This Is Not My Life

by Diane Schoemperlen

  As he pushed the truck around on the floor with appropriate zooming noises, the automatic doors at the rear opened. Most people came in through the front door, so everyone in the room looked up. Two uniformed guards entered with a prisoner between them in handcuffs and leg irons. The guards were both middle-aged men, and the prisoner looked to be about my age, mid-thirties, with a swath of white gauze wrapped around his head, blood seeping through it in the middle of his forehead. They were all three chatting amiably as the prisoner was checked in. I was sitting near enough that I could hear bits of what they were saying, both to the triage nurse—“He walked into a steel beam”—and to the prisoner himself, good-naturedly—“That’ll teach you not to watch where you’re going.” Then they led him to a chair close to mine and helped him sit down.

  The guards stood near him, one beside and one behind, while everyone else first stared and then looked studiously down at their own unshackled feet. Soon the others turned back to their magazines or their seatmates, although most were also sneaking surreptitious glances at the prisoner from the corners of their eyes.

  Only Alex continued to stare, still on his knees playing with the truck, inching ever closer to him. The guards were watchful but not alarmed. Alex zoomed the truck to a stop near the prisoner’s feet.

  “Hey, mister,” said my usually shy son. “Wanna play with this truck?”

  Now everyone, including the guards and the prisoner, was staring at me. I nodded and smiled. The guards nodded in return, and the prisoner smiled back.

  “Sure, little buddy,” he said. “That’s one nice truck you got there.”

  “It’s my favourite,” Alex declared, sending the truck straight towards the prisoner’s feet. “I’ve got three more trucks at home and a big yellow digger too. I’m gonna be a worker man when I grow up.”

  Still shackled, the prisoner leaned forward and nudged the truck back to him with one foot. “That’s a good idea,” he said. “You’ll have lots of fun.”

  They continued passing the blue truck back and forth between them, both making vroom-vroom noises and grinning. Then our last name was called, and I stood up, reaching for Alex’s hand. He came willingly enough, leaving the truck at the prisoner’s feet.

  “Bye-bye, mister,” he said, waving as we headed towards the nurse holding open the door to the examining rooms. “Hope you feel better soon.”

  “You too, little buddy,” said the prisoner, managing an awkward wave with both his cuffed hands. “You too.”

  He looked at me then and said, “Thanks, lady. That’s one great kid you got there.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I think so too.”

  AS WE WALKED BACK to the car afterwards, Alex was obviously feeling much better, and I was immensely relieved. I felt compelled to say something about the prisoner in the waiting room. I explained about prison as best I could, keeping it appropriately vague, I hoped, for a sensitive four-year-old. I expected him to ask what the man might have done to end up in such a place, but he didn’t.

  He said, “I hope his head is okay now.”

  I had to ask. “What made you want to play with him?”

  “Everybody was looking at him funny,” Alex said with indignation.

  I had to agree that yes, they were.

  “I thought he needed a friend.”

  I had to agree with that too.

  AS THE WINTER MONTHS WORE ON, I did what I could to battle the despair I’d fallen into over the end of my previous relationship. I still wasn’t anywhere near being able to write, but slowly, slowly, I began to climb out of the abyss. For no particular reason, I started knitting scarves, one after another, dozens and dozens of them. I was always running out to buy more wool. I spent every evening knitting until my hands were numb—and also, I hoped, the parts of my heart and my head that were broken. I was now going to Vinnie’s three days a week, sometimes four if they were short-handed. I took the scarves with me, handed them out to the other volunteers and all the lunch patrons. Shane wore his proudly.

  When not knitting scarves, I was cleaning out my closets and culling my bookshelves, bringing boxes of stuff to the Vinnie’s warehouse every week. Situated in a separate building behind the kitchen, it housed not only a food pantry but also many racks of donated clothing, small household items, towels, bedding, and several bookshelves that I was now keeping well stocked for the patrons. Several of the regulars were especially fond of poetry and literary fiction. Before and after lunch, the warehouse was full of happy shoppers who could take whatever they wanted for free.

