A Brief History of Time (Served)

“The only short day is yesterday.”
– ancient American prison proverb

In the beginning, the news cycle is inundated with talking head scuttlebutt about a sinister sourpuss called Saddam who definitely has some WMDs and maybe even dirty bombs squirrelled away in a sand dune overseas. My fellow Americans, Dubya says, while looking us point blank in the TV, a mustache that villainous can only be hiding one thing: a clear and present grimace of evil. And as everyone knows, presidents Do Not Lie – it probably says so in the Constitution. In no uncertain terms (okay, a term or two might be a wee ticklish) is this Saddam character hankering for a smackdown, because… well, Freedom, I guess. And besides – ‘Murrica, fuck yeah. 

Coming to a theater near you, 2003 in the year of our Lord is hailed by critics as the highly anticipated sequel to the smash hit 2002. From the opening credits it feels, if not downright predictable, at least as sensible as Rosie O’Donnell’s loafers. Eminem is all over the radio, shouting about your one shot to “Lose Yourself,” and the space shuttle Columbia sputters into white-knuckled orbit for the final time. Peter Jackson busts blocks the world over with three butt-numbingly longwinded Lord of the Rings films, and all is well in the Shire.

And so, Oh Three would ride in, all jacked up on patriotic Mountain Dew still fizzy from 9/11 and gripping a technological chubby the size of Napster. Cue an epoch of digitized social innovations nearly Cambrian in its speciation, one largely propelled by the universal human need to obsess over our exes without compunction. We are agog at the robust capabilities of 3G, starry-brained in anticipation of the next pixelly distraction.

But black swans do occur, those unfortuitous, anomalous twists not even Peter Jackson could shoehorn into a marketable script. A couple in particular stand out as memorable, at least to me. One, the only dirty bombs Saddam had stashed under a sand dune turned out to be the ones in the bucket he was using while cowering in a spidey-hole. And two, by January 10^th, I was facing a life sentence.

Ladies and gents of the jury, what we have here is known in judicial parlance as a real bonnaroo. A picaresque hoot if ever there was, and folks, this’n here is up for grabs. Depends which of these two teams of crackerjack – albeit a bit prolix – counselors you take a shine to more, I reckon. Here here, folks, quicker we get to tallyin’ yays, shorter we gone have to stay. Heh, well, most of us anyway. Jesus, Mary and Jurisprudence, will you look at the time. The season fee-nally of that C-S-I comes on here in two shakes. And Lord knows it stands to be a nail biter. That much, by gum, is beyond a reasonable doubt.

Twenty two years: what the judge broke me off after twelve of someone else’s peers decided that the myriad sinister possibilities implied by the several murky versions of events two bush-league prosecutors elicited from various hearsay sources merited one pound of flesh. 

Of those twenty two years, I would serve – with “good time,” earned by not having too good a time – eighteen years, nine months and two days. 

As I begin writing, I have fewer than one hundred days left. I am, in our parlance, a double-digit midget, shorter than a skeeter’s peter. My recollections of the beginning feel distorted, dreamlike – the effects of institutional lensing, a time-skewing phenomenon caused by looking back upon seven thousand nearly identical days. Clear as freeworld glass though, is how mistaken I was then about how events would play out over the years. My 2003 self could no easier have predicted my life as it is today than yours could have foreseen the iPhone or the Apprentice guy becoming our orangest president ever.

At our capture, my then-girlfriend (and later co-defendant) was pregnant, unbeknown to at least one of us. Being actively hunted for months by an aggressive multi-jurisdictional task force, relying on each other day and night for safety and sometimes your very survival, sutures you one to the other, splices your instinctual selves. Bonds forged in the crucible of great peril are, under certain light, indistinguishable from love. Act as if this girl is the hill you’ll die on enough times, and you’ll come to believe it in some primal way. Love, at its core, is the opposite of self-preservation. 

Lucas would be born eight months and six days later, two months before The Trial. For two weeks his mother and I sat side by side at the defendants’ table, our futures once again commingled like drawn blood. After the verdict was read, my vision darkled at the edges, a vignette of dissonance, reality overwriting disbelief. She stood a few feet and a billion miles away, stoic but for the tears sliding down her cheeks. Hopes of motherhood, faith in justice, love – all these drained from her face at the pronouncement of the two ugliest, brutish syllables in the English language: Guilty. My careworn heart recognized the finality of the moment. I would never see her again.

