Memory Matters

A few weeks ago, a new student started working with me in our afternoon GED class. “CJ” is a thin, gray-haired, sixty-two year old man who has spent the last thirty-eight years behind bars. He’s one of the “old time” inmates. Given a life sentence with the possibility of parole (odd, isn’t it, life but parole eligible), he is one of the approximately 7,000 Virginia inmates who are given perfunctory “parole hearings” annually. CJ’s annual review sheet shows his release date as “none.” Still, every year he appears before a parole examiner via Skype, answers a half dozen questions, and waits three weeks to receive his form letter denying him parole.

            CJ reads at less than a fourth grade level. His math skills are only somewhat better. But, a strange thing happens. I spend a fair amount of time reading to the guys in class. I’ll read a “social studies” piece about the Nazis and concentration camps. A day or two later, CJ will put down on paper with perfect recall every camp name, town, battle, General. It’s freaky to see, as if his mind hears the words and the spelling, then creates a photograph of it to be recreated by him on paper. He has amazing recall. “Larry, you said last Tuesday … “It’s a memory thing.

            I regularly read the story of Moses and the Exodus, the wandering through the wilderness by the people of Israel. I find comfort in knowing God never gave up on Moses. He had a plan for Moses’ life and neither his murder of an Egyptian, nor his fleeing Pharaoh to start a new life as a shepherd, would prevent God from carrying out His will.

            One message comes through over and over in the wanderings of the Israelites. “Remember,” They are told, “what your God has done for you.” It’s a message I keep close: “Remember; always remember.”

            I spent almost a year at a jail before transfer to DOC’s receiving unit. During that year I saw daylight exactly five times with three of those times being driven in a police car to court hearings. I arrived at receiving with a sickly pallor. I was a pale as I’d ever been. The first afternoon at receiving, my cell door opened for the daily thirty minute call. I walked out into the sun and heat of an August Virginia afternoon and saw the one-tenth of a mile track around the perimeter of the small rec yard. Without a second thought, I took off and began running. My chest heaved and my legs felt like rubber, but in just a few short laps it all came back, all the runs I’d had in my normal life. And, I ran and remembered running in the woods or around town or on the beach. It was as if the memories wired into my muscles reset the memories in my mind.

            “Remember.” So often guys in here try to forget who they were, where they are from. They create “new” persons who bear no resemblance to the real them. It’s so obvious: Ignore your past at your peril. In almost every letter he wrote to the small churches in Asia Minor, Paul reminded his flock where he came from. He never hid his truth, his life, because the miracle that was Paul’s life was his Damascus Epiphany. “Look where I was; look what I did; and then, God …”

            For a long time, I felt captive by my memories. I tried not to remember; fearful they would haunt my sleep. I would replay scenes over and over trying to understand why and hoping that “this broadcast” would lead to a different result. But, like that first run at receiving, my memories came back, but in a good way. I saw the joy and heartache as pieces of my life with many pieces still to come. And, as guys got to know me, they realized the man they saw wasn’t trying to be somebody he isn’t. As the great philosopher Popeye said, “I am what I am.” What I am is the product of a loving God who never gave up on me even as I went down some paths I shouldn’t have.

            “Remember.” Memory matters. Remember where you came from, who you are, and the path you followed to find your way home. It’s a lesson worth carrying in your heart in this place.

 

Three Men I Know

There are three men I know and each, I learned this week, are facing a significant crisis.  How they deal with their particular crisis, how they proceed forward, will say much about them.  As I watch and pray over the incidents that unfold around me I see faith lessons.

Woo was one of our first IT students.  I say was because this week he was sent to the hole, locked up after fighting another inmate in the staff kitchen.  Fight is the wrong word.  It was no fight.  Woo, a man I’ve described in the blog before as having a head the size of a Rottweiler’s is a huge man. He has tremendous forearms, almost as thick as thighs, “Popeye” arms.  He is a large, strong, powerful man.

Woo is a staff cook.  Tuesday, during his shift, another staff worker began running his mouth.  Words were exchanged. Woo has been dealing for months with his mother’s passing.  Because her home was in Georgia he was unable to attend (inmates are prohibited from funerals out of state).  So Woo, dealing with the loss of his mother, the despair of incarceration, and the stress of waiting to see if his federal crack sentence is reduced (he has five years to do on a federal conviction which he starts when he leaves VA DOC in June 2012.  In July, President Obama signed into law, applying retroactive sentencing guidelines, that corrects the harsh disparity between crack versus powder cocaine sentences) snapped out. 

He picked the obnoxious inmate up and threw him on the heated stove causing second degree burns.  Woo pled guilty to a simple charge of fighting (could have been much worse), and is doing fifteen days in the hole.  His security level is being raised.  His good time (what little we receive) taken (adding 90 plus additional days to his sentence).  He has been removed from his job and college.

