Riverine (19 page)

When my uncle walked into the bedroom, he gave the baby’s toes a soft pinch. “Hey, kiddo. You’re going to be all right.”

“Do we go now?” I said.

“We go now.”

I carried the baby into the living room and shifted him from my arms into his mother’s. Back in the squad car, I asked my uncle what he said to the couple.

“Not much. They needed someone to listen.”

I looked out the window and tried not to cry over the fact that I had soothed a stranger’s baby. It confirmed what I already knew—I wasn’t cut out for my uncle’s job. I was too emotional and prone to overthinking. The reality of the world was too much a shock for me. The child’s tiny fingers curled around my finger, his white walls that wanted for pale yellow or blue—that was too close. I thought I would be better off looking at it all from a slightly greater distance.

“Now let’s do the fun part,” Uncle Dave said.

“What’s that?”

“Get free doughnuts, of course.”

Uncle Pat and Mike Tyson were freed the same year, both having served less than four years of their original sentences. It was decided in an appeal that Uncle Pat’s acts had been justifiably committed in self-defense, a claim previously disallowed as a defense in his trial, and thus the sentence was overturned. Tyson, by all appearances, got out on good time and good attorneys.

After Tyson’s release, he racked up insurmountable debts, his wealth evaporating in a cloud of smoke shaped like Vegas, and eventually wrote an autobiography called
Undisputed Truth
. As if anything could be considered absolutely true, much less undisputed. The Associated Press reported that Tyson said that while he was incarcerated, “I was having so much sex [with female prison visitors and a prison drug counselor during his three-year prison stint in the ’90s] that I was too tired to even go to the gym and work out.” The AP reported, too, that since his release, Tyson “constantly warns that he’s not far from slipping off the edge, or slipping back into a strip club to party with drugs and women. ‘Sometimes I just fantasize about blowing somebody’s brains out so I can go to prison for the rest of my life,’ he writes. ‘Working on this book makes me think that my whole life has been a joke.’” Kid Dynamite was about to implode. The Baddest Man on the Planet, they called him. Another self-fulfilling prophecy?

I remember the day Uncle Pat was released from prison. Though they had overturned the ruling, they could not give back the time, nor erase it from his record. I was there with my mom to pick him up. He emerged from the razor-wired gates carrying a wrinkled paper bag. His clothes sagged from his body; his long beard, graying and frayed, grazed his chest. The sun on his face illuminated a man unconvinced of reality. Maybe a place is a turnstile that you pass through on the way to somewhere else. A small token for each ride is dropped into a narrow slot. Over a lifetime, a fortune piles up in the meter. The price of a prison sentence, exorbitant, no matter how long.

Postincarceration, Uncle Pat’s depressive states worsened, and he isolated himself from people by staying in his apartment most of the time. My brother and I would walk over from the Boys and Girls Club, where, as teenagers, we sometimes spent our summer days while my mother worked, to visit him, but we would quickly feel trapped in the tiny studio and wouldn’t stay long.

During my first year of college, Uncle Pat met a woman online. She lived in Texas, and he asked me to write her an e-mail that would vouch for him in anticipation of their first face-to-face visit—to ensure he wasn’t an ax murderer, I assume, but I suppose that was relative. If the bullet he’d hit his boss with had lodged a few inches to the north or south, everything would have been different. He would have been categorized as a murderer, like Corey. This difference, while having vastly different consequences for the victims, struck me as also a rather small difference with respect to the violent act itself. Was there much difference, then, in the
person
who had almost killed someone versus the one whose act had resulted in death? Measuring out the wrongness, the
badness
, of a person, was therefore complicated. Nonetheless, Uncle Pat was happier than I’d seen him in years, which left me little choice but to agree to help. Regardless of the gravity of his near-murderous act, be it self-defense or not, I believed he was still good enough to deserve love. Within the space of two paragraphs, I talked him up as kind, loving, good-hearted, funny, and well-intentioned. I wrote nothing that was not true, then sent it off to her using the e-mail address he’d given me. When he set off to marry her, a road trip with a wedding waiting at the end, it was with fanfare elicited by his enthusiasm. We crossed our fingers and waved him off, sharing his hope. But a week later he came back alone, and we never spoke of it again.

