Part Two: Chapter 2

II

Without a watch or a clock, I become dependent for my only sense of the passage of time on some of the gray institutional markers of my incarceration: the passing of meal trays through the steel cell door and the minor buzz that I come to associate with the shift changes of the guards. I try at some of these delineating markers to imagine the analog face of a clock on my wall, but I don’t seem to be able to place the clock’s hands with any certainty, and it is not only my vagueness as to the precise time that stymies me: I am beginning to forget the configurations by which a clock’s face and hands provide the symbolism which has always signified time and its passage.

But it does not seem a long time before I begin to experience my disengagement from time as a possibly helpful phenomenon. Amy Tuckerman did not even speak to me about the judicial status of my case or the need to identify and hire a lawyer, because, I sense, there is nothing helpful or concrete to say about those things. I must get to the point where there is something to say on these subjects, but I am not at all sure how I am to do this. I am surprised at the frequency of my naps, and at the fact that I am not more upset, more terrified, each time I awaken from one of these naps and recall the highly illogical dreams that have begun to fill them up.

There is one dream that begins with my cleaning my cell. I am trying to find a lost address. Years have passed, and I can’t remember where I left the address, or even whose address it was. All I know is that it was the last address that I had for anybody on the outside, my last correspondent, and in the dreams I experienced a sense of some relief that I would no longer have to keep up with letter writing.

In my cell there are few diversions. The only reading material is on the walls – phone numbers for the Harvard Prison Legal Project and another similar service, some exhortations to Jesus, Mary, and Allah, and a running dialogue in Spanish between two rival neighborhood gangs from Lowell – and it is soon exhausted. I would give anything I have for some paper, a pen or pencil, and a book. Almost any book would do, regardless of genre or quality, although I would definitely place a premium on thickness. Of course my notion that I would give “anything” is an empty commitment, since I have nothing. Prison economics seems to be a Spartan business indeed. I “own” a toothbrush, a small tube of toothpaste, and a single bar of state-issue soap. My wardrobe is similarly limited: two pairs of socks, two undershirts, two pair of white boxers, a single set of pajama-like red trousers, a shirt with ‘DOC’ stenciled in big white block letters on the back, and a single set of linens (one towel, one ragged pillow case, and a sheet that has given up a lot around its edges to allow resourceful inmates material with which to make belts, shoelaces, and little prison transportation systems).

A narrow length torn off from a sheet can be tied around almost any item needing to be transported and tossed down the tier floor from one cell to another, thanks to a finger space of about two inches between the floor and the heavy sliding steel door, Such items seem to include books, playing cards, toothpaste, deodorant, and surplus or rejected food from the chow trays that get passed in through the cell door slots three times a day. I have not been offered anything.

Bartering negotiations are among the strands of conversation I can hear issuing forth sporadically from other cells. There is also a running chess game going on somewhere on the tiers above me. It is a slow game, with the two players calling out each move – “Queen’s Rook to Queen’s Rook Three” – and then waiting three or four minutes for the next move to be announced. Presumably each of them is maintaining a makeshift live chess board with current place positions in his cell, but there are frequent arguments about where the pieces of actually are positioned, and the absence of agreement on this fundamental issue of the game’s realities makes the playing of the game more complex, more unpredictable, and as much a retroactive as a forward-looking enterprise.

No doubt this donnybrook between ontology and epistemology is a metaphor for many and various elements of prison life. In any case, I quickly lose interest in following their moves. I am not enough of a chess player to evaluate the skill level of these players, but I do form the impression that they would not fare well at the outdoor chess tables in Harvard Square. The other conversations emanating from the three tiers are predictable and basic: “Hey, Joe, what’s for chow?” and “Yo, C.O., I need some shit paper.”

After my conversation with Amy I was afforded the opportunity to take a shower. We are allowed showers three times a week, I have been told, and for these we are escorted down to the shower one at a time by one of the prison guards. The shower felt terrific, and I stood under the hot spray soaping and rinsing, grateful for such simple pleasure, for a lot longer than I would ever take at home.

It is a good feeling to be clean, as if it brought with it innocence or at least amnesty. But my cell itself is filthy: sand on the floor, crud on the toilet and sink, and a mattress that smells strongly of dried sweat. I have no cleaning implements, at least none intended for that purpose. There are three Latino inmates who come to this unit three times a day from another unit to pass out the chow trays. General cleaning is also a clear part of their job description, but they do not enter the individual cells. I have noticed them passing brooms and mops under cell doors to a couple of other PC inmates in here, but it is not a privilege that is shared widely, and these “runners” are not eager to extend it. Twice, in the roughly three days I have been here, I have asked one of these runners if he could pass me a broom and mop, but I have yet to achieve success. The first guy I asked laughed and kept walking along the tier, tossing back the phrase “no hablo ingles” over his shoulder to me. My Spanish, even at this basic level, is not good: I was not sure if this gentleman was telling me that he does not speak English, or if it was that he does not give the broom or mop to guys who speak English. The second runner whom I asked also laughed, and responded with an even more inscrutable answer: “I’ll let you know.”

