The American Friend

2011-12-30T16:10:00.010-05:00

“An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in.
A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.”— Bill Vaughn

WRAPPING IT UP

I’m no Pollyanna. In fact, I often call on my alter ego, Pollybollocks, to back me up. She’s not shy about voicing her rather acerbic opinion that not everybody thinks threatening clouds have a bit of silver tucked in the lining. Often the grass is not greener on the other side of the conundrum and if it is then most likely some horrible Monsanto product was at work there. Light at the end of the tunnel may very well be the oncoming train.

If it takes seventeen muscles to smile and forty-three to frown, why not employ both expressions for a better face work out? Surely the combination, a kind of smilates, is the best training regimen for a person who is aware, who has a sense of humor but cannot, no matter how hard she tries, see the humor in the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachman. We laughed uproariously at the verbal antics of GWB, shared knowing looks as he stumbled through his candidacy. We know how that went. Then we laughed some more when he became the fuck up in the White House, albeit with a little less joi de vivre.

“Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow. It’s what sunflowers do.”

This is a quote famously attributed to a rather impressive woman who was an outspoken Pacifist and a renowned author. She fought for women’s rights and championed the rights of people with disabilities. But Helen Keller, apart from being a genuine Lefty, was also, famously, blind. Before that huff of indignation swells, hear me out. It’s not about what Helen Keller may or may not have actually said. It’s how we bend ourselves, like old Hallmark cards shoved in the back of a drawer, or hang our framed flowery optimism in the hallway and keep our integrity shackled to positive aphorisms that have slipped from their context while everything around us is falling apart.

We aren’t sunflowers, so why risk being hypnotized by sunshine while the powers that continue to be play their evil game in the dark, behind closed doors and on luxury yachts under the kind of sunshine we’ll never afford? I have a feeling if sunflowers could talk they would be pretty pissed off at the beating human beings have given the planet. “Where are the honeybees?” “What the fuck is going on with all this fracking?” “Is that a chemtrail overhead or are you just not glad to see me down here, facing up at the sun?” And before you chide that it’s corporations that are ruining the planet, remember: Corporations are persons now.

If you only look on the bright side then you may very well be blind to the darkness unfolding behind it.

If “Hope” and “Change” are the words you still cling to after 3 years of not only disappointing, but also dangerous returns on your investment in optimism then you’ve kept your face to the sun far too long.

Making resolutions this time of year is, of course, a form of optimism. One gathers the courage to face their demons and, once and for all, tackle them. Procrastination can surely be wrestled with and I know it’s something I’ll get around to. Eventually.

I have every confidence that I will reactivate my love of and pursuit of printmaking. A wonderful man who works with The Mister has neatly and expertly sharpened my woodcutting tools, some of which belonged to my father. I have a good supply of rice paper that has remained untouched since I last put down my chisels and knives too long ago.

I’ll write because when I don’t, I don’t feel well.

And the songwriting will grow with The Mister and me. We have stories to tell and will continue to do so. He’ll advise me to “Pecker up, Lad,” when I am down and I will laugh. Sometimes.

I’ll pay close attention to friendship. What makes one stronger and what simply detracts? Who can teach me how to be a better friend? Who understands a hug is something one may not necessarily need at any given moment of upheaval but who is there when that embrace is wanted. I’ll strive to take on differences that make us all stronger as a whole.

When something is funny I will laugh. The dangerous differences will not make me laugh. Bumbling right wing contenders for the role of Corporate-Commander-in-Chief will not make me laugh. The present Corporate-Commander-in-Chief will not make me laugh. People who follow a candidate blindly and act as if our country was not well over the dangerous brink will not make me laugh. Trampling of civil liberties, rogue cops and pepper spray will not make me laugh. The death penalty has many volunteers who befriend each other and make each other laugh, but we never laugh about the vengeful system we are working to abolish. A man on death row may inadvertently make me laugh because of his sharp wit but he will also make me cry and he will make me angry. He will show me that the spirit can soar even under the most heinous circumstances. He will also remind me that this is no laughing matter.

I will cherish those friends, new and old, who understand anger and how it can be channeled into something productive, even if it’s just a simple sharing of information. I will cherish ones who re-align me when I veer off road without regard for critical thinking and facts; who will gently tell me I am wrong. I’ll pout, probably, when criticism is not so kindly offered, but I will take it all on if it is well intentioned. If it is not well-intentioned criticism I’ll look for the kernel of truth I’m meant to unearth and then I’ll get my Pollybollocks on and tell them, “Thank you, now fuck off!” Anger, for the sake of it, will leave me inching away, looking for the door. And if I am the culprit, I’ll take my comeuppance, apologize, and learn from it.

Anger and pessimism is often sorted out on long rambling walks. I love a walk in the park, sun shining above and cool crisp air urging me onwards. But the fact is, so often many details of Nature are obscured by strong sunlight. That rock that trips you because the light is in your eyes. An overcast sky makes it easier to pick out the source of all that birdsong in the trees.

My year-end resolutions have been written, in the nick of time, looks like. There are those afore-mentioned passions I will re-ignite like printmaking and the ones to continue stoking, like songwriting. I’ll continue writing stories in short story form, striving for each one to be a little bit better in its own universe. The much-loved screenplay that seems to have taken my writing partner, Lauren, and I a lot of time and no time at all will be finished and prodded into a new life off the page. There may be the beginning of a new novel if I can win my battle with procrastination. There are more personal resolutions I won’t share because I might very well fuck them up. Or I might not. Life is full of surprises.

My glass is half-empty. And I’m fine with that.

2011-12-13T13:30:00.043-05:00

“Happiness exists on earth, and it is won through prudent exercise of reason,

knowledge of the harmony of the universe, and constant practice of generosity.” —José Marti

THOSE HOLIDAY RETURNS

It’s that time again. A holiday season that grows inexplicably in length from year to year, a season that one clever friend has dubbed “Hallowthanksmas.” Children and parents flood the streets at the start of this season and beg door to door for sweets, which can no longer be homemade, must not be offered unwrapped and pretty much becomes an advertising campaign for manufacturers of cheap, mass produced candy. Costume outlets clean up because what I see, especially on the toney upper eastside, has been more store bought and less the result of an involved parent and a child's imagination.

Vampires were big this year. And not just among the knee-high trick-or-treaters, as the popular movement known as Occupy Wall Street has made undeniably clear. We, as a nation—specifically 99% of the nation—are being sorely tricked by the 1% who seem to own everything. What treats OWS has in store for them continues to unfold. That’s the crowd The Mister and I have joined and we don’t need to wear costumes, though we are happy to see others who protest and demonstrate in various homemade costumes that sparkle with originality and that lighten the mood of a serious attention to the destruction of our civil liberties, our way of life. We have brought treats to those who staunchly occupied Liberty Square, otherwise known as Zuccotti Park, like bags loaded with apples and oranges and then, when the colder weather set in we brought bag loads of thermal socks.

We also brought fliers.

Because around July of 2010 I began a journey with a man who I call a friend. Before that, I had searched for a way to broaden a personal dedication to ending the death penalty in this country. I joined a book club specifically geared to that cause. I needed an education, to arm myself with the facts that continue to shame our so-called civilized nation. I learned a lot. I am still learning, but at some point I felt ready to make a deeper, more personal connection. In my search I met a woman online who directed me to a young man on Texas Death Row. I read his story on the website volunteers have organized for him. He desperately needed another volunteer to type his handwritten updates that are posted on his website and facebook page. I ‘auditioned’ as it were and soon became a self-described amanuensis to Robert G. Will, a man who I would quickly learn was remarkable.

So, in October, when one of his chief supporters in Texas—a dedicated young woman with a family of her own, who still manages visits to Rob every week—sent me a batch of fliers in support of Rob’s cause The Mister and I headed downtown to OWS and did our best to engage, inform, and thank the passersby who took them from our extended hands.

Rob has been at the Polunsky Unit on Texas Death Row for 11 years. That’s 11 years of not seeing his little boy grow up or feeling a physical touch, the warm embrace from family and friends who love and support him. It’s 11 years of what he describes in painful detail in his personal letters to all of us and in his updates as an “Orwellian Hell.” That’s 11 years that he has been tortured at the hands of vengeful guards who, for whatever reasons, have themselves not learned compassion. It’s 11 years of the freedom we often take for granted. Eleven years of his life he will not get back.

Yet, he inspired and continues to inspire other men on Texas Death Row. He teaches them Yoga and meditation. He drives some toward the light of self-education. He is a self-taught artist of the highest caliber who engages and teaches non-violent resistance in the manner of the world’s greatest leaders like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. And, he continues to inspire me, and volunteers like me, who are in awe of his strength, integrity, talent and compassion.

And now, given the holiday spirit, we are asking for people to accept this plea for Robert G. Will and return with a generous donation. He needs financial backing, a lot of financial backing. Volunteers both here and abroad are working tirelessly for his freedom, to overturn a gross injustice. So many of us are struggling in our own way with economic downturns, as the 1% casually refer to the tsunami caused by the banks and corporations that threatens to drown us. All of us have personal responsibilities to family, friends, and the kind of lives that generous people live.

He needs so much more than court-appointed attorneys. Sadly, as Rob himself has written, it is all too typical that Texas court-appointed attorneys do nothing more than to aid the state. Prosecuting attorneys are armed with audio and visual exhibits. They prepare extensively. Everyone who has been released from Death Row has benefitted greatly from extensive fundraising. Supporters will have to raise over $100,000 to get the DNA testing done that secures a release. As Rob has written: “From knowing men who have been exonerated from Texas Death Row I’ve witnessed first hand how absolutely vital funds are for any and all legal purposes. Every exoneree has had pro bono and/or paid attorneys. I need to have that kind of help on my legal team. I need your help; we need your help.”

You can help in ways big and small, literally. Visit our webpage for Rob and read his story. Learn about this remarkable young man who has been wrongfully sentenced to Texas Death Row for a crime he did not commit.

To help in our efforts to raise funds for his cause check out our web shop! There are solidarity items like the PERSEVERANCE unisex t-shirts with a bold graphic design. These are high quality 100% cotton shirts designed by Dennis Schröder from Supportershirt and printed by DirAction from Hamburg. And they come is all sizes! Or choose among the other original items offered here.

Our main goal is to bring attention to Rob’s case by raising awareness and raising the much needed funding for his legal defense.

Lethal Injustice Rob Will e.V. is also a part of the Rob Will Defense Committee. They are a non-profit organization approved and registered in a local court in Leipzig, Germany. They have a tax number and are authorized to issue receipts for all donations. All contribution from donations and merchandise will be used exclusively for Rob’s defense and for his campaign.

Please consider making a generous donation in one of two ways:

Sending money via www.paypal.com is very easy. Just click on the "send money" tab at the top of the paypal page. Insert our email address—lethalinjustice@gmail.com—for the recipient and follow instructions.

You can also make donations directly to our bank account:

Lethal Injustice Rob Will e.V.
Bank für Sozialwirtschaft
IBAN DE17860205000003507800
BIC BFSWDE33LPZ

Give the gift that keeps on giving. Be that person who spreads the word about Rob Will. Support Rob’s bid for freedom. Thank you all, in advance, for that perfect gift that will bring us all a generous return.

* * *

This poem by Assata Shakur was included by Rob in the very first update I typed for him:

Affirmation

I believe in living. I believe in the spectrum

of Beta days and Gamma people.

I believe in sunshine

in windmills and waterfalls,

tricycles and rocking chairs.

And I believe that seeds grow into sprouts,

And sprouts grow into trees.

