About twice a month Ed pulled into our driveway on Friday night in an ever-changing series of fancy cars—a Toyota Celica, a shiny black Thunderbird with whitewall tires, a new car every year, which he let us drive, even the fully loaded baby-blue Lincoln Continental Mark IV with a leather interior, a huge hovercraft of a car that felt like driving a king-sized bed.
One day Sally and two of her friends and Alison and Paula and I—three girls in front, three in back—cruised the hilly back roads in the Conti la Monty, as we called Ed’s car, going on “runs,” getting stoned and driving Nemo Road or Moose Hill Road, roller-coaster roads with bumps and dips that momentarily floated your stomach if you drove fast enough. Stoned and suddenly hungry, we stopped at a bakery. When the woman’s back was turned, Alison reached into the display case and scooped a handful of something just baked in a pan, her fingers leaving gouge marks. Alison ran out of the bakery and fell into the backseat, licking gooey batter off her fingers, slight dimples under her electric-blue eyes showing when she laughed hard. Alison was that way—taking what she wanted, grabbing, audacious and headstrong, heedless of consequences.
We were left to quickly pay for our baked goods, hoping the woman wouldn’t see the tracks Alison had dug into the pan of bars or cake and catch us for . . . what, shoplifting dessert? Destruction of property? As if to restore a balance from Alison’s taking, as we drove away, sick from sweets, Paula puked on the leather seats and carpeted floor of the Conti la Monty that Ed kept immaculately clean.
Ed became my mother’s partner in crime. They’d walk into stores wearing old shoes or old coats and walk out wearing new ones. Ed was the kind of guy who mysteriously procured things, once a German shepherd named Max, who supposedly had gone to obedience school but clearly had flunked. The dog drove my mother crazy, and Ed took him back to New York. Later Ed brought us a pygmy goat and built a pen at the edge of our yard. The goat, Bucky, followed Mikey around the neighborhood, but its predawn bleating inspired complaints from Mrs. Wagner, so Ed gave it to some farm. A silver food van appeared in our driveway one Saturday morning, HOT DOGS in faded red paint above the service window. Ed thought we might want to fix it up and take it to beaches and concerts, but everyone was too busy or unambitious, and one day the hot dog truck was gone.
One weekend Ed towed a camper from New York that was “hot,” my mother said, some sort of “crooked deal.” He backed it into a corner of our driveway, which made my mother anxious. She wanted to “get it legal or get it off our property.” It’s ironic that my mother didn’t lie to me about the camper, even though she lied to the Registry of Motor Vehicles and participated in grand larceny (since the trailer was valued at over $250), which carried a penalty of up to five years in state prison, not to mention her being an accessory to interstate transportation of stolen property, receiving stolen goods, and insurance fraud. I watched my mother back out of the driveway on her way to the Registry of Motor Vehicles, the forged documents to transfer ownership tucked in her pocketbook on the passenger seat, her head just above the steering wheel, staring at the road ahead, intent, not looking back as she drove away.
She returned a couple hours later, happy that she hadn’t been caught and that the camper had legitimate plates. The crime seemed easy, just another errand to run—hardware store, bank, post office, pick up license plates at the Registry of Motor Vehicles (with doctored title), bread and milk from Fernandes on the way home. My mother painted the camper black and white and sewed gingham curtains for the windows, and she and Ed took Mikey and Ed’s son, Little Ed, camping and fishing on Cape Cod. This was stealing not to support a drug habit or to get rich but to return to some middle-class norm. My mother stole an American working-class vacation.
Success inspires repetition, like gambling. The engine had seized in Sue’s car, a Ford LTD; the car was dead but otherwise in good shape, no rust, decent interior, a high Blue Book value. I don’t remember who concocted the plan, but we decided to have the car stolen and burned to collect the insurance money. Arson. Insurance fraud. I knew someone we could hire; at fifteen I had connections—Paula’s brother, Duane, who was twenty. Duane was tall and strapping, like the “after” figure in the Charles Atlas bodybuilding ads, with a thicket of auburn hair and light-brown eyes like Paula’s. Duane said he’d do the job for $75, and we set a date. Since the car didn’t run, my mother and Ed towed it with chains to the parking lot of the Walpole Mall.
