The Visit

A cluster of barren leaves swirled over the still concrete yard. I gazed silently through a segmented window. Life here was measured above all by the slow ticking of the clock. Those who had long bids to face soothed the pain by saying with a smile that: "they can't stop the clock."

I leaned over the divider separating my bunk from the others to see if the pay phone was available.

Calling home several times a week while in prison was a privilege for which I became deeply grateful. The pay phone was the only real link I had with my son and wife who lived across the country. Letters and cards were cherished, but the call and conversation was a lifeline. As with so many things in that dark time, the enormous phone bill became yet another burden inflicted upon my family. After the enormity of the shame of coming to prison, and the incredible wrenching of the fabric of our lives, it was a relatively small thing like a phone bill that could cause the most anger by triggering deep emotions that always lurked below the surface emotions we maintained.

It is crazy how such small things can become so important. One becomes wary of this over time and how you learn to handle the small issues can determine whether or not you are allowed to even get to the larger ones.

I would call when I came back from cleaning the infirmary in the morning in time to talk with my son and wife as they began their day. There was a three hour time difference that sometimes worked to my advantage and sometimes did not. Or I would call late at night when I could get away with it, before my son went to bed. The calls were often for me a plea for contact with life - not just the one I had forsaken, but a larger one outside the walls that I desperately wanted to be a part of, but knew in my heart of hearts that was not to be for some time. It didn't take the sages of the world to tell me that wanting the unattainable is the cause of much of the world's misery. I felt enough of it then.

It was also impossible to shut out all of the sounds of life within the walls no matter how much I wanted to prevent my wife and son from knowing or even imagining what my life was like. But the sweet beauty of a simple call muted these sounds and visions and even made my fellow inmates seem less ominous. Once I had settled into life in prison, after about five months, the calls became routine. I am so glad that they were taken. It was an incredible largeness of spirit that my wife and son took them. They didn't have to be. That is why, even today, I think of the true lifeline that phone was to me which makes little things like seeing people screen their calls, or tell someone a lie that they aren't there, very troubling.

Now, with the comfortable distance of several years, my experience in prison is clearer and more infused with meaning. The filters I used to survive and defend against realities that were overwhelming have been stripped. I felt an enormous relief the day I was found guilty, after an initial intense reaction against the judgment, misplaced, unjust and dead wrong as it was. As I started my journey through life as an "inmate" it was as if an enormous weight had been lifted from me and I cannot even now begin to describe how positive that was. The merits of the case no longer mattered to me. I knew what the case was about, that appeals would be lodged and eventually prove victorious while monies would be exchanged.

The isolation in time and space was what I relished. I received this involuntarily because my plan for living was decidedly NOT working, but also because deep within me, it is what I craved. Peace. Isolation. No pressure to perform for others. I had done so and quite well, for so long that I had become tired and sought a thousand ways to destroy the connections I had with the world because all of those had become dark and threatening to who I believed I was. Because I did not, and could not, create a life, I did and could destroy a life - mine. The two results come from the same impulse that we all have - to be unique, to transcend one's self and to assert one's self against the perceived tyranny of a world which doesn't allow such indulgencies to be pursued.

I had tried hard to figure out what was wrong with me as I spiraled down from success to failure to destruction. Others did too, in quiet desperation. But like the exclusionary principle, which teaches that you cannot know both the speed and the location of a particle at the same time, the more intensely you try to shine a light on a problem, the more the problem evades you. The more you shine a light on a particle, the more the particle is going to move because more energy in the form of little packets of light move against it. That has to be one of the great paradoxes of life as we know it. The more we seek, the more what we seek eludes us. If understood and accepted, it can explain so much. In the midst of the experience of depression, the uselessness of alcoholism, drug use, destructive behavior and a host of other ills that lead one to incarceration, the more you try to figure it out from within, the more you drive it away. But, with a little time and space, and without having to search too hard, the better chance you have of understanding whatever what was wrong with you. Just let your life come to you. You don't have to give up anything to any one or any thing in particular. Just open yourself up to life- your life.