I believe in the magic of the hands.

And in the wisdom of the eyes.

I believe in rain and tears.

And in the blood of infinity.

I believe in life.

And I have seen the death parade

march through the torso of the earth,

sculpting mud bodies in its path.

I have seen the destruction of the daylight,

and seen the bloodthirsty maggots

prayed to and saluted.

I have seen the kind become the blind

and the blind become the bind

in one easy lesson.

I have walked on cut glass.

I have eaten crow and blunder bread

and breathed the stench of indifference.

I have been locked by the lawless.

Handcuffed by the haters.

Gagged by the greedy.

And, if I know anything at all,

It’s that a wall is just a wall

and nothing more at all.

It can be broken down.

I believe in living.

I believe in birth.

I believe in the sweat of love

and in the fire of truth.

And I believe that a lost ship,

steered by tired, seasick sailors,

can still be guided home

to port.

-Assata Shakur

2011-11-08T17:42:00.013-05:00

SHORT STORY

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief
that develops the powers of the mind.—Marcel Proust

MARATHON MAN

She listens to the young man standing before her. They are in the empty function room of Estonia House. The room is lined on either side with metal folding chairs. A paper tablecloth covers a long table holding electric coffee urns. Platters of miniature pastries lay untouched, and empty cups and plates wait to be filled.

“My father,” he says, “had always believed he had an astrological twin.” She’s known this young man since birth, since before his birth. There is the resemblance but the real proof is in his voice. She hears his words, but feels an undercurrent, some indefinable tension that birds must feel perched on power lines. This phantom’s manifestation, like an obstinate whisper in her ear, is his father’s presence. She knew this man, the person whose life will be the focal point for the next couple of hours. The son is interrupted from their conversation when other guests arrive.

Outside, the elegant Beaux Arts building fits like a storybook relic among the midtown neighborhood of massive, impersonal fabrication. Directly across East 34^th street was where her father’s shop once stood in a 5-story tenement. He’d worked among a clutter of antiques awaiting rejuvenation. Gold leaf floated in the room like precious dust motes. The smell of varnish pressured the air of his second story loft forcing a sharp intake of breath until the lungs got used to it. The building was torn down to make way for a movie theater. For a long time the air space above remained clear. Now a suffocating wall of featureless architecture blocks the sun. She is unaccountably relieved to see the Clover Delicatessen still hugging a busy corner at Second Avenue.

Runners in the New York City marathon are somewhere all over the city. When she and her husband left their apartment on the Upper East Side the frontrunner for the men had already sprinted down Fifth Avenue, at the top of their street. She remembers her old friend. He had, for most of his life, abhorred exercise. He had never, as far as she knew, ever jogged. He was a writer, a journalist, and a poet. He was an astrologer, and a philosopher. He was a politician who never ran for office. He was a self-taught reader in Sanskrit. He provoked and informed. He argued relentlessly. He was sometimes high-handed with fatherhood. Mastering chess was an obsession. He devoured books until the end. He was a thinker, not a runner.

So, it was a dual surprise when, a few years after he’d left New York for a much sought after life near the Pacific Ocean, he informed her that he had been ill for a while and that he’d embraced Yoga. His body, he told her, had been under attack. The illness remained unspecified, her queries ignored.

He was happy. Southern California was sexier than New York, he said. He was where he wanted to be.

The room in the landmark mansion is too big for the gathering. An initial procession of guests tapers off and there are fewer than 30 in attendance.

Hers is among the low murmur of voices that must make inquiries among strangers, or recognize faces that time had for so long put out of sight. With a start she recognizes her old friend’s sister. She reminds her so much of her brother. When had they seen each other last, they cry? They embrace. A woman who is about her age is a stranger until she mentions her name. With a rush of memory catapulting towards her, she confronts the first time she met her old friend, over 35 years ago. It was at a community newspaper and the woman before her had been married to the founder. Her friend had been the editor-in-chief, a muckraker who strode through a basement warren overrun with cats, fully aware of and entitled to his personal significance. He cosseted the women in the office, carefully stoking their desire to be noticed, appreciated, and blithely fended off protestations of going too far. Yet he ignored her. She knew, even then, what that would lead to.

Footsteps echo off the wooden floor until a circle forms loosely around her friend’s son. He thanks everyone for coming to honor his father. He invites anyone who wishes to say something to please, feel free. After an initial hesitation one after another of the men present steps forward to recall a man who defied simple interpretation. As each takes a turn at raking memory into a personal reflection she whispers to her husband as to who she knew or had heard spoken of over the years. Most she does not know. Her husband quietly urges her to say something. What he knows of her friend comes from meeting him shortly after they’d married. The stories she’d told had little in common with what he is hearing. She demurs. This is the time to speak of a man’s accomplishments, his personal power and what he loved best in the world: Socratic dialogue, writing the kinds of essays of which she understood very little, his very great pride in his son’s accomplishments. One guest reminisces about an unflappable attention to detail, getting a story factually correct and still packing a wallop. They speak of his almost fanatic dedication to making a chess champion of his son. Another man expresses a joking disappointment at the absence of any of the young female beauties their friend had had in his life at any one time.

She thinks this man who is speaking would be shocked to learn that she—an unfashionably full-figured woman in her mid-sixties—was one of those women he idolized, put right up there on a pedestal and then lectured adoringly into cultural awareness, like Charles Swann’s obsession with Odette de Crécy.

She met him when she was divorcing her first husband. They worked together at the newspaper, she as a graphic artist supporting herself as a fine artist. She marveled at his flagrant self-possession. For a young woman with a background like hers, he was both fascinating and terrifying. Ignoring her was his way of stalking her. They danced around each other and sometimes with each other until, for a brief tumultuous time, they were a couple.

She was a painter. Her studio was a basement room on East 85^th Street, across from the Dwight School. He knew her circle, her fellow artists, the journalists and all the rest of the crazies that made up her world post-divorce. He preferred to entertain rather than join them. She both resisted and embraced his Svengali-like attempts at educating her. He made her read Proust. He read philosophy and history for hours in her damp studio and they drank bourbon while she painted. He wrote sonnets for her that grew in grace and intensity. The ones she treasured most were about her cats. When she stopped sleeping with him he was both the jealous would be lover and the dispassionate observer. He urged her repeatedly. “You are a writer,” he proclaimed. “It is in your stars.”

Often he stopped by her studio, which was usually a buzz with heated discourse, dedicated drinking and the heady rush of oil paint and turpentine. When she wasn’t there he left hysterically funny notes taped to the studio door. His handwriting was an instantly recognizable swash. He signed the notes: “Ludwig Von Beetfield.”

He was as passionate as any man who is in constant spiritual and emotional pain can be. He charged at her, demanding, cajoling. He poured over her astrological chart and advised her. He told her what was meant to be. He, of course, was what was meant to be. She didn’t buy it. Artistic freedom was her reward for a difficult and stultifying marriage. He sometimes raged and she would send him away.

One night, when she’d sent him away, he’d lost his keys. In a drunken frenzy to escape her rejection he broke a window to get into his apartment. She shudders a little when one of the speakers, a roommate of his at the time, recounts his arrival home that same evening. Assessing the locked front door, the broken window, he laughs about calling the cops only to find his friend passed out in the apartment, snoring like a distempered bull.

Their commonality was their fathers. Defeated men, artists in a world that never understood them. He was both embarrassed and angered by his father. She knew that feeling very well. Never, he told her, had he ever felt anything but a freak, a stranger on the planet. Among his schoolmates he stood out for his Asian features. He committed a lifetime to exploiting that difference. He sharpened a rapier wit on their inadequacies. He was smarter than all of them. Of that, there was no doubt.

He married another when she finally, categorically refused his advances. Too much pain, she told him. Too much anger. They would drink each other dry.

He’d had a son, now her friend, who is wise beyond his years. She watches as he sits, silent and attentive to each speaker who reveals no secrets of his father’s life. The marriage foundered on the rocks of her friend’s despair at being misunderstood, of another hoped for protégée fleeing the force of his passion. When his son was still a little boy, his wife divorced him as acrimoniously as was humanly possible.

She leans closer to her husband. He takes her hand, squeezing it in recognition. The speeches fade in and out.

They reconnected when his son, still young, was tall enough to ride the Pirate Ship at Coney Island. She was completely taken with the boy. He knew she was set against a second marriage, as she was quite capable in her independence and her art. When she wasn’t looking he remapped the playing field and offered her a marriage of true minds. They would have an intellectual relationship based on vast amounts of freedom within the marriage, a kind of Bloomsbury marriage of the minds. He knew she didn’t want children of her own, and though he said he agreed, eventually he resorted to the poetic pressure at which he excelled.

He wanted to marry immediately and she insisted on a year. She wanted to go through four seasons with him. He told her he had stopped drinking. She needed more assurance. She spent time with his mother going to museums. His father roamed like a specter through his broken dreams. She looked forward to being a stepmother.

Within months of their announcement he bridled and threw off the constraints of sobriety. She broke the engagement.

“Are you alright?” her husband asks. The last speaker has retired to polite applause. His sister remains quiet and observant. Her physical appearance more proof of the family line. Her brow is creased with sorrow. A quiet young woman with a softly rounded face and the features that guarantee her uncle will not be forgotten trembles at her mother’s side. She begins to speak. Her lower lip quivers as she stumbles over her gratitude to those assembled.

When, many years later, she’d told him she was going to marry again, her old friend went to great lengths to dissuade her. He told her finally that he had done everything he could to have the Universe inform him that the marriage was absolutely wrong. He’d read their astrological charts, consulted the Tarot and threw the I Ching. The answers never varied. Her marriage was destined to last. They were marrying in the most difficult of their respective phases and would be challenged on every level, but if they came through it, and he was sure they would, it would be a lasting marriage.

They remained friends. She felt he was distancing himself for the past few years but still he responded when she contacted him. When she saw him on his infrequent visits to New York and she accompanied him on a shopping mission, she found it difficult to witness his extravagance in courting some young woman or other with expensive gifts. It was a bittersweet recognition—knowing how financially strapped he was—of the same kinds of gifts he’d made to her a long time ago.

Coats and bags are retrieved. Guests slip away. His son’s wife keeps a wary eye on their little girl, trying to make sense of all these strangers.

His sister tells her before leaving that her brother’s ashes were scattered upon the Pacific Ocean.

“It’s funny, isn’t it, that the marathon is today.” She looks over at his son who poses for photographs with his father’s friends. She waits for an opening to take her leave. “What about it?” her husband asks. “Oh, you know. The irony, if that makes sense. He wasn’t a runner. Really, the opposite.” She tells him he jogged her life on so many levels—art, culture, literature and politics. He jogged her way of seeing, of feeling and of learning. It’s kind of fitting, she adds, that his memorial should be here in Manhattan on the day of the marathon. “He walked and walked and walked these streets in search of stories,” she sighs.

“Come,” she says to her husband. “He’s free.” She starts for his son—her friend—and suddenly remembers an e-mail she received from his father. “Well, I am a grandfather,” he wrote. “She was born on my birthday. I am elated.” She steps carefully around the squirrely two-year-old bundle of blonde energy embracing her father’s legs who stares up at her with a familiar scrutiny. She holds the child’s gaze. He had found his astrological twin after all.

MARATHON MAN is an original short story by Linda Danz.

STORIES ON THE AMERICAN FRIEND Writers Guild of America, East #R28299

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business organizations, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. The use of names of actual persons, places, and events is incidental to the plot, and is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. © NOVEMBER 2011

2011-10-16T17:15:00.035-04:00

A SHORT STORY

“I don't think your ability to fight has anything to do with how big you are. It's to do with how much anger is in you.”—Amy Winehouse.

