by Angela Palm
“This way,” Dustyn said over his shoulder as he walked toward the freight elevator. “Lights don’t really work.” He had devastating brown eyes, a perfect pink mouth. But he himself was a kind of defended space—designed to keep people out. It was obvious that he made an effort to avoid embracing his natural good looks, what with his unkempt beard and haphazard appearance, his greasy hair, though I couldn’t understand why. He would not blend into any setting no matter how he tried.
Once we were both inside the small elevator, he grabbed hold of a dirty rope and pulled. A wooden door crashed down, whacking the floor with a thud. I jumped. “You get used to it,” he said. We were forced to stand close together, which seemed to make him uncomfortable. He smelled like basil, not unpleasant, but earthy. I decided I could get used to his aroma, though I wasn’t particularly drawn to it.
On the third floor of the building, I followed Dustyn down a dark hallway. He pointed to a few vacant rooms, whose walls were the color of verdigris. “This is where they used to test syphilis drugs. This one over here was for Prozac.” I wanted to stop to look longer, but he kept walking. He led me into a room at the end of the hallway. It had high ceilings and big windows. The blinds were drawn up, revealing row after row of single-paned windows, arranged like wall-sized checkerboards that overlooked the industrial south end of Indianapolis. The night skyline was the best view of the city that I’d ever seen. When he turned on the lights, I saw the rest of the room. Every surface was covered with poster-sized works of graffiti art. Easels and worktables and empty spray paint cans and stacks of art in various stages of completion littered the floor area. On the walls, brilliant sprays of color formed finished portraits of men and women, their images layered over detailed graphic designs. It was some of the most striking work I’d ever seen. It was electric, and it made a strange logic against Dustyn’s blasé nature. I wanted to dip my fingers into whatever swirled inside his mind.
“I’ll show you something else,” he said. “A little field trip. Follow me.” He grabbed a flashlight and we walked out the building’s back door, down an apparently unused set of train tracks, and beneath a bridge. He turned on the flashlight, directing the light against the cement underside of a bridge. He was not only an artist, but also a vandal.
“It’s stunning,” I said as I stared at what was his best work. A gigantic mural of a woman, her face familiar.
“Next stop,” he said. I followed him back inside. Instead of going into his studio, we walked up two more flights of stairs and then he began to climb a ladder and flung open a trapdoor at the top.
I’d been leery of ladders since the Grandfather Mountain incident. I could barely look at it without freezing up again. In my mind, I was right back there. I’ve heard that smell is the strongest link to memory, but I’m not sure that’s how it works for me. For me, memory flashes resurfaced when my body was oriented in a remembered way in a remembered place: up a ladder to a cliff.
“Where does that go?”
“To the roof,” he said.
I couldn’t tell if the tour was turning into a romantic experience or if he really did want to show me things. After a few seconds of deliberation, I followed him. The rooftop was skirted by a two-foot-high brick wall and large enough to sit at a comfortable distance from the ledge. I followed him to a spot in the middle of the rooftop and we sat down and looked out over the city skyline. He didn’t say anything and I didn’t say anything. Would he kiss me now? Or were we really just looking? I was game, either way, and happy to enjoy the view now that I was safely sitting down. When nothing more happened, I told him I was ready to go home. We stopped by his studio again so I could get my keys. I looked around again at the artworks covering the room—this place that I never would have guessed belonged to the dark-haired boy on the stunt bike, much less was hidden in a building in an old alleyway. I was in awe of him, and he seemed entirely disinterested in me. And what could I say for myself? That I had painted once and rolled it all up and stuck it in a closet? I wasn’t even trying. I was a half-assed writer, a sometime doodler, roaming around looking for something I couldn’t even name. I complimented Dustyn’s work, asking him questions about his process and spray paint methods and whether I could buy something to take home with me. He uttered a noncommittal response and would not look at me. I couldn’t determine what code I’d violated, but I sensed that he regretted bringing me there, and so after a few minutes, I left him there with his hidden art and his darkness and his too-handsome face and his secret, empty building.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The shoe barn sat in a thick patch of pine trees between the old funeral parlor and a crumbling row of apartment homes in my hometown. I’d go there even after I left. The appearance of the surrounding buildings reflected the way this part of town was built: on dreams half-launched between bankruptcies, destined for swift abandonment, eventual and total disrepair. After removing the faded No Trespassing sign that hung askew from the rusted, unlocked chain, I’d crack the sliding hinge door open wide to reveal the heaps of boxes. The boxes of shoes stored in the barn that once formed well-organized towers—someone’s bounty of hope—were now dashed across the floor, as if toppled by a child’s whim. The dream of a family’s business abandoned. Or so I believed. All I knew for sure was that the family was gone and the shoes remained, decades out of fashion and rotting. Slim pairs of weathered go-go boots made of crushed velvet and black-and-white saddle shoes with platform heels covered the barn floor. A range of mismatched sizes and varieties formed piles at the base of the heaps like skeletons ejected from their coffins.
