God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  The Social Security office was in a squat building with a shiny entry room, and there Littell confronted a machine that dispensed numbers to waiting customers. His mouth was in full disgust, full hatred, as he stared at the red plastic case. The numbered slip poked outward like a kid’s tongue. If he’d seen anything like this in the Lake Charles of his childhood he couldn’t remember it. He knew only what the sign said: PLEASE TAKE A NUMBER AND … Was there a button to press? Was he supposed to wait until someone did something, until the machine was activated? He didn’t want to break anything. He didn’t want any trouble with the security guard watching him from the back. He didn’t want anything to hurt his chances of qualifying for a card right away, or at all. Besides the guard, an Arab family and two reedy, disheveled women watched the drama.

  “Just pull,” I said discreetly.

  He did, barely stroking the paper.

  “You have to pull.”

  It didn’t tear.

  “Let me get it,” I said. “For my small part in your official identification process.”

  As we waited for him to be called, he read through a sheet of instructions. He read with his finger. It wasn’t a belabored, word-byword sort of reading, but there was his forefinger sliding steadily across each line.

  His turn came. He went to the window, sat across from the clerk, a dwarfish blond woman whose head scarcely rose above the counter between them. She wore a formal blue dress with great puffy short sleeves. From the breast pocket of his shirt Littell took his proof of existence: three Angola I.D. cards, his most recent and two from years ago, and his Marine discharge papers. He removed the rubber band that bound them all together. The papers were torn at every fold, ready to disintegrate.

  “I just got out of prison,” he confessed when she reached for his credentials.

  She didn’t react. Her elaborate sleeves stretching up to the counter, she spread what he gave her and glanced over it. “Well,” she said without irony, without aversion, in a tone of beautiful indifference, “you definitely have enough identification.” And with that, though she did no more than pass him along to another clerk at the computers, the midget in the bridesmaid’s dress became, for Littell, that day’s figure of grace.

  We celebrated at a Chinese restaurant. From our booth he gazed in all directions at the ornate black-and-gold wallpaper, another wonderment. We talked more of Camp J, mostly because I couldn’t imagine the person across from me, eating his spring roll delicately, fearful of mishap, with his knife and fork, existing for years in a cement cell so narrow he could stand in the middle and touch both walls, existing for years seeing only two or three hours of daylight each week, existing for years with the knowledge that he could make only one phone call per month, a virtual end to the possibility of crying out to someone who might listen, an end that seemed no less terrifying because he already had no one to call, existing for parts of those years eating the food loaf with his hands and for parts denied all clothes except a paper gown and for parts spreading water on the floor and sleeping in the puddle to lessen the heat and for parts not having a mattress anyway, it too having been confiscated as punishment. I could not put this human being together with that life, and I could not, here in the Chinese restaurant in a strip mall in Baton Rouge, connect him with the things he had done to receive those extra sanctions. When I imagined myself locked in at J, the bars closing and the guard walking away down the tier and the nightmare of being buried alive turned real, my chest constricted—I didn’t think I’d be able to breathe.

  “I just don’t think I could make it,” I said, a lie, because of course I knew that despite the shrinking of my lungs I would take that first breath, and that having done so I would take another, because the only alternative was not breathing, and chances were I wouldn’t kill myself, wouldn’t cut my wrists with a sliver of blade cracked from a disposable razor or devise and carry out some method of hanging myself with the bedsheet; chances were I would go on just as I had after the judge sentenced me to life without parole, an idea that had once, before my first trip to Angola, put me into that breath-narrowing, thigh-weakening dread, made me think I would rather die. We live for whatever it is possible to live for—that was the only sure lesson I ever drew from my year, and since it’s no lesson at all, I don’t mind making the revelation here, well before the end.

  But in Littell’s reply there was something beyond this basic human resilience. There was something particularly his. There was an impregnable strength built by sheer will. “The first time I went to the detention center, when I was twelve, they shut me in a cell, in solitary. And when they slammed that metal door, I wanted to run at it. I wanted to ram my head against it. But I caught myself. Even at that age I knew I just couldn’t let myself go crazy. I didn’t even let myself scream. It was the same at Angola. If I let myself have that feeling of suffocating, I knew I wouldn’t never get through.”

