Getting arrested probably did save Graham’s life, but prison was definitely wearing him down. On the phone, he was often angry, ranting about the disgusting food, the crushing boredom, and the racist comments some of the guards made. As one of the few white people in immigration custody, he often benefited from that prejudice, but he still identified with the other detainees, dressed in the orange jumpsuits they had to wear.
“We look like people from Guantánamo Bay,” Graham once told me.
I knew he was far better off than any of the Gitmo detainees—and so did he—but I still couldn’t get that image out of my head.
Hoping to lift his spirits, I tried to balance out my lecturing letters with reading material that offered more of an escape: copies of articles I thought he’d like, news about the photography world, jokes a friend used to email me, and New Yorker cartoons—like one of a guy telling his therapist, “I do count my blessings, but then I end up counting those of others who have more and better blessings, and that pisses me off.” And sometimes I just injected a little humor into how I described all the shit I was dealing with on his behalf—a joking tone tinged with a little resentment.
After a failed attempt to retrieve Graham’s property from the police, I sent him a play-by-play of my maddening outing.
11:00 a.m.—Change into skirt and heels—helpful for upcoming errand.
11:15 a.m.—Catch cab to go to Gold St. to pick up your property. Cab driver has no idea where Gold St. is so I have to direct him. At end of ride he says, “Wait, you’re going to the police station!?!” then wishes me luck.
11:30 a.m.—Lazy police officer won’t look at all the paperwork I show him. Because he just sees the pink voucher for the knife, he says that’s arrest evidence and I need a release from the DA. Sends me to the courthouse for that.
12:00 noon—Arrive at courthouse. As usual, get treated nicer than everyone else because I’m a) white, b) female and c) wearing a skirt. Nice guard practically offers to escort me upstairs. Sit down to wait in another dismal hallway with wooden benches. Annoyed guy at the window keeps turning around complaining that the clerk is on the phone, having a personal conversation. I get even more annoyed than him about the mind-numbing bureaucracy and ask woman next to me—who seems like a lawyer—if she knows why I need this DA release. She looks at the form and tells me it’s arrest evidence but that I shouldn’t need a DA release for the other stuff. I silently curse lazy officer at property pick-up and thank her.
12:45 p.m.—Back to Gold St. Same idiot yells at me to wait outside. I finally get allowed in and he tells me I need a voucher for your bag, laptop, keys, etc. or at least a voucher number. No amount of pleading (or the skirt) will convince him to look up one number plus or minus the number on the voucher I do have (for the knife), which I shouldn’t be given anyway at this point because I’ll use it on someone. He tells me I need to go to the police precinct and they can look up the number for me. Hey, guess where the 76th precinct is? Right by my house!
2:00 p.m.—Enter police precinct, where nice but slow-moving older lady at first reacts as if I’ve asked for something impossible, like a ride to the moon, but finally looks through all my paperwork and goes and gets a binder with all the voucher forms for May arrests. She uses the eraser end of a pencil to flip through the pages (slowly), stops to take a phone call, steps away to speak to the sergeant, finally finds your form and by now likes me enough to make a photocopy for me. She even takes the time to check and see where your property is: 508 Pearson Place, in Queens—not Gold St.
2:30 p.m.—Get home and call # for Pearson Place, which it turns out is near the 7 train. Nice guy on the phone checks to see if your stuff is there, which it is, except for the bike, which went to Kingsland Ave. and the 2 watches, which are at Gold St. Of course, Pearson Place is only open M-F from 7:30 to 2:30, but he confirms that your laptop, cameras, keys, etc. are in fact there. Why would they send the watches somewhere else? No idea. He assures me it will only take 15 minutes, not 2 hours, to find your stuff once I show up.
