Life After Hard Time
This essay first appeared in the LA Weekly, January 31, 1997 and was re-published in the UTNE Reader, May 1997
An accurate accounting is always confusing business, so let's just say I robbed a lot of banks. The FBI estimated between 30 and 40. Even I lost count. But I do remember this: Robbing banks was a cool thrill.
A little known fact: Stalin began his political life robbing the czar's banks. But unlike Uncle Joe, I didn't rob banks to help finance some great social cause. It was society that interested me. High society. I robbed banks to support a lifestyle. I was the guy who picked up every check, financed every trip to Vegas, rented the limo for dinner on Melrose and paid for the blocks of theater tickets. I kept a Chinese tailor, several cars, and played 18 holes of golf five times a week, sometimes twice a day. I entered malls and left four hours later, $6,000 lighter. I was a hedonist. And a popular one too.
I have a photo of myself shot during the late campaign days of 1988. I'd invited friends of like cynical mind to come and watch the presidential debates at my house. In the photograph, we are on my porch: I, the only brown man, am seated on the front right edge of the group, in khaki shorts, sockless ankles, casual loafers and a "Nixon in '88" T-shirt. A T-shirt slogan which spoke to a crude truth: It takes a crook to admire another one.
I suspect my big grin in those photos had much in common with Ollie North's or Charles Keating's. A hint of wry knowledge. It's the smile that says, "Yeah, that's right! I did it! And you know I got away with it.!"
I was everybody's best friend, but I was also a real barbarian. A son of a bitch in a Nixon T-shirt. There was meanness in my materialism. I didn't tolerate disrespect. Once, in a parking lot behind Crocidile Cafe, I attacked two men for staring at my girlfriend.
It was as if I were possessed to act with exaggerated urgency. As if my fatalism was full tilt. No surprise really: I'd always sensed myself doomed to die young. Like my mother, who died at age 26.
On the morning of a robbery, I'd stand naked in front of the bathroom's steamy mirror. I'd wipe off a circle big enough for me to stare at my wet image, at my dark sexy face, my clear complexion, the collegiate haircut, the small scar on my left eyebrow, my full lips, my dead eyes. I dared my hard self to flinch. My mouth opened slowly and murmured an erotically morbid demand: "Don't return without fifty-thousand dollars."
Stephen Crane describes a "delirium that encounters despair and death and is heedless and blind to the odds." I knew that state. I'd surrender my fear of death to the bathroom mirror. Then, unafraid of consequence, I'd pick up my .357 Magnum, tuck it into the back of my trousers, draw a deep breath, then walk into those banks fully prepared for a final shootout with law enforcement if destiny deemed it.
But destiny never did.
I was arrested when a girlfriend informed on me. The FBI was waiting for me when I went to meet her at her local university. I was sitting outside the student union, sipping a cappuccino, reading The Wall Street Journal. The agents identified themselves. I leapt up and started swinging. It took eight men to subdue me.
I served seven years in prison, without them-those party pals and lively gals. Seven years-a biblical number. Seven dreary Christmases. Seven unsensational New years. Seven banal birthdays. The same inane banter on every prison tier. The tedium wore away the thug. I vowed never to return.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
I was released six months ago, and while I remain determined not to go back in, adjustment is a bitch to manage, especially with the hard recidivism statistics breathing down my neck. Something close to 50 percent of all released inmates return to prison; more than half within the first 90 days of parole.
But if prison has its tedium, the world outside has its terror. Part of my anxiety has to do with the speedy and reckless pace of the world. I am accustomed to the opposite, to the methodical, movement-regulated-for-security prison pace. Mindless rapidity startles me and leaves me feeling off balance.
On the day of my release, I got a check for $150 and was shown the gate. The change of pace was immediate. The prison's parking lot was full of traffic-a honk here, a tire screech there. The friend who picked me up at the prison is a monk, the abbot of his monastery. But even this usually reverent man was a terror on the road. Charging ahead in fits and spurts, he wove maniacally through highway traffic, cutting off slower drivers.
And then there are the everyday humiliations an ex-convict must absorb in order to remain free. Poverty is one of them. The cash I left prison with seemed like a mockery. I owned nothing but the clothes on my back, no change of underwear, no soap or toothbrush, no bed. Forget a TV or car: I had no electricity or driver's license.
I am a proud man, and at times the pressures on my poise are intense. The shame of living off handouts made me wake up one morning at 3 o'clock with the old temptation tugging on me. I wanted to say, Fuck patience. I wanted to just go out and take mine. I wanted to risk it all again.
My struggle is clear: I am a ballsy, muscular man who has opted to assume a mousy role. I've chosen to live mundanely--even meekly at times--for my freedom.
The pitfalls for me are the everyday indignities the rest of you have learned to accept. The car that cuts me off on the freeway. The woman who barges into me while I wait in a grocery line. The obnoxious clerk at the DMV. The liar posing as a potential employer at a job interview. Or my devious neighbor.
Her. The one who substituted her clothes in my washing machine because she was in a hurry, and I'd gotten to the laundry room first. Several weeks ago I found my clothes, sopping wet, atop the rumbling machine I'd placed them in.
In prison this infraction would have been solved easily enough. I would have confronted the offending inmate with a sharpened piece of bedspring and I would have made him regret his insult, his foolish underestimation of me.
Instead, in my new role as "free man," I returned to my apartment and suffered what one writer has referred to as "the rage of the baffled." I became mousy.
I don't presume to recall my violent past as halcyon days. But I know I never would have allowed myself to be treated like this when my mien exuded menace rather than mousiness. The truth is that I wanted to walk next door and say, "Hey, you crazy bitch, don't ever touch my fuckin' clothes again or you'll find YOURSELF spinning in that fuckin' machine." But I didn't play the thug.
It is then, in the pause of acute humiliation, the sting of everyday disrespects, that I can vividly recall the chancy thrills of my adventurous salad days when "for posterity's sake" was a dirty phrase. When I loathed the future and abandoned caution. When the adrenaline sped through my veins as I drove away from a bank, laughing at the local cops racing past me in the opposite direction, toward the scene of my crime.
I have a friend who used to suffer from severe manic-depression. Gray, moody, Kafkaesque lows. Hysterical highs. Now he tells me, with no trace of angst in his voice, he manages his existence well in the boring hum of lithium normalcy. He survives the day no longer given over to extreme self-destructive urges. Yet, he and I know that it's not just the high and lows the medication has dulled: It is also his imagination. He went to the doctors for relief and was prescribed the condition of compulsory mediocrity.
I see sorrow in his current tame liberation. Perhaps I see similarities in our freedoms. It's as if we have become slower versions of our previous selves. Lesser men.
I have had to learn to crawl to be free. It remains to be seen whether I can live without flying.  back to writing |
