The young man, who had been staring apprehensively toward the hotel, turned to him, his face once more full of strain, and said, “I’m sorry… I was preoccupied. You said something about this place? I don’t think I understood you.”
A breeze drifted the grit that had accumulated on the table top, rearranging the grains into a slender crescent of glittering specks, and though some small portion of the colonel’s mind resisted the idea, he imagined a similar shift must have happened inside him, that all the grit of his desultory past had been realigned to suit a larger purpose. He wanted to deny this, but to do so he would have had to deny the feeling that then engulfed him. A feeling of calm satisfaction, of happiness. He had an urge to confide in the young man, to explain the simplicity of the thing it had taken him nearly twenty years to learn; but he realized that the years were necessary to the lesson.
“It’s not important,” he said, patting the young man’s hand. “It is enough to understand that whatever comes to you in life, you will always find a welcome here.”
JAILWISE
During my adolescence, despite being exposed to television documentaries depicting men wearing ponytails and wife-beater undershirts, their weightlifter chests and arms spangled with homemade tattoos, any mention of prison always brought to my mind a less vainglorious type of criminal, an image derived, I believe, from characters in the old black-and-white movies that prior to the advent of the infomercial tended to dominate television’s early morning hours: smallish, gray-looking men in work shirts and loose-fitting trousers, miscreants who—although oppressed by screws and wardens, victimized by their fellows—managed to express, however inarticulately, a noble endurance, a working-class vitality and poetry of soul. Without understanding anything else, I seemed to understand their crippled honor, their Boy Scout cunning, their Legionnaire’s willingness to suffer. I felt in them the workings of a desolate beatitude, some secret virtue of insularity whose potentials they alone had mastered.
Nothing in my experience intimated that such men now or ever had existed as other than a fiction, yet they embodied a principle of anonymity that spoke to my sense of style, and so when I entered the carceral system at the age of fifteen, my parents having concluded that a night or two spent in the county lock-up might address my aggressive tendencies, I strived to present a sturdy, unglamorous presence among the mesomorphs, the skin artists, and the flamboyantly hirsute. During my first real stretch, a deuce in minimum security for Possession with Intent, I lifted no weights and adopted no yard name. Though I wore a serpent-shaped earring, a gift from a girlfriend, I indulged in no further self-decoration. I neither swaggered nor skulked, but went from cell to dining hall to prison job with the unhurried deliberation of an ordinary man engaged upon his daily business. I resisted, thanks to my hostility toward every sort of authority, therapy sessions designed to turn me inward, to coerce an analysis of the family difficulties and street pressures that had nourished my criminality, with the idea of liberating me from my past. At the time I might have told you that my resistance was instinctive. Psychiatrists and therapy: these things were articles of fashion, not implements of truth, and my spirit rejected them as impure. Today, however, years down the line from those immature judgments, I suspect my reaction was partially inspired by a sense that any revelation yielded by therapy would be irrelevant to the question, and that I already knew in my bones what I now know pit to pole: I was born to this order.
While I was down in Vacaville, two years into a nickel for armed robbery, I committed the offense that got me sent to Diamond Bar. What happened was this. They had me out spraying the bean fields, dressed in protective gear so full of holes that each day when I was done, I would puke and sweat as if I had been granted a reprieve and yanked from the gas chamber with my lungs half full of death. One afternoon I was sitting by the access road, goggles around my neck, tank of poison strapped to my shoulders, waiting for the prison truck, when an old Volkswagen bus rattled up from the main gate and stopped. On the sliding panel was a detail from a still life by Caravaggio, a rotting pear lopsided on a silver tray; on the passenger door, a pair of cherubs by Titian. Other images, all elements of famous Italian paintings, adorned the roof, front, and rear. The driver peered down at me. A dried-up, sixtyish man in a work shirt, balding, with a mottled scalp, a hooked nose, and a gray beard bibbing his chest. A blue-collar Jehovah. “You sick?” he asked, and waggled a cell phone. “Should I call somebody?”
“Fuck are you?” I asked. “The Art Fairy?”
“Frank Ristelli,” he said without resentment. “I teach a class in painting and sculpture every Wednesday.”
“Those who can’t, teach… huh?”
A patient look. “Why would you say that?”
“’Cause the perspective on your Titian’s totally fucked.”
“It’s good enough for you to recognize. How do you know Titian?”
“I studied painting in college. Two years. People in the department thought I was going to be a hot-shit artist.”
“Guess you fooled them, huh?”
He was mocking me, but I was too worn out to care. “All that college pussy,” I said. “I couldn’t stay focused.”
“And you had places to rob, people to shoot. Right?”
That kindled my anger, but I said nothing. I wondered why he was hanging around, what he wanted of me.
“Have you kept it up? You been drawing?”
“I mess around some.”
“If you’d like, I’d be glad to take a look. Why don’t you bring me what you’ve been doing next Wednesday?”
I shrugged. “Sure, yeah. I can do that.”
“I’ll need your name if I’m going to hook you up with a pass.”
“Tommy Penhaligon,” I said.
Ristelli wrote it down on a note pad. “Okay… Tommy. Catch you Wednesday.” With that, he put the van in gear and rattled off to the land of the free, his pluming exhaust obscuring my view of the detail from a Piero della Francesca painted on the rear.
Of course, I had done no drawing for years, but I sensed in Ristelli the potential for a sweet hustle. Nothing solid, but you develop a nose for these things. With this in mind, I spent the following week sketching a roach—likely it was several different roaches, but I preferred to think of it as a brother inmate with a felonious history similar to my own. I drew that roach to death, rendering him in a variety of styles ranging from realism to caricature. I ennobled him, imbued him with charisma, invoked his humble, self-abnegatory nature. I made him into an avatar among roaches, a roach with a mission. I crucified him and portrayed him distributing Oreo crumbs to the faithful. I gave him my face, the face of a guard to whom I had a particular aversion, the faces of several friends, including that of Carl Dimassio, who supplied the crank that kept me working straight through the nights. I taped the drawings on the wall and chuckled with delight, amazed by my cleverness. On the night before Ristelli’s class, so wasted that I saw myself as a tragic figure, a savage with the soul of an artist, I set about creating a violent self-portrait, a hunched figure half buried in blackness, illuminated by a spill of lamplight, curled around my sketch pad like a slug about a leaf, with a harrowed face full of weakness and delirium, a construction of crude strokes and charred, glaring eyes, like the face of a murderer who has just understood the consequences of his act. It bore only a slight resemblance to me, but it impressed Ristelli.
“This is very strong,” he said of the self-portrait. “The rest of them”—he gestured at the roach drawings—“they’re good cartoons. But this is the truth.”