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REVIEWS The New Yorker
September 2004
The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell , by Joe Loya (Rayo; $24.95).
In his twenties, Loya achieved notoriety as the smooth-talking “Beirut Bandit,” who robbed dozens of Southern California banks. When the police caught up with him, in 1989, they discovered a Mexican-American from East L.A. who had once been a promising student. Imprisoned for seven years, he grew more violent until two years of solitary confinement prompted a remarkable self-transformation. Loya's memoir, begun in prison, is less concerned with his crimes than with their background—his family history, the details of barrio life, and the peculiar cultural currents that led him to identify with Reagan Republicanism and then to seek its perceived entitlements by any means. In the end, Loya's account of his struggle to redeem himself seems more genuinely thrilling than his crime spree.
 read an excerpt
The Houston Chronicle
October 15, 2004
A convict confronts himself
A little boy comes in a vision, bringing redemption on paper
By MICHAEL BERRYHILL
Houston Chronicle
Many people redeem themselves in prison through religion. Joe Loya did it through writing.
As a boy he was brutally beaten by his evangelistic, Old Testament-thumping father. Resenting the way church elders turned a blind eye to the abuse, Loya developed a thorough contempt for religion while using it to con friends out of money and women out of sex.
He spent part of his childhood in the infamous Maravilla housing projects in Los Angeles, birthplace of a notorious California prison gang. He grew up feeling tough by association. His parents were teenagers when they married. His father, a small man with an arm withered by polio, had been beaten by his father, a brooding Korean War veteran. Loya's mother died when he was 9, and in his grief and rage his father started beating him and his younger brother, sometimes so badly that at age 14 Loya redeemed himself by stabbing his father in the neck.
That led to a stay in juvenile detention hall, where Loya felt proud to be the only kid in the place who had fought back. He wasn't a victim anymore.
Still -- and he doesn't explain why -- he returned to his father. He drifted on the edges of college and Anglo society, dropping in and out of Bible school, working at an upscale clothing store, waiting tables at chain restaurants. All the while his unexamined rage was coming to a boil.
20-something hustler
By his early 20s Loya was hustling his friends and his relatives out of money and cars. He was smart and well-spoken, but he became, he writes, "a dark caricature of a preppy, " someone who lied all the time, even when he didn't need to.
As his friends and relatives caught on to his schemes, he decided to go for more. Instead of being a two-bit con man, he became a bank robber, pulling off more than 25 robberies, sometimes two in one day. That way he could end his "passive-aggressive ways." As a bank robber, he wouldn't have to lie.
"Bank robbery appealed to me philosophically," he writes. "I enjoyed the notion of being an agent of hazard who'd introduce people -- bank tellers or anyone else who got in my way -- to terror whenever their lives intersected with my violent whim. Something about that exchange made me feel alive. ... I wanted people who otherwise felt safe in life to feel the stinging fear and shameful helplessness that I had felt crawling across the floor as my father or school bullies kicked and taunted me."
When the police finally caught Loya, the detectives were baffled. Most bank robbers were junkies and gangbangers. Loya was so well-spoken that the police thought this Hispanic man was from the Middle East and dubbed him the Beirut bank robber.
Dispensing with morality
In prison Loya continued his quest to dispense with morality. Anyone who thinks federal prisons are a soft life will be enlightened by Loya's gritty narrative. He figures out prison life fairly quickly and learns to exploit a weak inmate, whose mistake is to think that because Loya is kind to him he is his friend. All the tough-guy posturing in prison, Loya says, comes from a fear of rape or being ridiculed as weak. He learned to spot men's emotional insecurities and take advantage of them.
"Drugs were everywhere in prison," he writes. "And not just pharmaceutical drugs. The same drugs in there as out here: Food. Sex. Religion." Prison was a sad parody of the free world to Loya: all the same addictions, all the same problems. As for religion, Loya would have none of it. It hadn't protected him growing up. Why would he believe in it in prison?
Eight months of solitary confinement provided him the chance to see himself. Solitude drives many inmates insane; they start cutting themselves to get medical attention; they curl into fetal balls; they cover themselves with their own excrement or throw it at guards. Loya developed techniques to deal with the madness. He did push-ups and handstands. He played mental games to see how long he could maintain silence. For a time he thought he had mastered solitude.
But he began being delusional. He kept seeing a boy from his neighborhood who had died of leukemia. "In that hour of dire need, I wasn't visited by God or his burning bush," he writes. "Jesus didn't call to me like St. Paul claimed he did to him, on that road to Damascus. No horns or trumpets blew. No angels in bright lights came to give me heavenly messages.
"I merely saw a very pale little boy."
