Jordan's Huguenots, and Other Narrative Fallacies
January 2014
Dear Ant,
Wow, what a month! I received your letter a week before we saw each other in the hallway. That was wild, by the by, passing you when I was going to chow. You look good, man. A little bit thinner—in the face and the hairline.
So, I guess we’re going to have to do this by letter since SOMEONE got himself locked up for a dirty urine before he could make it to Orientation. It took—what?—three days for you to get jammed. Personal record? God, I love you, man.
As soon as I heard, I sent you some tobacco and snacks through the block runner. He’s still here, so let me know if that fleabag didn’t give it to you. I’ll give him some whatfor.
Anyhoodiddlydoodly. Your letter made mention of a lady friend. Do tell me more. I’ve got news in that department, as well. I got married in 2010 to a wonderful woman named Lily. We were put in touch through a friend, and things developed through letters, and the rest is lovely history.
Thanks for your comments on “Albert & Me.” I incorporated some of the changes you suggested. You’ve always been quite the wordsmith.
All for now. Reach out whenever. Another piece enclosed.
—Adam
One evening about a month ago, as I sat reading in the bustling recreation area of Comstock’s honor block, my friend Jordan tottered over and took the wooden, auditorium-style seat next to mine. He'd just come from the library, and along with an ever-present marble comp book, he had a walnut cracker titled 20 Master Plots. When I made mention of it, Jordan said that he'd renewed the book so as to finish copying out notes.
"You know," I said, "you don’t need that.” Jordan just looked at me, serene.
"Normally, I wouldn't say something like this, but there are these tropes of writers' workshop participants." I proceeded to tell him about writers who, for numerous reasons, don't produce finished work. There's the guy who's working on the never- ending manuscript, the last chapter of which is perpetually over the horizon, so he'll never have to deal with critique; the woman who starts pieces then abandons them; the gentleman who's jazzed by the heady creative process of conjuring up stories, but his execution consists of giving the piece a title: he has a collection of titles.
"Jordan, you're a talented writer who's getting better with each piece. And, if l may be so bold, your time is better spent writing those pieces rather than reading How To. I haven't offended you, have I?''
"No," he said, "I was just remembering when I asked you what it was like being on the other side of me."
After reading Carnegie or Covey, Jordan had learned the self-improving value of knowing the answer to that question. As a general rule, I am charitable in my estimation of people, especially friends, and would normally sandwich a critique in betwixt positive comments, just as is done in writers' workshops. But such a formulation felt incompatible with that moment, with him seeming to ask for brutal honesty, so I told him he could be a tad depressing at times, how he often leads with something unfortunate that has happened to him or someone else, and his affect is gloomy. Then I stressed how he's a genuinely good person, smart, brimming with compassion, a good heart through and through, which is a rarity in here.
"Yeah," I said, "looking back, I feel bad for not leading with your positive characteristics, especially since I criticized you for leading with the negative."
"No, no, that's fine. I made a list of the times I started a conversation on a positive or negative note, and you're right. And I'm more conscious of that now. But what I was actually thinking about was a slight twist on that question: What is it like to be on the other side of a writer who doesn't write?"
"Ah l know what—that'd make for a nice essay. You should write it."
"No," he said immediately, "you should."
A smile took hold of his face, and as it spread to his ears and reddened his cheeks, I knew that I'd be writing it, and he knew it, too. But what I said was, "I don't know. I mean, can you see the irony of your not writing about your not writing?" His smile grew. I was making Jordan's point for him.
We entered into a brief Kabuki where he pretended to sell me on the project, while I coyly withheld committing to it. He brought up "Albert & Me," an essay I'd recently put to bed, whose subject was an old man known to us both, and how it managed to be serious and comic, and thus humanized Albert. But Albert didn't know I was writing about him (though I ended up giving him a large-type copy), and the piece had more of me in it than I'd planned. Having worshiped at the feet of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson has molded me into a gonzo, participatory journalist. Be that as it may, I was pleased with the outcome of that piece and, for the first time, saw in Jordan something of the plot savant, an arbiter of what works (O.K, I'm also extremely susceptible to flattery). More than that, though, his enthusiasm was rubbing off on me, and as he sort of squirmed with excitement, he appeared magical and childlike, a doppelganger of the character Dudditz from Stephen King's Dream Catcher.
I said, "This piece is going to make me sound like a dick. How can I not come off as a self-important know-it-all pointing out that his friend who's a good writer needs to write more? If you wrote it, the piece could be this ironic mindfuck: writing about not writing. If I do it, it'll just come off mean."
"Not at all, because I'm asking you to do it. You're authentic and don't have ulterior motives. You're like a big brother."
"Remind me, how old are you, Jordan?"
"Forty-two."
"You're five years older than me."
"Still," he said, "I think of you as an older brother." How does one argue around that?
What was Jordan hoping I'd accomplish? That I'd humanize him? Make sense of things and give his life narrative shape? Fair enough.