But when I went to Pearson Place a couple of days later, it didn’t take fifteen minutes—it took almost an hour. Once I got to the right window, at the right warehouse, I couldn’t catch the eye of anyone drinking coffee, chatting, or reading the paper in the room beyond the partition where I was standing, until someone finally noticed me and said (to no one in particular), “You have a customer.” The overweight officer who eventually sauntered over looked at the form I handed him, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, sighed, and said, “This is going to be mass confusion.”
After he walked away, I watched him fiddle with the knobs on a box across the room, wondering what he was doing—maybe the box had codes to wherever property was kept?—but it turned out to be a radio, which I realized when the Beatles song “Got to Get You into My Life” came on and everyone started swaying to the beat. Then he disappeared, leaving me to ponder the big stuffed dog in a cage on the floor with a sign saying PEARSON—BAD DOG and a withered plant (also in the cage) with another sign warning, DO NOT WATER OR TOUCH PLANT.
It took him so long to come back with Graham’s bag, I had plenty of time to conclude that this was probably where people who couldn’t get demoted any further ended up. They knew they were being punished, and the only power they had left was to punish whoever showed up at their dreary workplace. But I still wanted to shout, “I’m not a criminal, so stop treating me like one!”
—
BY LATE SEPTEMBER, I felt like I was doing time with Graham. For a month I’d been juggling work and friends with this parallel life—taking care of someone in prison—and that burden was starting to weigh me down. There were a few friends I confided in, but I hadn’t told my family yet. I had the courage of my convictions, but I didn’t want to deal with anyone else’s doubt—which doesn’t mean I didn’t ever waver.
“I’m seeing the point where this gets to be too much for me,” I wrote in my notebook one bleak afternoon. “I don’t know if it’s the taxes or sorting through all these depressing papers or if it was Graham annoying me on the phone yesterday—but I’m getting irritated. And the thought of this taking many more months makes me think of that infamous quote by the BP head after the Gulf oil spill: I want my life back, too.”
But when I wrote Graham that night, I didn’t mention feeling responsible for his well-being, or my anxiety about not knowing who he really was. I knew there was only so much he could handle behind bars. So I sometimes held back about my own frustrations and insecurities—but not entirely. I needed him to know how this was affecting me.
Your last letter was a bit of a downer. The one about all the people you’d met and what minor offenses they’d committed that were going to change their lives forever. Not that you shouldn’t write about it, but sometimes I think you don’t realize that it’s not easy to be immersed in this and then hang up the phone and finish an article or go out to dinner or listen to a band.
Another trippy thing is flipping through all your papers: the marriage certificates, divorce settlements, little scraps of paper with names of rehab centers, lists of how many bags of crack or heroin you bought, all the to-do references to your taxes—and one note that says “Learn Spanish” that made me laugh. Plus all the drops of blood on your bills and unopened mail you just couldn’t face. None of it is really a surprise at this point, but it’s sad to be sorting through all the artifacts of your unraveling. And then when I talk to you on the phone, it’s like I’m speaking to someone else. Maybe you don’t appreciate that yet, but you already sound so different—in a good way.
Even if it seems like you couldn’t possibly put up with months of this, just remember you’re going to be in a much better place when it’s all over, free of many of the burdens you couldn’t deal with for so long. That’s what I keep thinking as I’m sorting through everything—how chaotic your life was these past few years. Well, longer. I guess I always knew that much of this started when you were with Liz, but now it’s r
eally clear that it way pre-dated me showing up on your doorstep.
The truth had trickled out letter by letter, but by then Graham had admitted that he’d been using long before we started dating. It hadn’t been a relapse, and it had nothing to do with my inability to tell him I loved him. Even though I already knew both of those things, it was still important to hear Graham say it. He had always hoped that love would save him from addiction, so I wanted him to know that wasn’t going to happen—with any woman, not just me.
Here’s another observation (you’ll probably wish that I’d go back to being silently brooding): I don’t think there’s a woman on this planet who could possibly fulfill the expectations you have for a relationship—and yet, probably when you least expected it, I showed up for reasons maybe neither of us will ever quite understand. I think you’ll find that if you’re more grounded in yourself and can keep all these insecurities at bay—not to mention getting drugs out of your life—you’ll have a better shot at getting the love you want. OK, I’m done lecturing now….
