On reading Natalie Diaz’s “How to Go to Dinner with a Brother on Drugs” with a room full of men in jail for drugs.

It seemed like our class would bomb last week. The jail has been over capacity for months, so the blocks are being shuffled around. Many of the guards seem stressed. As do the inmates. And so, although nine people came to class, six ensconced themselves at the far end of the table and wanted to talk amongst themselves. Only three sat close, intending to discuss poetry with me.

But I’d brought excerpts from Natalie Diaz’s excellent collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec. I read her long, brutal poem “How to Go to Dinner with a Brother on Drugs.” Everyone was rapt.

“Wait for him in the living room

of your parents’ home-turned-misery-museum.

…

ten, twenty, forty dismantled phones dissected

on the dining table: glinting snarls of copper,

sheets of numbered buttons, small magnets

…

Your parents’ home will look like an al-Qaeda

yard sale. It will look like a bomb factory,

which might give you hope, if there were

such a thing. You are not so lucky –

there is no fuse here for you to find.

The guys laughed in recognition. These lines come early in the poem, before the swerve to darkest hurt.

One guy told me that, if you needed to keep a friend safely occupied after he’d had too much meth, “best thing to do, tell him, hey, can you fix this radio for me? There’s one piece in there that’s broken, but I’m not quite sure which one.”

2546138159_a18621514b_z — Image by Clio CJS on Flickr.

“Aw, man,” said a dude who’s been studying the programming language Python during his time inside, “at my gramma’s place, there must be, like, eight dismantled computers I was working on.”

The programmer said it was getting harder and harder to keep clean each time he got out. “Because it’s showing up everywhere, now. It used to be, you could stay away from all that by just hanging with different people. But now, like, middle class people, crowds that used to be all pot and psychedelics, now you go over, they’ve got meth, or they’ve got H … ”

I shook my head.

A man who wrote a jarring poem about the nightmare of his kid shaking him awake after an overdose (“I hear the sound of his little feet running / down the hall, I look to make sure the door / is locked, I pull the plunger back, I hear / his joy as he yells, I’m superman. / I do the shot”) agreed. They could keep sober if the stuff wasn’t there, he said.

“Last time I got out, I’d been three years clean. I didn’t want it! Wasn’t even thinking about it. But I’d made it two blocks, and right there in the Taco Bell parking lot, somebody handed me a loaded rig and said, like, hey, dude, wanna hit this?”

(“I was so terrified of being like my stepdad,” this guy told me once. “He beat me all the time. But all I managed … I mean … it’s like, I just turned into my real dad. Never there.”)

“Taco bell … ” I said.

“It’s like right there,” he said, pointing. Indeed, I walk past that place each week on my way in.

Jail (gray building, far left) and Taco Bell.

“But it’s not like your time here is gonna make you want it less,” said the programmer. “First time I got busted, they sent me to this juvenile facility. That’s honestly the most horrible place I’ve ever been. You’re by yourself, you have to just sit on a stool in this classroom kinda space all day. The only book you’re allowed in there is a Bible, but for my first three days, they didn’t give one to me. So I just had to sit there with nothing on that stool. And you’re not allowed to sleep during the day. They try to catch you sleeping. Like a guard might come to check on you, then open and close the door so you think he’s left, but then come sneaking back.”

A lot of his anecdotes involved sleeping. It must be awful trying to re-establish a regular sleep cycle after months on methamphetamine. Living inside a jail or prison – with schizophrenics in solitary kicking their doors and hollering through the night, minimal access to natural light, overhead fluorescents turned off for only four and a half hours each day – probably makes it harder. He once told me that a particular state prison wasn’t so bad – everyone felt pretty safe there – except that there were so many little rules that you were constantly worried about being written up and docked good time for an infraction.