  He chewed a small section of spring roll and sipped his tea.

  “And maybe one day out of the year, something nice might happen. I’m not talking about getting a new dude paying draft for protection, or a new shim for coming out of my cuffs in the bullpen-that was the game. That was regular. That’s what they call it, ‘He’s in the game.’ I’m talking about one time a few years ago I was in the blocks, not at J but over at Camp C, and this music, this guitar, starts flowing through the walls. It was that Jimi Hendrix song ‘Wind Cries Mary.’ It was that beginning, doon doon drooon. It was that sadness. I guess the music room at C was somewhere near those cells. ’Cause I could just hear that electric guitar. It was beautiful. And later I found out it was this dude named Myron Hodges. He was in my dorm one time. I never knew him. You can sleep two beds across from a dude at Angola and never speak. Not hello. But Myron was kind of famous. He was in the prison band. They used to travel all over the state. And he was a monster on that ax. Do you know those notes? Doon doon drooon. Man, I was so grateful for that. I wanted to thank him later.”

  The fortune cookies were set between us on the black plastic tray. I didn’t want mine. Littell opened both. The first slip read, “You will pursue higher education, whether in academic or spiritual form.” The second was one-in-a-thousand, a fortune cookie mistake—no paper inside at all.

  “Do you see this, Dan?” he asked, as we walked toward the car. “Yours didn’t have nothing in it. It could have been mine. But it wasn’t. I’m keeping this. ‘You will pursue higher education.’”

  He asked if he could drive.

  “Have you driven since you’ve been out?”

  “Nineteen eighty-two,” he said.

  “In the parking lot.”

  He sat behind the wheel, held it with hands at 10 and 2, and only then, after he had that feel, shifted into drive. He made a few 10 M.P.H. circles around an empty section of the strip-mall lot. I waited for him to ask if he could venture onto the road; I waited for him to go without asking.

  He stopped, pushed the stick into park.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “You’re getting too nervous.” He smiled again, as he had before the church youth group. “And that’s all the driving I need for right now.”

  At the end of his fifth week at O’Brien, Littell told his life story to the residents. This was part of the program, a scheduled date. While the cigarette-lighter woman ran the flame along her forearm, and while Littell sat expressionless in his new turtleneck, Miss Katherine opened the meeting with a psalm read from her Life Recovery Bible.

  O give thanks to the Lord

  Sing to him; yes, sing his praises

  And tell of his marvelous works.

  “You can’t do this on your own,” she said. “Without God helping me, giving me strength, I would have never made it this far. When I was in my own recovery, all that self-will and ego kept getting in the way. I didn’t think I needed God, I didn’t think I needed any community. I didn’t think anyone else had anything to tell me. But I kept going back to those meetings, because I s
aw there were people who’d found another way to live. And now I know I went through all that pain and all that turmoil for a purpose, and my purpose is to be sitting here in front of you all today, working on alcohol and drug recovery, and helping you all to find that change.”

  Before she introduced Littell, she took care of some community business. People had been smoking in the dorms upstairs. “There will be no violating that rule, are we cool on that?” She became briefly stern. “Because I’m not going to let O’Brien House be closed down by the fire marshals. This is part of my recovery, and I will not jeopardize that. I said, Are we cool?”

  “We cool” was the chorus.

  “That’s good. Because I am the Boss Applesauce,” a shriek of laughter, “and don’t you forget it. If you do, we will go outside, and I’m pumping iron. And what was that I’m going to learn?” She glanced around, waiting for help from someone she’d talked with earlier. “What was that thing?”

  “Tai chi,” a man called out.

  “Tai chi,” she said. “I’m going to get you with my tai chi.”

  She asked Littell if he was ready.

  He asked her, “I want to know at the outset, can I use profanity? I don’t know if I will, but I might have to. It might be what’s inside me.”

