A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden Read online

  I’m standing here holding a weapon the length of a Volkswagen and wearing a mask, yet people are just staring, wondering what it is I want. No one is moving. Thankfully, I’ve been a hold-up guy so long I’ve learned the words for “On the floor!” in five languages and two dialects — Mandarin and Cantonese, for the casinos.

  Today I give the bank customers the lowdown in English. People begin to fold, to lower themselves cautiously to the floor. I step between the sprawled bodies — a familiar scene; the polished floor looks like a swimming pool that has been drained too quickly.

  I wave my gun at the moustachioed manager behind a desk in a glass cubicle. He emerges, sleeves rolled up, tie loose. His hands pose surrender but his face wears a confidence not warranted, as if he knows something I don’t. But I already know. An alarm button somewhere in the bank has been pushed. That this score was going to be the feature news bulletin on the police radio channel within the first fifteen to twenty seconds was just a bank robbing fact of life.

  The manager starts for the floor but I stop him. Just then, another man wearing the same shirt, tie, and rolled up sleeves ensemble scoots out of a back office already down on his butt. I have the moustached manager still standing there showing me his elbows and palms and what I assume to be the assistant manager on his butt on the floor. For a few seconds nothing happens. Then I realize they are waiting for me.

  I had never done a bank alone. Usually I just wore the stopwatch and all I had to do was command the floors and doors while my partners cleaned the place out. Finally I click into gear and tell them I want the back door unlocked, the night deposit bags brought out, and the safes opened up. The two managers stare at each other helplessly and like helpless men everywhere they both cry for a woman. “Helen!”

  The fifty-ish woman rises timidly from the floor. “The safes can’t be opened for another hour, the night deposit bags are already gone, and the key to the back door is in the middle office, first drawer on the right. All we have on hand is the cash in this drawer.” With that she steps over to a desk behind the counter and begins emptying the drawer of its money. My heart crashes at the sight — a pitiful pile of fives and tens. There sat the hard evidence, the difference between a drug-fuelled fantasy and the reality of a well-planned score.

  I still have to get out of here, I know that much. I get the assistant manager off his butt and on to the job of opening the back door. I swing back around to hold sway on the bank then I spot it. The punch line to an old joke: “When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar.” This jar lead to the room behind the automatic teller machines.

  A new plan ka-chings into place like three cherries and an anchor. I throw the duffel bag at the manager and tell him what I want. He rolls his eyes and calls, “Helen, I need you to open the machines.” He joins Helen-the-Teller and together they head into the loading room. The assistant manager has the back door opened and I catch a fresh jolt of fear — the car is not in sight.

  Stacks of tens and twenties are flying into the duffel bag in three-foot lengths but it’s taking too long to withdraw and then unload each cassette. I yell for them to hurry, to throw in the whole tray. They do, and out comes moustache, dragging the now bulging duffel bag. I point towards the back door.

  The car and my driver are still there, to his credit and my relief. The manager drops the bag into the opened trunk and I thank him. He slams the lid shut and strides back into the bank without so much as a “you’re welcome.”

  All there is left is to scram. A car driven by what appears to be a hundred-year-old elf pulls into the lot and stops bumper to bumper in front of us. Behind her car and across the street stands a cop in her summer uniform — short-sleeved tunic and navy shorts. Her bare legs are planted two feet apart. She and her gun are in a three point stance aimed right at us. “Stop! Right where you are!”

  We back off the elf ’s bumper and fishtail out onto the narrow street nearly sideswiping a line of parked cars. The thunk of the bullet never comes. I’m still expecting the shot as we hit the T-section at the end of the block and turn left, out of the line of fire. Lintball accelerates and we tear up two more blocks then lean into a hard right. A very short street, then a left puts us on the perimeter road of Beacon Hill Park.

  I’m twisted around and watching the rear window. There is a three-way intersection coming up, a right will put us on a shortcut through the park. Make that without the cops spotting us and we’ve got a win. I can hear sirens but there is nothing with us yet. We make the turn but before I can even twist back around Lintball hits the brakes so hard I pitch forward into the dash. We are forced into a moving crawl, trapped behind a horse-drawn tourist carriage. Before I can stop him, Lintball cranks the wheel and speeds off down a paved pedestrian and bicycle path. The entrance is marked by a yellow, No Vehicles sign but that seems the least of our worries.

