This Is Not My Life

by Diane Schoemperlen

  Dorothy was disturbed again when she called one night and caught me watching a hockey game. It was true that I’d seldom (never) watched a hockey game of my own volition before I met Shane. But he was a committed hockey fan, and I didn’t see anything wrong with taking an interest in what mattered to him. After all, I expected him to take an interest in my writing, didn’t I? I also reminded her that I had once published a book of stories called Hockey Night in Canada, so it wasn’t entirely bizarre that I might watch a game now and then. I had to agree, though, when she pointed out that the title story of that book wasn’t exactly about hockey, was more about a young girl learning that much as the rules of the game are clear enough on the ice, the same cannot be said of real life.

  Shane was a dedicated Detroit Red Wings fan, and for my team, I chose the Chicago Blackhawks, because they were my father’s favourite. I cheered for them on his behalf, with fond nostalgia for those childhood Saturday evenings when I watched the game curled up on the couch beside him, eating popcorn, whooping when they scored, groaning when they didn’t, trying to understand what “icing” meant when not on top of a cake.

  I DIDN’T EXPECT THAT MY OTHER FRIENDS would be overjoyed about my relationship with Shane, and they weren’t. Some kept their opinions to themselves, some didn’t. Some had already met him, some hadn’t. Only one friend, Lily, seemed cautiously pleased, willing to give us the benefit of the doubt and hope for the best.

  Evelyn, who also volunteered at Vinnie’s for a time, said he was needy and demanding. Given that the exact same thing was once said of me by another woman as one of the reasons she was ending our ten-year friendship, perhaps I didn’t pay as much attention to this comment as I should have.

  Monica, who knew me when I first moved to Kingston, pointed out that I had always been fond of the bad boys. She had a point. Put me in a room with a hundred men. Imagine that ninety-nine of them were handsome and clean-cut, obviously successful in their expensive tailored suits and Italian leather shoes. Imagine that the hundredth man had long straggly hair, many tattoos, and was wearing a battered black leather jacket and cowboy boots. The hundredth man would always be the man for me, the only one I was interested in and attracted to, the other ninety-nine barely registering on my desirability radar.

  Shaking her finger at me, Monica said there was just one thing I had to remember about bad boys.

  With trepidation, I asked, “What’s that?”

  She said, “They’re bad.”

  Walter, another writer, said I was asking for trouble—how could I be so smart in my writing and so stupid in my real life? Walter was the only person who said the word stupid out loud and to my face, but I suspect there were others who thought it too. Walter was laughing when he said it and I laughed too, but I never quite forgave him.

  Patricia, also a writer, said she didn’t understand why I wanted to be with someone like Shane when I’d always been so afraid. She too had known me for a long time, and she too had a point. Yes, I am a frequently fearful and anxious person. Many years ago, at the end of a telephone interview for a national newspaper, the interviewer, a man I knew slightly, said he had one more question, off the record. “What,” he asked, “is your default position?” What was my baseline frame of mind when I was neither up nor down but just somewhere in the ordinary middle?

  My immediate answer: “Anxiety.”

  For those of us inclined to it, there is no end to the number of things to feel anxious about. Once anxiety is churning full-steam, it is hard to let go of. After the original source has dissipated or even disappeared altogether, the anxiety itself lingers, often just shifting over to something else, to whatever presents itself, like a blood-sucking parasite moving on to a more hospitable host. I find my own anxiety tiresome (not to mention tiring—I am always exhausted in the aftermath), and I try, not always successfully, to refrain from inflicting it on anyone else.

  I seldom feel entirely safe. If I wasn’t anxious, stressed, or worried about something, I would hardly recognize myself. I’m always bracing myself for the next thing. Try as I might to abide by Susan Sontag’s wise dictum “Do not suffer future pain,” I can seldom manage it.

  It would seem to be completely counterintuitive for a person like me to fall in love with a murderer.