That night, Sue and her boyfriend, Jeff, ate at a pub in the mall. After a certain period of time passed, they walked out to the parking lot to discover that Sue’s car had been stolen. She reported the crime to the police. The next day the cops told us they’d found the car at the gravel pit on Route 1, a mile from the state police barracks, where Duane had towed it while Sue and Jeff were in the pub and then had set it on fire, though only the trunk and rear end burned, which caused some delay in processing our claim. Eventually we collected the insurance payout of a couple thousand dollars.
My mother found a full-time job at Pondville Hospital, run by the state of Massachusetts, a two-story brick building hidden in the woods at the end of a winding driveway, almost directly across the road from Walpole Prison. Pondville mainly treated cancer sufferers and the occasional prisoner from Walpole with minor injuries, superficial stab wounds. My mother brought home stories of her “end-stage” patients, their sorry states, how she held their hands and comforted them while their lives slowly ebbed. For me, her only kid who smoked cigarettes, she described in graphic detail the halting, gasping breaths of lung cancer patients, their phlegmy spasmodic coughs. She threatened to drag me into Pondville to witness their suffering, their slow agonizing dying, which surely I’d face if I didn’t quit smoking, using the hospital as an object lesson, as she had the prison. I scoffed. I hadn’t been deterred by the antismoking film in home economics in junior high, by the image of an emaciated woman puffing a cigarette through a hole in her throat and speaking in a buzzy, robotic machine-voice.
Pondville Hospital was one of five state institutions within an eight-mile radius of my house, places that hid away the less fortunate, the misfits. Along with Pondville, Walpole Prison, and Norfolk Prison, the Wrentham State School for “mentally retarded and wayward children” (the “feeble-minded,” they were called when the school opened in 1910) was a mile and a half away, a two-story building set on a granite foundation, with five hundred acres of agricultural land, where in the early years developmentally disabled boys learned the manual labor of farm work. In winter I practiced with the swim team at Wrentham State’s indoor pool, the water heavily chlorinated because the mentally retarded kids peed in the pool, my eyes red and burning after an hour in the too-warm water.
During the years I swam there, the school was under investigation for its deplorable conditions, which a judge called a “disgrace and a nightmare.” A few years later the school’s certification was revoked because it failed to meet minimum standards of care. Decades later it was revealed that in 1962, to test the effects of nuclear fallout, professors from Harvard Medical School had given high doses of radioactive sodium iodine to sixty-three “mentally defective” children at Wrentham, ages one to eleven, without permission from their families—a crime as deplorable as any committed by a Walpole inmate, though nobody was ever held accountable.
The fifth state institution, about four miles north of the prisons, was Medfield State Hospital, opened in 1892 as the Medfield Insane Asylum, which housed up to 1,500 mentally ill and drug-addicted residents. Spread across nine hundred acres were fifty-eight buildings, many with elegant architectural details: dentil molding, Doric columns, arched windows, slate roofs. The administration building, where I picked up my mother from float shifts she worked to earn extra money, looked like a country mansion.
Inmates from Walpole and Norfolk Prisons worked “trusty” jobs at Pondville Hospital, Medfield State Hospital, and Wrentham State School, probably because they were cheap labor, earning less than a dollar a day. Perhaps, too
, someone in power thought that working with psychiatric patients or disabled children humanized prisoners. The “retardates,” as the newspaper called the Wrentham kids, wouldn’t fear the inmates, wouldn’t understand that their caregivers were murderers, rapists, thieves, drug dealers. A Norfolk inmate, Leo Hurney, a trusty who worked forty hours a week attending psychiatric patients at Medfield State, said, “I’m still a humanitarian even though I’m a con.”
At Pondville Hospital prisoners worked as janitors or in the laundry. One night an inmate in his midthirties asked my mother on a date; he was going to be paroled soon. She asked the man why he’d been sent to prison, and he told her that he’d killed the man with whom his wife had cheated. At least he was honest. My mother thought he seemed nice, but she declined his offer, nervous about the idea of dating a murderer, and anyway she was seeing Ed.
