Day 57 Poetry

The fellow passengers as he calls them have discovered he is a song writer and beg him to write love letters to their wives.  In return for writing them he is paid in paper and Bic pens so he can write to me.  He confides that everything he writes for them is really what he is wishing for us.  Here is the latest one written for a fellow inmate who longs to return to his former lover:

Be My Rainbow

Though I am in a Hurricane
All I dream about is You
Though the Tempest is raging all around me
All I hear is a Melody, Your Name, Your Tune

You are the Rainbow
That has Graced my Heaven
In Your eyes I see the end of the Storm
You are the Sunshine Whispering all is Forgiven
Yours is the Heart keeping me warm

Your Image haunts me every Moment
I feel the rhythm of Your Heart
Your Dance, Your Sway, relieve my Torment
I imagine our Souls Enwrapped

I have met you in a Magic Garden
I have reached You out in cyberspace
We have touched and yet I beg Your Pardon
I just want to Kiss Your Face

So please consider Being my Rainbow
Let All of Your brilliant Colors Shine
Because when the Storm is over
You are the Treasure that I Yearn to Find

Day 54 The State of Western Union

So today I drive a half a dozen towns down the coast so I can privately send a small amount of money to my soul mate.  With his earning power currently at 17 cents per hour, he can hardly afford a high retail granola bar let alone a hair cut. Even the e-mails we get to send add up at a nickle a piece.  Imagine working an hour in a 100 degree kitchen scrubbing giant burnt on pans for what amounts to the privilege of sending 3 emails.  It is a long way from Wall Street baby....To add insult to injury he hasn't been able to work for almost 2 weeks because a cart hit him in the shin and as it bled profusely through his pants and all over the floor he was told he could not be spared to go get it looked after.  Later that day he was still not given permission to seek medical help and given a couple of band aids. The next morning he could barely walk on it.  It was hot, swollen and had greenish pus oozing from it. Later his "boss" allowed him to go where ever it is they go for medical attention.  The wound was examined and he was removed from work duty as they were afraid he may have come in contact with a staff infection - they sent a culture out just in case it was the deadly resistant, non treatable sort that is often cause for immediate amputation of the affected limb.
All this for 17 cents an hour.
So we wait for the lab test to come back.
Anyway, back to my trip to Western Union.  I live in a teeny town where everyone knows everyone. So, I am thinking that if I go to the local Safeway and have Mr. Oh So Helpful Customer Service Manager handle my Western Union transfer - it will  only take seconds for the entire town to know that I sent $$$ to the Federal Bureau of Prisons and to a certain someone that has a number following their name.  Thus, a  journey an hour down the road to a store I have never been in and a town I rarely frequent.  Nonetheless, it is still obvious that I am sending funds to a prisoner and it is also obvious that I am new to all this.  it is obvious because there is a certain code that I am missing.  The girl helping me is a big, heavyset blond, make up brightly applied, nails long and fashioned into curved talons. She calls me away from the help desk area where others are waiting their turn to a more discrete corner of the long counter.  With her voice lowered she looks at me knowingly and says, "honey, you need this special code to do this...I looked it up for you so you can just plug it in the next time."  I know I have nothing to be embarrassed of but my face turns cranberry red and I look around nervously to see if anyone has heard or if there is anyone there that I recognize.  I stammer something about helping a family friend and she says, " anyone can make a mistake."  I have a feeling she may have sent a few of these herself.
Still, I leave feeling sick to my stomach, though grateful he can buy a few little things at commissary and make a few more phone calls.

38 Days .....Justice for Some

Latest thing: E-mail......well sorta...He is now able to send e-mails to me for a nickle a letter.  They go through a special website that I can sign on to. I write him.  Someone reads it for acceptable content and then eventually he receives it.  Sometimes, it seems to have a lag time of an hour other times it comes in up to a day later.  I have noticed that if I ask him to call me at a certain time when I know I will be home - he gets the e-mail after the time I requested so he isn't able to reach me.  This has happened EVERY SINGLE TIME.  It really is like trying to communicate with the dead.

In the last email I got from him he had just found out that the person who had introduced him to the crooked attorney that landed him in this place to begin with; the man that was the mastermind behind the scheme had just received his sentence for concocting the mess.  Well, if you can call probation a sentence. That's right. Scam people out of hundreds of millions of dollars and get probation.  Run 45 minute meeting and give a report that your attorney asks you to give and get 4 years.    He is now seething with the injustice of it all. 

We tend to think it could never happen to us.........it does.

Day 33 Heaven or Hell

July 4th weekend.  My biggest decision is which beach bonfire and BBQ to go to. We are still incommunicado - apparently the phone minutes don't commence again until around the 7th.  In a way it is like he is kind of fading away - perhaps its because I didn't realize how the calls with all the shouting and clanking in the background were constant and painful reminders of where he is.  Without them, I write my daily letter to him and go on with my day, my life, my world of color and light and fresh air.
Selfish??  I don't think so.  I think of a message I heard from a Toltec teacher last week that said,

" In reality, no one can make us happy.  No one can make us unhappy.  You are the only one that can give you heaven.  You are the only one that can give you hell."