OPEN MIC SURGERY

For Percy

Jo Fury slid the guitar case from her shoulder like a miscarried weapon. It was 2 a.m., and that much closer to Monday. Derek laid down the brush he’d been cleaning. “It’s nice to make even the drunks clap some time,” she sighed. The air smelled sharply of turpentine. “Bad night?” her husband asked. “First on was a magician,” she replied, “when isn’t it?” “When it isn’t,” he said. “Tea?”

“Yes, please.” Jo, or Joanna as she had been known as a child, unzipped the case and removed the Gibson. She set the guitar on its stand and followed Derek to the kitchen.

“You know the guy I like? Tom?” “The one who writes with his wife?” Derek asked. “Yeah. Anyway, one of the musos got up for his turn. I said, ‘Why do I think this one’s gonna be hurty?’ And Tom said: ‘Cuz of the wires and the little electronic boxes hanging off him, maybe?’” Derek laughed and poured boiling water over teabags. “Then, you know that little bald-headed guy in the business suit? The one I told you about who always shows up with a guitar strapped to his back and never performs?” Derek nodded. “He hit on me.” “Poor guy. What did you say to him?” “I told him ‘We’re done, buddy.’” Derek shook his head. Jo was tiny but she was tougher than nails.

Standing before the easel again, she admitted it wasn’t such a bad night. “I played three songs. Then Tom played a couple of new ones, good songs. You know, old school.” Jo sighed dreamily. Derek placed a mug of green tea in Jo’s hands. “Like you.” Her sighs were like clouds—cirrus he guessed—that lingered in her expression before they dispersed. She grinned. Who would have imagined old school hardcore. “Well, not exactly, but yeah, like me.” The last vaporous filament disappeared.

“This new?” Jo peered above the mug to a large familiar-sized canvas covered with a still wet ground. Derek Challenger had been working on this series for a long time, some eleven or twelve years. He had lost his gallery representation when the city lost the twin towers, but not his self-possessed determination to tell this story of a simple man, an almost embryonic figure in a landscape sometimes chaotic and warlike. There were other times when the figure coupled in a tender embrace, leaving the viewer to determine where one figure began and another left off. Often the figure was alone. Jo imagined where he would place the gold leaf that appeared in every one of these canvases, the leitmotif of sanctuary discovered on the horizon, or just around the impenetrable mountain or peeking through an ominous forest of unforgiving trees. Derek saw light beyond the struggle that was sometimes overwhelming. He worked against the ground color. A field of Naples Yellow and Titanium White meant a darker, somber, angst-ridden landscape would eventually rise to the surface of the canvas.

Jo pressed the tip of her index finger into Burnt Umber and Payne’s Gray. She knew this painting would not be about treachery; that it would grow into a cloudless landscape flooded with light and the character would find the going easier than in other tableaus. Every painting held a promise—evidenced by the gold leaf—that rallied the figure when he listened to the Universe.

They met in the mid 80s. Whores Of Fabulon had limped to the end of their tour. It was Jo’s last night in London, her final night with the band as it turned out. He spotted her in a pub in Kentish Town, drawn to her deceptively delicate frame, her China White face glowed from a jet black frame of hair. She watched his dark and purposeful hand, like a seasoned oak leaf, fall gently to the bar and point to a full pint of Guinness; an invitation that she grabbed like a life preserver. Jo was compelled by a story of a disturbing upbringing in Brixton. Derek’s parents, Caribbean immigrants, had met in prison, or he was born in prison, she couldn’t remember. He was an only child who’d left school at 15 after his mother died. Derek never spoke of his father. He never again mentioned his childhood, leaving an abstract impression on Jo like his canvases that were darkly layered, bleak and cracked like the surface of some evil planet. He was surprised when she revealed a suburban background of modest comfort, doting parents and that she was a natural honey-colored blonde.

About twelve years ago something in Derek shifted. It seemed to Jo a relief for him when the downtown art scene met its match with 9/11. He’d discovered gold leaf and it was as if he had been pricked all over. Luminosity sprang from him like light through a colander. He began the series she saw before her. He had not exactly lost the brooding temperament so much as come to terms with it. For all his blackness, he became lighter.

Jo Fury, still pale and now platinum haired, was drawn to the dark, claimed it was a fucked up world so she might as well get used to it. They were perfect for each other.

She started for the kitchen with her empty mug. What she really wanted—needed—was another blast of Stoli. Before she mounted the little stage at The Flaming Tiger, or at any of the open mics in bars around town, she blew back the white feather with a hastily downed shot of vodka, on the rocks, straight up, or good and dirty in a martini. To appease the goddess of must-really-be-healthier, she drank it with cranberry juice. Jo deliberated. Bells would ring much too soon. Morning would come before she was ready, when a classroom of ninth graders went straight for the jugular. It would be much more difficult with a hangover. There were only a few more days before it was over and summer granted her a reprieve from the classroom. She heard the ice crack from the tray, watched it settle into miniature boulders as the vodka washed over it.

“I’m going to bed love,” Derek said quietly. “You know, you have a particular look after you’ve done one of those open mics.” “I do?” She lowered the glass. “Good or bad?” “Good,” he said. Jo sipped her drink. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like my chest is somehow exposed and my heart is being massaged. Even on those crappy nights, even when the talent is less than stellar and the audience sucks.” “Sounds like open heart surgery,” he laughed. “Well, it is kind of like that.” She leaned in for a kiss. “One of these days teaching’s gonna give me a heart attack.” “I’ll set your alarm,” he said. “Go easy on that.” A trace of turpentine clung to her fingertips as she lifted the chilled glass.

They lived in a pre-war building on West End Avenue. Every day for the past few years an apartment was being renovated somewhere in the building. Derek and Jo were among the last of the holdouts, renters who by virtue of dwindling funds and rent control stayed the course. A cavernous, unfurnished lobby became a showpiece and the sleepy-eyed men at the door were uniformed, made to look smart when they directed guests to a recent sign-in sheet. Six floors above them and closer to the clouds lived a beloved icon—a living legend. She had resisted the lure of ownership of her rent-controlled apartment until the very last minute. The folksinger looked at both sides and decided she liked the other side so much she bought the adjoining apartment as well.

They managed. When the recession hit and little luxuries started falling, like plaster from an old ceiling, Jo went back to teaching full time with a resounding commitment that surprised them both. Derek was showing at a gallery in Chelsea but the sales suddenly stopped. The art-buying world—a fickle mistress—was more stressful for Jo than the occasional groupies Derek bedded. The last rent hike for his Chelsea studio was practically pornographic. They agreed that things weren’t getting any better and cleared an ample living room for his studio. She had already settled into the second bedroom. Years ago, they’d faced the room with bookshelves, now slouched under the weight of voracious readers. She had her guitars—a not too shabby collection—recording equipment she could handle, a laptop with Garage Band and a velvet, eggplant-colored couch—her elegant ruin—which she sank into when she had a steaming headache. Her best lines came to her then. Half of the room was taken up with his paintings. She didn’t mind, didn’t need much. She rather enjoyed having Derek around. The temptation to stray seemed to be held in check since he no longer kept the studio in Chelsea. He was older. They both were. And he cooked.

Flushing was a long subway ride from the Upper West Side. Jo hesitated at the door to her first class, repeating her mantra. “Ow, ow, ow,” she whispered. On the other side lay a roomful of ninth graders who could not care less about English grammar when they smelled summer and the only thing standing between them and freedom was the pale blonde teacher in an overcrowded class of Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims and Asians. But she loved every one of them; their defiance that thrummed like nervy chords from her guitar. In a way they had become their own songs and she, their conductor. They came from all over, more so since they closed Jamaica High. Many were low-level learners, and she had a disproportionate number of special needs kids in each of her five classes to add to chaotic numbers. No child left behind? Not only were they left behind; the breadcrumbs on the path were swept clean.

A voice cheered at her back. “Only two more days!” She turned and saw Kevin, a fellow teacher, or partner in pain as he put it wryly. “Escape from Alcatraz,” she croaked. “Rough night?” he quipped as he strode past her in the hallway. “Don’t give them any rope.” Jo straightened up, threw him her widest, brightest smile, shouting after him. “I know, I know. Want to get rid of half the teachers in this city? Give ’em a drug test.”

She left a windowless classroom that was 90 plus degrees, hotter than the outside air. Heading for a salon in midtown on the East Side she texted Derek as she hurried into the subway: “Home 4 dinner. Getting my blonde on!”

Later, when they’d finished their meal he asked how her day had gone. Jo admitted that she was a bit testy with the kids, that she was looking forward to the summer. “We all need a break.” For a treat she’d asked her last class to bring in their favorite talisman. No cheating, she told them. Don’t look up the word. Most, if they understood the word at all, she expected would bring objects that would not make it through a metal detector. “One girl got it right, sort of,” Jo sighed. Derek ran his hands through her long, freshly done hair. “Nice. So what do you mean by sort of?” She thought for a moment. “Oh, she brought in a dream catcher thing.” “Cool,” he said. Jo huffed, “It is not cool. Those things are bogus, never a Native American tradition.” Derek eyed her warily. She had her ‘get a life’ look on. “So, you said?” “I told her it was string.” He groaned. “I’ll teach ’em the word mendacity tomorrow.”

Derek began clearing the table. She studied his muscular arms, the color of polished mahogany. She pressed his hand lightly. She felt the coarse evidence of turps in the cracked skin around his fingers, on his knuckles. The proof of his passion lay embedded in the cuticles of his wide fingernails.

There were going to be more layoffs. “You’re one they like though,” Derek said. “I mean, you’re a great teacher.” She drained a glass of Pinot Grigio, her drink of atonement. “Are you nuts?” Derek had heard all this before, but she couldn’t stop herself. “More than eleven years in a system that doesn’t value experience. It’s all about the fucking numbers. They can get one-and-a-half new teachers for what they pay me, and they won’t squawk about anything that is asked of them, legal or otherwise. Union? What union! That’s how it is. Look, there are crappy, lazy teachers just like there are crappy, lazy everything else, but those are the teachers you hear and read about. Thanks Mike!” He reached for her empty glass. “They couldn’t replace you with one-and-a-half of anything.” “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Basically, I can expect to be tortured by administration until I can’t take it anymore.” “That would be terrible for your students,” he said and then asked: “Tea?” “Uhn, no.” She surrendered the empty wine glass. “Is there any more of the white in the fridge?”

In a few more days Jo could devote herself to the music. Derek would get a respite from rants about a broken system and how the current fixes don’t fix anything; how the disorganization went all the way up to the state level, for fuck’s sake. She was going to book all the open mics she could get into, maybe even some solo gigs.

She’d learned to play guitar as a kid and began writing songs when she was a teenager. Her parents, both teachers, encouraged her. They were only slightly bemused when she threw down the guitar for electric bass. She left the good girl behind in Great Neck and took a new bad ass self to Hunter College. By the time she graduated she knew the inside of every downtown bar and music venue. She practically lived at CBGB’s. Girl bands formed, dissolved and re-formed around her until the Whores Of Fabulon clicked their leather booted-and-chained heels and tore up a stage. She died her hair black—they all did—and painted her lips and fingernails to match head-to-toe allegiance to hardcore. A small but possessed following clamored for Jo Fury’s songs. Soon they were opening for Goth bands like Maria Ex Communicata and Amazon Ratcatchers.