It is no longer amazing to me the extent one can adapt to trying situations. In the midst of what to others would be a nightmarishly intolerable existence, through the habit of simple tasks and constant effort reaffirming the need for and hope of human nature, I continued my journey. One of the surest signs that all would be well, was a bright Sunday morning when I rose early, finished breakfast, and went with bible in hand to mass. It wasn't something I eagerly embraced for I was thoroughly disgusted with the many I perceived in prison who turned to religion and used it as a front. But as I walked into the brightly lit chapel, I saw at the alter the Monsignor who had performed at my wedding, welcoming all with the same love and compassion as he would to a congregation down the street. I approached him, tears in my eyes for he had been a close friend of my father and mother for years, and he said nothing but embraced me and said that all would be well.

I was ashamed then too, despite the gift of love and compassion of such a wonderful man, for I had put so many people through absolute hell that had once also put such incredible faith in me. I destroyed that as I tried to destroy my life with nary a thought for what I was doing.

It is said that evil is the lack of empathy and that is so true. I was full of self-loathing and had been so successful at creating a mask for so long that I allowed myself to deaden inside. I didn't want to think it was happening, and neither did anyone I knew despite the signs I had left strewn about daily in a life spun out of control.

But happen it did. In the midst of tossing away a career, the ties of family, friendships earned and valued, my sense of self as having a value, my self respect and judgment, my health, my freedom and all that I had built up and nurtured over the years, I was sent to prison - maximum security prison - for an assault on a client. I arrived at a prison that I used to visit as an attorney to counsel my clients, one or two of whom were not ecstatic with my representation, yet others who thankfully were. It was also down the street from a prestigious private school I had graduated from with honor and distinction, as well as down the highway from a beloved college where I had done the same.

Once again, I found myself in a place to be educated, to learn, to survive and to come out. Despite my ability to adapt and to thrive at times, I lived every day with the pain of knowing that I should have been at home that very instant with my wife and son. Nothing could change that essential fact. I should have been there every night to help him with his homework, or sing him a poor version of Danny Boy to help him fall asleep. I felt desperately every hour the need to protect him. The clarity of the impossibility can drive you mad. I had been accused at various stages of this "process" of not being able to feel, or drinking alcohol and engaging in risky behavior as a mask to smother my feelings. That is probably true. Men like me were raised to withhold feelings. To perform, to withstand, to endure, to persevere and to succeed. Never to show weakness. I was never taught or encouraged to express the full range of feelings that people do today at the drop of a hat - on national TV no less. These days, everything, including the law, is about feelings. Doesn't matter what actually HAPPENED. How you FEEL about what happened matters. To me that is crazy. Plus, I didn't LIKE most of my feelings, so I drank copious amounts of alcohol, preferably whiskey, every day to numb myself. Things were a lot easier in my mind as a result even though the carnage around me just kept piling up.

Drinking so much is so foreign to me now, but then it made perfect sense. Whether inspired by genetic predisposition, the catalyst of an active college social life, or just plain bad character, I don't know. What I do know is but for some enjoyable moments reading Brendan Behan and Lincoln's letters and speeches while inebriated, it is extremely difficult to function when one has a pretty constant stream of anesthesia cruising through your system.

As a result of my selfishness and distorted inward journey of destruction, I wasn't there for my wife and son for 19 straight months. I was a thousand miles and a world away. In addition to calling, I wrote incessantly. We no longer have time to sit down to write a letter to friends or family that expresses fully our thoughts and feelings. I had plenty of time to drift in and out of isolation. I made up games with my son where he would pick a place, an animal, a color and a person and I would craft a story. It was fun. Sometimes now when we are watching TV and the same story on sportscenter for the tenth time, I think back to the importance of remaining creative when one cannot share such moments together.

No matter how much I would pour into the call, or the letter, or the occasional card, it wasn't enough to satisfy the brutal honesty that is every child's domain. Every call would end with, "When are you coming home, Daddy." "Soon, real soon" was my only reply. Every coloring or card my son would send - I kept every scrap - would end with "when ar yu cming home" in the beautiful scribbling of my precious little pre-schooler. The words were damning because they were so simple and all I could offer back were, ultimately, lies and deceptions cloaked in the only mantle too many of us use with our children - naked authority. Again I would say "soon, real soon.' That was becoming my mantra, an easy lie just as easy to say as when I whispered over and over to my little boy that everything would be all right just before he got stabbed by two needles in the thigh at six months for whatever shots he needed at that time.

