Eventually two reporters from local newspapers turn up, then a spokesman comes in with a press release describing the prisoner’s last meal: a pepperoni pizza with extra mushrooms and a large grape soda. Everyone is talking about the new fifteen-dollar limit on last meals and how people love talking about what they’d request. Listening to the prison guy describe the procedure for the execution—in a detached, businesslike manner—I’m glad I decided not to witness it. That’s not something I want stamped on my memory forever.
The Xanax I took to level myself out this morning is wearing off, so I’m starting to feel a bit claustrophobic and jumpy. I need to get out and get some air. But once I step outside, it’s warm and sticky—and so deadly quiet it’s hard to believe I’m surrounded by hundreds of maximum-security prisoners. I wonder what’s going on behind those walls, what all the inmates have done, and whether they know someone on death row is about to die.
I’m still keeping my eyes peeled for sniffer dogs as I pull out my camera and take a few photos—mostly of the guard towers, the high walls, and the building. Heading back toward the checkpoint, I’m trying to figure out what else I can photograph when the guard sticks his head out of his booth and tells me there are some protesters gathering just outside the main gate.
“There used to be a lot more of them but now it’s only the hardcore ones that come,” he says. “We don’t mind as long as they stay off the main road—don’t want anyone getting killed.”
I expected the guards to be gruff and aggressive but so far they seem pretty friendly—then again, I’m not a prisoner.
As I pass through the gate I see a group of people gathered in a circle by the side of the road with their heads bowed. One of them is a priest and seems to be leading everyone in prayer. I take a few shots of the group—trying to get the prison in the background, with their rosaries hanging from their hands—then I notice a young guy wearing a vintage Clash T-shirt. He’s got a video camera so I ask what he’s filming.
“A project for school,” he says, not taking his eye from the viewfinder. “I’m doing a media course and thought this could be a good story.”
He lowers the camera and we talk for a bit about incarceration, the death penalty, and how many people are in prison because of drugs. “You wouldn’t believe how many meth labs there are around here,” he tells me. “Hillbilly speed, they call it.”
A few other protesters have joined the group so I take some more pictures—crawling into the middle of the circle and lying on my back so I can shoot them silhouetted against the sky. I get some weird looks but I’m trying hard to pull some good images out of a tough situation and these finally feel like they’ll work.
When I walk back through the prison gate, I notice a sign on a little building saying OKLAHOMA STATE PENITENTIARY HISTORICAL MUSEUM, which seems totally bizarre. It’s closed, but I can see some of the exhibits through the windows. Along one wall there’s a display of all the shanks confiscated from prisoners over the years, a collection of mug shots, and a door leading to “Old Sparky,” the electric chair put into retirement when Oklahoma switched to lethal injection. I wonder who ever comes here—I doubt anyone visiting an inmate gives a shit about the history of the prison.
It’s almost six o’clock by the time I wander back to the media center, trying to imagine what’s going on in the execution chamber right now. It all seems so surreal—that as I’m standing here a bit bored, someone’s life is about to end. The minutes pass. I wonder if he’s dead yet. How long it took. What he said at the end.
I’m still standing in the parking lot when a prison van pulls up and everyone who witnessed the execution jumps out. An official heads down toward the protesters to tell them the prisoner was pronounced dead at 6:11 P.M. I see the writer—she looks a bit stunned. I’m sort of curious about what she’s thinking, but I don’t feel like asking her what it was like to watch.
The prison spokesman is talking with the two local reporters and a couple of other people I didn’t notice before. “I can’t believe he didn’t apologize,” one of them says. “He actually said his life had been a blast.”
I’m half-listening to their conversation, anxious to get going, when I overhear something that stops me cold. It turns out that when the guy who was just executed committed the murder, he was high on crack. Hearing that word usually triggers a craving, but this time it has the opposite effect. Because some of what you hear about crack making people crazy is true. It hasn’t ever affected me that way, but I’ve seen it—some people do really fucked-up shit because they’re desperate for a hit.
CHAPTER NINE
December 2006
Upper West Side, Manhattan
By December, a year after I went over to Graham’s house to get my picture taken, the ambiguity of our relationship came to a head. For most of the fall, I’d been focused on my own well-being and career, and Graham (I hoped) was busy working on his. We still talked often, and saw each other occasionally—usually in public, so we wouldn’t be tempted to fall back into bed. But I was spending more weekends away from the city, taking the train out to Montauk or driving up to the Hudson Valley with friends. I missed being with Graham, but putting a little more distance between us made me feel like I could breathe again.
That’s not to say we weren’t close. If anything, I was leaning on him more than he was leaning on me. I’d been seeing David pretty regularly, learning how to open up more as we excavated my past. It wasn’t easy for me, but I was beginning to feel things more deeply, and to express those emotions—tentatively, sometimes awkwardly—and the person I felt safest doing that with was Graham. He was a sensitive sounding board when all that mucking around in my mind got to be too intense.