The truth is, as much as I like Jordan and want to do something nice for him, I'm in this for the practice. My memoir is having a tough time finding a home, as they say in the scribbler's racket. A small, fine publishing house rejected it, but, in a promising and uncommon gesture, one of the editors gave me notes for rewrite and said they'd be willing to take a second look. Much of what's needed is more narrative shape, a tighter through line, part of which entails threading in the characters from start to finish. After years of writing as catharsis and an attempt at figuring out my past, I've grown somewhat bored with myself (not entirely, as evidenced by the multitude of first person pronouns I manage to deploy). Fortuitously, there are many interesting characters in here.
Thus, when Jordan posed his question, I keyed in on the latter part, the writer who doesn't write. But what he really wanted to know — before I began trying to get him to write about it — was what it was like for me, the understood "you" in "What is it like to be on the other side of a writer who doesn't write?"
So I took him back seven years, to November of 2006, when I was given one of thirteen spots in Attica's Writers' Workshop. Finishing my bachelor's through the mail at the time, I was on good terms with the teachers who proctored my exams, the same teachers handling the workshop's call-out, so it was easy getting added to the list of participants. Since 2000, when I began keeping a journal in county jail, I'd been into writing, a passion that manifested itself in such unlikely venues as the reports I ghost wrote for my civilian bosses and a business ethics course, where I never met a case study I didn't spool out narrative for. I also wrote short essays that I shared with family and friends. On this road to becoming a better writer, there were several pieces of nonfiction in my rearview — breathless glorifications of drug-fueled mayhem, hyper-detailed and manic piffle — that couldn't recede into memory fast enough. There was no guide save good lit, which I devoured, and the at-best middling advice of a pair of published peers (one of whom, whose work appeared in Doing Time, Bell Gale Chevigny's anthology, suggested I use more alliteration and pointed to a poem of his that contained "babbling brook," a phrase I now realize was borrowed from Yeats or one of those blokes).
But that all changed one night in November, as I sat in a classroom with twelve of my fellow travelers and made the acquaintance of Jameson, a professor who had driven several hours to be with us that evening. An urbane, instantly likable sort, Jameson handed out comp books and pens, prompting a collective round of oohs since they were different and therefore better than the pens sold in commissary. He had us rip out a page from our books, and write, for him to read later, what kind of things we'd written to date, what we hoped to get out of the workshop, and, in general, why we write. I wrote about my creative energy, a self-exploratory bent, and desire for healing thyself; my wish to learn craft and write everything from fiction loosely based on my life to dark humor to essayistic pieces on prison to futuristic stories; then earn a master's in creative writing. My aim was to publish and make some money to pay for further education. Sweet kid.
After we had passed our pages to the front, Jameson discussed what the workshop would be. He would bring extra copies of the anthologies he used in his courses, and we'd study craft, do in-class exercises, read aloud drafts of our work, then have it respectfully critiqued by peers. The goal was to produce finished work. We were to carve out a chunk of time each day to write.
And so it went. Jameson spent some of his university stipend on used books, a smorgasbord of classics, which he arrayed on a desk and we availed ourselves of upon arrival, as if picking favorites off a buffet line. More good pens. A couple nights a month, Jameson drove hours each way for the three-hour-long workshop. Participants came and went. The first to leave was Denny, whose center-parted hairdo was encased in amber since the late eighties, when he went away. Like many writers in prison, Denny had a manuscript that he'd been lugging around for years, pages of action and adventure discolored and oily from the multiple readings of men whose feedback was not much more detailed than "it's good." Jameson had read the first chapter and gave Denny notes for rewrite, and that was the last we saw of him — I got word through a mutual friend that Denny thought Jameson was a no-talent hack. Who knows what the Fates have brought this schmuck, but I can imagine him today, seven years out, his manuscript dirtier from more readings, still talking about a professor who didn't know talent when he saw it.
Aside from Denny, there were men who couldn't handle the creative load and quietly stopped showing up. New participants came in, some with attitudes and behavior incompatible with our little sanctuary, and Jameson was forced to drop them from the rolls (or, when called for, one of us would, unofficially, make sure they knew not to return). The time spent in that classroom was a surreal vacation from the vulgar brutality of Attica. We shared those parts of ourselves normally shielded behind a stoic mask and came to think of each other as family, Jameson especially, and he us. There was my close friend, Whit, with his social psychology knowledge base; Bob, the creator of surrealist fiction; Ol’ Nick, whose work often seemed derivative or plagiarized; Chris, my Huck Finn-looking brother with a brain tumor, who stopped showing up, and whom we all thought was dead, until I ran into him in Comstock, his cancer in remission; Angry Pete who smelled metallic, sweated profusely, and liked my work so much that he was saddened every time I incorporated foul language; Dean, he of the NPR-grade reading voice and writing that I envied; our self-proclaimed junkie poet, Chris B., with whom I traded lines from William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski.
After personally embarking on a spate of short fiction inhabited mainly by robots or golden retrievers (seriously, those dogs were my calling card), I began to deal with my past on the page, as nonfiction, and in came my life in prison. I was still failing, but failing better, and eventually Jameson asked if he could pass along one of my essays — a musing on a prisoner's perception of time — to an editor at an academic journal.
