"They fuck you up, your mum and dad
They may not mean to, but they do…”
Thus begins one of Harun Al-Rashid’s* favourite poems by Philip Larkin. Recently I’ve become aware of the genetic straitjacket that I’ve been wearing for years, without fully realising it.
After the Nightmare on Enniskillen Street (see older entry), Lloyd un-Friends me on Facebook. Not just un-Friends me, but blocks me, just in case I’d try to be his ‘friend’ again. You know how serious that is: when you’re no longer friends on Facebook, that’s the end of the frickin’ line.
Facebook must be pretty dreadful for people with insufficient self-esteem, because when you notice the number of your ‘friends’ dwindling, it doesn’t tell you who un-Friended you, and you can’t help but think: “Who hates me?? Who thinks so little of me that they don’t even want to be my virtual friend??” In my case, after that unfortunate Friday night, I had a pretty clear idea who disappeared from my Facebook page, and thus from my life.
During my turbulent youth, certain circumstances would trigger specific feelings and I’d blindly react on them, not being able to analyse why I felt (or reacted) the way I did. Now I can.
Lloyd un-Friends me.
How do I feel? Indignant. Hey, if anyone should be un-Friending anyone, it should be the other way round! I’m the offended party here!
Disbelieving. Has he really un-Friended and blocked me? Maybe he’s just removed his profile from the site… I double- and triple-check that I can’t reach his Facebook profile and that it still exists.
Regretful, because I’ve been rather fond of Lloyd. Maybe the bad, awkward ending could have been avoided, had I acted differently.
What do I feel like doing? A part of me feels like calling him, or emailing him, to tell him that even though he was out of line, I’m willing to forgive him if he apologises.
I catch myself.
This is too familiar. It’s not the first time that someone’s wronged me and I was the one to proffer the olive branch.
Why?
Because I don’t want to be abandoned.
Do I particularly want to see Lloyd again? Not really. What would we possibly say to one another now?
So does it matter who puts an end to this ‘friendship’, if that’s what both parties want anyway?
Yes.
Why?
Because he made that decision, not I.
Perhaps it won’t surprise anyone who knows me to hear me admit that I’m a control freak; I’ve known this about myself for a while. Perhaps it’s my genetic predisposition, given that both my parents are control freaks in their own way, or perhaps it’s my reaction to the circumstances I found myself in.
"They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you…”
My father has always felt the need to exert control over the only people he could control – us, his immediate family. Presumably he was just reacting to the lack of power he’d had over his own life – having to bang his head against a glass ceiling, time and time again, due to the institutional anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, or having writer’s block – and it felt good to bend at least somebody to his will, to pass on the misery that he himself was feeling in order to make up for this overall impotence. My mother is a cleanliness freak. She may not feel like she has control over many areas of her life, but she can and will control the amount of dust and dirt in her house.
“For they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats…”
As for me, this need for control has dominated my life for as long as I can remember. It caused me to rebel against my parents’ irrational and erratic way of doing things, to get a job as soon I was legally allowed to work to break my father’s financial control over me, to finally change my name to one I’m happy with. It has defined my relationship patterns with men – keeping them at arm’s length, ostensibly so that they wouldn’t have much of a hold over me (though that didn’t work, for reasons I’m about to explain), choosing men who on the surface seemed as different from my father as they could be, in a kneejerk reaction to my turbulent relationship with him, and freaking out when they made certain decisions because my other weakness is my fear or rejection and abandonment, which I’ve only just become full aware of. Sometimes, being a control freak is no bad thing; I have no physical addictions and I do nothing to excess - I don't drink much and I don't overeat, because I'll be damned if anything has too much of a hold on me.
The Lloyd fiasco and my reaction to him un-Friending me reminded me of my first ever breakup at the age of sixteen. Even though I could tell after several days that my romance with Fred* wasn’t going to win prizes for romance of the century, I still held on, thinking that maybe things change with time. They didn’t, and he broke up with me. I didn’t take it too well, even though logically, I knew that we had to break up. Fred’s* a really lovely guy and he was concerned that he broke my heart. He didn’t, but the whole episode bruised my ego and triggered the first response of its kind – the feeling of loss of control and despair over the breakup, precisely because he made that decision, and not I.
I also remember clearly an instance in which Ed the Nudist, after visiting me at university, inexplicably took off in the morning without a word, ignoring my running after his car. When he didn’t return my calls afterwards, I felt a paralysing fear. “What if he was dead?! What if I never see him again?! What if he never wants to see me again?!”
It was exactly the same paralysing fear, the same cold, sick feeling in my stomach, the same panic that I felt as an eight year old, when I was left at Frankfurt airport to look after the luggage cart while my family disappeared somewhere. As far as I was concerned, they would never come back: something terrible had happened to them on their way to the bathroom, and I was left all alone in the world.
When I was nine or ten, I had the same pre-bedtime routine. I would ask my mum the same questions and in exactly the same order (I’ve got a touch of OCD, you see). “You’re not going to go away, are you? You’re not going to die, are you?” And my mother, because she loves me, lied to me and promised the impossible.
With Ed the Nudist, getting in touch with him became all-important and I must’ve left a zillion messages on his answering machine. Likewise, when Pantera threatened to run to Griselle when I wouldn’t do his bidding, my first impulse was to placate him in any way possible. Why? Surely, being abandoned by Ed the Nudist or Pantera should’ve been a cause for celebration rather than concern?
I now realise that the men in question were immaterial; it was the idea of abandonment, full stop, that I couldn’t deal with. No wonder I was so cut up about a friend’s death last year, for what’s death but the ultimate abandonment?
Where does all this fear come from? When I worked in Ukraine an investigative assistant five years ago, my friend Natasha the psychiatrist suggested that I read “A General Theory of Love”. The book gathered dust on my shelf for three years before I read it, and when I did, it illuminated some of my distinctive behavioural patterns and helped me to make sense of them.
It spoke of relationship patterns built over the first few months and years of a child’s life, and how one’s early relationship with one’s parents inescapably affects one’s adult relationships…unless you do something about it. It gave three examples: the consistent mother, who knows exactly when to support and comfort her child, and when to let them be independent, so the child grows up confident and independent; the erratic mother, who means well, who is mostly affectionate and supportive, but sometimes not around, so the child often displays fear and clinginess; and finally the neglectful mother, who ignores her child and its needs, and who grows up often unable to build good relationships with other because they were never given the tools.
When my sister was born, I was three years old, and my mother had to raise us with virtually no help at all; my father was always at work, there were no relatives nearby, and half the time was spent trying to obtain common household goods. It was the Soviet Union, after all. My sister was very demanding when she was small, and consequently my mother had little time or energy for me and I was often left to my own devices. One of my first memories consists of sitting in the snow and trying to dig out my little snow boot, which had gotten stuck. I was playing alone, which was often the case. This had the effect of forcing me to become independent, but also creating irrational fears and complexes that I’ve only started to acknowledge and deal with recently.