In another of my illogical dreams, much time has passed. I have served my time, a lot of it, paid my debt to society as if I had actually done the things I am accused of, and I am no longer a prisoner. I eke out a meager living selling pencils along the wrought-iron cemetery fence where Garden Street approaches Harvard Square near the Nameless Coffeehouse church. Even in summer I keep myself largely covered with a blanket, which of course is not about worth but about anonymity. In this dream there is an implicit backstory that somehow ignores my innocence, and my understanding is that the worst thing that could happen to me would be for the word to get around – Among whom? Among my fellow panhandlers? Among Harvard Square pedestrians? I am not at all sure – about who I am, about my past, about my time in prison for these crimes.

At mid-day I decide that I can put up with another hour of verbal abuse in order to get an hour of sunshine and exercise. Although I can see a small patch of sky through my cell’s exterior window, there is a poverty to the perspective that I have probably never experienced before: the sky that I can see does not connect to any horizon or anything else but sky, wall, and prison buildings, and consequently does not inspire me with any reverence for the life around me. In fact, it does not confirm the existence of any life at all. My longstanding and very orthodox notion that blue sky is a beautiful thing is revealed to me now to have been the conceit of a man of privilege. Now that I am incarcerated I am able to understand that the visual riches of the sky exist only to the extent that the sky is a backdrop or magical lighting device for the rest of the firmament: trees, mountains, the sea or a summer lakeshore scene, and other phenomena of which I am now deprived. Even from the Big Yard there is almost no view of a horizon beyond the height of the wall. The only exception is one small hill that rises above the sightlines of the wall with a few scruffy scrub pines and a flagpole. With the exception of that one area of treetops beyond the wall, the place is painted – sky and walls and floors wherever one can look – with a palette of lighter and darker grays that deaden any sense of life’s possibilities beyond the cell.

The catcalls begin as soon as we get to the Big Yard and begin walking on the track. A large baldheaded man falls into step with me and I realize it is Reardon. He shambles along for a few steps without speaking and I remain silent despite the shrieking protest of my heart. Faced with a monster like this beside me I do not have a liberal bone in my body. I have always been an articulate and relentless supporter of well thought out alternative sentencing, and of preventing programming for sexual offenders, and I have never felt any doubt about my strong opposition to the death penalty. But my physical disgust for this man trumps any principles or ideals, or any theoretical or ideological position I have ever argued or believed. This puke literally causes the process of physical regurgitation to begin its upward churn through my chest, and I admit to myself that I would pull the lever to rid the planet of him without a second thought.

But in the eyes of our hecklers we are equals:

“Hey, Reardon, that sick fuck is forty years too old for you,” comes a shout from one of the windows in the West Side housing unit.

“Heyyyy, Stannnnley, you going to trade some kiddie pictures with Reardon?” I look over toward the windows but I can see nothing but shadows behind the screens and bars.

I want to break stride now, to step onto the inside oval of the track like a runner abdicating his position in a race, but something – is there something that is not strictly humility that is the opposite of pride? – keeps me from doing that. It is partly a sense that by saying “I am not scum like you,” by an implicit attempt to distinguish myself as better than not only Reardon but others as well, I might be bringing something even worse down upon myself. From who or where? From this gallery of misinformed hecklers in the windows? From prison guards? From Karma?

Reardon is wearing a pair of blue walking shorts and he reaches into his pocket as he walks alongside me and seems to extract something that he offers to me.

“You need these?”

In his hand I see a couple of rubber earplugs like those worn by swimmers. They are, of course, the perfect prison accessories for someone such as Reardon. For a skinner. Or for me, in my present circumstances.

I reach out and take them.

“Thanks.” It is a struggle to speak even a single word to him. I reach down with the earplugs in my hand but my state-issue trousers do not have pockets, I realize for what is probably the tenth time in the last couple of days. Reardon has pockets. I do not.

“You put them in your ears, Branford.”

He knows my name. But then, why wouldn’t he? I don’t want to put them directly into my ears. I suppose that I am glad to have them, in spite of their source, but I prefer to bring them back to my cell so that I can wash them with warm, soapy water in the little sink there before I use them. I don’t want there to be any possibility of their passing directly from Reardon’s ears to my own without being washed.

