jail mail

What follows is one of many letters that a friend of mine receives from a prison inmate. The letters arrive with the words "STATE PRISON GENERATED MAIL" stamped across the envelope in bold print, which to both of us seems far more exotic than a postmark from say, Tanzania or Bhutan. I'm honoring my friend's request to stay mum about the whos and the whys of how this all came to be. But the writing is extraordinary, and the stories...well, unbelievably colorful considering they come from a place that I've always imagined to be black, white and grey---


I hope you’re doing well. It’s the kind of hope shipwrecked sailors have when they wash up on the shore of a foreign place. I can’t imagine what your life is like. I choose to believe that it is strange. Tell me so that I can live vicariously. Mine of course is Tim Burton strange. My clothes are blue and shabby but clean. A lot of the fellows here go to lengths in their dress as if it mattered; but I don’t care. My pants are worn and frayed, my white T-shirts stretched out and grey, and my dirty brown boots look something like a lumberjack’s at the end of his career. I continue to breathe, life isn’t so bad.

The cellie situation is vastly improved. Let’s recap: My good cellie, David Berlin, got a single cell, something I can’t begrudge, it’s so valuable. Privacy! Precious and impossible for me. Then, my San Diego homeboy, Jimmy Hatfield, a self-professed lunatic, moved in and immediately went lunatic, accused me of stealing his filthy plastic coffee cup and a 3 cent envelope. He roamed the yard while I was at work and told skeptical mutual acquaintances that I was robbing and persecuting him. After a month of dramatic chaos he moved out; and Bill Garrett moved in. He seemed like a good fellow even with his 6 boxes of legal problems. Before he moved in I advised him that I was an insomniac who read late into the night. “Fine,” Bill said, but within 48 hours it wasn’t fine and he took to sighing explosively from 9 p.m. until I turned out the light. He is a light sleeper and my page turning kept him awake; he suggested his health was beginning to fail thanks to sleep depravation. I’ve heard (or made up and have come to believe) that sighing for hours is unhealthy, but he didn’t believe me. Bill needs his sleep because he is suing every other agency in California for a variety of indignities foisted upon him. He’s suing the doctors here because they won’t give him amphetamine, which he thinks will cure his ADD. He has to get up at 5 a.m. (which truly didn’t bother me) to watch an obscure religious figure in order to gird himself for a day of typing, filing documents and looking up obscure case law that supports his insupportable positions. Bill is doing 35 to Life and is convinced his legal machinations will soon release him, a common delusion, though a necessary one. One night he asked me what kind of job he should get when he’s finally released—I suggested he should get a job breaking in other people’s shoes. An angry Bill said I wasn’t taking him seriously, and then he moved out. Then...I luckily met a goofy guy, nothing like me in countless ways, but has a sense of humor about himself, isn’t a casetalker, and he has a kitchen job that occupies most of his days; neither Bill nor Jimmy worked. However, my new cellie’s name is Booger. I don’t know why yet. What’s in a name? I don’t know. My occasional friend Rich is toying with his name. I got him a job in the library and then orchestrated his getting the head clerk job, which I turned down because I prefer to be the Overlord back in the stacks. Rich immediately went mad with power, something that happens to convicts often once they begin working closely with free staff or the police. A little Stockholm Syndrome I guess. Rich famously came out of the closet about 3 months into the job, surprising us all; he’d so efficiently portrayed himself as a S.F. stoner partial to women. We clash on the subject of his authority (he is only supposed to check out books and run the main computer) because he is lording his new (nonexistent) powers over the other librarians. Ultimately, I don’t care except that the rest of the crew complains to me, saying I’ve created a Frankenstein. Rich has embraced his feminine side to the point where he’s started taking hormones, and tells me this as a way of explaining his moodiness. A day later he very tersely tells me, “I wish you’d call me by my new name.” Puzzled, I say, “I’m sorry?” Too angrily for my tastes, he says, “My name is Feather. Everyone calls me that except you.” Three other librarians standing nearby, to a man, say things like, “Feather? Rich is Feather? Did you know that?” Rich then yelled at all of us, “My name is Feather!”—“Dude, seriously, you’ve been Rich to me for like a year. I had no idea.” Angrier yet, he hisses at me, “I’d just like you to give me the respect of going by my new name.” I am nonplussed and momentarily at a loss. Besides the librarians, a half dozen patrons are enjoying the wrangle. I finally say, “Alright, fine, I want you to call me Tumbleweed.” (which just popped out with little thought, but after a couple days with most of the library workers calling me Tumbleweed, I sort of like it); and then another worker, Wadley, an odd Muslim man who goes for weeks without talking to anyone, suddenly pipes up in his unusual Louisiana accent, “I wanna be Desert Hawk!”; and the 68 year old Mexican, Larry, yells, “My name is Boner!” a nickname he’s been trying to get us to call him for months. The upshot is that a lot of people here are now calling me Tumbleweed. You can call me whatever you want.