A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden Read online

  A CROWBAR

  IN THE BUDDHIST GARDEN

  STEPHEN REID

  © Stephen Reid, 2012

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Thistledown Press Ltd.

  118 – 20th Street West

  Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7M 0W6

  www.thistledownpress.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Reid, Stephen

  A crowbar in the Buddhist garden [electronic resource] : writing from

  prison / Stephen Reid.

  Electronic monograph issued in HTML format.

  Also issued in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-897068-36-6

  1. Reid, Stephen. 2. Prisoners’ writings, Canadian (English).

  3. Prisoners—Canada—Biography. 4. Authors, Canadian (English)—20th

  century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS8585.E606Z47 2012 C813’.54 C2012-904719-8

  Cover illustration by Elana Ray/Shutterstock

  Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing program.

  A CROWBAR

  IN THE BUDDHIST GARDEN

  For Susan — all the love there is

  Kind of faith June has for me, ‘bout wore down to nothing

  Kind of faith June has for me ‘bout wore down to nothing by now but like the rock in the unfarmed field it’s not going anywhere.

  — Johnny Cash, as imagined by Michael Blouin

  CONTENTS

  Prologue (The Beachcomber)

  THE LAST SCORE

  The Last Score

  A Man They Loved

  Celebrating Midnight 1999–2000

  The Last Jesus I Know Of

  JUNKIE

  Junkie

  LEAVING THEIR MARK

  Leaving Their Mark

  Crime and Punishment (2000)

  The Clockwork Grey of the CSC

  The Zen of the Chain

  Hooked

  The Carving Shed

  In the Company of Women

  Bushwhacking South of the Border

  There Are No Children’s Books in Prison

  Tough Guys Do So Vote (2004)

  Born to Loose

  THE ART OF DYING IN PRISON

  Without My Daughter

  The Art of Dying in Prison

  Epilogue (The Beachcomber)

  PROLOGUE

  (The Beachcomber)

  IF YOU FIND A PINK VIBRATOR washed up on a beach you might laugh and walk on by. But when you find a pink vibrator washed up on a beach and you are in prison — you do a snatch and run.

  William Head Institution, a.k.a. “Club Fed,” is an eighty-acre windswept rocky peninsula that juts out from the southern tip of Vancouver Island into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It is both a penitentiary and a place of terrible beauty. At night you can see the lights of Port Angeles, Washington, twenty miles to the south; Victoria, British Columbia, winks from five miles away to the northeast. A high steel fence topped with razor wire and backed up by two gun towers closes off the land entrance, and the cold black waves of the Pacific Northwest lap the perimeter shores like packs of hungry guard dogs.

  The prison, as is the nature and purpose of all prisons, serves to keep those of us sent here separate from society, cut off from the daily commerce of life. These craggy shores, dotted with fir and pine, stands of Garry oak, and the twisted limbs of arbutus, has always been a place of forced isolation. In the tribal memory of the Scia’new, People of the Salmon, the local native band upon whose traditional territory the prison sits, this was where, in pre-contact times, those who offended were banished to “find a new direction.”

  Then from the late 1800s to the middle of the twentieth century, it served as a quarantine station for plague-ridden ships from Europe and the Far East. The lepers were sent to a small offshore island, the victims of cholera and smallpox were confined on this peninsula. Some are buried here. I often think of those who journeyed so far in the holds of sailing ships, in what must have been horrifying conditions: the Chinese, the White Russians, all coming as refugees to the New World. They could only stare across at the lights of Victoria, so close as to seem within reach. They left their bones and their sorrow deep in the soil of this land.

  Since the 1950s, when the original prison was built, many thousands of prisoners have passed through the gates here, and this finger of rock and bush has kept us as cut off from humanity as the first native who stole salmon from his neighbour, or the last girl to disembark from the Empress of Russia. But times are modern, and the sea that all but surrounds us, especially in the winter storms that batter the rocky headland, also brings in messages, signs of lives being lived out there beyond our reach.

  Amongst the plastic shopping bags and Javex bottles, the fishing floats and frayed pieces of dock rope, are flattened Cheerios boxes, empty packages of Hot Blue Corn Chips, a can of Turtle Wax, a baby’s car seat, a child’s plastic Batmobile with one wheel and the driver missing, a broken piece of plywood with the words FORBIDDEN ZONE.

  The detritus up on these rocks sometimes fuels our prison economy. There are men who sit with their faces to the wind, hunkered down out of sight of the patrol trucks, scanning the waves for a bobbing whiskey bottle with a few dregs left or a Ziploc baggy with a few buds of pot, still smokable. One stone alcoholic told me about finding a half-full bottle of Bacardi rum (Black Bat, he called it) and how he downed it on the spot in one gulp. He eventually sobered up and helped found the AA group here, which in a fit of unbridled irony they named The Beachcomber’s AA Group.

  The dope fiends have to stoop a little lower and look a little harder, combing through the bull kelp and raking their fingers through the stones to uncover the small plastic syringes, which can then be sold for twenty dollars or traded straight for a flap of heroin.