  Arriving each Friday morning with Sister Frances, Shane was usually the only man there for the first three hours until another volunteer named Fred came in to dish up the soup and help serve the meal. Shane already knew Fred from the convent of the Sisters of Providence of Saint Vincent de Paul, where he and several other inmates were taken to attend mass every Sunday morning. He was more comfortable now, no longer alarmed by the bunch of us women singing and dancing around the crowded little kitchen to the classic rock always playing on the radio on top of the fridge. He got used to our joking and teasing, and was soon dishing out his share with the soup, salad, and sandwiches. He especially appreciated the sign on the fridge door that said, SARCASM SERVED HERE. Quick-witted, intelligent, and flirtatious, with an outrageous and facetious sense of humour, he could always make me laugh.

  He usually wore a pair of black track pants, and when he bent down to load or unload the dishwasher, he displayed a classic case of “plumber’s pants.” I was elected by the other volunteers to tell him he was giving a show not only to those of us in the kitchen but also to the whole dining room. I was mortified, but they insisted. “He likes you, he likes you!” they cried. So the next morning when we went outside together for a “breath of fresh air”—as we all called it when going outside to smoke—I told him. Now he was mortified. He soon found another pair of pants. Later he would say this was when he knew I loved him too.

  ALEX ALSO VOLUNTEERED at Vinnie’s several times. Now twenty-one, he’d been working for two or three years as a cook at a popular downtown restaurant famed for its prime rib. He might have been unimpressed by our low-budget high-quantity meals, but he was too polite to say so. Except for Dorothy, whom he’d known almost all his life, he was shy with the other volunteers, most of them women my age or older. He and Shane, however, quickly became friends. Shane told him often that he was a lucky guy to have a mother like me. What could Alex do but agree? Shane said if he’d had a mother like me, he never would have ended up in prison.

  With the arrival of spring, the scarves were put away and the sandals came out. On the first warm days, all the other female volunteers began showing up with their toenails painted. One Friday, even Sister Frances came in with her little old nun toes glowing neon pink. That day after lunch, I went to the drugstore and headed straight for the nail polish aisle. How was it that at almost fifty-two years of age, I had never once in my life painted my toenails? The next morning, I arrived at Vinnie’s with my toes sporting a vibrant red called Strawberry Electric, and everyone applauded.

  LATE IN THE SPRING, Shane told us he had a parole hearing coming up in the summer. He was hoping to be granted day parole and moved to a halfway house in Ottawa. He wondered if anyone would be willing to write a letter of support to the Parole Board on his behalf. He handed around some copies of official Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) paperwork. This was when we finally learned why he’d ended up in prison in the first place and that he’d been there for almost thirty years. Now we understood that in the language of tattoos, the teardrop below his left eye meant he had killed someone. Now we knew he was serving a life sentence for second-degree murder. Whatever initial alarm we might have felt about this was tempered by the fact that it had happened so long ago and that he had become an essential and popular part of the kitchen crew. We saw him as a person who had paid his debt to society and deserved a second chance.

  I knew so little about the Canadian justice
system that I wasn’t even sure about the difference between first- and second-degree murder. Shane explained it to me in the simplest terms. Only a murder conviction automatically results in a life sentence. Then it’s a matter of degree. First-degree murder means you planned to kill him, you intended to kill him, and you did. Second-degree murder means you didn’t plan ahead of time to kill him, but you intended to kill him, and you did. Manslaughter means you didn’t plan to kill him, you didn’t intend to kill him, but you did. In each case, someone ends up dead and someone else ends up in prison.

  In the argot of the inmates, Shane was doing “a life bit on a murder beef,” the word bit meaning the sentence and beef meaning the crime. Like Canada itself, prison has two official languages, that of the inmates and that of CSC.

