Hosoi

by Christian Hosoi

  From prison I promise Jen that I’ll save myself for her, no matter how long it takes to get released. That might sound insincere since there are no women around, but I want her to hear my commitment. I want her to know that I’ve found everything I’ve been searching for, including love and integrity, in one book and in one life, and that life includes her.

  When I read the Bible passage about making your yes mean yes and your no mean no, found in James 5:12, I begin to understand true integrity for the first time. I mean, everybody’s got his or her “good meter,” but there comes a point when your value system breaks down and you compromise. Faith is based not on rules and regulations, but on a desire to please something, actually someone, greater than what we see with our own eyes. I’ve always valued honesty and truth; now I know the Truth.

  ACCEPTING DIVINE WILL AND HUMAN LAW

  It can be noisy in jail, so I often block everything out by pulling my blanket over my head when I pray. Once I get over the idea that God isn’t going to open the cell door and set me free immediately, I begin praying for things other than my release. I still remember vividly one of the prayers I said: “Lord, I’ll travel to the ends of the earth—to Africa, to the rain forests, to tribes that have never heard of you. I’ll go anywhere and I’ll do anything. I’ll leave my family, I’ll quit skateboarding—whatever you want, I’ll do it.” Ridiculous, right? I meant it too.

  Immediately, though, I sense God whispering to me, “Christian, didn’t I give you your loving family and bless you with your ability to ride a skateboard?” I thought for a moment and realized he was right. I was like, “Yes, Lord. Forgive me—I’ll be the best husband, the best father, and the best skateboarder I can be, and I’ll still go wherever you want me to go.”

  Pops sells his land in Hawaii and we hire a lawyer for $35,000, most of what he gets for the property. Jen feels from the first that the woman we hire isn’t on the up-and-up, but it’s like she would later say, “When you’re as desperate as we were, you want to believe anything and will pay any amount.”

  The lawyer promises she can get me an early release, and that sounds good to me. She says she’s about to become a judge and has connections; she can talk to the judge hearing my case, she says, and he will cut us a good deal. She says that with her help, I’ll get five years instead of ten. We will later hear that she took our money and checked herself into a mental institution. A few years after that we will hear the tragic news that she has jumped to her death from a freeway bridge.

  Next, a man we know in the Islands, a good friend of the family, gives us six grand for another lawyer. That lawyer looks into things and is at least honest enough to tell us the truth: that there is nothing he or anyone else can do to get my sentence reduced.

  I finally, gradually make peace with the idea that I’ll be here a long time. I’m okay with that reality, but my parents are really broken up over it. Here I am, their only child, facing ten years for drug trafficking. With time and distance on my side I can see the goodness of my parents and also their faults. It’s kind of like opening the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, and seeing the way everything that was created was perfect before the fall. Even people with great intentions like my parents can’t keep on track without God. I’m experiencing a freedom I’ve never known, and I tell people an ironic truth—that I didn’t go from freedom to prison, but I went from prison to freedom.

  INSIDE RULES

  Life has its challenges for everyone, whether in jail or out, whether saved or not. Like jails and prisons everywhere, San Bernardino and Glen Helen are divided by race—now there’s a challenge for you. There are the whites, the Mexicans, the Southsiders, the blacks, Chinos, and the Islanders—Samoans, Tongans, Asians, Hawaiians, Filipinos, Guamanians, and the like. That’s where I fit in, with the Islanders. Things could be worse. For some guys, jail is much more isolating than it is for me. They’re cut off from the world for their entire sentence, making no connections inside and getting no visitors from outside.

  Other than fellowship with other inmates and visits from friends and family, I look forward to different types of food we order on commissary. My biggest treat is chili ramen. I like it best served with beef jerky, crackers, and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, all together in one soup. It’s actually not bad. I have friends visiting me regularly, and from time to time they put money on my books. With that money I can buy a variety of food from the commissary.

  Commissary equals currency on the inside, but there’s no locking things up; you just leave your purchases right there, usually on the bed. I have about seventy-five bucks’ worth of packaged soups, chips, crackers, candy bars, honey buns, and other things to eat.

  Here’s a story about when I first went to jail: Among my treats are four bags of popcorn. One day I return from the rec yard and find that one bag is missing. I don’t really care, but I’m thinking, Man, I can’t let someone get away with taking what’s mine or I’m gonna get punked the whole time I’m here. We’re in a tank of sixty inmates, and I stand up in front of them all and shout, “Hey, who took my popcorn?” When nobody admits to anything, I take further action and ask my shot-caller (a leader of a race) to investigate the situation.

  Meanwhile, I take further action myself. I sharpen a pencil very publicly—something that sounds harmless but sends a message. See, the pencils they give you in jail are short so that you won’t stab anybody with them. What people do is remove the blade from a disposable razor and use that blade to sharpen a pencil to a long, fine point. Then they take a playing card and roll it tightly around the sharpened pencil, along with another pencil for strength. Then they find something—say, the sticker from a deodorant stick—and wrap the two pencils tightly together. The result is a good shank.