My phobia is not the fear of a contagious disease. It is more as if I am back in the sixth grade and I am worried about catching cooties. We really did think about cooties back then. I was eleven years old and for as far back as I could remember there was one kid whom everybody else dumped on: Bruce Gibbs. We didn’t know exactly what cooties were – maybe the result of some sort of crossbreeding between earwigs, head lice, and cockroaches – but we were pretty sure that Bruce Gibbs had them. He always seemed to smell like he had worn his clothes to bed and had an accident in the bed sheets. His eyeglasses had been broken and taped together more than once. He stuttered and spoke with the residue of a Southern accent and his hair, at a time when most of us were beginning to wear our hair a little on the long side, was kept extremely short, as if his mother had cut his hair and had only one setting available to her.

Bruce Gibbs lived in a trailer on the edge of town, and he got on the school bus each morning with an older girl who everybody knew had had sex in the backseat of several boys’ cars. She lived in the same trailer as Bruce Gibbs, so when they got on the bus in the morning we would sometimes call out to him, “Bruce Gibbs, your sister’s a whore.”

“She ain’t my sister,” Bruce Gibbs said. “She’s my half-sister.”

He was not denying the other thing we had said, and that pleased us. So we would proceed to our next question:

“If she’s your half-sister, you know what that makes your mother, don’t you, Bruce Gibbs?”

He would try different tactical approaches on different days, sometimes keeping his silence to avoid further dialogue, sometimes speaking up as if to show us that we were not bothering him. We knew better, and we were pleased whenever we noticed evidence that he has been lying awake at night struggling with all of this.

“It just makes your mother a whore, too,” we would say.

I say “we” because I was never the ringleader – I even tried to resist playing the valued role of wordsmith, for which I was well suited – but I was usually right there, participating fully in this exercise of group brutality. I believe that I was never motivated by simple, outright cruelty: my motivation was equally cowardly: the simple desire to fit in, to be one of the gang, the popular kids. Sometimes I would even cringe at the things we would say and do to Bruce Gibbs, but then I had the extra social handicap of being smart, and my growing awareness of (or paranoia about) both the public and the unseen ways that my intelligence worked against me made me, for a time at least, even more eager to swim with the sharks.

By the time I was twelve I was beginning to develop enough of a sense of who I was and who I wanted to be that I began to veer away from the kind of small-town behavior that made life so relentlessly hellish for Bruce Gibbs, but as is often the case with such transformations I did not travel from one point to another via a straight line. There was one day when my behavior shamed me almost immediately, and that occasion and sense of shame has stayed with me all my life since then.

I can’t even remember distinctly the specific triggering incident, but it was certainly minor and unintended on Bruce Gibbs’ part. Maybe he tripped on his own shoelace or something, but in any case there was some kind of glancing physical contact in the classroom and, probably because one of my friends had noticed Bruce Gibbs brushing up against me, I found it necessary to challenge him with a tirade of sixth-grader’s venom:

“Don’t you get your cooties on me, Bruce Gibbs. You come down the boys’ room right after lunch, because I’m going to whip your ass.”

We tried to talk tough as eleven- or twelve-year-olds, but we did not have much to draw upon back then in the dark ages before rap music and MTV, so we just did the best we could.

Somewhat to my amazement Bruce Gibbs showed up in the boys’ room at the appointed time, and began with an apology.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything.”

“Bullshit, Bruce Gibbs. You spread your cooties all over this school and then you go around like a pussy saying you’re sorry. Ain’t gonna cut it this time. I’m going to have to give you something to think about so it won’t happen again.”

“I promise it won’t happen again.”

“And here’s why it won’t happen again,” I said, and I took a clumsy right-handed roundhouse swing at him, clumsy but aimed well enough to catch a piece of his chin and send his eyeglasses flying into the air, spinning until they landed on the boys’ room floor in three pieces.

He was not a very big kid, but as soon as his eyeglasses were off he looked even smaller, and I could tell that he was fighting a strong impulse to get down on his hands and knees on the floor to find and retrieve his glasses, but for the first time then he tried to defend himself, however lamely, bringing his dukes up to either side of his temples and crouching slightly, in a pathetic parody of a boxer’s stance.

There was a growing circle of boys around us, all of them cheering me on, and no doubt one or two also doing double duty as lookouts against the unwanted approach of a teacher.

“Jesus Christ, Gibbs, who taught you how to fight, your whore mother?”

“Hit him again, Stan!”

“Drop him, Bran Flakes!”

“Put that cootie cocksucker on the floor!”

