Sometimes I Think About It

by Stephen Elliott

  Ken has never heard of Alonza Thomas, but when the case is explained to him, he thinks Alonza could end up in an enhanced psychiatric unit or even a protective custody unit. But it’s hard to say. “It’s hard to get to a protective custody unit. You have to be Michael Jackson.”

  The prison in Lancaster is one of fifteen new prisons constructed in the past twenty years to keep pace with the exponential growth of the California inmate population. Designed for 2,200 inmates but housing 4,700, the prison is operating at more than twice its capacity just twelve years after opening. There are 809 peace officers and 442 support services staff, and there is an annual operating budget of $92 million.

  Because of the space crunch, medium-security prisoners are kept in dorm beds in the dayrooms of the maximum-security B and C units. The gymnasium houses another 120 beds in forty three-tier bunks. Nobody wants to be on the middle bunk. There is no room for anything except the beds. There is no privacy. The gym inmates are held in the mattress jungle up to twenty hours a day. The medium-security prisoners will all be released someday so are not considered as great an escape threat.

  Most maximum-security prisoners are in for life. Because of the overcrowding and the need to separate level III and level IV inmates, each group in B and C is given only two hours in the yard. D unit, the most dangerous—where Alonza was before being sent to isolation—is on lockdown following an inmate riot between the Hispanic and white prisoners earlier in the week.

  Ken was a marine and doesn’t see a problem with bunking inmates. “Serving the country, I lived in a dorm all the time.” He’s not unsympathetic, just matter-of-fact. The California prison system already operates on a $7 billion budget. He doesn’t think taxpayers should have to pay any more. Some people think prisoners should be given lighter sentences to ease the crowding, but Ken is concerned about the victims. He doesn’t think victims would appreciate the idea of releasing criminals because of overcrowding. He’s been to victims’ group meetings before, and that’s what he tells people when they start talking about prison reform. “Go to a victims’ group. It will change you. Until you experience that kind of loss, you can never understand.”

  Ken is a large man with a straight back, a bald head, broad shoulders, and a kind smile. He has worked in prisons most of his life. Prisoners see Ken as an advocate and hope to catch his attention, calling to him from behind the fence. Ken always stops to listen. In five years he’ll retire.

  “What’s with the new shirt?” a guard calls to Ken. “What do you think this is, Miami Vice?” Ken says the other day he was wearing a peach shirt, and they didn’t like that either. “That wasn’t peach,” the guard calls back. “It was pink.”

  Near one o’clock, the hottest part of the day, Ken leaves the prison for the office building on the other side of the perimeter, the iron door closing behind him. There are two hundred prisoners on this side of the fence, in the minimum-security facility. The MSF is for people sent to prison for a couple of months, those caught with small amounts of drugs, or repeat driving-under-the-influence offenders. Lucky for these DUI offenders, no one was killed.

  Outside the prison, the wind is slow and warm across the Mojave. In the distance are turbines and the wrinkled foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. It’s an hour and ten minutes to Hollywood. There is a sign for a future veterans’ home on a large lot on I Street, and a facility for illegal immigrants being prepared for deportation. The land here is cheap, handsome, and far from view. The landscape is filled with dark squares, nearly all of them being prepped for development. It won’t be long before Highway 14 becomes another choked thoroughfare and the last of the county is consumed by the city and its endless network of linked suburbs.

  5

  While visiting Alonza, Janice witnesses a drug arrest in the visiting area of Lancaster. Something in the force of the action snaps her, and Janice experiences her first panic attack. “Are you OK?” Alonza asks his mother.

  She tells her son she can’t come by herself anymore. She visits twice more with her youngest son, Patrick, then doesn’t visit for four months, despite living only ninety minutes from the facility. At the end of June, she receives a letter from an inmate explaining that Alonza has asked him to write to her if there is an emergency. You need to check on your son, he says. Something bad happen to him.

  When Janice tries to see Alonza, she learns he is in a solitary cell in administrative segregation. Time has to be reserved to meet with the inmate in a special glass-separated enclosure. Appointments must be made on the Friday before the visit. The first time she calls too late. The second and third times she is unable to get through. She leaves messages. Janice receives a note from Alonza, the last prior to the writing of this article:

  Dear Mom,

  This is your son Alonza hoping and praying that you’re in the best of health even though I am not. I am in the hole because I was raped by my celly and they’re doing an investigation. I need you to come and see me so I can give you details on what’s going to happen to me.

  I just want you to realize how scared, confused, and frightened I am. First off I don’t know whether or not he had any diseases. And since I told on him I’m considered a snitch and any of his gang friends that see me has to kill me so I’ll be forced to go to protective custody or die. Today is Friday. I hope that you come to see me tomorrow so I can tell you how it went down in person.

  He’s back here too. I can hear him talk to his friends, calling me a snitch. Saying he’s going to kill me if he ever sees me, or one of his homeboys from East Coast Crips will kill me. It’s driving me crazy. My mental state of mind is shattered. I just don’t know what to do. But one thing I do know is that you’ll come through as always. I just want to hug you and hear you say that everything is going to be OK. Even though I know it is not.

