by Jack Gantos
The next morning it caught up to me. I was tired. I was shaving and staring hard in the mirror, which was warped and gave my face the shape of an unshelled peanut. Suddenly my heart started pounding. My neck swelled with pressure. My ears closed. My eyes glazed over. And I began to think I wouldn’t make it out and, like so many guys I had helped sew up, I would take the razor and begin to hack and slice at myself as only a madman would. It wasn’t a new thought for me to think I might go insane, but I had always pushed the thought aside. This time the thought that I’d kill myself was unrelenting. As my hand began to shake I knew I was a moment away from hurting myself. I dove toward my cell door as if from the path of a speeding train. I shoved the razor out of the meal slot then dropped down and did push-ups until I couldn’t do any more and lay there stretched out on the hard floor feeling the warmth of my body replaced by the cold of the concrete.
By the time the count guard came by I was sitting on my bunk, half shaved and trying to will my shaking foot into a shoe.
Visiting hours were only on weekends and no one ever came to see me anyway so I was surprised when the hospital guard rapped on my door one weekday afternoon and unlocked it.
“You have a visitor,” he said. “Two of them.”
I had no idea who it might be. I got dressed and followed the guard. We passed through the first set of front gates and entered the visiting room. My father and my uncle Jim from Pennsylvania were sitting on folding metal chairs and smoking cigarettes. The way they were slumped forward made me realize they were drunk.
“Son,” Dad said, perking up when I walked in. He stood and lurched toward me. We hugged and I felt myself holding him up. He smelled of hard liquor—Canadian Club. That’s what he always turned to when he wanted to get hammered. Uncle Jim grinned. “How’re you doing?” he asked. I shrugged.
The guard stepped forward. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes,” he said, then left the room.
“Goddamned place is closed up tight as a nun,” Dad said. “We had to bang on the front door to get someone to open it up.”
“It is a prison,” I reminded him.
“We would have been here earlier but Jim spotted a roadhouse and we thought we’d have a few belts before coming in. You know, take the edge off of being here.” He waved his arm around and stumbled. A chair fell over.
I looked over toward the guard, who was watching through the viewing window.
“Dad, I hate to tell you this, but visiting hours are Saturday. They only called me up here because you came from so far away.”
“Well, hell,” he said. “Can’t a dad visit his son?”
“During regular hours,” I said. “Look, I’m going to have to go in a few minutes. Is there anything you wanted to say?”
“Wish I had a drink,” he said, and laughed.
I walked over to the guard. “Can he come back in the morning?” I asked.
“Not until the weekend,” he replied. “You know the rules.”
I went back to my dad. “Can you guys get a motel in town and come back Saturday? We can have the whole day together.”
“I got to be getting back home for work,” Jim said. “Your dad is up for a visit and we just thought we’d take a crack at running down here and seeing you.”
“Well, I’m disappointed,” I said. “It would be really nice to have some time to talk.”
The guard tapped on the window.
“I got to go,” I said. “Thanks for coming.” I gave them each a hug. Dad mumbled that he loved me, and I mumbled the same thing back. At that moment we were not so much in love as we were beat up from loving each other.
By the time I returned to my yellow room I was fuming and just wanted to kick something. I was so mad that he had showed up without any thought of when it was all right to arrive, or how it would look to the guards that my dad was some drunken slob beating on the front gate and hollering, “Let me in! I’m here to see my kid!” I could just imagine some report going into my file describing my home life. I felt even more insane.
But by the time I finished writing about it in my journal I had settled down. It was never like my dad to have a lot to talk about anyway, unless he had a good story to share. I’m sure he got drunk just in order to get up the nerve to walk in the door and tell me he loved me, and after that eruption of sentimentality, he wanted out. It was really harder for him than it was for me. It made me think that it must be harder for the visitors to come in than for the prisoners to visit with them. We were used to being inside. And for my dad to see his kid in prison, locked up, it was killing him. Arriving drunk and at the wrong time was the best he could do. And not hurting myself was the best I could do.
After seeing my psychological report I set up another meeting with the shrink. When I settled into the chair in front of his desk I noticed it was bolted to the ground. I had cleaned his office, too, and knew there was an alarm button under his desk he could press for emergency help. A lot of guys didn’t like the shrink for the same reason I didn’t—he had too much power over our lives. His reports to the parole board could extend your time behind bars. Or he could recommend an early release. Visiting him again was a risk, but I needed to do some damage control.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said, once I took my seat.
I wasn’t sure where to begin.
“Here’s a hint,” he said. “Don’t talk about your crime.”
“What if that’s all I’ve got on my mind?” I asked.
“Then let’s start with your family,” he said. “I see here that your father came to visit.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was great. He’s a good father.”
“What about your mom?” he asked.
“She’s totally supportive,” I said. “She’s wonderful.”
“And your brothers and sister?”
“I love them. I miss them.”
“Do you have anything you want to talk about—the stress, or feelings of anger, or remorse?”
