Chancers

by Susan Stellin

  “Very few immigrant detainees get bond,” Michael answered, eyeing my note-taking warily. “And he isn’t eligible because he’s got a drug conviction.”

  “So a citizen who murdered somebody can get out on bail, but Graham—who already served his sentence, for a misdemeanor—has to stay locked up?” In my role as Graham’s proxy, I found myself channeling his temper (minus the swearing).

  “I know it doesn’t sound fair, but the laws have gotten a lot stricter lately.”

  “What about getting his checkbook? Graham said it’s with his property at York, so doesn’t ICE have to give it to him, so he can pay for his defense?”

  “He’s in prison and he’s not a citizen, so I’m afraid he doesn’t have a lot of rights in this situation—but we can ask.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. As much as I knew about how badly immigrants were treated, a lot of this was still news to me.

  Michael told me he’d send Graham a form so he could grant me or Anna power of attorney over his finances, but Graham would have to get it notarized in prison and we’d have to get it approved by his bank. Then he introduced me to his paralegal, Maria, explaining that Graham could call her collect anytime (You’ll regret that, I thought) and that she’d handle the paperwork for his case.

  Maria was reassuringly efficient—making phone calls, faxing documents, putting things in motion—but a bit deadpan as she answered my questions. Her take on Graham’s arrest record: “I’ve seen worse.” Where he was being held: “It’s not as bad as other prisons.” The fact that ICE hadn’t officially charged him yet: “That’s not good. It could be a sign that they plan to move him.”

  “What should I put as your relationship?” she asked.

  “My relationship?”

  “With Graham.”

  “Oh. How about guardian angel?” I joked, finally eliciting a smile. “I guess ex-girlfriend sounds too bizarre, so why don’t you just say friend.”

  After Maria finished filling out forms, she handed me a two-page list of documents Graham needed to submit, explaining that she’d also send a copy to him. At the top it said: “Preparing for your final deportation hearing may be the most important thing you do in your life!” As I scanned the list—pay stubs, bank statements, proof of stable residence, marriage certificate, college diploma, inmate record, letters from family, friends, and employers discussing “your good moral character,” etc.—I could feel my hope seeping away.

  “Um, just looking at this list, I’m wondering how Graham is supposed to get all these documents if he’s in a prison in Pennsylvania?”

  “Someone will have to do it for him,” Maria said.

  Someone? Almost everything Graham owned was in storage. The key to that storage unit was being held by the New York City Police Department, along with his laptop. Even if Anna and I could get his key and find half of these documents, the firm also needed Graham’s last seven tax returns, which I was pretty sure hadn’t all been filed.

  “The thing is, he sold his house before he got arrested, so all his stuff is in storage. And to be honest, he was really a mess the last few years so I’m guessing he may not be totally up-to-date with his taxes.”

  “The judge is going to have a serious problem with that,” Maria said.

  I felt like telling her to tear up the retainer I’d just signed and give me back the check I’d just written. There was no way Anna and I could gather everything on this list. But before I hit the eject button, I figured I should at least talk to Graham, so I thanked Maria for her help and headed for the exit, clutching the thick folder of documents she gave me.

  As I waited for the elevator, all I could think about was something Anna had said: “Once the lawyer is hired, it’s out of our hands.”

  I never thought it would be that easy—that we could just hire an attorney, give Graham the firm’s number, wish him luck, and hope for the best. But I certainly didn’t expect to get drawn into anything like this nightmare. And I definitely wasn’t going to deal with his taxes.

  —

  ON THE WAY home on the subway, I mulled over what I was going to say to Graham: Sorry to get your hopes up, but I just can’t take on such a huge challenge….All your stuff is in storage, and I’m sure it’s a mess….I know I said you should fight it, but maybe a change of scenery would actually be good.

