“I always felt shy and worthless. Didn’t get over it till I was 65—that’s how long it took for me to speak in front of crowds. Because, of course, I was invited all the time. Ginsberg was just needy. At least I knew why I felt worthless. It was because my brothers molested me when I was 10. Took me 55 years to get over…
“Jack wrote Big Sur up in Larry’s cabin. And I’m in the book. A few years ago, some people made a documentary about it. They interviewed me for an hour-and-a-half but I was in the movie about two seconds. When I finally watched it, I almost fell asleep. Had to pinch myself it was so boring. They filmed me walking on the beach but it was the wrong beach. Why, I don’t know. I told them it was wrong but they didn’t seem to care. I guess they were going to fake it. But what’s the point of faking it if you’re making a documentary? That cabin isn’t even up there anymore. In Bixby Canyon. It’s a posh home now. There are a few buildings or whatnot where it used to be — but nothing in that film is authentic. I just don’t understand why people avoid facts! There I was walking down the wrong beach… and everyone they decided to put in the movie was so full of opinions. You see, I don’t have ‘opinions,’ I have knowledge. Jack wrote to me that he had to write that book. He felt good about it. The one thing I liked about that documentary was they flew me out from New York on EOS. I don’t think it exists anymore but it was all First Class — the only way to travel. My son met me there and we had a fabulous day in New York. Then we took the train to California and it was horrid.”
One day at San Quentin — she’d been doing her thing up there, and had managed to extend her sabbatical another six months — they told Kelly that a prisoner from the East Block had requested study time. The East Block is Death Row. Kelly thought that was a good omen. The great Buddhist teachers had always said the dharma was best practiced in the shadow of death-awareness. What better a pupil than one on Death Row?
It took some wrangling between the prison and the ACLU because the powers that be weren’t all that excited about the prospect of “Dead man meditating!” It was a control trip, that’s all. A few months went by… my wife didn’t have a clue what was going on. Then a friendly soul at the ACLU called to say their argument was a constitutional slam-dunk and the warden had capitulated.
Kelly told everyone she didn’t want to know the man’s crime or even his last name. “Half are probably innocent, anyway” was what she said to me. The prisoner was brought to a special room with a glass partition. (In her usual jail class, there were sometimes half a dozen inmates, and a guard but no barriers.) She described the condemned charge as “big and rough, sort of handsome, darty paranoid eyes, bookish glasses, big head of grayish Brillo pad hair, biker moustache.” His name was Ricky. The first thing he wanted to learn about was the Noble Truths. When he pronounced “noble” as in Nobel Prize, Kelly was touched. She said his nervousness was poignant; it’d probably been a while since he’d seen a woman, let alone spoken to one. Kelly was certain this kind of teaching would strengthen her own practice.
They met a handful of times. He was an eager student — meditation is popular on Death Row because it dangles the popular out-of-body-experience carrot of astral projection. Kelly began keeping a journal with an eye to writing something for one of the Buddhist magazines, Tricycle or Shambhala Sun. The subscription dharma rags love that shit; growing the sangha in Sing Sing is a perennial. Then she got more ambitious and set her sights on a book. A memoir (dual memoir, actually), part about her, part about Little Ricky. Well, mostly about her, but still, a kind of we’re-all-on-Death-Row type of thing. I thought the framework was immensely compelling: a condemned convict and a middle-aged Berkeley Buddhist engaged in the ol’ impermanence dialogue. Very cool.
I knew it was only a matter of time before she found out the nature of his crime — his crimes. She was making it too much of a thing not to know, which never works. The No! thing never works. I think she was being somewhat naïve. She was naïve, which happens to be her nature. But if she were really serious about writing a book, she’d eventually need to learn. She’d eventually have to ask. Their evolving intimacy alone, so to speak, would force the issue.
As it happened, her caged songbird was a child killer.
Do you remember Polly Klaas, the girl from Petaluma who was kidnapped? Well, Little Ricky was the monster who snatched her. Richard Allen Davis… remember him? If you’re from around here, you probably do. You’re certainly old enough.
Can I remind you of the case? Polly Klaas was having a slumber party. Twelve-year-olds. Around eleven at night, Little Ricky waltzes in with a knife and ties up the girls. Polly’s parents were home when it happened, how’s that for survivor guilt? If you’re a mom or a dad, you’ve got to be saying Kill me now. Swoops in and swoops out, Polly under his arm. Classic unthinkable bogeyman shit. Mrs. Klaas didn’t know anything was wrong until the morning, when she came in to see who wanted pancakes.
The weird thing is (in terms of the Winona connection) that Winona Ryder went up there after the murder — I want to say it was ’93—she went up to raise money for a reward. Because that’s where she’s from. Winona’s from Petaluma. And she did, she raised a lot. I want to say the final tally was $350,000. I don’t know the numbers, maybe fifty from the community, three hundred from Winona. Winona was awesome. A very kind thing to do, everyone appreciated it, you know, local girl made good, she didn’t come with a movie star vibe. None whatsoever. It hit her hard, hit everybody hard.
Little Ricky was of that genus of killers who begin their careers by torturing animals. Now imagine what the man-version of that boy would do to a lamb like Polly, a lamb who barely has its fur. A little lamb can certainly bring out the worst in a Little Ricky. A fellow just did the same thing down in Florida to a gal who was a few years younger than Polly. Went right into the house and grabbed her. Took her home and raped her, then wrapped her in garbage bags with her stuffed animal and buried her alive. I think about her. I think about Polly. I think about these things… Polly’s with her friends, they’re doing their girl-talk popcorn thing, playing music and dancing — safe. Maybe he punched her head to shut her up as they left the house, she’s under his arm, limbs slow-moving like a drugged crab, his adrenaline’s surging, he’s wasted, invincible, can’t believe he’s pulled this off. Drenched in alcohol, pot and meth, barely feels the lamb-crab moving on his hip, a pirate’s pride and booty — I’ll stop. Not from lack of candor, that’s one thing I’ve never been accused of. It’s more, well, you can’t know how far I go into thinking about these things, of inhabiting that sort of evil, examining it from every angle. Particularly of a child’s. It’s just so unpleasant, Bruce, but that’s how I’m wired. My “lingua franca.” If there’s a terrible place to go, I tend to be there. See, that’s what they did to me. I know it’s dreadful but that’s what I do, I conjure the details because I was killed, right around Polly’s age too. And I’ve had lots of time to think about it, I’m a student of murdered children, I inoculate myself. I know that’s selfish… well, the reasons I study them I suppose are two-fold. One is to honor and grieve for them — and honor and grieve for the child I once was before those monsters… I suppose another reason I go so deep is to celebrate that I made it through. That I survived. Because I believed for so many years beyond a shadow of a doubt that I’d be killed by those men. That God could not—would not save me. Because it was He who put me in harm’s way.