I passed a corpse a few minutes ago, walking home from Pearl’s at Sixth and Market, where I had dined on a ¼ pound cheeseburger, perfectly cooked, and topped with lettuce and tomato but no onion or mayonnaise.
I had left my hotel a little over an hour before and walked first to the Main Library. I dropped the volume of Proust that I had finished reading yesterday, a volume containing the fifth and sixth books of In Search of Lost Time, into the Book Return Box in front of the library’s closed doors. I continued to stand at those doors for about twenty minutes more while using my handheld device to check email, since I no longer have internet access in my room and the library‘s free wireless is on 24/7.
Uncertain about where to eat with only $28 dollars in my account and no income until day after tomorrow, I wandered down Market Street until I remembered that Pearl’s was just ahead and settled on eating there. I limited myself to a Mini-Burger to keep my tab at $6.00. I drank the complimentary water and helped myself to five complimentary spears of the best half-sour dill pickles that I have tasted since moving back west from New York in 1990.
As I made my way up Taylor, I was undecided about whether to turn onto Eddy and walk out to Leavenworth (the most direct way home) or to walk up to O’Farrell before turning west (in order to check the prices at a Laundromat/Internet Café I had passed two days ago). I knew that I would stop at Amigo’s Market in either case, since I wanted a small sweet for dessert so that I would feel content and fall more easily to sleep. I knew that I could get two little bags of gummy candy for $1.50 there, and as I have said before, I try to spend my grocery money at Amigo’s because the prices are very reasonable and the countermen are kind to the point of charity.
I crossed Eddy at Taylor still unsure which route to take, but stepping onto the curb I turned west. Half-way out the block, I noticed that the fence on my right was covered by dark green heavy plastic sheeting and remembered that the corner park that takes up that half of the block was being renovated. I looked ahead and noticed flashing lights atop an emergency vehicle that was parked at the right hand curb, facing me and against traffic.
A street dweller just ahead of me was huddled over a very large pile of possessions that leaned against the covered fence, arranging things. Two other men, who had approached from different directions, had stopped and were asking him something. As I reached the men I saw that police tape was strung from the covered fence across the front grill of a parked car, cordoning off the sidewalk. At the same moment I heard the words “dead body”, and I then took a harder look up the sidewalk, into the bright white headlights and the flashing roof lights against the glare of which I had previously been unwilling to stare.
At the corner of Jones Street, diagonally across from the SFPD Tenderloin Precinct Station and in front of the closed off entrance to the little park, I saw it lying, covered by a sheet whose yellow was deep and brilliant enough to suggest vinyl but whose folds fell stiffly, like some kind of angular drapery, characteristic of lighter plastics similar to the kind we used to cover the swimming pool in our backyard during winter. I turned to cross to the other side of the street as one of the men asked whether the deceased had been stabbed. “No,” said the street dweller, “He O.D.ed.”
As I crossed the street I saw another two or three people walking along the middle of he street, heading the other way. I heard the word “boy”, and stopped again to look at the shrouded figure with as much focus and attention as I could. From this angle, it did look rather small, but well within the average range for an adult. I noticed too that it lay right in front of the door to one of the sidewalk restrooms The City imported from France a decade or two ago in order to provide facilities for those living on the street. His feet were at the door, and he lay with his head pointing away from it. Had he died inside and been pulled to the sidewalk by emergency responders?
I was glad the he was covered, and although the intense yellow seemed jarring in circumstances where black or white would have been more appropriate, I was glad that the dead was being afforded his natural dignity. He could lie in his death privately, without violation, as is both meet and kind.
Had I ever seen him? Was he and he or a she or a tranny? Had she stopped me and asked for change as I left Amigo’s? And had I, explaining that I had only my EBT card loaded with food-stamp credits, offered a pan dulce roll, which she accepted, instead? Had he been inching his way up the sidewalk ahead of me the night before, his bare calf below his shorts wrapped in a dirty red neckerchief to cover a cut or abscess perhaps?
Had the overdose been one of heroin or methamphetamine? Had it resulted in a heart attack or in a relaxation of the diaphragm so profound as to end breathing and result in suffocation?
Had it hurt?
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
A Difficult Day or Two
Yesterday, hunger made me by turns restless and tired all day.
I awoke at 7:27 yesterday morning, just three minutes before my daily “Wake Up!” alarm would sound on my phone. I waited for it, stopped it, and stayed in bed, dozing as much as I could, until late morning. I had that first feeling hunger brings: enervation, a lack of energy profound enough to make you feel that if you got to your feet you might totter and even fall down before you could walk anywhere.