  I’m kneeling in the front seat facing back. A cruiser stops broadside at the yellow sign, spots us, and turns in. Fuck, Fuck, Fuck! I snatch the shotgun, wrangle my body halfway out the window and take aim across the roof. It’s only bird shot but the blast and the yellow flame spitting from the barrel should be enough to knock a couple of rookies off our tail. Sure enough, the cruiser brakes but before I can say yahoo, a motorcycle cop steers round the cruiser and comes roaring down the lane. I raise the shotgun and fire again. He swerves, re-guns the throttle and keeps coming.

  We fly over a narrow stone bridge, pass the duck pond, and the petting zoo. Lintball is again braking hard. My focus shifts. Behind us the motorcycle, lights flashing, crosses the bridge. Ahead are steel posts sunk into the pavement, the space between them too narrow for the car to pass through.

  Lintball halts the car just in front of the posts. He has the look of someone who is about to throw in the towel. I put my foot over his and push the gas pedal hard to the floor — all he can do is steer. The metal posts rip both sides of the car and we pop free into a four wheel slide right across a busy intersection. We get righted, find an opening and barrel our way straight down into the heart of the James Bay neighbourhood.

  I begin to think that maybe we have lost the motorcycle cop but then I see it, the white bug shield, emergency lights still pulsing from side to side. We start a long dance, us and that lone ranger on his motorbike. We’re racing down the street and he’s keeping up a calculated pursuit, staying just out of shotgun range but maintaining an unblinking visual. We’re flat out, doing eighty maybe ninety clicks an hour, almost flying velocity on a residential street. I’m wedged out the window, the wind whipping my hair, and for one glorious moment, when that shotgun bucks against my shoulder and all four tires lift free of the ground, I am no longer bound to this earth. But we bounce right back down and the motorcycle is still coming on like a bad consequence.

  I think of the Beijing howitzer — but killing’s not on my agenda. I come up with another plan as we near a sharp, almost ninety degree, curve on Dallas Road. “Round this corner and stop!”

  I’m straddling the middle of the road, standing there, shotgun raised in full lock and load. The motorcycle cop accelerates into the curve before he spots me and when he does, he spills. The bike slides out, the front wheel bounces off a concrete barrier and the white-helmeted cop tumbles ass over teakettle down the grass embankment. I get back in the car. Lintball is jumping out of his skin. “You did it, You did it!”

  Now we are clear to backtrack to where we planted a fresh car. But right then Lintball turns back into the chase, right towards a posse of cruisers that have been trying desperately to catch up to the action. Before I can get him turned around, an unmarked but unmistakable squad car comes off a side street and he’s got our tail. A hundred yards ahead a black and white pulls into a sideways slide, stops: suddenly there’s a cop leaning across the hood pointing his pistol straight between my eyes. Lintball brakes, wheels into a driveway. I bail.

  I struggle over a high wooden fence and start through someone’s backyard, but my body’s betraying me, I’m al
ready zigzagging with fatigue, I’m too run down from the months of abuse. I lean against the rough bark of a tree and throw up a pool of phlegm. I see an apartment building, and stagger towards it, the cries of “there he is, there he is,” reaching my ears. I’m expecting to catch one between the shoulder blades any second now but I’m so worn out I feel more resignation then terror.

  I make the lobby of the apartment building, push through and start knocking, trying door handles all the way, desperate to get inside one of the back-facing apartments. A laundry room, no exit. I open the stairwell door and through the plate glass window I see a cop, revolver drawn, in a crouched run along the side of the building. I’m trapped. All I can think of is an old Victor Mature movie where he plays an animal trainer helping to chase down an escaped circus tiger. He turns to the city cop and says, “When a big cat is trapped, he will climb,” and they cut to the tiger bounding up flights of stairs. I start to climb.