  So I’m standing there, sharpening the pencil, saying, “Look, somebody’s gonna give up my popcorn.” I’m shaking as I speak, but I look directly at this group of hard-core prisoners and think, It’s me against them.

  Each cell block typically has a shot-caller for each race, and every shot-caller basically oversees disputes between races. My shot-caller talks to the others after, and someone quickly gives the popcorn back and apologizes. I tell him it’s okay; that it’s all good.

  A message has been sent—and received—not to take my popcorn or anything else of mine. I’d just arrived and didn’t yet know how tough I was or what I’d do to survive. I also didn’t yet know what consequences standing up for myself could have had. I had already seen a guy stabbed for being a snitch, bleeding everywhere. If you’re a knucklehead and don’t play by the rules in here, you’re gonna get dealt with.

  CONTRABAND: PERKS AND PUNISHMENTS

  Cigarettes are allowed in the outside rec area in the federal prison, but they’re not allowed at all in the county jail, intended for shorter-term holding, which is where I start out. Anticipating this, inmates carry cigarettes in with them, hiding them where the guards won’t find them, usually up the poop shoot. When somebody new arrives with a pack of smokes, everybody waits eagerly in his cell while the guy goes to the bathroom and sits on the can. He’s in there washing the bag off and comes out with two packs of cigarettes and, believe it or not, a jumbo lighter. Even knowing where those smokes have been, nobody can wait to light up. That really illustrates the sick power of addiction.

  Inmates try to combat the smell of tobacco by blowing baby powder into the air as an air freshener. It’s not terribly effective. Now, instead of the smell of cigarette smoke, there’s a very noticeable combination of smoke and baby powder.

  A lot of smart people are locked up, but not all of them use their intelligence for good. Some incarcerated genius figured out how to get a light from a power outlet in the corridor outside a cell, and that knowledge is now part of the lore that’s passed on. Here’s how it works: Someone takes the lead from a pencil. After buying an eraser for the pencil, he pokes two holes in that and inserts pieces of the lead. He then wraps toilet paper around the whole thing and attaches it
to a rolled-up newspaper just long enough to reach the power outlet through the cell’s bars. The lead sparks on contact, the paper catches fire, and you light up.

  If an inmate wants to get a light the easy way, it costs him. Having a lighter in jail or prison is a good way to make some easy money, though. Somebody with a lighter can charge about a dollar just to light one smoke. People pay in soup or other commissary items. During my term, a soup equals eighty-five cents, for example. Since the currency often is food, the guy with cigarettes or a lighter ends up with a whole lot of commissary. You can always tell who has tobacco or a lighter in the house.

  In lockup, people who work in the laundry can give out extra T-shirts and socks. They prepare regular rolls of clean T-shirts and socks for distribution, but every so often they roll up doubles of everything. When a guy in the laundry sees a friend coming, he reaches in and grabs one of the doubles. Recipients can get away with it until there’s a shakedown. These are random inspections by the guards that are conducted in addition to the usual hourly cell checks. Illegal activities are always planned to go down between scheduled patrols, but shakedowns are designed to be unpredictable.

  During a shakedown, the guards strip all the linen from the beds and tip the bunks over so that everything you have is strewn on the floor. The guards march us into the chow hall and line us up, twenty at a time. We’re told to bend over and cough. If there are severe violations discovered, either on someone’s person or in his cell, that person gets consequences—more on that in a minute. For everyone else, it’s back to the cell, where everything is in shambles. Basically, that’s what happens when the guards suspect tobacco, weed, a shank, or some other illegal contraband.

  Despite the threat of shakedowns, people continue smuggling in cigarettes and intoxicating substances such as weed. With a minute of warning they can eat whatever weed they have and not get caught with it. Obviously, though, not even the most chronic smoker will eat an entire pack of smokes. Either substance, and many others, can earn you a trip to the hole, a cell not much bigger than eight feet by eight, with only one dim light burning. All you can have in the hole is a Bible, if you want one. You get one meal a day. It’s called a brick, and it’s all the food you normally get, thrown together in a pan, then baked and chopped up into square blocks. That and a drink is it.

  That’s the punishment when you’re in jail. In prison, if you get caught breaking the rules, you might get tossed into the hole, but you’ll also lose part of your “good time”: the fifty-four days a year that get subtracted from your sentence if you don’t have an incident. If you get a write-up or an incident report, your good time gets whittled away. In effect, you’re just adding to your sentence when you break the rules.

  No extra time for me, thank you. I choose to follow the rules, so I never get anywhere near the hole or lose any of my good time.

  One of my favorite times in county jail or prison is mail call. All the inmates stand around quietly as someone calls out the names of people who have mail. Receiving mail makes an inmate feel loved and cared for. I’m one of the fortunate ones who has a loved one who sends a lot of mail. Much as I enjoy the letters, I sometimes wish I could give some of mine to guys who don’t get any. That and phone calls are pretty much the only outside connections inmates have. Calls have to be collect, which can be very expensive: it’s five bucks for me to hook up with Hawaii, for example, and a dollar a minute after that. I speak to Jen or my dad in the Islands from time to time, and I call my mom on the East Coast whenever I can.