What a sweet rush of joy and accomplishment and validation I felt the night Jameson told me my piece was accepted for publication, the first in our workshop's brief history. I learned what galley proofs are, then got to proofreading. Months later, one of my essays would appear alongside those of three peers in The Minnesota Review. And I came to think that getting published wasn't that hard.
The transient nature of prison affected our workshop, and we lost some good men to bad trouble and routine transfers. But we had our core handful and new additions like Mr. and Mr. Benton, an interracial gay couple with inspirational stories galore.
Jameson taught us about reverse outlining, the technique of breaking down and reverse engineering a favorite published work or performing a postmortem on one of our own. He gave us each a brand new copy of Janet Burroway's Imaginative Writing, a damn good guide to craft, which provided such workshop maxims as show, don't tell, use concrete, significant details, write to the five senses, and seek to communicate and your
voice will follow. We learned how to create mindmaps, visual representations of our thoughts on any subject.
Jameson stressed "the work of work," the unsexy process of rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, that separates the pikers from the pros.
My mates and I learned the names of top-tier literary journals and yearned for acceptance onto their pages. I got my share of rejection letters and worse, editors who wouldn't even respond. Then, out of the blue, with Jameson's considerable help, I had a piece accepted by The Kenyon Review, another milestone in that they paid me, and quite handsomely. I came to embrace the dictum of that ruthless creator, Steve Jobs: "Real artists ship." Someone who has good ideas but lacks the discipline to form them into a finished piece of work is merely a dreamer. And my transformation was complete: the dog repeatedly rushing a fence, never stopping until he's on the other side of a project.
Before the four-year anniversary of the workshop, I was transferred to Comstock and immediately missed the camaraderie of my workshop mates and the access to Jameson, by then a friend as well as mentor, but the move was perhaps the best thing that could have happened for my writing. I was on my own and it was time to swim or sink. There was a looming deadline for submissions to an anthology of prison writing (published as Fourth City in 2014), so while I began working on a scenic picaresque of my seven days on the road between Prisons A and F, I encouraged several men to submit work of their own. When several of them wanted help, I became the close reader Jameson had been for me, and I gave them comments in my best Jameson voice, like, This might be less explicitly named as the topic, and, Perhaps this section can be economized, as you deal with it so beautifully earlier on, and so on. Several of the men stuck through the rewrite process, and I was proud when my friend BG's piece was accepted.
As others began to seek my counsel on their writing, I came to see that I was so very lucky to have encountered Jameson and received the tools he freely gave, and what I could do was pay that forward. Like a Ronin, cut loose from his master in feudal Japan, I roamed and made myself available, always on the lookout for writers, ready to lend help with that implement said to be mightier than the sword.
Distilling what I'd learned, I typed up a quick craft guide for prison writers and had friends in the law library make copies of it along with craft essays by Phillip Lopate and Joan Didion, and those great, five-hundred-word personal essays that appear on the last page of the New York Times Magazine. When appropriate, I gave this little packet to someone I encountered in the yard or overheard in the mess hall, and, as was most often the case, participants of the week-long orientation group I was paid to facilitate. It was my job to answer frequently asked questions, guide newcomers through the complicated bureaucratic morass of prison policies and procedures, and generally help them survive in these harsh environs. It earned me twenty-five cents an hour — the moral boosting, I did pro bono.
Which brings us back to Jordan. Being brand new to the state prison system, he was placed in the orientation program, and we spoke in the minutes before group started up. He was polite; well-spoken, shortish and quiet, and I was reasonably certain that this place would eat him alive. Chief among Jordan's concerns, however, was recovering all the books he couldn't bring with him when his federal prison term was terminated and he was transferred to the state. Any book we receive must be purchased directly from a vendor, so Jordan's books — most of them craft guides — sat in boxes in his parents' basement, and he felt bereft of guidance.
Sounded like a job for — bah bah bahmmm — a masterless samurai. "Hey, man," I said, "I brought you a little craft guide."
In the intervening three years, I passed Jordan in the hallway a few times, and he spoke of not being able to get his books, but I was more concerned to learn that, despite being a college graduate, he was in a GED class and wasn't looking to get out of it by having his college transcript sent to the principal. I caught a whiff of depression and learned helplessness. He talked vaguely about trouble from the guards.
When he finally got out of school, I spoke to the right people and got him a job in the prison industry, where his ten-dollar-a-week paycheck was four times what he earned sitting in a classroom. The job also moved him to a slightly better block, living amongst men who worked during the day and slept during the night, which isn't always the case in here.
I was happy to see him make it to honor block last spring, about eight months ago. And Jordan was happy to be here, too, but still smarting from the theft of his hundred-fifty-dollar TV. As he moved out of the industry cell block, he had to leave his duffels of property unattended for a moment, yet felt they'd be safe near the guard's post. It was certainly an inmate porter, with the blessing of the guards, who snaked Jordan's TV, and when Jordan told the guard that he wouldn't leave the block until it was returned, he was threatened and sent on his way.
