The Best of Lucius Shepard (74 page)

While
I was down in Vacaville, two years into a nickel for armed robbery, I committed
the offense that got me sent to Diamond Bar. What happened was this. They had
me out spraying the bean fields, dressed in protective gear so full of holes
that each day when I was done, I would puke and sweat as if I had been granted
a reprieve and yanked from the gas chamber with my lungs half full of death.
One afternoon I was sitting by the access road, goggles around my neck, tank of
poison strapped to my shoulders, waiting for the prison truck, when an old
Volkswagen bus rattled up from the main gate and stopped. On the sliding panel
was a detail from a still life by Caravaggio, a rotting pear lopsided on a
silver tray; on the passenger door, a pair of cherubs by Titian. Other images,
all elements of famous Italian paintings, adorned the roof, front, and rear.
The driver peered down at me. A dried-up, sixtyish man in a work shirt,
balding, with a mottled scalp, a hooked nose, and a gray beard bibbing his
chest. A blue-collar Jehovah. “You sick?” he asked, and waggled a cell phone.
“Should I call somebody?”

“Fuck
are you?” I asked. “The Art Fairy?”

“Frank
Ristelli,” he said without resentment. “I teach a class in painting and
sculpture every Wednesday.”

“Those
who can’t, teach … huh?”

A
patient look. “Why would you say that?”

“‘Cause
the perspective on your Titian’s totally fucked.”

“It’s
good enough for you to recognize. How do you know Titian?”

“I
studied painting in college. Two years. People in the department thought I was
going to be a hot-shit artist.”

“Guess
you fooled them, huh?”

He
was mocking me, but I was too worn out to care. “All that college pussy,” I
said. “I couldn’t stay focused.”

“And
you had places to rob, people to shoot. Right?”

That
kindled my anger, but I said nothing. I wondered why he was hanging around,
what he wanted of me.

“Have
you kept it up? You been drawing?”

“I
mess around some.”

“If
you’d like, I’d be glad to take a look. Why don’t you bring me what you’ve been
doing next Wednesday?”

I
shrugged. “Sure, yeah. I can do that.”

“I’ll
need your name if I’m going to hook you up with a pass.”

“Tommy
Penhaligon,” I said.

Ristelli
wrote it down on a note pad. “Okay … Tommy. Catch you Wednesday.” With that, he
put the van in gear and rattled off to the land of the free, his pluming
exhaust obscuring my view of the detail from a Piero della Francesca painted on
the rear.

Of
course, I had done no drawing for years, but I sensed in Ristelli the potential
for a sweet hustle. Nothing solid, but you develop a nose for these things.
With this in mind, I spent the following week sketching a roach-likely it was
several different roaches, but I preferred to think of it as a brother inmate
with a felonious history similar to my own. I drew that roach to death,
rendering him in a variety of styles ranging from realism to caricature. I
ennobled him, imbued him with charisma, invoked his humble, self-abnegatory
nature. I made him into an avatar among roaches, a roach with a mission. I
crucified him and portrayed him distributing Oreo crumbs to the faithful. I
gave him my face, the face of a guard to whom I had a particular aversion, the
faces of several friends, including that of Carl Dimassio, who supplied the
crank that kept me working straight through the nights. I taped the drawings on
the wall and chuckled with delight, amazed by my cleverness. On the night
before Ristelli’s class, so wasted that I saw myself as a tragic figure, a
savage with the soul of an artist, I set about creating a violent
self-portrait, a hunched figure half buried in blackness, illuminated by a
spill of lamplight, curled around my sketch pad like a slug about a leaf, with
a harrowed face full of weakness and delirium, a construction of crude strokes
and charred, glaring eyes, like the face of a murderer who has just understood
the consequences of his act. It bore only a slight resemblance to me, but it
impressed Ristelli.

“This
is very strong,” he said of the self-portrait. “The rest of them”-he gestured
at the roach drawings-”they’re good cartoons. But this is the truth.”

Rather
than affecting the heightened stoicism that convicts tend to assume when they
wish to demonstrate that they have not been emotionally encouraged, I reacted
as might a prisoner in one of the movies that had shaped my expectations of
prison and said with boyish wonderment, “Yeah … you think?,” intending by this
to ruffle the sensibilities of Ristelli’s inmate assistant, a fat, ponytailed
biker named Marion Truesdale, aka Pork, whose arms were inked with blue,
circusy designs, the most prominent being a voluptuous naked woman with the
head of a demon, and whose class work, albeit competent, tended to mirror the
derivative fantasy world of his body art. In the look that passed between us
then was all I needed to know about the situation: Pork was telling me that he
had staked out Ristelli and I should back the fuck off. But rather than heeding
the warning, I concentrated on becoming Ristelli’s star pupil, the golden apple
in a barrel of rotten ones. Over the next months, devoting myself to the
refinement of my gift, I succeeded to such a degree that he started keeping me
after class to talk, while Pork-his anger fermenting-cleaned palette knives and
brushes.

Much
of what I said to Ristelli during that time was designed to persuade him of the
deprivation I faced, the lack of stimulation that was neutering my artistic
spirit, all with an eye toward convincing him to do a little smuggling for me.
Though he sympathized with my complaints, he gave no sign that he was ripe to
be conned. He would often maneuver our conversation into theoretical or
philosophical directions, and not merely as related to art. It seemed he
considered himself my mentor and was attempting to prepare me for a vague
future in which I would live if not totally free, then at least unconstrained
by spiritual fetters. One day when I described myself in passing as having
lived outside the law, he said, “That’s simply not so. The criminal stands at
the absolute heart of the law.”

