Dry Spell

Dust blows and stings and gathers outside the door, in drifts, like snow. Every particle seems to be on its way to some other place. So much restlessness with no appreciable result other than relocation --  usually in my bed, my shoes, or my scalp. The lover that is rain, water, nourishing moisture, has left in search of something to sustain her. This dryness just seems to part of the way of things; there is no one to blame, or everyone. I see her everywhere, but am bound, paralyzed by fear. Everything longs for water, for love, a break in the dam that holds back the rushing relief of emotion, expression. The dust remembers the days when it was fed by rain, by the shade of blooming fruit. I must find a way to woo her back, woo her home. My eyes are full of the crust of sleep, body stiff, joints sore. This long sleep feels like it will never end. How did this happen? How did I get here? It began when I veered off my path because it hurt too much, was too hot to touch or hang onto. Or so I thought. Numbness was preferable to pain. Sleep walking preferable to scrabbling over the rocks of new territory. It's time to wake up. I hear thunder in the distance, a beckoning promise of consummation.

Sometimes It Has to be OK Not to Know

He walks into the workshop as eager to please as a cocker spaniel. Even though he is a man of twenty-three, he has the shy smile and air of innocence of a child. He is perennially cheerful, like he carries an inside joke, the punchline of which he just keeps grinning over, always fresh. I know he is a capable man on the yard, but he doesn't broadcast it in the workshops. He is respectful to a fault, and makes it a point after every workshop to thank me for coming.

T. is one of the long-time regulars. His genre is poetry, specifically love poems. He misses his girlfriend terribly and describes her in sensuous terms involving fruits, flowers, stars, incense, and crashing oceans of distance. They are flowing rivers of longing and abstraction. He can't seem to break out of it.

I push him to create a scene, to ground his work in some concrete particular. He, I think, finds that frightening, and has yet to go there.

Then one day he comes in with a Cheshire smirk and says, "I have something different today. It's the assignment you gave us, the one about showing a relationship through a scene."

I assume he is going to read a piece about his girlfriend, but when it is his turn, he details a trip he took with his father. In the account, he is sixteen, and his father takes him to a whore house in Mexico. He, contrary to usual emphases in pieces like this, omits graphic sex, but focuses instead on getting to, and crossing the border. His prose jumps with style, energy, and sensory richness.

It also takes a twist, has a silly, funny end, that embarrasses cops, specifically the Border Patrol, who can't discern the difference between deodorant residue and cocaine. I find it funny, but not terribly insightful.

After he reads I ask him if there is more he could include about what the trip was for him in terms of his relationship to his father.  That was, after all, the assignment, to convey something of the nature, the qualities, of the relationship.

He says "No. There is nothing more to tell. I hadn't seen more than a few times in my life before that. I don't know anything about him. He just came to take me out to make me a man. That's it."

T. does not traffic in irony. What he says is what he means. His look when he tells me this is as honest and complete as any sentences I have heard in my life. He puts a funny face on what he has with his father, which is next to nothing. 

I find the story both comic and tragic. I doubt many readers will get it without all the context, but decide to pursue publication anyway.

I file it in the category of "What might have, could have, should have, but what has never, been." That file is large. It sealed and protected by a thick wall of stories. 

It's a good piece, well written. I ask him if I can submit it to the magazine.

"Sure," he says, proud to have his work considered. The truth of it disarms me. I don't know how it will fly. 

Haiku For Fall (off the cuff)

Full cart at Costco
Blueberries and bananas
Stuck in Samsara

Moon pull-up last night
Wish I could do twenty one
Fall more than season

Cat brings mouse to bed
It looks for a place to hide
Not batting practice

Kids go to school now
Sun rises cool at long last
Papers need grading

Her hair begs touching
My hands tremble with fear
Too many bills to pay

I pull a blanket
Cooler pump self-destructed
Better turn it off

Breast(s)

C.C. exudes the confidence of the large and strong. His dread locks extend half way down his back, and the orange jump suit barely contains the bulk of his chest, arms, and broad back. He cocks his head when he looks at me, but he defers, at least for now, to my critique of his writing.

The first drafts of his work are all about sexual conquests. In a circle of men, that's a pretty safe subject, and, to my eye, is evidence of Eve Sedgewick's "male gaze." In her thinking, men bond over talking about women. That helps us guys overcome some of our discomfort or fear of each other. There is more to her work, but this thumbnail summary gets at some of the some dynamics of the workshops. There is inertia here, cultural inertia. Prisons are extensions and distillations of inequities and injustice. The men live in a focused beam that is intensified by sexual frustration and deprivation. In a word, the subject is touchy if not taboo. 

It's a tough moment when I bring up the topic of sexism in writing. C.C. and his portrayal of women is not the misogynistic degradation of "bitches" and "hos," but it does condescend. He bristles when I ask him about it.

"What do you mean, 'sexist?'" he asks.

"When you say Shaunny was a 'fine female' you reduce her to her gender rather than showing readers more about her, who she is, what she likes, or fears, what make her unique."

He thinks about that, as if, going beyond "female" is not exactly necessary.