Par for the course for Jordan, and those like him who've been convicted of a sex offense. While attitudes towards this caste of untouchables have softened during my fourteen years inside, there are still many staff and inmates who use the label as an excuse to extort and bully these men. The administration knows it, of course, but rather than try to change the institutional culture, they find if more expedient to try to mollify the aggrieved parties on an ad hoc basis. The claims office, to whom Jordan wrote, is actually an older guard who plays fixer by doling out hush money in the form of property confiscated from inmates during cell searches. Jordan, however, had his claim denied — no reason given — and wasn't offered the pro forma black and white TV, plastic hot pot, or Walkman. A senior administrator said he would help only if Jordan provided the names of the guards in question, which, rightly concerned about retaliation, Jordan decided not to do. For those of us not certain just how powerless we are, Comstock serves up object lessons.
After he got settled into the safer, more relaxed atmosphere of honor block, I asked what he was working on. Sheepishly, he said, "Nothing." In his comp book was a list of the volumes that he'd had in federal prison, and he mumbled something about having his mom find bookstores where he could purchase them anew. I was reminded of the Buddhist precept as to how the raft becomes useless once you reach the shore. To light a small fire under Jordan, I gave him a short essay of mine and practically begged him to write something to share with me. "Just write something."
Jordan admitted that he was embarrassed of his writing, and I told him that that was nonsense, that if he read what I'd written when I started he'd know he had nothing to be embarrassed about. He struggled to write because of insecurity, I couldn't stop writing because of it. My inner child — the Jungian "shadow" — is absurdly self-critical. And while I write to give my life meaning, avoid loneliness, and heal thyself on the page, I also do so to combat feelings of irrelevance. I naturally assume that others are as critical of me as I am of myself, so I'm constantly producing new work as if to say: Please look at how worthwhile I am; don't focus on the senseless murders, look at who I am now. I feel like I'm only as good as the last thing I created. So I understand insecurity and am on guard against my critical inner voice speaking for me to friends and loved ones.
Shortly thereafter, Jordan handed me his comp book, several pages filled with the outcome of two writing prompts from the pages of Writer's Digest. I went off to sit and read it, happy that he came through, hopeful, and a bit nervous — there have been a few guys I've cajoled into writing only to learn that I've created monsters in need of more help than I can provide. It was quickly apparent that Jordan was a writer. The two short pieces were vividly rendered scenes from childhood, and it was a pleasure discussing them with him, craftsman to craftsman.
In addition to the sense of community provided by writers' workshops, there's the very important extrinsic motivation of deadlines for work to read and discuss with your mates. It's an oft-repeated workshop aphorism that if you don't start writing tomorrow morning, you'll never start writing. But prison can be a time soup where things are forever put off until a tomorrow that feels the same as today. It so happened that some friends were looking for submissions to an in-house zine, five hundred to fifteen hundred words on the subject of women — fiction; nonfiction, anything. I lied and said there was a hard deadline thirty days away. Jordan agreed to work with me, so we could tighten each other's drafts. Mine was fan fiction of Meg Griffin from "Family Guy"; Jordan produced a dark comedy in which the protagonist, a male professor, gains tenure, but, in a "Twilight Zone" ending, takes a back seat to several female colleagues. Loses something in translation, but it was a solid piece (that made me question his relationship with women), and the editors accepted both.
Jordan was overjoyed to receive a copy of the zine with his work in it, and we celebrated his first byline with cold sodas.
When I surreptitiously profiled Albert, I complained about the lack of details from his past and an inner life that I had no access to. With Jordan, the opposite was true. He was quite open during this process, and shared more than I would have. On the first of four formal sit-downs, he and I monopolized a four-person table in the frenetic honor block rec area. I spread a few blank pieces of typing paper on the faux wood table top, said, "O.K., my good man, you asked for it," then proceeded as if I knew what I was doing.
It was oddly liberating. Playing journalist allowed me to disregard the rules of prison and ask direct personal questions about the contents of his inner world and past self. In lieu of a digital recorder, the blank pages became filled with my scrawl, a real-time mind map, flow charts of places he lived, people he knows, and my arrows shooting across the page to elide the longueurs.
Jordan was born in 1971. In the early seventies, when his father, an army officer, was posted to a base in what was then West Germany, the family moved overseas. His sister was born shortly thereafter. Jordan went to school in town, and would come to think of German schools as superior to their American counterparts. He spoke German as well as English and played soccer with friends. When Jordan was fourteen, the family returned to the States. It was a culture shock, as he considered himself German and even spoke English with an accent.
Naturally, his classmates were less than welcoming, and quickly took to calling him Hitler. He graduated high school, got married, then signed up for a six-year hitch in the Navy, where his scores on aptitude tests landed him a gig manning the missile-targeting system of a destroyer. He was different from his rowdy peers. Because he was used to befriending older people in his civilian days, and such folk tended to be officers and thus off limits to an enlisted man, Jordan had few friends. Four years into his service, his one close friend killed himself by breaking rank during muster and jumping overboard into one of the thirty-foot-wide propellers. Jordan said he was "emotionally unable" to handle life aboard ship. For "a lot of stupid reasons" — mainly a bullying superior — Jordan didn't renew and was honorably discharged from the Navy after his six years was up in 1996. His wife divorced him. Not long after that, he entered college as a twenty-five-year-old, and worked towards a bachelor' s in social science, graduating summa cum laude. In 2000, Jordan met a girl online and soon moved out of state to be with her. He found work as a computer teacher in a local elementary school and moonlighted for a large tech company as part of a sales team hawking network solutions to schools.
