Six Degrees from …

            A true story: Summer, 1998. We are at Myrtle Beach and our younger son is eleven months old. We’re on the beach and realize we need a change of “floaties” and juice. I leave the beach and head through the hotel lobby and into the elevator to go to our room. As the door begins to close an arm comes in.  The door opens and in walks … Kevin Bacon. That’s right, the actor Kevin Bacon. Being who I am, I look at him and go, “Hey, how’re you doing?” I get a tepid “fine” and then Mr. Bacon puts his head down and has no further conversation with me.

            A second true story: we have a wonderful biology teacher this fall. She’s energetic, enthusiastic and brilliant. She’s also a “local,” raised in Charlotte County before moving away to become an infectious disease researcher. We were talking the other day and the subject of the movie, “Sommersby” came up. That movie – starring Richard Gere and Jodie Foster – was filmed in the town I was living in with my wife and then only child.

            “My brother rented his house to Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford,” she told me. I knew the house. And, I remember Cindy Crawford. See, while Richard was “filming,” his significant other was exploring our little town (made famous after Brown vs. Board of Ed, when the white country school board voted to close the public schools rather than integrate). And that led Cindy, in a spandex sports bra and tights, to end up at the gym I worked out at. Cindy (I still feel like I’m on a first name basis!) came over to me and, in a sweet voice, said, “Can you please spot me?” How could I say no? So there I was standing over the lovely super-model as she bench-pressed.

            That evening, I regaled my friends with my “Cindy” story paying particular attention, and providing minute detail, to one part of her anatomy. It eventually led my wife to comment, “You’d think he never saw nipples before.” Which – in turn – led to my retort, “not like those!”

            “Famous people” stories. I have dozens of them from my travels and I use them with the guys in here who are enamored with fame. I tell them their lives matter as much as Jay Z or Snoop Dogg or the dozens of other celebrities they wish they were like. I tell them the same thing I told my older son after I’d spent a night at a high dollar craps table with the producers for the band Coldplay. My son asked me “Did you get your picture with them?” I responded, “They should have asked to get a picture with me!”

            We live in a world that is obsessed with fame and celebrity. But, the truth is, people are people and the real work, the real decency, isn’t in your fame, it’s how you treat each other. I understand why these guys “want” the lives they see these other folks living. But for me, as great looking as Ms. Crawford was, I value the moments I have with these young guys a whole lot more.

            Six degrees from “name the celebrity.” That isn’t what’s important. Heart, courage, mercy, those matter … and never more so than for guys putting their lives back together in here.

A Tale of Two Cities

The dichotomy was apparent. During the same weekend; from the same city, great joy and pride and terrible heartache and loss. Chicago. Summer in Chicago. And like so many other summers in that mid-western city, the blood of its youth spills too easily. Black children lying dead. Teenagers gunned down by gun-toting Black teenagers shouting gang slogans. A three year old shoots himself in the head with a gun his paroled felon father – a gun he should not have because of his criminal record – carelessly left out. Five dead. All children. Another weekend in Chicago and it barely registers a mention on the news.

Pennsylvania. Baseball; little league baseball. An all-black team from the Southside of Chicago, “the baddest part of town.” They win the American draw, beating a team from Nevada who five days earlier had knocked them around. It’s Williamsport – idyllic, rural Pennsylvania – where every summer young baseball players from around the world gather and play the greatest game on fields of green grass and manicured infields. Baseball and Pennsylvania are a million miles from Chicago.

For months the talking heads on Sports TV have decried the absence of Black big leaguers. And, by the numbers they are right. Growing up, I remember Mays and Aaron, and Gibson. I wanted to be Willie Mays. Today, less than one in ten ball players are African American. The pundits have a dozen theories. But, I listened as the coach of the all-black squad from Chicago, from the almost all-black “Jackie Robinson Little League” answered the question:

“Baseball is a game passed down by your father. In our league we still have a lot of fathers. It’s not that way for everyone.”

Jackie Robinson. Perhaps no single man’s courage and self-control mattered more in the country’s slow march toward integration than he did. Jackie Robinson, a great man, a hero. And yet today, more young black kids in Chicago can tell you about Jay Z than Jackie. Who really matters? What really matters?