It is true.  I did not give him this hell.  I do not need to live in hell as a result of his choice.  I can still love him and choose heaven they are not mutually exclusive.  He can choose heaven too - now or when ever he decides he is finished punishing himself.  I have chosen to no longer be punished by his decisions.  I feel the day brighten even though the sky is a mass of clouds.

Day 30

We have both survived the 1st month I leave you with an excerpt from his Gray Planet Chronicles:

The curious thing is that many of the passengers of the Gray Planet have all been transported several times...they are doing the Netherworld Tour just like Dante.  Some have moved from camp to camp without any rhyme or reason...while others were deliberately punished for some excessive demand, like requesting better food.  That is what I heard about several from the White Collar Planet mates who had previously organized a food boycott and were punished by being sent here...where it is worse.  So be careful what you wish for in this place...

Pardon me as my thoughts cascade out. This is truly a shock akin to you breaking the triangle of the billiard balls.  My thoughts are those balls scurrying to find a place on this gray felt and. In a reverse fashion to the game, not fall into the holes.

I am currently on the 5th floor.  Supposedly the best floor with the Cadre inmates who have different (green) two piece outfits as opposed to the jumpsuits (khaki).  The room is still a steel and concrete 2 story cocoon with 32 two man cells on the bottom floor connected by three 16 step gray steel staircases with mesh grating between the steps.  One set of stairs at the west side ( I assume due to my window facing north) and the other two mostly on the east.  The mid east staircase faces west and is next to the shower stalls on the 2nd floor which also contains 32 two man cells.  So 64 is the number and as the Aztecs and the Babylonian believed it is the perfect number...It is the perfect number parenthetically, it also crops up in vector based mathematics...of which I will write profusely later because it is my inspiration for the vector...or the living vector philosophy on mythology which I intend to develop on the Gray Planet.  Living vector...LIVE

As for living here...well the air conditioner is broken.  It figures that it will break on the hottest day and at the beginning of summer.  Normally, it is so cold...especially in winter that you need several sets of blankets and sometimes a double set of clothing to ward off the chill.  Excessive on both fronts.  At present, it is fetid and there is one 4 ft diameter fan moving air through the gray sub interior.

That interior is approximately 50' wide and 150' long supported by 10 four foot diameter round concrete pillars approximately 20 feet apart.   The space is an atrium type with the center about 30' wide and about 130' long.  There is a concrete ceiling with what must be steel end beams - 10 of them running perpendicular to the length of the floor.  In each section between each set of concrete pillars 10 of those running in the center and suspended by very thin steel u shaped bands is a 4' radius steel tube reminiscent of the large colon canal of a giant appendix, because it is capped at one end and it curves into the rest of the building on the other end above the entrance to the gray capsule...it truly looks alimentary... but it is the air duct for the fallen A/C...appendix has burst...no air. The asylum... The rest I leave to your imagination. The most amazing things are the planet farm is run by the farm animals... The farmer is absent... And it’s great to get to know the menagerie. The first insight into the modus vivendi of the farm comes from “otter” call him industrious Otter works in the food provision area on the fifth floor and took the liberty to explain that you in some farms other industrious organisms have modern communication devices and run business us within the farm that pay their mortgages and their families lifestyles outside. The farm is an industry that apparently has stores and consumers on a grand scale. It is run with the farmer carefully and purposefully oblivious as long as the farm does not go up in smoke.

Is game night for the NBA playoffs Lakers versus the Celtics... big game, big deal... there is a buzz within the compound... however the recall at 10 PM which is the obligatory returned to the cells comes at an inconvenient time in the game... it is fourth-quarter the score is tight and the black bros contingent is furious that they have to go in. Bad karma... the new C.0 is an Italian woman was wrestling with control of the situation and doing badly... loud taunts ensue... commotion, threatens and finally a shake down of the main and loudest protagonists on the second floor.

There are searches of the cell that were to remove any and all disallowed items... of course the list is long  -  so the shake down is painful so that struggle for control is won yet again by the CO and the loudmouth is finally quiet slightly after midnight.  Needless to say, I am exhausted since wake up is at 6 AM if you want bananas for breakfast. Bananas are the most coveted item on the breakfast menu. Truly the simple life... so this is the next morning and am on I am a trifle exhausted and will take a bit of a break before chronicling again...

Day 28 Monday Peace

We have run out of phone minutes and I feel slightly guilty because it is kind of a relief.  I don't feel compelled to stay home and to wait for a call that always begins with, "You have a prepaid phone call.  You will not be charged for this call.  This call is from an inmate at a Federal Penitentiary..."then somewhere in the background I hear him call out his name and I push #5 to allow the call to come through.  Now I have a reprieve for 4 days.  I can pretend this is not happening to him, to his kids and to me.