“My job there, they had me delivering ice in the middle of the night. Either you’d load the cart too heavy and struggle to push it around, or else it took hours to finish … and they still expected us to wake up at the regular time. So I’d practice hiding, like rumple my blankets or whatever so I could still be in my bunk sleeping but the guards wouldn’t see me.”

These men cycle in and out of jail. Sometimes people outside offer them drugs at the Taco Bell, sending them spiraling right back in. Sometimes, people outside try to help instead. But the help often falls short.

Diaz writes,

you have come

to take him to dinner – because he is your brother,

because you heard he was cleaning up,

because dinner is a thing with a clear beginning

and end, a measured amount of time,

a ritual everyone knows, even your brother.

Sit down. Eat. Get up. Go home.

She will try to help him, and she will fail. And he will also fail himself. The drugs will make Judas of them all – safe only when locked up, “happy” only when fucked up (the guys told me, “When you’re on meth, it can feel like ecstasy. But, man, coming down … ” Another finished his thought: “That’s why you gotta have more, to make sure you don’t come down.”), her brother can only be betrayed.

You will pour your thirty pieces of silver

onto the table and ask, What can I get for this?

On Finn Murphy’s “The Long Haul” and our dying towns

In Jason Shiga’s Empire State, the protagonist decides he will “see America” by traveling from Oakland, CA to New York City on a bus. Everyone derides the plan as foolish – he’ll see only the great big slab of I-80 and some gas stations – but, because he’d kept his plan secret to surprise a friend, nobody warns him until it’s too late.

Professional movers, however, take occasional breaks from the highway to navigate their trucks down treacherous suburban streets. It’s those excursions into the world where people actually live that lets movers understand America. Crisp descriptions of those excursions make Finn Murphy’s The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road a charming read.

Murphy’s experience criss-crossing the United States has also give him a sharp perspective on our economy. His political analysis is both more accurate and more concise than what’s been written by most academic researchers:

The next day I picked up I-94 west and stopped for the night in Ann Arbor. In college towns – like Chapel Hill, Boulder, Iowa City, Missoula, Austin, Madison, and Oxford, Mississippi, to name a few – all of a sudden, instead of unemployment, meth labs, and poverty, there are real jobs. … As far as I can figure, the only places left in America that can boast of vibrant downtowns are college towns and high-end tourist towns. In the rest of the country the downtowns were hollowed out when nobody was looking. You might think it’s only your town that’s been ruined by sprawl, but it’s happened everywhere. You’ve got the new CVS, the Walmart, the Home Depot on the fringes, while the old downtown is either empty or the buildings have a Goodwill store, an immigration law office, and an “antiques” store, meaning junk. The chains on the outskirts provide the nine-dollar-an-hour jobs and wire the day’s receipts to Bentonville or New York every night.

I hate it personally, but we deserved what we got. We wanted the eight-dollar sneakers and the forty-five-cent tube socks. … We didn’t consider that maybe it’d be a better bargain to pay twenty dollars for sneakers and buy them from the neighbor who owns the shoe store downtown and stocks sneakers made in Maine.

It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t give two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent underclass.

…

If a tourist poster of America were made with some verisimilitude, it would show a Subway franchise inside a convenience-store gas station with an underpaid immigrant mopping the floor and a street person at the traffic light holding a cardboard sign that reads ANYTHING HELPS.

Most of The Long Haul is more chipper than the passage I’ve excerpted above – Murphy discusses how he chose his career, the basic principles of long-haul driving and packing other people’s belongings, the zen of hard manual labor, and what it meant to finally let go of his own anger and enjoy his time on this planet. Both K and I loved the book.

But I wanted to share the passage above. I’ve written previously about common misconceptions regarding “free-market capitalism” – a quick summary being that although the phrase “free-market capitalism” is used so commonly that most people sense intuitively what it means, it doesn’t actually mean anything. To have a market, it cannot be free. (This idea is explained succinctly in the beginning of Robert Reich’s Saving Capitalism – you can read an excerpt in the essay linked above.)