“You know,” I said, arranging my face into a sincere expression, “I’ve really worked through all of that hard emotional stuff. I’m just feeling pretty solid right now. Just doing my time, and hoping to get out and get on with meeting the positive goals in my life.”
He stared at me for a long time. Longer than normal. Minutes passed. I sat there trying to hold my trustworthy face. I crossed and uncrossed my legs and hands. I breathed deeply. Then not at all. Then too deeply. I was a fake. I was giving him the fake me and he was just going to sit there for as long as it took for the cracks in me to appear. Slowly I lowered my hands and held on to the bottom of the chair as if I were about to topple over.
Then in a very quiet voice he said, “When you really want to be honest with me, come back. I don’t think you are a bullshitter. I just don’t think you have walked into my office to get help. You are here to con me, and you don’t have to con me. You can tell the truth, and I won’t hold it against you.”
I couldn’t look him in the eye. He had seen right through me. My motives were so pathetically obvious. Worse, I was just the same as every other jailhouse con who walked into his office looking to feed him a fake paint-by-numbers home life. And instead of standing out as something superior, I ended up just being one of the phonies.
I stood up. “I’ll try to open up more next time,” I said quietly. I left and never went back.
One morning Mr. Bow took me down to the hole, which was a corridor of isolation cells under the hospital wing, when he was doing basic medical rounds. Nobody got sent down there unless they had done something really bad—like get into a fight where someone gets seriously hurt, or try to escape, or assault a guard.
“Help,” came a cry from down the hall. “Help me.”
We went down and Mr. Bow opened the solid steel cell door. There was a naked guy lying face down on a mattress with the metal part of a broken light bulb up his ass.
“What happened here?” Mr. Bow asked.
“I was lying in bed and the b
ulb fell out of the ceiling and went up my booty,” he whimpered.
The three of us stared up at the empty light fixture.
Bow turned to me. “Go back upstairs and get Dr. Sokel and tell him to bring some tweezers, disinfectant, and suture material. Move it!”
I ran all the way down the corridor. As I ran I wished all the gates would open before me, and I could just keep running, as far away from this place as I could go.
But I couldn’t run out of prison. I did what I was told and got the doctor. I helped him gather his supplies, and as he trotted toward the hole to remove a broken light bulb from a grown man’s ass, I went back to my cell. There was nothing to do but feel the despair of that moment, until after feeling it over and over I picked up my journal and wrote it down and emptied it out of me. When I reread what I had written it was as if I had cast a spell on myself and the entire experience filled me up again. I just couldn’t get away from it. I poured myself into that book, and it poured itself back into me. It was like pouring one glass of water back and forth between two glasses.
For a long time I had known I wanted to write books, but I didn’t have any help and I didn’t know what I was doing so it took me a while to figure out what I had to write and how to get started. While in prison, it occurred to me that when I lived at Davy’s I could never write about something as unsettling as what I had seen in the hole because when I felt something so intense I jumped up and took a walk or ran to a bar where I had a drink poured into me, and another until I was so numb I couldn’t pour anything back onto paper. I didn’t have the patience to slow down and see that I had plenty of material to write about in high school. I just didn’t have the confidence and determination to sit still and nurture it properly. My mistakes, my self-doubt and insecurity got the best of me. Even as I crisscrossed Florida looking for “juicy” subjects, I missed them all. It seemed the harder I chased after a subject, the faster I ran in the wrong direction. Even while living in the Chelsea Hotel while waiting for my sentencing, I spent more time looking into the mirror at my wounded face than I did into my notebook. And the only time I did settle down to write was when I was sitting on the Beaver writing in the ship’s log. Even then I didn’t think I was writing anything of value. At sea I was reading all those great books and ended up thinking I had nothing great to offer in return. But that was untrue.
In prison I got a second chance to realize I did have something to write about. I found plenty of serious subjects. I had plenty of time to write about them and I couldn’t get up and run away, or drink, or smoke dope. When I had my fill of serious subjects I began to think about my life before prison, and I found so much more to write about. Prison may have been serious, but from within it, looking out my cell window, I knew life outside prison was more interesting. And as I sat in my yellow cell with my journal on my lap, I understood I had come all the way to prison to realize that what I had in my past was so much richer than what was before me. My struggle as a writer was a lot like my life, I figured. I made up rules for myself and broke them and made others until I got it right.
7 / getting out
Just as every prisoner has a getting-caught story, every prisoner but the lifers and the executed eventually has a getting-out story. Most of the stories are pretty routine. A man does his time, keeps his nose clean, doesn’t get into trouble, and is released when either his sentence runs out or the parole board gives him a date. But some of the getting-out stories are escape stories—mostly attempted-escape stories.
When I was at West Street I saw an escape-attempt straight out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Three guys had ripped bed sheets into strips and then braided them into a rope. There was an exercise period on the roof and because it was cold we wore big army jackets. When it came time for the escape one guy wound the rope around and around himself and put on the biggest coat he could find. There was a guard tower on the roof and a fence. Two other accomplices faked a fight and drew the guards’ attention while the escapee unwound the rope and threw it up over the fence and down. He tied the end to the fence pole and climbed up and over. The second escapee climbed up and over. Then the third. But the bed sheets couldn’t hold all their weight and snapped. All three of them fell about four stories. None of them died, but they all ended up in the hospital.
