by Stephen Reid
Still, I wish there existed a meat cleaver I could simply hand to some sort of metaphysical butcher who could lop off the part of me that committed these crimes, and who could send that part off packing to the stoney lonesome. Then the rest of me — the other ninety-nine percent — the part that is a devoted father, a decent neighbour, a dedicated husband, and a caring, useful member of my community could go home.
But it doesn’t work that way, and even if it did, who would choose what to cut? A psychiatrist might want my brain for analysis, a tribunal of judges would chop off my hands, the police I shot at, would, for sure, be clamouring for my oysters. And what about the heart? The heart of a parent? That overly mortgaged muscle? Would they drive a stake through it and then return it to my family?
But no, none of this will happen: it’s all up on the block and it’s all going. In criminal law, and much of life, we are our behaviour. I’ve offended wholly and I will pay wholly. The nature of this offence calls for a life bid, or at least enough years to pass as a lifetime. I know from experience that the calendar days of those years will march over me like an army of ants, each taking a uniform bite and carrying it down into the dark. But sympathy is not what I am looking for, even from myself. I have earned my incarceration. I just wish it weren’t so.
From jump street I had told my lawyer to enter “an offer of accountability.” On November 29th we had what was termed a “mini-trial” in regards to “specific” intent to attempt murder. Three of the charges were dismissed, reduced to careless and criminal intent; one attempted murder stuck.
Sentencing is set for December 20th. The Crown is asking for twenty years, my lawyer will ask for fourteen years — my original “offer of accountability”. Neither option feels much like Merry Christmas.
This year my friend Patrick is putting up our tree; Tim is stringing the outside lights; Dano is buying my children’s gifts for me; Michael and Marilyn are walking my family through Butchart’s Gardens to see the Christmas lights. My mother-in-law isn’t making her annual batch of Nanaimo bars and is worried no one will finish up the yams at our family Christmas dinner. My older daughter wants to leave for Mexico or L.A. — just to be anywhere but here for the first Christmas. My younger daughter seems more hope-filled. She tells me on the phone, “It’ll get better, Dad, as more Christmases go by, but we’ll still go through phases, you know.” She is a wise young girl who has learned to separate what her dad has done from who her dad is, something even her dad has yet to learn. When she visits, which is every Monday night at six-thirty, I watch her through the plexiglass as she draws pictures on a pad the guard has given her. She draws me, or my pop cans, lifting her eyes only occasionally. I watch as she carries her art over to the visiting area supervisor, as a present, and I see a ten-year-old girl who will be walking up to receive her high school diploma before I’m eligible for parole. Yes, there will be a lot of phases. I ordered the book she is reading, Island of the Blue Dolphin, so we can have our own private book club. I watch her favourite TV shows — I, Too and Sabrina the Young Witch. She is filling a time capsule for me with stickers and art and letters. She wants to buy me Christmas presents and save them all up for me to open when I come home.
My older daughter, who will graduate from high school this year, is also under the legal visiting age and has to visit me with Susan or with her boyfriend. She puts her arm around her mother’s shoulder in court and holds her up in the hallways on particularly trying days. She answers the phone and fends off the media. She makes dinner when Susan visits me in the evenings, or takes her sister to a movie when Susan needs an empty house. I watch her support whoever needs it, including me. Charlotte seems the strongest of the four of us but the crime is, at seventeen she shouldn’t have to be.
During the last stage of my sentencing hearing, good friends and good neighbours got up on the witness stand: most swore on the Holy Book, and they all described a man they loved, a stranger to the events described during the trial stage of my hearing. That process was characterized by a National Post columnist as a eulogy. Everyone should be afforded the privilege I had to hear the love of friends before his funeral.
My wife was the last witness of the day, and in her trademark grace and humour she described the pain and the joy of our thirteen-year marriage, and I loved her all the harder.
Both children have insisted on appearing on my behalf. I reacted with an emphatic no — they’ve been through enough — but as in most things with children, a compromise was struck. They have each made a video.
