“Don’t go back to Champaign and the old crowd,” I told him again as he sorted and packed.
“Does Davey have a reading light? I never used it much.” He handed it to me and I tucked it under my arm for Davey.
“Who is coming to pick you up? Your sister?”
“No, I decided to take the cab to the halfway house.” He’d decided that going to the halfway house in Peoria was a better plan than returning home. “I will see my sister once I get there.”
“Don’t let the guys at the halfway house punk you out. I hear they’re tough,” I said.
“See, this is what I won’t miss. You messing with me.” He tossed away a half-squeezed tube of hair gel.
“Remember, when you get there, start looking for a job immediately. You should be able to find a machine shop in Peoria.” He had learned to be a machinist at Pekin—they did give him that.
“Yes, Mom. You want these multivitamins?” His real mom had died of brain cancer two years earlier.
“You should take those with you.”
He agonized over each piece of junk.
“Just toss it, Bobbie, nobody wants to touch your crap.”
I gave him a hug before he left the cell. We waited together in the dayroom until a guard yelled his name and another one arrived at the unit to escort him to the main building for processing out. He had made a lot of friends, so it took some time for him to get through the dayroom handshakes and backslaps, good lucks, and keep your head ups.
It was weird not having him around. I had gotten used to tormenting him on a daily basis and now I would have to spread it around. When a friend leaves, you are of course happy for them. But it is tempered with loss. They leave, and you just sit down, read a book, and try not to think about it.
He was soon making decent money outside. His sister needed a kidney, and he gave her one of his. Even though he was trying, it’s hard when you get out. The temptations are sometimes greater than before. It’s always a struggle if you were born for trouble in a tough place. I kept in touch with him—I still do—to encourage him, but the waters are always high around him. It hurts me not to be close enough to be a better pal, which is what he needs.
Pekin was changing. America’s prisons were being flooded with illegal aliens, and very tough Hispanic gangs were coming in with them.
It didn’t happen overnight nationally, but it hit Pekin that way.
When any new guy arrives, there is of course the awkward moment when he has his tray of food in hand and is looking for a place to sit. He instinctively knows, even if it’s his first time in prison, that he may not be welcome at some tables, that they are reserved for cars or gangs or just friends, even if some seats are empty.
The new Hispanic guys suffered a little of this and then decided to take action. They planned to rush to the dining hall when the controlled-move alarm sounded and just take over some tables. My friends and I walked in and saw that the Latin Kings had taken our table and some others. There was a staring contest; nobody was going to start a fight right there. But something had to be done. A whole system of respect and coexistence was being challenged.
I no longer had the stomach for starting a confrontation over a stupid prison table, but I didn’t want my boys Pete, Toro, Jimmy, Richie, Pat, and Josh doing battle without me.
“Take a bite of your dinner, man, and get out of here,” Jimmy said to me. I didn’t get it.
“Go, Shon,” two others said.
“How many weeks you got, Shon?” Jimmy asked. “This isn’t your fight, man. You’re short. Get out of here. You need to go home.”
Jimmy was thinking past anger and about me. I held my tray with one hand and downed what I could. I had good friends.
“Don’t let us catch you out on the yard,” Jimmy joked, pounding his fist into his other hand.
“Talk to them,” I said to Jimmy as I left.
That’s exactly what happened. Jimmy and the others talked to the Hispanic guys. They worked it out. Everybody understood that everybody else was armed and dangerous and willing to fight. Nobody really wanted to fight over that awful food. We got our table back but didn’t reserve more seats than we needed. It worked out. Nobody lost respect.
That episode was the final one of my remaining days in Pekin, the place where I had been housed for nine and a half years. Although it had never been home, I did, in many ways, grow up there. And I grew up enough to understand that I never wanted to go back.
The federal prisons used to be places where bad people went for doing bad things. When the federal prison system was created, its primary concern was rehabilitating people. Not anymore. There are now over two million prisoners in this country at a cost of over $68 billion a year. The federal system is now mostly about warehousing drug offenders and forcing them to work in prison industries—factories owned by the wealthy and well connected. It’s big business.
I figured rehabilitation was possible, if you wanted it bad enough. But for every guy I knew who would come out better, there were twenty more who would come out worse. There was no real effort made to motivate the unmotivated. It was, as I said before, a Lord of the Flies situation with damn few grown-ups in sight—among either the staff or the prisoners.
I hated leaving Hater. I had grown fond of that old man and couldn’t stand the thought that he would spend the rest of his years inside. I promised to help him continue his legal fight, but we both knew it would be tough. He was actually more concerned about his 90-year-old father, Herman. I promised to go visit him.
There were a lot of other guys, too, who needed a break and a ticket home. The longer they stayed inside, the poorer their chances would be for a productive and decent life. Once you miss the appeal deadline, you’re lost in the abyss. I had tried to catch some of them from falling over that cliff, but I felt guilty now for leaving. New kids would be arriving, and maybe someone would help them but probably not. I wished I had done a better job of leaving something like a legal clinic behind, but other than my friend Josh, I wasn’t sure there was anyone capable of stepping up to the task. Surely I could help from the outside. I thought of ways I might do that, even if I never made it to law school. It was like that show Lost, where people are stuck on an island. I was leaving but I wanted to come back and help them out, too, if I could.