When applied to criminal theory, the self-fulfilling prophecy, a concept developed by sociologist Robert K. Merton, asserted that deviants became such after being told that’s what they were: bad. It was the manifestation of belief or prediction that involved labeling a young person a criminal, or a future criminal.
I began stealing shoes from the barn in high school. Sometimes I would take friends there and invite them to help themselves, as if the place were mine to give away. In college, when I learned the nuances between the various crimes involving theft, I was able to retroactively categorize my actions as burglary, defined as petty larceny plus breaking and entering. Trespass with the intent to steal. But did I consider myself a criminal, either then or now? No. Again, I thought of Corey, who, before the serious crime he committed, had committed crimes similar to mine but, unlike me, had been told he was a criminal and treated as such. He’d been labeled bad from the first incident of deviance, which had not hurt anyone and had not been intended to hurt anyone. Somehow, I was still good.
Condemnation
For several years, beginning in college, I was an active member of a Habitat for Humanity chapter. In addition to doing work on new homes being constructed locally, the group made trips each year to other states that needed work crews and to places that needed repair after disaster relief programs had ceased to be helpful in restoring residences. Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri, Louisiana. One year, we went to North Carolina to provide reconstruction relief in homes that had been severely damaged during Hurricane Floyd—which had swept through that area of the coast in 1999—and remained severely distressed in 2002. Though some of these properties had been condemned, deemed unfit to inhabit, some of the homes could be salvaged.
My efforts seemed futile even at the end of a full day’s work—there was so much work to do. I took inventory of what remained. A few families had begun to move back into their homes, but the restoration was slow. Five in six houses were still empty. I walked into these vacant homes, their doors not even closed, let alone locked. They held little worth protecting from intrusion, completely undefended spaces. Once the water swept through, I imagine the families felt a simultaneous fear and relief at the knowledge that no mere person could violate their property the way that nature could. I imagine people became less frightening after that, and weather more so.
I walked through the front door of a smal
l blue box of a home and toured its empty rooms. In the kitchen, a baby’s bottle sat on a shelf in a cupboard whose door hung from a single hinge. It was the only possession that remained. In another home, this one an aged white color that looked more like gray, I sat on a small wooden chair and gazed out the window at a desecrated backyard. The walls of the condemned homes had sustained water damage that rose several feet up the drywall.
Condemnation is also a process by which a government can exercise eminent domain to obtain privately owned property for some kind of future public use or redevelopment. With respect to criminal law, it has another meaning: a person deemed guilty and sentenced to a punishment.