By the time she met Derek the girls in the band were no longer girls. The lead guitar was smashed all the time. The drummer’s panting pursuit of Jo went unrequited and she shaved her head in protest. They were angry, frustrated and wearied by the road, torn apart by drugs, infighting and feckless management. Atlantic Records gave up on them. Jo was eager to return to a burgeoning hardcore scene, bands like Bad Brains, Reagan Youth, and Agnostic Front. She was done with women. She was over the bass. Derek wanted to live in New York.

They found their way with each other through sex and dissension, stubbornness and forgiving. They married in City Hall. Immigration was the hassle they endured for Derek’s green card but the resistance they were expecting from an agency keen to ferret out the fraud in inter-racial marriages never happened. They were approved at their first interview. Stunned, they got up to leave. The examiner shared her personal opinion that having observed them in the waiting room she thought they bickered and laughed like an old married couple already. And then she wished them well.

After one more shot with a band called The Wrath Of Grace she put down her cheap and nasty Melody Maker, thought about buying a Gibson Les Paul before boarding a Staten Island ferry and coming home a few grand poorer with a Gibson Advanced Jumbo. For better or worse she still had chops, a strong voice. Someone once told her that her voice was like the hum of a high-tension wire just as it gets hit by lightning. That voice had served her well in a classroom vibrating from a dissonant multicultural choir.

She still listened to Joan Jett and had a soft spot for Courtney Love, but she relished Amy Winehouse. Derek’s love of jazzer’s like Pharoah Sanders, Mingus and Miles Davis was intact, but she often heard the vibes from Terrance Blanchard and Joshua Redmond coming from the redressed living room. His concentration was evident. She began writing again.

He’d been to her gigs years ago, always visibly agitated from toxic levels of angst. Jo thought it was because he spent long hours alone in the studio. When he asked why she didn’t bring it down a bit she gave him a free pass. Since she’d started going to open mics she tried once to induce him. He did listen at home when she played back each new song. They were restless melodies that he admitted stayed with him. Still, he begged off. How many Black men do you see at these things, he asked. And she knew what he meant. A few young men had wandered onstage, but Gangsta Rap grated on Derek’s nerves. He hated stand up comics and big guys like him were bouncers on Bleecker Street.

Jo kept at it. Guitar Bob’s on the Lower East Side, with it’s shabby décor and laid back approach to open mic, was her go to place on Saturday afternoons. She’d collect her courage under a granddaddy willow tree in one of the many Community Gardens. Her introduction to the hip guy with the buzz cut and the vintage Ray-Bans who ran the open mic was his announcement that he’d just got back from New Orleans. A day late as it turned out, because he had been in jail! The mic rested atop a Frankenstein stand mended with the remains of more raucous evenings. By the end of the summer that venerable old bar on Avenue C would be shuttered. As much as she appreciated a good drink, replacing Guitar Bob’s with an upscale joint that prided itself on ‘artisanal’ cocktails was just ludicrous.

Unflagging, she made trips out to Queens to a tiny place called Swing Astoria. Jo winced while a mortified teen clutched her chest and stumbled through a Miley Cyrus cover. A woman from Amsterdam sang about crying on the flohohohohoor, banging the hurt out on the piano keys. Jo found she was sandwiched between a wan hippie couple from Woodstock who sang about hunted Silverbacks and a barely fledged white boy in a gang-style baseball cap who rapped about his girlfriend, the asshole. “This is the most bitter break up song I ever wrote in my life,” he growled. “It’s called Cyanide.” He was seriously tattooed, a trend Jo said no thank you to when needles meant AIDS. Nowadays she thought you might as well be wearing a suit and tie. Love was not winning in Queens. Hummus only went so far. The cafe did not serve alcohol. And though she’d gotten a warm reception from a tea-drinking audience a return trip was out of the question.

Brooklyn was the next outpost to be explored and she boarded the L train more times than she’d ever had in her life. There was Arnold’s Candy Shoppe, a ramshackle bar squatting under the BQE in Brooklyn. The performance space at the back was like the inside shell of a diner that looked like it had come off the movie set of some hopeless science fiction in the future. The cost of a drink was on the quiet side, the trilby-wearing patrons much louder. The noise didn’t really matter to Jo when she thought a performer was just ‘thinking out loud.’ She learned to bring it down with a quieter delivery.

She favored an Irish Bar on Bergen. The talent was above average. The room at the back looked to be the kind of place where revolutions were planned in whiskey-drinking earnest. An impish muso with a penchant for story telling kept the audience chatter to an acceptable level and was generous in his praise of each performer. Sometimes a stoop-shouldered player in a battered newsboy cap had to be helped to the mic, but he brought the revolution to life. In a voice curdled by age and anger he sang about the troubles back home.

One determinedly acoustic open mic in Williamsburg was—insanely, Jo thought—scheduled on the same nights as a raucous pool tournament. Only that singer who managed a crashing vocal accompaniment to a PBR shout fest did not walk away from the mic defeated.

Jo hit cafes in the West Village no wider than a subway car, and throwback bars on the Bowery replete with stripper poles and bowls of popcorn she indulged in freely knowing full well it was a salty ruse to get her to drink more. On the Upper East Side the bars opened onto traffic’s thunderous disregard. Performers became nervy backdrops for screaming sports fans.

Soon she became a steady presence at the Flaming Tiger and every Monday night mounted the stage in her turn.

When she returned home in the small hours Derek joined her in the kitchen. Usually she accepted the herbal tea offered, but a nightcap always followed. He asked why she had to lug the guitar everywhere; wasn’t there a communal one at any of these venues. She gagged. “Man if you did a DNA on any of those you’d have the spit and sweat of half the city on them.” He laughed and told her whether or not she liked it she was a long way from hardcore.

She was a long way from a guitar-punishing tantrum, but an irascible discontent still inhabited her lyrics. The world was a fucked up place. Even guitar makers like her beloved Gibson were destroying the rainforest, worse they were somehow allied with the damnable Tea Party. But she wrote love songs too, maybe fierce, but love songs nonetheless. Lovers were comrades, albeit tender ones, in communal wars. The guitar was all the heft she needed these days. Jo sat at the bar and scribbled words on a napkin in the ruby glow of a tiny candle. If the phrase stuck with her until she got home she’d rustle up some scrambled eggs and coffee and sipping a Bloody Mary she donned headphones and called up Garage Band on the laptop.

Sometimes she wondered if she was losing her fun, or if, indeed she’d ever had it. She commented on the young women who wore their black hair in ponytails or a fringed bob, shiny as a vinyl record signifying none of the angst of her day. Dressed in frocks like some latter Depression era ragamuffin, they sang songs about Christmas trees in June and putting on mittens. They had baby doll voices and Jo missed the roar.

Derek seemed entertained by her stories: “The Open Mic Tales,” he called them. She told him how she’d been thrown when a songwriter from Liverpool, whose casual conversation accented with a distinctive Scouse affected her like a shivering lullaby, until suddenly it morphed into Steve Earle or Johnny Cash onstage. “Mad, innit?” Derek joked.

Most of them came from somewhere else, like the kids in her classes. Ohio, Colorado, Kansas, where you decide to pick up your instrument and go west or east, as long as you don’t stay at home. A lot of them announced a cd release tomorrow but had plenty to sell today.

Some still evinced a ragged denim rock and roll and though aided by Dr. Scholl’s shock absorber inserts, still channeled their inner Bob Dylan. One night a university student from London rose to the stage and emphatically distanced himself from the London riots. “I don’t condone them,” he sniffed, and sang about student protest.

“Oh and Tom’s wife, Trix, was there tonight,” Jo piped. “She’s a hoot.” Derek said he’d like to meet them. This was new, Jo thought, but why not? “Sure. Usually when I run into him, she’s protesting on Wall Street or in Union Square or something.” Jo laughed recalling a couple of guys that night, new to the Flaming Tiger. “When one of the them blathered about how they got their name—Clear Blue Sky, or something—Trix cracked: ‘Good thing they hadn’t seen a pile of trash!’”

What Jo had not told Derek was that she had landed a featured solo at The Flaming Tiger. It was a few nights away. Nobody really listened to any one else at these things. Derek would be annoyed. She’d be teaching again and her rants would revert to the public school system. “I’m back to work soon,” she said. His surprising reaction, that she had to keep at the music no matter what, emboldened her to tell him about the gig. “You don’t have to go—.” “What?” Of course he was going. Jo smirked and said if this really was like open-heart surgery, he just wanted to be there for the bad news. “Let’s get to bed,” he soothed. He pushed her gently from the kitchen, shutting the light as they went. “The operation will be a success, love, and I’ll be there to witness the recovery.”

With gratitude to M.F.F for her generous response to my questions. And To E.O. for a wicked night on FB and the inspiration for Whores Of Fabulon.

OPEN MIC SURGERY is an original short story by Linda Danz.

STORIES ON THE AMERICAN FRIEND Writers Guild of America, East #R28299

2011-10-01T19:34:00.019-04:00

God gave Noah the Rainbow sign, don't you see?
God gave Noah the Rainbow sign, no more water but fire next time.
Traditional Gospel song

HAVEN’T WE BEEN HERE BEFORE?

James Baldwin was a famously angry writer, a famously angry self-described American Negro writer who once said, “I'm angrier now than I was when I was called an angry young man.” His writing took over my consciousness when I was a young woman trying to find her way from her father’s defeated Conservatism, his inability to see that what suffocated him as a so-called lower class White man was a roaring, insatiable monster that devoured Black men in this country. I watched as my father’s anger was further diluted and misdirected with alcohol and the lies of men in office like Richard Nixon. I needed to find anger, to understand it. As always, I turned to the writers.

This morning, at Riverside Church for the New York City memorial for Troy Anthony Davis who was executed by the State of Georgia on September 21^st 2011, I, as a much, much older woman, was looking for that anger all over again.

Now, the Mister and I are not the slogan-emblazoned T-shirt wearing type. Maybe because I am always trying hard not to draw attention to myself because I write stories and I can better hear another’s story when they are not focused on me. I attend demonstrations with my camera and notebook, and try to find those photographs that aren’t intrusive yet still tell the story. I want to listen. I want to see. The Mister is a Brit so his reluctance is self-explanatory. But today we put on the t-shirt. On a field of Black, the white type stated: we will not be silent.

Within moments of arriving at Riverside Church, which is on the upper Westside of Manhattan just above Columbia University, a gentleman, an African American man, approached. “Hey, I love your shirts!” We told him we got them at the ongoing Occupy Wall Street demonstration we had been to the day before. His name was Clarence. It was early and the South Hall where the memorial was to be held was still filling up. Immediately we three launched into a spirited take on current events and the obvious issue of the death penalty, like old friends and not three people who only ten minutes before were strangers. Of course we talked about the dismal state of journalism, and Clarence referenced the New York Times: “A bunch of overpaid stenographers,” he chortled. He was less delicate about his feeling for our president. Clarence won’t be wearing a spangled t-shirt any time soon. His eyes grew brighter when he spotted someone he called ‘a hero.’ Democratic State Senator Bill Perkins from Harlem shook Clarence’s hand warmly, they spoke awhile and the senator promised to catch up with Clarence afterward. Clarence told us that Senator Perkins was one of the reasons we did not have a death penalty in New York State, something for which I am deeply grateful.