All in all, Graham took my admonishing letters fairly well. He’d been off drugs for five months, and I was starting to see how much of a difference it made. There were still flashes of anger, but also this sense of acceptance I didn’t think I’d feel if I were in his shoes. One of the letters he sent me, written on the back of a “notice of hearing in removal proceedings,” sounded like he’d been on some kind of Buddhist retreat.
I’m sitting with 13 other people waiting to go into court and it’s amazing how patient you get after months of dealing with a bureaucracy that cares nothing about how long you wait for anything—from sick call, to mail, to notary public, to laundry—you name it. I used to get mad but now here I am sitting in this holding cell on a metal bench dressed in orange and I’m patient—It’s a sort of serenity that comes from knowing that anger, frustration, self-pity, blame—all do nothing to help your state of mind when you’re incarcerated. You can only fuck up your own head + that (in my case) has had enough of being fucked up, confused, medicated + convinced by it’s own self that what I’m doing/have done is/was OK. Now I have what people call clarity of mind.
It’s a weird thing ’coz memories come flooding back to me and leave me full of regret, sadness, pain + anger—but also I have many good + happy memories. It’s just that in the present situation the ones that hit home + kick you in the arse are the bad ones. I’ve lost a lot Susan—financially, emotionally, relationship-wise, friends—but I’ve learned a lot too. Anyway I’ve got to go into court now. This is on a poster in the councilors room:
We do not see things as they are.
We see things as we are.
Because of the weird time warp we were in—letters arriving a week after we’d talked—I already knew that the hearing had gone well. Graham told me that the judge said he didn’t see any reason why his request for “relief from removal” would be denied. But that preliminary opinion hinged on all the paperwork we had to gather, so I moved on to the next item on my to-do list: retrieving Graham’s stuff from the housing project where he’d been living. It was only six blocks from my apartment, but it might as well have been an ocean away.
All I knew about Graham’s former roommate, Joe, was that he was a black man in his fifties who used to work for the city but was on disability because of some health problems. “He’s really protective of me,” Graham warned—and he wasn’t kidding. It took weeks of phone calls to get Joe to agree to let me come over, and when I arrived, everyone hanging out by the entrance seemed just as wary.
A feeling of neglect permeated the whole building, as if the people who lived there didn’t deserve bright hallways or an elevator that didn’t groan like it was about to break down. Once Joe let me into his apartment—clean enough, but still dark and shabby—he whisked me straight into the bedroom and pointed to a pile spilling out of the closet and onto the floor. It was way more than I expected: clothes, cameras, shoes, negatives, notebooks, CDs, and a box of papers. Picturing Graham holed up there, like an injured animal that had crawled out of sight, was even more depressing than picturing him in jail.
After I stuffed what I could into the bags I had brought—discarding XXL hoodies and bootleg DVDs—Joe led me into the living room, where a large gray-haired woman sitting on the couch glared at me like I’d come to evict her.
“Hi,” I said, awkwardly. “I’m Susan.”
“A little late for that,” she snapped. “You walked right by when you came in. Never seen anybody so rude.”
I apologized profusely—thinking it was really Joe’s fault, for not introducing me—and she warmed up after I told her why I was there. Everyone, it seemed, had a soft spot for Graham. After I packed up some more things Joe had hidden, he helped me drag everything downstairs. I just hoped there wasn’t a stray crack pipe or dope bag in any of the clothes I had grabbed. I’d checked the pockets, but not that carefully.
While Joe and I waited for the car service I’d called, a guy named Tye came over to chat. He was a bit younger than me, in good shape and sharply dressed—he didn’t strike me as a crackhead or a junkie. I knew Tye was friends with Graham, but that didn’t stop him from giving me an earful about how bad Graham was at the end.
