D o i n g L i f e

This article ran first in Jacob Lehman's great zine FREE READING, January 2003, available online and throughout western California.

The prison: 3000 men stacked in rows, in cells no bigger than closets, and dark as closets with the door shut. The door shut permanently. Young men who will be here all their lives, old men who have been here all their lives, filed away in concrete pigeonholes to be forgotten.

I used to go there once a week, to teach them not to dangle their participles.

I went there but I was never actually in there. I saw this all through a window: the fact that I could leave.

My students told me their stories, how they got there, the mothers nodding off in the back room, the brothers with their guns, the whores kicked to death in the street while the little boys waited for the chance to roll her body. The late night robbery that turned into a late night shooting that turned into a late night arson to hide the evidence. The sensible efforts to escape, which failed. The insensible efforts to strangle in a rope made of dirty socks, which also failed. The heroin and cocaine and the pcp.

Sometimes they didn't even remember what happened. "The last thing I knew, I was smoking angel dust. The next thing, it was ten months later and I was here."

I felt very helpless and stupid in the face of this immense quotidian horror; words seemed useless, correcting their grammar ridiculous, trying to get them to liven up their verbs was surely a joke. Yet I realized soon that the class mattered enormously to my students.

The best part of it was the power of stories in that cinderblock world. Buried alive they struggled back up to the air, they screamed their way into coherence, they made delusions and excuses, certainly, but they also made meanings. They made worlds.

One of my first students was a burly black man from Oakland, clearly a big shot on the yard. The other men went in palpable awe of him; he could leverage a distinct menace just by lowering his eyebrows an inch, and he looked strong enough to crush skulls. In the class he was a goof. Gradually I realized that my little creative writing workshop was Ward's r&r from being tough. Every week he sat across the table and made eyes at me the whole three hours; sometimes with a sly self-deprecating grin he presented me with the apple from his lunch. He worked hard and loudly in the class. He enjoyed listening to other people read, and he loved to read himself.

Everybody was supposed to bring in his own work to read. From the very beginning two of the men in Ward's class were mind-blowingly good, so that many of the others were too afraid even to try. Ward always read. He presented his stories standing up, with exhuberant gestures and plentiful sound effects, referring as he went along to scraps of paper clutched in one hand. His first story was about a street bum who got back at an arrogant whore by slipping her laxative candy, and it only got wilder, every week a new amazement, life on the streets told with great gusto and flourishes, ending in deep bows to the lusty applause of his audience.

After a while I got hold of his little slips of paper, to see what he was writing down, if anything was publishable. I was stunned. There was nothing on the paper but a few pencil scratches. He couldn't spell "and". He was illiterate. He was doing it all ad-lib. Week after week, he was hanging himself out to dry in front of the whole class, and having a great time doing it. He was tough all the way down.

Their stories all tended to be strange. Some of the men could really write, and many who couldn't write well still got out stuff with energy and grit. Sometimes my boss would sit in on an exercise, and his pieces always jumped at me; even when he wrote about violence and crime, it seemed so healthy, somehow. The inmates' stories were kinked, eccentric, charged with the energy of needing to explain.

Some of them envisioned mythical lives for themselves, with women draped on each arm, and long sleek cars, dealing swift death to anybody they didn't like. Others told over and over the sequence of events that got them sent to prison. As the class went on, and they began to relax, some of them went deeper. One man wept, reading a story, something harmless about his childhood, about his home; he wept, not for where he was, or what he'd done, but for what he'd lost, that innocence. That time before time.

Outside on the yard I guess life was a little different. Where I worked was (may still be) the most violent prison in America, with over 900 incidents a year. I never saw it happening. I came on the yard just after the riot. I talked to somebody the day before he was stabbed. I heard the whistles, the alarms, the gunshots, the pounding footsteps, but I was always inside, talking about nouns and verbs. When the guards came roaring in waving their side-angle batons I didn't have to dive for the floor. I smelled the pepper spray but my eyes didn't burn.

I saw the man taken away on a stretcher, still alive, still yelling threats, blood soaking his clothes, his arms and legs shackled, only his mouth moving with terrible energy. I saw the man locked in the wiremesh telephone booth of the holding cage, he was screaming, he was furious, he was clearly crazy, taking off his clothes one by one and throwing them out through the slot in the cage, the ground around him littered with his clothes, and he was naked, and screaming, and maybe crying, it was hard to tell in the rain.

Between classes, I watched them play basketball, out on the yard, amazed at how cleanly they played. Nobody fouled so much as a fingertip. No skin ever touched. If they did, the rifleman in the gun tower might have shot them.

Around the table with them, I begged them for words and stories and what they gave me was the prison. All the social advocates to one side, the fact is, the inmates made this hell for themselves. The cinderblock and razorwire kept them inside but the prison existed most powerfully in their minds, in a special narrowness of their perspective, a sense even in the best of them that other people were there primarily to get over on. The prison was in their minds before they ever came and if by any chance one managed to leave he very likely came back pretty quick, because this was their world. It's not so bad, they told me. Three hots and a cot, and a punk under the bunk. This is my career, they said, if somebody talked to them about work. This is my life, this hellhole, this jungle, this horror show.

Anyhow, the program's gone now, axed in the state budget cuts. I understand this; when they're cutting programs for kids and the poor they won't fund writing classes for lifers. But I miss it, I miss it very much, and on the very last day of the class, I had a revelation about why I was there in the first place.

I am sitting in the class telling the men that although I've been fired, my boss, the arts facilitator, will carry the class on. He's intelligent, well-read, articulate, he'll do an excellent job, I am telling them, and even as I talk I see they aren't buying it. They are furious and sad and they will miss the class--"I had fun here," one told me, indignantly, as if that must be why it was being taken away--but they won't make up a class for my boss. In a flash, I understand: he's an employee of the prison. He's not on their side.

I am. And I realize then that's why I'm there, that's why the class works for them. Because we are alike, they and I, in one key way--we resent authority, and love to kick it over. Only, I put my violence in books, and theirs was written in blood.

I can harness my demons into metaphor. Their demons have taken over their lives.

Now I have walked for the last time through the cold grey walls of the prison, through gates opened and closed by people I never see, in towers, behind dark glass, with guns in their laps. The gates keep me out as they keep the inmates in. The budget cuts have terminated even the arts facilitator, so there will be no more classes, ever, no more word games, no more amazing stories, no more moments of grief and connection and insight, less evidence that they are living, feeling, thinking human beings.

Lying there in their bunks, two to a cell, in the dark, with nothing left to do but tick the days and years away until they die.

(c) 2003 Cecelia Holland

Pelican Bay State Prison