Lee Wengraf, from the Campaign To End the Death Penalty began the program. I met Lee some time ago when I was attending the NYC chapter of CEDP’s book club. I learned a lot in that time, eager to read books about the men and women facing this heinous institution, the truth about the prison industrial complex and its stranglehold on justice in this country. I met those who have been exonerated from death row, and heard them talk about their experience. I witnessed their continuing support to end capital punishment. Through one route or another I came to the struggle of a certain Robert Will on Texas Death Row. I volunteered to type his handwritten updates from the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas. I sent him the books he requested. Soon we were writing more personal letters to each other about books and art and music and about day-to-day life in New York for The Mister and me. It was good to see Lee again today. When I told her about my connection with Rob she said, “That is a very important case.”

I started to write that this isn’t meant to be about Rob, it’s about Troy. But it is about Rob. It’s so certainly about Rob that I feel Troy Anthony Davis would agree with me.

I listened to the speakers in South Hall, each following the other, adhering to the time limit imposed for the brief hour that the hall was available. Lee read a statement from Martina Correia, Troy Davis’s sister and his unflagging support. We heard a representative from the Campaign To End the New Jim Crow tell us, “We have to take responsibility for where our country is going.” Reverend Phelps, senior minister at Riverside Church, stated baldly that “…a great evil has been committed in this nation.” The core message of a faith that animated him is that we have no fear of death. Why then he asked, do we think killing is the worst thing we can do to a person? And then he asked the question: “Haven’t we been here before?”

The audience murmured their assent. Yes, yes, and yes.

Yusef Salaam, who in 1989 was one of a group of young men falsely accused and wrongly jailed for a crime that is so famous it needs no retelling. I remember it as if it was yesterday. I can’t imagine how a man like Yusef Salaam can ever forget it, put it behind him. But when I have heard him speak before and when I listened again this morning I had an inkling of that in his poise, his grace, his well-spoken demeanor. “Are we just another painting,” he asked, “or are we a masterpiece?”

One after another, each speaker rose to impart something meaningful, something personal. How in the African tradition, the loved one is honored as an ancestor but we must also pick up their struggle and fight their fight. We heard that we can crush the system that buried Troy Anthony Davis.

But I didn’t hear anger until a young woman rose to the lectern. Asia Dorsey is student and organizer at NYU. She wobbled a bit in her delivery, so clearly was she moved. But the anger was there. “Mr. President,” she demanded, “One of ours was murdered. We have been hurt!” And then she said the words that have been on the minds of so many of us: “Mr. President, where were you?” People around us quietly repeated: “Again. Say it again.” Later The Mister suggested there needed to be more from her, but, like the other speakers, her time was limited. “It is not okay to kill somebody,” she continued in a less wavering voice. And she left us with the admonition that a generation has been galvanized, something we witnessed the day before at Liberty Square, beneath the ever rising Freedom Tower at Ground Zero.

The singer, songwriter Karen Taylor delivered a beautiful and moving rendition of “Motherless Child.” During her performance hammering came from somewhere, an insistent tapping sound that I wanted to imagine was Troy letting us know he was listening.

Kenyon Farrow from the Center For Gay and Lesbian Studies told us that to come to accept being black and innocent is an oxymoron on the planet in which we live. His remarks in full can be found here.

A young woman representing the New York chapter of Amnesty International said, through tears, that though she had thought long and hard about what she was going to say today, it wasn’t until the train ride to the church that she found the words, the beautiful words that said she had never met a woman who walks more like a warrior in the footsteps of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth than Troy’s sister Martina.

A man named Jazz, a long time activist said, “You can’t unring a bell.” He told us we have to address this question of mass incarceration that turns our communities into open-air prisons. “I am Troy Davis! We are Troy Davis. This is our battle cry going forward.”

I thought of my father, beaten by the system in which he had put so much blind faith. I am still his daughter. I thought of my friend Rob Will who sits on Texas Death Row, unbeaten and fighting every moment of his existence to prove his innocence. I am still his friend. I left Troy Davis’s memorial with these parting words: “You cannot unring a bell. But you can stop it from being rung again.”

One of the speakers today was Brian Jones. He is an actor, activist and teacher. When once given the opportunity to speak with Troy on the telephone his initial reaction was: “What do you say to a man in a cage?”

We say: “We will not be silent.”

Please go to these links to learn more about Robert G. Will. You won’t be disappointed and may even become a supporter:

http://www.freerobwill.org

http://www.drivemovement.org
https://www.facebook.com/FreeRobWill

2011-09-26T19:09:00.004-04:00

POEMS FROM THE PAST

Mario’s Study

5 march 1976

Angry centuries on the bookshelves.

Electric sharpener filled to its grisly
death teeth with skin and bones.

He belonged to the second group; he
says he believes in the Silence of the Light.

It goes with the dust here, she says.

She flies erratically on the back of her
thoughts of waiting women to
the velvet tongue across turned wood,
to settle like wine on the evening
shadows, to relieve a bloodless
tension, to say why care?

But an aching distant throat jumped
into her goblet and cried, as tiny as
a stillborn diamond, “Listen,
silence is not yet a dead subject.”

2011-09-26T19:05:00.006-04:00

POEMS FROM THE PAST

Space

ca. 1976

he is among the missing
for that, alone, drugged
angels sing cathedral
cheers

the mole speaks into the
parrot’s ear he’s
flown again

loosened knots of laughter
come undone at his freedom
he is among the missing
he is among the missing

he has touched either side of him
self and chooses the space in
between

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARLES ZIMPFER

2011-09-26T19:00:00.004-04:00

POEMS FROM THE PAST

Smoke

26 March 1976

if we could rise like smoke

whiplashed with lace
backs bent smally in the wind
on waists of insects’ thighs
skating freely along
our own skin

fire to our selves
become ourselves again

2011-09-26T18:55:00.005-04:00

POEMS FROM THE PAST

Colors

11 March 1976

She wrote on the excess
of the daffodils.

Her thoughts were equally excessive.

They discussed the situation.

She wrote yellow thoughts
yellow loves
yellow inhibitions
and yellow anger. The answers
flew by in glorious black.

2011-09-01T13:20:00.005-04:00

A SHORT STORY

“No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving something behind.” George Washington Carver

LEAVING

She reminded herself a hundred goddamn times to keep her mouth shut. And still she forgot when it mattered.

Jean Margaret Fisher dug with the fingernails of her left hand into the cuticles of her right, lacerating the already wounded ridges of half moons and thought angrily, “I never, ever learn.”

Jean knew she’d had to do something. She felt paralyzed, her creative drive suspended, out of reach. She needed to restart full throttle. At that moment she faced a roomful of wide-eyed criticism glossed as patronizing curiosity.

They didn’t fool Jean. The artificial sweetness was as obvious as the tiny chunks of canned fruit visible in a Jell-O mold. She tugged on orange braided ties at the neck of a turquoise crepe peasant shirt. A worn denim maxi flared around her ankles, above bare feet shod in strappy sandals on cork platforms. She loved the indifferent comfort of clothes that said: “I am an artist.” She fiddled with a tightly curled strand of shoulder length hair that glowed like a burnished penny and that made her feel especially apart from them.

“Why now darling?” her mother-in-law managed through gritted teeth as she smoothed a non-existent wrinkle on her trim salmon colored skirt. She waited for an answer from Jean and fidgeted a string of pearls from her ivory Shantung blouse.

“Oh, you know, it was, um, already in the works before, um, before Fred’s….” Jean chattered helplessly. Schottenstein was kind of forced on her when they married. “No, I don’t mean forced, you know….” She meant she’d had no choice. Or at least she was unaware of a choice. “It was quite an ordeal. To get my name back, I mean, going through the courts and all.”

“So, nothing is wrong then? Frederick approves?” Jean followed the manicure, fingernails the color of the inside of a seashell, as it rose to a powdered cheek; her mother-in-law’s hand clenched, then relaxed as she patted her dark lacquered hair before stroking her delicate chin.

Frederick sidled up beside his wife, patting Jean’s head like an indulgent parent warns a sharp-tongued child. “No, nothing is wrong Rona. She means her artwork, her paintings, how she signs them.”

The company of Frederick’s aunts and uncles, niece and nephew—Jean’s in-laws—resumed their interest in the food laid out on the dining room table. Her sister-in-law Dawn is the daughter of prosperous Texans who in her words, “picked cotton.” A recent convert to Judaism, she cast a benign glance at her children fingering the pickles. Her husband, Frederick’s brother Jacob, was out of town.

Jean’s announcement had quieted them down, no small feat as they gushed over Frederick still slightly hollow-eyed from his recent hospitalization. Everyone tread carefully now, like they were wearing ballet slippers on a stage of crushed glass.

Jean inspected what looked like the entire menu of the Madison Deli spread before her. It was Uncle Maury’s doing. This was no time for his sister’s fancy schmancy ‘petty fours’ or whatever she called them. The family summoned required comfort food. And there it was in abundance, loaded onto the Lenox saved for special occasions. At the center lay a football-shaped mound of chopped liver, symbol of Frederick’s high school glory days. Cold cuts speared with toothpicks bewigged in frilly cellophane began to curl at the edges. A pair of old Sheffield silver chafing dishes separated pastrami, roast beef, and brisket from potato pancakes. There was smoked fish and crudités, which to Jean, looked suspiciously like raw carrots drained of moisture. Humble staples like coleslaw and potato salad upgraded in gilt-edged porcelain Chinese bowls. “It’s tradition,” Maury said when asked about the lumps of gefilte fish that no one touched yet appeared for the first time since Poppie died.

Too much food, thought Jean. It was a lot to take on for a girl raised on vegetables boiled to death in the English manner. A nostalgia for fish and chips had never induced her mother to batter cod for them. It was a lot to take on for a girl whose American father had left before she was ten years old. He died, but in her mother’s eyes he’d left them. Her father, Dennis, had been a musician, a piano player on tour with the big band when her parents met in Leicester. They married and her mother, Margaret, returned with him to the lower eastside of Manhattan. Love at first sight, Jean guessed, though her mother said little more than it was the drink and cigarettes that killed him. “It’s where you get it from,” she told Jean. “I don’t smoke,” Jean shot back.

She sipped the last of her drink. Sweet vermouth. She’d asked for bourbon and this is what she got.

Admittedly, it was the wrong time for Jean to reveal that she was going back to her maiden name, or bad timing as her father-in-law suggested in the surgeon’s cautiously imperious manner. But why did Frederick have to add that he thought she’d be more comfortable with her maiden name? That would surely open a can of worms from an already overstocked shelf. Jean popped a maraschino cherry into her mouth and rid herself of the sticky glass. She stopped at the walnut bar cart and chose from among cut glass decanters draped with engraved labels. “Even the liquor gets dressed up,” she mumbled. She poured straight bourbon over ice. She gulped from the glass, tapping the pressure. That was better, much better, she thought, and started for the living room.

Sprawling apartments on Central Park West were like museum exhibitions in the hands of a doctor’s wife who aspired to conservator of her possessions. The rest of the family had retired to the living room, volleying trivial remarks around Frederick, avoiding anything about why he was hospitalized. Maury’s benevolent profile shadowed the curtained windows above the park.

Jean hated the heavy gold and cream damask that choked the light. Cigarette smoke hovered in the room like a depleted dust storm. Tasseled tiebacks on the drapes reminded her of loosened belts on overfed guests. She never understood the purpose of a valance except to hang more of that gilt fringe. A plumped velvet sofa Jean habitually called a couch was overrun with decorative Kilim pillows. The Persian carpets and oriental vases cum lamps topped with pleated silk shades, she hated it all. No surface lay uncluttered; there was nowhere to rest the eye. Cloisonné was her mother-in-law’s passion and it was everywhere in the apartment. Even the soap dish in the guest bathroom was her handiwork. Rona added demurely whenever Jean’s painting was mentioned that she, too, dabbled a bit. Her abstracts embodied Mondrian and hung alongside expensively framed lithographs by Picasso and Dubuffet.

