Authors: John Edgar Wideman
Clearly, not everyone's to blame. Certainly not me or you. On the other hand, who wouldn't be upset by an evening of loud, half-naked, large black men fast breaking and fancy dribbling, clowning and stuffing and jamming and preening for white women and kids screaming their silly heads off. Enough to put any grown man's nerves on edge, especially after you had to shell out your hard-earned cash to watch yourself take a beating. Then, to top it all off, once you're home, bone tired, hunkered down on your side of the bed, here comes your old lady grinning from ear to ear, bouncy like she's just survived a naked
bungy-dive from the top of the goddamned pleasure center's twin-towers-to-be.
The Studebaker's wipers flop back and forth, bump over scabs of ice. The driver's view isn't improving. We inch along a long, long black tunnel, headlights illuminating slants of snow that converge just a few yards beyond the spot where a hood ornament would sit, if Studebakers, like Mercedes Benzes, were adorned with bowsprits in 1927. Bright white lines of force, every kamikaziing snowflake in the universe sucked into this vortex, this vanishing point the headlights define, a hole in the dark we chug, chug behind, the ever receding horizon drawing us on, drawing us on, a ship to Zion, the song says.
Our driver's appalled by the raw deal Rastus received. During an interview he asserts, I'd never participate in something so mobbishly brutal. I would not assume appearance is reality. I would never presume truth lodges in the eyes of the more numerous beholders. After all, my people also a minority. We've suffered unjustly too. And will again. I fear it in my bones. Soon after the great depression that will occur just a few years from now, just a few miles down this very road we're traveling in this hot,
fluup
ing car, some clever, evil motherfucker will say, Sew yellow stars on their sleeves. Stars will work like color. We'll be able to tell who's who. Protect our citizens from mongrels, gypsies, globetrotters, migrants, emigrants, the riffraff coming and going. Sneaking in and out of our cities. Peddling dangerous wares. Parasites. Criminals. Terrorists. Devils.
Through the slit in his iron mask the driver observes gallows being erected by the roadside. Imagines flyers nailed and taped all over town. Wonders if it had been wise to warn them we're coming.
So
who
invented the jump shot. Don't despair. All the panelists have taken seats facing the audience. The emcee at the podium taps a microphone and a hush fills the vast hall. We're about to be told.
I
HAVE A FRIEND
with a son in prison. About once a year he visits his son. Since the prison is in Arizona and my friend lives here on the East Coast, visiting isn't easy. He's told me the planning, the expense, the long day spent flying there and longer day flying back are the least of it. The moment that's not easy, that's impossible, he said, is after three days, six hours each, of visiting are over and he passes through the sliding gate of the steel-fenced outdoor holding pen between the prison visitation compound and the visitors' parking lot and steps onto the asphalt that squirms beneath your feet, oozing hot like it just might burn through your shoe soles before you reach the rental car and fling open its doors and blast the air conditioner so the car's interior won't fry your skin, it's then, he said, taking your first steps away from the prison, first steps back into the world, when you almost come apart, almost lose it completely out there in the desert, emptiness stretching as far as the eye can see, very far usually, ahead to a horizon ironed flat by the weight of blue sky, to the right and left zigzag mountain peaks marking the edges of the earth, nothing moving but hot air wiggling above the highway, the scrub brush and sand, then, for an unending instant, it's very hard to be alive, he says, and thinks he doesn't want to live a minute longer and would not make it to the car, the airport, back to this city if he didn't pause and remind himself it's worse, far worse for the son behind him still trapped inside the prison, so for the son's sake he manages a
first step away, then another and another. In these faltering moments he must prepare himself for the turnaround, the jarring transition into a world where he has no access to his son except for rare ten-minute phone calls, a blighted world he must make sense of again, beginning with the first step away and back through the boiling caldron of parking lot, first step of the trip that will return him in a year to the desert prison.