I stood inside a third small house stripped bare of all evidence that humans had recently lived there except for a 2Pac poster on the living room wall. It was the only thing completely unaffected by the flooding, pinned up in the middle of all that destruction. By then, it had been three years since 2Pac’s death. Rumors that he was alive were still circulating—my friends and I among the hopeful believers. We had attached ourselves to hip-hop and rap music in the 1990s, even though most of us were not part of the culture it represented. I watched his image eerily watching me from where it hung on the wall, amid the destruction and the wasted space. He was the Mona Lisa of rap, looking down at me. He’d been bought up with bail money and transformed by a Compton gang leader into a symbol, which ultimately led to his death. Despite that, his music had helped to bring to light a segment of America’s population that had previously been shadowed. He told stories that needed to be told. I wondered what he had thought of himself in that position. Whether it felt authentic or performative. Whether his death by drive-by shooting was simply another incidence of self-fulfilling prophecy. Hardened street life, hardened street lyrics, hardened street death. Because 2Pac wasn’t from Compton, as some of his music would lead you to believe. He was from the East Coast and made his acting debut in A Raisin in the Sun. Born Lesane Parish Crooks, he became Tupac Amaru Shakur, then 2Pac, then Makaveli. He had gone west, inventing, reinventing. The current took him.
I wondered whether the family who’d lived in that empty house would ever return. Whether the kids who had put 2Pac’s poster up would come back to claim it and how they would be changed by the flood. Whether the poster meant something important to someone who had lived there. I wondered where the family had gone. Why they had left only the poster behind. What would happen if I stole it. What would happen in the empty home’s next life. What remained after condemnation. What was “west” for me. I wondered how to bulldoze the past, or at least excavate the topsoil. How to fix the windows so that it looked all right from the outside. Or let come what may if I shined the light on the trouble inside.
THE BADDEST MEN ON THE PLANET
I first visited a prison when I was only twelve. My uncle Pat had been sentenced to twenty years for attempted murder. He had shot his boss in the stomach after being assaulted by him and his wife in a deserted parking lot. Uncle Pat had been asked to meet them there to discuss their disagreement about the legitimacy of the license plates on the rig my uncle was driving for the couple’s trucking company. The story goes that the three of them had come to blows before my uncle, outnumbered and recovering from a recent heart surgery, retrieved an unregistered handgun from his truck’s cab. Uncle Pat said he believed they’d meant to kill him. It was their word against his, with only telephone poles as witnesses.
My mother prompted us to write letters to Uncle Pat while he was incarcerated, keeping him apprised of our grades and art projects and goings-on, and eventually took us to the Plainfield Correctional Facility to visit him because, she said, he needed us. He was still a Good Person, she said, despite a conviction that would, in the case of anyone else, indicate otherwise. Our visit would be beneficial for him and help him survive, she said. He was depressed again, afflicted with one of the episodes of blanket-like darkness that came and went, I understood, like an emphysemic cough that could never quite be shaken off.
I was excited about the visit and fond of Uncle Pat. I’d spent that summer doing little but reading and staring into the sun, which gouged black holes that burned in my periphery well into the night. When I slept, I’d slip through one of them, to the other side of life’s motion-picture screen, into whatever romantic landscape I’d been reading about that day. To the moors of Wuthering Heights. To the plains of Little House on the Prairie or the colonial coast in The Witch of Blackbird Pond. To another place and time. Gone. The feeling that came over me as we approached the prison’s treacherously razored and fenced perimeter was multidimensional. It was a story world become real, raw experience at my fingertips rather than seen through a dream hole or the pages of a book. It was an invigorating and controlled brush with danger. It was also a harrowing revelation: freedom, once I saw it constricted up close, seemed even more necessary.
Alison Lurie, author of The Language of Houses, told me in an interview about her visit to a prison. She was studying the messages buildings send. Her husband was teaching in an education program for prisoners administered by Cornell University, and she’d gone to see him at the prison. “I was really scared the whole time because the whole atmosphere is of being shut in and closed and dark,” she said. “There’s a gloom over the whole place.” In The Language of Houses, Lurie examines the architectural intention underlying a prison’s design. “Once you are an inmate of such a building,” she writes, “the physical signs of incarceration soon become apparent.” She compares it to other spaces of confinement, reaching as far back in time as a baby’s playpen. “When we were children there were times when our own homes, however comfortable, felt like prisons.”