  Given permission, he began.

  “I was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana. I was the sixth child of Joy and Willie May Harris. I was born in the front room of their house, in the house my mother lives in to this day. I’ve got two brothers and four sisters. There wasn’t much love in the way of hugging and all that. My daddy worked, and my parents went to church, I’m not saying that. But as far as that warmth? Maybe I just didn’t feel it. My brothers and sisters I haven’t seen in so long, and I care about them, but we’re not close. I don’t miss them.”

  The biography continued through a childhood in friendship with a boy named Ricky Coleman. “He was my Ace Boon Coon. In 1979 he went up to Angola for life. But when we were kids, we started out stealing hubcaps and eight-track tapes from cars while guys was inside the nightclubs. We would make a sweep of the whole nightclub area, and we would sell our stuff to a fence, and some of the older dudes they started to admire our courage. They took us under wing, and they taught us the Murphy. For anyone who don’t know what the Murphy is, it’s like this. You see some horny dude, which Lake Charles had a lot of them from the military base over in Texas. And you tell him you have the number of a lady where he can go. He gives you cash, and you put him on the pay phone, and she talks sweet. So the dude drives off to meet her. Except there’s no one at the address, and we’re long gone when he comes looking.”

  Soon they robbed drug dealers. Soon they were doing drugs. But none of it was quite the heart of Littell’s story, the heart that emerged as the wall clock wound down on his half hour, as he rushed through his years at Angola and reeled from chronology to outcry: “And sometimes I’m just filled with hate.” His voice swelled and his back straightened in his chair and his hands clenched and his arms lifted, fists near his waist. “I got so much rage and hatred in me right now and I got to deal with that. I don’t know. It’s just there. And I either got to deal with it or it’s going to deal with me. Sometimes I be ripping up inside. I just be wanting to rip. Destroy everything, destroy it. It’s going to kill me. It’s going to kill me.”

  When he was through, and when Miss Katherine had spoken, the residents joined arms and gave their chant.

  Keep coming back

  ’Cause it works if you work it If you don’t you die

  So live it, every day

  One day at a time

  Whoops, there it is!

  Later Miss Katherine explained to me that the final line, adapted from a rap song, was the residents attempt to remind themselves that one day, after all their struggle, the change would take place as though by miracle, as though they had merely tripped into a new and easier life.

  Three weeks later, at the end of May, I was ready to wage what attack I could on the warden. I flew down to Baton Rouge to begin.

  One night, from my motel room, I called O’Brien House. Miss Katherine told me Littell was gone. He had decided to leave the program that past Sunday morning. He would give her no reason. He said only that his mind was made up.

  In all, he had spent two months at the halfway house.

  “The gates of Angola are opening up wide for you, Littell,” Miss Katherine warned. “And the next time it’s going to be forever.”

  He packed what he had in a cardboard box and crossed the vacant lot to the Greyhound station.

  NINE

  JUDGE POLOZOLA, CHERUBIC FACE TOPPED BY CURLY black hair, spoke pointedly to my attorneys: “I want you to read through the case law. All the decisions. I want you to make sure you do that. Because all this might be true,” he touched the pages of my lawsuit, “but I’m still going to have a hard time ordering a reporter inside a prison.”

  He was the earthly power, the one who existed beyond the domain of the warden. The judge had never released Angola from his indirect supervision. He had never quite trusted in the permanence of its reforms. So when the inmates felt they had been wronged, abused by guards or denied treatment at the hospital, they could appeal to him. They sent their letters to his chambers, to the office of his court-appointed expert, to the pair of lawyers he had named to defend the inmates’ civil rights. The letters started with propitiations. They wished well-being on the judge and his family; they prayed that Jesus or Allah—or both—would bless the judge or the expert or the pair of civil rights attorneys. And then came the stories. An inmate had been “stuck out bad” and was at Camp J “for dun nothing.” Another had been switched from metal-shop clerk to the grass crew for conspiratorial reasons not even the most sympathetic reader could follow. Most of the letters were read and filed and forgotten. The judge and his appointees were overrun by petty grievances. Most of the complaints didn’t deal with the prison at all but with claims of injustices at trial, of ineffective counsel, of innocence of everything. But sometimes the stories were relevant and troubling enough, and sounded true enough—a game of “Rambo” played amid the tall okra, where a group of guards arranged to look away while weaker inmates were raped—and a small, informal investigation began. The prison knew it couldn’t stop the two lawyers from wandering the grounds. It knew it couldn’t interfere with the expert’s interviews. Polozola’s authority helped guarantee that games of “Rambo” remained the exception.