  I felt guilty that I couldn’t help him, but by that night I was sure he’d understand. Except once again, Graham didn’t call. At first I was irritated: even off drugs, in prison, with nothing else to do, couldn’t he follow through on a simple task? But when he didn’t call the next day or the day after that, I started to worry, convinced he was on his way to Texas. Yet when I called Maria, she confirmed that the ICE database said he was still in Pennsylvania. She had no idea what might’ve happened.

  On Saturday morning, my phone finally rang, followed by the prison preamble.

  “Sorry I haven’t called,” Graham said. “I was in the hole.”

  “The hole?”

  “The box—solitary. They packed me up to ship me out a few days ago—again—but for some reason they didn’t put me on the bus. Then the guards didn’t know what to do with me so they threw me in the hole.”

  “Shit. Did they say why?”

  “Are you kidding? No one except you has told me a fucking thing. I haven’t seen a judge, there’s no counselor to talk to, I haven’t gotten anything from the lawyer—”

  “You didn’t get the package they sent? It should’ve gotten there by now.”

  “No, only a letter from you. And I still don’t have any money on my commissary so I can’t buy stamps or envelopes or paper or a thermal top—it’s fucking freezing in here. Everyone walks around huddled under a blanket.”

  “Wait—Anna put a hundred and fifty dollars in your account, like ten days ago.”

  “They told me my balance was zero.”

  Weeks later, Graham would get a printout showing that someone from ICE withdrew Anna’s deposit, then a day later voided the withdrawal. This happened twice—both times, just before inmates were allowed to place their commissary orders for the week. Mail delivery was equally unreliable. Besides the lost package from the law firm, some of the letters I sent came back saying the forwarding order for “Mariners Choice Marine” had expired. It took me weeks to figure out that ICE had listed the wrong address for York County Prison on its website, and the boating company down the street had apparently moved.

  At first I chalked up all these problems to the incompetence of a big government bureaucracy, but after a while it started to feel like a deliberate campaign. The pricey phone calls, the blocked commissary deposits, the out-of-state transfers, the erratic mail—the whole system seemed designed to isolate detainees, so they’d give up and agree to leave.

  “I’ll ask Anna to find out what happened with her deposit,” I told Graham. “And I’ll call Maria and see if she can send another package. But you should try calling her, too—just don’t go off on any rants. I know you’re frustrated, but it’s not going to help your case if you piss off the people who are supposed to defend you.”

  “I’m not going to yell at anyone,” Graham insisted, noticeably softening his voice. “But I’m pretty fucking fed up. My situation has only gotten worse since I’ve been here. I feel like I’m trapped in one of those mazes where every time you turn a corner and think you’re getting closer to the exit, you hit a dead end. And even if I wanted to sign out, I don’t have a fucking passport, so everyone says I could get stuck here for months waiting for a new one.”

  That was my opening to tell Graham there was only so much I could do for him, that maybe he should throw in the towel and sign out. But I was so shocked by the way he was being treated, just as the September 11 anniversary and all its bombastic patriotism rolled around, I couldn’t do it. I didn’t think I could live with myself if I turned my back.

  Graham had been plunged into the kind of nightmare most Americans think only happens in other countrie
s—usually, not democracies—where people get thrown in prison with no rights. But now it was happening here, to someone I knew and still cared about, all over a civil immigration matter. Graham had already done time for his crime.

  As the injustice of his situation became clearer—the privatized prison companies profiting from locking people up, government officials lying about the immigrants they were deporting (Graham was hardly a “serious criminal”)—my motivation kept shifting, moving from worry and concern to outrage and anger. So when Graham told me that he’d been thrown in solitary confinement because some guard didn’t know what else to do with him, I got drawn into his battle. And to be honest, at that point it became mine.

  —

  OF COURSE, NOT everyone who knew me understood why I was helping Graham, or believed me when I tried to explain my intentions.

  “I’d rather see you invest that energy in trying to meet someone else,” one friend told me.

