The Prison Book Club

by Ann Walmsley

  “When I first started my bit, it bothered me,” said Grow-Op. “It doesn’t bother me no more. That’s the thing of being institutionalized. You get a routine and it’s like a purpose.” In the book, he said, the soldiers were nothing before they joined up. “Some of them would still be on the streets. So it’s kind of like it’s a purpose for them.”

  Everyone talked at once. I reflected on how Derek was proving that he had a knack for asking questions that were relevant to the men, even if it led to a verbal melee. This must be what it’s like in an unsupervised argument in prison, I thought. If Carol had been there, likely she would have corralled the discussion sooner. But I was grateful for that brief window into their world, that glimpse of “the jungle” Ben had referred to.

  There had been other book group gatherings at Collins Bay in which the men had taken control. Before I joined, during a discussion of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road, the guys told Carol to be quiet until they had exhausted the topic they were discussing. These were brief glimpses into the way that disagreements can become dangerous in prison. I didn’t feel personally threatened during the discussion of War, but I sensed that Ben might be vulnerable, and that Quincy’s barrage of questions masked a rage that could erupt.

  After the meeting, a new fellow came up to me and asked if he could be one of the book club members writing a journal. Word seemed to be getting out about the journal writing. He was a fidgety West Indian man in his twenties with eager eyes and densely tattooed arms. He introduced himself as Deshane. “I write songs and stuff,” he said. I said he’d have to write about the books too, and he said he would. I had the chaplain search a blank journal that I happened to have in my satchel. It had gone through the X-ray machine earlier and the chaplain gave it the thumbs-up. I handed it to Deshane and watched him walk away happily, his small frame bouncing.

  Then I spent a few minutes with Gaston. He must have been wondering if his personal campaign for self-improvement, which he’d pitched to Carol and me last month, was already more than he could handle. Carol had brought him a stack of classics of American literature that Dennis Duffy had recommended. As well, he had his prison job, courses and the next book club book to read. And now it was time for me to load him up with one more thing: a journal. He took it from me and smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

  Gaston made his first entry in his journal the following day, reminding himself to kneel while praying, vowing to lose five pounds and noting that he had started Huckleberry Finn.

  10

  ABUSE OR NEGLECT?

  THE SECOND MEETING OF FRANK and Graham’s book club at Beaver Creek took place on a brilliant fall day. I loved how the terrain changed on the drive north from rolling moraine to the black soil of reclaimed marsh and finally to steep granite outcroppings. As always, I slowed when I passed a favourite field of mine on the moraine whose contours rippled crazily. That month, its cornstalk stubble rose and fell into the distance like a striped counterpane.

  The night before, I’d reread Frank’s journals, the neat typed pages that he’d produced on the Beaver Creek library computer. It was clear that he was now spending most of his prison days with books. He’d finished a 1974 biography of New York mobster Crazy Joe Gallo, by Donald Goddard, and was reading The Best American Crime Reporting 2009, a compilation of true-crime stories. And he was deep into Mafia Wife, the 1977 account of Barbara Fuca’s experiences as the wife of a Mafia drug dealer. The “364” shelf of the Beaver Creek library—that section in libraries’ Dewey system allotted to books on criminology and organized crime—must have been particularly well stocked.

  Frank had also tackled a novel in Italian, Lo Sguardo del Cacciatore, and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s five-essay book, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. Bitch was an unusual choice for a guy in prison, I thought, given that it spends considerable time assessing tough celebrity bad girls like Courtney Love and Joan Crawford. He was also well into The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, by science writer Seth Mnookin. The book hadn’t convinced him. He distrusted vaccinations and was refusing to get the prison flu shot that season, not wishing to be a “guinea pig.”