As a handful of business owners and CEO destroy the social fabric of the United States, they depend upon government intervention to help them do it. They need the government to enforce payment on certain types of contracts, but not others. They need the government to prevent certain actions that lower others’ property values – I’ll be punished if I set fire to your building – but not others – I won’t be punished if I dump so much poison that your neighboring property becomes un-usable.

Our country’s particular set of rules & regulations have allowed a small number of people to accomplish what used to be the work of many. Instead of a factory with 100 human workers, a foreman oversees 10 robots. The foreman gets paid more than the prior workers, but most of their salary now goes to the factory owner. And those 100 people who would have worked in the factory are mired in despair. Some get service jobs. Others take drugs. We get the “unemployment, meth labs, and poverty” that Murphy described.

And even the relative prosperity of the main street in college towns is fragile. In Bloomington we have several blocks with bookstores, comic shops, restaurants, bars, a public library, banks, clothing boutiques and smokeshops and the like. But in the past few weeks, an escalating conflict between the police and people without houses has kept shoppers away from the downtown.

Herald Times front page — A recent front page from the local newspaper.

Indiana is in many ways a heartless state, so our little town is one of the few places where people in need can receive services. Bloomington always has more poverty than you might expect for a city of just 100,000. Of late, Bloomington is also a destination city for drug use: between the heroin cut with fentanyl and the wide variety of supposed THC analogs sold as “spice,” the ambulances have been responding to upwards of ten overdoses per day.

In jail the other day, T. told me,

“It’s getting to the point where heroin and meth are easier to find than pot. When I got out of prison, I was three years clean, and I thought I was gonna make it … but I was walking by the Taco Bell and somebody handed me a rig, all loaded up and ready to go.”

G. said,

“It’s really hard to avoid it now. It’s spread to places you really wouldn’t expect. Like I remember ten years ago, the whole middle class crowd was doing the usual, some pot, some psychedelics, you know. But now people from those circles, they’re shooting meth, they’re using H.”

T. said,

“You talk to somebody, they’re like, yeah, I got it all, what you need, what you need. But you ask for pot, they’re like, naw, I don’t know where to get that.”

J. said,

“Okay, okay, these overdoses, you know? Trust me, I’m a real spice-head, I smoke a lot of that shit, and these overdoses, they’re all just people, they don’t know how to handle it. You can’t just jump in, you know, and smoke like I smoke.”

I asked him, “If pot were legal, would you smoke it.”

“Hell yeah I’d smoke pot.”

“No no, sorry, I mean, if pot were legal, would you smoke spice?”

The guys all laughed. “Nobody would touch that shit.”

And yet. In our town, now, people with all their belongings line main street. The hospital spends some thirty thousand dollars a day sending the ambulance there for overdoses. The cops hold their roll call several times a day in the public park where unhoused people used to sleep. Occasionally a dozen or so people will be hauled into jail: they lose all their possessions.

And people who had been spending money at the little shops feel afraid to go downtown. The places are all losing money … and when the money goes, compassion starts fading too.

It doesn’t take much for even a college town to become the post-apocalyptic husk that Murphy has seen spread all over our country. Which is sad, especially since it wouldn’t take that much to help people – our most dire need is a guaranteed basic income, probably coupled to a public works program. Instead we’ve settled for rampant inequality. But harms that start elsewhere won’t stay elsewhere.

*******

post-script: in the time between when this essay was written & when it was posted, the crowds of unhoused people have disappeared from Bloomington’s main street. And, two blocks away, the 280-bed county jail has had over 320 people locked inside for weeks. Somehow, this doesn’t seem like a long-term solution.

On changing a life.

Back in the 1990s, a buddy of mine was locked up repeatedly for possession of heroin in California. The drug itself is illegal, and apparently my buddy was making some poor choices while under the influence. You know, little mistakes, things like turning & running backward to flip off a cop while he fled, only to flip over the hood of a police car coming from the other direction. Liberating quarters from coin-op laundromats. Moving meth to fund his habit.