  I knock on doors on the second floor; 208 opens and I push my way inside. The futility of my predicament floods through me; I slide the shotgun under the couch and find the bathroom so I can wash my face. The bedroom door is open and I see the elderly woman who had answered the door holding the hand of an elderly man under the bed covers. I imagine they are praying.

  I return to the living room and sit slumped with the knowledge that my life is over. The couple emerge from the bedroom and introduce themselves as John and Kathy, as if I were some kind of queer guest. Kathy fetches me water — I must have looked thirsty — and John, an old Serbian freedom fighter, rolls me a cigarette.

  We could have sat like that forever as far as I was concerned, but we were interrupted by a pounding on the door. Loud voices ordered everyone to vacate the premises.

  Kathy and John did as they were told but I stayed put. The police didn’t enter, they simply left the door open and lit up the hallway with klieg lights. An hour went by. I could hear them emptying out the apartments all through the building. I knew they were removing any witnesses first. At least I wasn’t going to have to suck on my own shotgun.

  Waiting for death, I must have nodded off. They were all over me before I could rub the sleep out of my eyes

  The metal food slot on the cell door drops open with a bang and the hollow flushing of stainless steel toilets echoes up and down the hallway, the gut-wrenching sounds of city cells in the morning. I lay my arm across my eyes and try to shut it all out. I am coming down like a Boeing 747.

  Late in the morning a phalanx of seasoned officers escort me into a courtroom. I am barefoot and wearing only paper coveralls and forty pounds of chains. They are laughing at me and congratulating one another over the morning’s headlines. They are right, I am a clown. I learn I had spent four and a half minutes in the bank, long enough to apply for a loan.

  Weeks pass. More court appearances. My wife hires a good lawyer but we both know I can’t beat this beef with a bazooka. I plead out and although the judge listens to my junkie alibi he knows what everyone else, including me, knows — that we live in the arena of choices and now I’ll have to live with this one.

  I found myself stripped bare, beaten back from hope, and all out of illusions in yet another prison cell like every other prison cell I had lived in.

  The media vilified me as the man who had won redemption, then trashed it. The mayor of the city passed out hardware at the cop Oscars. I lay on my bunk, stared at the ceiling and began to think up ways to take myself off the count.

  I studied that ceiling until the first snowfall. I had two months until sentencing. That day I swung my feet to the floor and began to pace, hesitantly at first, seven steps in one direction, seven steps back.

  A MAN THEY LOVED

  MY HANDS ARE BROKEN, MY RIBS ARE BROKEN, and I’m dope sick beyond belief, but I know the real pain is in the mail, deeper than broken bones. It’s about broken promises, broken hearts, and broken lives. The headlines in the newspapers are as black and bold as gunpowder. The Jackrabbit Stumbles: after thirteen years of freedom, thirteen years of a publicly redeemed life, I have gotten myself wired, robbed a bank, shot at policemen, and held two people hostage. A nightmare I can’t imagine away or hide from in sleep.

  I collapse on my bunk and try to shut out the glare of the twenty-four hour light. Behind my eyelids life has become everything I can’t get back.

  I’m forty-nine years old, married to one of the most interesting and beautiful women on the planet, and parent to two incredible pieces of magic, Sophie, who is ten, and Charlotte, seventeen. The forfeiture is unbearable. I see a clear plastic laundry bag lying in one corner of my cell. If I could only get it over my head, wind it tight, airtight, at the neck.

  I keep the garbage bag clutched in my hand for five days, as I lie fetal, curled around that cavity that others call the centre of their being. I lie down with the pain and I sweat and I weep. Every five minutes I gather enough strength to do it, to place that bag over my head, and every five minutes and one second I gather enough strength not to do it.

  By the weekend I can sit up. Another inmate brings me a plate of congealed stew with a biscuit. I manage to swallow a few plastic forkfuls of the stew, but I don’t manage for long. I charge for the toilet bowel and sell a Buick all over the corner of my cell.

  The guy who brought me my dinner also helps me change clothes and clean up. That evening I sit on the edge of my bunk, sip a cup of water, and this time keep the biscuit down. I glance over at the plastic bag, now filled with sweaty socks and underwear. Who’d want to be sticking their head into that?