  When I arrived at Beaver Creek that afternoon, it was visiting hours, and the reception area was a din of noisy reunions and whispered consultations. A woman holding a homemade cake appeared to be upset with the guards. I signed in and told the correctional officers that the warden had approved visits with Frank and Graham before each book club meeting. One officer found us a quieter space in the empty chapel. Like the chapel in Collins Bay, Beaver Creek’s looked more like a public school classroom, with windows running along one side and what appeared to be a few school desks.

  Graham and Frank came in wearing matching white waffle-weave long-sleeved shirts with blue short-sleeved T-shirts pulled on over top. It might be minimum security, but inmates still wore prison-issue. Frank was losing his voice due to allergies and had grown a salt-and-pepper beard.The facial hair was his contribution to “Movember,” a movement in which men around the world grow moustaches during the month of November to raise funds for research on prostate cancer and other men’s health issues. Graham was clean-shaven as always. He told me that even when he had been a biker, he had never worn a beard or moustache. Graham left to get Frank a glass of cold water for his cough.

  Before we had a chance to even settle in our chairs, Graham began talking about a book drive he was organizing to improve the selection in the prison library. “Antiques” was how Frank described the existing library collection. Graham had worked out a scheme to approach women’s book clubs in Toronto who might donate their books to Beaver Creek after they’d discussed them, using the local John Howard Society as the receiving dock. Graham’s strategy for how to get the donated books through prison security was to run them through the X-ray machine, then spread them out on the floor so that the dogs could sniff them for drugs. He had pitched the idea to the warden. All he needed was a staff member willing to supervise. I commended him on his initiative.

  He also offered some advice on how to deal with book club members back at Collins Bay who repeatedly came to meetings without reading the books: stop providing cookies. A few, he said, showed up just for the cookies.

  Now that Frank and Graham were in minimum, life beyond prison was tantalizingly close for them. Frank had begun studying for his real estate licence and Graham had received approval for three Unescorted Temporary Absences (UTAs), during which he planned to visit a university campus to discuss completing his degree. They wanted to know what kind of work Vince had found. Vince was a former Collins Bay Book Club member and protege of Carol’s who had left prison some months before I joined the book club. I told them he was moving furniture. They were shocked. Graham said that surely, given Vince’s financial services background, he would have found something in sales at the very least. It was as though Graham was calculating his own likelihood of success based on Vince’s. Graham joked, “I’ve done more time in the hole than Vince did in jail.”

  “What am I going to do, Frankie?” he asked, looking at his buddy. He said that if all else failed, he would join his mother’s fudge business. They laughed, and Frank’s turned into a dry hacking cough.

  We talked for a few minutes more, mainly about the parental neglect in the book we would be discussing that evening. Then they had to get their books and prepare for book club. By the 5 p.m. meeting time, darkness had fallen and I had to make my way alone across the prison complex to the programs building. It was as inky as that night in Hampstead nine years earlier, when I’d been mugged. There were no guards evident on the grounds.

  I thought about what Frank had said in his journal pages about the prison, how there were no guards to prevent anybody from leaving the property and how the general atmosphere was relaxed. The main requirement of inmates was to stay within the marked perimeter and to show up on time for Count on their range.

  Great. I picked up my pace, looking over m
y shoulder several times. I made it to the building and saw Graham and Frank inside. How strange that I now felt safe with a former Hells Angel convicted of extortion and a man who had shot up a restaurant.

  This was the first meeting where the Beaver Creek Book Club would be flying solo, without Carol. I was curious to see whether Graham and Frank would fall quiet in deference to Phoebe. Donna and Meg were still there. So the other inmates hadn’t objected to their presence.

