The few shivering inmates huddled underneath the corrugated tin roof outside the closed San Quentin prison dining hall shuffled their feet in a strange, slow drag dance. They slapped their freezing hands in time against their dungaree-draped bodies, desperately trying to keep warm as they waited for the next unlock. It might be hours before any signal issued from the overhead gun towers. Trapped on the asphalt terrace of the upper yard, the inmates stomped and smoked and told lies, trying to amuse themselves in the midst of some of Northern California’s oldest and oddest architecture.
In the distance mismatched bulbs blinked on a scrawny Christmas tree, and a drenched bedsheet on the chapel dormer announced “Merry Christmas ’88.” Rain pummeled the sooty, slate shingles of the lower yard and sang a song of holiday misery. Directly across from the pavilion a three-story building sprawled at the perimeter of the grimy terrace. Beyond lay murky waters of San Francisco Bay. The building stretched along the water’s edge like a dozing dragon. In its full belly lay two hundred fifty men awaiting execution. Further down its gut under its tail lay the gas chamber.
The dragon had no face. It was an anonymous, brownish-gray stone structure called by many different names. The California Departments of Corrections used the formal “Condemned Men’s Unit.” The media called it “death row.” Mainline prisoners at San Quentin whispered “east block,’ respectfully refraining from any fatal utterances. Residents of the row called it “the shelf.” Its gothic entrance was a popular hangout for gawking inmates. And so it was on this particular day that I was stuck in the middle of a gang of yardbirds in the shadow of death row.
It was by far the most menacing building I had ever seen. None of its windows faced the yard. Instead they all faced the Bay the city of Richmond on the other side. It had a wondrous view of the water that was often dotted with sailboats and windsurfers on the weekends and a daily fleet of super-slick ferries carting beautiful commuters between Marin County and San Francisco. It was a vast improvement from the navel-gazing days of blank, windowless walls common to most prisons.
Shortly before lunch two nuns emerged from the hollow archway of death row, walking swiftly through the descending sheets of rain. The taller one held a large, black umbrella over the shorter one. They wore dark mourning garments-long, billowing, black habits with tightly drawn navy hoods trimmed in white.
As they drew nearer, the taller one seemed very protective of the tiny nun barely half her size. I had never seen any other religious enter or leave the building, so it should have struck me as odd. But it didn’t. They were headed for the plaza and the front gate exit, but the sidewalk led them directly to the pavilion where we stood, teeth chattering. Their dark-gray cardigans were buttoned to the neck, and they were bundled up tight for the weather-except for their feet, on which they wore black wool socks under brown sandals.
The crowd parted as they moved through its center. No one said anything. The smaller one stopped abruptly. She reached into a black satchel slung around her neck and pulled out a shiny medal object. Her head bobbled as she scanned the group, perhaps trying to decide who looked the most needy-or at least the most miserable. She did not make eye contact. The top of her head swiveled when she reached the spot where I was standing.
Without warning her head came up, and she stared me straight in the eyes. Her arms moved forward toward my rain-soaked jacket, and she clasped my arms, her tiny hands squeezing my biceps. She mumbled three words-“God bless you”-and placed a medal in my icy hands. Stunned and speechless, I stammered, “Thank you, ma’am,” at the bent figure smiling and staring at me with dark, tear-brimmed eyes. Then she and her companion trudged away as another torrent of rain fell.
I glanced at the medal. It depicted Mother Mary. I plunged it into my sopping pants pocket and prayed for the lunch whistle.
Several days later in the prison dental clinic, while glancing at a recent local newspaper, I came across a photograph of the same woman I had seen earlier that week. It was Mother Teresa. I pored through the article in disbelief, trying to recall what had happened in our brief encounter. I read the details of her U.S. tour-incident after incident of homage being paid this nun throughout the entire country, and here she finds me locked up for life, standing literally at death’s door.
“Well I’ll be d—-.” Shaking my head, I turned to an unimpressed brother fidgeting next to me on the sick-call bench. “This is the broad-uh, I mean nun-that gave me a medal, man.” He nodded and looked another way. “Right chere, bruh, I’m not jivin.'”
“Yeah, man.” The look he gave me before he turned away looked like he thought I ought to be in the sick-call line for nuts.
Clawing and ripping books and papers from my tiny, single cell on the fourth tier of south block, I searched feverishly for the medal. Beginning with my scroungey clothes and linen laundry, I soon turned to my books and newspapers, which occupied most of the living quarters. I combed every single inch of my room in vain. The medal was no where to be found. Flinging my weary bones on the steel bunk, I turned on the TV and tried to console myself.
The local news was running a special on the impact of her visit to the Bay Area. It noted she had paid a visit to death row to pray with the prisoners there. It showed footage of her all over the globe, laying on hands, praying, hugging, feeding, nursing, blessing, embracing the whole world in her saintly arms. I watched, growing nauseous that I had thrown away a blessed keepsake. The thoughts grew worse when I dwelled upon them. Before the night ended I freaked myself out thinking that the only possible chance for parole-a real miracle-I had stupidly lost. I had thrown my blessings away. I looked out from my cell across the gunners’ walkway on the opposing wall. Through the huge windows I could peer down on the rooftop of east block. Dawn was beginning to break.
One of the drawbacks of the reprobate mind is its inability to perceive and or interpret blessings, miracles, and God’s grace. The Bible is filled with such incidents, and my life was living proof it. It would take a saint to get it through my thick skull. By the time of my 1988 encounter with Mother Teresa, I had groped through some chilling religious episodes in the joint. There were the burly, intimidating Christians on the weight pile at Tracy DVI Prison, who propped sweaty coffee- and blood-stained Bibles on weight benches and screamed Scripture at the top of their lungs while pressing two and three hundred pounds of iron. There were the vindictive black Muslims of CMC East plotting jihad, which I militantly joined, and who tossed me out of the masjid when they discovered a smuggled pork chop sandwich buried deep in my loins.
