by Ann Walmsley
I was trembling in the parking garage, perhaps because of my difficulties with parking garages in London, and was relieved that Graham talked the whole time. I noticed he had sweat on his brow too.
We found a fluorescent bulb–lit café in the mall near the library and ordered coffee and pastries for him and water for me. I reached into my satchel and pulled out a used copy of All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. “My husband and I have both read it and we thought you’d like it.” He thanked me. I told him that Frank had joined a book club at his halfway house. “Is there potential that you could start a book club at yours?”
“It’s possible. I’d have to get to know some of those guys a little better. Half don’t intermingle with anybody, so I’d have only twelve guys to pick from. I think Frankie’s in a bigger place.” He said that if he couldn’t start one himself, he would join a book club out of the public library. “A good way to meet people, right?”
I took a sip of my water. “What are your emotions now that you’re actually out of prison?”
“It’s anxiety probably. Your head’s going in twenty different directions. It’s almost like information overload for me.” He hadn’t said “a feeling of liberation,” as I’d anticipated. He hadn’t said “free.”
“I know,” I said. “Things are expected and yet there are so many limitations.” He had ten more years until his warrant would expire. Ten years of parole. The authorities could impose restrictions on him for years to come.
He was aware that he needed to line up work and had already applied for two positions, including a job as a housing outreach worker for people coming out of jail. He’d included Carol as one of his references. “I could probably get a job doing grunt work right away, but I want to do something I like.” For that job application, he was transparent about his time in prison. It was now his calling card.
Meanwhile, the local John Howard Society had invited him to appear at their Prisoners’ Justice Day event, and a law professor at the University of Western Ontario had invited him to speak to his students in the fall. Graham was in demand.
As we talked in the café, his eyes occasionally looked over my shoulder or out the window. It made me a little more on edge about who might be following us. I asked him if he would show me his gang tattoo with the evidence of his withdrawal. He pulled the neck of his T-shirt to one side and there it was on his freckled skin, the logo of his street crew. The colours had faded but clearly etched were the year he joined, and the year he quit. The exit year was the year he joined the book club. He offered to show me another tattoo on his arm. An image of a man with pale eyes. “My buddy who was killed,” he explained.
No matter how model a citizen Graham was now, his past was still etched on him.
When we had finished our snack, he gave me a tour of his favourite spot in the city’s main library branch—a table on the third floor near the German literature and English literature stacks. We talked about Alias Grace, because he had been away on a UTA for that book club discussion. He had liked the story but was expecting Grace to fully assume the identity of Mary Whitney or some similar twist.
That table was where he would begin work on his next slate of distance university courses the following month, using a laptop that his wife had mailed to him from her base in Manitoba. And in a few months’ time he would take part as a “human book” in the Human Library project. It was an initiative that aimed to dismantle stereotypes by asserting that each human being is like a book worthy of being discovered, and by inviting library visitors to sit down and talk with each one.
I drove him back to the halfway house, much calmer than when the visit started. His anxiety had matched my own. Anxiety was a great equalizer.
In the months that followed, Graham dazzled his parole officer and many others. After working briefly in construction, he started a successful painting company with one of his brothers. Several police conferences invited him to speak to their new recruits. And he became the star speaker at Carol’s Book Clubs for Inmates fundraisers, often telling the story of how The Boy in the Moon reached one murderer who attended the book club, whereas the system’s violence prevention programs had not. An engaging speaker, armed with a sense of humour and plenty of statistics, Graham captivated audiences. A rule preventing Canadian charities from having directors with criminal records meant that Carol couldn’t install him as a director of Book Clubs for Inmates Inc., but he became an active member of the organization.