For about a decade, my sister and I fought like cat and dog because I was unable to vocalise what I subconsciously felt. It’s such a common problem between siblings and it made me laugh at how absurdly simple the explanation for it was when I recently watched an episode of “Frasier” where Frasier and Niles were discussing the very same thing. “You stole my mummy!” Frasier shouted. So obvious.
When my sister and I compared notes recently, it was interesting to note that even though she had 95% of our mother’s attention as a child, we both exhibited symptoms of the second scenario – that of an erratic mother. The damage is not irreparable, of course – my sister and I are very close now, and I no longer have a fear of water or the telephone, among other things. When I was younger, I hated calling people on the phone or – even worse – answering the phone if complete strangers called. An older friend tried to cure me of this, and she was successful. Now not only do I not think twice about calling complete strangers, but I can do so in three languages!
The negative relationship patterns don’t disappear overnight, but becoming aware of them is the first step towards breaking out of a destructive loop. That’s not to say that there isn’t the odd irrational flare-up, but now I can identify it for what it is, and ride it out.
If abstract abandonment is difficult for me to deal with, then perceived abandonment and rejection by someone who’d played a large and positive role in my life can be even more difficult to cope with. When an older friend of mine came back into my life after several years absence, saying that she’d like us to be in touch again, I was overjoyed, because her positive input into my life had been beyond measure when I was a troubled teenager. Yet when after that, she deferred from meeting and then stopped responding to my messages altogether, it left me completely bewildered and triggered the predictable stream of irrational thoughts: “What have I done to push her away? Am I so hideous? Is my company so unbearable?”
It particularly stung because many years ago, she’d paid me one of the greatest compliments of my life, saying that if she’d had a daughter, she’d have imagined her to be like me. Since I was far from being the ideal daughter to my own parents, to know that I was the image of the ideal daughter for someone whom I greatly respected was simply incredible.
The difference is that now, unlike before, the rational explanation overrides the irrational thoughts of abandonment and I am able to understand that my feelings and reality don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another. She has an entire life that I know nothing about and which has nothing to do with me, and there are dozens of explanations as to why we haven’t as yet met up for a catch-up drink.
In his poem, Philip Larkin goes on to conclude that because you’ve been screwed up by your parents, you will undoubtedly do the same to your kids, so you should refrain from procreating:
“Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out as early as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself.”
I don’t agree with the last part. Though subconscious parental influence can be difficult to pinpoint and even more difficult to shake off completely, it’s certainly not impossible. Besides, pretty much everyone’s parents pass on some kind of negative influence or crippling neurosis, so do we give up procreating altogether? My concerns as to whether or not I’d make a good mother due to the host of neuroses I could potentially pass on to my offspring does not automatically mean that I’d make a decent parent or disqualify me from motherhood; if said offspring can identify those neuroses, they can fight them.
I’ve acknowledged my Achilles’s heel, my twin hobbles of the need for control and my fear of abandonment, but they alone do not account for my persistence in seeking out and trying to maintain dysfunctional relationships. Time to dig deeper….
Wednesday, 23 June 2010
Sunday, 20 June 2010
A mixed catch...
The search for cyber love (or just plain old entertainment) continues, with mixed results.
Recently, Gabriel* caught what looked like a potential sea bass but it turned out to be a crab. At first, he was quite enthusiastic about KKN (Kitty Kitty Northern)*; he liked that she had interests of her own, seemed to be independent and, more importantly, was really rather keen on him. Their first date was ‘the best ever’ in her opinion, she was a no-nonsense, straight-talking northern lass, and though some of her opinions were ‘a little provincial’, Gabriel* enjoyed her company and could see himself dating her, even if it wasn’t looking like a long-term thing. Then suddenly, she became evasive and non-committal, and cancelled their dinner without explanation. It later transpired that she’d been keeping an eye on his Facebook page and had become jealous of a platonic female friend with whom he danced at a recent wedding. Heck, if that was enough to trigger a jealousy attack, then she’d have a real cow if she saw the photo of Gabriel* and myself dancing slow and close at Fred* and Daphne’s* wedding, as that was sensual bordering on obscene…
Gabriel* said: “I’d rather have a bit of a honeymoon period pre-squabbling, to be honest,” and I think that’s perfectly reasonable thing to expect. So farewell, Kitty Kitty Northern* and hello Overbite Girl*. The unfortunate nickname stems from my heartless comment; when shown her profile picture, I told Gabriel*: “She seems quite nice, but she’s got a bit of an overbite.” Their first date was postponed because Overbite Girl* had just had an operation on her jaw (to correct said overbite, perhaps) and because she had to drink her dinner through a straw for a week. When they finally did get together, Gabriel* summed up the whole experience by saying: “One date is enough.” Not quite in the same league of direness as Delroy the Soap Boy, but she didn’t have very much to say for herself, apparently.
As for me, I’ve also had a mixed catch, most of which I’ve thrown back in because they were too dull (“We haven’t spoken in a while.” That’s because I wasn’t interested and didn’t reply to your message in the first place), too overfamiliar (“Hi honey, how was your weekend?” I don’t know you, so why should I tell you), not sufficiently physically attractive (read: too pale, though I’m trying to keep an open mind with regard to ethnic diversity), or too desperate (“Pleeeeeeeeease write back to me.” Men shouldn’t show vulnerability, because women are like sharks: they then go in for the kill if they sense weakness).
Then there was a bank holiday message from Jayzet*: “I’ll be hanging out at Castle and would love for you to join me. Interested?” That’s better. He doesn’t beat around the bush, he displays definite interest in meeting in person, as opposed to bloody cyberchatting, and he is easy on the eyes – tall, dark and handsome, clean-cut, in a nicely tailored suit. I like a man who scrubs up nicely. I emailed him back to tell him that I’m abroad but that I wouldn’t be opposed to meeting up upon my return.
Then today, SweetSoulBoy77* has sent me the following:
"I find you most intriguing.
I'd like to know more about you.
How should we proceed from here...?
1. chat on here
2. chat on msn
3. a quick chat on the phone
4. meet for a coffee
5. meet at the airport and fly to a hot country for a week
6. get married online
It's your choice..."
Good opening email. He seems to be interested in my personality (as opposed to going on about how pretty my eyes are and generally trying to flatter me), the email is sufficiently light-hearted, and he gives me a variety of choices. I like choices. His photo is a bit blurry, but I think he looks a bit like that guy out of a Diet Coke commercial (i.e. nice physique) and that he’s got dark hair and goatee (I like facial hair). I veto the top two choices, explaining that I have short, stubby fingers and find it difficult to type quickly, tell him that I’m already in a hot country and suggest that marriage might be a little premature, but that I wouldn’t be adverse to meeting for a meal. I now have his phone number, so SweetSoulBoy77* and I are all set for a hot date when I get back home.