  Susan visits. She’s been here on previous days but this is our first contact; I couldn’t get up to see her the other times. I measure the two guards assigned to escort me to the visiting area. The top of my head comes level with the epaulets on their cannon ball shoulders. I step carefully. I know I am in ‘roid country; nobody grows that big eating homemade bread.

  They place me in a security booth and it is all Susan and I can do just to sit there, so numb and so saddened, and watch each other weep through that scratched-up sheet of plexiglass. And when we pick up those black forty-five pound telephones and hold them to our ears, all we can do is listen to that weeping until the hour has passed and the guards come for me.

  Susan begins to visit every day. Our words come slowly, the trembling of my face, of my hands, lessens. Soon thereafter my lawyer, a good and kind friend, begins to show up for a series of consultations. Each time he comes I am led out to the interview room, and he is waiting, yellow legal pad in one hand, pen in the other, poised to take notes. Just the facts, ma’am. With my bones back in my body, my will to live barely restored, it is already time for me to help him to form a narrative of the crime, to gain an understanding of the facts. Good luck.

  As I walk through it with him, recollecting the carnage, it is the faces that emerge most clearly. Bank employees, unfortunate customers, the innocent bystander, the elderly couple in their apartment: the fright in their eyes, the bewildered expressions. And finally, the masked and goggled Emergency Response Team. I didn’t ever see the actual faces of the ERT officers, but their feet left a lasting impression.

  In the years prior to my arrest I had been both a volunteer and a paid worker in an area of what’s commonly referred to as Restorative Justice. I had served on numerous boards of directors for organizations such as the John Howard Society, LINC, B.C., Prison Arts Foundation, PEN Canada, Spirit of the People, and Journal of Prisoners on Prisons. I lectured to crime students, taught creative writing in prisons, and conducted victim empowerment workshops. I was a paid contract worker for Corrections Canada (I had Advanced Security Clearance), helping long-term offenders find their way back into the community. I’d prepared presentence reports, moved prisoner’s wives into low-cost housing, driven their children to visits. I was an assistant at parole hearings, I refereed diversion programs for young offenders, moderated victim reconciliation sessions, and participated in healing circles.

  In the latter three f
orums the victim and the offender are brought together in an informal and neutral setting. The objective is to establish a moral relationship between the offender and the offence and to meet the needs of the victims. These sessions were where healing could begin to take place for the parties in conflict. It was an approach to criminal justice wherein anger, shame, and hurt could be transformed into fairness, generosity, and accountability. It was sometimes a way through the anger and the hate. It was often the beginning of hope.

  One particular session left a clear impression on my mind. It was not the sad tale of addiction and violation that was unfolding before me — these were all too common — but as I sat there, comfortable in my own chair, a witness to the human clumsiness that passed between this victim and this offender, I experienced a sense of liberation. I felt confident that I would be forever beyond the sad and humbling awkward ritual of accountability. I was so sure in that moment that I would never again be brought before the brass rail, made to stand, and be confronted by my own criminal failure.

  And hey, look at me now, I can’t even meet the eyes of my lawyer, my friend.

  He writes it all down. He turns the pages as I peel off layer after fresh layer and sink deeper into the territory of my crime. It is like collaborating on a book: I draw images, he writes the text. Early in the draft I think — why couldn’t I have been an alcoholic instead of a doper? At least an alcoholic is blessed with blackouts and memory losses. But a cocaine psychosis is nothing short of a chilling distillate; it was as if I had memorized a Quentin Tarantino movie.

  The queer part is that “me” — the “I” in the parade of events as they happened — had little or no emotional memory. Cocaine, in a full-blown psychosis, causes an utterly pure detachment. The moral relationship, ironically and sadly, belongs to the person I am this day. The moral compass, the remorse and the shame, are present in me through memory, through me reliving, reattaching myself to the events of that day. Unlike an insane person, I am responsible for my condition and unlike a psychopath I can attain an authentic sense of responsibility.