  No matter what happens to me just know that I love my family more than anything. I also pray to Jesus to save me and to get me through this and he talks back. He says this is what has to happen sometimes to get people to believe that God is real. He tells me he loves me and that he’s here for me through thick and thin.

  Alonza

  —Los Angeles, 2005

  On October 11, 2013, Alonza was released from prison. He was twenty-eight years old. Most prisoners don’t serve their full sentences, but because of his suicidal behavior and other mental health problems, Alonza served every day of his time.

  1. The People vs. David Foster, SC214A.

  2. James D. Wright, Peter H. Rossi, and Kathleen Daly, Under the Gun: Weapons, Crime, and Violence in America (New York: Aldine, 1983).

  3. Prior to the passage of Proposition 21, juveniles who committed the most serious crimes were presumed to be tried as adults. If there was a reason to try someone as a child, the burden was on the defense. It was exceedingly rare for a young murderer to be tried as a child. Proposition 21 now mandates that all serious offenders be tried as adults, allowing no room for mitigating circumstances.

  4. Proposition 21 also added crimes for which a child could be tried as an adult. In 2003, the last year for which data is available, there were several children tried in adult court for vandalism.

  5. William J. Bennett, John J. Dilulio, Jr., and John P. Walters, Body Count: Moral Poverty … and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

  6. Professor Wilson, now at Pepperdine, did not return multiple requests to clarify whether he ever supported Proposition 21 and if he supports it now.

  7. In 2003, the last year for which data is available, twenty kids are tried in adult court for petty theft, sixteen for alcohol-related offenses, ten for disturbing the peace, and eight for vandalism.

  8. Mother Jones, January/February 2000.

  9. According to several attorneys consulted for this article, if tried as a juvenile, Alonza would most likely have spent three to six years in juvenile detention.

  10. Report of the Inspector General, State of California, Tehachapi Youthful
Offender Program.

  11. When Alonza enters corrections, he has finished the tenth grade. He makes no progress toward a high-school degree after entering prison.

  12. According to prison files held at Lancaster, Alonza’s last day at Tehachapi was July 31, 2003.

  13. Vince Crittendon, prisoner #C-57138, requested that his information be made public.

  14. The prosecutor in that case, Matt Manger, testified on Alonza’s behalf on 2000, citing his cooperation in putting a violent felon behind bars.

  The Score

  1

  Lissette told me she was never very sexual with her husband. “In fact, when we were first together, we only had sex maybe twice a day.”

  I’ll let the absurdity of the statement stand for itself. You just have to remember how fragile she is. I have to always remember it, and how fragile I am. We met in a café in Berkeley fifteen months ago, when she was still married. She was reading a fantasy novel, and I wasn’t reading anything. We loved each other with one foot out the door. We broke up four times. Or we loved passionately, recklessly. We loved like we didn’t care if we lived or died or what the world looked like a week from tomorrow. And then we woke up bored, looked around for who else might be in the room. And she whispered softly in my ear, “We’re doomed. It will never work.”

  2

  This is not an essay about breaking up with my girlfriend. I was leaning against the wall of a closed restaurant when I started to write this. Lissette wasn’t even home yet; she was still out in the desert, celebrating at the Burning Man festival. I was reading a book about Theo van Gogh, the filmmaker killed by an Islamic fundamentalist in Amsterdam. I had quit taking speed for the most part, but only because it didn’t work anymore. I couldn’t focus and I was running out of money and I kept making plans and then giving up. I checked out war zones and interviewed celebrities and politicians, but none of it mattered.

  Around this time I was in New York, and I got in bed with a twenty-three-year-old volunteer with long, thick red hair. I thought she was Russian, but she said she was Spanish. She was just very pale. I couldn’t figure out what to do with her breasts. We were in bed, half-naked, and it was, like, this dead end. It was 2006, two months before the midterm elections. I could have gone for the belt on her jeans, but I had no intention of doing that. I had wanted her, but I had no idea what I wanted from her. I kept asking myself what all of it meant, but you can’t ask yourself a question like that and expect any kind of answer.

  Around this time I saw a woman walking down Valencia Street in San Francisco wearing a purple nightdress. She was limping, holding the hand of some punk rocker, staggering past the coffee shop. She was almost glamorous, except I was in the Mission, and in the Mission nobody is glamorous except the kids in the street gangs, with their smooth brown skin and blue scarves hanging out of their back pockets.

  Around this time I went to dinner with a woman, a sex worker, someone I used to date, someone I dated briefly. I always date briefly, and I always date sex workers because they’re the only ones who understand desire without sex. Real desire. Raw and unattainable and without purpose. Desire that ends there, all-consuming, for nothing. We ended up at the back of a restaurant called Delfina, and I told her I was having money problems and couldn’t afford a fancy dinner.

  She said, “Don’t worry.”

  This particular woman had been raped by her father, and one day a client came to her. The client looked just like her father. She tied the client to a wooden cross, screwed clamps onto his nipples, and beat him until his back was bleeding. The man begged to see her again, but she refused. Or something like that. I told her I have dreams about my father in which I’m holding his ears and screaming in his face. My father’s old and crippled now. I haven’t spoken to him in years.