  With two expensive attorneys to make my supplications, I hoped the judge would improve my situation as well.

  My lawsuit against Cain did not, technically, fall within Polozola’s supervision of the prison. He was entrusted with the inmates’ civil rights, not with any writer’s. But there were only two federal judges in his district, and once my case was assigned, at random, to him, I let myself believe I had a chance. He had dealt with Cain. He, at least, would listen.

  I knew before I started—and the lawyers I’d hired in Baton Rouge kept reminding me—that my chances weren’t great. Cain’s effort at extortion was secondary to my suit, which alleged that the warden had breached my First Amendment rights by barring me from Angola and which requested restored access. The attempted shakedown, as part of the story, was featured in the papers my lawyers filed. And it certainly seemed a problem for Warden Cain. But it could not, in itself, put me back on Angola’s grounds. And my First Amendment rights to be there in the first place were basically nonexistent.

  The United States Supreme Court, in a series of decisions going back to the 1970s, had helped to ensure that the nation’s prisons stayed isolated and unknown, that criminals, once sent away, could be forgotten. They had to be kept without physical cruelty—yes, on that the court was firm—but beyond that their lives would be ignored. Law-abiding citizens wouldn’t have to think of them.

  This was not, of course, the explicit rationale behind the 1974 ruling in Pell v. Procunier, which set precedent against the media when it comes to e
ntering prisons. The rationale was that the press had no First Amendment right to go anywhere that the public couldn’t go. A journalist’s right to express what he wished was protected by the Constitution; his ability to gather information was not. When a California state prison forbade reporters from interviewing specific inmates, the justices backed the state: The reporters weren’t on the inmates’ prison-approved visiting lists. That the reporters weren’t legal counsel, family, spiritual advisers, or friends deemed by the warden to be rehabilitative-and therefore, by prison guidelines, couldn’t be placed on the visiting lists—was judged irrelevant. The prison was merely enforcing a uniform set of standards on the public, and the reporters didn’t meet those standards.

  This and later decisions meant that wardens allow the press into their territory only when-and to whatever degree—they wish, and that the country knows almost nothing about the lives of 1.7 million of its citizens. What the Court failed to acknowledge, in writing that the constitution does not force “upon government the affirmative duty to make available to journalists sources of information not available to the public generally,” is that most government officials feel that duty anyway, as a matter of survival. They need to retain the public’s attention and its trust, and so they offer up a good deal of information. What they try to hide, other officials, also fighting for survival, help to expose. But with prisons the public doesn’t much want to pay attention; it has already handed over its trust.

  Wardens and state corrections departments have little motivation to share anything. Even the statistics they offer to prove what the Court does require, that their institutions be run safely, are useless for comparison and not necessarily reliable in themselves. The category of “significant injury” in a prison’s annual report can mean almost anything, depending on the state’s directives and the warden’s own definition and his instructions, direct or subtle, to employees about what to write down and what to leave unrecorded. Except for inmate deaths, it is impossible for anyone to judge from prison statistics how safely an institution is run. It is impossible to judge without being there—and being there for extended periods. (Inmates can write to the media, but their mail to reporters is subject to review in many states. Even where court rulings have made such letters confidential, inmates risk reprisal if their criticisms are discovered, and their accounts are difficult to verify. They can write confidentially to lawyers, but interested attorneys are hard to find.) So by allowing prisons the authority to shut down press access, the Supreme Court has aided in the guarantee that the lives of our inmates occupy no place in our minds.