Cuz

by Danielle Allen

  Michael related the story in a letter: “I wish every day that I would’ve stayed in bed. But how could I when my stomach was telling me that she was cheating? I figured if I catch her cheating, then I could resolve the relationship right there and then. I didn’t have the will to say it was over, but surely if I caught her in the act cheating then it would make ending it more simple. I was wrong, Danielle, dead wrong. Needless to say me and the guy had an altercation. He called the police and now I’m here.”

  Michael went straight from the altercation to prison for a parole violation. This pushed back the date of his sentence completion by a full year, from June 2008 to June 2009. I wish I could describe how I felt when I got this news, but I just can’t.

  It was such a catastrophic defeat that after Michael’s death, my memory obliterated all traces of his return to prison. I guess I sent him a few packages and must have written a couple of letters because I have his. But I was in a bad state before the news came—my marriage to Bob was coming apart. The intersecting professional and personal demands on each of us were beyond what we could handle together. And I simply have no memory of Michael’s second phase in prison, perhaps because of the torturous fighting as we moved toward separation, perhaps because of the magnitude of the defeat.

  For years after Michael died, I told people that my cousin went to prison when he was fifteen, got out when he was twenty-six, and died one year later. A permanent amnesia seems to have erased the time from his second trip to prison to the end of his life. It was only when I came across an August 2007 email from Karen with a prison address for Michael that I realized—and it wouldn’t be correct to say “remembered”—that he’d gone back. There is a seed of truth in this trick of my memory. Other than just superficially, I was not there for Michael’s last two years, one back in prison and that final year, still on parole, until, in his final three weeks alive, he was, officially at least, free at last. The disappearance of this stretch of time and what I presume was also my disappearance on Michael are probably the most painful and shameful things I have to admit.

  Now able to correct the distortions brought on by my shame, though, I can confirm that the barebones facts of my cousin’s biography are these. He was born on November 30, 1979, when Barbara Streisand’s “No More Tears” was the country’s number-one song. On September 18, 1995, at fifteen, two weeks before O. J. Simpson was acquitted for the murder of his wife, Michael was arrested for the first time for an attempted carjacking. On June 10, 1996, five days after the first birthday of the niece who, like me, would grow up to be a track star, he was sentenced to twelve years and eight months in prison. In November 1996, on his seventeenth birthday, he was transferred to adult prison. He got out of prison in June of 2006 when he was twenty-six, just before the Great North American Heatwave killed over 200 people. He went back in in June of 2007 when he was twenty-seven, got out again in 2008 when he was twenty-eight, and was finally clear of all supervision in June 2009. Less than a month later on July 18, 2009, at the age of twenty-nine, he died.

  One of so many millions gone.

  11.

  THE END, August 2008–July 2009

  The light went out of Michael’s eyes during his second stint in prison. Inmates get to take formal pictures, rather like the annual pictures kids take in school. They also get to take pictures with their visitors.

  We have a whole series of pictures of Michael growing up in prison. I see the Michael I always knew in all of them up until the last image, which was snapped during his second imprisonment.

  In those early pictures, it’s his smile, easy and giving; partly, it’s also a certain openness in his eyes. These qualities make him recognizable, at least to me, in all the earlier photos. Both those things are gone in the last picture.

  The smile and the eyes withhold.

  When Michael finally did get out the second time, during those final heady months of Barack Obama’s history-shattering first presidential campaign and months before the market crash that would consume a distant world of elites, he returned to what we hoped would be the comfort of his mother’s house. In a matter of weeks, though, she would need heart surgery, and this would consume them both. For several months, while the world seemed to hang from a precipice, Karen’s ever-devoted son nursed her back to health, but as the fall progressed, he spent less and less time with her. He would still come round—orderly style—to check that she had what she needed, that she had taken her medications, and that she was comfortable. But he had begun to live with Bree.