"So if I say something about he does her hair, that'll work better?" he says, trying on the different description.

"Yes, that's going to help make her more of a character, not so flat or stereotypical."

We go with that for a while.

As an assignment, I ask C.C. to render a specific scene with her to help show not just more about how hot she was and how good he was in bed with her, but something about him, some reflection on his actions, something that might make him a bit more human, complex, something honest, in which he might not look so good.

Other men around the table nod in reluctant assent.

One says, "Yeah. Where you afraid she might say no?"

C.C. sits with that, takes a deep breath, about busts the seams of his jumpsuit, and then lets out a sigh.

"OK, I think I could do that," he says, making it something of a challenge, a competition.

He re-assumes his Alpha stance.

"I went with a chick once, who only had one breast," he said. "I gotta say, that bothered me, turned me off. Problem was I really liked her. She liked me too. Until I saw her topless, that is. Then I went with another girl. Something about that didn't feel right, but I felt like I had to go with what got me off better. I just couldn't see eff'in some chick with only one tit."

"Now that is a story," I said. "Let's hear it, your side of it, how you worked that conflict out."

"OK," He said. "OK." 

Skin in the Game

"You'll have to vouch for him -- work, place to live, awareness of parole obligations -- if he's going to leave the halfway house," he said.

He was the manager of the Federal Bureau of Prison's halfway house. He was a big guy, bored and weary. He looked like he had seen it all and then some. Nothing could surprise him.

I felt like passing him a hundred dollar bill just to see how he would react.

The place was sad. Grimy. Defeated men and women wandered around the "campus" with heads down, feet shuffling. Folding chairs sat in the sun next to doors that opened onto a parking lot. It had been a hotel at one time.

The place next door advertised itself as the "No Tel Motel."

We were in a tough part of Tucson, not the best place, I thought, for a halfway house for men and women tying to get away from a life on the streets.

"I can do that," I said. "He'll be working for a magazine as an editor, and he has a guest house to rent on the east side."

He looked at me with an expression, "who do you think you're kidding? This guy is an addict, a hard-core, a ticking bomb," but handed over the paper, a kind of contract, for me to sign.

Here goes, I thought, I'm putting myself on the line here. If he falls, I may be on the hook for something, though I don't know what.

I pulled my pen out of my pocket and signed. He notarized the document and stamped it.

"I'll make you a copy."

As I folded it, J. came in the door with a question on his face. I nodded. He left to get his stuff -- a box of clothes, books, and a blood-red electric guitar. The guitar stuck out the box at a rakish angle, barely balanced, threatening to cascade out of the box onto the cold concrete.

I held open the chain-link gate so J. could squeeze through.

This was much bigger than leaving a half-way house. We were going out into the free world. He would be sleeping on his own tonight. No cellie, no counts, no flashlights in your face in the middle of the night, no screaming down the block, no watching your back.

He looked sheepish. unbelieving.

He blinked in the bright, knife-edge light of a December dawn.

Mr. G. Takes It To the Mat

Mr. G. stands like an Aztec fireplug when it is his turn to read. He takes his feet after pushing in his chair, looking around the circle, and taking a deep breath. He gathers up his hard-won dignity and pulls authority up from somewhere deep inside and feeds it into his voice. He is breaking new ground.

It is the first time he has read in the workshop. Yes, he has been attending, listening, and watching, for several months. I think he has been sizing me and the other men up. He has three large dots tattooed above his eye brows. Looking at him, I find it hard to focus on his eyes; I lift my gaze to those strange dots.

"I've never read in front of people before," he says.

I nod and tell him he is brave. Other men nod the knowing nod, having been there before.

"I was in the Mojave Unit when I met a man who thought he was a woman," he began.

He went on to tell the story of Misha, a "maricon," who had suffered greatly in prison, and who now was standing alone after a gathering of a church group.

Mr. G. had found religion in prison. At first it was evangelical Christianity but had morphed into a kind of Aztec pantheism. He was a devotee, a disciple, who lived and breathed his creed.

He read on, how, after the Bible study about loving your neighbor, the men had broken into groups, leaving Misha outside on his own.

Mr. G. approached him, struck up a conversation. He wasn't shy.

"So many people feel that homosexuality is the result of sexual abuse as a child. I was abused. I am not asking you about this without knowing what that is like."

The room went silent as the men around the table locked onto Mr. G.'s narrating. Suddenly the air went out of the room.

"I was wondering if your liking men came from an experience like that," he read, the tone one of curiosity rather than condemnation.

"Misha said that yes, he had been abused, raped several times, but that he did not attribute his attraction to men to the abuse."

Here Mr. G. pauses, takes a breath, and began to reflect.

"I have always been one to shun men I called 'putos' or 'maricones.' I wanted to beat them up, to shove them into a corner. But talking to Misha I saw that he was different, and had a right to be different."

Some of the men in the workshop shifted in their seats. Mr. G. was approaching a taboo topic, and it was uncomfortable, prickly.

"So I here to say, to stand and say, that I respect Misha for who he is."