Already I wanted to extract myself from this grotesque situation without doing further harm to Bruce Gibbs, but I wasn’t sure how to do it. I did a decent impression of Mohammed Ali, dancing around him and stinging him a few times with jabs to the shoulders and body where they would not hurt much, but still demonstrating my dominance not only to Bruce Gibbs but, far more important, to everybody else in the boys’ room crowd.

“Floatin’ like a butterfly, Stan!”

“And stingin’ like a bee!”

The circle of boys widened slightly to give me more room to show off my twelve-year-old stuff – it is always easier to impersonate Mohammed Ali if you are not terribly concerned about getting hit back – and I could tell Bruce Gibbs was getting dizzy, turning and turning to try to keep up with me, increasingly disoriented without his eyeglasses. He still kept his hands up high, although he had yet to successfully block or even deflect one of my jabs. It was sheer luck that neither of us had yet stepped on his broken eyeglasses.

All at once I lowered my own hands and stopped, just as suddenly as if I had seen a teacher enter.

“Pick up your glasses, cootie boy,” I said, and I turned and walked out of the boys’ room.

The next day was Saturday and I had a regular job in the morning mowing Mr. Ashley’s lawn. Afterward, instead of walking home, I walked in the other direction until I came to the half-mile dirt road that led down past Mary Kate’s grandfather’s farm to Bruce Gibbs’ trailer. It amazes me now to think back on how much I walked as a kid, and how free I was to go wherever I pleased without any apparent parental scrutiny. The assumption of my parents and everybody else in town, of course, was that there was no such thing as real danger – or real evil – in our little town.

There was evil inside Bruce Gibbs’ trailer, but I didn’t know it then. I stepped up onto the little makeshift wooden stoop that led to the rusty trailer’s side entrance, and I knocked on the screen door. A cat came to the door, bringing with it the foul smell that I had always associated with Bruce Gibbs himself, and it hissed at me to go away.

Then Bruce Gibbs’ older half sister Ramona became visible through the screen door in an open bathrobe. She made no effort to hold it together, and in her plump and slovenly generosity she provided me with the first look I had ever had a teenaged girl’s breasts and her white underpants. Her breasts themselves were as white as I could imagine any flesh ever being, round and full, a vision of beauty and possible invitation that I had no idea what to do with. All I know at the time was that I would gladly have stood there leering for the rest of my natural life.

“Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” she said through the screen. “What do you want, Stanley Branford?”

I was impressed that this girl who had breasts also knew my name.

“Is Bruce Gibbs here?”

Bruce Gibbs then walked up to the screen door behind her, holding part of his broken eyeglasses up to his face with one hand. Ramona turned and walked away from us.

Bruce came outside and walked past me. He stood under a tree in his all-dirt “front yard” among several large truck tires that were lying on their sides.

“What do you want, man?” he said. “Didn’t you hit me enough yesterday?

I sat down on one of the tires. A skinny reddish brown hen ran across the yard.

“I’m sorry, Bruce Gibbs. I shouldn’t of done that. I got nothing against you.”

“Well, me neither. I sure didn’t mean to touch you in class.”

“I know that. I’m not proud of what I said or did. I wish I had been man enough to let it go. How are your glasses?”

“They’ll be okay. Next week when I can buy some tape at the store and tape them up again they should be fine.”

“You don’t have any tape in there?”

“Not really. Used to be some in that old shed back there but my old man took his stuff out of there when he left out.”

I stood up and walked off the Gibbs property and back down the dirt road I had arrived on. I walked into the center of town and spent some of the money that I earned from Mr. Ashley at the hardware store. Half an hour later I was standing back on the stoop of Bruce Gibbs’ trailer, handing him the roll of black electrical tape I had bought him, but disappointed in my hopes that I might catch another glimpse of his half-dressed half-sister.

Bruce Gibbs showed up back at school Monday morning still smelling badly but with his eyeglasses serviceably reassembled. I kept my distance from him for a while after that. I knew I didn’t want to bully him again, but I didn’t have enough confidence in my ability to resist the negative peer pressure that seemed to follow Bruce Gibbs around like cooties and that foul cat smell.

A few weeks later we had a homework assignment of the interesting inter-disciplinary kind that my favorite teacher, Mr. Doyle, seemed to come up with about once a month, much to my delight. Mr. Doyle was the junior high school social studies teacher and basketball coach, but once a week he came down to see us in the sixth grade and taught engaging little modules that drew on contemporary events, encouraged us to venture into our parents’ domain of the newspapers, and required us to actually string together a few sentences about what was going on in the great wide world. I probably have Mr. Doyle to thank, as much as anybody else, for starting me on the way to a newspaper career. It was Mr. Doyle who told us to write two pages called “24 Hours to Live” about what we would do if we found out that was all we had left, and the following year he had us write news stories and headlines about the assassination of President Kennedy and its aftermath. I reveled in assignments like these, but the most memorable assignment I recall – not because of anything I wrote – was the one he gave us not long after I bought the electrical tape for Bruce Gibbs.