I had three possible sources of hope to look forward to. At 1:30 this afternoon, I would be able to pick up seven frozen dinners, my weekly allotment from Project Open Hand. Sometime around 3:00, the mail would arrive, and it might include a check for $25, payment for a piece of writing I sold, or a check for $400, payment for working as an Event Coordinator for a company that holds seminars at the Grand Hyatt once a month.
I stayed in bed to conserve energy until it was time to walk the four blocks to Open Hand. While waiting, my hunger progressed to the stage of nervous energy, a restlessness bordering on anxiety that prevents sleep but does not provide resources for much physical activity. I used that time to text my supervisor at the seminar company to ask whether this week’s seminar was still scheduled and to ask when I would get my check for last month. I then learned that I was supposed to have sent an invoice for the seminar three weeks ago. So I had to give up hope for the $400 check, but the meals and the possibility of $25 still lay ahead of me.
I brought the meals home shortly after 1:30. Back in my room I heated one in the microwave, ate it, and then heated and ate another. I knew that I would be doing yard work and getting paid for it tomorrow, so I didn’t have to worry that a second meal now would leave me short at the end of the week.
Reinvigorated at last, I went down to the community room and used the computer there to send the required invoice by email. Then I walked to Walgreen’s to pick up my HIV meds. (I had missed taking them for two days because when I got there Saturday evening, the pharmacy window was already closed, and yesterday I had no time even to try to get there.) Walking there, I phone my sister PD and told her about this blog and the two writing jobs it has brought me. On the walk home, I had a conversation with a stranger that led to a blessing.
When I got home, I discovered that the mail had arrived with nothing for me. I counted the pennies in the little bowl where I let change collect, and found that, with the few quarters, dimes, and nickels also in the bowl, I had a total of $2.07. I checked my bank balance by phone: $2.84. Since it costs $.50 to use a debit card for less than $5.00, I would have to make do with the $2.07 in cash. I wanted something filling and something sweet, the latter to comfort me before bed. I settled on a large baguette, which cost $1.50. I ate about half of it with some cheese I had in the fridge. Later I will finished it with sugar and cinnamon for my treat before bed.
But let me return to the conversation and blessing I mentioned above.
I stopped to look at the menu in the window of a sandwich shop on market at Ninth Streets. I had noticed the place before but had never looked to see their prices. The first number I saw was $7. I didn’t even bother to see what it was that cost that much. I already knew it was out of my league.
I heard a voice asking directions and thought it might be directed at me, so I remained engrossed in the menu. Then I heard the voice being answered by another voice, and they conversed. I turned and glanced at the two women, one in white, with dark glasses and a deep tan, and the other in blue, fair, with hair mussed by the wind. The fair one directed the other to me for directions, and I pointed her in the most direct way to her destination. As we two who remained began to walk down Market, we began to talk.
For some reason we talked about the birth years of the people who raised us, my parents and her grandparents, who were contemporaries. I said how glad I was to have been raised by people who lived through the Depression and who knew how to make things, how to repair and restore things, and how to keep things and keep them up. She agreed with me, and as we came to part at the dentist’s door (she was going for an extraction, on which topic I commiserated with her), she was saying that she had considered giving classes on basic survival, or rather self-dependence, skills. We said goodbye, and she said, “Bless you.”
“Bless you,” I said.
That was yesterday. Today I awoke at 7:30 hungry. I had an appointment with my therapist at AHP at 9:00. I struggled, not wanting to get out of bed to go. I decided to call and leave a message explaining that I needed to find food instead of keeping our appointment. I had just $2.84 available on my debit card, and if I spent $2.00 on a MUNI ride to therapy, I would have to walk to work later. I would arrive to do strenuous yard work already tired.
As I lay there my hunger moved into yet another mode, the one of physical pain in the mid- abdomen. I let myself sleep again.
When the time for work came, I made three cups of coffee, loaded each with sugar, and drank them in the half-hour before I left. I had plenty of energy to work 4 hours and left with cash to buy food on the way home.
It had been a difficult but brief period.
I awoke at 7:27 yesterday morning, just three minutes before my daily “Wake Up!” alarm would sound on my phone. I waited for it, stopped it, and stayed in bed, dozing as much as I could, until late morning. I had that first feeling hunger brings: enervation, a lack of energy profound enough to make you feel that if you got to your feet you might totter and even fall down before you could walk anywhere.
I had three possible sources of hope to look forward to. At 1:30 this afternoon, I would be able to pick up seven frozen dinners, my weekly allotment from Project Open Hand. Sometime around 3:00, the mail would arrive, and it might include a check for $25, payment for a piece of writing I sold, or a check for $400, payment for working as an Event Coordinator for a company that holds seminars at the Grand Hyatt once a month.