  That month’s book was The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls’s bestselling memoir of a deprived childhood. The book opens memorably with Walls, by then a successful New York writer and editor living on Park Avenue, in the back seat of a taxi. When, from the taxi window, she spots her mother rooting through garbage in a Dumpster, she slides down in her seat. No longer able to deal with the hidden shame of her impoverished upbringing, Walls decides to tell it all, from her father’s alcoholism and unstable work in a succession of mining towns to her mother’s skewed priorities: ranking art supplies above food for the family. The story of the four Walls kids’ upbringing amid abject poverty and neglect was often difficult to read, and I found her parents’ betrayals (like stealing the children’s money and not sharing food with them) horrifying. I couldn’t stop thinking about the scenes where Jeannette falls out of the family’s moving car and the parents fail to come back for a while and where the parents make the kids travel with the furniture in a U-Haul trailer whose back doors swing open on the highway. The father glamorizes these episodes on the lam as “Rex Walls–style” events. As the kids age, they figure out that Rex Walls–style isn’t adventure but abuse. Graham told Carol in a letter that the book was “a great read,” and that he had zipped through it in three or four days. One of the weaker readers, he told her, finished it in “two days straight. That’s great though because it means the book club is encouraging guys to read a lot more, which is exactly what we were hoping for!”

  Graham established his leadership off the top by taking attendance. It was the book club’s version of Count.As he called out their names, gruff voices around the table barked “right here” or “present” in response. There were a couple of new faces, including Hal, a slight, gentle-looking man in his thirties.

  Phoebe kicked off the discussion in a very English-teacher way by asking why people write memoirs.

  “To excise guilt,” said Tom, more as a statement of fact than as an opinion.

  “Exorcise demons,” added Earl, saying how some kids feel haunted by things that make them different from others. His voice was less gravelly than on the previous month and I noticed he was sporting a grey goatee.

  “Help others,” suggested a tall bespectacled middle-aged man whose name tag read BYRNE.

  “Financial gain,” said someone at the far end of the table.

  And as we were all laughing at that comment, Graham said, “To tell their version of events, right? People like Cheney and Bush both wrote separate memoirs of the same events and they have very different interpretations of how things happened.”

  But the reasons they offered for why Jeannette Walls chose to write her memoir were more nuanced. “I think in Jeannette Walls’s case,” said Frank, “she was so successful and sort of hobnobbing and people looked at her a certain way, but this was a way for telling everybody, deep inside, I’m not really like that.”

  Doc agreed: “She was tired of being ashamed of her parents. There was a deep sense of guilt and she wanted to expose herself.”

  “I think there’s a lot of healing that probably comes from putting that story down on paper,” said Richard, who I had now decided was in his sixties—about the same age as Frank.

  “I’d even be more cynical than that,” said Tom. “I’d take it one step further and say that she’s trying to profit off of the misery that her family endured.” He’d done some background research on Walls, he told the others, and what he found out about her celebrity reporting made him dislike her. “And I really don’t like anybody who’s not proud of where they came from,” he said. “To me that shows incredibly weak character.”

  “So you don’t think she redeemed herself?” asked Phoebe.

  “No I don’t think she redeemed herself,” he said, his voice oozing sarcasm, just as it had during last month’s standoff with Carol.

  We talked on for a bit about whether Walls, as an adult, did enough to offer help to her parents in New York. The men puzzled over why the parents were too proud to line up at soup kitchens when their kids were young and starving, yet once the kids were grown, the parents frequently ate at soup kitchens and other free-food programs and refused to take charity from their children.

  Then Graham spoke up. “I know we’re going there, but my terrible impulsiveness makes it hard to wait much longer. What I’m wondering is, who do you think bears more responsibility for the way those kids were treated? The mother or the father? We had this discussion earlier, me and Ann and Frankie.”

  “I was thinking it was the mother,” said Mitchell, the only black man in the group. “But I think she got some mental illness.”

  Of course, I thought. All the signs were there: she slept all day and the children couldn’t get her out of bed.

  “But if Rex Walls wants to skedaddle during the night, Rex Walls–style, doesn’t the mother have the responsibility to say, ‘Hey I’m going to grab my kids, I’m going to go do something?’” persisted Graham. “I mean at one time Jeannette actually puts it to her mother and says, ‘Hey listen, why don’t you leave?’”