By 2001, Jordan was in a federal prison, where, accounting for the nine months off for good behavior, he remained until 2010, when the state produced the scales to receive its pound of flesh, twenty-five year's worth. With just under a decade in the feds, plus his state time, Jordan will go to the parole board with thirty-one years under his belt, assuming he hasn't lost his four years of good time. If not, he maxes out four years later, 2035, when he's sixty-four.
But his interaction with the criminal justice system won't end there: enter the sex-offender registry.
Currently, someone with Jordan' s charges is listed on the registry for no less than thirty years after release from prison, during which he won't be allowed to touch a computer; there are severe restrictions on where one can live and work. In the America of 2014, there exist Hoovervilles in Florida, where sex offenders live under bridges because those are the only places for hundreds of miles which meet residency restrictions. An island off the coast of Washington is used to house that state's sex offenders. Given the televised fearmongering and penchant for dehumanization, is it crazy to imagine that, in the year 2035, someone like Jordan will be put on an island and hunted for sport?
Anyhoo, that's the simple timeline, one way of telling a story.
In a corollary to Chekhov's "rule of the gun," if there's a story set in prison, featuring prisoners, by act three we'll know their crimes. In pop culture, this is accomplished by a noir-ish reading of the case file while our man's mugshot stares at us menacingly or meekly or depraved, forlorn, scared, sick, whatever; there 's a gauzy flashback to the crime.
For the prisoners writing it, however, having to repeatedly badge ourselves with a recounting of our crime feels sort of like a bear dancing for a circus audience, and my reluctance to do so is one of the reasons my work will likely never find a wide audience. And yet, in almost every essay I've written — around twenty, totaling two-hundred thousand words — our narrator identifies himself as having committed murder. This bear dances, but begrudgingly, and not well.
It was brave of Jordan to be open to discussing his crime with me. We did so in our second interview because I wanted to get it out of the way. For a reductionist, the next section will feel like burying the lead, but, hell, such folk will be more disappointed that I don't write it as a tabloid headline, all bold capital letters and bad puns.
Jordan met Stu in late 2000, when both men worked selling computer network services. Stu was an affable forty-something who befriended Jordan. Jordan turned him into a father figure, one of several he'd cultivated over his lifetime, and so it wasn't a difficult sell getting Jordan to help set up and maintain a Web site trafficking in sexually-explicit images of college girls. Unbeknownst to Jordan, Stu, the marketing guy, began posting photos of underage girls, the youngest in her early teens. When the FBI arrested the pair less than a year later, Jordan stayed mum out of misplaced loyalty to his friend. Stu, who knew the system from previous arrests, knew to be the first one to "cooperate" and blamed it all on Jordan. After months of sheisty maneuvers, the Feds soured on Stu and were ready to see if Jordan could bring clarity. They offered Jordan five years in minimum security if he'd testify against Stu, which he agreed to, but before the trial could take place, Stu had worked himself back into the good graces of the Federales and was cooperating in their case against a former partner of his, the Canadian ringleader of a child-porn operation. Jordan was no longer useful, and the best the federal prosecutor would offer was ten years, double what was promised. He took that deal rather than risking decades if he blew trial. But that was the least of Jordan's worries.
Months before the scheduled start of Stu's trial, Stu's wife went to the local authorities alleging Jordan had inappropriately touched their child. It was a shrewd move to preemptively discredit Jordan's testimony against her husband, though that became moot, since Stu continued to cooperate with the Feds, and the case against him was quietly dropped. He told me that the couple's little boy was merely sitting on his lap while they watched TV, nothing more. But with Jordan about to begin a ten- year term in federal prison, the state prosecutor painted Jordan as a monster who needed to be locked away from society forever. Having spent thousands of dollars in legal fees for the federal case, Jordan had to rely on a public defender now, and the mope did little more than show up and remain conscious. On one occasion, this court-appointed member of the bar gave Jordan a laminated prayer card featuring St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes — perhaps he'd run out of instructions for how to make a proper noose out of prison bed sheets. He convinced Jordan to plead guilty to sodomy, and take twenty-five years.
"I shouldn't have copped out to that," Jordan said to me.
"Perhaps not," I said, "but then you'd be like some of our friends who blew trial and are scrambling like mad to get their seventy-five-to-life overturned."
If it sounds like I'm an apologist for Jordan, I assure you I am not. I don't know what exactly went down, but it wasn't kosher and he deserves to be doing time — something he readily admits — but certainly not a combined thirty-five years: More to the point, I refuse to be like some of my peers and most of the guards who fixate on people like Jordan, labeling them "rape-ohs" and "shit bags" to justify their bullying. Anyone who appears in the media as a result of his crime knows that there is often a discrepancy between headlines and reality, even if we don't all act as if one would think: that, as prisoners labeled as outcasts from society, we'd be more tolerant of the bad pasts of our peers, but then one would be ignoring the very human tendency to always find someone lower on the ladder, and give him a swift kick in the teeth.