Now he won't have it to worry about anymore. When I learned of the friend's death, I'd just finished fixing a peanut butter sandwich. Living alone means you tend to let yourself run out of things. Milk, dishwasher detergent, napkins, toothpasteâstaples you must regularly replace. At least it happens to me. In this late bachelorhood with no live-in partner who shares responsibility for remembering to stock up on needful things. Peanut butter a choice I didn't relish, but probably my only choice that evening, so I'd fixed one, or two, more likely, since they'd be serving as dinner. In the day's mail I'd ignored till I sat down to my sorry-assed meal, a letter from a lawyer announcing the death of the friend with a son in prison, and inside the legal-sized manila envelope a sealed white envelope the friend had addressed to me.
I was surprised on numerous counts. First, to learn the friend was gone. Second, to find he'd considered me significant enough to have me informed of his passing. Third, the personal note. Fourth, and now it's time to stop numbering, no point since you could say every event following the lawyer's letter both a surprise and no surprise, so numbering them as arbitrary as including the sluggish detail of peanut butter sandwiches, "sluggish" because I'd become intrigued by the contents of the manila envelope and stopped masticating the wad in my jaw until I recalled the friend's description of exiting prison, and the sludge became a mouthful of scalding tar.
What's surprising about death anyway, unless you count the details of when and how, the precise violence stopping the
heart, the volume of spilled blood, those unedifying, uninformative details the media relentlessly flog as news. Nothing really surprising about death except how doggedly we insist on being surprised by what we know very well's inevitable, and of course, after a while, this insistence itself unsurprising. So I was (a) surprised and (b) not surprised by the death of a friend who wasn't much of a friend, after all, more acquaintance than intimate cut-buddy, a guy I'd met somewhere through someone and weeks later we'd recognized each other in a line at a movie or a bank and nodded and then ran into each other again one morning in a busy coffeeshop and since I'm partial to the coffee there, I did something I never do, asked if it was okay to share his table and he smiled and said sure so we became in this sense friends. I never knew very much about him and hadn't known him very long. He never visited my apartment nor I his. A couple years of casual bump-ins, tables shared for coffee while we read our newspapers, a meal, a movie or two, a playoff game in a bar once, two middle-aged men who live alone and inhabit a small, self-sufficient corner of a large city and take time-outs here and there from living alone so being alone at this stage in our careers doesn't feel too depressingly like loneliness. The same motivation, same pattern governing my relationships with the occasional woman who consents to share my bed or if she doesn't consent to sleep with me entertains the option long enough, seriously enough, with attitudes interesting enough to keep us distracted by each other for a while.
Reconsidering the evening I received notice of the friend's death, going over my reactions again, putting words to them, I realize I'm underplaying my emotions. Not about the shock or sadness of losing the friend. He's the kind of person you could see occasionally, enjoy his company more or less, and walk away with no further expectations, no plan to meet again. If he'd moved to another city, months might have passed before I'd notice him missing. If we'd lost contact for good, I'm sure I
wouldn't have regretted not seeing him. A smidgen of curiosity, perhaps. Perhaps a slight bit of vexation, as when I discover I haven't restocked paper towels or Tabasco sauce. Less, since his absence wouldn't leave a gap I'd be obliged to fill. My usual flat response at this stage in my life to losing things I have no power to hold on to. Most of the world fits into this category now, so what I'm trying to say is that something about the manila envelope and its contents bothered me more than I'm used to allowing things to bother me, though I'm not sure why. Was it the son in prison. The friend had told me no one else visited. The son's mother dead of cancer. Her people, like the friend's, like mine, old, scattered, gone. Another son, whereabouts unknown, who'd disowned his father and half-brother, started a new life somewhere else. I wondered if the lawyer who wrote me had been instructed to inform the son in prison of his father's passing. How were such matters handled. A phone call. A registered letter. Maybe a visit from the prison chaplain. I hoped my friend had arranged things to run smoothly, with as little distress as possible for the son. Any alternatives I imagined seemed cruel. Cruel for different reasons, but equally difficult for the son. Was he even now opening his manila envelope, a second envelope tucked inside with its personal message. I guess I do know why I was upsetâthe death of the man who'd been my acquaintance for nearly two years moved me not a bit, but I grieved to the point of tears for a son I'd never seen, never spoken to, who probably wasn't aware my grief or I existed.
Empathy for the son not surprising, even logical, under the circumstances, you might say. Why worry about the father. He's gone. No more tiptoeing across burning coals. Why not sympathize with a young man suddenly severed from his last living contact with the world this side of prison bars. Did he know his father wouldn't be visiting. Had the son phoned. Listened to it ring-ring-ring and ring. How would he find out. How would he bear the news.