However, the person who seems to have fared best in the cyber jungle is Fred*. A week after his soon-to-be-ex-wife Daphne* called it quits, he went out on two dates, both with girls he’d met online, and seems to have found lasting romance with Lois*, a girl who made a real effort to drive down to see him. An avocado-related near-death experience aside, things are going smoothly and they’ve even invested in a luxury tent which will be their home for the duration of the Big Chill. Daphne* hated music festivals and camping, so it looks like Fred’s* onto a good long-term thing with Lois*. How does he do it?
In the immortal words of The Lion King theme song: “Some of us sail through our troubles, and some have to live with the scars.” Fred* clearly belongs to the first kind...
Recently, Gabriel* caught what looked like a potential sea bass but it turned out to be a crab. At first, he was quite enthusiastic about KKN (Kitty Kitty Northern)*; he liked that she had interests of her own, seemed to be independent and, more importantly, was really rather keen on him. Their first date was ‘the best ever’ in her opinion, she was a no-nonsense, straight-talking northern lass, and though some of her opinions were ‘a little provincial’, Gabriel* enjoyed her company and could see himself dating her, even if it wasn’t looking like a long-term thing. Then suddenly, she became evasive and non-committal, and cancelled their dinner without explanation. It later transpired that she’d been keeping an eye on his Facebook page and had become jealous of a platonic female friend with whom he danced at a recent wedding. Heck, if that was enough to trigger a jealousy attack, then she’d have a real cow if she saw the photo of Gabriel* and myself dancing slow and close at Fred* and Daphne’s* wedding, as that was sensual bordering on obscene…
Gabriel* said: “I’d rather have a bit of a honeymoon period pre-squabbling, to be honest,” and I think that’s perfectly reasonable thing to expect. So farewell, Kitty Kitty Northern* and hello Overbite Girl*. The unfortunate nickname stems from my heartless comment; when shown her profile picture, I told Gabriel*: “She seems quite nice, but she’s got a bit of an overbite.” Their first date was postponed because Overbite Girl* had just had an operation on her jaw (to correct said overbite, perhaps) and because she had to drink her dinner through a straw for a week. When they finally did get together, Gabriel* summed up the whole experience by saying: “One date is enough.” Not quite in the same league of direness as Delroy the Soap Boy, but she didn’t have very much to say for herself, apparently.
As for me, I’ve also had a mixed catch, most of which I’ve thrown back in because they were too dull (“We haven’t spoken in a while.” That’s because I wasn’t interested and didn’t reply to your message in the first place), too overfamiliar (“Hi honey, how was your weekend?” I don’t know you, so why should I tell you), not sufficiently physically attractive (read: too pale, though I’m trying to keep an open mind with regard to ethnic diversity), or too desperate (“Pleeeeeeeeease write back to me.” Men shouldn’t show vulnerability, because women are like sharks: they then go in for the kill if they sense weakness).
Then there was a bank holiday message from Jayzet*: “I’ll be hanging out at Castle and would love for you to join me. Interested?” That’s better. He doesn’t beat around the bush, he displays definite interest in meeting in person, as opposed to bloody cyberchatting, and he is easy on the eyes – tall, dark and handsome, clean-cut, in a nicely tailored suit. I like a man who scrubs up nicely. I emailed him back to tell him that I’m abroad but that I wouldn’t be opposed to meeting up upon my return.
Then today, SweetSoulBoy77* has sent me the following:
"I find you most intriguing.
I'd like to know more about you.
How should we proceed from here...?
1. chat on here
2. chat on msn
3. a quick chat on the phone
4. meet for a coffee
5. meet at the airport and fly to a hot country for a week
6. get married online
It's your choice..."
Good opening email. He seems to be interested in my personality (as opposed to going on about how pretty my eyes are and generally trying to flatter me), the email is sufficiently light-hearted, and he gives me a variety of choices. I like choices. His photo is a bit blurry, but I think he looks a bit like that guy out of a Diet Coke commercial (i.e. nice physique) and that he’s got dark hair and goatee (I like facial hair). I veto the top two choices, explaining that I have short, stubby fingers and find it difficult to type quickly, tell him that I’m already in a hot country and suggest that marriage might be a little premature, but that I wouldn’t be adverse to meeting for a meal. I now have his phone number, so SweetSoulBoy77* and I are all set for a hot date when I get back home.
However, the person who seems to have fared best in the cyber jungle is Fred*. A week after his soon-to-be-ex-wife Daphne* called it quits, he went out on two dates, both with girls he’d met online, and seems to have found lasting romance with Lois*, a girl who made a real effort to drive down to see him. An avocado-related near-death experience aside, things are going smoothly and they’ve even invested in a luxury tent which will be their home for the duration of the Big Chill. Daphne* hated music festivals and camping, so it looks like Fred’s* onto a good long-term thing with Lois*. How does he do it?
In the immortal words of The Lion King theme song: “Some of us sail through our troubles, and some have to live with the scars.” Fred* clearly belongs to the first kind...
Thursday, 3 June 2010
Enter the Bad Men, Part 3, or How I Became a San Quentin Pin-up.
As one of my friends used to say, none of my experiences count as negative ones, as long as they contributed to a positive whole, and I agree. If it hadn’t been for Antonio, then I probably wouldn’t have met my friend Saturnus*; when we were on a Greyhound bus from New York to Toronto, Antonio, bless his unfaithful little Jehovah’s Witness socks, went over to say hello to Saturnus*, one black man to another, and it turned out that Saturnus* and I had way more in common and are still friends, nine years on. Ed the Nudist introduced me to Rio’s, where I met Tony, my on-off dial-a-shag, whom I was rather fond of for a long time. My involvement with Forrest indirectly led to friendships and work with some of the most interesting legal minds in the US criminal law profession, while Pantera prepared me for Bill.
Bill (or Billy, as he now likes to be called, because it makes him sound friendly and approachable), the last Bad Man I’m going to introduce, isn’t exactly an ex of mine, but we were kind of involved and he ended up playing a greater role in my life than expected. He was one of my death row inmate pen pals; I started writing to him in the spring of 2004, rather by accident. In correspondence, as in my personal life, I used to practise positive discrimination: out of the seven men that I wrote to, six happened to be African-American and the seventh – a Mexican national who looked like Apollonia’s* twin brother in his profile photo. I’d like to think that I’m not entirely shallow: José’s profile was well-written and entertaining, and I found it difficult to reconcile this sensitive, earnest young man with the teenage gang member who took part in a gang rape and murder of two teenage girls; we remained firm friends until his execution in August 2008.
