been on the express train, a dozen or so stops away from getting a master’s degree. Strange how I’d managed to forget that. Stranger still to wonder where all of it—all those hours and years of burrowing, the knowledge issuing from them, the ambition that led to them—might have gone. None of it seemed to be in me anymore.
By this time I’d suffered through a cellmate in the bunk above murmuring words aloud as he read from his Bible and another given to Donald Goines’s Whoreson , Swamp Man and Kenyatta novels. Then Adrian came along, by which time I myself sat nose sunk like a tomahawk in college catalogs and bulletins. Our gray, featureless submarine went on plowing its way through gray, featureless days. And I, it seemed, while still submerged could complete my degree courtesy of the state that held me in such cautious esteem.
Nowadays, of course, in the house Internet Jack built, there’d be nothing much to it. But back then the labors involved proved Herculean. Each month or so I’d receive a thick envelope of material. I was expected to read through it, write the papers required and complete a test at its end, then mail the whole thing back, whereupon another envelope would arrive.
That was the theory. But often two or three months would go by before I received a packet, at which time I might be handed three of them, one, or a mostly empty envelope. Could have been inmates with a grudge working the mail room, some guard’s petty meddling or arrogant notion of control, or it could have been just plain workaday pilferage. Never an explanation, of course, and you learned quickly, once those doors slammed shut behind you, never to question. Had it not been for the protection afforded me by fish-nor-fowl status and, later, by one teacher’s taking an unwarranted interest, I’m sure the college soon would have scoured me from its pot. But it didn’t. I’d gone into serious overdraft, but checks were still being cashed.
October of that second year, I received my M.A. The elaborate certificate, on heavy cream-colored bond replete with Gothic lettering and Latin, came rolled in a tube such as the ones in which other inmates received the Barbarella, Harley-Davidson and R. Crumb posters taped to the walls of their cells. University regents wished to inquire, an attached letter read, as to whether I would be continuing my education at their facility. Forever a quick study, having now survived inside and in addition found my way through thickets of university regulations, I felt as though I’d turned myself into some kind of facility veteran, slippery enough to slalom around raindrops, savvy enough to ride the system’s thermals. Better the facility you know. You bet I will be, I told university regents.
If every year April comes down the hill like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers, then October steps up to the plate glum and serious—never more than that one.
Lifting a pound or two of prison clothes off the counter, I’d picked up a ton of grief with them. That I’d been a cop was not supposed to get out. But guards knew, which meant everyone knew, and every one of them, inmates and guards alike, had good reason to despise the various ship-wrecks that had cast them up here. They weren’t able to slit society’s neck or shove the handle of a plumber’s helper up Warden Petit’s rear end, but there I was. From the first, starting out small and escalating the way violence always does, I’d met with confrontations on the yard, at mealtime, in the showers, at workshop. Two months and half a dozen scrambles in, I received a rare invitation from Warden Petit himself—I hadn’t been able to back off fast enough, and guards, looking away, had given me time to break the guy’s jaw before moving in—who wanted to tell me how proud he was of the way I was handling myself.
“Thank you, Warden.”
“Tremendous pressures on you out there. I appreciate that, you know. I see it. They never let up on a
By this time I’d suffered through a cellmate in the bunk above murmuring words aloud as he read from his Bible and another given to Donald Goines’s Whoreson , Swamp Man and Kenyatta novels. Then Adrian came along, by which time I myself sat nose sunk like a tomahawk in college catalogs and bulletins. Our gray, featureless submarine went on plowing its way through gray, featureless days. And I, it seemed, while still submerged could complete my degree courtesy of the state that held me in such cautious esteem.
Nowadays, of course, in the house Internet Jack built, there’d be nothing much to it. But back then the labors involved proved Herculean. Each month or so I’d receive a thick envelope of material. I was expected to read through it, write the papers required and complete a test at its end, then mail the whole thing back, whereupon another envelope would arrive.
That was the theory. But often two or three months would go by before I received a packet, at which time I might be handed three of them, one, or a mostly empty envelope. Could have been inmates with a grudge working the mail room, some guard’s petty meddling or arrogant notion of control, or it could have been just plain workaday pilferage. Never an explanation, of course, and you learned quickly, once those doors slammed shut behind you, never to question. Had it not been for the protection afforded me by fish-nor-fowl status and, later, by one teacher’s taking an unwarranted interest, I’m sure the college soon would have scoured me from its pot. But it didn’t. I’d gone into serious overdraft, but checks were still being cashed.
October of that second year, I received my M.A. The elaborate certificate, on heavy cream-colored bond replete with Gothic lettering and Latin, came rolled in a tube such as the ones in which other inmates received the Barbarella, Harley-Davidson and R. Crumb posters taped to the walls of their cells. University regents wished to inquire, an attached letter read, as to whether I would be continuing my education at their facility. Forever a quick study, having now survived inside and in addition found my way through thickets of university regulations, I felt as though I’d turned myself into some kind of facility veteran, slippery enough to slalom around raindrops, savvy enough to ride the system’s thermals. Better the facility you know. You bet I will be, I told university regents.
If every year April comes down the hill like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers, then October steps up to the plate glum and serious—never more than that one.
Lifting a pound or two of prison clothes off the counter, I’d picked up a ton of grief with them. That I’d been a cop was not supposed to get out. But guards knew, which meant everyone knew, and every one of them, inmates and guards alike, had good reason to despise the various ship-wrecks that had cast them up here. They weren’t able to slit society’s neck or shove the handle of a plumber’s helper up Warden Petit’s rear end, but there I was. From the first, starting out small and escalating the way violence always does, I’d met with confrontations on the yard, at mealtime, in the showers, at workshop. Two months and half a dozen scrambles in, I received a rare invitation from Warden Petit himself—I hadn’t been able to back off fast enough, and guards, looking away, had given me time to break the guy’s jaw before moving in—who wanted to tell me how proud he was of the way I was handling myself.
“Thank you, Warden.”
“Tremendous pressures on you out there. I appreciate that, you know. I see it. They never let up on a
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