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?