I thought of my oldest son, twelve-years-old and now essentially fatherless into his thirties, long after he would ever need me. Back in the cell, I cried myself, sobbed like I had not since childhood, the anguish over failing him unbearable. My only solace was that he at least had one parent, a wonderful mother who I knew would rise to the tragedy.

But I had also inadvertently changed the world, bringing a life into it with no way to fend for that life. And now I feared, more than for my own future, what would befall this tiny innocent, this perfect being. Would his fate be seized by that of his parents? I imagined endless variations of the torment likely to befall him, alone in a world of facilities – of homes, not a home.

*      *      *

“Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.”
– Gregory David Roberts, “Shantaram”

Atonement you may seek here, say the outer walls in greeting, but despair is what you shall find. Of god nor devil no one has convinced you, nor of hell will they ever need to. Avert your mind from what lies beyond these towering horizons, this brutal architecture, your hopes and view amputated alike. This is Walla Walla, boy, Shawshank without redemption.

The Concrete Maiden will be your wife, life, and country for all futures foreseeable. Any freedom dreams you do entertain are fanciful, wishful rewrites of a regretted past, a reflexive ploy to fool yourself into feeling less alone and bleak, even if only for a moment. To try envisioning any life decades in the waiting is to court madness. 

You accustom yourself to extreme violence occurring often without visible provocation. Your second week in 6-Wing a prisoner gets clipped while standing beside you in a crowded sally port, one of the cell-sized airlocks regulating traffic into and out of the unit. Packed in, a dozen others do-si-do to make a hole, visibly Minding Their Own. The target is out before he hits the floor and the missile proceeds to stomping his head, his face. Finishing as abruptly as he began, he excuses himself as he squeezes past to be first out of the egress slider. You learn that in here, manners correlate strongly with the probability of consequences. Close custody prison is the most polite environment in the world.

You recognize environmental determinism for what it is, you see it all around you and vow to never relinquish your last freedom – the ability to divorce stimulus from response. To act, not react, and above all to not be acted upon – this will be your mantra. You will not allow this place, its social paradigm, to remake you in its image. Being here is mandatory, being of here is optional.

*      *      *

Mikey comes into county a few months after I do, booked for breaking 51 car windows in a prowling spree orchestrated by an older friend. His first time in adult jail, he decides to run with the white boys, which in his tank means whatever Big Ben says it means. Ben is a kraken among mere mortals, changing more lives than the chaplain. He once famously shattered the jaw, nose, and both elbows of another prisoner for farting at the breakfast table. 

Big Ben is on his way back to prison for sending two Californian outlaw bikers to Washington ICU beds. They had urinated on his motorcycle, which was parked outside a local tavern, simply because it was a Yamaha. Ben was inside, quietly enjoying his first beer after a three-year bid. The pair of bikers sauntered into the tavern, met Big Ben, and were airlifted out. Two more lives profoundly altered.

In Mikey’s dewy 18-year-old eyes, Ben is as cool as the other side of the pillow. The judge gives Mikey a year in county: one week for each window, plus one to think about what he’d done. Big Ben gives him a chance to prove himself.

In the hole over another dustup with the Mexicans, Big Ben decides the white boys are going to flood their cells, all twelve of them on the upper tier. Mikey was down to fight alongside Ben, now he learns the ad-seg rebellion drill: stuff sheets into the crack beneath the cell door, up each side. Cram a towel into the toilet and flush continuously. When the tidewaters reach around three feet in the dozen cells, Ben gives the order.

The tsunami of toilet water unleashed from eleven cells storms through the small jail, cascading down the stairwells into the basement, flooding the county sheriff’s precinct. 

Deputies slosh their way upstairs and into the segregation tank, only to find eleven cells with wet floors, in each a prisoner standing blank faced as if with no idea what happened. The twelfth is still full of the water in which Mikey is practicing his backstroke. 

Because of the more than $70,000 in damages to computers, equipment, and the building, the sheriff charges Mikey with felony malicious mischief. The judge gives him four years in prison, to be served consecutive to his first year.

Upon arriving at 6-Wing in Walla Walla he is told by the Aryan Family that he needs to “put in work” to get covered up the stick-and-poke tattoo on his skinny bicep that reads “Crip.” Born and raised in Mount Vernon, Washington, Mikey has never even seen a real Crip, but had figured a Crippish tattoo might impress the dark-eyed trailer park girls who like bad boys. He is the missile to be sent, along with an older prisoner called George, after a recent arrival beginning a life bid for child porn. 