Many times I've seen a man's past catch up with him, and his "friends" declare him persona non grata. The case of Lawrence typifies the matter. He was a year into doing two-to-six for a drug sale when someone came to Comstock who knew Lawrence from a previous bid and made it known that Lawrence had done ten years for rape. Suddenly, he was a "rape-o," png to many of his pals.
He was another guy I first encountered in the orientation group I facilitate, and we spoke a good deal about writing. Actually, after he came to honor block, Lawrence subjected me to long readings of his mystery-novel-in-progress and became a nuisance. I was already slowly distancing myself from this manipulative narcissist when his past came to light, and so, rather than appear that I judged him for the rape conviction, in Seinfeldian manner, I suffered Lawrence for another year and a half until he was paroled.
When I was new to prison, while I never persecuted those with rape convictions, I didn't have enough time under my belt (i.e., feel secure enough) to befriend them. One of my crew would point and say, "Stay away, that guy's no good," which could mean anything. And several of those men who did the pointing turned out to be no good themselves. Since we never truly leave high school, these guys are merely incarcerated versions of mean girls, always ready to say, You can't sit with us. Silly, really, these stories we tell ourselves in order to make sense of the world and sleep better at night. It's convenient to not believe that anyone is capable of anything at anytime. And such hypocrisy from men who know damn well what chicanery the DA engages in; who swear to anyone who'll listen what prosecutorial misconduct was perpetrated against them but then believe whole cloth the third-hand details about someone else's crime.
And then there's the backwards world nature of prison, where someone like me, with a murder conviction, is welcomed by his peers, and allowed to work in areas of restricted access, while someone like Jordan is not. I've learned that rape is an unfortunate commonplace that often goes unreported. My close friend Whit, who spent his formative years as an outlaw biker, described club initiations and biker rallies that always featured rape (sometimes of the prospective member). That lifestyle
attracts violent sociopaths, and turns them into a pit of vipers. Yet, go into any prison and outlaw bikers will be revered, even by guards.
I was losing the plot. To find some shape for Jordan, I began reverse outlining those excellent profiles in The New Yorker. It was from them that I realized what was missing: input from others.
The people I asked were friendly with him, and they said he was "nice" and "a good guy," which wasn't exactly a bombshell. Jordan and I have a mutual friend in Angelo, a kindly, erudite fellow who's been away twenty years, and whom I thought might give up the goods. In one sit-down, Jordan told me how transformative the relationship with Angelo has been. Before they came to honor block, they locked near each other in general population, sat together in the mess hall, and walked laps in the yard. It was Angelo, Jordan said, who broke him out of the funk; helped shift his focus off the shame of the past and taught him to challenge his assumptions and reframe his thinking in what sounded like self-administered cognitive behavioral therapy. The other thing he learned from Angelo: "Just because you have an answer today doesn't mean you stop searching." There is no there there.
It was disappointing when Angelo didn't get back to me on my request for input on Jordan. Perhaps he thought he'd be betraying a confidence.
Disappointing, but not a deal breaker. Unlike most interviewers, I live with my subjects, and can observe them inhabiting their lives, often over the course of years. What I really wanted was access to Jordan's family: I'd sensed early on that there's drama there; it was as if he had two sets of parents, the pleasant ones on the phone and the emotionally distant ones from childhood.
Even more than details about the crimes that led us to prison, asking direct questions about family, past or present, is a no-go. Yet Jordan gave me carte blanche on the condition that he could nix anything he felt to be too personal.
We started light. Jordan and his mother speak often on the phone. On visits, he is becoming closer to his father, the two increasingly seeing each other as individuals instead of merely their roles as father and son.
Jordan doesn't have much contact with his sister, but the two have never been close. She was "deathly ill" for much of her childhood, and Jordan was often at loose ends as a boy, living a latch-key life as his parents sat with his sister in various hospitals. He paid a steep price for his freedom: Jordan never felt loved.
His situation wasn't unique, but it was sad, so I put the interview on hold and spoke to him as a friend. The past can victimize us anew if we let it. You deal with it or it deals with you. Mostly, I let him process some of his sadness.
The tangent lost steam, so I got back to work: "What was wrong with your sister?"
Jordan said it was "some pulmonary thing," perhaps a result of the old man being exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam.
"But what about you?" I asked. "Your health wasn't affected, right?"
"He's not my biological father."
In the sultry words of the Virgin Mary: "Come again?"
Jordan said, "I don't think I am who I think I am."
"Sounds like Popeye. Were you adopted?"
No one would tell him the whole story, and he's been quietly obsessing over it for years. The more he prodded his memories, the more elusive the answers felt. As a little boy, accompanying his mother to Army offices for bureaucratic minutiae, he realized that the last name she provided for him didn't match his family's name. His sister, like many siblings, told Jordan that he wasn't part of the family and that no one wanted him. A tender child, he took it hard. In the manner of one who spent years puzzling this out alone, he produced little details for me, details that had come to take on outsized meaning in his personal narrative, smoothed over in his mind to form the truth. When he was a teenager, Jordan's mother revealed to him that he was the pre-wedlock product of an assignation with a close friend on New Year's Eve, 1971. For those of you keeping track, that night would be just about nine months before Jordan was born.
