As soon as the hack in the truck rolls by, I light the joint and suck it up in one long inhale. Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” plays in my head. Suddenly high and blissfully happy, I rewrite Dylan’s lyrics: All along the razor wire, convicts kept the view / While all the hacks came and went, barefoot snitches too.
Ah, yes, THC, tetrahydrocannabinol, magic elixir, mysterious chemical compound found in the smoke from this herb that is absorbed by blood in my lungs and carried up to my brain, where it attaches itself to welcoming receptors and miraculously alters my perception of reality. The world around me falls away. My world is a different place. There are no fences, no gates. There is no objective reality, for without some imprisoned consciousness to observe this world, and filter observations through the senses of a locked-up consciousness, who is to say where I am and what is real? A moment ago, I was walking along seeing my world as an enclosed space wrapped with miles of concertina wire and guarded by gun-toting cops. I perceived my fate as an uncertain future to be determined by faceless Bureau of Punishment drones, black-robed judges, and buttoned-down government attorneys. All that has dissolved; it no longer matters. All that has consequence is what is happening inside my head. I’m so high on joy and herb I could float over the fences, disappear in the leaden air.
Now … it’s princes keeping their view, barefoot servants, too. And, yes, Rojas, a.k.a. Birdman of Ashland. My little friend, round and brown as a nut, crouches beside a shrub. He mutters incantations as he places a cinnamon roll, some packets of jelly, an orange, and a Dixie cup full of sugar carefully in a semicircle at the trunk of the bush.
This is different. I stop and watch.
Rojas has a narrow head covered with sparse tufts of wiry black hair that sprout from his shiny brown skull like moth-eaten upholstery on polished wood. He speaks little English. Someone taught him to say asshole.
“Good morning, asshole!” he greets me cheerfully, though it is late afternoon. He’s got a sharp face, foxlike, with a wispy Charlie Chaplin mustache—a naturally comic look. I had noticed odd leavings beneath this bush some time ago, before my vacation in the Hole—bananas, apples, pieces of bread, even mints and hard candies placed on the ground under the bush like the snacks a child might leave under the Christmas tree for Santa. I was intrigued by this unexplained development in a life of crushing monotony. One day I saw a cigar still wrapped in cellophane alongside the other gifts. Each evening the offerings were there, each morning they disappeared, to be replaced by new oblations.
“Santería,” Rojas says. He tells me friendly spirits dwell in the bush and he entreats them to protect his soul from demons sent by Satan to capture him in the night. The bird sounds he makes are his invocation of the winged spirits to ward off the devil. Religion, ceremony, and magic found its way into this godforsaken place. It is as if faith stole in where hope had fled.
“Why this bush?” I ask him.
Rojas explains that, for one thing it is the only bush. And he’s right, though I had never noticed it before. There are no other bushes in the denuded recreation yard. One day, Rojas tells me, he saw a tiny bird, “un pajarito,” fly in and perch on the lower branches. The bird, he claims, looked up at him and then it disappeared. He came to believe that the bush is a portal, “una puerta,” he says and grins. A door to the spirit world. His eyes shine from his brown face with gleeful excitement that undercuts the solemnity of the occasion. I wonder if Rojas is actually crazy, if he believes his visions. For a moment it all seems unreal.
He can be a clown, this birdman; I never know when he’s serious. I watch him at mail call when we are most hopeful and vulnerable. Each time the guard calls a name to deliver a letter, Rojas pops up at the front of the assembled lovelorn and asks, “Rojas? Rojas?” as if he can’t understand why his name has not been called. And when it is over, as the Colombians call out, “Ni chimba! ” Rojas insists on searching the empty mail sack. He turns it upside down and shakes it to make certain no letters drenched with tears and kisses are stuck inside. He speed-walks around the compound with a flexed-knee stride, arms rigid at his sides and swinging like pendulums for extra momentum. When they open the units for the evening meal, Rojas zips along, his gleaming head bobbing like an acorn in the human stream, and he greets his fellow prisoners: “Hello, asshole!”
Axelrod and I worry somebody’s going to take it wrong and fuck him up.
The Dixie cup full of sugar persuades me he’s on the level. No crack dealer in his right mind would give up crystalline white powder to a shrub unless he really believed it gave him access to magic spirits and a door to another dimension. I tell Rojas to appeal to the sacred bush to grant me a release date.
“You want to go home?” he asks.
“Si, hombre. Don’t you?”
“Yes, but not yet.”