Anyway, Bill’s case caught my attention because a) it received a lot of coverage on the two death row pen pal websites (it later turned out that he’d been given a prime spot of the German one because he’d been romantically involved with the woman who ran the site) and b) because from his case summary, it seemed that he’d been accused on committing two murders which he couldn’t have been present at, since he had rock-solid alibis for both murders. Later, when I’d done my research, it turned out that he was not accused of committing the murders himself – he was accused of masterminding them and getting other people to carry them out, which is much harder to prove (or to disprove) and that he’s the only man on San Quentin’s death row who isn’t accused of killing anyone himself.
Bill came across as intelligent, articulate, and sensitive. In the photos, he was very attractive – tall, dark and handsome, with golden skin, hazel eyes and a neat moustache. I didn’t even realise that he was black until I’d read his profile because his skin was the same colour as mine after I’ve been out in the sun for a bit.
I was touched by his plea; he spoke eloquently of the ‘touch of a woman, be it emotional, spiritual or physical’ missing from his life. He sounded like someone who’d have a lot to say for himself, and I just couldn’t believe that he was on death row in spite of the alibis, so I wrote to him, wanting to know more about him and his predicament.
When I introduced myself, I told him that I couldn’t abide small talk and that I’m happy to answer questions about myself - if someone asks me probing and direct questions, they get Brownie points for it and that I answer all personal questions openly and honestly. He wrote me a long letter, telling me that he was exactly the same, and asking me to send him a photo of myself. I did, and he responded by saying that because I came across as very intelligent, he thought that I couldn’t possibly be stunningly beautiful as well, but I was! That though he had several other pen pals my age, I was ‘way more mature than any of them’. It seems that yours truly is somewhat susceptible to flattery; I eagerly lapped it up the compliments because most of them tallied with my own view of myself. Why, of course my mental and emotional maturity is light years beyond that of my peers. Why, of course I’m very intelligent. Not intelligent enough to spot a flatterer, it seems.
Since I’d expressed the desire to meet him in person that summer, in his second letter, Bill explained to me through use of diagrams how it was possible for two consenting adults to ‘have some fun’ during prison visits: since the visiting area was split into ‘cages’, the bottom halves of which were made of sheet metal, as long as your heads were visible through the wire mesh that started at shoulder level, you could get away with some groping under the table or whatever. If you came on a ‘legal visit’, i.e. if you were introduced as a paralegal, you were given way more privacy, with only one guard stationed at the end of the room with his back to you… That was all a ‘by the way’, just in case I felt like it, you know – no pressure. He was funny, charming and graphic. I was a frisky twenty three-year old and at the beginning I really enjoyed Bill’s graphic letters telling me how amazingly beautiful I was and what he’d do to me, given the chance. Rereading the letters, it’s clear that he was ‘grooming’ me, but it was fun at the time.
By the time I turned up at San Quentin, it was pretty much a certainty that something would happen if he turned out to be as charismatic in person as he was on paper. Imagine my surprise when I, having booked an extended four-hour visit, was told that I had just an hour to speak to Bill and that the visit would take place behind glass. Due to some infringement of prison rules on his part, Bill was placed on ‘B’ status, meaning that he was temporarily deprived of various privileges, including contact visits. We still had an entertaining chat through the glass, our ears glued to the prison ‘phones’. Bill seemed nervous and kept licking his lips. But his physical presence was overwhelming; in my life, I’ve only felt this instantaneous electricity, a hyperawareness of the other person, a kind of sexual bristling, only twice: with Bill and with Tom Tavares-Finson, a hotshot lawyer in Jamaica. An overpowering Alpha maleness, and with it, the certain knowledge that the other person is no good for you, but you can’t help wanting them anyway.
I wanna love you but I better not touch
I wanna hold you but my senses tell me to stop
I wanna kiss you but I want it too much
I wanna taste you but your lips are venomous poison
“Poison”, Groove Coverage
At one point during our visit, Bill whipped out his huge wang and demonstrated that it was in full working order with a smile on his face, as if to say: “This could all be yours, sweetie, if you play your cards right.” Humongous penises are kind of like train wrecks – you can’t help but stare at them, but they’re not going anywhere. He really was very charming in person and my visits were hugely entertaining at first, though in retrospect, I am really glad that I only ever saw him behind glass and didn’t get the opportunity to do more than one thing that I’d regretted.
I quickly discovered that Bill’s favourite conversation topic was sex. He could’ve asked me anything about myself, but he was primarily interested in my sexual preferences, and enjoyed talking at length and in detail about the various encounters he enjoyed during the course of his life. At first, it was entertaining, but it became apparent quite soon that there was little else.
His tastes were somewhat unconventional: he enjoyed watching his girlfriends have sex with other men; he got off on the jealousy, he explained, and on the power-tripping – the fact that the women would do that for him when they wouldn’t do it for any of their other boyfriends. My views on sex are very liberal; paedophilia aside, I believe that no sex is ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ as long as the parties concerned are consenting and they enjoy it, but some of what he told me just wasn’t my thing. I also began to wonder how those women would feel if they knew that their intimate details were being told to a complete stranger. I could well believe that the women would do for Bill what they wouldn’t normally do; Bill was very persuasive, and after leaving San Quentin post-visit, I’d shake my head as if to clear it because it seemed to me that I was a different person in his presence; his charisma weaved a temporary spell.
Bill was trying to make it as a writer. He’d read the Harry Potter books and became convinced that he could easily become a success as well. He didn’t seem to understand that to be a writer, you have to love to write, whereas his thoughts focused on spin-off merchandise, film rights and making millions. Like many inmates, he wrote rhyming stuff that he called poetry. I suffered through his attempts at rhyming stories, and came to realise that he wasn’t looking for constructive criticism. He believed that he was a great writer and the slightest criticism was interpreted as an all-out attack on him personally, clearly fuelled by my jealousy of his talent.
When Gabriel* did a story on me and my inmates for the Cambridge Town Crier, using Bill’s case as an example of the people I was trying to help, Bill read into the article what he wanted to, and came to believe that the article was in support of him, personally, rather than a ‘human interest’ article.
For reasons unknown, Bill assumed that Gabriel* was some sort of media mogul who could help him to get published as a writer, so he sucked up to him by sending him a card (Bill’s an excellent cartoonist) which said that ‘Anna’s living proof that angels do exist.’ Gabriel* took the piss out of me for months for that one. After I’d acquired a certain amount of notoriety thanks to a double-page spread in the Cambridge Evening News, to the point where my hospital colleagues would stop me in the corridors and tell me that what I was doing was great, and I began to get recognised in the street, Gabriel* told me that he’d ‘created a monster’. After some guy shook my hand in a pub and offered to buy me a drink, Gabriel* forever asked me for my autograph and generally mocked me.
