(excerpt)
by Patrick Tobin
There are some things you should know about Taft: It used to sit on top of one of the largest oil deposits in California,but that was then and this is now.
It was named Moron until the 1920s, when the town was nearly destroyed by fire. It was renamed Taft in honor of the former President, who by then was serving on the Supreme Court.
It’s small and it’s dusty. It’s surrounded by defunct oil derricks. It’s bordered on the east by fields full of perplexingly green grapes.
It doesn’t have a Starbucks.
It’s dying a slow death.
There’s a Big Kmart on the edge of town, the only store of its kind in the area. There’s a Little Caesar’s Pizza insidethe Big Kmart that serves as a meeting place for the retired and the unemployed.
There are eighteen bars in Taft, with names like Art’s Corner and The Oasis and Vi’s. There are three Latino nightclubs that cater to the migrant workers who pick the perplexingly green grapes.
There’s a main drag called Kern Street. If you’re not paying attention you can drive from one end of Kern to other before you even know it.
The thing that keeps Taft afloat these days is the federal prison: a privatized, low-security facility run by a corporation out of Florida. Entire clans in Taft, from sons to mothers to grandfathers, workat the prison for about ten dollars an hour.
Most of the prisoners who end up at Taft were convicted on drug charges and will serve double-digit sentences. Most of these prisoners are Mexican: upon their release they’ll be sent to Texas, where I.N.S. officials will drop them off at the border with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
A few of the prisonerswho end up at Taft are white-collar criminals. My dad is one of them.
There are some things you should know about my dad: He used to work for the I.R.S. He used to have a C.P.A. license. He used to be a partner in a tax firm on Maui that counted Mick Fleetwood as a client.
He’s a dry alcoholic; he’s bipolar; he’s addicted to gambling.
He’s blown through millions of dollarson expensive cars, homes in Hawaii and Montana, and pretty Japanese women who don’t speak English very well.
He weighs four hundred pounds. He only wears size 3X Aloha shirts. He has a photographic memory. He knows how to charm people with funnystories.
He devises elaborate schemes to screw people out of money. For one of these schemes, he told people he had a nephew, an executive at Microsoft,who wasoffering him stock at an amazing discount. He told people all they had to do was wire him money and he would invest it for them in this stock.
He knows most people will believe him if he promises a double return on their money.
Before I could visitmy dad at Taft Correctional Institution, I had to send in a completed Visitor Information form for approval. The form I received, BP-S629.052, bore the telltale signs of Liquid Paper,and had the coarse quality of a copy of a copy of a copy.
Question number seven asked for my relationship to the inmate. Question number eight asked if I desired to visit him/her. Question number nine (“Did you know this person prior to his/her current incarceration?”) spooked me, because it brought to mind that dark galaxy where women obsess over death-row inmates. As I signed and dated the form, I thought about the woman who married Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker. I tried to remember her name and what she looked like, but eventually her face merged with that of every mentally ill woman I’ve ever seen on TV talk shows.
By the time I mailed the form, Mrs. Ramirez had become heavy set, with long, stringy hair parted in the middle. She had rabbit teeth and bad skin. She was known for her casseroles. Her shy smile could quickly curl into a sneer.
I imagined this Mrs. Ramirez cutting in front of me while I drove to Taft to visit my dad and I was surprised by how much I despised her—more for cutting in front of me, with her greedy air of celebrity entitlement, than for the fact that she married a disciple of Satan who had killed thirteen people.
There was a paragraph on the form, right above the signature line, that said if I didn’t answer the questions truthfully I was guilty of a federal offense, punishable by a fine of not more than $250,000, or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both (see 18 U.S.C. § 1001).
Question number eight and the way I’d answered it troubled me: did I really desire to visit my dad? Since I hadn’t had any contact with him during the first two and a half years of his incarceration, Taft might question why I was visiting him now. Maybe they read the letter I sent him for his last birthday—the one with the cautiously crafted sentences offering forgiveness—and they were able to decode my real feelings.
I imagined someone at the prison, much like the evil mastermind O’Brien in 1984, reading through my letter before turning his attention to my Visitor Information form. I imagined O’Brien closing my file with disdain.
“Who does this asshole think he’s fooling?” he would say to himself.
O’Brien would say this because he’d know the truth: no matter how much I try to forgive my dad, I can’t.
I still hate him for the way he destroyed our family in 1983, when he was arrested for fraud two weeks before my high school graduation. I still hate him for the way everything we owned was seized, my mom and younger brother Tim fleeing like refugees to her parents in Montana.
I still hate him for that summer before I went to college, when I had to get him back on his feet and convince him, on a daily basis, not to kill himself.
I still hate him for all the shit he put us through: the alcoholism, the bipolar disorder he doesn’t treat, the gambling addiction. I still hate him because he used my brother’s murdered wife for one of his schemes. I still hate him because he continued to defraud people right up until he was sentenced to Taft in 2003 even though he swore to me he’d changed his ways.
O’Brien somehow would know all this and yet he would approve my form. Maybe he’d know I still thought about my dad every day, even though I tried to forget about him. Maybe O’Brien would approve my form because he’d figured out that I’m weak and easily manipulated—my Room 101 is the childish notion that my dad will eventually turn his life around.