  “She might have the responsibility,” said Donna. “But did she have the capability?” Like Mitchell, Donna suspected that the mother was mentally ill, and she was diagnosing borderline personality disorder.

  “I felt the mother’s actions were more heinous than Rex’s,” I said. “When I put down the book the two images that stuck with me were the mother eating the chocolate bar under the blanket and not offering any to her children, who are starving, and the revelation that the mother owned that million-dollar piece of land. She conned her kids into thinking that their life was glorious and adventuresome.”

  “It’s too complicated,” said Hal. “They fed into each other— enablement or whatever.At times the father was worse.At times the mother was worse. How do you even pick in that situation?”

  Doc weighed in by saying both parents were equally responsible. “It was really a classic story of codependency with rampant alcoholism,” he said.

  “I disagree with that,” jumped in Frank. “Rex is not your classic alcoholic. He had a period of time there where he wouldn’t drink. He would come through for them when he had to, and bring groceries. A real alcoholic is the father in Angela’s Ashes,” he said, referring to Frank McCourt’s popular memoir of his miserable Irish Catholic childhood where the father would “drink the wages.”“In Angela’s Ashes, the father just showed up when he had nowhere else to go. That was an abusive father.”

  Richard said that he’d found something on page 61 that we should consider. I loved it when the guys noted page numbers. The passage described the moment when Jeannette and her brother Brian’s chemistry experiment exploded, setting their “laboratory” in an abandoned shed on fire. Their father told them that in physics the zone above the flames was considered a borderline between turbulence and order. Richard said: “That’s the metaphor for Rex’s life.”

  “Order and turbulence,” said Byrne. “Like when Jeannette is in the hospital recovering from burns. That was order.” Her dress had caught fire while she was cooking hot dogs and she was in the hospital for six weeks after she received skin grafts. I recalled how she had enjoyed the three square meals a day and the nurse’s concern and care. “And then Rex comes in,” said Byrne, “and says we’re going to leave the hospital Rex Walls–style and it’s turbulence again.” Rex was skipping out on the hospital bill.

  Then Phoebe invited us to pile in with our favourite moment of Rex Walls at his lowest.

  “Pimping his daughter out in the bar was pr
etty bad,” said Earl.

  “I don’t think that was the worst,” said Mitchell, as he poured himself a coffee from the coffee machine, claiming that Rex’s worst moment was after pimping her out—when he denied that she’d been molested and claimed that the guy had probably only pawed her.

  For Byrne it was the time when Rex came home drunk and smeared the mouth of the clay Shakespeare bust that Walls’s older sister, Lori, had made for her Cooper Union art school application portfolio. “That was a very, very evil thing to do,” said Byrne.

  “His whole life was framed with excuses,” said Richard. “He couldn’t hold a job because the Mafia was mixed up in the unions and they wouldn’t let him work.” Almost everyone around the table broke into laughter, the laughter of recognition that Richard was bang on.

  But for Graham, the father’s greatest offence was risking the sexual abuse of the kids by his own relatives back in his hometown of Welch,West Virginia. “They’d lived in cars, they’d lived in pretty well every shithole you could think of, eating out of Dumpsters, but he leads the kids into a situation where they’re likely to be molested,” said Graham. He leaned forward on the table and thumped it. He had warned Frank and me before the meeting that he might not be able to check his emotions in the meeting when it came to Rex exposing his children to that danger. “You’re gonna get me going and I’m just gonna go right off,” he had said. “I can see it coming.” Again I was seeing that strong moral code he had when it came to family.

  It reminded me about something else we’d talked about, the three of us, before the meeting. We’d reflected on our own parents and whether we had any experiences comparable to those of the Walls kids. Frank said it wasn’t unusual for kids to fall out of moving cars in the 1950s, especially if they were “old junkers.” I said that before seat belts, many kids had scars on their chins from sitting on their parents’ laps in the front seat and banging their mouths on the dashboard. I pointed to the scar beneath my lower lip.