Frederick’s nephew snuck up behind Jean and filliped her on the back of her arm. She yelped, shooed him from her and returned to the dining room. Frederick appeared with his time-to-get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge look. “What’s with Jakey?” Jean waved vaguely, as if to say it doesn’t matter. “Are you drunk?” he asked. “Maybe a bit, it’s been a long day,” she replied, nibbling a potato pancake. Her sister-in-law appeared with a little decorative pillow. “Don’t be forgetting this y’all,” Dawn purred. Rona had presented it to them earlier and Jean had promptly tucked it out of sight. Her mother-in-law’s go to gift for family and friends: the needlework pillow. “Gone Antiquing” and “Daydreaming” were her favorites. Dawn held out the pillow and nodding to her children who were tearing up and down the long hallway, skidding on the rugs like frenzied cats she said: “I already have two of these.” She sighed and tucked a strand of naturally blonde hair behind her ear. “Your turn.” Jean studied the pillow, its meticulous stitching: “Whenever a child is born, so is a Grandmother.”

Usually they walked to the east side through the park to their walk-up on 94^th Street. The staying power of summer light was still evident in August so she was surprised when Frederick insisted on taking a cab. “We’re practically there,” Jean griped.” “You’re tired,” he told her, “and drunk.”

At home, absent the scrim of family, she noticed Frederick’s paleness, an uncertainty in his movements. He’d lost weight and his jacket hung from his frame like an empty garment bag. He would not return to medical school. His father had connections. Already there were inquiries made at Rockefeller Institute. Frederick would be granted some time off before he began his doctoral work, something in research, at the university. She had not been included in these plans. She was the last to know he’d been hospitalized.

Jean, too, had quit school. She didn’t want to be a social worker. Her mother wanted her to be a social worker, or a teacher, even a nurse. Her mother wanted her to be something. An artist was not something. At the end of her first year at Hunter College, with her mother retired from her job at Metropolitan Life and in Florida at a safe distance, Jean became an artist. When Jean met Frederick she’d just started working in an art gallery on Madison Avenue. The clientele were mostly women with too much money on their hands and not enough time to spend it. If they didn’t play tennis or mahjong, then, like Frederick’s mother, they shopped.

He’d pushed open the door to the gallery with his mother fussing at his shirt collar. “Rona…” he whined comically, “…behave.” “My son, the absent-minded doctor,” Rona said to no one in the shop in particular. Jean was both new to the job and to a child being on a first name basis with its parent. Hers was ‘mum.’ To address her as Margaret would have been unthinkable. She was left to entertain or, more like, be entertained by Frederick while the shop owner took a valued customer under her wing. Frederick joked self deprecatingly, was pleased with Jean’s laughing response and expressed interest when she told him she was an artist. Out of earshot of his mother he asked Jean out.

Despite deprivation Jean was a surprisingly cheerful child with a singular imagination. Her mother had, albeit unconsciously, tried to tame liveliness that challenged her own inner angry life. Jean had always been content in her solitary pursuit but she realized soon after meeting Frederick that she was lonely. An impetuous courtship was one way to combat the loneliness. She quit the gallery and they eloped before she found the job at Columbia University in the Fine Arts Library. It was quiet work and she enjoyed handling the fine leather bound volumes of art history. She shared a basement room a few blocks further east and downtown from their apartment and set to painting seriously. Between Frederick’s studies and her job and dedication to her art they rarely spent time with each other. When they did it was usually at family gatherings or parties thrown by Frederick’s fellow med students. Jean had never quite understood Frederick’s heated pursuit of her. It all fell into place, though, when she met Jacob. Sibling rivalry—striving to upset the most apples in the parental cart—compelled them to marry ‘outside.’

Jacob and Dawn met in New Orleans when they were students at Tulane University. Cool, blonde, a cheerleader and a Southern Baptist, Dawn bested Jacob’s revolution by marrying a New Yorker, a Jewish New Yorker. After discreet enquiry on Dr. Schottenstein’s part she was received like a bit of exotica that had fallen into their midst, something to be re-fashioned. Dawn played the folksy card. She gave them grandchildren, started a decorating business from home, which was a late 50s architectural sugar cube in Pound Ridge. She began placing Rona’s abstracts in living rooms across Westchester County. Jean remained the enigma.

And she and Frederick were like strangers now. He went out in the day, usually to his father’s office or to spend the afternoon with his mother shopping to fit a thinner body. He was never allowed anything less formal than tan chinos and pastel polo shirts adorned with little green alligators. Jean kept track of it all in her journal; that he’d accompanied her to the library that morning, telling her he needed a change of scenery and how she had been unaware that Frederick was found in the men’s room on the floor above in Schermerhorn Hall.

She’d gone home at the end of her day thinking he’d just not bothered or forgotten to let her know when he left, which was not unusual for him. It wasn’t until later that evening that her father-in-law telephoned. He’d been the one they called. Frederick, it seemed, had had a breakdown. He was exhausted, his father said, and they would concentrate on getting his strength back for the moment. When Jean visited Frederick the next day she was not prepared for the restraints on his wrists, his motionless body. Alone with him in the room she felt pointless and grabbed a stray sock that lay on the floor like a failed flotation device. Suddenly Frederick reared up. He looked confusedly at his tethered hands and then faced her wild-eyed. Jean leaned in to catch something like an ominous draft from a deep cave. “Fred? What is it?” she whispered. “I want to kill you,” he croaked.

His mother arrived and Frederick fell back against the pillows. “You should get some rest, dear,” she chided, casting an apprehensive glance at Jean. “You look terrible.” After what seemed like hours her sister-in-law pulled Jean’s crimped fingers from the sock and led her from the hospital to a waiting cab.

Jean had taken a few days off from the library. She was, in fact, exhausted. Days dragged in slow motion. While Fred was in the hospital she’d scrubbed the apartment until her fingers puckered. It was on the third floor of an old brownstone. The floor was uneven and every closet door stuck. Casement windows she’d thought were so quaint were murder to wash and very little sunlight eked through the tiny diamond shaped pattern into the front room. Every bit of furniture, all secondhand finds, shone with Olde English. A matchbox terrace off the bedroom at the rear of the apartment was not often utilized for anything more than storing their bikes because of the mad woman above who fed the pigeons.

Not long after his homecoming Jean and Frederick had a heart-to-heart. “You’re not…?” he started. “What? Happy?” she replied. “No. I was going to say you’re not painting.” Jean waffled, making small excuses. “A bit blocked. Only temporary. I’m drawing more.” Frederick asked about Taylor. Mary Jo Taylor was her full name but because she was never sure if she preferred the feminine or the masculine she just called herself Taylor. Taylor admired Jean. She was in awe of her passion but she was also a little intimidated by her. They’d met at a student party. Taylor was a cousin of one of the med students, an artist fresh from Louisville, Kentucky and new to the city. She and Jean shared the basement studio. Taylor worked in a bar nights and weekends. It was perfect. “Is she back?” Frederick asked. “Invite her over for a drink.”

A half-finished bottle of Henry McKenna held down one corner of the map Taylor spread out on the floor of the front room. The smell of marijuana lay in the air like virtual netting. “I’m jealous,” Jean pouted and rooted in the ashtray. Taylor smiled, gratified. “There’s more where that came from.” She produced another joint and continued tracing a route with her fingertip. “I only made it to the Painted Desert. Next time I want to go to Abiquiu.” “Yes!” Jean hollered, raising a jelly glass half full of the strong brown liquid. Frederick looked puzzled. “Abiquiu?” “Georgia O’Keeffe,” Taylor and Jean replied, laughing in unison. “Oh,” he said chastened, “of course.” Gamely he offered: “You ought to do something like that Jean.”

Jean resisted a sharp comeback. Instead she ignored him and spoke to Taylor. “You know. I just might.” Taylor looked up from the map. “Really? Cos if you’re serious I’d go right back. We could go together. We could paint.” “You don’t have a license,” Frederick reminded her. Taylor interjected: “You can get one, a temporary one, in a couple of weeks.” “You don’t drive,” he said slightly more insistent.” “I’ll teach her. We’ll start right away.” Taylor dragged deeply on the joint and grinned. “Let’s start now!” Frederick watched helplessly as the two women threw themselves across the map and head to head they giggled and plotted. “Well, maybe start tomorrow. You’ve had a bit too—.” Taylor’s excited response rose above Frederick’s appeal. “We’d better make some tapes. Cain’t count on the car radio. God almighty, it was torture listening to “Havin’ My Baby”.

First thing Jean got her learner’s permit. They went out driving in Taylor’s tangerine colored Beetle every chance they got. They began slowly after the rush in the evening, navigating carefully along the drive around Central Park. Sometimes they started out at midnight after Taylor’s shift. Jean’s confidence grew and every time she changed lanes or accelerated with a little more daring, Taylor slapped the dashboard with glee: “Damn, girl. You are a natural!” They cheered when Jean no longer slammed the clutch and nervously shifted into a lower gear that nailed them to a steep incline at 103^rd and Lexington. On weekends when neither had to be at work in the morning, they worked in the studio until just before daybreak. Then Jean carefully navigated downtown on the FDR, her heart racing faster at first than the speed she was traveling. Soon they ventured across the Brooklyn Bridge and doubled back just in time for sunrise over the city.

Everything looked different from behind the wheel. The city, especially on the upper eastside, lay in dormant splendor. They’d cruise past the Andrew Carnegie pile on Fifth Avenue. Jean pointed out where Truman Capote had begged for alcohol from passersby from a window of the imposing rehab center on 93^rd and they never tired of the ghostly façade of the old armory silhouetted against a moonlit sky. Taylor spied the squadron motto carved into the red stone. “It means Charge!” Jean told her. “Bootayanahvont!” Taylor yelled as they sped past.

Jean passed the written and aced the road test. She slipped behind the wheel like a seasoned diver into a wetsuit. She stopped tearing at her fingers, seeing them displayed so nakedly on the steering wheel. Once Taylor screwed up the courage to ask Jean why she was so eager for this trip. She’d be away from her husband for what, three weeks at least? “I’m feeling really shadowy, that’s why,” Jean answered. She added that they couldn’t rush a thing like this. Maybe they needed more time, a month, six weeks. “If you can swing it,” she said and did not wait for Taylor’s answer.

A professor of Frederick’s was induced to buy a painting from Jean. Frederick and Robert Havermeyer were close friends. Everyone called him Havermeyer. She had only met him once at a raucous party in his SOHO loft. For months before he was hospitalized Frederick had rolled in late at night red-eyed and uncommunicative after studying with Robert. Since Fred’s release there was no mention of his downtown friend when once they seemed inseparable. Jean, emboldened, arrived at the loft on a murky stretch of Prince Street uninvited and made a case for the sale of one of her larger paintings. It was easier than she’d imagined.

Jean’s bags stood on the landing. She had only to pack the cassette tapes. She and Taylor had agreed right off the bat to mix tapes of their personal choices. Taylor was more Harry Chapin and the Allman Brothers. Jean was Joni’s free man in Paris. She was midnight at the oasis. She was Steely Dan and Bob Dylan and Zappa. They bonded over the Eagles and the Stones and early Beatles. They agreed to throw in Stevie Wonder and the Jackson 5, Elton John and Grand Funk. They had their doubtful moments: Barbra Streisand? The Way We Were? “I dunno,” Jean admitted, “It feels right. I loved the movie.” So, that gave Taylor Jim Croce, and the Steve Miller Band. Wild Thing was a yes and John Denver a definite no.