I have become aggressively pacifistic (an oxymoron if ever I heard one) since my arrest.  Violence is never the solution.  Behavior – fighting especially – to settle disputes in prison is commonplace.  I regularly recite the mantra to the guys “you can’t put your hands on someone in the real world”.  Unfortunately, in the “real world” too often “might makes right”.  Violence begets violence.  As Gandhi said “an eye for an eye and we’ll all be blind.”

How will Woo respond?  How will the loss of his job, college and good time affect him for the remainder of his bid?  What has he learned from this that will ensure he won’t repeat the insanity?  This is Woo’s third time in prison.  I pray it’s his last but this past week gave me reasons to think it isn’t.

Monday night the 5:00 pm news put up the photo of a “convicted sex offender” caught in a high school parking lot in Richmond.  “An investigation revealed the offender had failed to register.”  The offender?  Alexander, the “lawyer” I’d written about previously who made thousands of dollars each month off the hopes of inmates seeking a way out, the same guy who became involved with an officer this past summer which led to him being investigated and her being fired.  The same Alexander who was only released 56 days ago.

As I’ve written before, I met Alexander at the Henrico Jail.  To see someone I knew in jail came as a complete shock to me.  I’d seen him around bar events, legal ed seminars, and the like from time to time.  My gut reaction always was “this guy’s full of it”.  My opinion didn’t change when I saw him at the jail or later when I saw him here.  He was too cocky, too crazy with the officers, and to quick to tell guys their cases were beatable.  I avoided him.

Some of the officers had tipped me off that things weren’t as Alexander said.  He’d tell guys he ran a $4 million plus scheme on the street to gain inmate awe (point of information:  million dollar thefts carry reverence in prison.  I am treated as a genius because I was dumb enough to get caught after steeling $2 million).  He, in fact, took $30,000 from a trust account.  He also neglected to tell guys he had a 1999 conviction for indecency with a minor.

Even worse, there were indications Alexander hadn’t learned anything from his stay in the hole his last three months here – or his three plus year bid.  A number of guys had stopped me the past few weeks asking for help putting letters and materials together to mail to Alexander.  “He’s agreed to have his law firm handle my appeal,” they’d tell me.  Problem is, there is no law firm.  Alexander isn’t a lawyer.  He’s still running the same hustle he ran in here.

Now, he’s back in jail.  He’s facing new charges and these are serious:  failure to register is a major problem for a sex offender.  Being in a school zone as an unregistered convicted sex offender makes things even worse.  Alexander will, in all likelihood, be back in prison within the next few months.  He’ll get new time for his new charges and additional time for his violation of the terms of his probation.

For the guys in here still doing time, it’s just another dumb ass who gets out and screws up and makes it that much tougher on the rest of us to get out early.  Will Alexander ever get it together?  The answer appears to be doubtful.

And then there is Gary.  Gary is an Episcopal minister, a rector at a well-established church in Richmond.  Shortly after my arrest a dear friend who came almost daily to see me telephoned my minister.  The minister’s response when my friend asked him to visit me at the jail?  “I’m not getting in the middle of his legal problems and his marital problems.”  He wasn’t the only one from my church who rejected me after my arrest.  But the sting of being rejected by my clergy was deep.

My friend turned to his own pastor – Gary – to visit me.  Gary didn’t know me.  He’d never met me.  I wasn’t a member of his flock.  Yet, this man, this stranger, called on me at the jail.  He continued to do so monthly.

When I transferred to the hell that was receiving, Gary showed up.  He listened to me.  When I cried out asking “why” he didn’t offer simple, easy explanations for the mystery that is God.  Shortly after my arrival at receiving he sent me a card with the archangel Michael portrayed.  “Michael is the angel who guards and protects the Lord’s people” he wrote.  I put that card on the bunk so that every night as I lay there hearing the screams throughout the building I saw Michael.  That card, that angel, greets me every time I open my locker.

Throughout my stay here at Lunenburg Gary has written me – and visited.  He sent two amazing books about Christian meditation that helped me “silence the noise” in my head during prayers and bask in the quiet presence of God. There are two men that have led me to a deeper understanding of the mystery and magnificence of the Lord.  Gary and my friend Harley, who asked Gary to visit, are those men.

When I seek to model my Christian life after someone, it’s Gary I think of.  He had no reason to reach out to me.  Yet, his faith led him to me.  I am surviving this because of people like Gary.

Last night I received a copy of a letter Gary mailed to his parishioners.  My friend sent it with a short note that said “keep Gary in your prayers”.   Gary advised his congregation that he’d been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.  “The doctors are optimistic” he wrote about his prognosis.

I have taken to heart conversations and letters I’ve shared with this wonderful pastor.  Life does indeed not appear to make sense sometimes.  And trials and suffering make their way into our lives and they test us to the point of breaking.  But, God is good.  He is in the midst of all storms and He does see us through.

Every night since that first visit he made to the jail, Gary has been included in my prayers.  I don’t understand why or how cancer strikes.  I don’t understand why good people suffer.  But I do know Gary will be fine.  He is a good man and has the love, respect, and prayers of many.