I feel selfish.  I want to enjoy the sun shining on my face without thinking of him straining to see it through a metal grate in a 40x40 exercise pen. I want to go to sleep on my king sized pillow top mattress with my down pillows and organic cotton sheets without remembering he has a lumpy 3" blue striped foam mattress filled with the grief of all its past inhabitants. 

I want to scream at him for being so stupid, so delusional and so desperate that he trusted the man, his former big shot attorney that got him into this mess to begin with.

Mostly I just want a little peace.  I will get it for the next four days until the new month starts and the frantic, rushed phone calls start up again.

Day 27 The Sabbath

Sunday - a day to pray.  I will go and join my small congregation that welcomes all in the spirit of non-denomination, sexual preferences and the like.  There will be more trays of food heaped up in the great room then there will be attendees.  My kind of place! We will pray, meditate, sing and be grateful for all God has bestowed upon us. In all it will be a time to honor ourselves and others and find the light and joy that resides in all of us.  His service will be quite different....

In contrast, he will likely attend and sing at the Sunday service at Club Fed.  An excerpt from his Gray Planet Chronicles detailing his first day at church follows:

 I get my first gig on this planet through "Boston Brad."  I am singing in the choir for the Sunday service. At first, I was looked at with suspicion by Rev. Bird who is a devout black minister with eyes that follow your every emotion and question, " Have you got Christ in your heart?"  He looked me over, his gray sculpted beard with glasses perched at the tip of his nose and eyes looking up and over with furled brows because he didn’t want to raise his head, only his gaze because he was contemplating Christ’s light on the fan wall that barely reflected the rays of the sun.  "Everyone has Christ in their souls" I offered naively.  That raised his approval and got me a  hummph... "Well that ain’t necessarily so," he said. " The Devils in some folk and I don’t want nothing to do with the devil."

Rather try then intercede I said," I had accepted Christ and would like to sing with them." With an uncertain and dubious look Rev. Bird said, "We will see - the heart will tell it all."  Here it was 11:45 and the chaplain came up to gather  us up on the fifth floor, to take us to the chapel on the third floor.  To get out, you have to go through padlocked 2 inch thick steel and glass door which has a glass wall next to it and a  wide gray steel top bottom and middle. Then you have to go down the Gray Hall that connects (our side) with the East side; go through another gray steel glass cage door into the elevator area which has 4 steel elevators that look like they belong in an industrial slaughter house. The floor looks like something you would hose down after some messy animal leaves its entrails on the steel floor. The floor has these diamonds one inch patterned raised grooves could almost be fleur de lis but really are flowers of evil intent because they look like they could have been flesh eaters. 

We trudge in to the chapel ,Boston Brad, Red Bird, Trevor, and another late 40s black dude. At the last minute a black guard with a gray metal and plastic heavy cart comes in with two bags of melting ice. He says, " brutal they have no fans or air conditioning on the fourth floor."  He is right. It is about 85̊ and not a ripple of air anywhere... the air itself is gray... dead gray. We proceed to the chapel which is a gray linoleum floored 30 x 30 room with the PML and the far right corner an electric piano.  In the center right is  a single three-foot fan. The blue chairs with arms and gray  plastic chairs are stacked against the left wall and there are the obligatory one foot-wide floor-to-ceiling jailhouse windows that have 3 inch thick glass separating the unholy congregation from the outside We saunter in, unstacked some of the blue chairs grab the hymnals and then the cockfights began... it seems that Rev. Bird and Duke  sort of lock horns over the program. He believes that he is the pre-Madonna by the Rev. His older more puissant and knows what he wants... and by God’s Spirit... he’s going to get it.

We start off with, Go Tell it on the Mountain. I have never sung it so I’m humming along and then I start improvising and punching it up and that gets the Rev.’s ears pricked. He likes it so... I got the spirit of the Lord in me... well... why don’t I start with the first verse... those days with John Massey at St. Mary’s in with Rev. Harris sure came in handy. But you guessed it, Dukes nose is out of joint... he’s been one upped, so he tells me... "You don’t have to strain yourself..." I’m thinking I’m not straining the keys to low for me so I’ll just sing the third harmony well the Rev. Loves that. Go figure. So we are all smiles.  Boston Brad then inquires about the next song in our repertoire.  That starts another cock fight.   Finally, it is settled and we sing Coming Home . While I spice it up with another one of my hallelujah - Aretha thing and it’s a dazzler! And so we go to the last song in which it says that the Lord shall take your burden and then  we are done. Smiles for all and we in the in gratitude and all hold hands as a  young church helper another cadre  profusely thanks the Lord for the new additions. We all clasp our hands and then individually shake for good measure the Rev. Is all smiles now... I got the Lord a my soul and he knows it... he really knows it.