The trusties wore special uniforms so that employees and patients could differentiate the inmates from the regular janitorial staff, like my brothers, Patrick and Michael, who worked at Pondville part-time in high school. Michael’s supervisor, Jerome, was a “good guy,” even though he’d killed a man over a drug deal; he and his brother had both been sent to Walpole Prison. Patrick worked with an inmate named Tony, a huge, toothless African American man in his midsixties, who at nineteen supposedly killed three men in a bar fight, like something out of a Grimms’ fairy tale. Tony had been in prison almost half a century. He believed he’d never be released, but at least he was out for a few hours every day, mopping floors and emptying trash. He and Patrick smoked joints on break, and Patrick gave him pot to smuggle inside. Tony snipped the fingers off surgical gloves, stuffed them with pot, knotted the packets, and hid them in his rectum.
Some of the trusties gave off a menacing vibe, like Reg, in his fifties, convicted of murder, who Patrick thought might stab you if you turned your back to him. The janitorial staff—Patrick and a couple of other teenage boys with after-school jobs, and the inmates—played cards in the break room, the boys awed and a bit afraid of their criminal coworkers.
One day when I picked up my mother after her shift at Pondville, as we walked past a man in the hallway, she whispered, “He murdered someone.” I looked back to watch the murderer swish his mop across the linoleum. His face showed nothing of a killer. I didn’t know what a murderer should look like, but he shouldn’t have a sunken back and white hair and a big belly overhanging his belt. I thought a murderer was a specific type you could identify. I wouldn’t have thought that a murderer would be Mikey’s classmate’s father, Leroy Chasson, whose wife—dressed as a nurse and wielding a .45—broke him out of Norwood Hospital after he’d purposely injured himself in Walpole Prison. The Chassons fled to Colorado, where they lived for seven years until America’s Most Wanted exposed them.
Or a druggie I saw around town in Walpole, Woody, who in a few years would kill his best friend, Billy “Lighty” Lightner, and wind up in Walpole Prison. Or one of Patrick’s friends in high school, who slashed a kid’s throat with a broken bottle during a fight at a party one night. None of the bystanders helped the dying kid, because they didn’t want to get in trouble, so he bled out before the cops arrived.
When I needed to borrow my mother’s car, I drove her to work and picked her up after her shift. Often I saw clusters of people in the prison parking lot carrying signs or milling around, and I wondered what was happening—perhaps prisoners’ rights groups protesting inhumane conditions on Block 10, the segregation unit, or members of the media waiting to photograph the return of some escapee, or a famous prisoner shuffling in ankle chains. Maybe the commotion was correctional officers on strike.
Throughout the 1970s there were frequent clashes between guards and the prisoners’ rights group, or between guards and the administration, especially John Boone, Massachusetts’s first African American corrections commissioner. In the early 1970s, Boone tried to introduce progressive measures, but in protest of his liberal policies, guards walked off the job. During the guard strike from mid-March to mid-May of 1973, except for state troopers posted at the perimeter, the inmates ran Walpole Prison, a rare time of interracial cooperation and calm. A pool of 550 citizen volunteers, including the Walpole Jaycees, served as observers, stationed on the cellblocks twenty-four hours a day.
The decade of the 1970s was the most violent and troubled in Walpole Prison’s history, emblematic of prisons nationally. In 1973 in the United States there were ninety-three riots for every million prisoners; in 2003 there were fewer than three. In 1973 there were sixty-three homicides per one hundred thousand prisoners; in 2000 there were fewer than five, even though the incarceration rate had quintupled since 1970. In Walpole Prison between 1971 and 1973 there were two major riots, a guard strike, fires, work stoppages, shakedowns, lockups, widespread drug use, and four superintendents in three years (one said to have suffered a nervous breakdown).
There were dozens of stabbings and violent inmate deaths. In 1973 a Boston Globe headline read, “Walpole Tops Nation in Inmate Killings.” The inmate murder rate at Walpole Prison was more than three times higher than in San Quentin, more than four times higher than in Marion Federal Penitentiary in Illinois. The final murder of that murderous year was in November, when Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, was stabbed sixteen times in his chest while he slept in his supposed protective-custody cell.