He says he has never eaten so well. “Cinco niños.” Five kids back home in Santo Domingo. No prospects for work in Washington Heights. He tells me he can make enough money working in the UNICOR factory to send some home to his wife and children, and still afford a new pair of sneakers.
“You are my friend,” Rojas says and embraces me. “I will speak to the spirits for you also.”
THE MAGIC OF the sacred shrub appears to have worked. Spirits taking form as tiny birds nibbling sugar and puffing cigars have saved Rojas from eternal damnation. He’s happier than ever, rested and well-fed. More Dominicans have appeared on the compound as if conjured by Rojas. They are his friends; they know him from the streets of New York City and from the villages of the DR. This latest influx of immigrant criminals is a noisy, happy-go-lucky lot. Dressed in baggy army fatigues, they look like shock troops from the Third World. There are so many new prisoners, Bureau of Punishment higher-ups decided to move long trailers onto the compound, park them on the rec yard, and convert them into barracks.
During my forced vacation in the Hole, I had to relinquish my bottom bunk. I lie on the top bunk above the level of the cinderblock walls separating the cubes, and I can see Rojas resting peacefully. No more do his trilling birdcalls shatter the undercurrent of dormitory noise. Light from high-intensity security lamps outside glows in through the windows like pale blue artificial moonlight.
I am wide awake, no embrace of sleep like a lover’s arms to fall back into.
Rojas’s magic worked for me as well. There is a note stuck to the window of Axelrod’s office telling me I have legal mail. But he has been off for two days, and I have not been able to get my hands on what I know must be my notice from the Bureau of Punishment’s Central Office in Washington, DC, advising me of my new release date.
I need to know this; I can’t sleep thinking about it. I lie awake listening to a symphony of snores and visualize the slack-jawed, dead-looking faces from which the sounds issue. It’s like an orchestra or choir, a pond full of croaking bullfrogs. Each sleeping musician plays the unique instrument of his nose.
Even Rojas’s name was called at mail call today. More proof of the strength of his magic, or so I thought. But it was only a letter from the Education Department telling him that he had failed his GED exam and would be required to take the test over again.
IN THE MORNING before work call I snag Axelrod to collect my legal mail. Rip open the envelope. Stare at the words on the paper.
What? Three more months! No way! These miserable Punishment cocksuckers denied me credit for meritorious good-time I earned working as unit clerk at the MCC while awaiting trial on my second case. They assume the position that because I wasn’t sentenced at the time, I was not eligible for the award. This is pure Punishment Bureau jive and bullshit. They have intentionally disregarded the fact that I was already sentenced on the Maine conviction, and serving that sentence even as I awaited trial on the New York case, and therefore I am entitled to the good-time.
I fold the letter and tuck it in my pocket. Show no emotion. Don’t let Axelrod see that I am seething inside.
“Not bad,” he says. “You got most of yo
ur good-time back. Right? So you’ll be with us until September.”
No, I’m thinking, I’ll appeal. I must; and I do. A lot can happen in three months. I could get black lung disease or cancer and die. And with the way this joint is filling up, the place could go off. I could get caught up in a riot like what happened at the penitentiary in Atlanta—my greatest fear.
Chapter Sixteen
OF TIME AND SPACE
FCI Ashland, Kentucky, June 30, 1990
TODAY IS MY last day in prison. This time out of time is coming to an end. I could count the hours, the days, the weeks, and months and years that I have been locked up. But it doesn’t really matter. I have reached the point where I could spend the rest of my life in here. Because … it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the new space I occupy inside my head.
I am reminded of the last lines in Byron’s poem “The Prisoner of Chillon”:
My very chains and I grew friends,
So much a long communion tends
To make us what we are:—even I
Regain’d my freedom with a sigh.
It’s a sigh of relief. Yes, of course, I’m relieved. Finally, I can stop fighting. I won, I challenged the Bureau’s bean counters and got all my good-time restored. That feels good. To beat the Punishment fuckers out of any time is a victory. As is the knowledge that I held true to at least one fundamental understanding about myself: I am not a rat. I gave them nothing but time. Eight years. No one else was locked up because of evidence I gave. Actually, make that two fundamental understandings about who I am: I don’t snitch, and I do not take it up the ass. Not from the government or anyone else. Still a man. Neither a pitcher nor a catcher in these many years of life in the Big House. I remain virginal. Unrehabilitated. Untamed. Still an outlaw. I continued to smoke, smuggle, and traffic in the magic herb pretty much the entire time I spent in prison, even after I could almost see the end.
Foolish, yes. Hypocritical, no. I am still a soldier in this grotesque war on plants. I may have won my own personal battle, but the war rages on.