That fall I was dismayed to discover that Gaston was back behind bars. He had left the prison on May 10, shortly after the Alias Grace discussion. He had attended one meeting of Frank’s halfway house book club, reading Shutter Island. Then in mid-August he was back in the slammer for having failed a random drug test. The test showed traces of opiates. Before returning to Collins Bay he spent fourteen days in the Don Jail in Toronto. “The worst fourteen days of my life,” he told me. The Don Jail was what the men called a “bucket,” a provincial jail that acted as a holding pen for individuals awaiting trial or convicted inmates en route to other facilities. During those two weeks he fasted for three days, ranted, yelled, screamed and banged.
The irony was that the trace opiates came from the poppy seeds on the bagels provided at breakfast by his Toronto halfway house, according to Gaston. He compiled documents reporting similar cases for his parole board hearing. A particularly compelling piece of evidence was the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons Form BP-S291(52), which acknowledges that poppy seeds may cause a positive drug test and that inmates on parole must agree not to consume them. While that seemed persuasive, in the ruthless court of the prison yard, the other inmates dubbed him “Bagel Boy.”
That fall, the parole board agreed with Gaston’s evidence about the poppy seeds and ordered his immediate release, this time to his home rather than a halfway house. A month later, I finally had an opportunity to meet him outside Collins Bay. It was on a day when he had just visited with Carol and she had given him one of her husband’s suits to wear for a job interview at an addiction treatment centre. The interview opportunity itself was also thanks to Carol working her contacts. Inspired by Carol’s generosity, I arranged to meet Gaston at the Royal Conservatory of Music café, and brought along three of my husband’s silk ties to complete his interview outfit. It had been so long since Gaston had worn a suit, he was uncertain about the required components. “Is it just the jacket and pants?” he said, showing me Bryan’s beautiful blue pinstripe jacket and trousers. I assured him that a vest was no longer necessary.
At the café I had a prosciutto cotto panini and he ordered the tuna wrap, though he was too busy talking to take a bite. Only now was he able to feel truly free, he told me in his usual rapid-fire nervous patter. During his three months at the halfway house, the burden of responsibilities was too great, he said. “Looking back now, I’m thinking, holy mackerel, how did I juggle it?” Back then, he had had to provide a complete itinerary of where he was at all times, and call the halfway house from a land line upon entering and departing a public building like a mall or library. The land-line number was proof of his location, but it meant scrambling to find increasingly rare public phone booths. When he found work on a landscaping crew, he had to phone in at the start and end of each shift. Whenever the crew drove near some of the banks he had robbed, he experienced an emotional jolt. “It brings you right back. Holy!” Once when he was late calling in, his curfew was moved up to seven o’clock as a penalty.
Gaston listed with exasperation all his other obligations from that time in the halfway house: attending weekly Community Maintenance Program meetings, AA and NA meetings, relapse prevention meetings, case management team meetings, urinalysis testing and parole officer meetings. His chores at the halfway house included vacuuming and yardwork. “Then of course my wife, my four kids, my job, my responsibilities to the church. Holy macaroni.”
So when Collins Bay released him to his own home in Toronto, not a halfway house, it took him two full we
eks to stop reaching for the phone out of habit, thinking he had to call someone to report in.
Gaston’s cellphone rang during our conversation. It was his contact for the interview. He handled it professionally, and when the interviewer asked how he knew Carol, he said he had been in her book club in prison. After it was over, I told him how great it was that he had told the truth.
“I didn’t want to, but when he asked me, I can’t lie,” he said. That was a change. I recalled another story he had told me about a different job interview back in the spring, several weeks before Collins Bay was about to release him for the first time. He did the interview by phone from prison with his parole officer in the room, and he told the potential employer a little white lie: he couldn’t take up the job immediately because he had a “big project in eastern Ontario” and didn’t want to leave his current employer in the lurch. He said his parole officer rolled her eyes.
“You know, Annie,” he said, using a name I hadn’t been called in more than thirty years, “if I had to tell you what my dream job was, it’s to work in the addictions field. Not get calluses on my hands, but put on a nice suit and tie and help people. You know I like to talk.”