  MICHAEL ALLEN, IN CENTRAL JUVENILE, WITH MOTHER, KAREN ALLEN, AUTUMN 1995

  MICHAEL ALLEN IN CALIFORNIA REHABILATATION CENTER–NORCO, DATE UNCERTAIN

  MICHAEL ALLEN IN CALIFORNIA REHABILITATION CENTER–NORCO, DATE UNCERTAIN

  MICHAEL AND KAREN ALLEN, VISITING DAY IN CALIFORNIA REHABILITATION CENTER–NORCO, 2004

  MICHAEL ALLEN, DURING SECOND PHASE IN PRISON, 2007–2008

  In the months before Michael’s parole violation, Karen and Bree had developed a strong mutual dislike, fighting a subterranean battle. Now, with Michael out again, Bree sought a formal treaty. She called Karen to say that Michael would be living with her and that she didn’t want conflict.

  This was understandably hard for Karen. The relationship between the two ex-convicts was violent. Bree, too, had been in prison, for attempted murder, as Karen understood it, and Karen’s protective motherly instincts were on red alert. She never saw her son get physical with anyone except once when she saw Michael fight with Bree on her tidy front lawn. Bree had been going down the street breaking the windows on people’s cars and throwing things at the walls of Karen’s house. Michael had gone outside to warn her never to come round again. The two started to fight. Through a window, Karen saw Michael knock Bree out. Startled, she rushed out to bring a halt to things.

  The trouble was hardly confined to this one altercation. The only time Karen or Roslyn ever saw Michael drunk was during this period after the second time he got out. He had recently reconnected with Devonn, the friend who thirteen years earlier had been his partner in the attempted carjacking. Michael came home with him one night from a party where people had been serving him Pink Panties (ice cream mixed with vodka, pink lemonade, and ice, then put in a blender to make it like a shake). They’re also called “Creepers” because the alcohol sneaks up on you. Weeping, Michael could barely stand and was screaming, crying hysterically first to his mother, and then to Pastor Rinehart on the phone, that he wanted nothing more than to get away from Bree but also couldn’t stay away. The words of another ancient poet, Catullus this time, might have been his own: “I hate and I love. Why I do so, perhaps you ask? I know not, but I feel it, and I am in torment.”

  In October, Roslyn helped him get a job at a television studio where she worked nights transcribing the recordings of sitcoms that had been taped during the day. Imagine a room full of people clacking out our prefab dreams. Michael began sleeping with a friend of his sister’s who worked there. When Bree found out, she began harassing her rival with obsessive phone calls that escalated into threats. In November, just as Barack Obama broke the patterns of American history, Michael quit the job.

  That same month, Michael, for the first time, broke a promise to his sister, or seemed to have done so. She had communicated with him by text, asking him to help her move. He had promised to be there, but he never showed. With Michael, this sort of unreliability had been unheard of. Eventually, Roslyn learned that he had never gotten her messages. Bree was stealing his phone and responding to his texts, pretending to be Michael, to cut him off from his other worlds—his family, his other romantic relationships.

  Every six months, Michael went to get his blood checked. He had at some point become HIV positive. Karen and I didn’t know about this. Only Roslyn knew. She believes he told the four women he slept with of this fact. After his death, his mother put out word that she was ready to acknowledge any children he may have had and contribute to their support, but
no one came forward to claim such a relationship. This is all we know about the tangled weave of his relationships.

  By December, when much of the rest of the country was hoping that Barack Obama would be able to steer the country away from the cliff, Michael’s world fully contracted. It was then, living at Bree’s house, that he became Big Mike, driving her Mercedes or her second set of wheels, a green Subaru truck. That winter, he revealed to Roslyn a gun, hidden wrapped in a towel, in the Mercedes. By spring, he was running drugs, including at least one trip to Texas. Records reveal that on May 15, 2009, he got a speeding ticket in border country—Arizona, Pima County. Later, the detectives investigating his murder found marijuana and PCP in his room. It’s still so hard for me to put the pieces together, but during this time Bree and Michael also appear to have attempted to rob a gas station. Nor was that the whole of the trouble. Something else, unnameable, seems also to have happened in that period.