  The language of the carceral world, like all language anywhere, is always changing. In Canada, prisons are no longer officially called “prisons.” Only two or three are still called “penitentiaries.” The rest are now “institutions”—not to be confused with all those other institutions with which most people are familiar: financial, educational, religious, and mental institutions, not to mention the institutions of marriage and democracy. The people who work in these penal institutions are now called “correctional officers,” not “guards.” Shane usually called them “the coppers” or, on a bad day, “the pigs.” He always called himself, and liked to be called, a “convict.” Not for him the new softer sanitized terms “inmate” or “offender.” To him these were just mealy-mouthed euphemisms akin to saying someone has “passed away” instead of just plain died.

  I soon learned more about the intricacies of the prison world from Shane’s LifeLine worker, Stuart, who sometimes came to Vinnie’s to see him. Founded in 1991, LifeLine was a national organization funded by CSC and run by the St. Leonard’s Society to provide specialized support for inmates serving life sentences. There were about two dozen LifeLine workers, all of them lifers themselves, having been on parole successfully for many years since their own murder convictions and now working with thousands of other lifers across Canada.

  Another lifer from Frontenac, a wiry whippet of a man named Lenny, came to Vinnie’s once too, accompanied by another LifeLine worker, Evan. Lenny and Shane were close friends, had been doing time together for decades. Shane said Lenny was definitely “institutionalized,” but he was not and never would be. I had only a vague idea of what this word meant, but Shane’s insistence on who was and who wasn’t reminded me of my father once insisting that his doctor had told him he would never get Alzheimer’s even though three of his five siblings already had. He was in the early stages of the disease himself by then, although we didn’t know—or at least hadn’t acknowledged—it yet.

  If Alzheimer’s is, as it’s sometimes called, the old-timers’ disease, institutionalization, I thought, must be the long-term prisoners’ disease. In retrospect, I realize that I should have taken the time right from the beginning to understand what it actually meant.

  Lenny had been thinking he might like to volunteer at Vinnie’s too, but after one shift he said it was too hectic for him and he didn’t like people all that much anyway. He ended up volunteering at the Humane Society instead.

  I had now met four murderers in a matter of months—Shane, Stuart, Lenny, and Evan—four more than I had ever expected to meet in my entire life.

  THE HOT MEAL PROGRAM AT VINNIE’S would be closing for the summer, reopening in September, the day after Labour Day. The other volunteers were looking forward to a two-month vacation, but I was dreading it, afraid that without the place and the people to keep me occupied and anchored, I would slide back into the black hole of depression. Only the warehouse was open during July and August, just on Tuesday mornings. I decided I’d volunteer there for the summer, sorting the donations, hanging the clothes, stocking the food pantry, doing whatever needed to be done. One morning a week, I hoped, might be enough to keep me sane.

  Our last lunch was served on Friday, June 30. The Friday before, I’d given Shane a signed copy of my novel about the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of the Lost and Found. He’d often talked about how much he liked to read and also about his weekly ETAs to Sunday mass at the convent. Because I knew nothing about prison then, it didn’t occur to me that he might not be allowed to take the book back in with him. But somehow he managed it, and by the following Friday, he’d read the whole book and was eager to talk to me about it.

  After lunch was served, Shane and I went outside to smoke before Sister Frances took him back to the prison. We talked about the book (he loved it, and his comments were intelligent and astute) and also about his impending surgery in July (this would be the second replacement of his right knee). Then he asked if we could keep in touch over the summer, if he could write me a letter.

  I said, “Sure, why not?” and gave him my address.

  Why not, indeed?

  It was only after I got home that I wondered if this was a good idea.

  The following Friday I received a letter in the morning mail. Two handwritten pages in which Shane made it clear that he was hoping for a romance, that I was, in fact, the woman of his dreams. I stewed about his letter all weekend. On Monday morning, when I was still trying to figure out what to do about it, the mailman brought me another one. A single page this time, in which Shane took back everything he’d said in the first letter.

  At the warehouse the next morning, I was energized with relief, an even more potent pick-me-up than straight caffeine. I emptied and sorted four bags of clothing, unpacked and shelved three cases of Kraft Dinner and another two of tomato soup, and filled the freezer with the weekly donation of muffins and pies from Costco. Then I went outside for a breath of fresh air. A red car was just pulling into the parking lot. More donations, I assumed. Two men got out of the car. One was Stuart from LifeLine, and the other was Shane.

