While I was down in Vacaville, two years into a nickel for armed robbery, I committed the offense that got me sent to Diamond Bar. What happened was this. They had me out spraying the bean fields, dressed in protective gear so full of holes that each day when I was done, I would puke and sweat as if I had been granted a reprieve and yanked from the gas chamber with my lungs half full of death. One afternoon I was sitting by the access road, goggles around my neck, tank of poison strapped to my shoulders, waiting for the prison truck, when an old Volkswagen bus rattled up from the main gate and stopped. On the sliding panel was a detail from a still life by Caravaggio, a rotting pear lopsided on a silver tray; on the passenger door, a pair of cherubs by Titian. Other images, all elements of famous Italian paintings, adorned the roof, front, and rear. The driver peered down at me. A dried-up, sixtyish man in a work shirt, balding, with a mottled scalp, a hooked nose, and a gray beard bibbing his chest. A blue-collar Jehovah. “You sick?” he asked, and waggled a cell phone. “Should I call somebody?”
“Fuck are you?” I asked. “The Art Fairy?”
“Frank Ristelli,” he said without resentment. “I teach a class in painting and sculpture every Wednesday.”
“Those who can’t, teach… huh?”
A patient look. “Why would you say that?”
“‘Cause the perspective on your Titian’s totally fucked.”
“It’s good enough for you to recognize. How do you know Titian?”
“I studied painting in college. Two years. People in the department thought I was going to be a hot-shit artist.”
“Guess you fooled them, huh?”
He was mocking me, but I was too worn out to care. “All that college pussy,” I said. “I couldn’t stay focused.”
“And you had places to rob, people to shoot. Right?”
That kindled my anger, but I said nothing. I wondered why he was hanging around, what he wanted of me.
“Have you kept it up? You been drawing?”
“I mess around some.”
“If you’d like, I’d be glad to take a look. Why don’t you bring me what you’ve been doing next Wednesday?”
I shrugged. “Sure, yeah. I can do that.”
“I’ll need your name if I’m going to hook you up with a pass.”
“Tommy Penhaligon,” I said.
Ristelli wrote it down on a note pad. “Okay… Tommy. Catch you Wednesday.” With that, he put the van in gear and rattled off to the land of the free, his pluming exhaust obscuring my view of the detail from a Piero della Francesca painted on the rear.
Of course, I had done no drawing for years, but I sensed in Ristelli the potential for a sweet hustle. Nothing solid, but you develop a nose for these things. With this in mind, I spent the following week sketching a roachlikely it was several different roaches, but I preferred to think of it as a brother inmate with a felonious history similar to my own. I drew that roach to death, rendering him in a variety of styles ranging from realism to caricature. I ennobled him, imbued him with charisma, invoked his humble, self-abnegatory nature. I made him into an avatar among roaches, a roach with a mission. I crucified him and portrayed him distributing Oreo crumbs to the faithful. I gave him my face, the face of a guard to whom I had a particular aversion, the faces of several friends, including that of Carl Dimassio, who supplied the crank that kept me working straight through the nights. I taped the drawings on the wall and chuckled with delight, amazed by my cleverness. On the night before Ristelli’s class, so wasted that I saw myself as a tragic figure, a savage with the soul of an artist, I set about creating a violent self-portrait, a hunched figure half buried in blackness, illuminated by a spill of lamplight, curled around my sketch pad like a slug about a leaf, with a harrowed face full of weakness and delirium, a construction of crude strokes and charred, glaring eyes, like the face of a murderer who has just understood the consequences of his act. It bore only a slight resemblance to me, but it impressed Ristelli.
“This is very strong,” he said of the self-portrait. “The rest of them”—he gestured at the roach drawings—“they’re good cartoons. But this is the truth.”
Rather than affecting the heightened stoicism that convicts tend to assume when they wish to demonstrate that they have not been emotionally encouraged, I reacted as might a prisoner in one of the movies that had shaped my expectations of prison and said with boyish wonderment, “Yeah… you think?,” intending by this to ruffle the sensibilities of Ristelli’s inmate assistant, a fat, ponytailed biker named Marion Truesdale, aka Pork, whose arms were inked with blue, circusy designs, the most prominent being a voluptuous naked woman with the head of a demon, and whose class work, albeit competent, tended to mirror the derivative fantasy world of his body art. In the look that passed between us then was all I needed to know about the situation: Pork was telling me that he had staked out Ristelli and I should back the fuck off. But rather than heeding the warning, I concentrated on becoming Ristelli’s star pupil, the golden apple in a barrel of rotten ones. Over the next months, devoting myself to the refinement of my gift, I succeeded to such a degree that he started keeping me after class to talk, while Pork—his anger fermenting—cleaned palette knives and brushes.
Much of what I said to Ristelli during that time was designed to persuade him of the deprivation I faced, the lack of stimulation that was neutering my artistic spirit, all with an eye toward convincing him to do a little smuggling for me. Though he sympathized with my complaints, he gave no sign that he was ripe to be conned. He would often maneuver our conversation into theoretical or philosophical directions, and not merely as related to art. It seemed he considered himself my mentor and was attempting to prepare me for a vague future in which I would live if not totally free, then at least unconstrained by spiritual fetters. One day when I described myself in passing as having lived outside the law, he said, “That’s simply not so. The criminal stands at the absolute heart of the law.”
He was perched on a corner of an old scarred desk jammed into the rear of the art room, nearly hidden by the folded easels leaning against it, and I was sitting with my legs stretched out in a folding chair against the opposite wall, smoking one of Ristelli’s Camels. Pork stood at the sink, rinsing brushes in linseed oil, shoulders hunched, radiating enmity, like a sullen child forbidden the company of his elders.
“‘Cause we’re inside?” I asked. “That what you’re saying?”
“I’m talking about criminals, not just prisoners,” Ristelli said. “The criminal is the basis for the law. Its inspiration, its justification. And ultimately, of course, its victim. At least in the view of society.”
“How the hell else can you view it?”
“Some might see incarceration as an opportunity to learn criminal skills. To network. Perhaps they’d rather be elsewhere, but they’re inside, so they take advantage. But they only take partial advantage. They don’t understand the true nature of the opportunity.”
I was about to ask for an explanation of this last statement, but Pork chose the moment to ask Ristelli if he needed any canvases stretched.
Ristelli said, “Why don’t you call it a day. I’ll see you next week.”
Aiming a bleak look in my direction, Pork said, “Yeah… all right,” and shambled out into the corridor.
“The criminal and what he emblematizes…,” Ristelli went on. “The beast. Madness. The unpredictable. He’s the reason society exists. Thus the prison system is the central element of society. Its defining constituency. Its model.” He tapped a cigarette out of his pack and made a twirling gesture with it. “Who runs this place?”