A child from shortly before the marriage being raised by his mother and her husband — the arrangement could have come about for any number of reasons. But why give him the biological father's last name? It's all an open secret that his mother wishes to leave in the past.
As he revealed this to me, I got the sense that he was longing for someone to share this secret past with more than as he was looking for another detective to solve the mystery. It brought Jordan into focus for me: the kid who never knew his biological father, and acted out, looking for succor in his friends' parents; the kid who never stops collecting father figures.
And that's when Jordan admitted to being molested by a friendly neighbor.
"Dude," I said, "you don't have to tell me this stuff if you don't want to."
"It's O.K.," he said. "It feels good to talk about it with someone like you."
As a young man keeping too many secrets, feeling unwanted, Jordan began acting out, looking for trouble, seeking attention. His parents eventually sent him to a therapist, in whom Jordan confided about being molested. This professional saw that Jordan could keep a secret from his parents, so he molested him, too.
I said, "My God, man."
"Yeah, I know."
I had come face to face with the axiom that victims of sexual abuse often internalize that treatment as an appropriate way to show affection, thus becoming abusers themselves. What role did that play? Not an easy answer there. Erroneously of me, a correlation found was a causation made. It turned out that a lot of what I perceived to be evidence of serious wrongdoing, perhaps even pedophilia, was in fact Jordan's shame, as someone who has regained a solid moral compass, of being instrumental in the exploitation of women, even if he did go in thinking they'd all be over eighteen.
"There were choices I made that brought me here," Jordan said. "I can't change that. But now it's up to me to make choices that get me home a better person."
"Here, here. Now that's the work of work."
Not long ago, Jordan handed me a page of writing while I was on the phone with my wife. It was comprised of short declarative sentences — a page from Hemingway's book — with no paragraph breaks, and began: "My name is Jordan. I am forty- two years young. I am 5 foot 6, 195 lbs. I tend to wobble a bit when walking. I have brown hair and brown eyes. I wear glasses." It goes on to mention his "elementary years in West Germany" and various schooling, then continues:
My family ancestors are French Protestants know as Huguenots.... I have few friends. Those I surround myself with are geared toward truth rather than fantasy. I enjoy walking for exercise. I read everything... I believe humans are naturally weak but can grow stronger by pursuing wisdom and understanding. I don't believe that some people are unsavable. I consider myself a Christian. When I leave prison I hope to establish a nonprofit ministry to help homeless ex-prisoners find a place to live. I eat when depressed and have little self-control in that area.
"Wobble a bit when walking" is a good description. Jordan was in a bad car accident when he was two years old, which resulted in a back injury, required him to wear leg braces for years, and left him with scoliosis.
Eating while depressed: He's not so much a binge eater, rather a perennial snacker. I live two floors above him, and because it's an open-tiered cell block, I can hear when he gets bags of chips "on the juggle" from his neighbor. This neighbor operates a "store," loaning two items for three in return. If, over the course of a weekend, I hear Jordan juggle chips, cookies, microwave popcorn, and sodas, I know he's having a rough go of it and needs a friend, so I'll try to make time for him at rec.
The bit about the Huguenots squares with his trying to make sense of the past. It's also quite common in prison for one's ancestry to take on importance as entree to a crew — Italians, Irish, Russians, Dominicans, Salvadorans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans (to the best of my knowledge, there's no Huguenot table in the yard).
Guy who never paid much attention to his family origins before going away suddenly feels the need to have an Italian flag inked on his biceps.
I've got Mediterranean features, and sometimes get asked, "What are you?" Naively, I used to respond "American." "No," they'd say, "where your people from?" "Russia," I've learned to say, because it's quick and easy.
When I was new to prison, embraced by a rough-and-tumble crew who would lovingly denigrate each other with "dumb mick," "lousy guinea," and, for yours truly, "fucking Jew," I began to imagine the Old Country, just as my friends did theirs. My people came to America from Ukraine and Poland at the beginning of the twentieth century. Discovering that Ukraine's Odesa is a seaport, I entertained romantic notions that my love of sailing comes from a distant relative, a tough old salt who stood at the helm of a merchant vessel, squinting out over the cold waters of the Black Sea, wearing a thick cable-knit sweater and pea coat. It's more likely, however, that my ancestors eked out an existence selling schmattas in a Polish shtetl. I'm cool with either, because both are equally meaningless to the story of who I am in this moment.
The term "narrative fallacy" was coined by Nassim Taleb in The Black Swan, used to describe our tendency to rely on flimsy accounts of the past and give them disproportionate importance in shaping our expectation for the future. In other words, past isn't prologue. Furthermore, luck, or lack of, plays a larger role in our lives than talent, stupidity, and intention combined, despite how convenient and gratifying it is to believe otherwise. We are quick to judge the author of a repugnant act as depraved or evil, while justifying our own bad actions as a one-time mistake.