“If he hadn’t gotten locked up, I don’t know what would’ve happened. That boy was heading down a path where there was no turning back.”
Just as he was going off about Tracy and all the shit she had pulled, a skinny woman named Kia walked up and chimed in: “That bitch was a nightmare. He had to sell his house just to get rid of her, and then she still wouldn’t leave him alone.”
I was surprised by how much they all cared about Graham. Clearly, he wasn’t just some white guy who came to the projects to buy drugs—he was embedded there, they were all friends. But if he did win his case, they didn’t want to see him end up back in their midst.
When I mentioned I thought Graham should do some kind of outpatient program once he got out, Tye said, “Hell no, he had his chance at that outpatient shit. Graham is way beyond that. He needs some serious fucking rehab.” Kia and Joe both nodded their heads.
I knew they were right, but that consensus still threw me. If Graham’s pals from the projects could see the depths of his addiction—but he resisted getting help—what were the odds that he’d ever stay clean? That was the main thing I worried about as I ran all over the city, trying to give him that chance. Even if he won his case, all that effort might still go to waste.
—
ONCE I GOT home, I had just enough time to sort through Graham’s stuff, pull out any papers that seemed useful, and dump the rest in the basement before my parents arrived. Since they had no idea I was back in touch with Graham, I’d asked him not to call while they were in town.
For the next three days, I lived life solely in the outside world. We went to the opera (passing back and forth my parents’ huge binoculars), walked all over the city, and celebrated my dad’s birthday—this time, meeting my friend Alex and her husband for dinner. It was one of our better visits: The weather was perfect, no one was sick, and we didn’t argue about politics or family dramas.
The day before they left, we were having brunch near Graham’s old house when my dad said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you—remember the caretaker at that condo we stayed at in Florida? He got deported.”
I froze, my heart racing as I listened to him describe what happened to this guy.
“Can you believe they made him leave the country?” he asked, after wrapping up his story. That opening was too tempting for me to resist.
“Actually, I can. I wasn’t planning on telling you this, but Graham is in immigration detention right now. They’re trying to deport him because of a misdemeanor.”
Without missing a beat my dad asked, “Who’s Graham?”
“The guy I was with a few years ago,” I said, surprised by this memory lapse. “You were at his house for my book party, just down the street from here.”
“Oh, right.�
�
After I told them what had happened to Graham—the arrest for drug possession, the summer in Rikers, the transfer to immigration detention, and how I found him—I gulped down half a glass of water, bracing myself for their reaction.
“Well, of course you should help him,” my mom said.
“Why wouldn’t you?” my dad asked, reaching over for a bite of my cold pancakes.
That was not at all the response I expected. I thought my parents would caution me about getting too involved with Graham, especially given how badly our relationship had ended. My mom knew I had bailed him out of Rikers—I’d shown her the story I’d written about that, and reading it had really upset her. That was partly why I hadn’t shared much about Graham’s later decline: all the arrests, his escalating drug habit, or my efforts to help him.
But now they didn’t seem judgmental about what I was doing for him, and maybe that shouldn’t have been such a surprise. I was raised to believe you helped out someone in need; my mom especially had set that example. But it was still a relief that they thought I was doing the right thing. Finally, I didn’t have to justify or hide what was going on in my life, and that meant a lot to me.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
October 2010
York County Prison, Pennsylvania
I’m playing blackjack with some Russian guys—all card sharks so I’m losing badly—when the CO tells me I need to go downstairs to meet with ICE. This can’t be good. I just saw them at my hearing a few days ago, and that was stressful enough.
My lawyer was on speakerphone, so it was just me, the judge, a court officer, and two guys from ICE, in a tiny courtroom inside the prison. I was panicking ’cause everyone told me this judge is tough, but he said he didn’t see any reason why my deportation order shouldn’t be canceled, and the ICE lawyers didn’t object. I felt this huge weight lift, thinking I might actually have a shot at winning, so I’m nervous about why they want to see me again.
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