It’s not the only time I’ve been called an angel. I’ve had a few comments from PlentyofFish.com users, saying that I looked like one, Forrest once called me his ‘guardian angel’ after some botched attempt to save him from himself, and Harun Al-Rashid* once referred to me as ‘the angel of death’ after I’d complained to him that in my nursing work, I get the interesting people, but only when they’re at death’s door; he insinuated that they know they’re going to die when they’re left to my tender mercies.
In February 2005, I did something really stupid. I was staying with Forrest in San Diego, but I popped over the San Francisco for a few days to do some prison visits and Bill asked me for some, erm, compromising photos of myself, saying what a ‘precious gift’ it would be and promising that they’ll be ‘for his eyes only’. I had a bad gut feeling about it all, and I regretted it as soon as I’d sent them to him, but I rationalised it by thinking that he’s in a terrible situation, on death row, he’s got little support…who was I to begrudge him a flash of skin on some shiny paper? I’m not rich or famous, so he wouldn’t exactly be able to sell them to some glossy mag and live happily ever after on the proceeds, could he?
In April 2005, two things happened: I decided that I wanted the photos back because I wasn’t comfortable about him having them, and I told Bill in person that I couldn’t be romantically involved with him because I loved Forrest. The last bit was probably a convenient excuse because Forrest and I were not ‘exclusive’ and Bill certainly wouldn’t have minded being ‘the other man’, but in spite of his charisma, I was going off him mentally. Pantera had the same charisma, the same persuasive nature, but that only works for a little while before cracks appear in the façade and you recognise that the person beneath isn’t all that interesting and is monumentally insecure. Bill did his best to run a harem from his prison cell, and if what he told me is to be believed, numerous women came to San Quentin just to have sex with him, including a sixty-something married woman from the UK who flew out several times a year and who allegedly was the most uninhibited of them all. He then went on to say that though she was the most attractive, I was even more attractive than her, which immediately made me think of the Pantera/Griselle scenario – that I should be grateful he’s choosing me above all these other interested parties.
I was interested in his background, but it only served to confirm my misgivings about him. Bill was a manic depressive and a career criminal, whose legitimate business ventures fell through, and who turned to forgery as a way of making a living. Unlike my other death row guys, by the time he’d ended up in San Quentin, he was 37 years old and had done time in prison for forgery before but hadn’t learned his lesson. He liked the easy money and he liked chasing women; that seemed to sum him up. He’d been married twice and had three or four children, but he was an absent father for the most part, and he didn’t even know about his eldest child until she was grown up. He couldn’t really explain why he got married, given that he never gave up womanising, though I could explain why women wanted to marry him – they wanted to pin him down, to own him or at least a part of hime, to have something concrete, and he gave them what they wanted – a ring and a certificate – without giving up his lifestyle.
On one hand, I was glad that he was honest with me, but on the other, what he told me repelled me. He was generally good at being ‘all things to all women’, but he couldn’t read me, and therefore when he told me what he thought I wanted to hear, he was way off the mark. His younger daughter got back in touch with him after fifteen years incommunicado (he blamed his wives for keeping the kids away from him) and he showed me her letter, in which she bitterly blamed him for not being there, for their mum struggling to bring them up by herself. He’d read those words but be unable to take them in; his second wife put up with his womanising, but on one condition: that he be home in the morning when the kids wake up. When he failed to turn up one time, she had the guts to throw him out. His reason? He was with some woman and couldn’t be bothered to come home; in the same breath, he’d tell me what a great father and husband he was, completely believing himself.
He bragged about the number of women he’s been with, forgetting that I’m not a fellow male prisoner and therefore not terribly likely to be impressed. When he told me that he’d only used a condom once in his life, I thought that it was irresponsible beyond belief. I’m well aware of STD statistics, and given that 25% of all sexually active Americans are Herpes carriers (whether they’re symptomatic or not), it was very likely that he was one if he’d had lots of unprotected sex with strangers. I was just amazed that in this day and age he’d take such risks, so if I originally had any thoughts about getting frisky with him, that put an end to that.
It bugged me that he used to slag off his exes, his wives, and his other pen pals while being all sweetness and light to them on paper and in person. I knew full well that he would quite easily do the same to me, regardless of his assurances to the contrary.
When I told him that I didn’t wish to be involved with him, that I only wished to be his friend, he took it as a complete rejection of himself, and I wasn’t prepared for the underhanded ire and the outpouring of bitterness that followed over the next couple of years. He couldn’t believe that I’d chosen a crack addict over him. Bill thought himself superior to Forrest, even though the latter had worked hard (on the right side of the law) all his life and hadn’t neglected his responsibilities as a parent, unlike Bill, but being rational is not Bill’s strongest suit.
As for the photos, he flatly refused to give them back and was aghast at my selfishness. How could I give him something so precious and then cruelly take away his reason for living? (Bill was big on hyperbole, too). We reached a stalemate: he thought I was selfish for wanting them back and I thought he was selfish for holding on to them after seeing how unhappy it made me. Cajoling, threatening – none of it worked, because Bill thrived on conflict, and when I received a particularly abusive letter from him while working in Jamaica that insinuated that the only reason I was still living with my parents was because clearly I was sleeping with my father, I put an end to our correspondence. The comment itself wasn’t a big deal – he was clumsily trying to get a reaction out of me – but by that point, we were just trading insults and the negativity wasn’t good for either of us. Bill also sent me a photocopy made of one of my photos by another stupid female pen pal – and that’s after promising that no one would ever see my photos apart from him!
I thought I was being very clever by sending him the Mary Chapin Carpenter lyrics to ‘The Last Word’:
You can have it, I don’t want it
When you got it, I’ll be gone
It won’t matter what you’re saying
When the damage has all been done
Bill and I both suffer from last-word-itis, and I thought that this way, I won both ways: if he responded, then I’d already told him that it didn’t matter if he had the last word, and if he didn’t, then I’d have the last word. Of course, when he responded, I promptly ruined the effect by then answering him. It’s kind of like the time when my friend and former housemate Sonia* yelled at Tim the Grim (another housemate), who’d insulted her boyfriend, and made a dramatic exit by slamming the door, only to discover that she’d forgotten her handbag and had to go back and retrieve it.
A year later, I heard from Bill again, by which point I wasn’t angry anymore. We discussed my reasons for feeling angry, he discussed why he felt upset about my choosing Forrest over him and I felt that perhaps we could resolve things as adults, and maybe even build a friendship. He still wouldn’t give back the photos, but after months of bitterness I understood that the photos only had as much power over me as I gave them. Once I came to realise that they weren’t important, Bill’s hold over me diminished greatly and his ‘victory’ over me was illusory.