  Bree and Michael had their big fight on Karen’s front lawn, the one where he knocked her out, that same May. Maybe the argument had something to do with the trip through Pima County. It’s impossible to say. That night when Bree began smashing car windows, Karen wanted to call the police, but Michael urged her not to, saying, that if the police came they would put him away for a very, very long time because “he had hurt two people real bad.” Then, as Michael and Bree thrashed outside, Karen heard Bree threatening to call the police on Michael. Michael responded that since she had been there too, she would just get herself in trouble if she did.

  Karen also heard Michael say, “Go on, then. Tell your cousin to call a hit on me,” the most glaring piece of evidence that he was now fully ensconced in a world of hit men, where people kill on orders.

  Starting from that night, Karen added to her prayers, her constant talks with God, the hope that the Lord would liberate Michael from his misery. “I just wanted Michael out of his conflict,” she recalls. Later, for all the pain of losing her beautiful baby boy, Karen also found some kind of peace in it. Death, she believes, had become his only possible release.

  The theologian Augustine captured her experience, I think, more than a millennium ago. “It is true, then, that the life of mortals is afflicted, sometimes more gently, sometimes more harshly, by the death of those most dear to us. And yet we should prefer to hear, or even to witness, the death of those we love, than to become aware that they have died in their very soul. The earth is full of this vast mass of evils; that is why we find in Scripture, ‘Is man’s life on earth anything but temptation?’ And why the Lord himself says, ‘Alas for the world, because of these obstacles.’”

  While I was consumed by travel and lecturing, and a new job in New Jersey, Karen and Roslyn were the only people by Michael’s side, intuiting just how bad things had gotten. Karen’s prayers for a release for her son acknowledged a truth. Roslyn’s final Monday dream that someone came to tell her Michael had died also emerged from that unguarded quadrant of her soul that already understood the trajectory of her brother’s life. Yet mother and daughter tended to these chilling intuitions separately.

  Even with one another, they did not share the small, still voices that spoke from their hearts. Those of us who were further away had no idea. Even when we came together, we could not see. We could not apprehend the demons chasing Michael as he greeted our wedding guests at the door to the chapel.

  Just shy of a month past that glorious champagne-filled June wedding day, when Jim and I set out on a new life together, the police picked up Bree for petty theft and a prior record. Two weeks later, although she was already in prison, they issued an arrest warrant for her for Michael’s killing and charged her with murder with malice aforethought. She had shot Michael in her kitchen.

  There had been one witness. A middle school age boy. He’d heard, not seen, the events. But there were voices, a hit, and gun shots. With the help of relatives, Bree cleaned Michael up nicely, even prettifying him. She then bundled him in a blanket, put him in his little hatchback, and drove him to the street-corner where he was found. Three accessories—all members of Bree’s family—were also charged.

  Bree pled not guilty.

  To prove its case, the prosecution prepared, among other things, to introduce a pattern of acts of violence perpetrated by Bree. As the transcript of the proceedings reports:

  People intend to introduce evidence of a 2003 assault with a firearm by Ms Brent. In that case, Ms Brent allegedly shot at a man who was at a bus stop with her. The man was laughing and mocking her because he believed she was a man. The people allege that that uncharged crime is material to the issue of motive in this case.

  The public defender prepared a defense. Again, the record reports:

  Ms. Brent was in a dating relationship with the deceased for many years, prior to this incident. The two had a turbulent relationship in which Mr. Allen would hurt, threaten, assault and stalk Ms. Brent. The relationship unfortunately came to an end on the date of this incident. This case is in no way similar or related to the facts in the prior bad act and therefore that act is irrelevant and immaterial to the facts necessary to prove motive in this case.