Missouri. Over four thousand people gather for the funeral of a young black man gunned down by a white police officer. No one yet knows what happened. I don’t presume to know what was in the officer’s heart before firing those fateful shots and I choose to believe he is distraught because blood has been spilled. Too many – on both sides – use this tragedy for their own political ends. Blood spilled and a family mourns a son gone too young. And, another family lives with the repercussions.

Here’s what I wonder, how many black children have to die in the street of Chicago at the hands of other black children before someone stands up and says “enough!” Where is the national outrage and national dialog as we watch thousands of young kids turning to gangs and killing each other? Why is “Ferguson” the issue and not just a symptom of something so much larger? And why are we not watching – and listening – to the mothers and fathers of those ballplayers?

A young man I know in here from Richmond told me about the shootings that regularly took place near his home. He was raised in a home with a mom too young to care for herself, let alone three young kids. So “Gramma” became their refuge. “Gramma” fed them, even when it was just mayonnaise on white bread. “Gramma” was responsible. Mom? She was in and out; Dad? He was at “state farm” (Powhatan to those not “in the know” on Virginia’s prisons).

And summers in Richmond, summers in the city’s notorious Gilpin Court, were filled with robberies and drug deals and killings. My young friend whom I tutor in English and Excel and any other class which comes our way, tells me when he was six he was sitting on the front stoop with his brother and sister. “It was loud, like a firecracker. Pop, pop, pop. Then, people across the street started running and that’s when I saw him … bleeding as he fell in the street.” His first seen “body.” Man shot across the street staggers and dies yards from him. And his six-year-old eyes see it all.

A few moments later, the police and an ambulance arrive. The neighbors stand all around but nobody “saw anything,” at least not in Gilpin Court. An ice cream truck approaches and Gramma gets the three kids popsicles, “Red, white, and blue rockets,” he tells me. They stand with the others behind the yellow tape, licking their popsicles as the dead man is loaded up and carted off and the blood, pooled on the ground remains. Gilpin Court, Richmond. Another dead black young man.

I can’t watch the news about Ferguson, Missouri anymore. It seems almost ghoulish and undignified. And, no matter what that young man may – or may not – have done, I can’t help but think it could have been avoided. There are too many dying too young and they look like so many of the young men I care about in here.

I confront race every day in this place. Early on, in my first few weeks in jail when my life was in a complete tailspin, I realized how little I really knew about being black in America. Every opinion I held as fact came from a life almost completely devoid of blackness. Then again, almost every opinion I held as fact came from a life almost completely devoid of contact with poverty, poor education, ignorance, and a whole lot more. My opinions were all forged from my own privileged life. I knew, I soon realized almost nothing about living – and dying – in America. Dylan wrote about such things in “License to Kill,”

Now all he believes are his eyes

And his eyes they just tell him lies

But there’s a woman on my block

Who sits there as the night grows still

She says who’s gonna take away his license to kill?

I hear about my young friend’s life in Richmond, I watch as more families weep over the loss of children cut down for no good reason and I wonder who will take away our license to kill? When will we see beyond color or economic status and mourn, really mourn the incredible waste of life and vow to do better? It seems as if it will overwhelm us, destroy us, condemn us. And then, twenty young black kids in yellow shirts with white pants run across the infield and I see hope.

Two cities. You can take all the pain and death and despair of Chicago, and Ferguson, and Richmond together and weep and lose hope until you see Williamsport, Pennsylvania and grass, and smiles, and baseball. 

You know what gives hope? When all you see and hear is death and anger and you look around your prison housing unit and almost every TV is turned to a team of little leaguers from Chicago and guys, hardened by life and crime and death are pulling for these kids as they play … a game.

There isn’t a black and white; there’s green and there is the sound of a ball coming off a bat and there’s joy. 

No, But I stayed at Holiday Inn Express Once

You’ve seen the ad.  There is a dramatic moment where someone’s life or safety hangs in the balance – a snakebite, a shipwreck, in an operating room. Our hero suddenly steps forward. With calm and cool direction, the hero takes charge and offers precise instructions to resolve the crisis. “Are you a surgeon?” A thankful, awestruck crowd member asks. “No,” comes our hero’s reply. “But I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.”