I stayed in bed to conserve energy until it was time to walk the four blocks to Open Hand. While waiting, my hunger progressed to the stage of nervous energy, a restlessness bordering on anxiety that prevents sleep but does not provide resources for much physical activity. I used that time to text my supervisor at the seminar company to ask whether this week’s seminar was still scheduled and to ask when I would get my check for last month. I then learned that I was supposed to have sent an invoice for the seminar three weeks ago. So I had to give up hope for the $400 check, but the meals and the possibility of $25 still lay ahead of me.
I brought the meals home shortly after 1:30. Back in my room I heated one in the microwave, ate it, and then heated and ate another. I knew that I would be doing yard work and getting paid for it tomorrow, so I didn’t have to worry that a second meal now would leave me short at the end of the week.
Reinvigorated at last, I went down to the community room and used the computer there to send the required invoice by email. Then I walked to Walgreen’s to pick up my HIV meds. (I had missed taking them for two days because when I got there Saturday evening, the pharmacy window was already closed, and yesterday I had no time even to try to get there.) Walking there, I phone my sister PD and told her about this blog and the two writing jobs it has brought me. On the walk home, I had a conversation with a stranger that led to a blessing.
When I got home, I discovered that the mail had arrived with nothing for me. I counted the pennies in the little bowl where I let change collect, and found that, with the few quarters, dimes, and nickels also in the bowl, I had a total of $2.07. I checked my bank balance by phone: $2.84. Since it costs $.50 to use a debit card for less than $5.00, I would have to make do with the $2.07 in cash. I wanted something filling and something sweet, the latter to comfort me before bed. I settled on a large baguette, which cost $1.50. I ate about half of it with some cheese I had in the fridge. Later I will finished it with sugar and cinnamon for my treat before bed.
But let me return to the conversation and blessing I mentioned above.
I stopped to look at the menu in the window of a sandwich shop on market at Ninth Streets. I had noticed the place before but had never looked to see their prices. The first number I saw was $7. I didn’t even bother to see what it was that cost that much. I already knew it was out of my league.
I heard a voice asking directions and thought it might be directed at me, so I remained engrossed in the menu. Then I heard the voice being answered by another voice, and they conversed. I turned and glanced at the two women, one in white, with dark glasses and a deep tan, and the other in blue, fair, with hair mussed by the wind. The fair one directed the other to me for directions, and I pointed her in the most direct way to her destination. As we two who remained began to walk down Market, we began to talk.
For some reason we talked about the birth years of the people who raised us, my parents and her grandparents, who were contemporaries. I said how glad I was to have been raised by people who lived through the Depression and who knew how to make things, how to repair and restore things, and how to keep things and keep them up. She agreed with me, and as we came to part at the dentist’s door (she was going for an extraction, on which topic I commiserated with her), she was saying that she had considered giving classes on basic survival, or rather self-dependence, skills. We said goodbye, and she said, “Bless you.”
“Bless you,” I said.
That was yesterday. Today I awoke at 7:30 hungry. I had an appointment with my therapist at AHP at 9:00. I struggled, not wanting to get out of bed to go. I decided to call and leave a message explaining that I needed to find food instead of keeping our appointment. I had just $2.84 available on my debit card, and if I spent $2.00 on a MUNI ride to therapy, I would have to walk to work later. I would arrive to do strenuous yard work already tired.
As I lay there my hunger moved into yet another mode, the one of physical pain in the mid- abdomen. I let myself sleep again.
When the time for work came, I made three cups of coffee, loaded each with sugar, and drank them in the half-hour before I left. I had plenty of energy to work 4 hours and left with cash to buy food on the way home.
It had been a difficult but brief period.
Monday, May 13, 2013
A Cup of Coffee
Yesterday afternoon I sat at a table on the sidewalk in front of the Maxwell's House of Caffeine on Dolores Street at 17th. I had spent my last two dollars on a cup of coffee and sat with my two bags, one of which holds three days worth of clean clothes while the other holds my papers, the book(s) I am reading, stationery, stamps, notebooks, tools (tiny LED flashlight, screwdriver, etc.) and toiletries.
I had spent my last two dollars on coffee for a couple of reasons. For one, I was tired and yet not ready to rest (that is, I had no place to rest, no place to go except the street). For another, I wanted to stay within a few blocks of where I was while waiting for a return call from a friend who lives around the corner. The cup of coffee was a way to rent a table at which to sit while I waited. And beyond these reasons, coffee assumes a special importance when you are as poor as I.
