Once in its grip, the system tries to break them. Half-broken black men, hip-to-it brown men, not buying it Asians and rebellious usually stupid white ones. And the system knows how to break them, break them further. So when they get out of it, if they get out, there’s little ways to go but back in. And that’s how the system wants it. Think not?
Keep a man in solitary long enough it’ll drive him nuts. Even the toughest of them. Take away the human contact, even as cheap and violent and brutal as it sometimes is and you take away reason to live. And it works that way on most, but not all.
There are ones, the rare ones who are tougher than the system because they know who they are and how it truly is and they will not give in and let themselves be eradicated. They understand the game, play it when they want, and always know it’s a game of someone else’s devising. It’s the system’s game.
And there’s only one way to survive it, the game set up to kill you, and that’s to know the very nature of the game, that they hold all the cards, and you can only hope to outthink them. Not an easy trick to do, but sometimes it can be done. Humans are nothing in not adaptable.
“Give us some time,” my friend says to the guard. Just a simple request. The guard picks up on something, gives him a look.
“Give us some time…” the guard repeats, leaving it open ended.
My friend picks up on that.
“Please, give us some time,” says my friend with a smile. “Is that what you want? You want me to say “please”? I got no problem with that. Please, can we have some more time? That’s easy for me to say,” he says to the guard, smiling all the while, but I hear a lot else in his voice. I wonder if the guard does?
The guard acquiesces and after all that was the objective.
My friend spent, funny word “spent,” 20 years in a “no-contact”, isolated cell, outside yard – bigger cage actually – for one-hour a day for exercise, as the punishment phase of his death sentence, before moving to a much better condition after an evidentiary hearing putting a whole new picture on his case. Visitors have person-to-person contact, he has regular phone use (monitored of course) and “privileges” for what he can have in his cell and buy from the outside. This is a vast improvement to the punishment routine.
Nevertheless prison is prison, an 8 x 10 cell is a small place and you live by someone else’s rules. No different than slavery. It’s a reality most of us would never want and fear to get. Taking away a person’s freedom is close to taking away a person’s life and is sometimes only the prelude.
My friend understands the system because he’s seen it up close for 35 years in prison and the first 20 years before that was no picnic. Life was foster homes, some okay, some not, juvenile jails and then graduation to a notorious state prison named after an early saint. That’s how life goes for some people. The usual gory scenario of martyrdom for old Saint Quentin, and the prison bearing his name for my friend.
But he’s managed to stay alive for more than 50 years now in a system that’s been trying to kill him since he came into this world from a mother addicted to crack and a broken father who could offer him and his younger sibs not much, only the option to fend for themselves, if they could. Hell of a legacy.
But my friend learned how to do it and is still doing it. Sometimes all there is to hold onto is survival.
My friend learned how to survive the system when he got turned on to Buddhism and meditation, not the usual jailhouse religious conversion scene. Besides, Buddhism doesn’t operate on a religious or faith-bound belief, certainly not here in the West. It operates on a practical, observable and always questioning basis. There is no Buddhism without the practice of meditation and that is the platform from which to watch and observe, in detail, one’s life as it is happening, or in Buddhist-talk, unfolding.
It’s a different way of looking at and understanding and dealing with the world than all the previous Western belief systems, but has taken hold here for some decades now. Its pragmatism, lack of dogma, simple application and encouragement to question all things can be attractive. At least to some.
Becoming Buddhist has in a sense liberated my friend, though I think we’d both agree to let that all go if he could just get out of that goddamn place and live a normal life.
Of course he’d remain a Buddhist anyway because that’s what he became and that’s who he is. For that matter he’s an ordained Bodhisattva, a person of deep vision, a dedication and commitment to life-affirming actions in the world, and a teacher for others, which is what he has become.
His books, written in prison, teach what he’s learned, you could say the hard way. His books give you life and discovery in all the unusual places. His books and his life in prison are the ways of this Bodhisattva.
But he’s more than that. Much more. He’s a man. A man in prison for a crime he didn’t do. The system pretty much knows this and isn’t in a hurry to let him go. For one thing, he knows too much. But he’s not interested in telling those stories. He’s got other things on his mind. He wants to talk to people about liberation, about finding freedom in the least looked places.
Life is a crazy deal, from birth to death. Who you get thrown around with, where you grow up, how you grow up, it’s just a crapshoot of fate. No?
The most interesting thing is what a person does with it. All of it. All of the stupid shit. Born any other place, of any other people in any circumstances we’d be different people, with different beliefs and all that goes along with that.
My friend lives and writes in a Death Row prison cell and connects from that solitary place with tens of thousands of people. How many of us can say that? He is listened to and he is heard.
To me he’s just my friend and that’s the way it’s always been. We connected through words, his a poem in a magazine and then some letters between us. Words. Our words on pages connecting us, people from very different worlds. And yet not. Two people connected by some sort of thing that recognizes value in the other. Or something like that.
Life is so strange and our meetings and encounters seem random and unconnected, but who’s to know? Once in a while you meet people who can teach you about life, it’s genuine and you know that at some deep level. Maybe the trajectory of your life has come to this moment and these relationships which are your life. Maybe that’s a phrase I thought I’d never use and probably shouldn’t.
Which brings me back to the system. Remember the system? That’s the thing that’s got us all by the shorts. The system sets the rules of the game. You think you can outfox it, but you can’t. It’s too many moves beyond. You don’t have to take my word for it. Look around you. How many people do you see that are free? Truly free. That’s what I thought.
The system is geared to beat you down or make you comply with it, and even get you thinking you’re making your own choices. But it knows what you’re thinking and what you want before you do. What do you think advertising is all about? And it’s all advertising. Just about whatever you see and have been led to think is true is merely advertising. The trick I to see that.
The system can only be out gamed, out played when it’s seen through. That’s the only way out. How that happens is quite a mystery, but it does.
My friend in San Quentin has a bead on it. It could be the very reason they keep him there. But the game’s not over yet.
To be continued…
Will – I am rarely tempted to re-read an article – but what you’ve said here deserves thought, mulling kind of thought.
I will read it again. And maybe again. Thank you for telling the truth.