All that is left of the sentencing hearing is to see these videos and listen to the testimony of BC’s chief forensic psychiatrist. I have read Dr. Lohrasbe’s report. He says I empathize and have understanding of the impact of my actions on the victims of my offence. He judges my remorse to be genuine. He’s right. He also expresses the opinion that an extended period of sexual interference from my childhood is a significant factor in my life-long battle with addiction. Whether or not he’s right, we both agree it’s not an excuse for criminal behaviour. But it may give me a handle, something to hold on to, a place to begin again in my quest to become whole. I am determined to go wherever I have to go, to take it as deep as it is deep, to do whatever it is I have to do to become whole, to never commit another offence, to never again get addicted. To become, finally and forever, the man my many friends and family described that day from the witness box.
My previous incarceration lasted fourteen and a half years. Most of my adult life has been spent in some of the toughest maximum security prisons here and in America. Many of those years were spent in solitary confinement. When I think back to those endless days of silence, lying there curled around that emptiness, it at least made sense then. It was designed that way: alone in a cell, separate from all that’s human, I was supposed to feel alone. But years after my release, a release I had worked so hard towards, changed so much to accomplish, standing in the middle of a room with my family, that emptiness would return. I felt so inhumanely alone, and it felt so unfair. Surrounded by the people I loved and who obviously loved me, the emptiness didn’t make sense anymore.
No human being lives in any state close to constant grace. I had moments when grace visited. It came unexpectedly, and remained ever so briefly. Sometimes, when I produced my life and inhabited it fully, like early in the morning, up witnessing the dawn and hearing the first bird clearing its throat, or over a candle-lit dinner watching Susan drink slowly, the legs of a red, red wine reflecting the flame between us: these times I would be in awe of the world.
These are the moments that as I learn once more to meditate and make prayer, I hope will return for a visit.
This morning, when the judge drops his gavel, my chin will probably be on my chest, and as I so often do when I stand alone and afraid, I will probably be rocking my body back and forth. But I hope that as his arithmetic reaches my ears I will be tilting forward, and thus follow through, begin a new fall, this time towards grace.
CELEBRATING MIDNIGHT 1999–2000
THE JUDGE GAVE ME EIGHTEEN CHRISTMASES. What could be worse than spending Christmas in a county jail? On Boxing Day they tossed my cell and seized the broken-off tip of an Xacto blade. It was beginning to look like New Year’s in the hole.
I considered protesting — that my “contraband”, the size of a microchip, would make an unworthy weapon, or that one of his officers had given it to me so I could cut my horoscope from a newspaper — but decided to hold my mud. After seven months on a regular unit with too many nineteen-year-old garden gnome thieves listening to Metallica and watching Judge Judy, the thought of a little solitary seemed too appealing to risk losing.
What to pack for the digger? Bruce Powe once addressed a Writers’ Union AGM, and one phrase had stuck with me: “the future of solitude is reading.” My future was a lock. I’d better pack the reading.
I knew they always allowed one book in the hole, the Bible, so I chose The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. King James, K
ingsolver, they’d never notice.
A battery of guards marched me down to Segregation — ten cells along a narrow hallway in the basement of the jail. My bed ran across the back of the cell — four inches of concrete topped with an inch thick vinyl mattress. I’ve slept on futons that were more comfortable.
I tapped on the wall, a three and one. A three and one back. Other wall, no answer. Morse code it wasn’t but I knew I had one friendly down here.
A few days later I was kicked back, two thirds into The Poisonwood Bible and smoking three a day, compliments of my friend next door. Kingsolver’s Bible was a providential choice, a story of such unbearable radiance, I rationed my daily pages. New Year’s Eve count was down to about four hours and I’d accepted being a quiet witness to the new millennium.
The door to Seg buzzed open and a spitting, yelling, kicking skinny little kid was dragged into our solitude. They wrestled him into a cell: a one-man riot, he pounded his door with his fists, screamed abuse, continually flushed his toilet, and pushed his cell alarm.