I met a young guy named Quentin, who was an okay kid. He always came off tougher than he was. He was being transferred from a minimum-security prison for a court appearance. Some new charges had been filed against him and he was worried. Too worried to go before a judge again. Since he had minimum-security status, he wasn’t handcuffed, and as the guard drove past a cornfield Quentin flipped open his door and bailed out. He hit the road, rolled a few times, then hopped up and ran into the field. The guard stopped the car and hollered for him to come back—he promised he wouldn’t tell anyone that he had tried to escape. Just come back and all would be forgiven. But Quentin knew the future charges against him were true and he was crashing through the corn and looking for a way out. He came to a farmhouse, forced open a basement window, and hid in the coal bin for two days. On Sunday the farmer and his wife went to church and Quentin went upstairs, found a set of car keys, and took off in a pickup truck. A few days later, as he stepped out of a grocery store, he was picked up. The truck had been spotted and traced. He never changed the plates.
A group of guys started an “astral projection” circle, where they would sit around a card table and concentrate on breaking down all their molecules into subatomic material and drifting through the fences. That was a waste of time. They went nowhere. Other guys would get furloughs and not return—but were eventually caught. Some guys were on work-release and would walk off the job. But they were always caught. It was always something dumb—like they saw a car with the keys in the ignition, or they went into a bar and got loaded and just decided not to return. Nothing remarkable. There were no daring helicopter rescues, no tunnels, no ingenious plans to dress up as a guard and stroll out through the front door.
Most often the escape attempts were straightforward and totally ineffective—they tried to climb the fence. We all knew it was impossible, but desperate cons like the X-ray tech before me tried anyway. The fence was twelve feet high with triple rows of razor wire on the top, and if you made it over that fence there was a second, identical fence to get over, and there were guard towers with snipers, and bloodhounds in their kennels just waiting to sniff you out. But in the dozen or so attempts I saw or heard about, not one man made it over the first fence.
Still, after the parole board set me off, my mind wandered toward escape plans. I imagined the usual plots—a helicopter rescue, a tunnel, a paperwork snafu and mistaken release. Escape became a mental parlor game. And then I stumbled across a plan that would work. I knew a lot of draft dodgers who had spent time hiding out in Canada. I figured I could, too.
After I had received my minimum-security custody rating from my caseworker, Mr. Bow offered to take me out on an evening furlough to a “special motel where you can get your rocks off.” All I had to do was have fun and be back by midnight. Cinderella rules.
Only I wouldn’t come back. Before going I would raise cash inside by selling medical supplies. I could check flight schedules and make a reservation by using Mr. Bow’s office phone when I mopped his floors on the weekend. And once he dropped me off at the motel, I could cab it to the airport, catch a flight to Canada, and be over the border before I was missed. I knew it would work. It was simple. And it was tempting, but being a fugitive for life was too much of a risk.
Yet, it was delicious to imagine.
My real getting-out story was nothing like the one I had imagined. First and foremost, I got a new caseworker. Mr. Wilcox retired, and I was assigned to Mr. Casey. He was young, and not yet beaten down by the brutal atmosphere and the frustration of trying to help people in pretty hopeless situations. So I tried one more long shot. I went to him and told him that I wanted to go to college and that if I got accepted to one while still
in prison did he think I could persuade the parole board into giving me an early release to go to school.
“I never heard of an escape plan like that before,” he said. “If you get accepted to a school, I’ll write a Special Progress Report and we’ll give it a try.”
That was all the hope I needed to get me fired up. I went down to the library and asked the librarian if they had a Barron’s guide to colleges. They didn’t. So I went to Mr. Bow’s office and asked him to buy me one. I told him I’d pay him back somehow, but for now I just needed the book.
The next day he brought one in. We pored over it. “Okay,” I said, “I want to go to a school with a writing program but I don’t have any writing. So let’s find a school, any school that has low standards, and I’ll offer them cash.”
We flipped through the pages and found a small school in New York. Graham Junior College. It was a two-year school with a focus on communication arts. Their motto was “Learn by Doing.” That sounded fine to me.
I sent away for an application. I had Mr. Casey mail my request from his house so the envelope would not be stamped with U.S. Dept. of Corrections, like all outbound prison mail. I used his address for the return. Soon, they responded. I filled out the application, and in my cover letter I made it extremely clear to them that I was not applying for financial aid—that I was a one-hundred-percent cash-paying student. I figured that would speak louder than my mediocre transcripts from Sunrise High School. I also told them that I would like to enroll as soon as possible—in the mid-year January semester. I spent days crafting my answers to a few short essay questions. My caseworker and I decided since the application didn’t ask about arrests or anything like that there was no point in bringing up the subject myself, as it would probably spoil my chances. Mr. Casey typed up the application, wrote a check for the application fee, and sent it back to them.