  The pink vibrator, once it was rinsed, dried, a couple of new wires soldered in, and batteries installed, hummed to life as good as the day someone walked it out of a love boutique. This buzzing missile ignited a frenzied bidding war. The lucky beachcomber is rumoured to have got twelve bales of tobacco for it and then was able to return and back-tax the buyer for an extra four bales not to reveal his name to the rest of the population.

  One young Cree from north of 60 fished out a wallet containing sixteen American one-dollar bills. Functionally illiterate and unfamiliar with the look of US currency, he thought he had hit a jackpot and was downcast when his dealer did the cold math for him. Still, with the exchange rate, he had enough for a flap.

  I don’t drink or get high these days; my needs are small, and I beachcomb for a different reason. I walk the trails above the coves every day and stare down at the flotsam and jetsam amongst the logs and kelp and natural debris. I watch for that half-submerged square edge, or that colour or texture that is out of pocket with the natural world. I fish out the ripped condom package, a pair of mirrored sunglasses (one lens missing), a high-topped Reebok, size thirteen.

  This is my news from the outside world, my mail, posted anonymously and arriving by accident, connecting me to the live
s of strangers on the free-side shores. I conjure up the genesis of each item, its journey, its past lives, and try to envision the lives it touched. I imagine a young man on a beach ripping open a red condom package with his teeth, or his girlfriend astride him tearing it open with hers. Could it have been tossed out the porthole of a passing cruise ship after a gay liaison? Did a ten-year-old steal it from his parents’ night table to make water balloons and impress his friends?

  I wonder about the flattened package of Hot Blue Corn Chips. Was it opened and poured into a bowl at a barbecue? Or were the chips shared by two friends, eaten right out of the package, while they sat on the edge of a dock, their toes touching the water and each other?

  Where was the missing Batman for the Batmobile? Who had Turtle waxed their Pontiac Firebird on their day off, then tossed the brown container into the bay? Had the plywood door with the one hanging hinge finally and mysteriously come to rest against the rocks in this place on purpose? In the real Forbidden Zone? These battered and broken and waterlogged objects on the beach are the strings that tie me to the outside world. Each has its story, and it is their stories, unlike my own, that set me free.

  THE LAST SCORE

  THE LAST SCORE

  JUNE 09, 1999, 9:15 AM PACIFIC STANDARD TIME. For me, emerging from the Shell station toilet, my head rocking from a fresh jolt of heroin and cocaine, and twenty minutes behind the nine ball, this am is about to become anything but standard.

  I climb into the passenger side of an old hot-wired Dodge whose back seat is loaded with enough artillery to light up a small country. The bank is six blocks away.

  We hook a right on the red and head south. The coke is screaming through my blood but the heroin begins to whisper back and I settle in a bit, wipe some sweat and scan the traffic. I never got mangled before a score — not since I was a juvenile throwing corner stores up in the air.

  I take a quick hinge at the toothpick behind the wheel. I recruited him last night. He has a lint-ball hairdo and the wild eyes of an amateur. My wheelman and this primer-painted, six-cylinder scrap of a getaway car have a shared personality: they are both mutts.

  The motor coughs blood, threatens to die, but the tread-bare tires roll down the sloping pavement and we enter Cook Street Village, a gentrified hub of small shops and businesses: two cafes, both with patios, an Italian bistro and an English pub. The village proper is less than three blocks long and on my side of the street it’s book-ended by the Royal Bank of Canada and a Mac’s Milk. We pass the Mac’s Milk.

  The sun filters through the leafy canopy of the great horse chestnut and elm trees that line both sides of the street. People sit at sidewalk tables sipping foamy coffees, folded newspapers on their laps. A light breeze trembles the leaves, and their shadows on the sidewalk become like little fishes kissing. A couple strolls by, she with a sweater tied around her waist, hugging him. The whole morning and the people in it seem clear and bright and shiny — everything I’m not. I slide even deeper into the sunless interior of the car.

  If ever there was a time to bail it is now, but it’s only a fry pan to fire situation. I am ninety grand deep into the crew back East and tomorrow is payday. I have stalled long enough. My only option is to meet their plane. With their loot.

  I tug on my gloves and motion Lintball to pass the bank, I need more time. He turns right at the next street and I haul the heavy zippered duffel bag into the front. By the time he has circled the block and is coming up on the rear of the bank again, I have already checked the load on an Ithaca pistol grip 12 gauge pump, have a long-barrelled .22 pistol on the seat beside me and secured a .44 magnum in the holster on my hip. From the back seat, under a blanket, I take a Chinese assault rifle with a square clip of twenty-one steel jacket bullets, each the length of a basketball player’s finger. I flick the safety off, cover it again with the blanket. It’s a chase gun, one to discourage even the baddest dog from biting our tires.

  I rip at the metal fasteners and have my tearaway tracksuit off before Lintball turns into the rear parking lot. He jumps on the brakes; I adjust the eye holes on my clear plastic mask, and exit the still rocking car.

  I lope alongside the bank, hugging the red brick wall, the duffel held loosely and my face to the ground hoping I’m incognito in the homemade uniform — a SWAT ball cap and POLICE stencilled boldly on the jacket. But the mask — as I catch my reflection in the bank’s glass doors — a product of some last minute shopping, too, with its rouged cheeks and red painted lips, makes me look more like bank robber Barbie than a facsimile cop. I place a gloved hand on the crossbar of the front entrance doors and push inside.

