Among Murderers. Sabine Heinlein
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He often said, “Every person is beautiful until proven otherwise.” And for good measure he sometimes added, “Then they are still beautiful; I just can’t be around them.” Angel found Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which he read on a subway ad, so beautiful it brought tears to his eyes. He enunciated each word with the heed and force of a sculptor carving stone. It quickly became apparent to me that words mattered to Angel. For twenty-nine years words were all he had. Keeping his word had become as important to him as being able to read and write. Words could fill voids. They could be used to foster relationships. They could keep him busy on long, boring days and help him reach beyond prison walls. Angel discovered that he, too, could write poems, make jokes, and conquer the hearts of strangers. Words could win trust and impress people. With the help of words physical anger could be converted into aggressive enthusiasm. Best of all, words could serve as scaffolding, holding in place and obscuring a personality on the verge of collapse.
I came into this world not knowing anything, Angel’s poem “The Dance of Wonder” begins. Then I found wonder in taste, sound, and the exploration of my body. / But that did not last.
Together Angel and I explored the city of his youth. We rode the subway, went to Central Park, and walked along the banks of the Hudson River. One of our early trips led us to MoMA. Angel found Picasso’s Violin and Grapes “so beautiful, it gives me chills.” Gauguin’s island women reminded him of family, Richard Serra’s steel sculptures of “stuff” he had to clean in prison. At first, Angel always relied on me as his guide. When I took three steps to the right, he would hurry to follow suit. When I turned around, he turned around, too. This was unknown territory to him, and he approached it with an odd mixture of impulse and vigilance. When we passed a stone sculpture by Brancusi, he said, “I want to throw it in the water and ride it.” He then went on to examine parts of the escalator welding and its seams with his eyes and his hands. He had learned how to weld in prison and explained to me how he looked at things from an “engineering point of view.” He told me that out on the streets he was haunted by imperfections on license plates. Better than most people he knew how a perfect license plate should look. (After all, every New York State license plate has been made at the Auburn Correctional Facility, the prison where Angel served part of his sentence.)5
After quickly formulating some James Bond scenarios to account for a helicopter that hung from MoMA’s ceiling, Angel looked out the window to study the neoclassic architecture of an adjacent building. “If I had billions and billions of dollars,” he mused, “I would build a mile of columns in the desert as a symbol of strength.”
But, suddenly, Angel got tired. He yawned. It was already three o’clock in the afternoon, and he, ever fearful of delays, was eager to get back to the Castle.
This is the Angel I first got to know. He was an intriguing character. He was popular among his Quaker friends and among the Fortune Society’s employees. But some of the halfway house residents regarded him with suspicion. Some of the men ridiculed him behind his back. I, too, could feel a tension within him, a cord pulling in two directions. How could such a nice, funny guy have killed “a friend”? There must be more to it—a hidden side, a dark corner. There was a lot to explore. It was easy to talk to Angel because Angel did most of the talking. He seemed to take a certain pride in revealing even the smallest details of his life to me. For now, I decided to just let him talk.
CHAPTER TWO
At the Garden
Adam was released to the Castle at the end of April of 2007. He had served thirty-one of his twenty-five-years-to-life sentence for two counts of second-degree murder, robbery, conspiracy, and an attempted escape. I met Adam at the Albany advocacy day in May where I had also met Angel. What I first noticed about him was his meticulous attire. Fashion had always been very important to Adam. A seventy-two-year-old Muslim convert, Adam wore classic secondhand wool sweaters and wire-rim glasses that complemented the color of his silver beard. His wardrobe showed off his athletic build and broad shoulders. His graceful posture, the golden ring on his right hand, and his gray beard and glasses made him look wise and dignified. When he was handed the microphone, he spoke with gravity, confidence, and strength. Because of his aura it took me a few weeks to approach him. When I finally did, I was surprised to find a man who laughed easily and readily shared his sorrows and pain.
Adam experienced his surroundings with unusual intensity. He was aware of every step he took and wondered constantly whether the people around him were as aware of him as he was of them. Adam and I were worlds apart, yet I could relate to him. Aside from the glaringly obvious differences, Adam and I shared certain qualities. We were connected by a state of constant alertness. We both liked to “analyze.” Our vigilance protected us and kept us in check, but it also made us slightly neurotic. We moved on thin ice.
Adam’s observational skills had benefited him in prison. They gave him something to do, kept him safe, and allowed him to teach prisoners in need of his various modes of introspection. In prison he established “coping programs for lifers,” people who, like him, served indeterminate life sentences or who were sentenced to life without parole. His classes addressed the needs of prisoners that the prison system neglected: How does an individual who was sentenced for murder come to terms with his legacy? And how does he go about the possibility that he might have to spend the rest of his life locked up in a vacuum while outside a world is unfolding, becoming more and more foreign each passing year? Can you recover and be reformed when you might have to spend the rest of your life in prison? No one else seemed to discuss these questions.
Adam could feel an ever-increasing void. He was on his own. Prison threatened to draw him into the big, black hole of timelessness and despair. He decided to deal with it himself. Adam believed that there was a way an individual could actually rehabilitate himself. No, not could—it was imperative. That was his responsibility after having committed such horrendous crimes.
One of the first things Adam told me was that he had come to terms with the fact that he would die in prison, and now he missed his “family,” his fellow lifers. “I can do this. I can do this till I die,” Adam said about prison. “This is no big thing to me.” That was his mantra. He kept a scrapbook in which he pasted articles and pictures of places lost, of places he wasn’t able to visit. The outside world was no more than a figment of his imagination—hope and hopelessness reduced to strips of paper and glue.
When Adam finally did return to the outside world, he was stunned. He wanted to see as much as he could, lamenting that he didn’t have much time left. He had to hurry because of his looming death.
During the two years that followed Adam’s release, we embarked on excursions in Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens. One of our early journeys led us to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which Adam remembered from his childhood. When he was eleven or twelve, he would walk or take the trolley from his home in Bedford-Stuyvesant to the park. He had been a loner as a child and always loved nature, trees, flowers, and birds. Sometimes in the summer he would go to the Garden to sleep under a tree. He didn’t know where his love of nature came from; all he knew was that none of the other kids came along.
When I arrived at the Botanic Garden at 10:30 on a Sunday morning, Adam was sitting on a bench across the street on Eastern Parkway. As always, he wore matching clothes and laughed happily when we said, “Hi.”
At the Steinhardt Conservatory, a greenhouse complex that simulates different climates and vegetation from around the world, Adam touched everything he saw. The fruits on the cactus in the Desert Pavilion looked like little strawberries. Adam muttered, reading the plaques aloud. It was almost as if I weren’t there.
“Endurance and avoidance,” he read, referring to the characteristics of cacti. “The survival of the fittest . . . Hmm.” Adam always hummed when making space for more thoughts to come.
He admired the Mohintli cactus’s slender, velvety leaves and its bright orange blossoms. Touching the hairbrush cactus, he yelped, “Ouch!” Then he laughed, giving me a quick glance.
In the Tropical Pavilion he wondered about the Golden Eye Grass, an inconspicuous-looking plant with a poetic-sounding name. And how different mahogany looked from the outside than from the inside! One couldn’t