A mantra. A big lie. Something said over and over, no matter how untrue or uncertain, until you either began to believe it, or ignore it completely. But children know. Whether it is because they have just come from a beautiful place, an innocent place, a purity in space and time, or because they haven't spent too much time around the rest of us, I don't know. My wife and I had chosen not to tell him where I was. He thought I was in the hospital with stomach problems. That led to some humorous incidents. At a church gathering during my incarceration, during a period when the minister asks the congregation if they want any special prayers said for a family member who is sick, my beautiful four year old boy raised his hand and asked everyone to pray for his daddy who was in the hospital. When asked what for, he responded with great conviction: "I think it's diarrhea."

The phone was still being used by a junkie who was screaming at his significant other with a savage intensity. Why the other person didn't hang up amazed me. The caged yard outside and to the right of the window that I looked out of looked like a small playground for an inner city school. That was the area where newly arrived prisoners, or transferred prisoners, had their yard time. Maybe an hour or two a day. R and D. Receipt and Diagnostic. Later, I learned that the purpose of this first phase of everyone's prison experience is multifaceted and carefully orchestrated. An exception is made for those who are particularly dangerous to others, or those who are in need of protection because of what they did or who they had pissed off. The system weeds out the troublemakers. It protects the truly helpless unless they make too much of a nuisance of themselves. You want to find out early who is predator and who is prey. And you find out if you can take it. Locked in a cell basically 20 hours a day. Boredom is physical. Violence lurks silently. Hopelessness smiles.

If you can make it through the first 60 days unscathed, you are in decent shape. Every day is a decade, with humor the only real relief. I put my education to good use. Once, when challenged by a neighbor up from Walpole, Mass, who was 8 years in and knew a LOT that I didn't, I named the author for every book he could come up with over a three night stint. I didn't want to anger or embarrass him, just give respect and earn a little myself. I wasn't going to do it physically, but there are other ways to do it - even in prison.

You have to give and earn respect just as much if not more in prison than outside the walls. What matters is not what got you into prison, with certain exceptions, but what you do and who you are in prison that determines whether you can do your own time and walk out, or whether others are going to do your time for you, with no guarantees. The exceptions are child molesters and rats. I can still hear the pop and thud as one of the former was whaled on by an enraged inmate wielding a pillowcase full of V-8 juice cans. It wasn't so much what he had done, but the relative lack of sentence compared to someone who had just sold weed.

The new guys, during yard time, would walk in a deliberate circular manner, hover in small groups or beg for cigarettes with imaginative semaphore and direct appeals to brothers and friends walking the yard. "Hey, I'm off the patch" was a familiar cry as well as the ever versatile "what's up", accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders. As in regular society, "what's up", depending on inflection and body language, can mean as many things as mao in Chinese. Which means a lot. To me, the ingenuity with which these guys arranged to have handmade cigarettes delivered to the no-smoking section of R & D was worthy of acclaim, not sanction.

Now, no one walked the yard. It had closed a few minutes earlier. Unless there was something out of the ordinary to do, nothing stirred during this time except the occasional clink of keys in locks as a new shift of guards arrived. You could see the different caliber of guards head to areas as diverse as the inmates they housed. Rough, square, hulking men heading to H building, also known as gladiator school. Older, hard, no nonsense but intensely human men climbing steadily to North unit, home to lifers, hardened cons doing big time, gangs, devil's disciples, people who had to be controlled. These violent men were mixed with amazing men who were there for life and who actually were able to live one.

My unit was a relatively calm place full of cribbage and chess, reading and TV. There were a few problems. Once, in an untelegraphed burst of fury, a nephew stormed into his uncle's house (a house is your cell or living area) and started smacking him. There were many family members incarcerated together and for many, prison life had not improved their ability to relate. In prison, "Whose your Daddy?" often is not a rhetorical question. The co's came flying in and as they were taking the kid away to shu, special housing unit, he ran headfirst into the wall in some futile form of protest. Not only did he get a big headache and 30 days in the hole, but he later told me the prison billed him about a thousand bucks for the damage to the wall.