  Other people were less direct, but the message was still clear: I must be nuts to rush to the aid of my junkie crackhead ex-boyfriend, especially now that he’d landed in prison. And that was fine—I expected a few raised eyebrows directed my way. But after describing Graham’s plight and trying to justify what I was doing for him, I finally realized why it made some people uncomfortable: because they wouldn’t have done it. And that was fine, too—but it still bothered me. No matter what Graham had done, I didn’t think he deserved what was happening to him.

  The person I leaned on most was my friend Alex, who was shocked by Graham’s situation and didn’t question why I’d gotten involved in his case. If it hadn’t been for her support, I’m not sure I would’ve seen it through to the end.

  “I feel like you’re just beginning on this journey,” she told me, one night when I was feeling overwhelmed. “You’ve elected to do it, you feel compelled to do it, and your gut is going to have to tell you if you’re okay with it.”

  “Yeah, but am I crazy to be doing it?” I asked.

  “I think you’re being driven for reasons we don’t fully understand,” Alex said.

  —

  ON SEPTEMBER 13, three weeks after Graham was taken into ICE custody, he finally saw a judge—but the law firm wasn’t notified about his hearing in time, so it was postponed until the end of the month. Maria told me that that was still good news: It meant that he wouldn’t be transferred out of Pennsylvania.

  With that worry off the table, we moved on to preparing Graham’s case. After hiding so much for so long, he had to open up his whole life to my scrutiny—which was terrifying for him, but tantalizing to the sleuth lurking in me. He gave me the password to his email account, permission to access his storage unit, and a notarized letter saying I could pick up his property from the police. Somehow he managed to get ahold of his checkbook, so he also sent me a bunch of signed blank checks—a risky move, but it took so long to get the power of attorney approved, it was the only way I could access his money.

  None of this was easy—each task had some complication we had to solve—and we still had to deal with his taxes.

  I called Graham’s accountant and explained what had happened to him—one of many times I’d have that conversation, paving the way for Graham to follow up with a letter. She told me she didn’t think she could do much to help, since he’d blown a chance to work things out with the IRS, then shared her own frustrations with his slide into addiction.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said, not waiting for my consent. “Why are you doing this for him?”

  When I hesitated, she chimed in with an answer: “Well, it must be love.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I stammered. “I mean, obviously I still care about him, but the main reason I’m doing this is that he’s in a horrible situation and I think it would be devastating for him if he got deported.”

  Then I thanked her for whatever documents she could find and hung up, unnerved by her romantic assumption.

  Love? Graham was now a twice-divorced, unemployed, recovering addict with a prison record—who’d lost his brownstone and ruined his credit. I really didn’t swoop in to save him because I thought we’d get back together. For one thing, I had no idea if he’d end up winning his case. And even if he did get to stay, Graham still had a lot of problems he needed to address. From what I could tell, he’d gotten clean but he hadn’t really dealt with the emotions that made him turn to drugs for relief, and being in jail certainly hadn’t helped with that challenge.

  Maybe I still loved him, but from everything I wrote or remember feeling at that time, I had two major reservations about Graham. First of all, I wasn’t sure if he’d be able to stay clean over the long haul, and more importantly, I didn’t know if I could ever really trust him.

  —

  THE DAY AFTER Graham got out of solitary confinement, I went to the Brooklyn Book Festival downtown, hoping to meet Piper Kerman—author of the memoir Orange Is the New Black. She was taking part in a panel discussion titled “Exposing a Difficult Past,” talking about the year she spent in a women’s prison. Since I was having trouble talking about Graham’s difficult present, even to friends, I was riveted by everything she said.

  Afterward, I lined up with other fans waiting for Piper to sign our books. When it was my turn, I was nervous to admit—out loud, in front of strangers—that my ex-boyfriend was in immigration detention, but I blurted out Graham’s story and she nodded sympathetically, saying that she’d heard those facilities were pretty grim.

  I asked if she had any advice about how to help Graham maintain his sanity, especially since just a few days in solitary had rattled his already fragile state of mind.