I guess that his showing the photos to his fellow inmates shouldn’t have come as a surprise, and while I wasn’t too bothered about becoming San Quentin ‘pin-up of the year’, when another pen pal of mine informed me that Bill’s been trying to rent them out for a fee or for favours, I flipped. If anyone was going to benefit from compromising photos of yours truly, surely it should been me! When I questioned Bill about it, he lied outright, venting his fury on my other pen pal, and refusing to explain how James knew what the photos consisted of if he’d never seen them. I probably would’ve been prepared to accept an insincere apology, but there was none forthcoming. He then asked me for new copies, because his had gotten worn out, and basically told me that either I can make the copies, or he’ll get someone else to do it – and that’s after the apologies, the declarations of friendship, whatever!
At that point, it sank in that we’ll never see eye to eye. I used to believe that if you explain something to someone clearly enough, they’ll eventually get it, but with Bill, I ran into a brick wall. His world view was very different from mine, and he was simply incapable, in spite of his reasonably high IQ, of understanding another person’s point of view or of empathising with them. He was supremely selfish, delusional, and completely unable to face himself. I realised that he won’t change, that he’ll never be a better man because he doesn’t believe he needs to change. As far as he’s concerned, everyone else has got a problem, not him. He’s not responsible for his current predicament – the justice system is. His estrangement from his children is his wives’ fault – never mind that the children are grown up now and can get in touch with him if they want to.
I also realised that I didn’t believe in his innocence – that actually, it’s perfectly plausible that he did mastermind a computer store robbery that went wrong (that his younger brother is doing life in prison for), that he didn’t think anyone would get hurt, and was genuinely sorry that someone got killed – but as far as he was concerned, it’s not his fault or his responsibility. It’s also plausible that his ex-girlfriend, to please Bill, then bumped off another ex-girlfriend who’d decided to testify against him because she had legal problems of her own. I’m not saying that that’s what happened, and I’m aware that the prosecution used a number of illegal manoeuvres in order to secure Bill’s conviction (which was based on circumstantial evidence only and therefore should not have been enough under the eyes of the law), but the scenario they presented was not out of the realm of possibility. I don’t think he’s an evil mastermind, but his complete lack of responsibility was worrying and I had an issue with corresponding with a man who didn’t strive to better himself and on whose word I couldn’t rely.
It was a mutual decision to end correspondence in 2008, though a year later, I got another letter from him, saying that he missed me and asking if there was a second chance at friendship. I responded by saying that I wish him well, that he should read “A General Theory of Love”, because it changed my life, but that I don’t want to correspond with him – that I’m happy to wish him well from a distance. He sent me a bitter missive, saying that he wouldn’t write to me in a million years, and asking me to never write to him again. I obliged.
I’ve often wondered how I’d react if I were allowed back into the States, if I went back to visit my other San Quentin inmates, and Bill were in the visiting room. Would I ignore him? Would I nod at him courteously? Would I be overcome by old feelings? Would he knock me off-balance again? I know for a fact that regardless of what he said last year, he’d be thrilled to see me. I’m the one who got away, the one who ultimately wasn’t bowled over by him.
For Bill, I’m a scab that he can’t help but pick at, just as for me, he’d been like an itch I couldn’t scratch, somewhere at the back of my mind, just like Pantera had been before him. Why? Why did those two have such a hold on me for so long?
Bill (or Billy, as he now likes to be called, because it makes him sound friendly and approachable), the last Bad Man I’m going to introduce, isn’t exactly an ex of mine, but we were kind of involved and he ended up playing a greater role in my life than expected. He was one of my death row inmate pen pals; I started writing to him in the spring of 2004, rather by accident. In correspondence, as in my personal life, I used to practise positive discrimination: out of the seven men that I wrote to, six happened to be African-American and the seventh – a Mexican national who looked like Apollonia’s* twin brother in his profile photo. I’d like to think that I’m not entirely shallow: José’s profile was well-written and entertaining, and I found it difficult to reconcile this sensitive, earnest young man with the teenage gang member who took part in a gang rape and murder of two teenage girls; we remained firm friends until his execution in August 2008.
Anyway, Bill’s case caught my attention because a) it received a lot of coverage on the two death row pen pal websites (it later turned out that he’d been given a prime spot of the German one because he’d been romantically involved with the woman who ran the site) and b) because from his case summary, it seemed that he’d been accused on committing two murders which he couldn’t have been present at, since he had rock-solid alibis for both murders. Later, when I’d done my research, it turned out that he was not accused of committing the murders himself – he was accused of masterminding them and getting other people to carry them out, which is much harder to prove (or to disprove) and that he’s the only man on San Quentin’s death row who isn’t accused of killing anyone himself.
Bill came across as intelligent, articulate, and sensitive. In the photos, he was very attractive – tall, dark and handsome, with golden skin, hazel eyes and a neat moustache. I didn’t even realise that he was black until I’d read his profile because his skin was the same colour as mine after I’ve been out in the sun for a bit.
I was touched by his plea; he spoke eloquently of the ‘touch of a woman, be it emotional, spiritual or physical’ missing from his life. He sounded like someone who’d have a lot to say for himself, and I just couldn’t believe that he was on death row in spite of the alibis, so I wrote to him, wanting to know more about him and his predicament.
When I introduced myself, I told him that I couldn’t abide small talk and that I’m happy to answer questions about myself - if someone asks me probing and direct questions, they get Brownie points for it and that I answer all personal questions openly and honestly. He wrote me a long letter, telling me that he was exactly the same, and asking me to send him a photo of myself. I did, and he responded by saying that because I came across as very intelligent, he thought that I couldn’t possibly be stunningly beautiful as well, but I was! That though he had several other pen pals my age, I was ‘way more mature than any of them’. It seems that yours truly is somewhat susceptible to flattery; I eagerly lapped it up the compliments because most of them tallied with my own view of myself. Why, of course my mental and emotional maturity is light years beyond that of my peers. Why, of course I’m very intelligent. Not intelligent enough to spot a flatterer, it seems.
Since I’d expressed the desire to meet him in person that summer, in his second letter, Bill explained to me through use of diagrams how it was possible for two consenting adults to ‘have some fun’ during prison visits: since the visiting area was split into ‘cages’, the bottom halves of which were made of sheet metal, as long as your heads were visible through the wire mesh that started at shoulder level, you could get away with some groping under the table or whatever. If you came on a ‘legal visit’, i.e. if you were introduced as a paralegal, you were given way more privacy, with only one guard stationed at the end of the room with his back to you… That was all a ‘by the way’, just in case I felt like it, you know – no pressure. He was funny, charming and graphic. I was a frisky twenty three-year old and at the beginning I really enjoyed Bill’s graphic letters telling me how amazingly beautiful I was and what he’d do to me, given the chance. Rereading the letters, it’s clear that he was ‘grooming’ me, but it was fun at the time.
