Authors: David Samuels
When he appeared in court for sentencing in front of Judge James Schum, Hogue looked
nothing like the lean athlete who could run twenty miles in a day and pass for ten or fifteen years younger than he was. Appearing gaunt and disheveled in the courtroom, he seemed to be sick, an effect that he accentuated by growing his hair and beard long. He sat in the courtroom and
listened impassively to his criminal history, which by now included ten arrests and seven
convictions for fraud, forged checks, impersonation, trespassing, and larceny. The court also heard that he had been rejected by seven or eight community correction facilities but accepted by a program in San Luis Valley that would allow him to serve out his sentence in a supervised community setting.
Hogue’s attorney, Harvey Palefsky, was unable to find anyone in the state of Colorado
who would agree to testify on his client’s behalf. When he saw Cindy Putnam at his client’s sentencing hearing, he instructed Judge Schum to call her to the stand. Having had no prior indication that she would be asked to speak, the witness stammered, then froze like a frightened deer. Later, Putnam wished that she had been able to stand up in the courtroom and say a few positive things about her old running partner. She had great empathy for Hogue, who was a
human being not unlike herself—a shy person who tried to avoid hurting others, and whose
motives were generally pure. He might benefit from the kind of help that a good psychiatrist might be able to provide. But her native shyness, her lack of preparation, the unexpected pressure of the moment, and her doubts about the true parameters of Hogue’s deceptive nature made it impossible for Putnam to say even a single word. The only person left to speak before the judge and the assembled spectators was James Hogue.
“I would have pled guilty last year, but I was trying to get whatever I could back to my
family,” he explained to Judge Schum. “In the last month or so, I’ve been able to do that, and give away whatever property I have.”
Schum appeared frustrated by Hogue’s unwillingness or inability to take responsibility
for his crimes.
“I’ve stolen some things, and I’ve also purchased some things that [might have been]
stolen,” Hogue finally answered. “It’s hard to explain why.” He told the judge that he might be suffering from “some sort of collection compulsion,” which might in turn explain why he never disposed of all the property in his house. The judge was not impressed.
“Well, you have a collection compulsion,” he said. “Do you collect anything besides
stolen items? Like rocks, books, or bottles?”
“Rocks?” Hogue asked, surprised. The question of rocks was a tricky one. A further
search into the defendant’s criminal record would have revealed that he had stolen a quantity of precious gems and minerals from Harvard University. “Urn, books,” he decided. “Classical
CDs.”
“That wasn’t enough to satisfy the compulsion?” the judge asked, in a way that didn’t
sound friendly.
“I guess not,” Hogue answered. When Schum asked Hogue about his discussion of
running up debts on his credit card, Hogue’s answer was not convincing.
“Well actually, it was not credit cards I was talking about,” he said, despite clear
evidence to the contrary on the taped phone call that had just been played in the courtroom. “I have ATMs that go to my bank account. I don’t see why I can’t use my ATM.”
Hogue may have also been pretending to seem weak-minded and pathetic in order to buy
a reduction in his sentence, and the strategy showed some signs of working. “It seems to me that there’s almost a mental health issue,” Judge Schum speculated out loud to the courtroom. While it might have been better for Hogue to take Brian Patrick’s advice and come clean to Irina, his attempted deception of his fiancée was hardly a crime. The true nature of Hogue’s problem was not hard to diagnose.
“You have a long history of ripping people off,” he said. “It goes back to 1983. And part
of the problem here is that you just don’t seem to learn the lesson through these various lighter sentences that you’ve received over the years.” Over the course of more than two decades,
Hogue’s history of theft had escalated from bad checks for a few hundred dollars to thefts of property worth thousands of dollars. “And it’s getting more serious,” Judge Schum said, as he anatomized Hogue’s criminal progress.