  I didn’t know how he’d engineered it, but there he was, grinning. Stuart went into the warehouse, and Shane and I stood shuffling our feet in the gravel like teenagers. I offered him a cigarette and lit myself another one.

  He said, “You got my letters.”

  I said, “Yes, I did,” then launched into the dreaded “Let’s just be friends” speech. I prattled on about how I wasn’t looking for a relationship, was still getting over the last fiasco, just wanted to get back to writing and leave romance alone. I was looking more at his feet than his face, trying to tell them gently that I wasn’t interested.

  He said, “You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m sorry. Yes, let’s be friends.”

  When Stuart reappeared, Shane shook my hand and followed him to the car. Then they drove away.

  RETURNING TO THE KITCHEN AT VINNIE’S after Labour Day, I was worried that things might be awkward with Shane. If he was there at all, that is. If his summer parole hearing had been successful, he would already have been moved to Ottawa, and I would never have seen him again. I hadn’t heard anything more from him over the summer. I’d thought about sending him a card to say I hoped his knee surgery had gone well, but I didn’t. I had continued going to Vinnie’s on Tuesdays. The rest of the time, for fear of jinxing myself, I tried not to pay too much attention to the fact that my writer’s block seemed to be lifting and I was writing a short story—a story about, among other things, a misguided relationship and a writer who cannot write. The story kept getting longer and longer. My friend Lily said, “You’re writing a novel!” I insisted I was not. But she was right, and by the end of the summer I was working on the second draft.

  In September, Shane was indeed back at Vinnie’s and, much to my relief, he was not uncomfortable at all. This made it easy for me too. We caught up on the events of the summer. He didn’t seem unduly upset about the negative outcome of his hearing, saying he’d just have to try again next year. His surgery had gone well, but without proper physiotherapy afterwards, he was still in pain and limping. He was supposed to be using a cane but seldom did, because he said it made him feel like a
decrepit old man.

  He was coming to Vinnie’s three days a week now. We slipped back easily into working together, joking, teasing, flirting a bit, and occasionally breaking into song. We were right back to irritating each other too, him messing up the towel under the dish rack right after I’d straightened it, and me saying, “You are the most annoying man I’ve ever met!” and straightening it again. He pretended never to be able to remember what I’d called him. “What did you call me?” he often asked. “The most what?” Just so I would say it again.

  Was this when I began to fall in love with him?

  By the end of September, it was clear that Sister Frances wouldn’t be able to continue as his escort. The requirement that she must keep him in “sight and sound” meant she had to stay at Vinnie’s for the entire five hours, and this was too much for her. Shane asked all the volunteers if anyone was willing to take over as his escort. Three of us said yes: me, a woman named Laura who knew Shane from the convent before he began working at Vinnie’s, and Russell, the regular driver of the Vinnie’s van. First we each required a criminal background check known as a CPIC, the acronym for Canadian Police Information Centre. Russell was deemed unacceptable because he had a minor criminal record from forty years ago. Laura and I would go together to Frontenac one afternoon for the volunteer training session. This would be the first time in my life I would enter a prison. More than anything, I was curious.

  I’d been living in Kingston for twenty years then but had no more knowledge of prison than the next person. Although prison is indeed part of our society, we tend not to think of it that way. Hidden behind stone walls and founded on secrecy, it is a parallel universe to which we are forbidden access and which we’re just as happy to think has nothing to do with us. Like most city residents, I had driven past these institutions thousands of times without paying them much attention. They were so much a part of the city that I took their presence for granted. If I did give them more than a passing thought, it was only when I happened to be driving down King Street past Kingston Penitentiary and was struck yet again by the incongruity of its location in one of the most attractive, desirable, and expensive residential areas of the city, on the shore of Lake Ontario beside a three-hundred-dock marina filled with pretty sailboats. Or when I found myself waiting at a red light on Bath Road right beside Collins Bay Institution and had time to observe the majestic castle-like architecture and soaring red spires that had earned it the local nickname “Disneyland.”