Among Murderers. Sabine Heinlein
Читать онлайн книгу.
and failed to consider its possible consequences; he was complicit in the guards’ deaths. And instead of facing up to what he had done, he ran from the law until he was captured. There were worlds between Adam’s thinking now and his attitude thirty years ago. Now he constantly expressed his shame, guilt, and remorse and his wish to be able to turn around and change his past. Somewhere along the line he must have learned to face his transgression. What he had yet to face was freedom, the strange bright world he entered after thirty-one years in the dark.
CHAPTER THREE
Street Code
On May 25, 2007, Bruce was released to the Castle. He met Angel and Adam at the first Morning Focus meeting, where residents discuss their plans for the day. It was difficult not to notice the new resident. Bruce was a towering six-foot-six, dark-skinned man with a clean-shaven head. At fifty-two, he had hands the size of dinner plates and heavily scarred wrists from an old childhood burn injury. He wore big, square glasses with bulky frames and pop-bottle lenses that were given to him in prison. His outdated-looking glasses gave him away to anyone familiar with New York’s reentry scene: watch out, here comes an ex-felon.
The glasses were courtesy of Corcraft, an institution within New York’s correctional facilities that produces furniture and apparel—and glasses—for government agencies, schools, and universities. New York’s biggest “rehabilitative” machine, Corcraft claims to “[keep] inmates employed to help prevent disruption” and “[teach] work disciplines and job skills,” which, hopefully, come in handy once they are released.1 Corcraft pays prisoners less than one dollar an hour.
When Bruce was released, Angel had already discovered that he could replace his prison glasses with stylish frames from Duane Reade or Rite Aid. Bruce, however, was stuck with his prison glasses for the time being because he was nearsighted and needed to save up before he could afford a new pair.
Bruce, Angel, and Adam began to hang out because they could relate to each other. They had no need to ask one another what they were in for. Murder, clearly. There is hardly any other crime that gets you twenty-four years and up. Combined, they had spent eighty-four years behind bars, more than an average lifetime.
Bruce, Adam, and Angel didn’t feel the need to talk to each other about their crimes. Of course, the men knew the basics about one another: Bruce shot a stranger in an argument, twenty-four years; Angel killed a friend in an argument, twenty-nine years; and Adam was involved in a robbery, in the course of which two security guards got killed, thirty-one years. But they didn’t discuss the specifics, the reasons why they committed the crime in the first place, its consequences, or the feelings that came with these traumatic events.
“That’s one thing [prisoners] don’t discuss: the crime,” Bruce told me right at the start. “If you got twenty to life, then they know you had to have a homicide. Once they find out how much time you got, people know.” He explained that prisoners are snitches. In prison you had to constantly watch your back. The rule held that if you were provoked, you had to put your foot down. “You gotta come in and set your territory,” Bruce said. “It’s gotta be known that Bruce will fight.” This attitude didn’t just change overnight, and hints of it remain to this day. Inside himself, Bruce was still a prisoner. How could he be expected to change from one day to the next?
The trials and tribulations of the new world seemed a bit less threatening when they were approached together. Adam and Angel quickly applied their newly gained knowledge, while Bruce trotted along with suspicion. On his second day out they took Bruce to Fairway to show him how to shop.
Number one: To avoid confusion and terror, you have to make a shopping list. Update your list during the week. Number two: Look for store brands first. Store brands are cheaper and narrow your choices. Number three: To save money, look for value packs of soap and toilet paper. Number four: Don’t think too much. Just grab something and head to the register.
Then Adam and Angel put their next lesson into practice: the subway. They got Bruce a MetroCard and showed him how to slide it at the turnstile. At first Bruce didn’t get it. He only knew tokens and kept sliding the card the wrong way, first too slow, then too fast. He felt stupid and hoped that no one was watching. He was relieved when he finally made it to the subway. But this was where the trouble really began. What were all those people staring at, and why did they brush him on their way out? Bruce felt “disrespected” and provoked. In prison there was no reason to stare unless you intended to start a fight. The same was true for physical contact. If your safety mattered to you, you simply didn’t bump into others. In prison you automatically made space for people approaching you, but in the subway there never seemed to be enough space. The men often felt provoked by their fellow riders. Yes, this would take some getting used to.
Once they had gathered strength again, they headed to the bank to try out Angel’s new ATM card.
“We were like the three stooges,” Angel told me, who, unlike Bruce, was rather amused by his daily mishaps. “Bruce said, ‘I’ll be the muscle.’ Adam was the bagman—the one who carries the money. And I’m the computer guy. I’ve never touched an ATM, though. But Bruce had seen his sister use her ATM card. Well . . . and Adam doesn’t know a damn thing.”
Angel couldn’t stop chuckling while telling the story. He described how the three of them stood outside the bank scratching their asses trying to figure out which way to insert the card to open the door. When they finally made it into the lobby, they struggled to put the card into the machine. They tried it in all possible directions to no avail. Their attention was so focused on the slot that it took them a while to realize that the machine was broken. “Look! It says on the screen that it’s out of order.” Exhausted, the three went back to the Castle without having withdrawn any money.
It is ironic that the men’s support system could land them back in prison. In New York, parolees are not allowed to associate with other people with criminal records. The argument behind this rule is that this association may be detrimental to their rehabilitation. A parole officer told me: “Parolees palling around with each other leads to gangs, robberies, conspiracies, and ultimately back to prison. That’s the idea.”
Angel repeatedly reminded Bruce and Adam that if either one of them were ever hit by a car, he would go to the nearest telephone booth, place an anonymous 911 call, and then flee the scene. This was not only to avoid association with another ex-felon but also to avoid police contact (another parole stipulation).
Like their relationships in prison, in which an unannounced transfer could tear them apart, the men’s new friendships had an impermanent quality to them. Friendship provided support where support was needed and saturated their idleness—the time they spent without women and work and without a real home. But it was also a result of desperation and the assumption—their own and society’s—that three murderers must relate to each other, no matter their differences.
When I would come to the Castle to meet Angel, Bruce usually hovered in the background like a ghost. Not a scary ghost, just restless and wary, as if sentenced to relive his past eternally. Eventually, at the end of the summer of 2007, Bruce and I started talking. Our first real conversations were slow and awkward. We would sit down in the Castle’s backyard, and Bruce would put my digital recorder in his shirt pocket. He folded his large hands and waited for me to ask questions. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk. It seemed as if he “couldn’t find the zipper of his prison armor”—an expression Adam had coined to describe the isolation former prisoners tend to experience in “our” world.
At a coffee shop, over doughnuts and tea, Bruce quickly admitted what he had done. Then he was silent again. Twenty-four years ago he and a girlfriend went to the liquor store to buy something to drink. His friend went ahead while he looked for parking. When he entered the store, he saw that a stranger had cornered his friend and was making sexual advances. The girl was screaming hysterically. Bruce separated the two, and his friend left the store. Bruce and the stranger began to fight, and Bruce shot him. He aimed for his shoulder but hit his chest. “Tyrone Davis,” Bruce said. “I always call my victim by his name.” That was it.
I was relieved when Bruce offered to give me his trial transcript. Between two pieces