He
was perched on a corner of an old scarred desk jammed into the rear of the art
room, nearly hidden by the folded easels leaning against it, and I was sitting
with my legs stretched out in a folding chair against the opposite wall,
smoking one of Ristelli’s Camels. Pork stood at the sink, rinsing brushes in
linseed oil, shoulders hunched, radiating enmity, like a sullen child forbidden
the company of his elders.

“‘Cause
we’re inside?” I asked. “That what you’re saying?”

“I’m
talking about criminals, not just prisoners,” Ristelli said. “The criminal is
the basis for the law. Its inspiration, its justification. And ultimately, of
course, its victim. At least in the view of society.”

“How
the hell else can you view it?”

“Some
might see incarceration as an opportunity to learn criminal skills. To network.
Perhaps they’d rather be elsewhere, but they’re inside, so they take advantage.
But they only take partial advantage. They don’t understand the true nature of
the opportunity.”

I
was about to ask for an explanation of this last statement, but Pork chose the
moment to ask Ristelli if he needed any canvases stretched.

Ristelli
said, “Why don’t you call it a day. I’ll see you next week.”

Aiming
a bleak look in my direction, Pork said, “Yeah … all right,” and shambled out
into the corridor.

“The
criminal and what he emblematizes …,” Ristelli went on. “The beast. Madness.
The unpredictable. He’s the reason society exists. Thus the prison system is
the central element of society. Its defining constituency. Its model.” He
tapped a cigarette out of his pack and made a twirling gesture with it. “Who
runs this place?”

“Vacaville?
Fucking warden.”

“The
warden!” Ristelli scoffed at the notion. “He and the guards are there to handle
emergencies. To maintain order. They’re like the government. Except they have
much less control than the President and the Congress. No taxes, no
regulations. None that matter, anyway. They don’t care what you do, so long as
you keep it quiet. Day to day it’s cons who run the prisons. There are those
who think a man’s freer inside than out in the world.”

“You
sound like an old lifer.”

Bemused,
Ristelli hung the cigarette from his lower lip, lit up and let smoke flow out
from his mouth and nostrils.

“Fuck
you know about it, anyway?” I said. “You’re a free man.”

“You
haven’t been listening.”

“I
know I should be hanging on your every goddamn word. Just sometimes it gets a
little deep, y’know.” I pinched the coal off the tip of the Camel and pocketed
the butt. “What about the death penalty, man? If we’re running things, how come
we let ‘em do that shit?”

“Murderers
and the innocent,” Ristelli said. “The system tolerates neither.”

It
seemed I understood these words, but I could not abide the thought that
Ristelli’s bullshit was getting to me, and instead of pursuing the matter, I
told him I had things to do and returned to my cell.

I
had been working on a series of portraits in charcoal and pastel that depicted
my fellow students in contemplative poses, their brutish faces transfigured by
the consideration of some painterly problem, and the next week after class,
when Ristelli reviewed my progress, he made mention of the fact that I had neglected
to include their tattoos. Arms and necks inscribed with barbed wire bracelets,
lightning bolts, swastikas, dragons, madonnas, skulls; faces etched with Old
English script and dripping with black tears-in my drawings they were
unadorned, the muscles cleanly rendered so as not to detract from the
fraudulent saintliness I was attempting to convey. Ristelli asked what I was
trying for, and I said, “It’s a joke, man. I’m turning these mutts into
philosopher-kings.”

“Royalty
have been known to wear tattoos. The kings of Samoa, for instance.”

“Whatever.”

“You
don’t like tattoos?”

“I’d
sooner put a bone through my nose.”

Ristelli
began unbuttoning his shirt. “See what you think of this one.”

“That’s
okay,” I said, suspecting now Ristelli’s interest in my talent had been prelude
to a homosexual seduction; but he was already laying bare his bony chest. Just
above his right nipple, a bit off-center, was a glowing valentine heart, pale
rose, with a gold banner entangling its pointy base, and on the banner were
words etched in dark blue: The Heart Of The Law. The colors were so soft and
pure, the design so simple, it seemed-despite its contrast to Ristelli’s pallid
skin-a natural thing, as if chance had arranged certain inborn discolorations
into a comprehensible pattern; but at the moment, I was less aware of its
artistic virtues than of the message it bore, words that brought to mind what
Ristelli had told me a few days before.

“The
heart of the law,” I said. “This mean you done crime? You’re a criminal?”

“You
might say I do nothing else.”

“Oh,
yeah! You’re one of the evil masters. Where’d you get the tattoo?”

“A
place called Diamond Bar.”

The
only Diamond Bar I’d heard of was a section of LA populated mainly by Asians,
but Ristelli told me it was also the name of a prison in northern California
where he had spent a number of years. He claimed to be among the few ever to
leave the place.

“It’s
unlikely you’ve met anyone who’s done time there,” he said. “Until now, that
is. Not many are aware of its existence.”

“So
it’s a supermax? Like Pelican Bay? The hell you do to get put someplace like
that?”

“I
was a fool. Like you, stupidity was my crime. But I was no longer a fool when I
left Diamond Bar.”