I grew up drinking coffee black. I even believed in the moral superiority of those who drink coffee black. I looked down on those who polluted the brew with cream and sugar as weaklings who could not take the real thing. But when I became poor, I quickly learned that there are big jars of sugar and entire pitchers of milk available free to anyone who buys a cup of coffee. If you can get the barista to leave enough room in the cup, you can add enough sugar (carbohydrate) and milk (protein and fat) to relieve your hunger for a couple of hours. So there I sat, sipping my meal and reading the novel I had checked out from the library.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an African-American man pulling himself along the sidewalk sideways. He approached me deferentially.
"' 'Scuse me, Sir," he said. "I'm not tryin' to rob you or nothin'."
"O," I said, "I know that."
"Do you have a dollar or a quarter you can spare?"
"I'm sorry, but I don't," I said.
He had not paused for my reply but continued his probably oft-repeated appeal.
"'Cause I just got released --"
"'Cause I just got released --"
I cut off his pitch.
"Yeah, I got released two days ago," I said.
His tone of voice changed completely, no longer pleading but simply direct and familiar. "From where?" he asked.
"Bruno," I said, dropping the "San" from the name of San Francisco County Jail 5, which is in the city of San Bruno, and thereby establishing my bona fides as a former inmate.
"And now I'm homeless," I went on, "and this cup of coffee is my dinner."
"And now I'm homeless," I went on, "and this cup of coffee is my dinner."
He looked at me kindly as he slid past me, continuing to sidle down the sidewalk on his way. As he passed me he leaned in close, tapped me gently on the shoulder with a closed fist, and spoke softly, close to my ear.
"Take it easy," he said.
"Take it easy," he said.
"You too, brother," I heard myself reply as he walked away.
It was the first time in my life that I had ever called a black man "brother", and I had done so instinctively, without thinking.
As much as I might have wanted to use that term in the past, I had always felt self-conscious and afraid of giving offense. The shame of privilege had restrained me. That shame had kept me from expressing a common humanity into which my incarceration had now set me free.
As much as I might have wanted to use that term in the past, I had always felt self-conscious and afraid of giving offense. The shame of privilege had restrained me. That shame had kept me from expressing a common humanity into which my incarceration had now set me free.
Bruno
Today is Mother’s Day, in honor of which an art show was held last Friday in the foyer of County Jail #2, the women’s jail, at 425 Seventh Street. (It was through this foyer that I was released from custody both when I had been held for only 2 days at 850 Bryant and when I had been held for 10 at Bruno.)
From the very moment in which the words “under arrest” are uttered, everyone you encounter contributes to rendering you powerless.
When I was preparing to begin student-teaching, I talked to a number of experienced teachers who advised me to remember that the most negative response you can give a student (or anyone else for that matter) is to ignore him or her. Not to rebuke, nor to deny, but to ignore. If you have a student who speaks up too frequently and too often without a point, and who is generally disruptive, the best response is to say nothing at all. Let their talk be answered with empty silence. Render them invisible -- non-existent -- by treating them as such.
The police who arrest you, and then the sheriff’s deputies who are your jailers, similarly negate everything that constitutes your sense of self: your will, your intellect, your emotions. They do so by ignoring you completely. No answers to your questions, whether about the charges, about the process you are going through, about your ability to communicate with anyone outside -- about anything. You are something that they process, the ultimate objectification.
Everything is uncomfortable and debilitating. The handcuffs hurt, and having your arms behind your back makes it hard to get into the back seat of the squad car without falling into it. The back seat itself is hard molded plastic, without upholstery of any kind. You can’t sit with your back supported by the seatback because your manacled arms are in the way. You slide across the hard plastic with every turn, every acceleration or deceleration the driver makes.
At the precinct station house, they hold you first in a tiled room with hard wooden benches bolted to the shiny concrete floor, in the midst of which, as in every room you will now occupy, you see a drain toward which the floor slopes from all sides. Through a small window with holding wire mesh suspended within it, you can see someone going through papers in the adjoining room. She occasionally looks up at you, and occasionally others appear in the room with her. Eventually a cop or two, their equipment swinging and rattling heavily from their belts, enter the room you are in and, still refusing to answer any questions, take you back out to the car, load you in, and drive you to the county jail.