  My strongest personal link, both by mail and by phone, is with Jen; I send her love letters, she sends me love letters and notes, and I talk to her every night. Every month I send her a devotional called The Daily Bread and we read that together, over the phone. When we’re about to get off the phone we sing “Amazing Grace”—every phone call till my release.

  Knowing God offers me so much security that I’m no longer afraid of anybody or anything—not even of dying. But I never do get threatened or hassled in either jail or prison. I get along with everyone, and I’m vocal about my Christian faith. Like everything else in here, if you’re gonna do something, you’ve got to push it to the limit. Nobody on the inside likes a poser, so prison tests your commitment and the authenticity of the stand you’re taking. My commitment is to walk with God and not back down or compromise regardless of anything that might challenge my faith.

  Everything’s segregated here—I mentioned earlier how the races tend to group up together—but I hang out with people from all races and do Bible studies with them all.

  NO MATTER HOW CRAZY THINGS GET ON THE OUTSIDE, POPS FOUND PEACE ON THE INSIDE. HOSOI FAMILY COLLECTION.

  “I learn that my old friend Jay Adams has been locked up for a parole violation. While Jay has some violence on his record, he’ll tell you what almost every other violent offender will tell you: that every bad thing he ever did was related to drug use.”

  Jay’s always been an awesome guy, but not so much when he’s high. In the old days Jay and I set the trends, broke the rules, and challenged the records, but now, as we sit in prison and think about being free again someday, his letters express a desire to talk to kids about getting off drugs. I have some amazing letters from Jay. Like all of us, he’s far from perfect. He’s always been influential without trying to be. He never cared about his fame, but now he expresses a desire to use whatever notoriety we have to help at-risk kids.

  Aside from Jay and me, there are quite a few other well-known skaters who are Christians. Three of them, Jay “Alabamy” Haizlip, Dennis Martinez, and Eddie Elguera, have actually become pastors. My old friends and competitors, Steve Caballero and Lance Mountain, have been Christians for a while now. Add Josh Harmony, Brian Sumner, Chad Tim Tim, and Richard Mulder to that list and that’s quite a heavenly skate team.

  The new millennium means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. To me, it marks the time when my whole world changed. Now that I’m saved, I’m thinking, Whoa! Where do my parents stand in all this?

  As I mentioned earlier, Pops was an artist/philosopher everyone, including me, looked to for answers. He never followed anyone’s rules but did everything his own way. While he made a lot of mistakes, mostly rooted in drugs, he really did have a lot of the right answers, and I’ve met few more naturally loving parents. Pops was a great father overall, the best he knew how to be. But there was a piece missing; and now—with my new relationship with Jesus—I know how to help fix the things that are broken in him.

  I call Pops from jail one day and say, “I’m reading the Bible regularly, and I gave my life to Jesus. What do you think of that?” I’m genuinely curious. This is right up his alley, and I know he’ll have an interesting take on it. I guess I’ve taken him off-guard, though, because for once he doesn’t say much. He’s just like, “Oh yeah? Cool.” I recall one of the few times he ever talked to me about God when I was a kid. He said, “I believe in evolution and in God.” That was good enough for me at the time, and I had no further questions back then. Now I remind him of saying that and ask if he still believes in God. He replies that he doesn’t know. “Look, Pops,” I say, “God is real and Jesus is real. I found that out for sure by reading God’s Word.” When I suggest that he read the Bible, he replies, “Oh, I’ve read it before.” I tell him to read it again—especially to read about Jesus, starting in the book of John. I tell him that once he does that, I want to talk to him again. He agrees to look into it.

  When Pops comes to visit in person, we begin where we left off. Again, he doesn’t have a lot to say, so I start. I share with him how I came to believe that Jesus Christ really is alive, and I encourage him to come to his own decision about that and then figure out how he wants to respond.

  Pops thinks back on his own history of religious matters. He tells me that he attended a Catholic church for a time when he was fourteen. He went on his own; nobody else in his family had ever been to church or had any interest, and he wanted to che
ck it out. I say, “That’s all cool, Pops, but what’s your take on Jesus dying for your sins so that you can be saved?” He pauses, looking a bit uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation, and says, “That’s a tough one.” I tell him that if he doesn’t put his whole trust in Jesus, he won’t see heaven. I ask again if he believes that God is real, and this time he says that he does. I press him a bit: “Well, you need to open up your heart and ask God to forgive you and ask Jesus to reveal himself to you.” Just like that, he says, “All right.” I lead him in a prayer and tell him that he’s got to read the Bible every day. He agrees to do that, and we wrap up our visit.

  The next time he visits me, he’s crying, broken up about our shared past and about the direction he helped me take in life. I’ve never seen him cry like that before, and it shows me that God is touching him deeply. He says, “Forgive me, son.”

  “I totally forgive you, Pops,” I say, “and I love you. It’s not your fault I’m here; this is the result of decisions I made. You need to forgive yourself, though.” We’ve always been close before, but now we’ve forged an unbreakable bond that not even a prison wall can break. Now, I have to talk to my mom.