I packed and repacked my letters and books in the last weeks. A book my mother sent, called The Purpose Driven Life, kept ending up on top, maybe because it was the right size or maybe because I kept sneaking peeks inside, despite the fact that its title was short a hyphen, which bothered me.
And maybe I kept scratching around that book because I was wise to the fact that most of my life had been characterized by chaos, not purpose. If I had had some sort of calling back then, the robberies wouldn’t have happened. I could definitely see the appeal and the organizing convenience of having a purpose in life. Helping others had been an excellent endeavor for me, but I would soon leave all that behind. Out in the world where you have to make a living, you can’t be a jailhouse lawyer living on thank-you snacks. I’d soon find out if I had a future working in law. One way or another, the whole purpose thing sounded like the right question to be asking at the time.
Could I win Annie once I got out? Now there was a purpose. But that would be answered one way or another. What purpose after that? I had come in here thinking I would leave with a new life plan. I had just a few weeks left to find one.
I had resisted any corny behind-bars religious conversion. I didn’t like the idea of living as a stereotype of some prison script. I had seen a lot of guys misuse religion as a way to hide from who they were and where they were. It’s easy enough to put all your mistakes on some altar and say, poof, I’m absolved. I’m brand-new. Not likely.
I had digested some of my guilt and knew part of it would be a knot in my stomach for the rest of my life; I still had lots to repay on that account. I didn’t want to hide from that or from anything. But a real theory of life and living, a pu
rpose that might thread together the thousand beads of disorder that would otherwise spill over the floor—that I could go for. So I read and pondered.
I thought most about the grace that had come my way, the kind people who had given me their time and love for no good reason. I still was not ready to take credit away from them by saying it was all from God, or Jesus. But I was seeing a sort of layer of love out there that kept sending me the right person and the right opportunities. Noah and Seth? All that because I didn’t like my kitchen job and complained to a guy watching TV with me? Ann Marie Metzner—the holy grail of my youth? Good grief. Sometimes it was too much.
I knew the standard Bible stories from when I had learned them as a kid, like the Old Testament story of Job, who was saddled, time and time again, with horrible losses. His children were killed, everything went wrong in his life, yet he held to his faith. My situation was the reverse: love and generosity and other blessings had come to me in amazing ways, one after the other, yet I clung to disbelief.
I was not looking at my Pekin surroundings with Jimmy Cagney eyes anymore. I could see that many of the guys were decent at heart. Even the worst of them had suffered greatly in their lives and they deserved some understanding. The very worst of them were receiving my pity instead of my anger. I wasn’t getting softer—you have to be hard to survive in prison—but I was seeing past the anger. I was mostly seeing that I was moving toward love and away from fear. That is a big move.
My upbringing was Christian and my sensibilities were Christian, so it was natural for me to start to process things in that frame. I could imagine Jesus himself in Pekin, maybe a few cells away. Actually, I had met his love many times in the kindness of friends. I wanted to make that relationship more real. I wasn’t ready for some big come-to-Jesus moment, but I was becoming friendly with the whole idea that we have worlds within our worlds, mansions within our prisons, and friends who are very powerful in helping us do the right things. How many more good things would have to happen to me before I caved and admitted that I believed?
I was thirty-three when two guards walked me out. It was October 2, 2008. Prisoner #15632-047 was free—at least free to live in a halfway house near Omaha for a few months. My days and nights would be carefully controlled. Any trouble and it would be back to jail.
There is a well-known inmate superstition that says it is bad luck to look back at the prison as you leave. It means you’ll see it again. But I stood and stared at what had been home for so long. And I didn’t mind the idea of coming back, if it was as an attorney who would help some people marooned in there. In fact, I hoped there would always be enough friendly help coming to people in prison to give them a chance at redemption. I couldn’t even count all the good things and nice favors that had come my way, even from the first day. Good old Bee Dog, my first friend and celly, who had served his sentence, been freed, and then got snagged for something again, was probably at some faraway prison being nice to some new kid.
My brother Brett picked me up. I didn’t recognize him because he was wearing mirrored sunglasses and a hoodie. He gave me a quick hug, then punched me in the arm the way brothers do. A few people had wanted to take me home, including Annie, but I was worried about freaking out, and I wanted to be with someone with whom I could feel most comfortable. That was Brett. We settled in for the eight-hour drive.
He told me all about his beautiful wife, Katie, and their two beautiful boys, Nathan and Marcus, and his blossoming sales career in St. Louis. He had made it—made it through the rough patch of youth.
You can’t imagine what it feels like to get out after a decade locked up—the wide views, the kaleidoscope of striking colors after so much black and white—it’s sensory overload.
I looked at people in the other cars and saw them talking and smiling—content. It had been a long time since I had witnessed that.