The guys I met along my journey also made a deep impression in my soul. Chuey, my Chicano friend, the tone-deaf tenor in the Folsom Prison choir who was martyred one night during choir practice, not on account of his crummy voice but from having lied as to his home. He claimed he was a Norteño (Northern Mexican-American), and he was staying on Northern turf, but was really a Sureño (Southerner) in disguise. I was trampled in the stampede of “Christians” headed for the door of Graystone Chapel following the gang-sticking, as they left Chuey alone, leaking life.
Then there was my neighbor Chief Rising Sun at Soledad Prison (all Native Americans in stir call themselves “Chief,” I soon learned, when there are no other Native Americans around). After a few months I renamed him Chief Rising Hand because he was always begging me. After much pressure he agreed to accompany me to a Baptist prayer meeting.
But when he showed up with a new homeboy and it came time for me to introduce my guests, I couldn’t decide how to pluralize their tribal name, Blackfoot. “Brethren, may I introduce my two Blackfoots?” Chief turned crimson. The crowd sniggled. “”Err, I mean-Blackfootsies?” They howled. Chief went ruby. “Please fellows, welcome my two Blackfeets.” Chief struck scarlet. The meeting was not fully restored to order until Chief testified that Jesus a mighty powerful medicine man. Neither of us was invited to a Soledad service again.
My search for God, though wavering, had been relentless, but the light always managed to elude me. The only thing that kept me going was the fact that I knew I loved God, and he loved me. It was trying to locate him that seemed impossible. Once, following a fiery Pentecostal meeting delivered in Spanish with a sketchy English translation, I found myself, along with a half dozen other delirious inmates, stark naked and romping around in a huge makeshift baptismal tank on the lawn, babbling in an unknown tongue and getting gloriously “born again.”
A year later found me sobbing uncontrollably in the crowded nave of a Holiness Revival where a silver-tongued Charismatic minister rocked the congregation, insisting that we were all going to hell if we weren’t soon “saved” I begged him to save me. Suddenly the flashy appeal of becoming permanently saved struck me as a much better deal than my waning born-again spirit. The minister wrapped his slender black fingers cluttered with costume jewelry around my bald head and barked some unintelligible words at the ceiling, and I felt the power surge through my limp frame. I was dizzy with the spirit. My dome was reeling with every shifting change of doctrine. The joy of Jesus faded. The load of religion was an unbearable weight, and there seemed nowhere to lay my burden down. I had stretched for the foot of the cross, but I couldn’t reach it.
There is a curious similarity between priests and prisoners. A visiting friend who had just left a cloistered monastery brought it to my attention. No doubt it is the confinement, but there is another more subtle change that often results: piety. I never tried that route, although I have seen much of it. I was always looking for the humor. Jesus loved a good laugh, and no one has a better sense of humor than God. That is one of the things that attracted me to Catholicism. Only Catholics seemed to enjoy my religious stories.
In April of 1996 two desperate young lifer prisoners hacked their way through the several chain-link fencing surrounding the California Rehabilitation Center at Norco and made a clean break for freedom. The getaway car never showed up, and they were caught the next night only a few miles away. In the middle of the following night the remaining lifers were saddled up and spirited away to the desert.
Leaving quasi-tropical Los Angeles for sun-baked Blythe in Riverside County, where four thousand hours of sunlight blaze down annually on the dreaded Ironwood and Chuckawalla prisons, we wondered what we had done to deserve such a fate. After all, we hadn’t made a run for the fence. Who in his right mind would want to live in the desert? It never occurred to me how many significant stories in the Bible take place in the desert.
Just as Jesus had begun his ministry in the desert, my enlightenment would begin there. Only where Christ was tempted by Satan, I found two angels: H. K. Han, the tireless Korean-American Catholic disciple studying to become a deacon, and Sr. Elizabeth O’Keefe, the ageless prison nun from Saint Joan of Arc Church in Blythe. Before I could mumble a Hail Mary I was swept up in a spiritual pull of Catholicism fiercer than the white-water rapids of the nearby Colorado River. Besieged with Bibles, prayer guides, meditation manuals, hundreds of holy card pictures of Mother Mary, Jesus, and saints, I soon had enough rosary beads, scapulars, and medallion chains to string a football field.
Whereas other denominations from outside visited the prison when it was convenient, the Catholics moved in body and soul. The entire Church was involved-the nuns and lay people on a daily basis, the priest weekly. Bishop Barnes of the Los Angeles Archdiocese beamed with hot sermons for hopeless prisoners. No other faith submits its first-rank people to wretches like us. In twenty-two consecutive years of be jailed I have yet to witness any organizations other than the Catholic Church provide such support. If I landed in the hole tonight I know I could count on Sr. Elizabeth visiting me within a week. Sooner or later the question had to arise: “Why are these people being so good to me?”
I’m sure there are many stock answers-missionary spirit, charity, duty. But why would these people pick a bum like me? I believe it started with one particular incident: that Christmas over twelve years ago when Mother Teresa gave me her blessing and I found life at the door to death row.
On October 23, 2,000, following my seventieth birthday, I was baptized, confirmed, and had my First Communion-a Catholic triple-header. It was one of the proudest moments of my life. The service was performed exclusively for me. I thought they were afraid I might croak before the regular service next year. Whatever the cause, I am glad of it, and my only regret is that I didn’t do it twenty-two years ago. By now I’d either be back on the streets-or in heaven.