It was nearly 3 A.M. The air breathed cooler as the seasons changed. Jean closed the bedroom door. Frederick had an interview later that morning at Rockefeller. Her sketchbooks lay on the coffee table, unpacked. Instead, she’d decided to bring lined notebooks, bought a really good pen. Frederick often said that Jean saw everything in black and white, which was not necessarily meant as a compliment. Maybe she did? The studio wall was hung with huge white sheets of Rives BFK; graphite line drawings that Frederick described as diluvial. Jean had to look it up: like something caused by a flood.

She’d quit her job at the library and had not told Frederick. It was the first time she lied to him. She thought it might not be the last.

A familiar car horn tooted in the quiet street. There was cash in her wallet. She left the credit card on the table. Who was Jean Shottenstein? Her temporary driver’s license said: Jean Margaret Fisher. Jean would be sure to drive the last bit, the best part on their return. Driving into Manhattan at daybreak. Nothing better.

LEAVING is an original short story by Linda Danz.

STORIES ON THE AMERICAN FRIEND Writers Guild of America, East #R28299

2011-08-11T17:58:00.006-04:00

August 5, 2011 Visit With Rob

Perfect Balance In

An Imperfect World

By Dawn Bremer

Immediately upon arriving I learned that the District Warden was on site at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, where Robert Will is on Death Row. This explained repeated turns through the metal detector, requiring me to go back, remove all of my rings, and go through again until there was no ‘chime.’ Ah, yes. I was going to have to be on my best behavior. It was that kind of day at the prison.

I waited an hour before Rob was brought down to the tiny visitation cage. Meanwhile I purchased food and drinks for him. Visitors are allowed to bring $25 in change for the vending machines. This sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? When you see the prices, you understand quickly that it can occasionally run close on being just enough. Since fresh fruits and vegetables never seem to find their way to Rob or any of the people incarcerated there, $3.25 for a container containing about 1-1/2 cups of iceberg lettuce, a couple slices of cucumber, one grape tomato, and some chopped lunch meat seems reasonable to be able to provide some nutrition. Rob arrived and I saw that his wrists did not bear the same deep impressions from the handcuffs as they had on a previous visit. We exchanged initial pleasantries. I mentioned the absence of energy drinks in the machines, which he had requested. Rob informed me there is a new captain who had all of those drinks removed from the vending machines. Inmates did not need them! This new captain is a bully, running roughshod over the inmates and those who work with him. This man worries me — the embodiment of, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Rob and I discussed the ongoing search for a large law firm to aid in his case. I relayed the recent conversations I’d had with the ABA Death Penalty Representation Program in Washington, DC. They had received the case documents I sent, have reviewed them, and are actively trying to recruit a firm to take Rob’s case. The difficulty is that law firms are not jumping to take pro bono cases, and in this economy they are even more reluctant. However, the ABA Death Penalty Representation Program actively continues in its efforts and the interest in Rob’s case is strong and sincere.

As well, I continue to explore other avenues toward locating a large law firm to take Rob’s case pro bono. This is not an easy task and one that I pursue zealously. For any of us who are blessed to have Rob in our lives, his spirit is infectious and inspires all of us who support him to pursue everything ‘zealously.’

During our visit, Rob had a sneezing fit. I asked if he was feeling okay. Rob described the vents in the cells, how filthy they are, and, subsequently, the air they emit. He said he has covered the vent in his cell before with a white cloth, and a few days later removed this cloth which was covered in black filth. This is the air he breathes.

At one point, I noticed Rob make eye contact with someone behind me. The tall man lumbering behind the visitors was the warden. This was the first time I had seen him on the grounds. Since the warden claims to have an open door policy, Rob asked that I visit the warden’s office on my way out. “There is no hot water on F-Pod,” Rob told me. I was floored. Lack of hot water to an entire Pod needs to be reported by a visitor to the warden? How do you not notice there is no hot water, such a basic necessity? How long, I wondered, would the warden or any of the correctional officers be willing to go without hot water in their own homes? For how long would they consider that to be acceptable?

On my way out, I stopped in at the warden’s office, but he was not in. There were three women in the small waiting area: a secretary behind the desk, an employee sitting in a guest chair, and another uniformed employee standing to the side. I asked the secretary if the warden was available and she said he was out of the office. She asked if I wanted to leave a message so I told her about the lack of hot water on F-Pod. She took down Rob’s TDC number, looked up my name on the computer in his records, and then wrote a note about the situation. I’m not entirely filled with confidence that the note will make it anywhere beyond being a source of random doodling during times of boredom for whoever sits at that desk.

At this moment, I am looking at a picture of Rob and me taken at the Polunsky Unit during our visit. The old saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” I never gave that much thought, really, until today. I never realized how completely wrong that statement is. I am looking at the image of Robert Will and a thousand words could never even come close to describing or conveying the beauty of this man — his mind, his soul, his essence, his dignity. He is a father, a son, a brother, and friend. Rob is strength and grace in perfect balance.

But Rob Will is, above all else, innocent! We need to shout that loud and long to make it heard. We need to make the justice system listen. We need more voices so that Rob’s voice can be heard. We need to picture Rob and where he is and never stop until he is free again, the innocent man we know him to be.

Pax e bene,

Dawn Bremer

http://www.freerobwill.org
http://www.drivemovement.org
https://www.facebook.com/FreeRobWill

Dawn is a fellow advocate to end the death penalty in the U.S.

This is her first person report from death row.

2011-07-21T18:42:00.009-04:00

July 20, 2011 Visit With Rob

Moving Forward

By Dawn Bremer

Another Texas scorcher and it wasn’t even 9:30 A.M.

I arrived at the Polunsky Unit on Wednesday morning, checked in with the guard as usual, and waited for my car inspection before being allowed to park. I entered the first building. This is where security happens: the metal detectors, machines that X-ray for possessions, and that other unavoidable, the pat down.

Before being admitted I was directed to a booth and handed a scratched up yellow plastic “DR Visitor” [re: number] tag in exchange for my driver’s license. Just then a woman entered through the courtyard to the visitor’s center. I saw clearly that she was upset as she returned her visitor tag and collected her license. Immediately she sought comfort in the arms of a man who had been waiting in the room and began to sob. I didn’t have to ask. I knew she’d been visiting Mark Stroman. The gentleman left her, took his tag and proceeded through the courtyard to the visitor’s center. We stood less than a foot apart, coupled in the space between the electronically controlled steel doors. His hurt and sadness were palpable.

His distress was so evident, so overwhelming, that I reached out and touched his arm. I quietly offered my apologies for what I knew he must have been feeling. He thanked me and then asked my name. Who was I there to see? I told him and we embraced and passed through the open steel door to our respective areas.

Rob was escorted into the little visitation cage on the other side of the bulletproof glass. Immediately I noticed the deep indentations on his wrists I knew to be from the handcuffs. This is the fourth visit I have had with Rob and the first time I have ever seen his wrists so deeply marked

He told me they were still in lockdown when I asked what was going on. There was no end in sight to a relentless diet of peanut butter sandwiches. They’d had a shakedown at 7 A.M. that day. As well as the usual Polunsky Unit correctional officers, there were also those who are referred to as field bosses from the Huntsville Units. These officers escort inmates to the fields, to endlessly hoe and till the soil. This used to be part of the process that led to planting, cultivating, and harvesting. This is no longer the case at Huntsville. There is no other purpose to the mindless tilling than to create a Sisyphean experience that wears down the prisoners and destroys any sense of purpose. Rob described the field bosses in their cowboy hats and spurs as being far more intense than even the Polunsky Unit staff.

For a man who’s been held in an impossible environment—surrounded by oppression, hate, and hopelessness—Rob was, as always, focused, bright, and full of fire. We discussed our continued efforts toward finding a large law firm and the need to search out of state and get his case off the assembly line legal process, which is unavoidable in Texas. There are tasks, in his case, which need to be addressed, and options to be considered in achieving those goals and we explored that in our discussion. There are many out there who love and support Rob and who are doing wonderful things to meet these goals. There is much work to do in coordinating those efforts.

As always, our visit ended far too soon. On Wednesdays everyone has to clear the visitation area by noon to allow for the press. On this particular Wednesday, the noon cut-off was also because Mark Stroman was being transferred to Huntsville. We lined up at the steel door leading to the hallway. A handful of correction officers, maybe five or six, were milling in the hallway. I caught a glimpse of one of the field bosses from Huntsville before the visitor’s area was shut to allow those officers to coordinate and disperse. Rob’s description left me no less shocked to actually see one of these guys wearing a cowboy hat and spurs. Spurs! Really? What purpose on earth do spurs serve an officer inside a prison? In the absence of a horse, I shuddered to think of the possibilities.

We filed out and started across the courtyard. Another couple, a man and a woman, had also been to visit Mark Stroman. She was a tiny little thing. Her companion kept his arm around her as she fought back tears. I approached them in the parking lot. The hurt had become harder for her to hide. At a loss again, I could only offer apologies for their evident sorrow. What was my name, she asked. Did I know Mark? I didn’t know him personally, but I told her I knew of him through Rob. This petite woman then clasped me to her with a strength that belied her stature. Crying, she said softly, “He’s a good man.” I replied, “I know.”

We parted and drove from the Polunsky Unit in our respective vehicles. What I witnessed from those who love Mark Stroman—the painful enormity of grief—is something that will stay with me always. But it also inspires and deepens my conviction to bring awareness to those who think anyone deserves to die. I found this quote recently from the singer Cyndi Lauper and I think it fitting for the occasion:

“You always have to remember – no matter what you’re told – that God loves all the flowers, even the wild ones that grow on the side of the highway.”

No one deserves pain.

Let’s move forward with greater strength, a firmer resolve, and the unbending will to free our friend, Rob Will, an innocent man on death row.

Pax e bene,

Dawn Bremer

http://www.freerobwill.org

http://www.facebook.com/FreeRobWill?ref=ts

Dawn is a fellow advocate to end the death penalty in the U.S.
This is her first person report from death row.

2011-07-10T12:04:00.015-04:00

SHORT STORY

“Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends.” Shirley MacLaine

BESPOKE CLOWN

“I’m friggin’ bored,” Jude moaned. Her doughy cheeks, pockmarked like stale puff pastry, made Tessa shudder.

“Tessa? You mad at me?” Jude reached for her friend who neatly avoided her touch. She picked at some fresh eruption on her face. “I hate Hartford.”

“Cut it!” Tessa’s sharp retort rattled her. It must be the heat making her so touchy, Tessa thought. She turned back to Jude. “What do you think? Hartford’s the last place on earth I want to be.”

“Oh, sorry,” Jude muttered. “You’re never bored. Why would—?”

“It’s not my friggin’ fault you’re bored!” Shrugging off Jude’s dismay Tessa reminded her of their first adventure. “God, remember that friggin’ dog in New Britain? Oh man, you were freaked out!”

“Ma-a-an. He was friggin’ evil,” Jude drawled, relieved. Short of carfare on a long holiday weekend in early October, they’d made the nearly nine-mile trek on foot to an art museum the next town over from Hartford. It was at Tessa’s instigation that they plotted a route, packed a few peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and started out at dawn. Their only misstep brought them uncomfortably close to a nervy Alsatian pacing his domain, his matted coat oilier than the floor of the gas station, his bared teeth the color of old piano keys.