  Think of it this way. For fifteen years, I had a pure black cat named Cleo who crossed my path a dozen or more times a day. This, I figured, was like a vaccination, rendering me immune to all the other black cats in the world who might accidentally cross my path, towing all that proverbial bad luck behind them. Shane was my black cat.

  Think of it this way. When my son started school, he was timid, sensitive, small for his age: a prime target, I feared, for bullies. But it never happened. He was also immensely likeable, and within weeks, he’d befriended all the bullies he could find. At the time I thought, Oh no, he’s just like me, all too fond of the bad boys. He tells me now that he did it on purpose, figuring that nobody else would ever bother him if all the bullies were his friends. He was right.

  Shane was an intimidating-looking man, and that convict glare of his was mean enough to peel paint. All those jailhouse tattoos made it obvious where he’d been—although there was once a sweet elderly lady at Loblaws who asked him if he’d been in the navy—and for anyone who knew the language of tattoos, that teardrop made it clear what he’d done. Perhaps I believed that as the baddest of the bad boys, Shane would cast a force field around me that would keep all the other bad boys away, not to mention all the other things there were to be afraid of in the world. He looked strong and possibly dangerous. With him beside me, I would be too. He would be my protector. This didn’t mean I would be his simpering fawn-eyed damsel in distress. It meant he would always look after me. He would always take care of me. No one else ever had.

  After many years of unhappy relationships, I’d come to mistrust the feeling of intoxication I always had when falling for a new man. I’d come to the conclusion that this feeling had only ever led me straight down the road to misery. Although I found him attractive, I didn’t have that feeling when I met Shane. We were friends first, just like everybody says you should be. This time I thought I had my wits about me. This time I thought, hilarious though it might sound now, that I was proceeding in a mature and reasonable manner. This time I thought I was safe.

  There I was, at the age of fifty-two, still believing in dark horses, long shots, exceptions to the rule, swimming against the tide, betting against the odds. There I was, still looking for love in the unlikeliest of places (prison) with the unlikeliest of people (him).

  SHANE WAS ALWAYS FORTHCOMING about his criminal history. Soon after we became involved, he presented me with a large package of paperwork. Hefty though these files were, they comprised but a small sampling of his oeuvre. He seemed proud of the vast amount of paperwork he’d accumulated over thirty years in custody, as if it were proof of his importance in the world.

  In addition to the AIDS test results I’d insisted on seeing, there were reams of official CSC documents detailing the whole story of his incarcerated life. I was impressed by his candour and his apparent desire to lay all his cards on the table so that I knew exactly what I was getting myself into, as if he were giving me the opportunity to do my due diligence before signing the deal. I joked about it with my friends, pointing out that this was one of the advantages of dating a convict: not only did I always know where he was, but he came with paperwork outlining all the terrible things he’d done in his life, whereas with a regular guy you just had to find out what was wrong with him as you went along.

  It occurs to me now that we both came with paperwork: him with all those files and me with all my books. Much as I thought I knew all about him from reading those documents, he thought he knew all about me from reading my books. In the final analysis, perhaps we both looked better—or at least different—on paper than we did in real life.

  PATRICIA ALSO SAID SHE HATED TO SEE ME once again falling for an “unavailable�
�� man. But despite being incarcerated, Shane was hardly unavailable. Most weeks we saw each other every day except Thursday, when Vinnie’s was closed and there was no visiting. Most weeks I visited him on Tuesday and Friday evenings and on Saturday afternoon. On Sundays I met him at the convent in the morning, and then, after treats in the basement, he and the other inmates were taken back to the prison while I went home, changed my clothes, then went to the prison for the afternoon.

  I’d also been given permission to join him at the AA meetings he attended on Wednesday evenings. Each week he and half a dozen other inmates from Frontenac, as well as another group from minimum-security Pittsburgh Institution, were escorted to and from a church in the west end where the meetings were held in the basement.

