Robert Mason - Chickenhawk - Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

After coffee and a croissant, Patience and I went outside and walked laps on the concrete path around the yard. I told her of my adventures as keeper of the grounds around Dorm Four, which she took to be funny.

Patience told me how nice everyone was back in High Springs. We’d wondered how the people of High Springs, a small (population five thousand) rural southern town, would react to the news that I was a convicted drug smuggler—and had been walking, unknown as such, among them for two years. It turned out they were very supportive. One man told me, just before I’d left for prison, that I shouldn’t worry. “Hell, Bob, there’s a lot of people in this town made their living making moonshine. People understand about pot. You don’t have to worry about nothing.” Another man, Bob Ryan, who operated the country store up the road from us, sent this message with Patience: “Tell Bob I’m feeling real safe now; knowing he’s up there in prison and not able to sneak into my house some night while I’m asleep and stuff one of them marijuana cigarettes in my mouth.” Patience told me she’d met a couple—Mike Costello, a Vietnam veteran, and his wife, Patti Street, who had been one of Jack’s teachers. Mike had written a novel about Vietnam called A Long Time from Home , which he was in the process of getting published. She told me Mike was cutting firewood for her so she’d be ready for winter. Patience had passed a petition around town, which hundreds of people signed, and sent it to Judge Sol Blatt, asking him to give me an alternative sentence.

In conjunction with the petitions, we had hired (with the extra advance from Viking against my royalties) a group known as the National Center for Institutions and Alternatives (NCIA), which was preparing an appeal of my sentence to the judge. In support of their work, people—readers and friends from all over the country—were sending hundreds of letters to the NCIA, which would be submitting them to Judge Blatt. The goal of NCIA was to have me released to work in my community as an alternative to incarceration—there are Dorm Fours in every community. Tom Wolfe, the chief of police of High Springs, even wrote a letter saying he’d watch over me personally, make sure I did my work.

I had not much hope in the success of this appeal, and the fact that so many people supported me was both exhilarating and heartbreaking. I’d never had so many friends in my life. I was guilty as hell and paying the price. I did not believe I deserved to be helped.

We walked slow laps around the short path, Patience clinging to me like I was going to be snatched away any second. I was feeling miserable. I had come to some kind of adjustment, a balance with myself about being in prison that this walk was upsetting. “Patience. Do you realize that if you keep coming up here every other week, we’ll have to go through this at least fifty times?”

“How do you know? You haven’t even seen the parole board yet. And the NCIA petition, you don’t know how that will work, either.”

“True, I don’t know anything for sure, but I have a strong feeling about it. Everybody here figures he shouldn’t be here. And they’re probably right. If God considered each person’s whole life and compared it with the fuckup that got him here, most of these guys wouldn’t be here. But that’s not how it works. I’m going to get the standard two years, what they give people who smuggle three thousand pounds of pot. They don’t care if I’m a nice guy and this is my first crime.”

Patience nodded. “We’ll see. In the meantime, I’ll come see you every other week.”

“Patience, having you come here is killing me. I hate the visiting room. It’s like a fucking bus station—no, it’s worse; it’s like waiting in a dentist’s office for two days with one Elks magazine. It took me three days to get over the last visit.”

We stopped on the walkway and she stared at me. “Well, how often do you want me to come?”

“The truth?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want you to come. I’ll see you when I get a furlough. I want to work at Dorm Four and never know what’s going on outside until they tell me I can walk out of here. That’s what I want.”

Patience looked like she was going to cry. She shut her eyes and said, “I have to come, Bob. I have to. I have to see you to believe you exist.”

We started walking again. Damn, this was so complicated: other people’s feelings. It was easy for me, I didn’t have any. I was numb. Why couldn’t Patience just go numb, too? “Okay,” I said. “How about once a month?”

“Every two weeks, Bob. That’s what I need. That’s all you can do for me now.”

John and Alice were strolling toward us, John chewing on one of an endless chain of puffed-rice crackers he ate between celery stalks during the visits. Abreast of us, John said, “How you doing, Bob?”

“Fine,” I said. “Fucking fine, John.”

Sunday afternoon, after twelve hours of visiting spread over two days, I was lying on my cot trying to disappear. I wanted to go to sleep and wake up in two years.

In addition to extreme boredom and humiliation in conjunction with visiting, another of the problems of sitting with your wife for such long periods is that the subject of sex invariably rises. If you watched carefully, and God knows I had the time, you could see couples playing skillfully disguised, tender sex games: A wife turns to look out the window and brushes her hand across her husband’s lap. The husband does the same. A skirt overlaps a man’s pocket and you can see the movement of her hand when the hack is not looking—that old hole-in-the-pocket routine. These people were sex-starved and were doing things in public they’d never dream of doing normally.

There is the stump of a large oak tree in the visiting yard sawed off level with the ground that, before it had been toppled, had shielded some daring couples who, with friends on lookout, would enter into coital bliss while the hacks wandered around unaware of the fact. Eventually some actual criminal—a Christian zealot, it was said—blew the whistle on a couple of fornicators and the prison administration sent the guy to a real prison over in Tallahassee and took vengeance on the oak tree.

Well, Patience and I played these games, too, with the result that the young male malady known as “lover’s nuts’’ or “blue balls,” depending on where you’re from, struck me. It was not sexy. It was painful. The only cure I knew of was to go hide in one of the stalls in the bathroom with a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Oil (a popular product in camp) and work it out. If I didn’t do that, I’d have an embarrassing reaction to the water spray when I showered which was impossible either to hide or to attend because, as I mentioned, our showers were public. My great fear was that some hairy, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound, weight-shack faggot (no gays were allowed in Eglin, but who knows?) would smile and take as an invitation—trolling with live bait, if you will—my predicament. All in all, visiting was not profitable for me.

Two months later. I was sitting in one of the two park benches behind Dorm Four smoking a cigarette. Dorm Four was now perfect. I had even taken to combing tiny tree detritus from the lawns with my rake as fast as it landed, falling from the overhead and totally uncontrollable tree branches. I was having a hard time coming up with much else to do. Dorm Four could have been put in a glassed-in diorama at a museum, it was so perfect. Across from me, sitting on the other park bench behind Dorm Four, was George Allen, the caretaker of Dorm Five, which was identical to Dorm Four, right next door. George and I, both being custodians of entire dormitory grounds, had a lot in common and had taken to meeting like this daily, just before lunch, to have a smoke break and talk about new things to do to our dorms. “I saw you washing your sidewalks today,” I said to George. George smiled sheepishly. “You like it? The way it looks?” “Yeah,” I said jealously. “It looks nice while the concrete is wet—” “I know,” George said, looking exasperated. “If only there was some way to keep that wet look—”