Shift change came at eleven, but the kid didn’t give up. Unless a prisoner is in danger of harming himself, most guards will ignore the abuse, write him up, and let fatigue take its course. The early shift guard was one of those, but the kid wasn’t jailwise enough to spot his replacement.
I opened my book and tried to return to the story of a white missionary, his wife, and four daughters trapped in a jungle of their own. But then the door to Seg buzzed open and the Cell Extraction team swept in. I couldn’t see them, but I didn’t need to — the army of the dark empire, in black padded uniforms, visored helmets, high boots and Plexiglas shields — like the casting call to a Star Wars flic.
“Throw out your weapons! Lay down on the floor and you won’t be hurt!”
What weapons? Spit out his tongue? The kid had a roll of toilet paper and a blanket in there.
The team charged in holding up shields and spraying mace. In the end the subdued youngster was carted out hog-tied, to an Observation cell. The hall became very quiet. The outside world would soon be celebrating midnight 2000.
I heard a tap on the wall, dropped to my belly and peered out under the door. My friend next door was using a tightly-rolled newspaper to manoeuvre a fresh-lit cigarette over to me — it was just out of reach. I tore off enough toilet paper to twist into a foot-long string, and tried to fish the cigarette into my cell. First flick, missed. Again, just about; third flick lucky. The string had looped a neat circle around the smouldering cigarette: I was the roping champion of Tobacco Rodeo!
As I began tugging gently, a pair of black boots planted themselves on both sides of that smoke. Pinched! A frozen moment, then one boot lifted and kicked the cigarette in under my door. The sound of footsteps fell away down the hall.
I sat on my little bed, hugging my knees, and took a long hard pull off that cigarette. Some backyard fireworks boomed in the distance and the light reflected in my cell. It was the best cigarette I’ve ever smoked, but, like solitude, there’s never enough. I flicked the butt into my toilet, tapped a three and one on the wall, and escaped to the Africa of Kingsolver’s imagination, where all human commerce is both cruel and tender.
And knowing that each day, even one spent in solitary confinement on the dawning of a new millennium, is not an unfortunate gift.
THE LAST JESUS I KNOW OF
I’M RIDING THE BENCH OPPOSITE A GUY who tells me he has a spider up his ass. In the other cage, by himself, is a delicately built native with Lola Falana bangs and 34 B-cup breasts poking out of a grey standard issue T-shirt. He/she has fresh gauze dressing wrapped around both wrists and has been talking non-stop dingbat since we scooped her from the infirmary. I hear motors engaging and a long meshed gate sliding open. The Corrections Services transfer van lurches forward and we enter the sally port of the Regional Psychiatric Centre.
Prison is about waiting. The guy with the spider up his ass does his quietly, chin resting in cupped hands, long hair falling like bad string over his face. But Raven — she insists on being referred to as a woman — waits for no man, dives right into her story. They just don’t get me. I’m no drag queen, I’m a transgender. A work-in-progress. Do you know how much money nip and tuck operations, botox treatment, silicon, and collagen injections cost? I do. And after all that they refuse to give me the surgical procedure. Then they go, “Oh Raven, why are you slashing up?” Like get a brain, dude!
Raven’s vagina monologues are starting to make my teeth hurt. I’m more interested in the guy opposite me. But before I can begin to coax it out of him — the story not the spider — the van pulls forward and parks in front of Admissions and Discharge.
Raven is taken out first. She minces and gingers to the amusement of her escorts. The rear doors open and I start to slide along the bench, my leg chains scraping the dimpled steel floor panels, but the waiting officer holds up one palm and motions the Spider Man forward. The doors slam shut again. I am left in the semi-darkness with no other story than my own.
At the age of fifty, I’m facing the front end of a fresh eighteenyear sentence.
In the dictionary escape is at best “a temporary relief from circumstances.” In trying to figure out how to pass the next eighteen years, I discovered the Intensive Therapy Violent Offender Program, a gruelling horror show in which sixteen of the most dangerous offenders are culled from seven regional prisons and forced to endure a year of masochistic and humiliating psychodynamic therapy. I volunteered.