  I quit drinking on my own on May 1, 1992—May Day, May Day! By then I’d had a serious drinking problem for many years. When I finally made up my mind to quit, I didn’t go to AA for several reasons: I am not a joiner, I was shy, I was embarrassed, and I knew little about AA, was leery of what I did know, all that talk about a Higher Power, the Twelve Steps, and the Big Book. I couldn’t imagine myself sitting around with a bunch of strangers, saying, “Hi, my name is Diane, and I’m an alcoholic.” I had now been stone-cold sober for almost fifteen years, was long past feeling tempted to have a drink or worrying about a relapse. At first I only went to the AA meetings because I was curious, and Shane wanted me to. But I soon found myself wishing I’d gone there in the first place.

  What I found in that basement was a compassionate community of people to whom I didn’t have to defend, justify, or otherwise explain myself; people with whom I shared a great many personality traits regardless of how different our lives might be; people who were as ready to laugh as they were to cry, on their own or someone else’s behalf. At AA it didn’t matter where I came from, how many books I’d published, what I was wearing, how much money I made, or how many times I’d messed up my life. All that mattered was that I was there. Each week I went home after the meeting feeling strengthened and sustained, filled with new ways to think about not only my relationship with alcohol, but also my relationship with the world and myself.

  The following spring, Shane and I both celebrated our sobriety birthdays at AA, fifteen years for me, seven for him. He credited a prison doctor with getting him off alcohol and drugs, including heroin. She was, he said, the best doctor he’d had in thirty years inside, and he owed her his life. I was touched by the birthday cards we received from the other members and the Black Forest cake we were served at coffee time. In my other life, only Dorothy had ever acknowledged the importance of each successful year of my sobriety and shared the pride I took in this accomplishment. She had never missed sending me a congratulatory card and did not now.

  LESS THAN THREE WEEKS after Shane began working at Vinnie’s in January 2006, Stephen Harper was elected the twenty-second prime minister of Canada, his Conservative Party squeezing into power with a minority win. A large part of Harper’s platform was his “Tough on Crime” agenda. Despite the fact that the overall crime rate had been declining for at least a decade, this agenda was relentlessly advanced as what was needed to keep Canadians safe: tougher sentencing, tougher punishment, tougher conditions inside, and tougher release restrictions. Bringing sweeping changes to almost every component of the criminal justice system, these measures would do nothing to address the root causes of crime nor to actually prevent crimes from being committed. Much of what Harper proposed was based on the American correctional system as it had evolved during the expansion of its own “War on Drugs” campaign—a process by which the United States had become the world leader in incarceration, with more than two million prisoners nationwide. Even the American Department of Corrections had since admitted that this had done nothing to prevent or reduce crime, and they were now changing direction. The Harper government would continue with this increasingly punitive agenda undeterred by the empirical evidence of its obvious and expensive failure in the United States.

  In early 2007, before the implementation of these changes began in earnest, visitors were allowed to bring home-cooked meals to be eaten in V&C. In those days, which we later came to think of as the halcyon days, I could cook a delicious and nutritious meal at home and bring it to the prison in my insulated cooler.

  Knowing how much Shane enjoyed food, I brought him familiar favourites like meat loaf, beef stew, chili, lasagna, perogies, or pork chops. I’ve never thought of myself as a good cook, but he was impressed. Sometimes I surprised him with dishes he had never tried before: basmati rice, chicken tortilla soup, Greek barley salad, and Chinese pork, one of my mother’s recipes featuring stir-fried pork tenderloin, green pepper, and mushrooms. Looking back on it now, I wonder why I never took him a pie.

  Shane could bring cutlery and plates from his unit to V&C. In the summer, he could also bring fresh salads made from the produce grown in the large garden tended by the inmates on the prison grounds. I brought cloth placemats from home, and some women brought tablecloths. Once inside, we all went about setting our tables and warming up our dinners in the microwave as if it were the most normal thing in the world to be dishing up dinner in a prison. Soon enough it was. Much as we speak of someone “being” in prison, in fact, the inmates live there, and, especially for lifers like Shane, the prison becomes home. It also becomes home away from home for their wives and girlfriends. And me.

