her meds, she said, but selling them for food on commissary and cash for her release. When she got out, she said, there would be no shelter, no food, no clean clothes. But now, without her meds, she was unraveling. And I saw for the first time the repetitive nature of homelessness and addiction, and the cycles of madness and sanity that went with it. Poverty, I realized, led people to impossible choices, trading whatever slim mental health options they had for money to eat or a place to stay. Still, I had two friends there now, even though Wynell hated Duckie.
“She ain’t got your best interests at heart,” Wynell told me.
In jail small things were hurtful and perceived attentions given to one person over another made for jealousy. I understood and said nothing.
* * *
Every night, when we ran out of First 48 episodes, Wynell and I would take turns reading to each other. Wynell loved and hated the horrible parts of Unbroken. They definitely had that car crash quality to them: look, but don’t watch. Other times, I would read passages that felt absolutely real to me in my experience locked up. They affected her, too, sometimes with outbursts of disgust, other times with silence.
There was one particular passage that spoke to the dignity it requires to stay alive. Even if the body wants to give up, Hillenbrand writes, it is access to that dignity that sustains prisoners and keeps them alive. It seemed true for Louie. It seemed true, too, for people like Viktor Frankl and Elie Wiesel, who survived the Holocaust, and Harriet Tubman, whose worthy acts dignified her and gave her a reason to live. In slavery and oppression, Hillenbrand seems to say, the difference between living and dying is the preservation of dignity.
Though I can’t compare my experience in county jail with the experience of slaves and Holocaust victims, or Louie’s and Phil’s experience in the Japanese POW camp, I could certainly relate to the issue of dignity. Everything inside Lynwood was designed to strip you of your self-esteem. Everything. But there were always acts of quiet resistance. We would give the guards names: Wolf Eyes, Bologna, K-Won, Grim Reaper, and Stick. The inmates would “cheek” their meds at pill call for others who couldn’t get pain medication or laxatives. Since the guards called us ladies (when they weren’t also calling us insects), we called ourselves and each other bitches. As in “Yo, bitch, can I have your cereal if you don’t want it?” Wynell liked to “fall” from her bunk so she would have to go to medical for her “injuries” just to change things up. At least once a week, someone clogged their toilet to get out of their cell. Ingenuity was the safeguard of dignity.
The same was true for Louie. Hillenbrand writes: “Louie soon learned a critical rule of conversation: Never use a guard’s real name. Guards who discovered they were being discussed often delivered savage beatings, so the men invented nicknames for them . . . Turdbird, Flange, Face, the Weasel.”
There were other acts of defiance at Louie’s POW camp. Hilarious ones. Sometimes they would save up all their farts—chronic dysentery made them especially ripe—and when told to bow before the emperor, they “would pitch forward in concert and let thunderclaps fly for Hirohito.” One POW convinced a guard that he could make a sundial work at night by lighting a match. Louie began keeping a diary with a stolen pencil and a tiny book that a fellow POW, a bookbinder in real life, had made for him out of rice paper. Louie would faintly write his entries upside down on the other side o
f pages that he filled with decoy writing—seemingly innocuous names and addresses. Then he hid the diary under a board in his cell. “With daily room inspections, discovery was likely, and would probably bring a clubbing. But this small declaration of self mattered a great deal to Louie. He knew that he might well die here. He wanted to leave a testament to what he had endured, and who he had been.”
I loved Louie for taking the risk. Writing under the weight of censorship, and in this case possible death, was a profound act of courage. Writing is survival. Leaving behind your testimony defies mortality. It pledges your allegiance to freedom. It saves you.
* * *
One day, Wynell found Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in the “library.” When you found a good book there, it was almost like finding gold in an old forty-niner creek bed. You knew good books existed, but you figured you’d never see one again. Once in a while, someone would go home and leave her books behind and the women would swarm the “library.” In moments, the pile would be picked clean. Wynell had found a treasure when she stumbled upon Angelou’s book.
Angelou’s book is one of the top ten most banned books in the United States. Since 1983, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has been publicly challenged thirty-nine times, even in my home state, liberal California. In 1982, at the American Booksellers Association, the book was displayed in a miniature prison cell for the inaugural Banned Books Week for the organization. It seemed fitting, then, that I was hearing it for the first time in jail.
The Lost Chapters Page 9