Graham often mentioned his own therapist, Debi, who seemed to be helping him. He’d quote her advice about not letting frustration and anger ferment into negative thoughts, which led to irrational actions—even putting that advice into practice. He’d hang up if we were starting to get into a fight, telling me he wanted to cool down first so he didn’t say something he might regret. And his emails were more lucid, with thoughtful observations about addiction. He really did seem to be on the right track. But when we did get together—to look at art or have dinner—his mood sometimes shifted abruptly, and I couldn’t tell if drugs were to blame.
He swore he’d been off heroin since his detox in June. “I’m not using,” he insisted whenever I asked. At that point, that was the truth in Graham’s head: “Using” meant heroin; crack or prescription drugs were different. It was almost like he’d bought into that “at least I’m not a junkie” mentality. But at the time, I didn’t know for sure where he was on the recovery spectrum. He’d drop hints occasionally, admitting he wasn’t “one hundred percent,” which was the main reason I wasn’t rushing into getting back together.
In some sense, we were in the same place as when we first started dating—except there was no question that I still loved him. I just didn’t know if I could ever be with him again. That uncertainty was tearing him apart, so as the holidays rolled around, he started pushing for some kind of resolution, emailing me the question I wasn’t ready to address.
When you get back from thanksgiving can we sit down and talk about us? it’s been a long time and much as i want to be with you, wake up with you, share my life with you i can’t live indefinately in a sort of limbo just waiting. its not the torture it used to be - thank fuck! but i find it hard not to reach out and hold your hand or hug you or give you a kiss. so you see i’m still walking a tight rope in some respects - and i don’t wanna fall.
It was mid-December by the time we made plans to meet. But when I emailed Graham on Friday asking when he wanted to get together over the weekend, he didn’t write back. At first I was relieved—I didn’t know what I was going to tell him. But by Saturday night, I was pissed. How did he expect me to even consider rekindling our relationship when he couldn’t be bothered to answer my message?
On Sunday morning I got a
call from his ex-wife Anna, asking if I’d heard from Graham.
“Actually, we were supposed to see each other this weekend,” I told her. “But I haven’t heard from him so I’m not sure what’s going on.”
“He’s been arrested,” she said, without further preamble. “There was an explosion at his house that blew out some of the windows. Liam found out when he went over to see Graham.”
I was stunned. “An explosion?”
“I don’t think they know what caused it, but there was glass everywhere and now the police are searching the house.”
“Is Graham okay?”
“It doesn’t sound like anyone was hurt.”
I was too shocked to ask anything else. After we hung up, I immediately hopped on the subway to Brooklyn. This I had to see for myself.
—
WHEN I GOT to Graham’s house, it was officially a crime scene, with yellow police tape stretched across the front door, plywood covering the windows, and a plainclothes officer standing guard outside.
Just like the night I surprised Graham on New Year’s Eve, I had to muster up the courage to open the gate and walk up the steps. Masquerading as a nosy neighbor, I asked the cop what was going on.
He was happy to share plenty of theories with me—and apparently, anyone else who asked: an explosive device, possibly a meth lab, something about a weapon.
A bomb? Crystal meth? A weapon? I knew Graham was hiding things from me, but none of that sounded at all like him.
“He’s not a terrorist or a drug dealer,” I wanted to say, but then I realized I should keep my mouth shut. I didn’t want this guy asking if I knew the owner of the house, which might lead to other questions.
So instead of meeting Graham to talk about whether our relationship had a future, I met Anna at the Brooklyn courthouse to try to find out what had happened. We barely knew each other, but we were both relieved to be navigating this ordeal together.
It was a surreal introduction to the city’s criminal justice system, which seemed designed to punish those of us deemed guilty by association—with someone who hadn’t been convicted. The phone numbers we were given by the police rang without anyone picking up. At the courthouse downtown, the information window opened sporadically without revealing any answers. Every couple of hours, a clerk would tape a sheet of paper to the wall listing the defendants due to be arraigned in the next session. We’d all crowd around to search for a name, then sit back down on the hard wooden benches.
For a while, the cop-show quality of the experience distracted me from the emotional impact of the day’s events. But as the afternoon faded into evening and Anna left to get dinner for Liam, there was no escape from the questions ricocheting around my head. Was this all some post 9/11 overreaction, exacerbated by Graham’s foreign accent and anti-authoritarian temper? Or was he guilty of crimes I couldn’t even imagine?
The waiting, the not knowing, was excruciating, finally propelling me to approach the information window again—to take action.
“Your first time here?” asked the male clerk who had taken over window duty. The question bordered on flirtatious, so I seized the opportunity to get some answers.
“It is,” I said, playing the girl in over her head. “This is all kind of overwhelming so I’m hoping you can help me—I’m trying to find out what happened to my friend.”
It turned out Graham had been arrested on a drug possession charge, a misdemeanor. But there was a problem with the paperwork, the clerk told me—a sketchy search warrant, I guessed. He said he doubted that Graham’s case would be heard that night.
“Is there any information about an explosion?” I asked. “Or a weapons charge?”
The clerk typed, then paused, then typed some more, staring at a monitor that looked like it was decades old. Trying to look grateful, I leaned in, hoping to see what was written on his screen.