  I held her hand under the table. She had hard palms, strong fingers. She had one more client, so I walked her back, and we lay on her couch for a couple of minutes.

  I was just back from Connecticut, where a bunch of true believers were working eighteen hours a day to elect a businessman worth $300 million to the Senate. They were against the war, and he was against the war. I thought, This man has hired and fired people. That’s not a statement about character so much as a basic truth. Win or lose, they would all be disillusioned, particularly if he won. They would go home crying.

  This was at least half my problem. I was jealous of these people. Their youthful idealism. Even the ones who were older than me. I’ve worked for politicians. I’ve been a believer. They’ve never failed to make a fool out of me and break my heart.

  And that’s what I was thinking about, the intersection of the half-naked girl, the sex worker with the dark past, and the new politics. But the only place these things met was at me, and I was sitting against what used to be a Kentucky Fried Chicken, trying to figure out what to do with my life. I was tired of having breakdowns, bored with perpetually standing at the edge of a panic attack. I was going to have to do something, but I wasn’t sure what.

  3

  When Burning Man was over, Lissette called me from Reno. Not immediately; a couple of days later.

  She said she didn’t want to come home. She was having such a good time. She had that desert voice. The I don’t care about you voice. It was like a challenge. “I had such a good time,” she said. She said she met a guy who was going to teach her how to weld and blow glass. She said she met a guy who was coming to San Francisco to work in the prison, and she told him he could live with her for a couple of months in her studio in the Tenderloin.

  She told me all this from inside a hotel room, where she was staying with one of her clients. A client had driven her out to the desert, and another client was driving her home. Lissette worked as a dominatrix. In San Francisco they paid $300 an hour for attention, plus tip. On the open roads of Nevada, littered with the occasional casino, they had her all to themselves for the price of gas. They were happy for her time, but I was less excited. I felt pushed away by her idealized version of herself. This insistence on being happy, even if it was true. She had made promises to herself out on the playa. Promises that included making more art, spending more time with her son, and worrying less about what I thought. She promised herself she would be happy, forgiving, and carefree. Then she danced in front of the fire.

  When I saw her, she wore a T-shirt she had just bought at Target and black underwear and sat at her desk with one leg tucked beneath her. Her windows were frosted and closed, but from the top of them I could see some of the buildings in Union Square.

  “I wish I had been at Burning Man with you,” I said, and she called me a liar.

  We talked about her happiness. How she had never been happy with me since we got back together. How we never did anything together. I asked her if she’d fucked anybody in the desert, and she said no. She’d had a platonic boyfriend out there, and at one point they’d sat near the end of the playa, where the mountain rises suddenly, and talked about what might have been.

  I thought of how New Orleans had flooded during Burning Man and people had been dancing in the desert while Jefferson Parish was guarding its bridges with shotguns and people were dying in the New Orleans convention center.

  Lissette said she decided to break up with me while she was in the desert. She was staying in a tent village when she made her decision. To make sure she didn’t go back on it, she fucked three men and then took two hits of ecstasy and acid. This was different from what she had told me earlier, but I guess she was waiting for her moment.

  We were lying in her bed. “I’m waiting for you to talk me out of it,” she said.

  “How would I do that?” I asked.

  “I take it back. I don’t want to break up with you. I love you.”

  “Do you take back fucking those other guys?” I asked. Her leg was over my leg, and she’d pulled my shirt off. I kept grabbing her ass, squeezing. She has the greatest ass I’ve ever seen. Even when I thought about her fucking other men, all I saw was he
r ass jiggling up and down and how good that looked.

  “Just give me a month,” she said, and I asked her why she thought that would work, and she said she needed people to suffer for her and if I would do this, then she would know I was suffering, and then she would love me and I would feel safe and then I wouldn’t be distant from her anymore and everything would be fine.

  I told her I didn’t know. I told her I needed to think about it. I wanted to have sex then. She started playing with my nipple, biting me. I reached between her legs, slid a finger inside her. “Tell me you’ll see me again,” she said. It was totally unfair, but fair had nothing to do with it. I thought it had to be possible for me to have a real relationship. The kind people have in magazines, that “fulfill” and “facilitate.” This had to be open to me, though I’d never experienced anything like it.

  I almost said yes, but I didn’t. I said, “I don’t really care who you fucked out in the desert. The desert is the desert. I know about the music, the lights, and the pills. I’m glad you had a good time. It was probably the greatest display of disposable art ever assembled. Fuck whoever you want.” But then I thought, I am in bed with a crazy person and she has tried to hurt me and she will try again. She was aiming an elephant gun at my heart. So I said, “Give me a day to think about it,” and that’s how she knew it was over.

  “You’re breaking up with me,” she said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said.

  When I left her apartment, the Tenderloin was full of fog. It floated near my kneecaps. The air was cool and wet, and it wasn’t totally dark. There were drug dealers and college students in front of the red-and-green flag of the taqueria. Forty thousand people had gone to the desert carrying art to burn, and pills. A spontaneous, impermanent city.