There it is the sheriff’s department which treats you with the disrespect of ignoring your humanity. Although you listened to the driver radio ahead to them before you were out of the precinct station parking lot, you must wait in the car, cuffed and folded on the hard back seat, while the two offices who brought you there talk to their counterparts at the door, chat to other waiting officers aabout the times they worked together or did this or that or knew so-and-so. When you are at last admitted to the building, you begin waiting at the first of a series of desks, counters, or office cubicles that comprise the stations of your entry into the system. Your privacy is stripped away, and whatever interior selfhood you have is violated, during the photographing, the fingerprinting, and the questioning about your birth, about your residence, about your workplace, about your medical history, about your current medical care. Then the stripping and the violation culminates in the taking away of your clothes and the ensuing inspection of your naked body, including any possible hiding places on or in it.
The cops have added a further refinement to the dehumanizing strategy, one that would never have occurred to me. During the hours and hours that this process takes, the cops are cracking crude jokes, telling stories about one another (or worse, about poor souls they have arrested or seen in jail in the past) which they consider amusing and at which they laugh loudly. They toss around every kind of racial, ethnic, sexist, etc. slur you can think of and they guffaw.
They ought to be ashamed.
Instead they think it is you who is in the shameful position.
Once you have been entered like data into the system, the castration of your will grinds on through the mindless routine of day after day. You cannot do any of the things you need to get done to keep your life, the life to which you hope, perhaps quixotically, to return, together. I had no idea whether any of my friends or family knew what had happened to me. Had they noticed my absence yet? Because I was homeless, no one was waiting to hear me come through a door somewhere.
Having had to surrender my mobile when arrested, I didn’t have anyone’s phone numbers. Even if I had, I soon discovered, you are allowed access only to very expensive pay phones for which you need to buy payment cards from the commissary, something you can do only once a week. You can make very expensive collect calls, but since most cellular service plans block collect calls, you need to know landline numbers Once upon a time I knew dozens of phone numbers, but nowadays we call someone by touching their name on our phone’s display screen, not by entering their number. After a couple of days passed, I was finally able to remember the number for the landline at my sister M’s house, and after a couple of tries I was able to speak to her.
One of these days I’ll tell you how that went.
I mentioned mindless routine.
You are awakened at 4:30 AM, ordered to dress and make your bed in the exact manner of this particular institution, made to wait standing for the carts to arrive, and then called one by one to get a tray of food from the guys who came with the cart from the kitchen.
As for the food, I must tell you about the peanut butter. You get a wad of it, wrapped in wax paper, about the size of a lemon an egg, with some soft, easily torn white bread and no utensil to help spread the was, which is itself only semi-soft. In every holding cell in the system, you see wads of peanut butter stuck to the ceiling overhead. The ceilings are always 15 or more feet high. It takes a powerful arm to launch a stiff, hard wad of peanut butter at that ceiling hard enough to get it to stick. Once it is there, however, it seems to stay for perpetuity. I never saw, or did I ever hear tell of, one of these peanut-butter hardballs coming down.
I won’t bother describing the rest of the food. To do so would be of as little interest as was the food. And as in the joke Woody Allen tells in “Annie Hall”, there is never enough of it.
At about 5:15 AM you are ordered back to your cell and locked down for a few more hours of sleep.
The rest of the day consists of a rotation of time spent locked down in your cell and time spent in the common area, where you can find conversations, card games, books, magazines, and loud televisions tuned either to movies (action pictures, crime, jails, violence -- lots and lots of violence) or to sports.
This common area is semi-circular and two stories high, the cells ranging along the rim of the circle, their interior walls all glass. A steel staircase and catwalk provides access to the upper story of cells. Everyone is visible at all times. The only nod to privacy is the pony-wall, about 24” high, in front of the toilet in your cell. It assures that when you sit on the toilet you are visible only from the waist up.
The guard’s desk, a miniature command center, stands at the hub of this semi-circle. She or he is watching you all the time.
I spent the lion’s share of my time reading. I read a P. D. James mystery called “The Lighthouse”, a book by Robert Reich called "The Work of Nations”, and a sci-fi adventure by Michael Crichton called “Timeline”. They were long enough, engaging enough, varied enough, and well-written enough to occupy my mind through the ten days I spent at Bruno.
I also played a kind of solitaire that my cellie, EE, taught me. He was arrested on a domestic violence charge because he left some food and clothing for his infant son on the doorstep of the house where his son and his baby-mama still live while no one was home. The Restraining Order issued by the court, however, forbade him from coming within 100 yards of the house. And since he was in the country illegally to begin with, he was put on an ICE hold immediately upon his arrest. I am sure that within no more than a week after I got out on bail, he was being put on a plane back to Honduras. He said that he would have to wait a year and a half, maybe two, before he returned. It would cost $5000. It will be his third or fourth border crossing.