Hogue was a menace not only to private property but to the feeling of security that made
it possible for Telluride to function as a high-end resort town. He was a bad neighbor. “You’re giving your own neighbors a line about how you’re gonna be the good guy and look out for
them, and then you’re turning around and ripping them off behind their backs,” Judge Schum
concluded. He sentenced James Hogue to the maximum term of ten years in a state penitentiary.
Hogue’s attorney called the sentence “a waste of talent and brainpower.” It was hard to
imagine that anyone in the courtroom that day would have disagreed with the statement. At the same time, it was hard to fault the people of Telluride for no longer wanting Hogue around.
Cindy Putnam visited Hogue in jail one last time to express her regrets for freezing up in
the courtroom. Hogue apologized for putting her on the spot. Her testimony wouldn’t have made any difference anyway, he said. The judge didn’t care about the facts of the case, or who James Hogue really was. He had made up his mind prior to the hearing.
After Hogue was moved to the state prison in Canon City, Putnam heard from him once
more. He spent from six in the morning until ten at night outside, he wrote. He hiked twenty miles a day and did some jogging too, which was difficult because of his work boots. He no
longer complained of feeling sick or having tumors, as he did when he was in jail in San Marcos.
He sounded confident and strong. He asked Putnam to send him money for running shoes,
clothes, and a radio, so he could listen to NPR.
Hogue had given Putnam title to his white Toyota truck before his sentencing hearing in
May, a fact that might have influenced her testimony on his behalf, had she offered it in court.
Having declined to testify, she was more than happy to wire him some part of the cash value of his truck. She wrote him several letters to make sure that he had received the money, but he never wrote back or called. Perhaps a bond of trust had been broken by Putnam’s failure to speak on his behalf in court after he gave her his truck, or perhaps maintaining contact with people outside was too much of a strain. Perhaps she was starting to know him too well. Dick Unruh, a local attorney who had helped plot Hogue’s legal strategy, also tried to contact Hogue to see if he was okay, but he never wrote back or called him, either. No one I spoke to in Telluride ever heard from Hogue again.
VIII. Visiting Day
On a clear and cold winter afternoon towards the end of my stay I went to visit James
Hogue in San Miguel County jail in Ilium. Aside from the residents of the nearby ski condos, no one really lives in Ilium, which is about ten miles down the road from the mining town of
Placerville. The San Miguel County jail sits at the end of a service road in the shade of three ten-thousand-foot-high mountains. Plenty of Telluride residents have spent a night or two here for driving drunk. Aside from a navy Plymouth Valiant, a later model of the family car that my parents used to drive, and a half-dozen trucks from the sheriff’s department, the parking lot was empty. Outside the entrance to the jail were three slender young aspens, like the trees in Hogue’s backyard. It would be hard to imagine a more beautiful spot for a jail.
Despite my previous failed attempts to see Jim, I felt sure he would see me this time, if
only because he didn’t have many visitors. “He doesn’t see many people,” the jail clerk agreed, as she read over my latest application. With his taste for spectacular surroundings, it made sense that Hogue would wind up in a jail at the top of the Rockies, looking out on snow-capped peaks and high tree lines that could equal anything supplied by his imaginative universe, in which other human beings play only minor roles. After mentioning the natural beauty of the setting, I asked the clerk, an older woman in a county uniform, if inmates could see the mountains from their cells.
“They can’t see anything,” the clerk answered, matter-of-factly When I took her answer
to mean that the cells looked out over the parking lot, she corrected me again. The windows of the cells faced a concrete wall and were made of unbreakable translucent glass that let in light but no other visual data that might stimulate the prisoners.
The clerk on duty agreed to take a letter to Hogue, in which I suggested that we had a lot
to talk about, that I could send him books, that there might be money for a film about his life, and whatever other inducements I could think of that might encourage an isolated man to talk to me about the enigmatic roots of his life. I had never cooperated with the law enforcement
officials who wanted to put him away. On the other hand, I didn’t think that he was innocent of the crimes with which he was charged. I looked at his case the way a biologist might. James Hogue was another animal in the forest. His behavior interested me, because each and every life is connected to each and every other life. By understanding Jim’s life, I might reach a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of the ecology of a forest that shelters many different kinds of life whose awareness of each other is only partial. Because we are social animals, we are vulnerable to impostors, who tell us what we want to hear, and who trade the simple
pleasures of human companionship for more abstract pleasures that cannot be shared with others.