“I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you,” he said, abruptly clicking something that made the text on his computer disappear. I thanked him and returned to my seat.
It was almost midnight when I left the courthouse, but before going home I stopped by Graham’s house and used my key to let myself in. The cop and the yellow police tape were gone, but it still looked like a crime scene. I was stunned by the violence of the mess.
Whatever the police were searching for, they were way more thorough than I’d ever been—pouring boxes of cereal and cans of coffee on the floor, ripping open couch cushions, emptying drawers, pulling books from the shelves, all left in piles that suggested an angry trajectory.
I didn’t turn on any lights, but the streetlamps lit random objects in the shadows. In the bedroom downstairs, I picked up a box from a pregnancy test we’d once bought, an unused wand still intact. That’s where I’d stashed the crack pipe I found the night of my book party, hiding the box in a wicker hamper. The pipe was gone. Had the cops found it? I panicked as I realized I never threw it away.
That was followed by relief that the pregnancy scare was a false alarm. I couldn’t imagine having a child with someone who was locked up in jail, but I felt bad for Anna—and Liam. I hoped he hadn’t come inside and seen any of this.
Down the hall in Graham’s office, I couldn’t find his laptop, my mind racing through all the emails we’d sent mentioning drugs. Could they be used as evidence? Would I have to testify about what I knew? Then again, I didn’t know anything that might explain what led to this destruction.
Stepping through the chaos, I noticed there were photos scattered on the floor, as if a pile had been picked up from the desk, thumbed through, and tossed aside. They were pictures from our trip to Hawaii, but now the happy caption I’d imagined had changed.
Seeing my face trampled on the floor felt like a personal violation—a hot flash of lightning cutting through the brewing storm of my outrage. The cops had made a wreck of the most intimate parts of our lives, but Graham had exposed us to this. This was where his drug habit led.
—
THE NEXT DAY, I went by myself to the arraignment, sliding across a bench in the courtroom where a bailiff directed me. I hadn’t eaten or slept much, so I leaned my head on my hand for support, looking up when the door at the back of the room opened and a line of defendants shuffled in.
I saw Graham before he noticed me, a jolt of recognition that made my heart race as I visually patted him down, searching for clues. He was wearing jeans, sneakers, and a navy hooded sweatshirt—typical attire on the streets of New York, but in a courtroom, his outfit said “hoodlum.” At first I was relieved that he seemed okay, not visibly hurt or dope sick, which I took as a sign that maybe he hadn’t been using.
But once he looked my way, we had a charged silent exchange, communicating all the emotions of the moment through an intense long-distance stare. He seemed surprised to see me, but not necessarily glad I was there, gratitude and shame trading places on his face as he reached up to brush a finger under his eye, then fix his hair.
The message I sent was a calculated combination of worry, disappointment, and anger—communicated through the slump of my body, the hardened line of my lips, and the watery blink of my gaze. As much as I told myself I’d gone to the arraignment because I needed to find out what had happened, I was mostly there because I wanted him to see how I felt. He once told me he was always taking pictures in his head—that he didn’t need a camera—so this was one image I wanted him to have.
It still wasn’t clear if Graham was guilty of any crime, and the brief proceedings didn’t produce any answers. When his case was called, a heavy, court-appointed lawyer shuffled up to represent him, a cliché with his stack of folders and harried manner. But no one from the police department or the DA’s office was there to present any evidence, so the judge adjourned the hearing, setting bail at $1,500.
The mention of bail took me by surprise, since that wasn’t the reason I’d gone to the arraignment. I had no idea how to bail someone out of jail. I also wasn’t sure I wanted to do Graham that f
avor.
—
IT WAS A week before Christmas, and for the next twenty-four hours, I felt like I was living inside my own Dickensian tale, escorted by ghosts from the future, present, and past. But mostly it was the ghost from the future that held my hand, showing me a life I didn’t want to have.
After a crash course in posting bail, via Google and calls to lawyers and the New York City Department of Correction, I learned that a bondsman wouldn’t handle a measly $1,500 bail. I’d have to pay it in person—and because the fax machine at the Manhattan Detention Complex wasn’t working, I’d have to go to Rikers Island, where Graham had been transferred.
This information was communicated to me by an unhelpful clerk—as if the connection between a broken fax machine and my bail money made perfect sense.
I was tempted to let Graham stew in a cell until his next hearing, and didn’t especially want to drain my bank account on his behalf. But Anna had called his parents in Scotland, and they’d promised to wire the money, so I said I’d handle the payment. They couldn’t stand the thought of their son spending Christmas in jail—and as mad as I was, neither could I.
Still, I was nervous about going out to Rikers Island carrying $1,500 in cash. On the subway, I kept reaching into my bag to feel the thick envelope of bills, sure I was telegraphing “mug me” to anyone who looked my way. When I got out of the subway in Queens, I had to ask a traffic cop where to catch the bus to Rikers Island, mortified to admit where I was headed. But once I boarded the nearly empty bus, I relaxed a little—I wasn’t likely to get robbed on a shuttle to jail.
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