Apparition on a page
He wrote a story about him, and "the apparition of madness finally released language. ... The writing had opened me, had freed me to begin thinking again. ... The writing was an unmasking of myself. No more hiding behind a facade of bravado. I was committed to disarming my rage so that I might eventually have a chance to live a normal life and stay out of prison. Organizing my blemished narrative on the page allowed me to grasp how my anger and violence had always disguised immense wounds, and had been mostly a profound grief for a life gone terribly awry. ... I saw how my crimes replicated my childhood universe, how I was introducing my victims to the terror I felt as a boy."
It would be tempting to label this book a prison memoir, but it is more powerful than that. It is a book about doing what we must all do, one way or another: come to terms with ourselves.
Michael Berryhill is a Houston-based writer.
Publishers Weekly Book Review
July 12, 2004
THE MAN WHO OUTGREW HIS PRISON CELL:
Confessions of a Bank Robber
Joe Loya .
In this well-written, insightful memoir, reformed bank robber Loya provides a searing account of the physical and emotional scars he received growing up in East Los Angeles. After his mother's death, both Loya and his younger brother suffered horrible beatings from their father, a Protestant minister. While Loya avoids blaming his eventual career as a criminal on his father's brutality, the resulting feelings of helplessness clearly played a major role in transforming a bookish nerd into a violent thug. Pushed beyond his limits, Loya finally takes drastic steps to protect himself. His rapid descent into a life of crime leads to a demeaning and grueling prison stretch. Loya does a masterful job of conveying the survivalist ethos he's forced to adopt while incarcerated. His gradual rejection of that code, nurtured and sustained by a pen-pal relationship with poet Richard Rodriguez, is a little less well-developed, and his ending the narrative shortly after his release leaves unanswered some of the thoughtful questions he raises about rehabilitation and reintegration into society. Nonetheless, many readers will find Loya's honesty and self-awareness gripping and will root for him to transcend his inner demons.
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The San Jose Mercury-News
September 26, 2004
EX-CON RETURNS TO HIS LOVE OF LITERATURE 
By Jill Wolfson
Special to the Mercury News
The title of this engaging and honest memoir actually refers to two people. The first is a fellow inmate of Loya's who grew so obese during incarceration that he resembled a baby elephant. The second is the author, who went into prison angry, bitter and violent, and through introspection and writing found freedom even behind bars. Joe Loya grew up in East Los Angeles, a studious, devoutly religious adolescent who seemed set to follow in the Bible-thumping ways of his minister father. The slow death of his mother, along with the tumultuous L.A. neighborhood and his father's increasingly abusive behavior, changed the boy's path. Loya's strengths -- his abundant charisma, his intelligence, his fearlessness -- became weaknesses that encouraged his descent into crime. ``An accurate accounting is always a confusing business,'' Loya writes. ``Let's just say I robbed a lot of banks in a fourteen-month span. The FBI estimated between thirty and forty. . . . Even I lost count. It was easy to do. Sometimes I robbed two or three banks a day . . . my fatalism operated at full tilt. No surprise really: I was the same age as my mother when she died. . . . I used to tell friends that any year I lived beyond my mother's age was a bonus.'' This story could have been simple and predictable. An abusive childhood leads to a life of crime leads to redemption. But Loya, who is a freelance writer, an associate editor with Pacific News Service in San Francisco and a performance artist, was raised on literature; his father read his son bedtime stories by Hemingway and other greats. The love of language shows in the prose and in the complex layering beneath every scene. Loya's unusual mix of street smarts and bookishness attracted the attention of writer Richard Rodriguez. For several years, the two maintained a pen-pal relationship. In his foreword, Rodriguez explains his fascination with Loya and illuminates the nagging question that underlies every page of this engrossing autobiography: ``How was it possible that the man I was addressing each week and reading -- the Joe Loya of fine sensibility -- was also the criminal who had been so dangerous to himself, and, eventually to others?''
USA Today
September 9, 2004
The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell: Confessions of a Bank Robber
By Joe Loya
Few experience the life that Loya has led and survive to recount it so compellingly. Loya's memoir is more prescription than cautionary tale: Overworked immigrant teen parents struggling to build a better life instead encounter a spiral of bad luck. Eventually, Loya's father becomes physically abusive. No surprise, Loya's path leads to crime and prison. His story carries no hint of victimization or sentimentality.
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San Francisco Chronicle
September 5, 2004
Taking a hard look at himself while doing hard time
Reviewed by Jonathan Kiefer
A bookish, winningly philosophical Mexican American kid from the projects of East L.A., grows up motherless, repays his father's cruelty with a knife to the neck and goes on to make a name for himself as a bank robber in the money- mad 1980s. He serves seven years, two in solitary confinement, then remakes his name as a Bay Area storyteller by performing his own redemption on stage. For that tale to work at all, it would have to seem completely, unflinchingly authentic. Being true should do the trick.
When Joe Loya performed his autobiographical one-man show, "The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell," in San Francisco two years ago, audiences ate it up. But there also seemed to be a critical consensus that Loya's skills as a raconteur trumped his acting, an implication that his material was better served on the page than the stage. Hence the book, with the annotating and inviting subtitle: "Confessions of a Bank Robber."