I would also come to a better understanding of why lying is wrong, and not simply a normal part of everyday human behavior.
Back in my room, I sat on the bed with a notebook on my lap open to a fresh page with
the name “James Hogue” underscored twice for added emphasis. I tried to think of something
clever to write. He was too abstract to be a good thief. Maybe he liked being alone in his
mountain cell, watching the light outside his room get brighter and then darker. Maybe he was watching the Chargers-Patriots game on TV.
The question of how writers come to appropriate the lives of the people they write about
is a tricky one. The morally upright stance is that writers tell the truth and that everyone else in the universe exists at their pleasure, to provide them with quotations and documents. The false humility that so many writers show in the face of the lived experience of their subjects is belied by the act of writing, which always involves a head-on collision between someone else’s actual life and the writer’s inner life. While it is facile to equate journalism with lying, it is also true that both actions share in common an unpleasantly instrumental approach to people and to
language that diminishes the common store of trust. The subject has no power to alter a
reporter’s approach to his or her subject, or to take back a single word that they said. I waited for another hour but Hogue still didn’t call.
The next day, I sat on my bed at the appointed time and the phone rang, but I didn’t
answer it. Instead, through a mutual friend, I sent Hogue another letter. This time, I received an envelope containing a handwritten response written in No. 2 pencil on four sheets of blue-lined white paper.
“Thank you for your very nice letter,” the familiar voice began. He couldn’t see a good
book coming out of his story, he said, because there would be too many gaps; “the good stuff would be missing. The residue of peevishness or boredom in his answers was most likely the
product of the fact that he was in jail. It was the voice of a man who was trapped in a situation that he had created, and which had deprived him of his accustomed ability to take control.
“You became a liar when you told that first lie as a child in the same way a murderer
becomes a murderer with their first murder,” he wrote, in response to a question I asked him about whether he had ever felt deceived in our interactions. He could not have felt deceived, he wrote, because he had never believed a single word I said to him.
“Do you miss the mountains?” I had wondered.
“No.”
“What do you imagine during the day?”
“Not Much.”
“How do you keep your mind occupied during the day?”
“Sleep.”
Telluride was worse than Princeton, he wrote. “Here is unbridled greed. There is maybe
not as shallow. You’ve been to both; don’t ask me!”
He was not planning to become a doctor in Russia, as the CD-ROMs and the books about
anatomy had seemed to suggest. He claimed not to understand my questions about wanting to
become a fictional character, or whether there was any such thing as “the real you.”
“If you could be James Hogue in high school in Kansas, or Alexi Santana at Princeton, or
Jim Hogue in Telluride, or any of your other former selves, right now, who would you be and why?” I asked him.
“I don’t know, maybe there are more choices?” he answered. Having done his assigned
writing for the day, he turned the tables.
“Now, for your questions,” he began.
1. Are you greatly dismayed by the sum of your life?
2. Is your mother proud of you?
3. Despite having an abundance of personal charisma and imagination, Hunter Thompson
was only partially able to impose himself into others’ stories. Do you feel that this is a good strategy for you, as a lesser light? Do you ever want to have your own story?
4. Does the success of Uzodinma Iweala annoy you? Do you feel you should have had
that talent and luck bestowed upon you?
I looked Uzodinma Iweala up on Google, and was impressed by the young Nigerian
novelist’s achievements. By that point, the insult had gone flat. Envy was a major theme of his insults. He wondered if I envied the achievements of the writers on the
Harvard Lampoon
who went on to write for
The Simpsons
.