Three men I know this week confronted trials.  Like all of us, some of the trials faced were the result of anger and impulse, or pride and arrogance, and others just visited upon us for no reason.  I pray for all three men that their trials awaken in them the true purpose God calls them to.

And these three remind me of a story:  “A Rottweiler, an attorney and a priest walk into a bar…”

Moore Stories

There’s a guy in here named Moore. Moore is a mid-fifties black guy who’s been in and out of the system a number of times. He’s also a prime time “whaler”. Whaler is prison jargon for liar, a guy who makes up stories that are so far-fetched they can’t possibly be true.



In Moore’s case he whales about his athletic prowess. One day he tells everyone he was in an NBA training camp. The next, he was a triple A infielder for the Yankees. It’s gotten so bad when he walks by I’ll stop and say “yeah, I invented ramen noodles”, or “yeah, I invented writing”. Or, my personal favorite, “I’m really a 30 year old black rapper who’s married to Halle Berry. I’m just here to research a movie”.


The thing about prison is, you can be whoever you want to be. The more desperate and pathologic the inmate, the more outrageous the story. There’s the guy I tutor with rotten teeth, early 40’s, reading at a third grade level who swears up and down he drove a 2006 Bentley.


Cars, women, jewelry, it all becomes the subject of far-fetched tales. But, as I’ve written before, prison merely mirrors “the street”. This past week the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held as unconstitutional a federal law making it a felony to claim you were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. The defendant, Xavier Alvarez, claimed to not only be a medal recipient, but also a retired NHL hockey player married to a Mexican movie star.


The court wasn’t condoning lying, but was saying lying – without something else like defrauding someone of money – isn’t a crime. I think about the concept of lying a great deal. In one particularly venomous letter, my then wife stated “you’re a liar and a thief”. I wrote back and told her “I only lied about stealing”.


Shortly after meeting my wife in college I took a look at her application to the school. I worked for the associate dean of students and back then privacy wasn’t as big a deal as it is today. Besides the amazing photo on the application, under “extra-curricular activities” she had written “high school cheerleader”. I knew it had to be true. She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. I didn’t tell her I saw her app, I just asked her one night about cheerleading. She told me she wasn’t ever a cheerleader. I never said anything else to her about her embellishment, but I always wondered why. She didn’t have to do it. She was beautiful, and brilliant, and pleasant.


Everyone lies. We do it everyday, multiple times. We lie about big issues (“yeah the money is legitimate”) and we lie about small issues (“you look great”). My ex insisted in one letter “I never lied to you, except telling you sometimes it was good when it was so so”. Less than a paragraph later she wrote “I haven’t loved you for a long time”. Funny, the night before my arrest she told me “I love you”.


I think we lie because in the short term it’s easier. Why hurt someone’s feelings with the truth? Why unload your problems on those around you? Lying is a lot less risky. You can be who you want, not who you are.


But lying comes at a price. You can’t keep up with all the lies. Eventually, the truth comes out and there are always consequences.


I often wonder what my wife’s feelings would have been if I was more assertive to what I needed in our relationship. Would she have been receptive to change? I don’t know; but, I do know the price I paid was way too severe. I lost her. And, ironically, I lied so I wouldn’t!


Back to prison. I teach beginning and advanced writers programs for the school. There’s a teacher for an advisor, but she doesn’t attend class. She just helps me prep materials and topics.


I teach by telling stories. A lot of them are about me. The guys in the class sit spellbound as I describe my ineptitude in building a garbage can holder, or a trial I conducted, or my arrest. My stories are all true. I go out of my way to be painfully honest about successes and foibles, emotions and actions. They gaze on in amazement then say “no one ever tells us the truth about their life”. But, I’ve discovered its OK to be me, like Popeye the sailor, I now hold my head up content that “I yam what I yam”.


Yesterday afternoon “Hank” asked to walk the track with me. He was down. The Virginia Supreme Court dismissed a petition he filed. It was tossed on an urban legend that exists in prison that states an inmate can “de-incorporate” (the government gives you a social security number; you become a corporation. Return the number and they have to release you). From the moment I arrived in prison I told guys “this is a crock. It doesn’t exist. It won’t work.” I upset a good number of guys with my honesty. But, I was proven correct.


Hank told me he had paid an inmate $300 to handle the dismissed petition. “I feel hopeless, like God’s give up on me.” As we walked and I listened I felt the pain in his voice. He’s back here on a probation violation. He previously did three years for grand larceny, got hooked on heroin, forged/altered a check an the judge gave him all his suspended time: 12 year to do. Harsh sentence? No doubt. Decent guy who got in trouble because of a drug addiction? Absolutely. Being helped in prison? No.


After he finished, I told him my story: a perfect life; deeply in love with a beautiful woman; two amazing sons; friends; great job and education. I told him how it was all gone.


He stopped walking and stared at me. “How do you go on?” he asked. I told him the most honest thing I knew; that I trust, I hope, I know this will all work out for the best. Everyday I get up believing that people can endure anything with hope and that’s the truth.


In honor of Moore, let me just say “I invented hope and truth”.