Of course I considered the possibility that my reaction or overreaction might be a way of feeling sorry for myself. For the sorry, running-down-to-the-ground arc all lives eventually assume. Sorry for the prison I've chosen to seal myself within. Fewer and fewer visits paid or received. No doubt a bit of self-pity colored my response. On the other hand I'm not a brooder. I quickly become bored when a mood's too intense or lasts too long. Luckily, I have the capacity to step back, step away, escape into a book, a movie, a vigorous walk, and if these distractions don't do the trick, then very soon I discover I'm smiling, perhaps even quietly chuckling at the ridiculous antics of the person who's lost control, who's taking himself and his commonplace dilemmas far too seriously.
Dear Attorney Koppleman,
I was a friend of the late Mr. Donald Williams. You wrote to inform me of Mr. Williams's death. Thank you. I'm trying to reach Mr. Williams's imprisoned son to offer my belated condolences. If you possess the son's mailing address, could you pass it on to me, please. I appreciate in advance your attention to this matter.
***
In response to your inquiry of 6/24/99: this office did execute Mr. Donald K. Williams's will. The relevant documents have been filed in Probate Court, and as such are part of the public record you may consult at your convenience.
P.S. Wish I could be more helpful but in our very limited dealings with Mr. Williams, he never mentioned a son in or out of prison.
I learned there are many prisons in Arizona. Large and small. Local, state, federal. Jails for short stays, penitentiaries for lifers. Perhaps it's the hot, dry climate. Perhaps space is cheap.
Perhaps a desert state's economy, with limited employment opportunities for its citizens, relies on prisons. Perhaps corporate-friendly deals make prisons lucrative businesses. Whatever the reasons, the prison industry seems to flourish in Arizona. Many people also wind up in Arizona retirement communities. Do the skills accumulated in managing the senior citizens who come to the state to die readily translate to prison administration, or vice versa. I'm dwelling on the number of prisons only because it presented a daunting obstacle as I began to search for the late friend's son.
Fortunately, the state employs people to keep track of prisoners. I'm not referring to uniformed guards charged with hands-on monitoring of inmate flesh and blood. I mean computer people who know how to punch in and retrieve information. Are they one of the resources attracting prisons to Arizona. Vast emptiness plus a vast legion of specialists adept at processing a steady stream of bodies across borders, orchestrating the dance of dead and living so vacancies are filled and fees collected promptly, new residents recruited, old ones disposed of. Was it the dead friend who told me the downtown streets of Phoenix are eerily vacant during heatstroke daylight hours. People who do the counting must be sequestered in air-conditioned towers or busy as bees underground in offices honeycombed beneath the asphalt, their terminals regulating traffic in and out of hospices, prisons, old folks' homes, juvenile detention centers, cemeteries, their screens displaying Arizona's archipelago of incarceral facilities, diagrams of individual gulags where a single speck with its unique, identifying tag can be pinpointed at any moment of the day. Thanks to such a highly organized system, after much digging I located the son.
Why did I search. While I searched, I never asked why. Most likely because I expected no answer. Still don't. Won't fake one now except to suggest (a) curiosity and (b) anger. Curiosity since I had no particular agenda beyond maybe sending
a card or note. The search pure in this sense, an experiment, driven by the simple urge to know. Curiosity motivating me like it drove the proverbial cat, killing it until satisfaction brought it back. Anger because I learned how perversely the system functions, how slim your chances of winning are if you challenge it.
Anger because the system's insatiable clockwork innards had the information I sought and refused to divulge it. Refused fiercely, mindlessly, as only a mindless machine created to do a single, repetitive, mindless task can mindlessly refuse. The prison system assumes an adversarial stance the instant an inquiry attempts to sidestep the prerecorded labyrinth of logical menus that protect its irrational core. When and if you ever reach a human voice, its hostile tone insinuates you've done something stupid or morally suspect by pursuing it to its lair. As punishment for your trespass, the voice will do its best to mimic the tone and manner of the recorded messages you've been compelled to suffer in order to reach it.