  “Letters,” Piper said. “Send him lots of letters.”

  So I did. And he wrote back—surprisingly thoughtful, confessional letters. And that old-fashioned correspondence was how Graham and I really reconnected, our unlikely present circumstances churning up our unresolved past.

  “Thanks for your letters,” Graham wrote me, early on in our postal exchange. “They make a bad day a bit better and an okay day even more okay. I must admit that if it weren’t for your intervention in this whole mess I would probably just be trying to go back to Scotland—cut my losses + start all over again. It might still come to that, but hopefully not. So I’m gonna be grateful to you one way or another ’coz you took a lot of time out of your life and in a selfless way thought about my wellbeing + future—a rare + beautiful thing. But if it gets to be too much don’t be scared to say enough is enough, okay? I’m saying that truly but hoping it’s not the case!”

  I was scared to say “enough is enough” but I wasn’t afraid to be blunt about other things, like telling him he needed to come up with a plan A and a plan B for his future (in America or Britain), step up and be a better dad to Liam, and consider some kind of drug treatment program wherever he landed. Graham was adamant that he didn’t want to go to a halfway house—“I’ve had enough of living with men snoring, farting, and burping all night long,” he told me—so I pressed him on what changes he was willing to make.

  What I wonder is really the same as the questions I was asking you a few years ago: What do you want, what’s it going to take to make it happen, and are you willing to do those things? It’s that last part I’m not sure about with you.

  I still have this nagging feeling you’re looking for an angle or a shortcut. And honestly, that’s what weighs on me as I’m doing all this to give you one last chance—and I do think it’s your last chance, Graham. Because if this hell isn’t enough motivation to get you to make some serious changes, to let go of your pride and your stubbornness and get some help so you actually have a shot at staying clean, no matter what side of the Atlantic you end up on, I think any relapse, if that happens, is going to lead to a bad ending. That would be a particularly crushing blow, but it’s a risk I’m taking—once again betting on you and hoping that this time you’ll prove me right.

  It’s not that Graham was reluctant to be honest
about his struggle with addiction; he’d write pages and pages about how it had taken him down. He was finally acknowledging all these things he couldn’t see or admit when we were together, so I was getting the truth I’d been so desperate to hear. It didn’t matter that it had taken years to get there. I’d rush to open the mailbox every night, still trying to come to terms with the fact that I had a pen pal in prison—the same way Graham couldn’t believe he was inmate #160863.

  Sometimes I think to myself “How the fuck did I end up in this situation?” And you know what? It’s an easy answer: addiction, selfishness + lies—in a nutshell.

  Addiction is a motherfucker. Coz you don’t think it’ll affect you when you start doing drugs, you convince yourself you can quit anytime you want (especially if you’ve kicked before). You don’t want anyone to know so you lie about it—the whole situation gets depressing + unsurmountable! So you get high to take away the pain of not being able to quit—and on the few occasions that people reach out + try + help, you push them away usually lying to them coz your so embarrassed + ashamed + the admission of addiction—to the addict—it’s like an admission of failure. You see yourself as being weak, lacking in spirit, strength, morals, faith, whatever + it leaves one open to being judged by people who’ve never been in your shoes. Then fear and self-loathing send you back to what you know will take that away and to people who do know—other addicts. They understand, they’ll take my side, they’re my pals—that’s how your mind convinces you to use again, to run from the truth right back into the arms of the devil.

  Anyway, it is what it is and I’m alive + not dead, I can think clearly + not in a blur, I can be honest + not lie. And for all that I’m grateful. This losing my freedom has taught me a lot. A 78-year old heroin addict that I used to spend hours talking to used to say to me “Graham, everything happens for a reason” and it drove me crazy ’coz of course everything happens for a reason or it wouldn’t happen. But now I’m sort of understanding what he meant by that. I’m in jail for a reason—and not the obvious one—getting arrested for drugs—no I’m here to save my life ’coz if I didn’t get put in jail who knows what could have happened to me!