Before we went into the visiting room, we put our belongings into a small steel locker. A prison within a prison. Escape from the heavily guarded facility would be miraculous. A female guard patted me down, and I stepped through a metal detector. We waited in our assigned sitting area for Uncle Pat to be called down for the visit. Every prisoner who emerged from the door near the guard’s desk adjusted his belt and scanned the room in search of some remains of his dignity. Perhaps he momentarily willed himself to believe that he was not altogether human and thus he could not be dehumanized. This could not be his actual life, he might be thinking, his body disrobed and inspected for contraband a few feet away from where his family waited to see him. He had surely been someone else before this. How long until they begin to forget what came before? I wondered. How quickly does the erosion of self-identity begin in a place like this? What does a place like this do to a person? And how does one ever recover? In prison, I imagine time must expand and contract in the minds and bodies of inmates, even as it is measured and counted, every second the same as the last.
Revealing objects concealed in the rectum—that is the purpose of the squat and cough, an examination required of the inmates upon entering and exiting the visiting room. I watched the men try to relax into brief hugs shared with their families and friends after having just been strip-searched on the other side of the cement brick wall that divides the visiting room from the hallway leading to the yard and cell houses. Beyond that wall, the prisoners were housed like caged mice, and violence swept through like a riptide: destructive, random shakedowns, aggressive outbursts between inmates, and occasional attacks on staff occurred without warning or logic. I found myself trying to see through that wall to what lay beyond it. Even as their visiting periods commenced, the men remained hyperalert, stiff in the jaws and shoulders, their eyes darting erratically over their shoulders, their bodies jolting slightly at any sudden commotion. In this kind of man’s life, trouble interjects itself like a misplaced comma, rendering a reading of his life’s transcript choppy and piecemeal. Everything was fine, and then—, —.
When Uncle Pat came in, he walked slowly and heavy-footed, as he, too, readjusted his belt. He looked familiar but altered: long, unkempt hair, a loss of focus in his eyes, a bit jumpy. He tried a joke. We’d heard him tell it before, and al
though the beat before the punch line lasted several seconds too long as he paused to watch a fly perched on the arm of a chair clean itself, we laughed anyway.
There is a picture of me as a child in which I’m sitting in the grass in our front yard, next to a patch of overgrown lilies. The flowers have already bloomed for the year, their fibrous green leaves spilling out from the cement blocks that encircle the flower bed. In the background, a fence encloses me within our yard—that boundary that would later seem to mark the limits of my own existence. I’m wearing a sundress that dips low across my nipple line, revealing scrawny ribs and tan lines. The dress is handmade, constructed from a patchwork of fabric scraps. In the picture, four sickly calico kittens, whom I named Jo, Bo, Mo, and Flo, are brandished across my chest, presented for the camera like living trophies. I was present at your birth, I might be thinking. Don’t you remember when I bent down over the cardboard box and named you? My arms strap the kittens’ fragile necks tightly against me. Their newly opened eyes seep with disease, and their soft pink tongues flail as they kick and wail, desperate to be released from my hug. I’m smiling for whoever is behind the camera. I can still smell the lily of the valley, its thin tendrils occupying a corner of the picture’s foreground. I’d mistaken the kittens’ fearful mews for the sound of tiny white bells tinkling in the breeze.
Shortly after that picture was taken, I dreamed my father placed the unsalvageable kittens—“They’ll die soon anyway”—into an old pillowcase, one by one. He cinched the top into a loose knot as they shrieked and tumbled against one another. He dunked them into the four feet of standing water in our backyard and waited and smoked his Salems, one by one, until there was nothing left to smoke. It may not have been a dream. I can no longer remember. Someone drowned those cats. Was it my father? Or our neighbor, Wild Bill?