As we finished our sandwiches and headed out, Gaston and I talked about his reading Shutter Island at the halfway house, then about his search for books that he and his wife could read together. “And you know what I want for Christmas?” he said, as we shook hands to say goodbye. “I told my wife I want a new reading lamp so I can read at night.”
In the months that followed, Gaston enrolled in a two-year university program in addictions and mental health and began volunteering at the addictions centre. He left landscaping and began working in a sign business, making sales calls, driving a truck and organizing the warehouse. Like many former inmates, he remained on the police radar and wound up in jail twice more for brief periods though, to the best of my knowledge, he was never convicted.
Frank’s life was so hectic that we didn’t have a chance to talk at length until some nine months later. He and his wife spoke to me from an arena where their son was playing hockey. His son’s team won the game but Frank observed that Malcolm Gladwell was right in Outliers when he said that hockey players born early in the year had an advantage over teammates born later in the same year. His son, born in November, was suddenly six inches shorter than his good friend on the team who was born in February. “He’s disadvantaged,” said Frank.
Lots had changed for Frank. He was working as a builder on a project to convert a six-car garage into a guest house on a property north of the city. It was a complete gut job and included elaborate reframing. During his six years on the lam, when he spent most of his time in the main branch of the Toronto Public Library, he had researched construction methods and materials at length.
He was still living in the halfway house and enjoying the book club there. Just like at Collins Bay and Beaver Creek, his new book club met about once a month, on a Wednesday evening after work, and they discussed books that many other mainstream book clubs were also reading, including Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces. They held their meetings off-site at a bubble-tea house or a donut shop. Because there were usually only about eight members, they could generally find a corner in which to talk. “It’s a little diversion from everyday things, and it’s interesting to hear those guys talk,” Frank told me. He had no recruiting role in the book club. Renata ran it all, and did a good job, he said. He liked that she posted notices at the halfway house advertising each book club meeting, with accompanying blurbs from inmates who had read the book before. What a great way to promote a book in-house, I thought. Not quotes from Amazon or New York Times book reviews, but from the guys themselves. If there was a film associated with a book, like Life of Pi, the book club would screen it together sometime after the book discussion.
“The Thirteenth Tale is what we’re reading now,” he said. “It’s pretty good. It’s about a voracious reader. She was raised in a bookstore.Then there’s a famous writer in England that’s dying and wants her to do her biography. The problem is, she’s had different biographers before and it’s always a lie. This one’s supposed to be the truth.” Frank’s mini-review made me want to read it.
“How would you compare your book club at the halfway house to the one at Collins Bay?” I asked.
“It’s smaller. The Beaver Creek Book Club was probably the best one. You’ve got serious readers there, who’ve read a lot of books.” As for the Collins Bay Book Club, “It gave me something to look forward to, ’cause I was bored out of my head there. At least once a month you could talk to normal people from the outside, not criminals.” I recalled that he had once told me that the book club meetings were a respite from the prison yard, where most conversation involved boasting about crime.
Ben agreed to meet me several times, including one cool April day two years after he had left Collins Bay. I waited for him at a café near his halfway house in Toronto. When he walked in the door, he was almost unrecognizable, having shorn his dreads into a short head-hugging layer of hair, revealing his forehead. A curly moustache and goatee encircled his mouth and when he came toward me smiling, his teeth blazed white. He was wearing a black leather-sleeved hoodie with its hood down. I was only finally sure it was him when he removed his reflecting aviator sunglasses, revealing his familiar downward-slanting eyes with their heavy lids.
We took our coffees outside into the sunshine, grateful for our warm jackets. I knew Ben had had a succession of jobs since leaving Collins Bay, including warehouse work for a retail store and a pretty gruelling stint staining cabinetry, which had paid eleven dollars an hour. According to Carol, he had briefly run a Cash for Gold business until a customer conned him with a fake diamond ring, setting him back seven thousand dollars. That spring he was buying cheap cars at auctions, fixing them up and selling them, making two or three thousand dollars per car. And he’d been talking to a Jamaican coffee company about a business venture to sell their products in Canada.