Mikey and George rush the sex offender’s cell one December morning as the doors are racked after mainline. Mikey subdues the middle-aged prisoner with a few semi-effectual punches to the face. George picks up the man’s wooden cane and wields it like a lumberjack splitting firewood. Blood spatter darkens the walls, ceiling and floor of the cell, spraying off the curved hardwood handle out onto the tier. 

Shortly after George and Mikey flee the tier, the sex offender finishes his life sentence where he lay in his cell. Cause of death is listed as massive head trauma. 

At trial, George testifies against Mikey in exchange for a twelve-year deal, which he will serve in PC. Mikey holds his mud like he’s supposed to, never saying a word about being sent on a mission or otherwise. This judge gives him 26 years, to be run consecutive to all other sentences.

I last saw Mikey a handful of years ago when he arrived at Monroe. At 30, he was still slow-blinking and eager to fit in, his crappy Crip tattoo replaced by several crappy AF tattoos. He still had about 17 years left. We walked the track together once, for old time’s sake.

“Fifty one windows, Mikey. Goddammit.”

He shrugged. “It is what it is.”

“That may be. But it sure as hell ain’t what it was.”

*      *      *

“The hourglass pokes at the ribs of my cage.”
– The Mars Volta, “Soothsayer”

At some point you dream, when you do, only of the prison multiverse. Tonight you’re doing time in Mall Prison, where trays of scrumptious looking – and thus alien – meals reside securely behind Lexan. Other nights you burst awake, sweat-soaked, your heart racing after having flung yourself from Sky Prison, where some highwires lead to the big yard, others only to yawning expanses.

When rarely you dream of the outer world, some predicate fact is unkiltered – you were released by mistake and they’re coming, you escaped accidentally and they’re coming, someone planted contraband beside you. Oh yeah, and they’re definitely coming.

You learn to sleep less, and wake more easily. Even your reptilian neurons are leached of freeworld considerations, making you wonder if your unconscious mind is institutionalized. You untrack the day, the week, the month, or age unfolding beyond the guntowers, letting time slip from your grasp, largely ignored.

You make it through four years in Walla Walla, thriving somehow in this fallow field. You’re pinballed about the state from prison to prison, finally making it to camp near your family, only to get hooked up over a riot you sat out. After a few months in IMU, they send you across the state and backwards in custody, to medium at Walla Walla.

You earn camp status again nearly a year later, only to be kept in Walla Walla, returned to the Penitentiary. They have rebranded WSP as a “camp” but no one is fooled by the new signs: a hundred and forty years of hate-fueled inertia is not diverted by semantics. These breezeways are paved in a hundred thousand life-changing mistakes, mortared with misery. The Mother of Sorrows is as durable in spirit as the brick in her blunt geometry. A squatty reliquary beneath the inland sun, her stone veils hiding indelible stains.

*      *      *

My second day back I venture out to yard – 16 years nearly to the day since I last walked this track. The three units remaining operational are segregated one from the other due to COVID-19 and so, because I’ve hit the last afternoon gate this wintry afternoon, there are only six prisoners on the Walla Walla big yard. 

In the day there were never fewer than a hundred men out here, usually closer to three hundred. In close custody you rarely miss a yard.

Guntowers stand glowering like sentries at each corner of the walled-in big yard. Vacant now, they’ve been mothballed like so much else here. No need for armed guards patrolling the walls of a “camp.” 

For over a century we ate under the gun. In the yard, several pairs of guards continuously walked the track, the sidewalk along the foot of the wall. Atop the wall guards with AR-15s slung from their shoulders watched over their cohort walking below. Tower guards waited on balconies, rifles in hand, itching to fire a warning shot into the chest of anyone fighting a little too well.

Today, two sleepy guards sit near the yard entrance, their chairs tipped back. Once, the gauntlet began right there, a line of guards pat searching every prisoner entering or leaving the yard, turning away anyone whose fingernails were deemed too long and thus potentially lethal. No more annoying way to go out, I guess, than getting scratched to death on the big yard.

Phones still line the western wall, 38 of them spaced six-feet apart. Once those phones were segregated like every other physical feature of our environment, a racially exclusive line for each, and rarely one open. Today, I am the only prisoner strolling along the western sidewalk, past the chorus line of receivers, most dangling broken and useless from inoperable phones, not one being used.