As a condition of probationary release, he was sentenced to rehab. Required to participate in AA meetings. He’d show up sullen, at least for a while, then start showing up stoned, then quit altogether as his addiction took hold. Nobody can force you to get sober, he told me. You can be forced not to use – if you’re locked up without it, then you’ll kick. But that’s not the same as being sober. You can’t be clean – not really – until you have a choice.

Unfortunately, that first moment of choice often comes at an awful time in people’s lives. Incarceration is traumatic; so is release. From Susan Burton and Cari Lynn’s Becoming Ms. Burton:

There’s also no logical reason why federal prisons offer halfway houses to those newly released, but state prisons provide nothing. Four thousand newly released women arrive in Los Angeles County every year to nothing. No re-entry programs, no counseling, no services, no assistance. You have no house key, no credit card, no checkbook, no driver’s license, no Social Security card, no identification of any sort because anything you were carrying when you were arrested has been destroyed by the state. You’re just one woman in the crowd of mostly black and brown faces, one number in the recidivism stats that are decidedly not in your favor.

Like vultures, the pimps circle, eyeing you, assessing you. The drug dealers circle. You know them from the old neighborhood, and they call you by name, offering their brand of a welcome home party. You have little incentive to say no. Ego tells you you’re gonna make it by any means necessary. Ego tells you you’re a grown woman. But you’re scared. How do you calm yourself? How do you connect with something healthy and hopeful when you’re surrounded by Skid Row? When you haven’t been allowed to make a decision in five, ten, twenty years? When all you want to do is wash prison off you, but you can’t, because it’s in you. It’s seeped into your psyche and into your soul.

…

All I wanted was to ease the fear, ease the self-loathing, ease the hopelessness. It seemed the only thing in the world I was certain of was how to escape by taking drugs, by self-medicating. Three days: that’s the average time for someone to relapse after getting out of prison. I knew nothing about statistics, but I knew that, in a drug high, I could escape into silence.

It takes a lot for an addict to get sober. I don’t fault the people who want to get clean but keep slipping. Still, this much is clear: you can’t change your life until you choose to.

I started teaching in the local jail because I felt ashamed. I am a citizen of the United States, and the horrors of mass incarceration are inflicted on behalf of all citizens. I personally owe an apology to those who’ve been yanked away from their lives unfairly … and to those children whose parents were taken away … and to those parents whose children were taken away … and to those who lost their neighbors … and to those whose loved ones were harmed by the violence begat by entire community’s loss of trust in the police, which required inhabitants to take justice into their own hands … and …

Given that some 2.5 million people in the U.S. are currently incarcerated … with another 5 million on probation or parole, a tiny slip away from being shipped away again … and which surely means tens of millions more whose lives have been sundered by the loss of a loved one … many of them innocent children … there is no way I could give a personal apology to everyone who deserves one. I’m sorry, as a citizen of the United States, that your mother was yanked away on my behalf.

But I can go in and teach. Last year, I spent about five hours each week inside the most miserable place in town. Even now, after one of my classes was canceled, I spend close to three hours a week in there. And I hate being in jail. Everyone does. It’s loud, bleak, malodorous, filled with stale air and flickering fluorescent light. Full of angry people who won’t make eye contact when you talk, but will stand at the front of their cells and stare. If you don’t see a dude, he might bang the glass and shout – I jump.

The elevator has buttons. The buttons do nothing.

There is waiting. Lots of waiting.

But the time I spend with the men in class (only men – the administration has declared all female inmates to be manipulative, irresistible seductresses and will not let male volunteers work with them, for the volunteers’ protection) is great. They love our poetry class. Despite the fact that many of these men stopped out of school and never looked at poetry on the outside, they are astute readers.

Several of the men in our classes grew to love writing as well. Monster House Press has put together a literary magazine featuring some of their work, available here.