“You know, Ben,” I said. “I keep looking at these storefronts across the street and wondering which could be a bookshop café.” I told him I’d always hoped one of the book club members might open a bookstore. The coffee tie-in sounded ideal to me. He looked dubiously at the row of two-storey brick shops. It would be all he could do to make the coffee deal work, he explained, because he had no capital up front to invest. There was also a sizable tax bill to pay first. He took a drink from his mocha coffee and wiped the whipped cream and chocolate syrup off his beard.
Ben had continued to write his journal regularly for about a month, recording all the happy reunions with friends and family. But his writing also contained descriptions of conditions in the halfway house that made him uneasy. His first roommate talked to himself, was heavily tattooed and wore white socks so dirty that they were black. The poor health and hygiene of some of his housemates made him fastidious in the kitchen and bathroom. “You have to clean, wipe, bleach, wash before you use anything,” he wrote in his journal. As a result, he showered at the houses of family or friends.
Then we talked about books, how Carol had given him Alias Grace to read when he first entered the halfway house, and how he was now reading And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini. He mentioned the scene where Abdullah was left behind as his father took his three-year-old sister to Kabul to be adopted by another family. It had stayed with him, he said. I told him it had lingered with me too, stirring up a sharp feeling of loss and confusion. I pulled a gift for him out of my satchel: my copy of Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s novel, The Sound of Things Falling, which I had read with my women’s book club. “We have to talk about it after you’ve finished,” I told him. “One of the women in my book club identified something symbolic in the novel that the rest of us had missed and it’s a thrilling insight.”
Finally I asked him to tell me about the manslaughter charge that had landed him at Collins Bay and in Carol’s book club. Ben tol
d me his version of events. He said that people wearing courier uniforms attempted a home invasion at his townhouse. He was already suspicious about the delivery because he wasn’t expecting a package. When they first knocked, he didn’t answer the door. But when they rang the doorbell twice, he responded. He knew something was up when the courier driver didn’t have a pen for him to sign the signature pad. As Ben went back into the house, a man came running through the door with a .380-calibre pistol. “My mistake was leaving the door open,” said Ben. “So basically I had to shoot him.” He used the Glock semi-automatic pistol that he kept in his house. He told me that the robbers knew he was involved in drugs and had assumed he had money and drugs in the house. The Crown acknowledged that there were elements of self-defence in the case, but Ben was nevertheless convicted of manslaughter.
I asked him about Dread. “All I know is that he was deported to Jamaica,” I said. Ben said he had heard that Dread was building a house there and that his children were going to move to Jamaica to go to school. I remembered that Dread had once told me his dream house would have a “king’s bedroom” for the man and a “queen’s bedroom” for the woman.
“And his wife?” I asked.
He didn’t know.
“Is he still reading?”
Again Ben didn’t know. It was time to go, and we shook hands. I wished him well, as always, and reminded him to call me when he had finished the Vásquez book.
I first heard from Peter months later. He called me a couple of times from a halfway house, returned to prison for a while after what he called “a dirty piss test,” and was then back out and keen to invite Carol and me for a coffee in his small town. We agreed to meet, but Carol had to cancel at the last minute. So I packed my copy of Lisa Moore’s Caught, which I’d read in two days flat, and a copy of the children’s book Goodnight Moon because he had a friend with a child who loved books, and I drove out of the city alone to meet him. As I drove I recalled my last visit with him, in which I’d asked him to describe the room in Collins Bay that we were sitting in from a writer’s perspective. It was a different storage room from the one we usually used—one that also contained guitars, chairs and music stands but had no outside windows. Peter told me, “It’s empty, even with stuff in it. Because it’s jail.” He had a writer’s sensibility.