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, I had attended a fund raiser for Robert Reich’s campaign to be Governor of Massachusetts. He was running against Mitt Romney. I contributed $250. I remembered how delightful our conversation had been, as only a conversation with someone who has great intelligence, a kind heart, and deep knowledge of the world can be.
*
While incarcerated, I was lucky enough to find myself in a holding tank waiting for transport from 850 Bryant back to Bruno. I waited there with, among a group of about 15 men, two of the best storytellers I have ever heard. I was still new to the system and was keeping my eyes downcast and my thoughts off my face. But these two made me smile to myself and soon look up to watch them as they played to the exclusive audience gathered there.
I quickly realized that they were competing with one another the way break-dancers did when I lived in Manhattan in the 1980s.
After finishing one of his stories, as a kind of interlude I think, one of them started asking the other whether he remembered certain guys, listing names like Jerry and Damon and John. He mentioned having seen so-and-so a few days before, and had been glad to see that the guy was doing well, had a nice car, a good job, and nice home and family. "You know," he said, "back in the 70s I always told those guys 'I will not be the last crack dinosaur on the streets!' and here I am, the last Cack Dinosaur on the streets!" Everyone laughed, and our burdens were lifted a little.
But this was a competition, and before our laughter died down, the challenger spoke up.
"O I got off that crack. Gave it up completely." He paused and and after a two count declared with voluble glee: "'Cause I found out about that crystal meth!"
Shouts, laughter long and loud. "You can fuck all night and the next day and at the end of the weekend you still got money in your wallet!"
Many stories were told that day, and I will share more of them in the future.
Let me just add here that "Sullivan's Travels" was never far from my mind.
*
The artworks were by inmates of the San Francisco County Jails and by Evan Bissell, an artist who worked with groups of inmates and children of inmates to create portraits of these inmates, portraits that tell the stories of the impact of incarceration on all of them. Almost every work brought tears to my eyes. A quilt made of pieces of prison clothing, all that particular orange, brought back a vivid memory of the feeling you get when you are allowed, after the search, to cover your nakedness with ill-fitting orange socks, briefs, drawstring pants, a t-shirt, and a sweatshirt.
Many of the artworks told stories of the new lives people have built after their release, the lives they began building even while incarcerated. Some memorialized those who died behind bars. All told of the struggle to retain dignity and purpose under those circumstances. I gave my contact information to one of the volunteer organizers of the show and hope to have photographs and more detailed information to share in another post soon.
For now, though, let me tell you a thing or two about jail.
*
When I was preparing to begin student-teaching, I talked to a number of experienced teachers who advised me to remember that the most negative response you can give a student (or anyone else for that matter) is to ignore him or her. Not to rebuke, nor to deny, but to ignore. If you have a student who speaks up too frequently and too often without a point, and who is generally disruptive, the best response is to say nothing at all. Let their talk be answered with empty silence. Render them invisible -- non-existent -- by treating them as such.
The police who arrest you, and then the sheriff’s deputies who are your jailers, similarly negate everything that constitutes your sense of self: your will, your intellect, your emotions. They do so by ignoring you completely. No answers to your questions, whether about the charges, about the process you are going through, about your ability to communicate with anyone outside -- about anything. You are something that they process, the ultimate objectification.
Everything is uncomfortable and debilitating. The handcuffs hurt, and having your arms behind your back makes it hard to get into the back seat of the squad car without falling into it. The back seat itself is hard molded plastic, without upholstery of any kind. You can’t sit with your back supported by the seatback because your manacled arms are in the way. You slide across the hard plastic with every turn, every acceleration or deceleration the driver makes.
At the precinct station house, they hold you first in a tiled room with hard wooden benches bolted to the shiny concrete floor, in the midst of which, as in every room you will now occupy, you see a drain toward which the floor slopes from all sides. Through a small window with holding wire mesh suspended within it, you can see someone going through papers in the adjoining room. She occasionally looks up at you, and occasionally others appear in the room with her. Eventually a cop or two, their equipment swinging and rattling heavily from their belts, enter the room you are in and, still refusing to answer any questions, take you back out to the car, load you in, and drive you to the county jail.
There it is the sheriff’s department which treats you with the disrespect of ignoring your humanity. Although you listened to the driver radio ahead to them before you were out of the precinct station parking lot, you must wait in the car, cuffed and folded on the hard back seat, while the two offices who brought you there talk to their counterparts at the door, chat to other waiting officers aabout the times they worked together or did this or that or knew so-and-so. When you are at last admitted to the building, you begin waiting at the first of a series of desks, counters, or office cubicles that comprise the stations of your entry into the system. Your privacy is stripped away, and whatever interior selfhood you have is violated, during the photographing, the fingerprinting, and the questioning about your birth, about your residence, about your workplace, about your medical history, about your current medical care. Then the stripping and the violation culminates in the taking away of your clothes and the ensuing inspection of your naked body, including any possible hiding places on or in it.