Silence.

Then applause.

Knock me over with a feather.

I need to stand back here to state that I  am not trained as a therapist, that I do not encourage inmates to write about their demons or their wounds. That said, I don't forbid or discourage their doing so either. I am interested in the writing, and if the writing grows out of a painful moment, then so be it.

Mr. G. absorbs the applause, flushes a little, takes most subtle of bows, and then says something that takes me even more by surprise.

"Since I started writing in this class, I have looking at things that have scared me all my life. I am finding that if I write about this stuff, it bothers me less. I've been having fewer nightmares lately. I feel pretty good."

This triggered some of the other inmates to jump in with experiences of their own.The talk sounded something like a men's support group, but I didn't mind.

I thought of Terry McMillan, a teacher of mine when I was in graduate school. She said "If you feel blood pop out your forehead when you are writing, you'll know you're on to some good stuff."

Well said, Terry. Well said.

Sucker Punch Then Haymaker: How Prison De-Humanizes Inmates

N. has shaved his head again. He has also bulked up over the last couple of months. Crude tattoos sprout from his forearms. He walks with more of a swagger, a don't-fuck-with-me cockiness. When he joins the workshop, he first scans the tables to see who else is there. Most often, he loosens up before giving me a nod and smile of recognition. Sometimes, though, he sits outside the circle, back against a wall. 

N. is twenty-two years old, bright, interested -- deeply interested  -- in writing screen plays. He has written a few that he has entered in the Pen Prison Writing Contest. So far, he has not won or placed. He keeps trying though, keeps knocking on the door.

N. is in on drug charges, like many of the other young men in the writing workshop.  He grew up poor in Phoenix, the only son of a single mom. He learned early on to fight, to hold his ground. Raves and the fast life of ecstasy dealing proved too much to resist.

He should, in my view, be in college. If he were at the University of Arizona, he would likely be one of the star students in film or writing courses. He works hard at his craft, taking it far more seriously than even my best university students. He reads well. He devours the books on writing that I bring in.

I know because he cites them when he makes a comment on another man’s work. He is a fine critic, with a good ear. 

I mention N. because he is a case study in what is lost when a country locks up too many of its men and women. He has become invisible to the “free world.” He is losing something of himself that he may never again recover. He wages a losing battle to feed the fires of humanity that burn strong in him. I ask myself how one might feed that humanity. What would it take to keep the burning, to add fuel to the flame? All I can offer is language and its ability to express some human truth, to ask a shared human question. I can bring in words and ideas that may or may not be enough to offset the soul hungry maw of prison. He needs dignity, fire to create, a chance.  He is hanging by a thread, a thread of what he believes as humanly possible. What is "humanly possible" rests on what he imagines as "human," and what is human is composed in his experience, his imagination, and what he sees in books, film, music, and the storm of discourse that is language. Language holds the key to what he will imagine as possible.  

He is one of over two million and counting of Americans who are locked up, which is more than any country on Earth. We are champion incarcerators. But it's killing us, even if we don't know it, especially because we don't know it. 

Money from education has decreased about as much as funding for prisons has increased. Incarceration cost more that drug treatment, and is far less effective. Prison serves to perpetuate poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, and organized crime. It makes our nation a less desirable place to live. 

Prison, in this man's America, strives to punish rather than rehabilitate, crush rather than foster, reduce to the lowest common denominator rather than enlarge an offender's humanity. This punish and let-them-rot mission of mass incarceration produces monsters rather than fully functioning human beings. The system operates with clinical, if not fully thought through, efficiency.

Prisons exacerbate chronic social ills; they fan the flames of racism, reinforce a toxic form of masculinity, perpetuate cycles of poverty and violence, deprive inmates of contact with nature, and actually strengthen organized crime by letting gangs run the show on the yard. Education programs have been eliminated; vocational opportunities have disappeared. The prison complex in Tucson used to grow much of its own vegetables in a large garden that is now barren, scraped dust. 

Prison culture is racist, misogynistic, ultra macho. Prison populations are the throw-aways of society: the poor, the people of color, the under-educated, the marginalized, desperate, and mentally ill. The message of prison is one of despair more often than hope.  

But the greatest damage prisons exact on the men and women unfortunate enough to end up there is that it deprives them of voice, removes them from the horizon of social visibility. They become forgotten ghosts to all but those who make the trip to visit or volunteer.

N. is trying. He wants to write. He wants to find his voice. He wants to learn. He wants to be heard, to be seen, to find out who he might become, given half a chance. 

His work is good, and he has published some poems, stories, and essays. He has explored how his identity as a man is tied to combat; he wrote an extended essay about his father that was published in the prison workshop literary magazine. That might give him some confidence, open a door to another possibility. His learning to express his struggles, his gaining a awareness of the forces aligned against him might provide a larger world of possibility. Reading and writing can illuminate and expand his horizons beyond the perimeter of razor wire. If he accepts prison life as all there is, he is doomed.

Odds aren't good, but he is young enough to learn to dodge a punch, absorb a blow or two, especially if has vision to see what's coming.