We stopped for gas at a convenience store and I went inside. I hadn’t had a stick of gum in over ten years and it sounded good. A girl cashier with pigtails studied me. I glanced down to make sure I wasn’t still wearing prison khakis. Jack Klosterman, my dad’s good friend from Grass Valley Farm, had sent me some new clothes for the trip.
The gum and candy aisle presented too many colors and choices, which required decisions. I sort of panicked, then quickly picked out something and paid. I would feel the same state of anxiety for about a month.
On the road I looked around and let the new world soak in. I asked Brett what it was like to be married, to raise kids. I was proud of what he had become.
“The last time we were in a car together we were going pretty fast,” he said. That was true. We had been in a getaway car.
We finally drove across the bridge into Nebraska—the Good Life. We went to a restaurant in the Old Market, in the downtown area of Omaha, where my family was waiting. My beautiful sisters, Samantha and Kristin, were there and let out a cheer. Mom was waiting. My brother Brook was waiting. And Jack Klosterman was waiting.
I walked over to see Big Jack and behind him was Annie.
In the last months before my release I could not get a bearing on her feelings. Maybe she was a little afraid of dealing with me as a free man instead of at a safe distance. I wouldn’t push too hard, but I had this resolute belief that what I hoped for would happen somehow.
She sat beside me, smiling. She held my hand under the table.
When the party broke up and we were outside talking, she told me she had something for me out in her car. I walked her to it, and she turned and kissed me. It was like that first kiss, though now she was the aggressor.
Mom and the girls drove me to the halfway house. The accommodations were worse than prison. I could handle a couple months of anything, I figured, with so much freedom around me to take the sting out of it.
It took me a couple days and some patient help from my sisters to learn the intricacies of a cell phone. Portable phones were expensive things with a retractable antenna when I had gone in; now they were cheap and everywhere. I even saw young kids talking on them at Walmart, which kind of freaked me out. Everything freaked me out in those first days.
I could now communicate with Annie whenever I wanted; she was right there in my pocket. We spent the evenings talking, without the fifteen-minute limit or high rates.
She drove me to my job interviews. I was turned down as a car salesman, a retail store clerk, an administrative assistant, and a factory worker. It was the start of the Great Recession, and jobs were scarce for everyone, let alone an ex-con.
We stopped at one more car dealership. I walked in and asked the owner if there were any openings. His eyes were stalking a husband and wife looking around the showroom as if they might be the only new car buyers in America that week. They might have been.
“Do you have any experience?” he asked without looking away from his prey.
“No,” I answered.
“Where was your last job?”
“Federal prison.”
“Follow me,” he said. I thought my search was over. Nope. Just outside, where he could still keep a bead on the couple through the glass doors, he told me to leave and not come back.
While I was being kicked off the property, Annie was taking a call from California. A job she had applied for a few months earlier had come through, a counseling job at a very prestigious eating disorder clinic in Malibu. All her research, her master’s degree, her nutrition work with her father’s company, and her own personal experience had shaped her into an expert. She had studied nutrition and eating disorders as diligently as I had been studying law. It’s interesting that we both had intensely studied the things that had tripped us up in life.
They wanted her, and it was her dream job. When I returned to the car, she seemed almost drugged. She gathered herself, listened to my rant about the car dealer, then told me. She would not accept the job, of course, she said. I told her she really had to. Of course she did. I hated it, everything about it, but it was her dream. I encouraged he
r to take it.
The week before her move, she started pulling away, which is what you have to do. We would just do what we had to do for now. But it was awful, and I was walking around feeling sick.
So I did what any lovesick guy would do when his girl was leaving; I phoned my mother. I explained the disappointing job prospects and blurted out that Annie was leaving me. She said something about being selfless.
“Yes, Mother,” I replied.
Annie flew out to Malibu and was having difficulty finding an apartment. At one point she texted me. She wanted me to call her so she could escape from a talkative guy with a room to rent.
She texted again the next day and said that she just wanted to come home, and for a few hours I was hopeful that she wouldn’t find a place to live. But she soon sent me a picture of her apartment with a caption that said, “my new home.” That hurt.
We could write and call, sure. I had to trust that things would work out. They always had for us. But the prospects looked bleak. She had flown to California. She was gone.
My first job was conducting political surveys over the telephone—fifty calls an hour. I was so good that I lasted nearly the whole first day. The next day I landed a new job washing cars at a local Chevy dealership.
I needed a car to travel between that job and the halfway house. John Fellers was in the business, so I called him. He wanted me to meet him at a county building, which seemed odd.
“We’re here to put the title to this car in your name,” he said. He was standing beside a long black 1989 Mercedes Benz in mint condition.
“I can’t afford it.”
“This car is from me and Bev and Johanna. It’s our thank-you for getting me home early.”
It beat the hell out of a Snickers bar.
I really couldn’t believe it. What a great thing for him to do. I drove around, talking to Annie on the phone and feeling somewhat like a normal person.
To some stares, I arrived at that cruddy car wash job each morning in that big boat of a car—almost a limo.
Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption Page 19