The cops have added a further refinement to the dehumanizing strategy, one that would never have occurred to me. During the hours and hours that this process takes, the cops are cracking crude jokes, telling stories about one another (or worse, about poor souls they have arrested or seen in jail in the past) which they consider amusing and at which they laugh loudly. They toss around every kind of racial, ethnic, sexist, etc. slur you can think of and they guffaw.
They ought to be ashamed.
Instead they think it is you who is in the shameful position.
*
Once you have been entered like data into the system, the castration of your will grinds on through the mindless routine of day after day. You cannot do any of the things you need to get done to keep your life, the life to which you hope, perhaps quixotically, to return, together. I had no idea whether any of my friends or family knew what had happened to me. Had they noticed my absence yet? Because I was homeless, no one was waiting to hear me come through a door somewhere.
Having had to surrender my mobile when arrested, I didn’t have anyone’s phone numbers. Even if I had, I soon discovered, you are allowed access only to very expensive pay phones for which you need to buy payment cards from the commissary, something you can do only once a week. You can make very expensive collect calls, but since most cellular service plans block collect calls, you need to know landline numbers Once upon a time I knew dozens of phone numbers, but nowadays we call someone by touching their name on our phone’s display screen, not by entering their number. After a couple of days passed, I was finally able to remember the number for the landline at my sister M’s house, and after a couple of tries I was able to speak to her.
One of these days I’ll tell you how that went.
*
I mentioned mindless routine.
You are awakened at 4:30 AM, ordered to dress and make your bed in the exact manner of this particular institution, made to wait standing for the carts to arrive, and then called one by one to get a tray of food from the guys who came with the cart from the kitchen.
As for the food, I must tell you about the peanut butter. You get a wad of it, wrapped in wax paper, about the size of a lemon an egg, with some soft, easily torn white bread and no utensil to help spread the was, which is itself only semi-soft. In every holding cell in the system, you see wads of peanut butter stuck to the ceiling overhead. The ceilings are always 15 or more feet high. It takes a powerful arm to launch a stiff, hard wad of peanut butter at that ceiling hard enough to get it to stick. Once it is there, however, it seems to stay for perpetuity. I never saw, or did I ever hear tell of, one of these peanut-butter hardballs coming down.
I won’t bother describing the rest of the food. To do so would be of as little interest as was the food. And as in the joke Woody Allen tells in “Annie Hall”, there is never enough of it.
At about 5:15 AM you are ordered back to your cell and locked down for a few more hours of sleep.
The rest of the day consists of a rotation of time spent locked down in your cell and time spent in the common area, where you can find conversations, card games, books, magazines, and loud televisions tuned either to movies (action pictures, crime, jails, violence -- lots and lots of violence) or to sports.
This common area is semi-circular and two stories high, the cells ranging along the rim of the circle, their interior walls all glass. A steel staircase and catwalk provides access to the upper story of cells. Everyone is visible at all times. The only nod to privacy is the pony-wall, about 24” high, in front of the toilet in your cell. It assures that when you sit on the toilet you are visible only from the waist up.
The guard’s desk, a miniature command center, stands at the hub of this semi-circle. She or he is watching you all the time.
*
I spent the lion’s share of my time reading. I read a P. D. James mystery called “The Lighthouse”, a book by Robert Reich called "The Work of Nations”, and a sci-fi adventure by Michael Crichton called “Timeline”. They were long enough, engaging enough, varied enough, and well-written enough to occupy my mind through the ten days I spent at Bruno.
I also played a kind of solitaire that my cellie, EE, taught me. He was arrested on a domestic violence charge because he left some food and clothing for his infant son on the doorstep of the house where his son and his baby-mama still live while no one was home. The Restraining Order issued by the court, however, forbade him from coming within 100 yards of the house. And since he was in the country illegally to begin with, he was put on an ICE hold immediately upon his arrest. I am sure that within no more than a week after I got out on bail, he was being put on a plane back to Honduras. He said that he would have to wait a year and a half, maybe two, before he returned. It would cost $5000. It will be his third or fourth border crossing.
*
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, I had attended a fund raiser for Robert Reich’s campaign to be Governor of Massachusetts. He was running against Mitt Romney. I contributed $250. I remembered how delightful our conversation had been, as only a conversation with someone who has great intelligence, a kind heart, and deep knowledge of the world can be.