The assignment was to write an essay about the single 20^th century American we most admired. I wrote two essays, one about President Kennedy another for extra credit about Albert Schweitzer, and I enjoyed the assignment immensely even when I had to get up in front of the class and read my work aloud. Other classmates got into it, too, and I sat and listened that day to their little rhapsodies about Bob Cousy and Alan Shepard, Jackie Robinson and Annette Funicello and Ted Williams and the Birdman of Alcatraz. But the incident that made the assignment memorable for me came near the end of that day’s class when Mr. Doyle stood up in front of the class and read the last essay himself.

“If you remember the assignment when I gave it out, we didn’t say anything about celebrity or fame or even any particular age requirement for the subjects of your essays. So I find it interesting that each and every one of you chose to write about a very famous adult, with the exception of Annette Funicello and one other notable exception. That person chose to write about a boy of twelve, someone we all know. I’m not going to give away the subject or even of the person in this class who wrote the essay, and I am going to ask all of you to do me the personal favor of refraining from guessing about the identity of either one. Can I count on ach of you for that one small favor?”

“Yes, Mr. Doyle,” we all lied.

With our promises secured, Mr. Doyle proceeded to read what I now remember as a sensitive, touching, surprisingly well-written essay that Bruce Gibbs had written about me. Of course everybody knew that Bruce Gibbs had written it, and they knew that the guy who had broken his eyeglasses and then brought him the roll of electrical tape was me. There wasn’t really much more to the essay than that, the story of the unexpected gift of tape and what it meant to Bruce Gibbs, but I sat in the classroom and my eyes filled with tears as I recognized a very limited sort of kindness in my own retreat from brutality.

For a while afterwards my friends and classmates teased me every bit as much as they harassed Bruce Gibbs. I could tell they hoped I would lie: deny the story and disavow any connection with Bruce Gibbs, but I surprised myself and them by remaining mostly comfortable in my own skin, and a tenuous and unarticulated bond began to form, however haltingly, between Bruce Gibbs and me. We never hung out together, and certainly neither of us moved decisively away from the social status and social stigma, respectively, that marked our places in school, but we did occasionally nod to one another in passing, meaningfully I thought, and on three or four occasions over the next several years we actually had what I would call conversations. Nothing much, but enough to notice, given the general scarceness of meaningful contact with my peers during those years.

“You need anything else, just let me know,” says Reardon.

“Thank you, Reardon,” I answer. “Thank you very much.”

He looks over at me now, alert to his realization that I know who he is and what he has done. I imagine him wishing that there might be one person in his life, in prison or anywhere else, who would somehow be forever inoculated against finding out about him. The thought has occurred to me in these last few seconds, as I have accepted his gift of the earplugs and subjected myself to the associative memory of my history with Bruce Gibbs, that perhaps I can bring myself to overlook what I find monstrous about him. That I might reach out to him with kindness and humanity, as if to stand in for that imagined person inoculated against finding out his identity. I am thinking of his implicit offer to be my get-it guy, to hook me up with anything I might need, like the Morgan Freeman character in Shawshank. I would love to have a pen, some writing paper, and a book to read, and I would not be surprised if Reardon could provide these things in a minute. The mere fact that someone who has committed the crimes he has committed is still alive years into his prison sentence speaks to a certain capacity to work available connections.

I search my insides to see if I have the physical capacity to further humanize my relationship with him, and I find that I do not. I cringe when I think of the transactions that might place the items on my wish list in Reardon’s hands, and at the expectations that might, for Reardon, go along with his offer of assistance. Even if all he wants is for me to treat him in the future as if he were human, it is a deal on which I cannot guarantee delivery. I consider him scum, and my physical need to get away from him as soon as possible is so powerful and non-negotiable that I reach out again impulsively and hand him back the earplugs.

“You keep these,” I say. “I don’t want them. I need to jog a little bit now.”

I leave Christopher Reardon the track then and run off away from him. The heckling and the catcalls continue from behind the barred, screened windows of East, West, and the Mods, but I am noticing now that although I can still hear it all physically, the words no longer enter my consciousness in any specific way. Nothing in my life has ever prepared me for this experience of so openly and decisively shunning another adult human being. Intellectually I do not like it, but I find that there is no other option available to me, and physically now I actually experience a fleeting, euphoric sense of exhilaration at achieving this degree of separateness.