I’m carrying a new bedroll and a whole lot of apprehension towards a two-storey cellblock, which from the air would look a lot like the Pentagon, only smaller, with one wing missing. This is the world of VHF radios, handcuffs, and fear, not the safest of therapeutic environments. I have pictures in my head of dungeons filled with men screaming or sobbing on their knees — somewhere between Jerry Springer and the Inquisition.
The door to the main dome area opens and the pitch of madness hits my ears. Once considered dangerous and unstable, the men here, who walk as if their arms have been stapled to their sides, have been chemically shackled. Everything that was violent, and all that was human, seems now absent in them. My escort urges me up the stairs where I’m to be housed separately, on the second floor, the Programs Wing.
Upstairs appears eerily quiet; the cell doors have been left hanging open as if there had been some sort of hurried evacuation. The door to the cleaner’s closet bangs wide and out pops a kid who looks more like he should be mowing his parents’ lawn than mopping a prison floor.
The youngster abandons his mop and morphs into an overeager one-man welcome wagon. His name is D, short for what I don’t ask, but when I offer my hand, his face turns crimson. His hand goes reluctantly into my grip, boney, and deformed in the shape of a lobster claw. He quickly tucks it back behind him in a habit as practised as it is tender.
D gives me the lowdown — the other guys that make up our group, I’m the last to arrive, my cell second from the end, anything I need just ask, and oh by the way, could I score him some tobacco from the commissary?
My cell is the same as the countless others I have inhabited over the years — bunk, desk, toilet, and a razor wire view. By the time I have the corners of my blanket tucked in I learn that D is doing a life minimum seven sentence behind a manslaughter conviction while he was still a juvenile. Hence his request — he’s asked me to boot for him because he isn’t old enough to buy cigarettes.
I know I will eventually have to acclimatize myself to this new-wave-new-age-crack criminal-television-talk-show mentality that encourages the outpouring of explicit and personal details at such breakneck speed. But who wants to hear about a wrecked childhood, a girlfriend’s fetishes, or a homicidal act from a person five minutes after you’ve learned he even exists on the same planet?
In D’s case it’s forgivable: he’s young, nervous, scared, and even though he hasn’t said it yet I know he’s seen me on the six o’clock news. I’m his idea of a major criminal; for him
making Number One on a Most Wanted list is analogous to winning on American Idol. The fact that I feel more busted than brazen won’t faze D much; like most young people he is more interested in his idea of a person than the human reality. I leave the tier to get his cigarettes.
Coming out of the commissary I catch sight of D going into the laundry room and give him the sign for the come-and-get-it. I don’t make it another fifty paces down the strip before I am confronted by a correctional officer wearing black leather gloves. His jaw juts out dramatically; I want to tell him that he shaves really, really well but instead I answer his question about what was in the bag I just handed off to the kid. Jack Foote — it’s on his tag — reminds me we are in a maximum security psychiatric facility and he’ll brook no bullcrap on his watch. He knows exactly who I am and says I won’t be getting any special treatment around here. Which really means I will be getting special treatment. His belt radio erupts into static, then a few bursts of a language only people in uniforms can understand. It’s for me — I’m wanted up in psych assessment for intake testing.
Upstairs in the program area, a middle-aged woman in a track suit ushers me through a doorway marked Assessment Clinic. I feel I have entered a scene in A Clockwork Orange. Christina, who is the programs clerk, places a blue file folder and three golf pencils on the table in front of me. She explains these tests will determine my risk factors, measure anger quotients, and help identify my crime cycles.
Most of the tests are short and I begin to rack them up. On a scale of one to five, one being Does Not Apply and five being That’s Me To The Nines, circle your choice to each of the following statements. (A) When I become angry I throw things. (B) I like to watch fires. Etcetera etcetera. Essentially they are asking you to admit you are a lunatic.