This kid was so tragically typical. Endless family problems. A little problem with anger management. No ability to love and be loved. And, fatally, he had a fascination with breaking into businesses for the thrill it. He didn't really take anything. He would break in and just sort of stand around enjoying the feeling. He was the kind of guy doing life on the installment plan. A two to four here, a four to eight there. He wasn't ever getting out. He probably didn't really want to. Like so many others, three hots and a cot were a better deal than what he had going on the streets.

What you hope to be able to do is solve problems, not create more. That is a hard thing to do in or out of prison. If you have a problem that got you there, solve it so that when you walk out - remember that they can't stop the clock- you won't be walking back in anytime soon.

But I couldn't see my son. I couldn't hold him and soothe him when things went bump in the night. That hurt so much more than anything else. I had let that happen and it killed me every second. That was my punishment, not the bars and the loneliness and the hard work and the constant tension and the time.

The phone was clear. I hopped off my bunk, stepped into my slippers and shuffled off to make the call. I dialed and waited for the computer to take my name and make the connection. The few seconds I would have to wait before I could speak were another reminder of how not in control of my life I was and how tenuous my connection was with the two people who I had forsaken and whose trust I had shattered. What if they weren't there? What if they refused my call? What if they were hurt and couldn't get to the phone?

Though the conversations were often halting and awkward, they were wonderful. My wife would always have some lovely story from work or her family. She is a private person in a public business and I would relish when she would share with me what had happened during the day. It was so strange to have this, and the letters we would send, be our only connection. Compared to others, I was so fortunate but it didn't always feel that way. I didn't want her to fly out to see me this way. I wanted her to stay with my son while I straightened out the big problem I had gotten myself into. Though the decision to remain separate was practical, its effects were profound. You cannot keep a relationship alive on the phone, at a distance. This was not an experience I wanted to share. Sometimes one needs to go away in a relationship to heal and then return, hopefully, strengthened. The result can be a stronger connection. As Umberto Eco wrote so beautifully, "Separation is to love as wind is to the flame; it extinguishes the lesser and fans the greater." But this was probably not the kind of separation he meant.

This phone call was different. It wasn't just that I was in a concrete jungle with the feeling that any time could be the wrong time, but that the connection I was trying so hard to make couldn't be made. So, in the midst of our usual banter, my son spoke in a direct and sweet voice words I will never forget. "When are you coming home Daddy, I'm forgetting what you look like."

I couldn't speak. The words seared my throat like a brand. Nothing that has ever happened in my life has cut me like that. Nothing. The anger and shame boiling within began to overwhelm me. I caught myself and uttered in as soothing as tone as possible words that even as I said and heard them, opened the wound even wider for I knew them not to be true. "Soon son, soon. Now be a good boy for your Mommy and get your rest. I'll call you in a few days."

I still don't know if my wife heard those words. I don't know if she knew what he had just said and I didn't say anything about them. She probably did. With a strong intuition and heart, my wife knows things that she doesn't let on that she knows. So much of any relationship, like good music, is what is heard between the notes.

I didn't say anything. I told her I loved her, that I missed her and that the appeal was in the works and that all would be well. Though I knew where I was, and what my reality was, she didn't. And that only widened the ever growing gap between us. But nothing brought the world crashing down on me like the words of a four year old boy who didn't do anything wrong, but didn't know where his daddy was, couldn't go see him and was beginning to forget what he looked like.