And I have more good news. Some time back, I sent the revised manuscript of my novel to Mailer. He liked it enough to send it to a literary agent. The agent sold the book to a publisher who has a check for twenty grand waiting for me after I hit the street. I may have a future in this writing racket after all.
I’M ON THE merry-go-round, going from housing unit to work detail, commissary to law library, education department to hospital, to have the different staff members sign off on my release, stating I have no infectious diseases (the specter of AIDS is upon us); I have no books or outstanding orders or debts that need to be settled before I depart. So I am walking around now knowing that the space I inhabit is about to be greatly, hugely, infinitely enlarged.
Though … not quite.
“What do you mean I have to report to my parole officer? I thought this was a non-paroleable sentence. I was denied parole,” I say to my case manager.
“Yes, that’s true,” Axelrod says. “But you still owe us the remainder of your sentence on the street. Not parole exactly … but parole exactly. You have forty-eight hours to report to the United States Parole Office in the Eastern District, Brooklyn, New York. That’s where you’ll be living, right?” He smiles. “You do have an alternative. You can refuse to sign the release papers and do the rest of your time here—a little over two years—if that’s what you want to do.”
“You, white man Axelrod, speak with forked tongue,” I say. “Give me the fucking papers. Where do I sign?”
It doesn’t really matter. There is nothing more they can do to me. The time I spent in this restricted space went inside; time entered me and changed me. It grew new space in my head. It’s like a prison cell I inhabit that I carry around in my consciousness. I’m safe in here. They can’t touch me. I am a new person. I live in a dimension that is beyond space and time. Every cell in my body has been renewed. At last I made peace with the lunatic twin, bad Rickie Stratton, that kid who would be Al Capone or Robin Hood or some combination of the two. I left him in the Hole still doing his push-ups, still plotting his release, still running from his fear of mediocrity. The walls have dissolved. The chains and bars and handcuffs have become my nerves and my bones and my flesh. Doing time has become my experience.
But there is still one stop on my personal merry-go-round I know I must make if I am truly a new man. It is not required by anyone but me. As I sit in my cubicle with the minutes and seconds of my internment ticking away, my meager belongings given away, my hand holding the release papers that will allow me to step through the gates and walk away, I know what I have to do, and yet I am fearful. Nervous, afraid, whatever it is—I don’t want to do it. I would rather not have to face him, but I know I must. It’s the same feeling I used to get before a wrestling match, or before the plane landed and the cargo door flew open. Or before I stood in front of a judge.
The new self takes over. I see myself stand, walk out of the cubicle and pass the TV room, pass Axelrod’s office and the guard’s station, over to the other side of the barn where the other captives live in their stalls.
Rector stands facing the cinderblock wall in his cube. He’s naked from the waist up, his muscular black back to me. He looks like he’s preparing a cup of instant soup. I could still wimp out and walk on by. No one would know but me. What if he spits on me and says, Fuck you, cracker? What if he hits me or throws soup and scalding water in my face and we get into it all over again? How fucked up would that be? Well, your Honor, this fool, inmate Stratton 02070-036, he was on his way out the door to be released. But he got into a fight with another prisoner …
Why can’t I just leave well enough alone and let this go, forget about it?
Because—I can’t. I must do this or live with the knowledge that I am a coward.
“Rector,” I say, and he turns to face me.
Now we are looking at each other. I don’t step closer; to enter his cube uninvited would be an act of aggression. I look him in the eye and say, “Respect, man.” And the fear disappears.
He puts down whatever it is he’s doing and nods, says nothing. I am about to turn and walk away when he steps closer and offers me his hand.
“Yes,” he says. “Respect back at you.” And we shake hands.
It’s over. Now I’m free.
I HAND THE duty officer my fully signed and executed release papers. He looks them over, asks my name and number.
“Stratton, 02070-036,” I say for the last time.
He checks my face against my mug shot, hands me back my release papers, and gives me an envelope with an airplane ticket and a hundred bucks.
There is the front door. Just walk down the hallway past the convict with the buffer polishing the linoleum. Show the release papers to the cop on the front gate. See the taxi pull up outside to take me to the airport. Now step out the door into the unrestrained space beyond the fence.
Here it is: the World. I can see the horizon. I look up at the sky, wide, blue and unbounded by fences laced with glinting ribbons of razor wire. Here it is—freedom. Here I am. See it. Feel it. Absorb it. Walk and keep walking and know that I am free at last.
Gaze up at the heavens and ask the Creator: Who am I, God, that you have brought me this far?
I am nothing. Reborn, I am an empty vessel.
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