I’m convinced that Michael became the man he believed he could be when he was on the line, the lead shovel, slowing down a fire’s path. The heat and screaming crackle of fire brought focus, too, to his academic efforts. In his college course during this period, he also became the man he believed he could be and finally completed a course. The outdoor time helped concentrate the indoor time.
In the year of the Fire Siege, Michael found the secret to his well-being: fires, books, and love. He was one of the lucky ones. Not yet among the millions lost, he had, if fleetingly, found himself.
YET MICHAEL’S PLEASURES ON sweaty days of training and hot and smoky days of firefighting weren’t altogether pure.
In the years since his death, I’ve discovered many things about Michael that I didn’t know. Some are harder to take than others. Here’s one of the toughest. Sometime in this period, Michael the valiant firefighter also began ferrying drugs into prison in his anus. Perhaps that’s why the $1-per-day wage didn’t bother him.
Other things, too, mean that this period of light also held darkness. In May 2004, unrest in the prison culminated in the death of an inmate and an especially long lockdown. Michael never told me about this death and lockdown; I learned about it from inmate family chat sites. On the whole, he kept such darkness to himself.
This pattern of reserve broke a year after the Pass Fire when Michael had some sort of personal crisis—I imagine having to do with Bree. One of the features of communicating with an inmate is that the conversation—whether on the phone, visiting, or in writing—is never fulsome. All talk is recorded or under surveillance; letters are opened and invariably reviewed. Consequently, much goes unsaid or only obliquely expressed, as if in code. This is why I can only imagine what the cause might have been of the single most despairing letter I ever got from him. In a missive dated to October 2004, the darkness, whatever its source, broke through:
I’m tired and worn out. Everything is becoming more harder to deal with. I’m not writing this seeking comfort but I’m not sure why I’m writing this. . . . Danielle, I’m holding on for dear life and it seems like I’m losing grips on everything. I cry uncontrollably at night. There are few good days and moments that are painful seem to last forever. I stay up late to avoid reflection when I lay down. I do as much as possible during the day to tire myself out so I can sleep through the night. I’ll finish this some other time. Love always, Michael.
This, I think, was lovelorn Michael. None of Michael’s family or friends ever knew him to use drugs. He didn’t receive any medical attention during this period, so he wasn’t ill. Something had gone awry, I believe, with the first love of his life. But because so much was communicated obliquely in all of our conversations and our correspondence, I can only speculate. This letter makes clear, though, that the darkness could be deep. Against this backdrop, the light of the year of the Fire Siege shines out all the brighter.
As I have assembled the fragmentary shards of what my family members know about Michael’s prison time, the most powerful thing to have jumped out is the surprising discovery that he can indeed be said to have had one very good year.
The year of the Fire Siege was the high point of Michael’s life.
His letters, his essays, his fire memoir, all seem to sing, to proclaim a yearlong chorus of hosannas. This was the period when—hot off his Inferno essay, on the cusp of learning what it is to fight fire—he wrote, “Several years ago all I could see was a hill of years to climb. I’ve made it up top and now I’m running down.”
Only in that year could he write, “Time is flying by so fast I can hardly keep up with the days.”
III
UNFORGIVING
WORLD
Some say the world
will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
—ROBERT FROST
21.
FIRE AND ICE
Bree came from a world where cousins, or at least one of her cousins, could call hits. Yet Michael loved Bree permanently. Their love was, as he would say, “Love always.” This love anchored him to the world of these other cousins, and their guns and drugs. When asked to choose, he affirmed his love of Bree.
This is why he died.
Why did Michael love Bree? He loved her because she was the most beautiful woman he had seen as he came of age with heterosexual desires inside an all-male prison. Who knows when Michael was first sodomized. Probably it was when he was first transferred to adult prison in Susanville and, in Centinela the older inmates, the lifers, as he put it, “took care of him.” But Michael and Bree were age mates. Out of all the men in prison she could have had, she chose him. His family loved him, and he loved his family, because he was born to them. He and Bree chose one another in a world with little room for choice, a gift to one another of surpassing value.
But why was Michael in prison long enough to meet and fall in love so inextricably with someone who, in the end, was plainly bad for him? Why did he have to pass from boy to man, an odyssey of eleven years, behind bars?
By the time Michael, as a teenager, was punished in 1995, California legislators had given up on rehabilitation in prison. They had given up on rehabilitation even for juveniles. Critics of the penal system say that all the time. Here is what they don’t say. Legislators had also given up on retribution, the idea that the punishment should fit the crime. Retribution actually puts a limit on how much punishment you can impose. The California Assembly members who voted unanimously to try as adults sixteen-year-olds, and then fourteen-year-olds, for carjacking had all become deterrence theorists. They were designing sentences not for people but for a thing: the aggregate level of crime. They wanted to reduce the totality of crime; they didn’t have any interest in justice for any individual person, whether victim or perpetrator. The target of Michael’s sentence was not Michael, a fifteen-year-old boy with a bright mind and a mild proclivity, as we shall see, for theft, but the 2,663 carjackings that occurred in Los Angeles between January and August of 1993. I don’t know how high that number was by the time Michael stood before the judge in the spring of 1995, but Michael stood in, in essence, for all of those jackings, just as did every other defendant who passed before the bench. Deterrence dehumanizes. It directs at the individual the full hate that society understandably bears toward an aggregate phenomenon. But no individual can or should bear that kind of responsibility. Such an approach to punishment is unconscionable. The concept of “just deserts” is meant to protect people from excess.