By the time I turned up at San Quentin, it was pretty much a certainty that something would happen if he turned out to be as charismatic in person as he was on paper. Imagine my surprise when I, having booked an extended four-hour visit, was told that I had just an hour to speak to Bill and that the visit would take place behind glass. Due to some infringement of prison rules on his part, Bill was placed on ‘B’ status, meaning that he was temporarily deprived of various privileges, including contact visits. We still had an entertaining chat through the glass, our ears glued to the prison ‘phones’. Bill seemed nervous and kept licking his lips. But his physical presence was overwhelming; in my life, I’ve only felt this instantaneous electricity, a hyperawareness of the other person, a kind of sexual bristling, only twice: with Bill and with Tom Tavares-Finson, a hotshot lawyer in Jamaica. An overpowering Alpha maleness, and with it, the certain knowledge that the other person is no good for you, but you can’t help wanting them anyway.
I wanna love you but I better not touch
I wanna hold you but my senses tell me to stop
I wanna kiss you but I want it too much
I wanna taste you but your lips are venomous poison
“Poison”, Groove Coverage
At one point during our visit, Bill whipped out his huge wang and demonstrated that it was in full working order with a smile on his face, as if to say: “This could all be yours, sweetie, if you play your cards right.” Humongous penises are kind of like train wrecks – you can’t help but stare at them, but they’re not going anywhere. He really was very charming in person and my visits were hugely entertaining at first, though in retrospect, I am really glad that I only ever saw him behind glass and didn’t get the opportunity to do more than one thing that I’d regretted.
I quickly discovered that Bill’s favourite conversation topic was sex. He could’ve asked me anything about myself, but he was primarily interested in my sexual preferences, and enjoyed talking at length and in detail about the various encounters he enjoyed during the course of his life. At first, it was entertaining, but it became apparent quite soon that there was little else.
His tastes were somewhat unconventional: he enjoyed watching his girlfriends have sex with other men; he got off on the jealousy, he explained, and on the power-tripping – the fact that the women would do that for him when they wouldn’t do it for any of their other boyfriends. My views on sex are very liberal; paedophilia aside, I believe that no sex is ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ as long as the parties concerned are consenting and they enjoy it, but some of what he told me just wasn’t my thing. I also began to wonder how those women would feel if they knew that their intimate details were being told to a complete stranger. I could well believe that the women would do for Bill what they wouldn’t normally do; Bill was very persuasive, and after leaving San Quentin post-visit, I’d shake my head as if to clear it because it seemed to me that I was a different person in his presence; his charisma weaved a temporary spell.
Bill was trying to make it as a writer. He’d read the Harry Potter books and became convinced that he could easily become a success as well. He didn’t seem to understand that to be a writer, you have to love to write, whereas his thoughts focused on spin-off merchandise, film rights and making millions. Like many inmates, he wrote rhyming stuff that he called poetry. I suffered through his attempts at rhyming stories, and came to realise that he wasn’t looking for constructive criticism. He believed that he was a great writer and the slightest criticism was interpreted as an all-out attack on him personally, clearly fuelled by my jealousy of his talent.
When Gabriel* did a story on me and my inmates for the Cambridge Town Crier, using Bill’s case as an example of the people I was trying to help, Bill read into the article what he wanted to, and came to believe that the article was in support of him, personally, rather than a ‘human interest’ article.
For reasons unknown, Bill assumed that Gabriel* was some sort of media mogul who could help him to get published as a writer, so he sucked up to him by sending him a card (Bill’s an excellent cartoonist) which said that ‘Anna’s living proof that angels do exist.’ Gabriel* took the piss out of me for months for that one. After I’d acquired a certain amount of notoriety thanks to a double-page spread in the Cambridge Evening News, to the point where my hospital colleagues would stop me in the corridors and tell me that what I was doing was great, and I began to get recognised in the street, Gabriel* told me that he’d ‘created a monster’. After some guy shook my hand in a pub and offered to buy me a drink, Gabriel* forever asked me for my autograph and generally mocked me.
It’s not the only time I’ve been called an angel. I’ve had a few comments from PlentyofFish.com users, saying that I looked like one, Forrest once called me his ‘guardian angel’ after some botched attempt to save him from himself, and Harun Al-Rashid* once referred to me as ‘the angel of death’ after I’d complained to him that in my nursing work, I get the interesting people, but only when they’re at death’s door; he insinuated that they know they’re going to die when they’re left to my tender mercies.
In February 2005, I did something really stupid. I was staying with Forrest in San Diego, but I popped over the San Francisco for a few days to do some prison visits and Bill asked me for some, erm, compromising photos of myself, saying what a ‘precious gift’ it would be and promising that they’ll be ‘for his eyes only’. I had a bad gut feeling about it all, and I regretted it as soon as I’d sent them to him, but I rationalised it by thinking that he’s in a terrible situation, on death row, he’s got little support…who was I to begrudge him a flash of skin on some shiny paper? I’m not rich or famous, so he wouldn’t exactly be able to sell them to some glossy mag and live happily ever after on the proceeds, could he?
In April 2005, two things happened: I decided that I wanted the photos back because I wasn’t comfortable about him having them, and I told Bill in person that I couldn’t be romantically involved with him because I loved Forrest. The last bit was probably a convenient excuse because Forrest and I were not ‘exclusive’ and Bill certainly wouldn’t have minded being ‘the other man’, but in spite of his charisma, I was going off him mentally. Pantera had the same charisma, the same persuasive nature, but that only works for a little while before cracks appear in the façade and you recognise that the person beneath isn’t all that interesting and is monumentally insecure. Bill did his best to run a harem from his prison cell, and if what he told me is to be believed, numerous women came to San Quentin just to have sex with him, including a sixty-something married woman from the UK who flew out several times a year and who allegedly was the most uninhibited of them all. He then went on to say that though she was the most attractive, I was even more attractive than her, which immediately made me think of the Pantera/Griselle scenario – that I should be grateful he’s choosing me above all these other interested parties.
I was interested in his background, but it only served to confirm my misgivings about him. Bill was a manic depressive and a career criminal, whose legitimate business ventures fell through, and who turned to forgery as a way of making a living. Unlike my other death row guys, by the time he’d ended up in San Quentin, he was 37 years old and had done time in prison for forgery before but hadn’t learned his lesson. He liked the easy money and he liked chasing women; that seemed to sum him up. He’d been married twice and had three or four children, but he was an absent father for the most part, and he didn’t even know about his eldest child until she was grown up. He couldn’t really explain why he got married, given that he never gave up womanising, though I could explain why women wanted to marry him – they wanted to pin him down, to own him or at least a part of hime, to have something concrete, and he gave them what they wanted – a ring and a certificate – without giving up his lifestyle.
On one hand, I was glad that he was honest with me, but on the other, what he told me repelled me. He was generally good at being ‘all things to all women’, but he couldn’t read me, and therefore when he told me what he thought I wanted to hear, he was way off the mark. His younger daughter got back in touch with him after fifteen years incommunicado (he blamed his wives for keeping the kids away from him) and he showed me her letter, in which she bitterly blamed him for not being there, for their mum struggling to bring them up by herself. He’d read those words but be unable to take them in; his second wife put up with his womanising, but on one condition: that he be home in the morning when the kids wake up. When he failed to turn up one time, she had the guts to throw him out. His reason? He was with some woman and couldn’t be bothered to come home; in the same breath, he’d tell me what a great father and husband he was, completely believing himself.