Each week, we met with mid-level offenders in a classroom, and with recovering addicts inside the New Leaf New Life dormitory. This latter was an incredibly grim space. Twelve men lived inside this dormitory full-time; there were two steel tables with uncomfortable round seats attached for their meals in the “living area”; there were bunk beds in the “sleeping area”; they had a toilet and shower, the only portion of the room not under constant camera surveillance. The concrete walls were painted gray, and the only window was a small, wire-reinforced pane in the door: this window looked out to the booking desk on the ground floor of the jail.

So: no exterior windows, no glimpse of sunlight, no fresh air, twelve grown men crammed together for months in a space smaller than the living room of my own (small) home. A wall was shared with the drunk tank – sometimes somebody would be kicking & shit everywhere. Sometimes a schizophrenic would sing ceaselessly for days. Sometimes an angry inmate would rhythmically kick the steel door, every three seconds another KLOOOM reverberating through our skulls.

New Leaf had been granted this space by the jail because no one else wanted to be in there.

And yet that is where we held our best classes. Even though the space was wretched, the men chose to be in there. Volunteers – like J-M & me, and a dude who held AA classes, and a local linguist, and others – came in to offer some “enrichment.” The men also created their own programming: one of the twelve conducted a meditation session each morning. After our class had been going for a while, the men started reading poetry out loud to each other. They were suffering, but they learned to suffer together. In that small, crappy space, dudes riddled with Aryan Brotherhood tattoos befriended black men. A dude forgave the informant who’d put him there. Together, these men weathered the deaths of their parents, girlfriends, wives – mass incarceration has ravaged our country. In the devastated communities left behind, people die all the time.

Hell, mass incarceration caught up with my wife and me, too. Last November, my wife’s mother was murdered. It’s unlikely the killer would’ve done it if he hadn’t been so severely distanced from his friends and family, locked up for a decade for a pair of low-level, non-violent drug crimes. He sold crappy amounts of cocaine; ten years of his life were yanked away; now my mother-in-law is dead.

To publicize the Monster House Press magazine with the men’s poetry, we made a video using the text of a poem from the collection, Max E.’s “San Diego 1985: I Felt Your Presence in the Absence of Time.”

I love this poem for its depiction of epiphany. It’s hard work to change your life, but before that work can even begin, you have to want to change. As much as I hate the way we treat “criminals” in this country, many men have told me that they’re glad they were jolted from their routines – their lives were on a bad course and jail shook them awake, making them realize that they needed to change.

Surrounded by angry angels, this poem’s narrator realizes he’s made a mistake.

Given a reprieve from fate, that is when the hard work begins. Here’s another excerpt from Becoming Ms. Burton:

Drugs are insidious. A social ill for some folks, a criminal ill for others.

…

Jail had done nothing to stop my addiction. Education, hard work, dedication, a support system, and knowing there were opportunities for me and that my life had value: these were what had made all the difference. For the past twenty years of my sobriety, I deployed each of these facets, every day.

Few people find the right path on their first attempt. Collectively, nobody in the U.S. can claim to be on the right track. We’re wrecking the environment, we’re wrecking lives … some of us try to tread lightly, but the world is still being wrecked on our behalf. We all share the blame.

We, too, need to be jolted into change.

On horror, healing, and Joanna Connors’s ‘I Will Find You.’

During a recent writing class, we discussed Bonnie Jo Campbell’s “The Trespasser” (reprinted in American Salvage, in case you’d like more). We’ve been discussing a lot of literature themed around addiction and recovery, and in this short story a family walks into their summer home to find the wreckage left by a quartet of trespassers who broke in and used the place as a meth lab.

The family — especially their thirteen-year-old daughter — feels violated. Their belongings rearranged, their kitchen charred, a mattress ruined, their sense of security shattered. But the piece doesn’t dwell on the family’s reaction. Instead the story presents, through a series of contrasts to the thirteen-year-old’s life, the horrors that may have led one of the trespassers — a sixteen-year-old girl, violated in turn by the men she was with, who stayed alone in the house to hide in a closet and shoot up until the family arrived — to make the choices she did.