  Three months earlier. Three o’clock in the afternoon, my birthday, March 13th. One of those brilliant champagne days that comes to Victoria in the early spring. Seated at a small ornate table on the raised patio of Café Mocha with a thimble-sized coffee in front of me, I observed the circuit traffic in the Cook Street Village, nursed a sense of detachment, and amused myself by imagining the lives of the passers-by.

  A guy two tables down took a pull on his Gauloise; I envied him the thick smoky hit on his lungs and wanted to ask him for one, but I hadn’t had a cigarette in almost a year. My life was mostly defined by ex’s these days, ex-smoker, ex-con, ex-bank robber, ex-addict. But there was always one shadow I could never seem to turn into an ex — a sense that I am as separate from this world as a switchblade knife.

  The too familiar feeling had descended upon me earlier in the day without invitation or warning. I had been to a lunch, a birthday gathering of six other Pisces poets and writers. Years ago when we all learned that a bunch of us had been born under the same self-contradictory sign, we planned an annual lunch. “The Literary Fish Lunch Bandits” had grown to include two lawyers and a bookseller. Somewhere before dessert and after my third refusal of wine I began to distance from the comfortable humour of my friends. They were animated about their gardens, happy with their ex-partners, and self-deprecating about their publishing successes or their literary prize nominations. They were smart, sensitive, and sensible people. I saw in them, perhaps wrongly, a coherence, an essential wholeness that I lacked.

  Since leaving prison twelve years ago I had wanted desperately to build something of my own life, too. But with every task completed, every responsibility met and promise kept, there came — along with a sense of satisfaction and well-being — another unsettling sense that my life was becoming nervously enclosed. Increasingly I felt too far inside, too weatherproofed; I feared I might lose the feel of the rain on my face and the wind in my hair.

  I had made my excuses and left the luncheon early and was on my way home when I decided to stop in the Cook Street Village and people watch. An old man shuffled by, his body bent like the drooping ash of a cigarette. He scowled and struck out with his cane as if loathing the ground he walked upon. Was this how it all turned out? You made something of your life and wound up near the end getting mad at a sidewalk?

  I abandoned my coffee and started down the steps to the street. A pickup truck booming rock music cruised past. The driver did a double take but didn’t slow down. I watched him park a few blocks away, far enough that when he exited the truck I couldn’t make out much except leather and jeans. He jaywalked, dodged a few cars and with one last look my way hustled up the steel fire escape on the side of a low apartment building.

  My truck was in the same direction as I headed along the sidewalk, stooping to pick a few of last year’s chestnuts off the ground. As I straightened up, shaking the chestnuts like dice, I found myself facing, from across the street, an old red brick bank. I laughed at the whiff of nostalgia, seeing the Lions in navy, blue, and gold mounted on either side of the glass doors to the lobby. The Royal used to be my bank of choice. I had walked through those roaring lions more often than I cared to remember, but a long time ago.

  I was fitting the key into the truck door when I heard my name: “Stevie!” I’ve got two kinds of friends, ones who call me Stephen and those who know me
as Stevie. I looked up. The leather and jeans guy from the truck waved wildly from the landing. He was motioning me over and bounding down the steps at the same time. As he came nearer I couldn’t quite fish his name out of the memory pool but for sure he was someone I had walked the big yard with. Close up his eyes were glassy and pinned to the nines. He greeted me with that hand slapping faux exuberance of a heroin high: “Great to see you Stevie, me and my old lady watched you on TV … channel surfing and there you were. Hey, come on up, I want her to meet you.”

  And there it was. My conundrum, my Rubik’s Cube without the colours. I was in old brain territory; I simply withdrew the key from my truck door and followed him up the fire escape into the building. It wasn’t his “old lady” I hungered to meet, but a much whiter, paler lady from my own past.

  He knocked, two haircuts and a shave, and we entered a small airless junkie apartment smelling of toadstools and cat urine. A slow-lidded woman in a housecoat bid me be seated on a sagging couch. It seemed the perfect place to unmake my life, just for this afternoon. Just for today.

  I smoked the heroin and got a go flap. I stopped twice on the drive home, once to throw up and once to buy a pack of cigarettes. My wife smelled the tobacco on my breath and saw the long-distance holes in my eyes. She retreated to our bedroom, closed the door, and wept. My birthday cake on the table, surrounded by presents, looked even lonelier.

  I slept that night on the couch and in the morning said my junkie prayers, never again Lord. Within three days I was back in that toadstool apartment; within three weeks, I was injecting five speedballs a day and the number was becoming a vortex.

  I emptied my bank account and flew back to Toronto to cuff a shitload of coke from a crew of old friends, major earners known as The Graduates (from the school of hard knocks). I used my reputation as collateral. By the third month my home life was in shreds. I had either shot or fronted the coke out to some gypsy junkies from whom I had no hope of ever being paid. I was ninety grand in debt, payday was looming, and my life was in the toilet. Time to go to the bank.