Six days later, against all regulation, Frank Ristelli visited me in the isolation block. I asked how he had managed this, and dropping into his yardbird Zen mode, he said, “I knew the way.” He inquired after my health—the guards had rapped me around more than was usual—and after I assured him nothing was broken, he said, “I have good news. You’re being transferred to Diamond Bar.”
This hardly struck me as good news. I understood how to survive in Vacaville, and the prospect of having to learn the ropes of a new and probably harsher prison was not appealing. I said as much to Ristelli. He was standing beneath the ceiling fixture in my cell, isolated from the shadows—thanks to the metal cage in which the bulb was secured—in a cone of pale light, making it appear that he had just beamed in from a higher plane, a gray saint sent to illumine my solitary darkness.
“You’ve blown your chance at parole,” he said. “You’ll have to do the whole stretch. But this is not a setback; it’s an opportunity. We need men like you at Diamond Bar. The day I met you, I knew you’d be a candidate. I recommended your transfer myself.”
I could not have told you which of these statements most astonished me, which most aroused my anger. “‘We?’ ‘A candidate?’ What’re you talking about?”
“Don’t be upset. There’s…”
“You recommended me? Fuck does that mean? Who gives a shit what you recommend?”
“It’s true, my recommendation bears little weight. These judgments are made by the board. Nevertheless, I feel I’m due some credit for bringing you to their attention.”
Baffled by this and by his air of zoned sanctimony, I sat down on my bunk. “You made a recommendation to the Board of Prisons?”
“No, no! A higher authority. The board of Diamond Bar. Men who have achieved an extraordinary liberty.”
I leaned back against the wall, controlling my agitation. “That’s all you wanted to tell me? You could have written a letter.”
Ristelli sat on the opposite end of the bunk, becoming a shadow beside me. “When you reach Diamond Bar, you won’t know what to do. There are no rules. No regulations of any sort. None but the rule of brotherhood, which is implicit to the place. At times the board is compelled to impose punishment, but their decisions are based not on written law, but upon a comprehension of specific acts and their effect upon the population. Your instincts have brought you this far along the path, so put your trust in them. They’ll be your only guide.”
“Know what my instincts are right now? To bust your goddamn head.” Ristelli began to speak, but I cut him off. “No, man! You feed me this let-your-conscience-be-your-guide bullshit, and…”
“Not your conscience. Your instincts.”
“You feed me this total fucking bullshit, and all I can think is, based on your recommendation, I’m being sent to walls where you say hardly anybody ever gets out of ’em.” I prodded Ristelli’s chest with a forefinger. “You tell me something’ll do me some good up there!!”
“I can’t give you anything of the sort. Diamond Bar’s not like Vacaville. There’s no correlation between them.”
“Are you psycho? That what this is? You’re fucking nuts? Or you’re blowing somebody lets your ass wander around in here and act like some kinda smacked-out Mother Teresa? Give me a name. Somebody can watch out for me when I get there.”
“I wish I could help you more, but each man must find his own freedom.” Ristelli came to his feet. “I envy you.”
“Yeah? So why not come with me? Guy with your pull should be able to wangle himself a ride-along.”
“That is not my fate, though I return there every day and every night in spirit.” His eyes glistened. “Listen to me, Tommy. You’re going to a place few will ever experience. A place removed from the world yet bound to it by a subtle connectivity. The decisions made by those in charge for the benefit of the population enter the consciousness of the general culture and come to govern the decisions made by kings and presidents and despots. By influencing the rule of law, they manipulate the shape of history and redefine cultural possibility.”
“They’re doing a hell of a job,” I said. “World’s in great goddamn shape these days.”
“Diamond Bar has only recently come to primacy. The new millennium will prove the wisdom of the board. And you have an opportunity to become part of that wisdom, Tommy. You have an uncommon sensibility, one that can illustrate the process of the place, give it visual form, and this will permit those who follow in your path to have a clearer understanding of their purpose and their truth. Your work will save them from the missteps that you will surely make.” Ristelli’s voice trembled with emotion. “I realize you can’t accept what I’m saying. Perhaps you never will. I see in you a deep skepticism that prevents you from finding peace. But accomplishment… that you can aspire to, and through accomplishment you may gain a coin of greater worth. Devote yourself to whatever you choose to do. Through devotion all avenues become open to the soul. Serve your ambition in the way a priest serves his divinity, and you will break the chains that weigh down your spirit.”
On my first night in jail, at the age of fifteen, a Mexican kid came over to where I was standing by myself in the day room, trying to hide behind an arrogant pose, and asked if I was jailwise. Not wanting to appear inexperienced, I said that I was, but the Mexican, obviously convinced that I was not, proceeded to enlighten me. Among other things, he advised me to hang with my own kind (i.e., race) or else when trouble occurred no one would have my back, and he explained the diplomatic niceties of the racial divide, saying that whenever another white man offered to give me five, flesh-to-flesh contact was permitted, but should a Latino, an Asian, an Arab, an Afro-American, or any darkly hued member of the human troupe offer a similar encouragement, I was to take out my prison ID card and with it tap the other man’s fingertips. In every jail and prison where I had done time, I had received a similar indoctrination lecture from a stranger with whom I would never interact again. It was as if the system itself had urged someone forward, stimulating them by means of some improbable circuitry to volunteer the fundamentals of survival specific to the place. Ristelli’s version was by far the most unhelpful I had ever heard, yet I did not doubt that his addled sermonette was an incarnation of that very lecture. And because of this; because I had so little information about the prison apart from Ristelli’s prattle; because I believed it must be a new style of supermax whose powers of spiritual deprivation were so ferocious, it ate everything it swallowed except for a handful of indigestible and irretrievably damaged fragments like Ristelli; for these reasons and more I greatly feared what might happen when I was brought to Diamond Bar.
The gray van that transported me from Vacaville seemed representative of the gray strangeness that I believed awaited me, and I constructed the mental image of a secret labyrinthine vastness, a Kafkaville of brick and steel, a partially subterranean complex like the supermax in Florence, Colorado where Timothy McVeigh, Carlos Escobar, and John Gotti had been held; but as we crested a hill on a blue highway south of Mount Shasta, a road that wound through a forest of old-growth spruce and fir, I caught sight of a sprawling granite structure saddling the ridge ahead, looking ominously medieval with its guard turrets and age-blackened stone and high, rough-hewn walls, and my mental image of the prison morphed into more Gothic lines—I pictured dungeons, archaic torments, a massive warden with a bald head the size of a bucket, filed teeth, and a zero tattooed on his brow.
The road angled to the left, and I saw an annex jutting from one side of the prison, a windowless construction almost as high as the main walls, also of weathered granite, that followed the slope of the ridge downward, its nether reach hidden by the forest. We passed in among the ranked trees, over a rattling bridge and along the banks of a fast-flowing river whose waters ran a mineral green through the calm stretches, cold and clouded as poison in a trough, then foamed and seethed over thumblike boulders. Soon the entrance to the annex became visible on the opposite shore: iron doors enclosed by a granite arch and guarded by grandfather firs. The van pulled up, the rear door swung open. When it became apparent that the driver did not intend to stir himself, I climbed out and stood on the bank, gazing toward my future. The ancient stones of the annex were such a bleak corruption of the natural, they seemed to presage an imponderable darkness within, like a gate that when opened would prove the threshold of a gloomy Druid enchantment, and this, in conjunction with the solitude and the deafening rush of the river, made me feel daunted and small. The engine of the van kicked over, and the amplified voice of the driver, a mystery behind smoked windows, issued from a speaker atop the roof: “You have ten minutes to cross the river!” Then the van rolled away, gathering speed, and was gone.