A few times, I went over to clean his first-floor apartment. It was sparsely furnished with an alcove that held a daybed that doubled as his sofa. The space was small enough to discourage inviting visitors over. I did my best not to show a physical reaction to the stench that had built up inside, tried to make it a bit homier for him by hanging a few pictures on the wall and ordering his canisters by size on the short length of kitchen countertop. I coated his counters with 409 and scrubbed them clean. I removed the yellowed light fixtures, dumping dozens of bugs into the trash, and wiped them clean with Windex and paper towels. After another surgery, I came to change the dressings on his scars and examine his stitches for infection, even as my stomach threatened to empty itself onto his kitchen floor. Not long after, my aunt found Uncle Pat face down in his apartment, unconscious and nearly dead. He had gone and done it, finally, we thought. At the hospital, his stomach was pumped, the liquid mass of dissolved pills extracted from his body through a thin tube. Death, redacted.

In college, when I still couldn’t shake my feelings for Corey, I had written him a letter. I was sure that some part of me had been locked up with him. I heard his voice in his reply. At first, his words were a deep comfort and a reminder of the boy who had always taken care of me, tending to me as if I were a fickle houseplant. But as the months of school passed, he became guarded. He lectured me about the actual ins and outs of prison gangs as I learned about them, theoretically, in my criminal justice classes. I drew the symbols of a dozen prison gangs on my midterm exam and wondered whether Corey had any of them tattooed onto his skin. In addition to the prison education he was getting, he was taking college classes in anthropology and sociology. At times he was more open, relaying to me what was required of a person in prison and how survival sacrifices humanity and reason. How there was so little light, so little sustenance. Almost no growth save for what he could create for himself. He told me he was fighting, building muscle, boxing, making a name for himself. What did that mean? A reputation that people would fear? He had no choice, he said; he was preparing for the long haul of a lifetime in prison. Nineteen to ninety, if he lived that long. Part of me hoped he would, and part of me hoped he wouldn’t. I couldn’t imagine him at seventy with the onset of Alzheimer’s, which ran in his family, still sitting in a prison cell five decades after the bad in him had run dry. “That’s justice,” he’d say. “That’s what I deserve.” At some point, the reputation he made for himself would have to be stronger than his physical body. It would have to protect him.

Corey asked me about how I found an address to which to send that first tentative letter. In turn, I told him about my search on the Internet and the e-mail I had sent to the correctional facility staff late one night from my college dorm room, in hopes of obtaining a mailing address for him. I told him that he had been my first love, a confession made on paper out of desperation—if I could admit to that, I thought, I could let it go. Be happy with a real boy in the real world. Or just be me, something that rarely occurred to me as a pursuit worthy in and of itself. He did not acknowledge my confession in his reply. Eventually, I became a little bit scared of who he had become and stopped writing, only to start again and again, year after year, with the same unsent letter:
Dear Corey, I’ve been thinking of you. I’ve never stopped. Do you think of me?
It was the only thing left to say, some catch of water in my throat that I could not clear.

That same year that I wrote Corey for months, I paid a man to tattoo my back. I paid another man to pierce my belly button as I lay on the floor of my dorm room. On a date with a guy named Tony, we had the cartilage of our ears pierced. There was some comfort in this control. Some relief in knowing exactly how and where pain was inflicted on my body.
Here
, I might have said.
Right here, this is where it hurts. This is why. In three days, I’ll feel nothing
.

After prison, Mike Tyson got a tattoo on his face while he was partying in Vegas. The tattoo, scrawling wisps that lap at the edges of his left eye like black flames, is a symbol of the Maori tribe. When he was asked what he thought immediately after getting it, he said it made him look “sexy.” He acknowledged that he had no knowledge of its meaning at the time.

After prison, Mike Tyson returned to organized violence and finally did fight Evander Holyfield. In the first fight, Holyfield achieved a technical knockout after seven rounds. In the second fight, Holyfield head-butted Tyson, who was disqualified when he bit off a chunk of Holyfield’s ear in retaliation. The media outcry after that offense was louder than the one after his rape conviction. Some types of violence can still shock us. After prison, after biting Holyfield’s ear, Tyson lost and regained his boxing license. He made a movie and apologized to Holyfield on
Oprah
. If only we all had the world’s ear for the making of our amends. “It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know,” writes Andrew Solomon in a
New Yorker
article. Mike Tyson had done bad things. So had Corey, so had Uncle Pat. I didn’t hate any of them.