I walked back to my bunk and senses numbed, got ready for bed. A bewildered walk to the sink. Brushing teeth with a flat metal tray as a mirror. An equally bewildered walk back through bunks of men getting ready to end another day and dream of unattainable things to my box where I kept my stuff. I put my brush and paste away and took a look at my meager possessions. Everything I had fit into a footlocker. And that had to be protected with an intensity foreign to people outside the walls. I worked half of the day cleaning the infirmary for fifty bucks a month. I worked out, read, wrote, watched TV, played chess and softball and held endless conversations to get along. I became un-scared through routine and denial. I became numb through my self-serving mantra until like a deep echo from below shatters a sheet of black ice covering restless waters, my son cracked with simple words the façade I had built up with many false ones. He shattered the mantra. That this was ok, this was part of God's plan, that this was ok because I could handle and deal with it and that I could rationalize this as I had rationalized so much. How incredibly pathetic. His honesty jeopardized me, tainted my illusions. Just like hope is a dangerous thing in a place where there is very little, so too is the failure of memory a terrible thing. Memory had played a brutal role in my trial, as it does in every trial. I was learning all I could about the science of memory and how our memories of our childhood and the good things in our life can sustain us. And for me, just as the victim couldn't remember anything about what happened, now my son couldn't remember me.

Why? How can one be lost? Because memory is a constructive process. It is built out of the fabric of our lives. It is not an item in a data bank that can be simply be retrieved when necessary.

"Remembering is … an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole mass of organized past reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or language form."

A guy named FC Bartlett wrote these words in a fascinating work that I spent hours poring over. He devoted a lifetime to study how we remember. Others like Daniel Schacter and legends like Carl Jung explored the intricacies of the mind to determine how we bring up an image of something from the past. If you can't remember something, it means that it either never happened, or that base of experience upon which memory is based on is fading.

But these were just words and theories. I had spent much of my life studying words and theories. But now my son was forgetting what I looked like. My son was having trouble reconstructing me. I was trying hard not to let my old image fade while I tried to reconstruct myself.

When someone you love is forgetting what you look like, and you try to fall asleep in a prison cell, you learn what it is like to have your heart torn in half and your soul ripped asunder. Anger and self-loathing consume you as you try to go to sleep. Sleep comes, Caliban like, as in your solitude you find yourself wishing for a thousand twangling instruments to hum about your ears until you do cry to sleep again.

7:15 am. "Harris, visit", Officer P boomed from just inside the door to the guard's office outside our unit. I had just come back from the shower and was putting on my greens when the call came. My beloved mother was coming out for one of her twice weekly visits. During my entire stay in prison, this courageous, graceful, beautiful woman who has seen me in glorious times and in the darkest of times, and who embraced me fiercely with her frail but strong arms while I yelled my innocence when the jury verdict was read out, was waiting for me. I had brought disgrace on my family and added a huge burden to their lives. Despite that, she would come every week and we would talk and laugh and play gin rummy and eat junk food. It was wonderful. She is the kind of person who could make friends with anyone and who radiates the same grace in the waiting room of a prison as in preparing her home to host a future president. She chooses to make things special and to remain cheerful despite wrenching times. She is wise and brings a quiet grace to every gathering, every conversation, every moment. To be able to assimilate such extremes is the hallmark of wisdom, stemming from gentleness. Perhaps too many of us try to live at one extreme or another, when those from whom we can learn so much have touched both, triumph and tragedy, joy and pain, and returned from each, unscathed and further ennobled.

I learned much later that though always composed, thoughtful and pleasant appearing on the surface, I did not handle anger well. It has been a struggle to learn the things I have learned but they have come with a permanence that can only come through pain. I wasn't overtly violent, but I did not know how much anger I kept hidden away over so many things. I handled anger and most feelings like most men raised in the kind of world and the time I lived. I wouldn't feel it. I'd stuff it. Sink it deep inside where I would hope that it would eventually go away. It wouldn't. And I would also hope that it would go away because I had seen it unleashed through my father on occasion and that had terrified me. It terrified me to think that that kind of rage lurked inside of me.

After my son's unanswerable question, instead of "processing my feelings", all that morning I silently seethed. Whatever dreams had come and gone in the night had not purged the pain. To the people here, even though the first thing they do is give you a number, I refused to live as a number. But to my son, I was fading, worse than just a number. I was so angry that I could not be with him, get his lunch ready, go over his homework, get him ready for school and that someday I would have to tell him all of this. Tell him I was not in a hospital. I didn't have diarrhea. I had guards watching me, not nurses. I was an inmate, not a patient. The anger inside intensified as I avoided all human contact, quickly signed out for a pass to walk through the closed yard to the visitor center, and stopped just outside to be logged in.