In trying to make sense of the past we focus on those striking events, gloss over the stasis and drift, and construct a tight, tidy narrative. When I lay out the plot points of my life as a writer, as I did earlier, I often neglect to remember the hours of frustration, failure, and rejection. The not being able to fall asleep because my brain was whirring with edits. Between the writer writing and his published work lay the writer manque. If I'm being honest, as much credit as I' d like to give to ability and drive, my accomplishments are mainly due to my path crossing Jameson's.
As to Jordan, one can construct a plot line in which he's raised in a barren emotional environment, seeks warmth outside the home, is sexually abused; in seeking a father figure, he's led into a situation where he becomes the abuser. But that's something of a caricature, an impulsive choice to decide we know what happened, then fit the evidence to support our conclusion, ignoring evidence that contradicts it. There are less impulsive choices: maybe Jordan put a young child on his lap to receive sexual gratification; perhaps Jordan, having grown up in Germany, showed affection in a European manner; or, as a great deal of study has shown, Stu's five-year-old couldn't tell the difference between something that happened and something he was told had happened — told by parents who had a vested interest in discrediting Jordan. All I have to go on is Jordan's memory. But memory is a poor historian. So maybe we just call him a rape-o, steal his TV, hope that he spends the rest of his life in prison, and consider the matter closed. Or maybe something that's none of the above. something that accounts for the ability to change and alter the course of one's narrative, allowing our protagonist to come to grips with his past, grow from it, and use it as a force for transformative good.
Because I can tell you, that's the Jordan I know. His social sensitivity and slight anxiety allow him to be more attuned to others and a more tolerable person than a lot of the self-centered louts in here. There are several things I learned about Jordan from our sit-downs and the concerted effort of writing this. Even though I'm on guard against narrative fallacies, I fall victim to them as easily as anyone else. My assurance, upon meeting a nebbishy Jordan three years ago, that this place would eat him alive, was gladly proven wrong.
While I thought Jordan remained in a GED class because he was in too much of a funk to leave; the truth is, he spent a year and a half as an unofficial TA, helping his classmates practice essay writing, a job that his conviction precludes him from officially performing. As Finding Nemo teaches: We survive to fulfill our purpose for others. And he's a lot more worldly and self-possessed than many give him credit for. I've sometimes wanted to intercede in his dealings with a peer, to make sure he's not taken advantage of, only to watch him do better than I probably could've done for myself. He's a Jedi like that. He has made the best of his thirteen years inside, enjoys what amenities this dive has to offer, has several good friends (myself included), is productive, and works on continuously improving himself
I compare that to some of our peers — convicted of a sex offense or not — who get their faces cut and are forced to sign into protective custody; or those who decompensate, and wind up stuffed to the gills with psychotropic meds; the self- medicators who spend decades chasing a joint or a bag of junk. I've known men who kill themselves rather than do a fifth of the time Jordan's doing.
What turned out to be our last formal sit-down began with a guerrilla writers' workshop, just the two of us working over the opening scenes to a piece of fiction he's writing. It's set in Germany, during World War Two, and begins with a teenage boy meeting with his dying grandmother, who sends him on a quest to save a family heirloom before it's destroyed by Allied bombs. The character will be an underdog, the family's reluctant choice to locate what turns out to be an old family tree, containing a coded map which leads to a cache of ancient texts. "Knowledge," Jordan said, "being the greatest treasure of all.''
It's said that fiction writers have only one story, and they spend a lifetime finding different ways to tell it. The victim narrative is one of the most powerful stories that someone can live by. Perhaps someday Jordan will find that the answers he's looking for come from within, and he'll be able to stop writing the story of a boy forever searching for a father. It was the case with me that, in retrospect, I had to purge the loneliness by writing about outcasts who find solace in the company of robots and golden retrievers.
But rather than dispense pop psychology, I treated him to craft advice, told him which paragraphs worked and which needed tweaking, discussed pacing and character development. Jordan was enthused about the story's potential and committed himself to seeing it through to the end, then doing rewrites. After forty minutes or so, the workshop petered out, so we pivoted to my project, our project.
"I know where I'm going to begin — with the scene of your coming from the library with 20 Master Plots — but how should I end?"
He looked pensive, and genuinely gave it thought. "I don't know."
"All right, we'll come back to that." I told him how I was toying with the idea of structuring the piece with section headings taken from plot tropes, like Our Hero Suffers A Setback. Sort of earnest, sort of tongue-in-cheek — aesthetic like a Wes Anderson film. Lots of metanarrative asides. But first I'd need to borrow his notes from 20 Master Plots.
Jordan reached down into his plastic pail, and quickly returned, a pained expression on his face. "I only brought my story tonight. I must've forgotten the comp book with my notes. I'm sorry."
"That's O.K.," I said. "We'll get to it tomorrow night." It was late and I was spent. I put my reading glasses atop my head and rubbed under my eyes. And that's when it hit me: Jordan had his story, not the marble comp book. "Jordan, do you realize what this means? Tonight, you're no longer a writer reading, but a writer writing."
"That's it," Jordan said, a smile enlivening his face. "That's the ending."