Violence happens in a negative plane, like a dug hole. First you’re digging, aware of the shovel in your hands, aware of the pressure as the dirt flies behind you, and then you’re simply standing over a hole, black and gaping like a foul mouth. Regret is fill dirt, settling and settling, always leaving a dimpled impression—one that never quite smoothens—in the topsoil. Domestic abusers will apologize, swear up and down to never do it again, swear they didn’t know what they were thinking. Inmates who have had long enough to think will walk themselves through their crime, again and again, not only to understand it but to pinpoint the moment that brought them to prison, to imagine the inertia of the decision that would wreck lives landing instead a fraction to the left or right, avoiding the knockout punch with a sidestep. But instead, this happened, then this happened. Then suddenly, everything went awry. Cut straight to the bruised and bloodied aftermath.

I had to give up on Corey. Though he was always in the back of my mind, I had to live my life. I moved on without fully letting him go. There were many boyfriends over the years, and I wasn’t picky about who they were. Men were distractions for me, placeholders. A way to keep me from being alone with my thoughts, a way to keep the darkness of my mind at bay.

Just after college, I was living back home, sharing a little apartment with Jo, my closest high school girlfriend, while I was working on a political campaign. I fell blindly in love with the idea of a man named Steve. Politics is a training in optimism; you learn to inflate positive qualities to make up for negative ones. The relationship lasted four months. And during that time, I was enamored of Steve’s vision of his future self, which he described to me in detail, as if it were part of a stump speech, over screwdrivers that he’d sweet-talked the bartender into giving him for free. Steve was starting a construction business. He was making a website. He was an
entrepreneur
. He complimented me generously, and in return I was going to help him connect his current self with his future self. He could get to his construction jobs if only he had a car, so I loaned him money to buy one. He could call me more often and line up more construction work if only he had a cell phone, so I added him to my cell phone plan for a mere $9.99 a month, which he would repay to me in cash on the fifteenth of each month. I liked to help where I could, I told myself. A few weeks later, he lost the car he had purchased with the money I’d loaned him; he put the car up as collateral for a title loan, the sum of which he squandered in less than two hours at an Indiana casino. As an apology, he took me on a date to a Vietnamese restaurant in Chicago. I drove. When we left without paying, a wave of shocking regret jolted through me as we hauled away in my Mustang like Bonnie and Clyde. I did not recognize my own eyes in the rearview mirror. Shaking, I dropped him off at his mother’s house. I changed my phone number and locked my bedroom door, donned sunglasses and poured a bottomless gin martini.
Thank goodness I never slept with him
, I thought, as if that mattered.
Thank goodness I had only needed his feigned affection
. Like Harlow’s monkeys, I would have curled up with a wire doll if I thought it would love me back.

The guilt was unbearable. The next day, I mailed cash to the restaurant, along with an anonymous note that explained in rough terms that I had forgotten to pay. Steve came to my apartment the following Saturday and pounded on the door for a full twenty minutes. I sat inside with the lights off and the blinds drawn tight, holding a flashlight over my phone bill. He had racked up a debt of $863 in four weeks. A very deep hole.

After prison, Uncle Pat’s freedom was relative. He had difficulty obtaining a job due to his felony conviction and mental health state. Whatever issues he’d had before prison had been exacerbated by his four-year stint. After the attempted suicide, Uncle Pat entered a period of reentry and recovery, respectively, names for the new shape of his life. He determined that a move to Michigan, away from people, would suit him well. He planned to breed rottweilers and write a screenplay. He planned to watch the snow pile up around him, whitewash for a new future. He would buy a tractor to mow a big lawn to stretch out the summers. But even a new life is a kind of prison after prison. In Michigan, he began composing lengthy e-mails to members of our family, berating me and my cousins and aunts for not making the six-hour trip to visit him frequently enough. It was unfair to his nieces and nephews—we were starting our own lives and could not, in our early twenties, save his too. He called me once and told me that he had been used by the government for information that only he had about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. When I raised concerns to my mother, she conferred with her sisters. But ultimately, nothing happened. No one could force him to get help. I wasn’t even sure they recognized it as mental illness. They resisted such labels, tending to sweep undesirable facts of life under the rug. Meanwhile, Uncle Pat entered long, intermittent periods of no contact, going silent and electronically dark for months on end. Sometimes, my mother and aunts persuaded neighbors or friends who lived within driving distance to check on him. They held their breath through the long winters, awaiting the reports. Alive? Well? Alive, at least?