Since antiquity, mankind has known that anger drives retribution, the desire to make someone pay. When punishment fits the crime, anger sates itself; it modulates; it softens. This is what makes it anger, not hatred, a distinction recognized by philosophers all the way back in antiquity. Hatred is distinguished by its unending quality, its rigid fixity and imperviousness to softening. A proposed punishment for a fifteen-year-old of twenty-five years to life for a first arrest after a freely confessed week’s crime spree and failed carjacking in all of which that fifteen-year-old was the only person physically injured is one of the purest expressions of hatred I can imagine. The economists Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz sing the praises of an American educational system that generated opportunity in this country for two centuries because it was a “forgiving or second-chance” system. But our world is forgiving no longer. Michael was in prison for eleven years from adolescent bloom to full manhood, long enough to form a life-altering bond to a fellow inmate, because we have built an unforgiving world.
So we lost my baby cousin when he was twenty-nine. Why, cuz? Cuz of fire; cuz of ice. In his poem, “Fire and Ice,” Robert Frost condenses the whole of Dante’s Inferno into nine lines.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for dest
ruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Society’s hatred of rising violence served up a disproportionate sentence for Michael. His own desire for Bree tethered him to a violent world. Ice and fire. Fire and ice. Both brought him to his destruction.
Yet the why’s don’t end there, nor do the reasons. The deepest question remains. How exactly did fifteen-year-old Michael come to be holding a gun in a Southern California carport on a foggy Sunday morning in September 1995 intending to separate a man from his possessions? Was it fire? Or was it ice?
22.
THE SINGLE MOTHER AND
THE GREAT WHITE WHALE
Michael Alexander Allen was born on November 30, 1979, sole survivor of a twin conception, to a twenty-three-year old single mother who lived with her sister, Roslyn, and her sister’s lover, Brenda. Two older siblings also welcomed him into the world.
Michael had such a huge head when he was born that the doctor thought there was water on his brain. But he came out smiling and laughing and so was introduced to the family as the baby with personality and charisma. This was a baby we all wanted to cuddle.
His mother, Karen, hadn’t been a single mother for long. Just the previous summer, she had left the father of her three children, whom she had met the summer after her junior year in high school in Fernandina Beach, Florida, where she was born, a little fishing village on Amelia Island, the southernmost of the Sea Islands running along the Atlantic Coast. Karen was the baby daughter of a fishing boat captain and his second wife, a midwife and informal community nurse. Karen was twelfth in a big brood; seventh to this mother. During the decade of the 1950s, African Americans entered the professional workforce in dramatic numbers. The number of black nurses in the country doubled from 3,500 to nearly 7,000. Karen’s mother didn’t have a degree, but she was among those serving her community as a nurse. This was a family with grit.
NEWBORN
Karen fell in love the summer after her junior year in high school. Paul Johnson was the lucky man, a construction worker, who was working on all the new condominiums springing up that would transform Amelia Island into a posh resort. He popped diet pills and took speed, and, to Karen, represented money, fancy cars, and drugs. She herself drank a little and smoked weed. Although cocaine was flowing into Florida in the 1970s, PCP was as fancy as it got with Paul. He was also married.
During Karen’s freshman year in college, in 1975, she dropped out at the start of the spring semester, started working at a bus station and later a nursing home. Then she moved in with Paul. Their first child, Nicholas, was born in November. Karen didn’t drink or smoke while she was pregnant because smoking made her feel nauseous. That was how she always first realized that she was pregnant, the fact that the weed made her feel sick. In November 1977, Paul and Karen’s second child, a daughter, Roslyn, was born, a quiet personality like her older brother who would grow up to be as big-hearted as her mother.
By the time that Karen was again pregnant, things had turned hard with Paul. He had consistently told her that he and his wife were divorcing but this never happened. Then, Karen learned that Paul and his so-called wife weren’t married after all. There had never been any legal impediment to their marrying, if Paul had only wanted to. This startled Karen into self-awareness. School was also deepening her self-confidence. Following in the footsteps of her mother, she was even preparing to start nursing school. Her sister Roslyn had promised to pay for it. Karen had a desire for education, and with Paul she also began “requesting and moving with more freedom.” The result was that “his jealousy just became incredible.”
Paul became “abusive, surprisingly”—surprisingly physically abusive. He accused her of infidelity, charging that this third pregnancy, this being Michael, was not his child. He pinched baby Roslyn. He beat Karen. “The first time he beat me, my face was unrecognizable. I tried to go to work,” Karen recalls, but her coworkers sent her home. On one occasion when Paul went after Roslyn, Karen got a knife. “That moment I found some strength within me and I said this is not going to keep going. I wanted to fight.” Paul tried to choke her. Somehow they resolved that altercation without injury, and thereafter they managed to avoid such severe physical fights, but the conflict didn’t stop. Karen began to express herself more vocally but also to play little tricks on him.