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Morbidity and Mortality*
Last Friday, May 3rd, was the 100th anniversary of my mother’s birth. She died in 2002, but she has been with me a lot since then. T.S. Eliot says that “As we grow older/the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated/Of dead and living.” And Leonard Cohen sings hauntingly about what I mean:
Also on last Friday, the PBS Newshour aired two stories of particular interest to me. The first concerned a report from the CDC concerning a jump in suicide rates. For the year 2010, the number of Americans choosing not to live increased by 28%. Among white Americans, the increase was 40%. And among men in their 50s (my age) the jump was 48%.
This story was followed by one on the difficulty that unemployed older Americans, especially those who lost their jobs in the recession following the 2008 global financial collapse, are having finding employment. This report included clips from a discussion which the reporter, Paul Solomon, held with a group of unemployed older Americans. One of them was a man who said that he had run through his entire savings, including his 401K, and had only $2000 to his name. He was to be getting his last unemployment check this week. He was already getting help in the form of financial hardship pricing on electricity and gas and in the form of food stamps, but he was behind on his mortgage. He did not know what he was going to do.
At the end of the segment, the man who runs the counseling agency to which all these people had turned, Joe Carbone, said this:
"I love this country so much, but I can't imagine that we would ever leave any of our citizens, any of our brothers and sisters, to be part of a process that's declaring them hopeless. And that's what's going on."
The link between these stories was noted, though not discussed at length. I was struck by the fact that the report on suicide identified sub segments of our society by race and by age, but not by class. (I must note that I do not know whether the research paper published by the CDC included economic as well as other analyses, but the news report for the general public did not. The Director of the CDC did talk about the impact of drugs and alcohol on an individuals risk for suicide. He said that it was important that health care providers be aware of their patients’ substance abuse, etc. He did not say that a more equitable economic system might have huge and even life-saving medical benefits
Nobody on television that night said that poor folk have little reason to go on living in 21st century America. The notion that "they" can work their way out of poverty and upward into prosperity is a vicious (I mean that word quite literally) lie. And the society as a whole, the “nation” (if indeed one can talk about this country as a unified community at all), does not want to help support those who can find no way to support themselves adequately. The myth of the Rugged Individualist (Rand, Reagan, et al.) has conveniently given the housed and fed an excuse to wash their hands of any responsibility for the rest of us.
_____________________
*My title. "Morbidity and Mortality" is also the title of the prestigious medical journal published by the CDC in which the report on suicide appeared.
Also on last Friday, the PBS Newshour aired two stories of particular interest to me. The first concerned a report from the CDC concerning a jump in suicide rates. For the year 2010, the number of Americans choosing not to live increased by 28%. Among white Americans, the increase was 40%. And among men in their 50s (my age) the jump was 48%.
This story was followed by one on the difficulty that unemployed older Americans, especially those who lost their jobs in the recession following the 2008 global financial collapse, are having finding employment. This report included clips from a discussion which the reporter, Paul Solomon, held with a group of unemployed older Americans. One of them was a man who said that he had run through his entire savings, including his 401K, and had only $2000 to his name. He was to be getting his last unemployment check this week. He was already getting help in the form of financial hardship pricing on electricity and gas and in the form of food stamps, but he was behind on his mortgage. He did not know what he was going to do.
At the end of the segment, the man who runs the counseling agency to which all these people had turned, Joe Carbone, said this:
"I love this country so much, but I can't imagine that we would ever leave any of our citizens, any of our brothers and sisters, to be part of a process that's declaring them hopeless. And that's what's going on."
The link between these stories was noted, though not discussed at length. I was struck by the fact that the report on suicide identified sub segments of our society by race and by age, but not by class. (I must note that I do not know whether the research paper published by the CDC included economic as well as other analyses, but the news report for the general public did not. The Director of the CDC did talk about the impact of drugs and alcohol on an individuals risk for suicide. He said that it was important that health care providers be aware of their patients’ substance abuse, etc. He did not say that a more equitable economic system might have huge and even life-saving medical benefits
Nobody on television that night said that poor folk have little reason to go on living in 21st century America. The notion that "they" can work their way out of poverty and upward into prosperity is a vicious (I mean that word quite literally) lie. And the society as a whole, the “nation” (if indeed one can talk about this country as a unified community at all), does not want to help support those who can find no way to support themselves adequately. The myth of the Rugged Individualist (Rand, Reagan, et al.) has conveniently given the housed and fed an excuse to wash their hands of any responsibility for the rest of us.
_____________________
*My title. "Morbidity and Mortality" is also the title of the prestigious medical journal published by the CDC in which the report on suicide appeared.
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