  IN THOSE DAYS, I WAS ALLOWED to bring books to Shane, five or six every couple of weeks. He had already made his way through most of the small library at Frontenac, where, according to him, the fiction collection was composed mainly of tattered paperback copies of murder mysteries and horror novels. He often lamented the lack of serious literary fiction, especially by Canadian writers. I was more than happy to rectify this problem and spent hours choosing books for him from my shelves. I was disappointed that he didn’t much like Alice Munro, pleased to find he shared my love of The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill, so much so that he passed it on to several other guys before returning it. I was not surprised that he was especially fond of No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. Soon to be sixty years old, he’d often commented on the regrettable fact that jail was no country for old men. Once he requested a copy of Waiting for Godot, but returned it unread and without comment.

  Each time I arrived at V&C with my bag of books, they were thoroughly checked, not for their literary merit or their suitability for prison consumption but to ensure I hadn’t hidden any money, drugs, or weapons between the covers. After they were approved, Shane could keep them in his unit and read them at his leisure. He had a lot more time to read than I ever did. Whenever he would heave a big sigh and say, “I’ve got nothing to do this afternoon, I guess I’ll have to read,” I could barely contain my envious annoyance.

  IN THOSE DAYS, AT THE END OF EACH VISIT, the inmates were permitted, under the watchful eyes of the guards, to walk out of the building with their visitors, down the front steps, and partway into the parking lot, where they stood behind a yellow line painted on the pavement, waving as their loved ones returned to their cars. One summer Sunday afternoon, after looking back to wave goodbye one more time, I found a woman slumped sobbing against the car next to mine. I was a seasoned visitor by then, and I’d noticed her inside, a new face in the visiting room, a well-dressed woman with stylish blonde hair and expensive-looking jewellery, there to see her son, who looked about the same age as mine. He was tall and slender, clean-cut with big brown eyes and a shy grin. They could have been brothers, her son and mine. Shane said the boy had arrived just a few days before, apparently on a drug charge.

  Shane had warned me many times not to get too friendly with the other visitors, not to get involved in their problems. He said you never knew who might be up to something, bringing in drugs or money, and CSC was big on guilt by association. There was also something he called “We think, we feel, we believe”—meaning suspicions were enough for CSC. They didn’t have to prove anything before punishin
g you for it. But I could not, in good conscience, just walk past this crying woman, get into my car, and drive happily away.

  I glanced back at the building. Both Shane and her son had gone inside. All the inmates had. Only a single guard still stood on the steps watching us. I fully expected him to come charging out to the parking lot and send me on my way, but still, I had to say something.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, for want of a better opening. Obviously she was not.

  “No, no, no,” she sobbed. “I can’t bear it. I can’t bear to see him in there. I can’t bear to drive away and leave him.”

  I made comforting noises and patted her arm. The guard remained on the steps, watching but not moving towards us.

  She said, “He told me not to worry. He said, ‘I’m okay here, Mom. I’m making friends here already. Don’t worry about me, Mom. I like it here.’”

  Telling me this made her cry even harder. I felt tears prickling my eyes too.

  She looked at me desperately and said, “How can you stand it? How can you do this over and over again, just driving away and leaving your fellow in there?”

  I said, “He is not my son.”

  IN ADDITION TO ALL THE TIME WE SPENT TOGETHER, Shane was also sending me cards and letters two or three times a week. I didn’t hear the term “love-bombing” until much later. His love letters were usually handwritten but sometimes typed. There were a few computers available for inmate use. Each inmate had his own floppy disk containing his files and a few games, but they did not have Internet access at any time. Stamps, envelopes, writing paper, and cards could be purchased at the canteen. There was a limited selection of free cards in the chapel too. I wondered if the guards who checked the outgoing mail were amused to find, behind the religious sentiment with lilies and cherubs on the front, the less angelic and more lascivious declarations of Shane’s love and passion.