Like some unfortunates who are physically ill, people who are angry all the time are annoyingly self-centered. I know I was. People who are sick at least have an excuse if they have no empathy for others, or care much about the world around them. If you are sick, or have a "condition", that becomes your life and blocks you out from understanding other people's concerns at times. We see people like that everywhere. They will tell total strangers intimate details about the most appalling personal matters. It may be their only way to cope. But an angry person will just try to inflict pain on others without caring about their feelings, their needs, and their hopes. Anger is a mask, for guilt or shame or fear. Prison is full of selfish, angry people. So is society. And as I walked to that visit to see my mother, I was angry. I was ashamed, guilt-ridden and afraid. I was morbidly and myopically focused on the injustices done to me, legal and otherwise, not that I had imposed on others. And when one's life has been stopped cold, as mine had been, there is little room made for empathy.

The visiting room is like a large community rec center. At the far end closest to the prison itself is a latrine-like strip down area where we are examined thoroughly for any contraband that might be transported in various body cavities. Even when sitting in the visiting room, you cannot cross your legs in the shape of a four, only a seven. That is to prevent you from seizing the opportunity, while chatting amiably with a guest, to stuff something you aren't supposed to have between your legs.

As my pass was checked, I looked up. My mother was one of the few visitors who had been passed through. It was about 7:30 am. I didn't even think that she had to get her "tired old bones," as she would say, up out of bed, get my father his breakfast, get the car started on a frosty New England morning at 6:30 am to drive the 18 miles to wait in the waiting room of a prison to see her son. She had once driven to a different part of the same town to watch me graduate with honors and distinction from a prestigious prep school, graduate as well from a world-renowned college further on up the road, start my profession and have a beautiful grandson who now couldn't see his father, her son. What was she feeling? What were her thoughts? How incredible could a person be who would not only do this thing, quietly endure the shame and the humiliation and never complain, but never make me feel guilty, never criticize?

I didn't care at all, smothered in the stink of my world of anger and shame.

She smiled faintly and raised her arm to point out the table we had been assigned. I smiled not at all. I strode purposefully to the table without bringing the deck of cards, paper and pencil to play the gin rummy games my mother loved and over which we laughed and talked. This was a mother visiting her son in prison who brought with her all the good cheer and devotion that only those who know themselves can bring. None of that mattered to me. I was tired of appeals and rationalizations and keeping up hope and faith. I wanted her to know how much pain I was in because of the brand seared upon my heart innocently by my son.

About ten or fifteen steps away, she could sense my hostility.

I didn't kiss or embrace her. I sat down. I looked at her coldly and said as I heartlessly as I could: "You can visit me when I can see my son." I stood and walked back to where I had received my pass. I looked back for a second while I reentered the strip room to see my tired mother sitting ashen faced at the table not knowing what to do, hoping I would come back.

I walked back to my bunk, laid down, read a bit and went to sleep with my heart hardened and with a resolve to stick to this ludicrous plan uttered like the pathetic manifesto of the doomed revolutionary. I didn't call anyone. I wallowed in self-pity for the rest of the day and the next, attempting to remain ignorant of what a complete and worthless fool I was.

The next day at about 2:30 in the afternoon, that selfsame Officer P opened the heavy door to our area and boomed, "Mail call." I hopped off the bunk and joined the ten or twelve inmates anticipating this daily ritual.

I returned to my bunk with a small card, addressed to me, with my mother's writing on the cover. I have always been so proud of my mother's handwriting. She was an excellent student, trained by hardworking and compassionate nuns, and her graceful yet disciplined hand spoke of a time when she had so much before her.

I opened the card. On the cover was a small sailboat, gliding at a slight angle on a bright blue sea, hugging the shore. The painting was called "The Long Leg" by Edward Hopper.

I opened the card and read: "Dear Dave, I love you. Mom."

I smiled and wept silently for several minutes. Though even the memory of this may fade, I can feel the love in my heart that I felt right then because of this pure act of unconditional love. Instantly, the coldness imprisoning my heart and who I was at that time, melted. I knew my son would not forget me. I knew that this time in my life was as a shadow that passes across the sea for I had in me what this beautiful person had given me long ago and reminded me of still.

She remembered.