  A year and a half into the case, with a jury empaneled, Bree took a deal and pled nolo contendere (“no contest”) to voluntary manslaughter. Under the name Isaiah Brent, she was sentenced to twenty-two years of incarceration, but, this time, since she’d by now undergone gender reassignment surgery, Bree was sent to a women’s prison.

  Michael and Bree had first met when they were both inmates at the Correctional Rehabilitation Center–Norco, a men’s prison, where they had become lovers. A summer baby, Bree was little over two years older than Michael. She was just his height and just his weight. As Karen understood it, Bree was in prison for attempting to kill a boyfriend. As far as the public record reveals, she’d been convicted as Isaiah for assault with a firearm and for threatening injury with the potential to result in death. When she entered Michael’s prison at twenty-five, she was a cross-dressing transgender woman still early in the process of transitioning. After she got out, and before Michael came home, she had gender reassignment surgery.

  When that gold Mercedes cruised Michael’s homecoming back in 2006, it was Bree in her chariot coming for to carry Michael home. We all had thought the relationship ended when Bree left prison a year ahead of Michael, and we believed that Michael’s home was with us. What Michael himself thought or wanted that homecoming day, I will never know.

  He hadn’t invited Bree to the picnic. Yet she came and would stay.

  When Michael contemplated renting that tidy little studio apartment on Ethel Avenue, with its white fence and pearly roses, it was voluptuous Bree in her tight clothes and gold Mercedes whom he was visualizing having to introduce to those kindly landladies. How would it have gone if he had taken this “associate” home with him?

  When he spent that twenty-four hours dithering over whether to rent the Ethel Avenue apartment, his real question was whether to repudiate the first and only love of his life.

  Would he choose Bree?

  He did.

  And as the poet says, his “arrow flew, as if of itself,” from his bow.

  Michael had made his life’s defining choice.

  II

  INFERNO

  “Rehabilitation is pretty much out of favor as a concept for juvenile offenders. Now the theory is that they’ll learn if you lock them up for long enough. There are obvious problems with that. The criminal justice system has no resources to rehabilitate anyone. But all the existing theories have flaws. When it comes to juvenile crime, frankly nobody in the country and nobody in the world has the answer.”

  —AN EXPERT, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1995, “New Wave of Mayhem; Juveniles Are Increasingly Committing Violent Crimes—and Experts Don’t Know Why or How Best to Stop Them”

  12.

  CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

  Where were you when you were fifteen? Close your eyes and try to recall. I lived in
a bedroom with a brass bed, with a blue-and-white-striped Laura Ashley comforter. There were matching valences on my windows, and I had a wooden rolltop desk, with a drawer that locked and held my secrets, including dirty letters that I couldn’t at the time translate from a German boy who’d been the object of a minor summer music camp romance. I was awkward and insecure, confused about how to find my place in life. Often I was lonely. All of this was true despite the fact that I was hurtling into my junior year of high school as captain of my varsity track team.

  I was younger than most of my classmates at Claremont High School, and my friends all had their driver’s licenses by the start of our junior year. I was not, however, allowed to ride in their cars. The only time I ever got grounded in high school was when my librarian mother caught me sneaking a ride with a friend to get to my French class at the local college. I grew up in a college town, a faculty brat, where everyone knew my mom and dad. My parents had made a critical decision early in the lives of my younger brother Marc and me that, regardless of what career opportunities came my father’s way, they would not move until we had graduated from high school. I grew up in one place, where everyone knew me. I couldn’t even get away with sneaking to my college courses.

  Which of us does not remember what life was like at fifteen? The torments of adolescence leave indelible marks.

  Eight years after I got grounded for sneaking to class in that friend’s car, my fifteen-year-old cousin, Michael Alexander Allen, who also didn’t yet have a driver’s license, was arrested, for the first time, for an attempted carjacking. A few months later, after he turned sixteen, he sat in Torrance, California, in court, the standard kind with the swinging gates just inside the doors of the courtroom, hands cuffed there and in an orange suit, in December 1995 and January 1996, as a judge determined that he would be charged as an adult.