“I would bake sweet potato pies and I wouldn’t eat it, and he was thinking I was trying to poison him. That’s the kind of stuff I did.” There was a voice that was waking up inside her.
In her second trimester with Michael, Karen flew to Southern California to visit siblings who in the late 1960s and early 1970s had moved there, like so many other African Americans seeking opportunity outside the Deep South. This visit permitted an opportunity for conversation, especially with her sister and her sister’s girlfriend, and conversation brought clarity. She settled her mind on moving away from Paul and to Los Angeles. During her visit, she started to organize welfare, medical benefits, and food stamps. Returning to Florida, she packed impractically—books, tennis rackets, and dishes—and left, taking Nicholas and Roslyn. She says that if the violence hadn’t been there with Paul, she would be there still, living with Paul in tropical coastal Florida. She was committed to the idea of family. But instead Nestor Avenue in Carson, California, Big Roslyn’s house, was home when Michael was born.
23.
FIRST STEPS
Michael’s aunt, Big Ros, who gave him his first home, wanted to make sure that her little sister, Karen, would get up on her own two feet. From the get-go, she told Karen she wouldn’t be able to stay; she shouldn’t get comfortable. Two months into the Iran hostage crisis, a month after Michael’s birth, and just after Christmas, Big Ros made good on her promise to evict the family and sent them packing to live with another sibling, their brother Daniel. The plan was for Karen to stay there until she found a job.
The 1979 oil crisis had sent the economy shuddering into a recession with interminably long lines at gas stations. Although African American unemployment would soon reach historical highs, within a month Karen found a job as a certified nursing assistant. In following in the footsteps of her mother, a nurse, she had lucked into work in one of the few growth areas of the economy, service jobs in the health industry. This would permit her to inch her way forward in the years to come.
FIRST STEPS
But good fortune was cut with bad. This country girl from northern Florida with the overbite and sweet smile could not possibly have guessed back then in 1979 that another service industry was growing just as fast as her own. She could not have guessed that Los Angeles was poised to become the largest urban market within the world’s largest market for illegal narcotics. The United States is and has for some time been the world’s single biggest importer of illegal drugs. Our shifting tastes for heroin, marijuana, and cocaine make and break fortunes the world over. Hardly a late-twentieth-century development, this has been true since 1933 when the first Prohibition, against alcohol, ended, and the Mafia found a substitute product in heroin.
It needs to be known that La Cosa Nostra built its heroin business first in New York, in Harlem. The black community there was, sadly, an easy mark. Proximate to La Cosa Nostra’s own East Harlem neighborhood, Harlem in the post-Depression 1940s was full of people on the skids ripe for recruitment into addiction. There were small-scale black criminal groups, though nothing like the Mafia’s own level of organized crime. But these groups were ready to pick up street-level distribution. The powers-that-be, whether in police or politics, were unlikely to be too troubled by the further degradation of the African American community. An East Harlem Italian mob neighborhood became the epicenter for distribution, and by the end of the 1940s, addiction had already become entrenched in Harlem’s African American community. Bellevue Hospital in New York saw six youth admitted for heroin in 1950, then seventy-four in the first sixth months of 1951. Fifty-two of these were black.
The powers-that-be, as i
t were, got bothered only later, especially when drug use spread to the troops in Vietnam. Everyone noticed when Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs in 1971, and the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws criminalized not only trafficking but also possession, and outlawed not only heroin and cocaine but also marijuana. What few people could have known in 1979, when Karen decided to venture west to Los Angeles, was that one of Nixon’s first moves, that of shutting down the Mafia’s French Connection, had the effect of busting the American narcotics market wide open, which afforded opportunity for entry to traffickers from Colombia, Mexico, and Southeast Asia. Globalization was about to arrive, destination, Los Angeles.
As Barbara Streisand crooned “No More Tears,” and people played and replayed Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” there was simply no way for Karen to know that a plague of violence was about to break out throughout the Southland. The country girl from northern Florida, still so unvarnished, saw only opportunity in the City of Angels.
24.
“SIS, RUN!”
When Karen got her first certified nursing assistant job, she moved her young family to Normandie and 104th near Southwest Community College in Watts, a small quadrant of that Los Angeles neighborhood that, in fact, had had no looting, arson, or damage during the Watts riots fifteen years earlier. Michael was too young to remember the difficulty of his family’s first sojourn in a home of their own, as his mother woke him and his older brother and sister at 4 A.M. so that they could head to the babysitter on an exhaust-belching city bus, before Karen turned around and headed to a workplace that she didn’t reach until 7:15 A.M. To help South Los Angeles, bus fares had been reduced to 50 cents for three years, and Michael and his family joined waves of Angelenos who helped public transit in Los Angeles reach its modern peak in ridership.
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