While practicing remedial weapon drills about 17 years ago, a guard called Wooton dropped the loaded magazine from his AR-15 off the wraparound balcony of the southeast guntower; the one directly across the yard from where I stand today, remembering what happened next. He got the attention of one of the prisoners playing bocce in the tower’s shadow and let down the key bucket on a 40-foot rope, the device used to hand off keys at shift change. 

“Hey there,” he called down. “I need you to put that in the bucket.” 

Maybe because such a statement technically constitutes a directive – which we are to obey under penalty of infraction – or possibly because he was just willing to help out a guard in a pickle, the prisoner retrieved a loaded magazine laying in the big yard and placed it in the key bucket.

A month or so later, during another crowded afternoon yard period, Wooton dropped his magazine again onto the same patch of grass. This time the magazine was installed in his assault rifle. All four men playing bocce turned toward the signature clatter of a gun hitting the ground and froze. The loaded AR-15 lay on the grass, not 20-feet away.

“Uh, guys,” Wooton stage whispered to the prisoners below, quickly lowering the key bucket, “I’m going to need one of you to place that, uh, item, in the bucket.” 

Four shoddily tattooed wax figures shifted their gazes from the rifle to the tower guard above, back to the rifle.

“Please?” he implored.

Crickets.

“Come on, guys,” he stage whispered, “I’ll make it worth your while.”

Laying there in the autumn sun, the rifle glowed, radioactive. All four prisoners envisioned, I’m sure, the other three guntowers triangulating on whoever might be daft enough to pick up a loaded weapon on the Walla Walla big yard. Each likely imagined being ballistically hollowed out by State-issued rounds fired by enthusiastic sharpshooters. 

Four heads swiveled side to side a few slow degrees, as each convict took one exaggerated step backward. Then another. And another, before turning and walking briskly toward the farthest corner of the yard.

Finally, Wooton had no choice but to radio in the Broken Arrow situation. The fight siren was sounded, and prisoners were directed in two languages to ‘Get Down, Stay Down’. All available weapons were meanwhile trained on the yard quadrant where the rifle lay beneath the disarmed guard, frantic in his embarrassment and still unable to leave the tower.

Until he retired a decade later, Wooton was relegated to patrolling the laundry and maintenance shops. I worked in laundry, running the dryers. Wooton was as far from being the worst guard in the penitentiary as he was from being smartest. You could do much worse than having your area searched by him.

At least twice a week, during his walk through the shop, someone would call out, “Hey, Wooton!” 

And every time he would stop, look around. “Huh? What?”

“You dropped something!”

*      *      *

“It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.”
– Cecil B. DeMille, “The Ten Commandments”

Fewer guards walk the tiers and breezeways now, but their collective mindset remains as constipated as it was in close custody. The execution chamber and adjoining two-cell block of death cells, though mothballed, stand atop 6-Wing, jutting above the southern wall of the yard same as ever, reminding you where the hell you are. Cast in masonry and displayed on high, this structure stands as the ultimate artifact of institutionalized cruelty at once inhuman and uniquely human. 

The Court had the forward vision to strip this State of its power over life and death, but the State, ever myopic in its pursuits, refuses to so much as dismantle the Chamber. The gallows and injection table remain intact inside, the artificial owl on a pole outside to discourage birds from properly adorning the temple of State-issued retribution.

You in turn remind yourself that this superstructure now means no more than the state park restroom outbuilding it resembles, and you will only glimpse it a few dozen more times. 

Given the camp designation of the facility now, prisoners here may have no more than four years left, but the politics of Wally World reign eternal. API/Native, Hispanic, and White prisoners still carefully vet their own for certain charges and behaviors (sex offenders, rats, homosexuals and the like are verboten). Cells, yard tables, and even showerheads remain segregated and jealously defended. 

A subtle distinction: now most undesirables are given the option of “checking in” to PC before getting clipped. You welcome the tradeoff of increased internecine drama for the slight reduction in violence.

*      *      *

One morning a few weeks after my return to WSP, unit staff send me to the education building. For photos, they say. “What for?”, one might ask. (This one does anyway, albeit silently.) A case study on the visible long-term effects of Salisbury steak? The yearbook, maybe?

This photo, I would find out, is for my WA state ID, to be placed in my central file until I release. A monumental milestone, one that for decades I’ve watched others reach as they neared the gate. Always some other guy, usually one who, after serving a 24-month bid, doesn’t appreciate it because he cannot – not truly, anyway. My first non-prison ID in over 20 years will include two authenticating features: a hologram and a smile.

