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Afterwards
Jul. 25th, 2006 09:06 amFascinating conversation with a prison guard who came into the store yesterday.
Now, one of the things about having a store is that you are a captive audience behind that counter. People take advantage. People launch into the most amazingly boring soliloquies and you're compelled to sit there listening while your eyes turn into glazed doughnuts, knowing full well that after they've wasted 10 minutes of your life – 10 minutes which you're never gonna get back! – on their reminiscences of that time someone at work poured Dave's Insanity all over your frozen burrito, they are going to sail out that door without buying a thing.
However the prison guard was interesting.
For one thing, he was very smart. For another, he was completely unaware of how much he hated his job. It was as though Hank Stamper from Sometimes A Great Notion, had floated through my door, Hank Stamper after the forests had all been logged out. One began to get a grasp at just how tight a grip the prison industry has on the State of California's collective balls.
"I've been stabbed twice," he told me. "Last time they called in a priest to give me the last rites. Shithead nicked my carotid artery."
He was maybe fifteen years younger than me, a handsome guy except for the shaved head. Guys with shaved heads look like Mr. Clean to me. I can't tell them apart.
"But it's a good job," he hastened to add. "I make good money. Hell, I'm paying my daughter's way through college."
Plus the only other employment opportunities available in Susanville where you live are all in the thriving methamphetamine industry. I thought, but did not say.
"How long have you been doing it?" I asked.
"Twelve years," he said. "I get to retire in three."
But who's counting? I wanted to say. Again, didn't.
I forget how we got on to the topic of families and familial variation, but he had a brother who'd experienced prison life from the other side as well as numerous cousins and uncles. And he was surprisingly unsympathetic towards them.
Okay, maybe not so surprisingly.
"There's just no accounting for it," he said. "Two brothers of the same blood raised in the same home and we're just as different as different can be."
"Why do you think that is?"
"I don't know. You know, people's lives have junctures and those junctures don't usually come with signposts. You think you're making a choice but actually you're making a decision. And you don't know until a long time afterwards what the decision was you made that day. Maybe you never know. Maybe that's why you drink and drug."
"Do you believe in rehabilitation?" I asked.
"No," he said. "Not at the level I'm at – I'm level four at a high security prison. Inside these guys are something, they have status, they're part of a brotherhood. Outside they can't get a job and they have child support that's breaking their balls. That's when they hold up a liquor store praying they'll be caught. They're institutionalized."
###
I watch the news for an hour every morning, before my day begins to sink under the weight of its own inconsequentiality. One human's struggle to impose order on the chaos of her own life seems insignificant compared to what's going on in the Middle East – so much death, so much destruction, and all of it reported as though each missile attack is a rally in some kind of super World Cup. Which I suppose it. Blood sport…
Max writes me a short letter: Much of the reading we've been doing involves development of ethical systems, and I've been wondering about it often, what decisions one makes based on arbitrary criteria, and why.
And I want to write him back in this vein, but of course I'm too preoccupied by trying to remember where I put the pink slip for the Mercedes which Project Hope is coming to tow away today and whether if I write a check to Cingular this morning, it will float long enough so that the money will actually be there in my checking account when it comes time to process it.
What I want to tell Max is what the prison guard told me: most people don't make ethical decisions. Most people don't make any kind of decisions. Of course, they think they make decisions but the choice between 31 flavors of ice cream is really not a decision, it's an excercise in enumerative programming applied to a finite set.
Decisions are made at junctures and junctures don't often come with signposts.
I suppose the trick of a really conscious human being is either to recognize those junctures or to assume all life is a juncture.
Now, one of the things about having a store is that you are a captive audience behind that counter. People take advantage. People launch into the most amazingly boring soliloquies and you're compelled to sit there listening while your eyes turn into glazed doughnuts, knowing full well that after they've wasted 10 minutes of your life – 10 minutes which you're never gonna get back! – on their reminiscences of that time someone at work poured Dave's Insanity all over your frozen burrito, they are going to sail out that door without buying a thing.
However the prison guard was interesting.
For one thing, he was very smart. For another, he was completely unaware of how much he hated his job. It was as though Hank Stamper from Sometimes A Great Notion, had floated through my door, Hank Stamper after the forests had all been logged out. One began to get a grasp at just how tight a grip the prison industry has on the State of California's collective balls.
"I've been stabbed twice," he told me. "Last time they called in a priest to give me the last rites. Shithead nicked my carotid artery."
He was maybe fifteen years younger than me, a handsome guy except for the shaved head. Guys with shaved heads look like Mr. Clean to me. I can't tell them apart.
"But it's a good job," he hastened to add. "I make good money. Hell, I'm paying my daughter's way through college."
Plus the only other employment opportunities available in Susanville where you live are all in the thriving methamphetamine industry. I thought, but did not say.
"How long have you been doing it?" I asked.
"Twelve years," he said. "I get to retire in three."
But who's counting? I wanted to say. Again, didn't.
I forget how we got on to the topic of families and familial variation, but he had a brother who'd experienced prison life from the other side as well as numerous cousins and uncles. And he was surprisingly unsympathetic towards them.
Okay, maybe not so surprisingly.
"There's just no accounting for it," he said. "Two brothers of the same blood raised in the same home and we're just as different as different can be."
"Why do you think that is?"
"I don't know. You know, people's lives have junctures and those junctures don't usually come with signposts. You think you're making a choice but actually you're making a decision. And you don't know until a long time afterwards what the decision was you made that day. Maybe you never know. Maybe that's why you drink and drug."
"Do you believe in rehabilitation?" I asked.
"No," he said. "Not at the level I'm at – I'm level four at a high security prison. Inside these guys are something, they have status, they're part of a brotherhood. Outside they can't get a job and they have child support that's breaking their balls. That's when they hold up a liquor store praying they'll be caught. They're institutionalized."
I watch the news for an hour every morning, before my day begins to sink under the weight of its own inconsequentiality. One human's struggle to impose order on the chaos of her own life seems insignificant compared to what's going on in the Middle East – so much death, so much destruction, and all of it reported as though each missile attack is a rally in some kind of super World Cup. Which I suppose it. Blood sport…
Max writes me a short letter: Much of the reading we've been doing involves development of ethical systems, and I've been wondering about it often, what decisions one makes based on arbitrary criteria, and why.
And I want to write him back in this vein, but of course I'm too preoccupied by trying to remember where I put the pink slip for the Mercedes which Project Hope is coming to tow away today and whether if I write a check to Cingular this morning, it will float long enough so that the money will actually be there in my checking account when it comes time to process it.
What I want to tell Max is what the prison guard told me: most people don't make ethical decisions. Most people don't make any kind of decisions. Of course, they think they make decisions but the choice between 31 flavors of ice cream is really not a decision, it's an excercise in enumerative programming applied to a finite set.
Decisions are made at junctures and junctures don't often come with signposts.
I suppose the trick of a really conscious human being is either to recognize those junctures or to assume all life is a juncture.