As should be expected of any hard-time memoir -- this one with portentous, single-word chapter titles such as "Omen," "Flux," "Corruption" and "Hazard" -- Loya makes retrospective self-analysis his main business.
"The boy in the mirror seemed like a stranger whose tragedy I was observing independently," he writes. "The detachment I felt from my own traumatic experience baffled me. I expected to own myself more forcefully, to know and feel my experience more acutely."
Stories like his often involve men finding their religion in jail. Loya found a jail in his religion: Not long into a strict Protestant upbringing -- so strict, actually, that religiosity obscured all other aspects of his heritage -- he lost his mother and helplessly watched his pious father become a brutal tyrant. The abuse was its own horror, and his father's hypocritical sanctimony left Loya wary of trusting any authority, let alone God, and sewed poisonous seeds into otherwise normal boyhood mischief.
"I enjoyed the feeling of conspiracy, the way chicanery felt like immunity," he writes of an early discovery, one of many. "A canopy of dread hung over our lives in those days, and the rules of the house were in flux, family alliances taking a different shape, ideas of right and wrong foggier."
Loya has done some honest work in sourcing the rage that drove his felonious behavior. He describes his life with compelling urgency, and with a knack for efficient characterization and setting detailed scenes. Tracing his ascent, as it were, from petty, bumbled burglaries to audacious bank heists, he uses grand, Biblical language with ambivalence, reverence and often caustic irony.
What emerges is a complex temperament, at once writerly and beastly, and Loya is well aware of the duality. He laid the book's groundwork through correspondence with the writer Richard Rodriguez, to whom Loya appealed for mentorship while in prison. Telling excerpts from Loya's letters are included here: In a single paragraph, he speaks calmly of having stabbed a man in the face, yearns for the postprison freedom of watching porn with a soundtrack and quotes Marcus Aurelius on the subject of human imagination.
Loya's essaying can at times seem redundant, as if the effort to render emotional nuances with absolute precision were periodically blurred by self- enchanting eloquence. But, within reason, that's an indulgence to which some big books with big themes -- like human fraternity and the nature of violence -- are entitled. He also approaches Dostoyevskian gravity. "The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell" adds a real contribution to the literature of criminality, for which it's likely to make provocative rounds among book clubs and among families whose black sheep have put themselves and their loved ones through years of hell.
To Joe Loya, in 1984, "[t]he world, with its honest priorities and daylight responsibilities, seemed too far away from me, designed for others to function in. I clearly wasn't suited for the straight-and-narrow.
"Some drastic action was needed. So I finally started thinking about who I really was. Stabbing my dad was the only drastic thing I'd ever done in my young life. That was my only passion, born of genuine fear and loathing, desperation and concussion. That was the only believable part of me." Twenty years later, it's the part that might seem hardest to believe, because Loya has so successfully wrestled himself "free to choose my reaction to any situation," and, with the wisdom and clarity of hindsight, gotten it all down on the page.
His is an astonishing true story and also a meaningful one, bearing out its own repeated lesson, that the "same thing that'll make you laugh will make you cry."
Jonathan Kiefer is a writer in San Francisco.
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Kirkus Review
July 15, 2004
THE MAN WHO OUTGREW HIS PRISON CELL
Confessions of a Bank Robber
A cradle-to-jail, coming-of-age and going-bad autobiography from a bank robber out of the East LA barrio.
Debut author Loya was schooled in violence by a Bible-thumping, kid-thrashing, wife-beating, feckless father. Dad's first wife, the author's mother, "was twenty-six years old when she died," he writes. "I was nine." The paternal whippings finally ended when Joe attained manhood with one rash act: he stabbed his father. It wasn't fatal, but Dad got the point. Joe shed a flimsy religious guise to become one hardcore hustler, challenging earthly and heavenly fathers. He favored hot cars, cool preppie vestments, and confrontations with all comers. An apostate, he trusted no one, betrayed no emotion, and lied easily. The route from The Church of the Open Door to the prison of barred gates began with bounced checks and progressed to grand theft auto, larceny, fraud, and bank heists. It was fun—until Joe got arrested and spent seven years in the slammer. Suspected of a jailhouse killing (the true murderer is not identified), he landed in solitary. His portrait of jailhouse life shows prisoners pitted against guards, against other inmates, and, ultimately, against themselves. A chance viewing of an Oprah segment prompts Loya to straighten himself out. It's all a one-man show. This introspective Mexican Raskolnikov has become, as his sponsor, Richard Rodriguez, says in a foreword, "a theatrical." He is wont to quote Nietzsche, Rilke, Marcus Aurelius, and other worthies—and, inevitably, the writing smacks somewhat of affectation. But against the odds, this felon's drama is eventually compelling. The solipsistic title refers to an enormous fellow inmate as well as the author. Strong writing from a talent that jelled in prison. |