Getting to education from where I am in 8-Wing requires passing through the old quad gate (the rolldown steel curtain separating the two halves of the penitentiary for decades, now permanently open), negotiating the checkpoint at movement control, walking behind the old death row and around medical, through circulation control, up the education stairway, and down a hallway. 

Seventeen years ago, such a journey involved having your ID scrutinized by guards at each checkpoint who would ask where you were headed and then stare at you as if you were lying and it was up to them and them alone to break you. Then they would painstakingly verify your answer against their callout sheet, which may or may not reflect the callout sheet back in the unit, before clearing you for cross-quad travel. Only at this point would the solid steel doors at each control sally port slowly cycle open, never more than one at a time. To dawdle in leaving the cell was to not make it in the five-minute movement period.

You were to never pass through a gate before the slider opened all the way, nor touch one under penalty of a major infraction for tampering with a locking device. What we call a ‘holeable offense’, meaning you’re getting hooked up. Grab the door all you want in the bucket, son.

After standing in front of the main gate at movement control for four or five minutes, I begin to steal occasional glances at the mirrored control booth, never too blatantly, nor foolishly attempting to peer in. Finally, a guard saunters up to the other side of the slider.

“What are you doing?” he asks, his tone oddly nonthreatening even through the steel door. I wonder whether he is baiting me, good-copping me into admitting I am out of bounds.

“Officer ____ directed me to ED 201 for photos.”

“No, I mean, why you just standing out there?” he says, grabbing the handle on his side and leaning into it, trundling the heavy steel door along its track. “You gotta open ‘em yourself. Just do me a favor, make sure you shut ‘em all the way behind ya. It’s freezing out there.”

I explain that I’ve been programmed to never touch one of those doors. 

He laughs. “Welcome to camp.”

At circulation control, the next checkpoint, I summon the huevos to approach the unhallowed control booth and peek between my cupped hands through the two-way plexiglass, an act that would in years past also get you hooked up pronto. Inside, a squad of mop buckets is posted along the floor, coiled extension cords manning the control panel, a phalanx of push brooms defending one corner.

Walking the deserted breezeways in the heart of Concrete Mama, manually controlling my own ingress and egress through sally ports and checkpoints while passing abandoned guard booths, I’m locked in a prison movie set after filming has wrapped. Not unlike many versions of my prison multiverse dreams, except I can’t quite wake myself up. Not yet.

*      *      *

“The future ain’t what it used to be.”
– Yogi Berra

You notice how returning to your spawning grounds, so to speak, serves to contrast who you are now with who you were then.

Upon arrival in 2003, you are a dogged addict, your best virtue being that you don’t try to pretend otherwise. Your weakness surpassed only by your stubborn fear of facing this blighted reality with no reprieving substances, you rechain yourself again and again to the very anchor pulling you under all these years.

You spend three and a half more years likewise, wandering the escapist’s fog of intoxicants.

It occurs to you in a ragged heartbeat one morning, after seven speed-soaked days and nights, your last-ditch epiphany. You stare unscreaming at the remnants in the mirror, the lightless eyes stripped of every dream, near unrecognizable but for the dull cast of loathing. You beg your soul, hiding crumpled and small: What torment, if not this sea of time and loss, can possibly exile from me this King Without Land? To its dark decrees alone have you remained loyal through years of weariness and sorrow, its will your constant undoing. Your flawed heart shrieks, craving an end to circular pain. To go on communing with the wrong fate is to grant death a lifetime in its toil. 

Never again, you vow. Your first promise ever that would remain unbroken.

Determined to become the person you had stopped believing you could ever be, you change first your habits, your actions. In the resultant still you gaze inward, a deep field image of sorrow constellations, galactic regret. There are truths about yourself so unsightly that only in the enveloping gloom of loneliness can you bear to face them. 

On July 4^th, 2021, you quietly celebrate the 15^th anniversary of that morning: your Declaration of Chemical Independence. The view behind you is as clear as mountain air. Your ascending path, at times forged inch by moment and tooth by nail – though pronounced from this vantage – is inevitable only in hindsight.

Over the years, you dethrone impulses, cultivating instead principles, a framework of integrity from which you can relate honestly, authentically – first to yourself, then to others. You focus your tiny sphere of influence solely on yourself, privately working toward a purposeful life. One day, others begin to take notice.

*      *      *

Steve Bartholomew