            

The intent of the ad – besides humor – is to convey how intelligent and able you become after a night at the Holiday Inn Express. In a crisis, someone – it seems – always has the answer. And we’re quick to go along with that person because we assume he knows what he’s talking about. But what if he doesn’t? What if he’s full of it and just made the whole story up? That would be life in prison.

            

I am bombarded daily by guys that seek to impress me with their knowledge and life experiences. If I didn’t know any better, I would think every inmate doing a drug sentence was just like the infamous Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Every drug guy in here wants to have you think he was one brick shy of Jay Z. Forget the fact that Jay Z’s drug dealing days were not that profitable (his claim to fame – beating a drug stop on the Garden State Parkway on 4^th Amendment illegal search and seizure grounds occurred in an old, high mileage Nissan Maxima with the header peeling off the roof). No, Jay Z turned from low level drug dealing to Rap mogul the old fashioned way: He had an entrepreneurial idea and worked hard to make it come true.

            

The admen who brought you the Holiday Inn Express campaign can’t compete with the guys in here. Bullshit (pardon my language) is creative and artistic. The really strange thing is, most guys want you to think they are so smart, yet they buy almost any line thrown out. They are beyond gullible.

            

We recently had an inmate claim to be a thoracic surgeon. “Have you met the doctor yet Larry?” I was asked on a number of occasions. “Are you sure he’s a doctor,” I asked dozens of guys who were taking their medical records to him. “Of course he’s a doctor. We asked him and he told us all about medical school, and surgery, and his offices.”

            

The “doctor” was transferred last week but not before a little internet search by someone on the street confirmed he was an LPN who was locked up on a sex charge. “I knew he wasn’t no doctor,” was heard all over the compound from the very same guys who weeks earlier had bought into his story. Gullibility is alive and well inside the walls.

            

There are always one or two charlatans who hang out in the law library and convince men so desperate to get out that they’ll pay practically anything for a chance at freedom. The stories are always the same: your defense attorney screwed up – or worse, sold you out; the judge and the commonwealth attorney made a deal; there was no evidence to convict. And the self-described Clarence Darrow’s tell you they just got a guy off death row, or another guy released due to a “technicality,” and they have an old English writ that’ll work; “just give me $50,” they say.

           

I’m asked if it’s true and I tell them no, the law doesn’t work that way. “But he said,” I’ll hear and I’ll respond, “He doesn’t know the law. He doesn’t know the truth.”

            

Guys in here crave being in “the know.” They want the fictions to be fact. “The Governor just brought back 65%!” (Good-time earning so you only serve 65%, not 85%). And I explain that the Governor can’t bring back something that never existed (Virginia never had 65%; parole-abolished in 1995 – wasn’t on a 65% scale). Nor can the Governor arbitrarily, in the middle of August, change the Virginia Code. That’s not how laws are made in the Commonwealth.

            

One of the main driving forces in prison and a chief cause of the tremendous rate of recidivism after release is ignorance. Men in here know so little about so much. They lack basic skills in reading comprehension, math, science, history, and geography. That is a dangerous thing because an inability to discern truth from bullshit is at the heart of most crazy prison stories. It’s more important in here for a guy to say he drove a Bentley – even though he lacks basic education, has obvious health issues, and never made more than minimum wage – than to say he owned a 1980s Corolla and is back to prison for a third bid for dealing eight balls of crack in the projects.

            

Discerning the truth: I spend a fair amount of time each morning reading the Psalms and Proverbs. Over and over they speak about knowledge, truth, and wisdom. Can you cut the wheat from the chaff? Can you see through the racial ignorance peddled by Black and White alike in here to deny responsibility for our incarceration?

            

As I had to explain to a young friend in here that the guy claiming to have three associate degree and a masters is lying through his teeth, it occurred to me that prison mirrors the real world. We live in a world driven in large part by ignorance and prejudice. And we immediately fall back on an eye for an eye-revenge and retribution as the keys to justice. They aren’t. “Mercy,” the Apostle James said, “triumphs over judgment.”

            

“Be who you are.” I tell that to guys quite often as they try and impress me with their stories of their exploits. There isn’t anything glorious in being busted with thirty kilos or losing your wife and family over embezzled funds. Discern the truth, show mercy and compassion. It doesn’t require a stay at a Holiday Inn Express.