Maybe O’Brien would be in his office—a motivational poster with a bald eagle and the wisdom of Sun Tzu tacked to his wall—waiting for the moment when he could finally harness the cage to my face.
I decided to drive from Long Beach to Taft the night before I visited my dad. Visitor registration started promptly at 7:30 in the morning and, as anyone who has ever employed me can verify, I’m not exactly a greet-the-dawn-with-a-smile kind of person. I found a cheap motel on the internet called, inexplicably, The Holland Inn and Suites. I expected a giant windmill, but the photo showed a converted 20s style apartment building. It reminded me of a women’s residential hotel. I pictured myself making taffy with young ladies in curlers, gossiping about the typing pool, and I felt a whole lot better.
Accommodations arranged, I packed a duffel bag with fresh underwear and a clean shirt. I made sure the cat had food and water. I printed out Mapquest directions from my home in Long Beach to The Holland Inn and Suites.
On the surface, one would think I was getting ready for a completely run-of-the-mill road trip—particularly if one ignored the way my head hummed an endless loop of self-doubt and anxiety.
On the road to Taft, I tried to find a way to process the information I’d discovered on www.prisontalk.com. Prior to visiting the website, I’d read through the U.S. Bureau of Prison Visitor Guidelines and felt confident that I understood the rules: no khakis, no white T-shirts, no provocative attire, no gang-related accessories, no cellphones, no wallets or purses or money. Nothing but my car keys and a photo ID. Okay. Got it.
I still felt like I didn’t know what to expect during the actual visit, the physical act of communicating with my dad within a prison setting. I went to www.prisontalk.com because my concept of prison visits came mostly from the movies shown on Lifetime. For example, was I going to use an old-fashioned two-way phone to talk with my dad, staring at him through a thick Plexiglas window? Would there come a moment when my dad would break down sobbing andI ‘d hold my hand up to the glass in a poignant gesture of comfort?
I didn’t find the answers I was seeking. What I found instead was a discussion about the recently instituted rule against inmates having pornography. An ex-con with the screen name Retired-2 wrote:
There is a lot of sex going on in prison. Many guys cell up with their lovers. I never used porn for masturbation in the joint, my imagination was much better. In the county we had what we called a “Jack Shack” which was a shower that we had plastered the walls & curtain with porn pictures. It was nice to get a Playboy in the joint because it had great articles in it, LOL.
Laughing out loud, indeed. Now I had an image of my dad “celling up” forever burned into my head. I wasn’t nervous that he might actually discuss anything of a sexual nature during our visit—his complete silence on the topic during my adolescence being a good indicator—but I worried that he might drop clues that I wouldn’t be able to ignore. He might pull up his sleeve to show me a brand-new tattoo, his flexing bicep paying homage to someone named Ernesto.
“Can you believe it?” he might say with a giggle. “I think I’m in love.”
My mouth would drop open, and the worst thing would be that my reflection in the Plexiglas would look like I was about to give someone a blowjob.
I had trouble finding The Holland Inn and Suites because MapQuest directed me through a residential area with no streetlamps. I drove around lost, my headlights revealing houses with darkened windows, the yards filled with all manner of broken-down recreation vehicles. Every turn seemed to bring me back to where I’d already been: a Möbius strip as designed by Richard Ford.
I started to panic. It wasn’t just the lack of streetlamps that made me uneasy—when I was little I was often scared at our cabin near Glacier Park, where, in the middle of the night, your entire body dissolved into an inky, black abyss. What bothered me most about this particular neighbourhood was its total lack of human activity. It wasn’t even eight o’clock. The eerie silence reminded me of horror movies where people have to hide indoors after dark or the Horrible Monster will get them.
What precisely was the Monster, though?
Someone at work advised me I should be careful in Taft because I’m gay and the town is home to one of the largest groups of white supremacists in the country. I appreciated my co-worker’s advice, as I certainly wasn’tin the mood to die at the hands of fat, blonde men wearing Dokken T-shirts.
The skinheads, however, didn’t terrify me.
What actually terrified me was the way my visit had always been weeks away—I’d go into work each day and look at my Outlook calendar and think I’ve got plenty of time before I see him. The future, once so safely in the distance, was making its entrance into the here and now, like a grotesque actor taking the stage and sucking up every last molecule of oxygen from the theatre.
I was really going to see my dad for the first time in nearly three years. Everything was happening too fast.
I parked my car behind a horse trailer to wait for my panic to subside. I cranked up the volume and played the prelude from Tristan und Isolde twice in a row. A woman inside one of the houses peered at me with concern from behind parted drapes—you’d think playing Wagner in skinhead country would have earned me points.
It’s too bad I noticed her, because I felt compelled to give her a look in return that said, as politely as possible, Fuck off.
Patrick Tobin’s stories and essays have appeared in many journals, including Agni, Grain, Florida Review, and Kenyon Review. He wrote the award-winning film No Easy Way; he nearly ran over Tom Cruise’s dog; his stepfather and stepsister are from Alberta; he lives in Long Beach, California with his husband, Joe.