He bragged about the number of women he’s been with, forgetting that I’m not a fellow male prisoner and therefore not terribly likely to be impressed. When he told me that he’d only used a condom once in his life, I thought that it was irresponsible beyond belief. I’m well aware of STD statistics, and given that 25% of all sexually active Americans are Herpes carriers (whether they’re symptomatic or not), it was very likely that he was one if he’d had lots of unprotected sex with strangers. I was just amazed that in this day and age he’d take such risks, so if I originally had any thoughts about getting frisky with him, that put an end to that.
It bugged me that he used to slag off his exes, his wives, and his other pen pals while being all sweetness and light to them on paper and in person. I knew full well that he would quite easily do the same to me, regardless of his assurances to the contrary.
When I told him that I didn’t wish to be involved with him, that I only wished to be his friend, he took it as a complete rejection of himself, and I wasn’t prepared for the underhanded ire and the outpouring of bitterness that followed over the next couple of years. He couldn’t believe that I’d chosen a crack addict over him. Bill thought himself superior to Forrest, even though the latter had worked hard (on the right side of the law) all his life and hadn’t neglected his responsibilities as a parent, unlike Bill, but being rational is not Bill’s strongest suit.
As for the photos, he flatly refused to give them back and was aghast at my selfishness. How could I give him something so precious and then cruelly take away his reason for living? (Bill was big on hyperbole, too). We reached a stalemate: he thought I was selfish for wanting them back and I thought he was selfish for holding on to them after seeing how unhappy it made me. Cajoling, threatening – none of it worked, because Bill thrived on conflict, and when I received a particularly abusive letter from him while working in Jamaica that insinuated that the only reason I was still living with my parents was because clearly I was sleeping with my father, I put an end to our correspondence. The comment itself wasn’t a big deal – he was clumsily trying to get a reaction out of me – but by that point, we were just trading insults and the negativity wasn’t good for either of us. Bill also sent me a photocopy made of one of my photos by another stupid female pen pal – and that’s after promising that no one would ever see my photos apart from him!
I thought I was being very clever by sending him the Mary Chapin Carpenter lyrics to ‘The Last Word’:
You can have it, I don’t want it
When you got it, I’ll be gone
It won’t matter what you’re saying
When the damage has all been done
Bill and I both suffer from last-word-itis, and I thought that this way, I won both ways: if he responded, then I’d already told him that it didn’t matter if he had the last word, and if he didn’t, then I’d have the last word. Of course, when he responded, I promptly ruined the effect by then answering him. It’s kind of like the time when my friend and former housemate Sonia* yelled at Tim the Grim (another housemate), who’d insulted her boyfriend, and made a dramatic exit by slamming the door, only to discover that she’d forgotten her handbag and had to go back and retrieve it.
A year later, I heard from Bill again, by which point I wasn’t angry anymore. We discussed my reasons for feeling angry, he discussed why he felt upset about my choosing Forrest over him and I felt that perhaps we could resolve things as adults, and maybe even build a friendship. He still wouldn’t give back the photos, but after months of bitterness I understood that the photos only had as much power over me as I gave them. Once I came to realise that they weren’t important, Bill’s hold over me diminished greatly and his ‘victory’ over me was illusory.
I guess that his showing the photos to his fellow inmates shouldn’t have come as a surprise, and while I wasn’t too bothered about becoming San Quentin ‘pin-up of the year’, when another pen pal of mine informed me that Bill’s been trying to rent them out for a fee or for favours, I flipped. If anyone was going to benefit from compromising photos of yours truly, surely it should been me! When I questioned Bill about it, he lied outright, venting his fury on my other pen pal, and refusing to explain how James knew what the photos consisted of if he’d never seen them. I probably would’ve been prepared to accept an insincere apology, but there was none forthcoming. He then asked me for new copies, because his had gotten worn out, and basically told me that either I can make the copies, or he’ll get someone else to do it – and that’s after the apologies, the declarations of friendship, whatever!
At that point, it sank in that we’ll never see eye to eye. I used to believe that if you explain something to someone clearly enough, they’ll eventually get it, but with Bill, I ran into a brick wall. His world view was very different from mine, and he was simply incapable, in spite of his reasonably high IQ, of understanding another person’s point of view or of empathising with them. He was supremely selfish, delusional, and completely unable to face himself. I realised that he won’t change, that he’ll never be a better man because he doesn’t believe he needs to change. As far as he’s concerned, everyone else has got a problem, not him. He’s not responsible for his current predicament – the justice system is. His estrangement from his children is his wives’ fault – never mind that the children are grown up now and can get in touch with him if they want to.
I also realised that I didn’t believe in his innocence – that actually, it’s perfectly plausible that he did mastermind a computer store robbery that went wrong (that his younger brother is doing life in prison for), that he didn’t think anyone would get hurt, and was genuinely sorry that someone got killed – but as far as he was concerned, it’s not his fault or his responsibility. It’s also plausible that his ex-girlfriend, to please Bill, then bumped off another ex-girlfriend who’d decided to testify against him because she had legal problems of her own. I’m not saying that that’s what happened, and I’m aware that the prosecution used a number of illegal manoeuvres in order to secure Bill’s conviction (which was based on circumstantial evidence only and therefore should not have been enough under the eyes of the law), but the scenario they presented was not out of the realm of possibility. I don’t think he’s an evil mastermind, but his complete lack of responsibility was worrying and I had an issue with corresponding with a man who didn’t strive to better himself and on whose word I couldn’t rely.
It was a mutual decision to end correspondence in 2008, though a year later, I got another letter from him, saying that he missed me and asking if there was a second chance at friendship. I responded by saying that I wish him well, that he should read “A General Theory of Love”, because it changed my life, but that I don’t want to correspond with him – that I’m happy to wish him well from a distance. He sent me a bitter missive, saying that he wouldn’t write to me in a million years, and asking me to never write to him again. I obliged.
I’ve often wondered how I’d react if I were allowed back into the States, if I went back to visit my other San Quentin inmates, and Bill were in the visiting room. Would I ignore him? Would I nod at him courteously? Would I be overcome by old feelings? Would he knock me off-balance again? I know for a fact that regardless of what he said last year, he’d be thrilled to see me. I’m the one who got away, the one who ultimately wasn’t bowled over by him.
For Bill, I’m a scab that he can’t help but pick at, just as for me, he’d been like an itch I couldn’t scratch, somewhere at the back of my mind, just like Pantera had been before him. Why? Why did those two have such a hold on me for so long?
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