Marquette County Jail 1971

Say What! : The Limits of Memoir
(Atherapeuticism as Art)

What follows is an act of memory dredging that seeks to retrieve rather than recount my life; in other words, an artfully contrived imaginative recollection. My strategy will be to substitute irony for self-indulgence; although I suspect that this in itself will not ensure literary value. In arbitrarily organizing the chaos of past experience, my intent will be less to sermonize than to engage. My moral aim, if it can be called that, is to achieve a voice that better understands the self-created fictions that guide my behaviors, not in the sense of a rebirth or recovery, but of recognition. My motivation derives from a guiding suspicion that moving beyond a sensibility that understands writing to be a form of self-therapy has less to do with devoutly atoning for one’s sins than unflinchingly accepting the story that unfolds.

“It may be more productive in telling a story to choose a narrator or a narrative point of view of someone who does not know what his own story means.”
-- Charles Baxter

1971

In solitary confinement one becomes preoccupied with marking time, with making calendars out of bars and radiators. That our awareness of time is keenest when we need it least is one of life’s cruel ironies. One day, in a chain of nameless days, the sheriff arrived on the top floor of the jail, of which I was the sole occupant, and asked, “do you know why you’re on the 4th floor, Tessier?” I said, “yea, sheriff, cos there ain’t no 5th floor!”

On those rare occasions when the turnkeys would come upstairs, I’d talk shit. With a fixed, Rasputin-like, glare I would inform the jailer that there was really no difference between us. We were both condemned to a 19th century brownstone hell, As the deputy would turn to descend from his Sisyphian task, I would cruelly remind him that there was, of course, one sad aspect that made our situations quite different: I’d be leaving after serving my sentence, he wouldn’t. As he disappeared from sight, blowing him a kiss, I’d say I loved him and there was nothing he could do about it.

Then deputies and inmates alike thought I was crazy. The thing with solitary is that it matters less who you talk to, or hear, than that you talk to or hear someone. Or so I thought. There’s a difference between participating in a dialogue and being an unseen hearer. Much like Hamlet, who never planned on hearing Polonius’s prayer, I assumed that what I might hear would somehow conform to my expectations. But where Hamlet was undone by his relentless pursuit of revenge, I was the victim of lonely curiosity. When I was allowed to move into the bullpen area, I would sit in the corner closest to the stairwell. In the mid-afternoon, when the inmates below were playing Euchre, I would sometimes hear their conversation. On one occasion, this torturous eavesdropping resulted in my hearing a particular group of perennial jailbirds discuss my future: “He’s a drug addict, he’ll end up in Carp River College (Marquette State Prison) for sure. He’ll be a lifer, I can smell em. He thinks he’s getting out in 60 days, but when the time comes they’ll arraign him on new charges and hold him without bail until sentencing. I figure he’ll get ten to twenty. That’s what drugs’ll do to ya.” I quickly learned that it was better for me to read (after they gave me my books), write (with a hidden pencil stub on the flyleaves of religious pamphlets), and exercise, than to tune into the jailhouse lawyer channel.

I had been caught with a small amount of hashish. My lawyer—someone I retained an bad advice and limited funds—assured me that I would get no more than 30 days. But in light of my radical politics and the prevailing, conservative views of the time, I feared the worst. Steeling myself for what was to come—an impossibility, since there is no way to imagine being incarcerated—I assembled an array of books I thought might prove educational and ease the boredom. Sartre, Artaud, Kesey, and Kazentkais were just some of the authors I selected. When December 27th arrived (Happy New Year!) I took it as an article of despair that my lawyer was nowhere to be seen. I can’t remember Judge Hill’s lecture, but I do recall the sentence--60 days in the Marquette county jail. My friends looked on helplessly as the deputies hustled me away.

My hair was down to my waist at the time. And I, being young and somewhat innocent, naively thought that losing my hair would be one of the major injustices of being incarcerated. Consequently, during the visits I had with my probation officer leading up to my sentence, I donned a cheap, dark wig. My long blond hair, kept in place by old fashioned bobby pins, barely fit under this hellish toupee. I was processed in and lodged on the 3rd floor: two bullpens with five cells adjoining them that housed the general jail population. My cellmate was one Mike Savard (he’s dead now). Saver, then 17 years old, would spend his remaining years in state prison. At the time he was a troubled young man with a history of violent behavior that had followed him through grade school. In the short day and a half I was with Mike I came to like him. I began to understand how materially and spiritually deprived he was. When he asked for help in writing a letter, simple words like, “from”, “The”, or “when”, were a struggle for him. And so it was that Mike and I were cellmates.

I noticed that one of the deputies had eyed me hair suspiciously on arrival. I suspect he had an idea that all was not right with my coiffure. I wasn’t surprised then at the approaching sound of jackboots in the stairwell. It was common knowledge that two guards meant trouble. The notorious Joe Maino himself, the future sheriff, told me I needed a haircut. As this was happening, the inmate grapevine alerted the trustee barber, Billy Mallete, to the situation. As Billy valiantly pretended to clip my wig Maino picked up the clippings and carefully scrutinized them. Even I could see the wisps of fine blond hair amongst the course wig locks. The jig was up.

I was given two choices” either voluntarily submit to removing the wig, or, have it taken off by the guards. At that point I took off the wig and slowly removed the rusty bobby pins. My hippie dreds cascaded to my waist in a permy wave that would have made R. Crumb proud. Fighting back tears, I sat, depressed and broken, as my hir was crudely shorn with dull scissors. Something was lost; but what? I didn’t realize than that what I had mistaken for a sad little moment of tragic insight would pale in comparison to the soul searching my own foolish actions would burden me with in the days to come. How often it is that what we perceive the worst is simply a humorous prologue to real hardship.

Being young, immature, arrogant, impatient and morally at sea, I hatched a plan, via a note sent through the trustees, to have my confederates smuggle in a quantity of dope. On the night of the haircut, day 2, I passed a long string through a hole in my window screen. My pals on the ground attached a bundle of joints and Seconal, which I quickly reeled in. Poor me! I couldn’t sleep. Ha! Well I slept that night. But every night thereafter I would long to be back in the homey confines of the third floor. The next morning, groggy from my barbituate binge, I awoke to a posse of deputies menacingly looming over me. I was jerked to my feet, removed from the bullpen, and marched downstairs where my clothes were exchanged for denim coveralls. I was then moved to the Federal block on the 4th floor. Since Federal prisoners rarely visited Paquette’s jail, I had the place to myself. I was put in the most isolated corner cell in an already empty block. As if this wasn’t sufficient punishment, for he first week I was locked down without access to the empty bullpen. Given the fact that Mike Savard was now a trustee, and I was in solitary, it wasn’t hard to figure out how they learned of the stash in my mattress.