PAROLE

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I want to tell you a story.

A while back, a long while, I had finished up 15 months in CB 8, an Isolation Unit in Florence. Two guards came out to the exercise dog kennel, cuffed me up and took me down to a guard in a tie at a desk. He checked off a few boxes, told me that I was done here and that I'd finish up my bit in Mojave unit, a high medium near Auga Prietta. I would see the parole board in five to six months, contingent upon the absence of any further infractions.

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"Well, that'll do 'er," he said.

I went up to the parole board some seven months later. My mom, dad and my wife all made the drive to show that unlike most I had a support system, and maybe to reach inside me to encourage any last hope still hanging 'round.

The Board was a group of sullen pedestrians chained to statutes, numbers, and the shelf life of felons. They were short on listening, long on a hundred ways to say "denied".

I went up for parole one, two, three times. Each time they moved papers around, looked up at my visitors at the appropriate moments. But it was a done deal as they drug out nine years of my write-ups, verdicts from court proceedings, I&I investigations, gang involvement, descriptive notes of my wife's Q&A while trying to visit me, necessary strip search of wife and a female friend, violence, drug abuse, and a Class 3 felony of promoting prison contraband. Needless to say, it was overkill, but it did prevent any further outside intrusions from my diminished support system.

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Six months later I went before them again. The faces changed but they were all too familiar and my wife seemed almost relieved when they apologetically concurred: "No".

It was in those late afternoons when walking back to my bunk that I noticed the world outside had become abstract, a satellite speeding round a planet I had compartmentalized, at least the friends, family, and relationships, and only now did I accept the miscue, that I held no key back in.

It takes what it takes. For some, I could guess a year might do it; for others, well, maybe they'd never fall off the edge of the world. It didn't matter which world, just that most flipped a switch.

For me it was just a sign of things to come.

Another Christmas, a riot, heroin, more. My body was tight. If I took the edge off, it wasn't enough - I felt as if my ligaments and calf muscles had been stuffed inside a smaller frame.

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A man, a friend, had run up his tab with the border brothers. Maybe he had lost his alarm for trepidation, danger. He stood 6 foot something', but wasn't a bully. Anyhow they moved him back up to the walls, people droppin' kites, C/Is, rats - it never stopped.

I'd had my share. It was just one more step backwards into a vacuum that had no end.

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Then an exit appeared like I was fucking Houdini.

The loudspeakers draped on poles crackled on a Friday morning just after count. "Sedlmayr 63888 report to Parole Board in Re-class building on North Yard".

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Shit. I had just fixed and was cleaning the outfit when the ese keeping watch whistled: cell block cop was coming my way to give me a pass to get across the yard. I was good n' loaded. He wished me good luck. I washed my face, threw on a work-shirt and lit up a cigarette as I walked slow, keeping to the right of a crowd.

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Jesus, the chow hall smelled like rotten vegetables.

I made eye contact with men I knew, went through a quick pat down, wand, knocked on the door, another wand.

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"Open your mouth," he spoke, "Stick out your tongue. You just wake up?"

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"Yup," I said, "Just woke up."

It was a good hour and some before they called my number. I slowly took a chair. I was dead calm, I didn't give a shit. No one there to disappoint, I laughed quietly, it was all a charade. Fixed.

I answered the same questions.

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"Can you speak up?"

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"Oh yea, sure, sure."

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I couldn't find one authentic word in them or in me. It was static, like on a little AM radio from when I was a kid.

I didn't tell them how sorry I was for this, that and the other thing. I wasn't, not to this day. When I stepped out for the final approach, all I thought about was that I had a ball of that shit in the broken light fixture on my run.

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It took less than 10 minutes this time.

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"Shit," the guard laughed, "Whatcha do to tick them off?"

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"Nothin', Boss, whole bunch of nothing."

 

He stopped laughing and stood near me as they read their decision. It took a second to get inside my head.

 

"You have served over 85% of both your sentences and we grant you parole. Of course, its intensive."

 

"Of course," I mumbled back, but I felt nothing, no different, and that was why I was ready to go. I understood that much.

I was asked to sign some paperwork and I could almost feel the empty vessel that had carried a child's body and now gave it up to the darkening of the light for good.