The violence continued throughout the 1970s, with vicious killings. One inmate was stabbed fifty-seven times in his cell. Another was beaten to death by his cellmate (who’d bludgeoned to death his former cellmate with a toilet seat). Another prisoner, Robert Perotta, was killed in a gruesome manner, strangled, then castrated. In 1974 twenty-two-year-old John Kelly, the brother of a friend of Sue’s, had been a guard just four months when he and another guard were taken hostage, bound and gagged for twenty-four hours, then released unharmed. After the media had been barred from the prison, the inmates took hostages, because they needed a way “to speak to the people,” their statement said.
Overcrowding was blamed for the trouble; the prison was designed to hold 566 men, but by 1976 there with 693 inmates. State legislators toured Walpole and found rats in the cells, debris all over the floors, and conditions so hazardous that they worried about a hepatitis outbreak. An officer recruit who visited Block 10, the segregation unit, said, “There was shit, garbage, everything thrown all over the place. Human shit. And it stunk.” Another officer who worked Block 10 saw “garbage [knee]-high on the floors—feces, urine . . . an inch of slime on the floor so when it was wet outside, you’d slide down the corridor.” Governor Michael Dukakis was urged to shut down Walpole Prison. I was oblivious to much of the turmoil, except when the trouble boiled over the walls into the front lot, where we used to park for the Hobby Shop.
Sometimes when I passed Walpole Prison on my way to Pondville, I’d see a lone figure sitting inside the bus stop, a small brick shelter across the street from the prison, perhaps a just-paroled ex-con, someone without friends or family to pick him up so he sat in the tiny hut staring at the cement walls across the road, outside but still too close as he waited for the Greyhound that traveled Route 1A, picking up riders at the prison stop and then in Walpole center, where my friends and I used to board to shoplift at the Dedham Mall or sometimes rode to the end of the line, Forest Hills, where we caught the train to Boston.
What did it feel like to be released after three or five or ten years of imprisonment, fifty bucks of gate money in your pocket, a set of civilian clothes, only to sit across from the prison at the bus stop waiting and waiting for a ride out of Walpole?
5
Clarity and Logic
In the fall of my sophomore year, I took an English class called “Clarity and Logic,” an accelerated course for students who’d been recommended to skip the required tenth-grade English. None of my friends were in the class. In “Clarity and Logic” we read “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” by Alan Sillitoe. The narrator, Smith, was a seventeen-year-old “
outlaw bloke” in a borstal, a youth detention center in England, where he was recruited by the warden to run a long-distance race to win a medal for the prison. “I didn’t mind it much,” Smith says, “because running had always been made much of in our family, especially running away from the police.” I wonder whether our teacher, Mr. Hubbard, a handsome man who played rugby (which might have explained his chipped front tooth), chose this story because we lived in a prison town, or maybe just because the protagonist was a teenager, like us.
In class Mr. Hubbard asked why Smith, a gifted runner, purposely lost the race. He waited, staring at our blank faces, hoping someone would respond, these smart kids who would graduate at the top of their class, become salutatorian, valedictorian. Maybe these kids couldn’t identify with the protagonist, a delinquent, couldn’t imagine intentionally losing a race they could easily have won. I’m sure I was the only one in the class who’d ever done anything wrong, who’d earned detentions, who’d broken laws. The spirit of that delinquent boy lived in my bones. I could see that his act was about freedom—that he chose to lose, to forfeit the trophy and the approval of his keepers, for a larger prize, autonomy, to be true to his spirit. He rebelled, defied authority, exercised power in a powerless situation. His reason was clear and logical. I raised my hand.
After that, Mr. Hubbard would look to me for answers in class discussions, but one night I smoked angel dust and again the next day and the next until it became a habit.
November 10, 1975—No school tomorrow. Went on runs all night with Paula, her brother Duane, and his girlfriend. We bought a gram of dust. That’s the first time I ever got dusted. Dust is heavy but it screws up your brain cells.
Body Leaping Backward Page 9