There is a sense of forgiveness to the piece. Because, yes, the sixteen-year-old’s actions were wrong. She should not have broken in to the house with those men. She should not have stolen methamphetamine they were cooking from them. She should not have stayed living in another family’s home, rearranging their possessions, dragging comforting items to a closet, dragging a mattress — emblematic of her own violation — outside.

And yet. Campbell presents the ways in which that sixteen-year-old trespasser has already been punished, brutally so, before she committed her transgressions. She did wrong. Perhaps some punishment would be appropriate. But she was punished, arbitrarily so, by the universe at large. Born into a life where she was violated by her mother’s boyfriends, burned by cigarettes, treated as worthless so long that she may have begun to believe it. Those preemptive punishments were quite likely the reason why she committed her later crimes.

It is human to want vengeance against people who hurt us. It is especially human to want vengeance against people who hurt those we love. But something that’s often missing from our criminal justice system in the United States is an acknowledgement of the punishments already doled out to innocent children, punishments that harmed their developing minds and may have increased the likelihood that they’d be tangled up in future crimes.

Joanna Connors’s I Will Find You is a hard book to read — a beautifully-written exploration of a bleak topic — but she presents this contrast perfectly. If you can handle reading a detailed, nuanced investigation of a sexual assault, I highly recommend it.

Connors was hurt. Connors, as best I can tell, is hurt. The psychological effects of torture can linger for decades, and sexual assault, despite the inappropriate term (personally, I far prefer using the phrase “violative assault” to better distinguish it from sex, but then people sometimes don’t know what I’m talking about), is an act of torture.

She was, from the perspective of a prosecutor, the perfect witness. She was educated, sober, unacquainted with her assailant… and a white woman assaulted by a black man.

All those characteristics make it easier for the state to win a conviction.

(A quick note: though she was harmed, Connors was a witness, not a defendant. That’s how our judicial system treats the victims of sexual assault. At least that’s better than the old system, in which Connors’ husband would be considered the defendant because his property — his wife — had been tarnished through unauthorized use.)

Indeed, Connors’s assailant was convicted, was sentenced to many years, and eventually died in jail. A rarity, as most of us now know.

But Connors’s pain did not go away. A corrections officer at one of the prisons where her attacker was held told her — in an attempt to cheer her — that her attacker was probably brutally abused while incarcerated. That particular prison, the correction officer acknowledged, had a well-deserved dismal reputation.

Hearing that the man had suffered more did not help Connors heal.

And so Connors decided to learn about her attacker: What was his life like? Why had he ruined hers?

Indeed, the innocent child who would grow into the man who raped her was wretchedly abused. Connors could not interview her attacker — he had died in prison before she began this project — but she met with the man’s siblings. One wondered what he had done to be born into a life of such misery.

Everyone in the attackers’ family had been raped. Repeatedly. Connors cried alongside the attackers’ sisters. I was stupid, I deserved it, each said in turn. The exact words with which Connors had castigated herself after she was assaulted.

Those words were not true in Connors’ case. And they were not true for the attackers’ sisters. No one deserves to be tortured.

And, in contrast to the outraged response from her family and from the criminal justice system after Connors was assaulted, no one cared about the crimes perpetrated against the attacker’s family. Connors does not belabor this point. She was white, well-educated, graced with the sobriety that comes easily to those with no childhood demons to escape — she received justice.

Others, who through no fault of their own were born to uncaring, abusive, impoverished parents, did not.

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: methamphetamine

On reading Natalie Diaz’s “How to Go to Dinner with a Brother on Drugs” with a room full of men in jail for drugs.

On Finn Murphy’s “The Long Haul” and our dying towns

On changing a life.

On horror, healing, and Joanna Connors’s ‘I Will Find You.’