The museum turned out to be old-fashioned stucco that looked like somebody’s grandmother’s house. There was an abundance of Hudson River School paintings on display. Nature portrayed as gaudy characters in cheap romance novels, what Tessa called calendar art. Her preference was for the modern, the stuff that pissed off her dad, like Any Warhol’s Mona Lisa. She loved it all, every avant-garde thumb that flicked at the nose of convention.

Tessa grinned. “It scored points with Miss Merz, am I right?” She mocked the art teacher with a prim New England lilt: “Albert Bierstadt was a painter of such grandeur. What divine brushstrokes….” She twirled an imaginary brush in Jude’s face.

There was that irrepressible shriek, followed by the spluttered coughing sound Jude made when she laughed. Laughter was their shared release and Tessa added to their whooping chorus. Jude’s friendship had such ferocious intensity though, that had she not been so lonely it would have put Tessa off.

Jude’s fingers trailed lightly across her own face, exploring.

“Don’t do that, okay? You’re bumming me out.” Tessa Scott looked away, searching for some distraction among the unruly flame-colored daylilies fanning the porch stairs they sat squarely upon. It was still a novelty for Tessa, roomy old houses and the wicker furniture that creaked with exhaustion. Wildflowers with their messy fusillade spilled across the worn selvedge edge of an unkempt lawn.

Tessa lived with her father now in a small apartment on Laurel Street a few blocks from the high school where she’d spent her senior year.

She’d grown up on the lower eastside of Manhattan where front porches and backyards were as scarce as swollen bank accounts. What prevailed were drab tenements, tough housing projects, Italian pizzerias, Jewish delicatessens, Ukrainian coffee shops, and bars. There was Tompkins Square Park, a place she avoided at the best of times, despoiled by the career homeless, as her dad called them, and paper bag winos. He’d had equal disdain for the other bums, the artists and poets—the beatniks—who had put down roots and whom Tessa secretly admired. “Get a job” he’d mutter or “Get a haircut.” There had been talk about fixing up the park, but the neighborhood was less bothered by a derelict band shell. They wanted something done about encroaching crime, rival teen gangs. They wanted to leave their airless apartments, return to park benches of a summer evening and linger among desultory conversations with their fellow escapees. They wanted their park back.

On any enervating summer afternoon—her skin glistening with sweat—Tessa would have languished on a stoop in the projects where they’d lived since she was two. She’d watch through letterbox eyes as drugs were passed in narrow doorways on Avenue D. Older boys jimmied the hydrants and sunburnt kids came out of nowhere, like acne on a teenager’s forehead, to spread across the street and sprint through the icy cold torrent. A dare would prompt one of the braver among them to bodily redirect the deluge to an open basement window until the building super rained his fury upon them and they scattered like cockroaches at first light. Hartford had none of that. She couldn’t get good pizza, not like in New York, a whole pie for under a buck. For beer, Connecticut had package stores. A hero back home was a grinder in Hartford.

The student population at Hartford Public High had taken her by surprise. It wasn’t so much segregation as dissociation. Arriving for the first time on opening day she was struck by the scramble of Negro teens discharged from a parade of yellow school busses. Martin Luther King’s dream was not quite the reality on Forest Street. Her old public high school had been fully integrated. Bussing, unless it was on public transportation, had been unnecessary and both the financially underendowed and the students who were better off coalesced for the purpose of generating some kind of art. Apart from Miss Merz’s class, which suffered from 20^th century blindness, there was nothing like that at Hartford Public High; no painting, no photography class, no sculpture studio, no fashion and no advertising design. Woodworking was a boys only class so she was relegated to home economics, a subject Tessa found laughable.

All expectation of fitting in was abandoned early on. She’d been thrust into her senior year in a strange school. Her clothes were wrong. She spoke with a funny accent she refused to modulate and she considered herself an artist. Friendly overtures to Negro girls in her homeroom were met with wary amusement. The madras and Weejuns crowd gave her wide berth. Asylum Hill seemed a perfect name for the neighborhood.

A big girl with a coarse complexion had been seated next to her in art class. She’d cackled with delight when a cheeky comment escaped from Tessa, producing an irritated pucker from Miss Merz: “Jude, we’ll have none of that,” the teacher warned, not unkindly. Then, addressing the transplant: “You’ll find there is culture beyond New York City, Miss Scott.” Tessa’s face had burnt brighter than the Bierstadt sunset projected onto the pull down screen at the blackboard. But the incident brought her the admiration of the few defectors from preppy she found there.

She’d left her old schoolmates and neighborhood pals back in New York. It was also where she had left her mother.

Jude never asked and Tessa never revealed her mother’s violent rages; rages that came from nothing ever being good enough. She had a flirtatious side that bordered on hysteria. Tessa suspected she had been unfaithful. Though there were times when her mother fell into an almost sweet confusion, like she didn’t know who or where she was exactly. Then, for a while there would be a tenuous connection between the three of them. They were like strangers thrown together and for a brief while they steadied their little boat until the tranquil sea turned savage again. Avoiding flare-ups, Tessa sought refuge in her journal, her art, and the many galleries and museums in the city. Her father put in even longer hours at his upholstery shop on First Avenue near the 59th Street Bridge. Sometimes Tessa would walk the few blocks after school and spend the rest of the day into evening at her father’s side.

He had talked about leaving New York. Tessa had assumed he'd meant the three of them. There was a citywide newspaper strike that lasted one hundred days and then it was all he talked about. Tessa imagined it was the real reason he had wanted to leave the city. He sold his business and took a job with a decorator in West Hartford. He never talked about her mother. If Tessa asked about her he replied: “Yours is not to reason why….”

But all that was behind her, allowing a dozy intermission on a muggy afternoon in June; the air so warm you could hear it drone in the trees. It would be Tessa’s first summer away from New York. Liberty for a few weeks longer in a strange city stretched ahead, untried, until the summer job started.

Jude’s life was just as it had always been. Here on this splintered porch, in the house she’d been born in, accepting in her way. Her older brother, a painter, had left for Canada just before Tessa arrived. An escape artist, Jude said once and then never mentioned him again. She’d had few friends before Tessa came along, but they fell back as Jude stepped forward to embrace her new friend. They could not compete with a girl from New York.

The houses on Jude’s street wore their benign neglect without rancor. Her home differentiated from the neighbors only by its inhabitants. Jude’s family was white. The neighbors—apart from a few elderly Poles and Lithuanians further from Farmington Avenue—were black. The houses set back from the street shared a common fall from grace that demanded they respect each other’s privacy. They did not mix. They did not need to.

A command, gruffly served in Polish, came from behind the girls. “English, Mama,” Jude sighed. She took the straw hat leveraged above her from the thick, purposeful fingers of her mother. Mrs. Kowalski did not like Tessa and granted only the thin evidence of a smile. It did not sit well that Tessa’s mother had stayed behind in New York. They were diehard Catholics, Jude explained. “She’ll like you once she gets to know you.” When the girls bent over homework together or hauled over-sized sketchbooks to their laps Jude’s mother appeared and wordlessly shoved her daughter’s bedroom door fully open. If Tessa stayed overnight, Mrs. Kowalski was sullen and more uncommunicative in the morning. It was disconcerting and made Tessa uneasy, though Jude tried to reassure her. It was the language thing. Summer brought them out in the open, out of an airless bedroom under the eaves.

From the start Jude followed Tessa’s lead, though her ardent nature was bothersome at times. They’d had other outings closer to home. Many Saturday afternoons were passed in the cool marble interior of The Wadsworth Atheneum. It was quiet there and they wandered the empty galleries unnoticed, heads close, brooding over their reflections in a shallow pool under a statue of Venus in an open sunlit court. More often they found themselves in a dark corner, mimicking the marble statue of a couple of scowling women. “Let him perish!” they’d squeal and tear up the staircase behind it.

“Caked on blustery of dusty history,” Jude recited aloud, fragments from the poems she wrote and never showed Tessa. She’d nodded in earnest as Tessa excitedly described the meaning of a certain minimalist artist’s installation—the ‘approximate invisibility’ of the piece—but she’d failed at enlightening Jude to the deeper meaning of a florescent tube. Compared to the museums in Manhattan—apart from contemporary bright spots—after a few visits Tessa found it antiquated. She missed the welter of emotions that sprang up when she’d stumbled upon the ordered chaos of a Twombly at the Modern and be both disturbed and aroused by a swan’s ecstasy.

They sketched outdoors in Elizabeth Park and Tessa showed Jude how to abstract the seemingly normal landscape around them. They had explored all three floors of Mark Twain’s pink and red Victorian Gothic mansion that rose above Farmington Avenue. Smaller but no less impressive was the cottage around the corner which had once belonged to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Writers she had devoured as a sophomore. “We’re readin’ it for English this year,” a classmate offered. “Uncle Tom’s Cabinet.” Hartford was a desert she’d not have to endure much longer.

Tessa stabbed a loose floorboard with her foot. Unthinking, she pouted. “What did you ever do without me?” Jude, eager for validation gushed, as if on cue: “M-m-m, my groovy friend.” She gauged Tessa’s irritated squint. “I meant groovy in a good way.” And then helplessly she blurted: “I mean, special. You’re my beautiful special friend.”

Tessa rolled her eyes, mitigating discomfort. She took in Jude Kowalski’s lank, waist-length hair, an ambivalent dishwater blonde cascade. Jude wore apology effortlessly: the thickset Polish physique, shoulders like sagging house beams, and a downturned mouth that even laughter could not right. Tessa knew, because Jude told her often enough that she despaired of ever having the kind of attention Tessa got. Jude’s hooded reptilian stare and a complexion unfairly scarred by genetics were constant reminders.

They were as unalike as Lucille Ball and her television sidekick Vivian. Tessa knew they made an odd couple in the school hallways; she with her trim athletic build, pert breasts and a disposition that drew guys to her like rats to cheese. Tessa’s new female classmates regarded her with suspicion, taking in her defiant blonde ponytail, fresh, flawless complexion, and a laugh that struck like lightning.

Tessa wanted to say don’t blame me if I’m pretty. She wanted to scream, “I hate it, hate all the friggin’ attention. I hate every friggin’ minute of it. Guys don’t take me seriously. No one takes me seriously.” Instead she softened her rebuttal. “You were born here at least. You weren’t dragged kicking and screaming.” She snatched the straw hat from Jude’s head, spinning it with her index finger. “You’re really talented, you know. You get to be treated like an artist, Jude, and everyone drools over your work. Miss Merz thinks you’re a genius already.”

Jude shrieked and lunged for her hat. They wrestled like boys, rolling into the wicker chairs, shoving them aside in their tussle. Jude straddled Tessa, thrusting her meaty hands against Tessa’s thin shoulders. “Get off!” Tessa shouted, grimacing and red-faced. She rose sharply and clapped her hands to her thighs. She tugged at her denim cutoffs. “Right. I have an idea.”

…

“You’re cr-a-a-zy,” Jude snorted. She drew her hair into her fist, scowled at the ends for a moment and then tossed it behind her.

“Shush,” Tessa whispered and pushed Jude from the smaller gallery in the Wadsworth where the new acquisitions were displayed. Jude, unsure of the urgency, yelped: “For Pete’s sake, don’t have a cow.” “Cool it. Let’s go outside,” Tessa urged under her breath and Jude allowed herself to be hurried past the tapestries and through the Great Hall.

On Main Street at some distance from the entrance Tessa breathlessly repeated her idea. This will blow your mind, she said. They would create a painting, frame it, and hang it in the museum. They were artists right, ready for anything? Ready to be a little daring? Jude nodded soberly, still unconvinced. “But we could get in trouble, big trouble. What about the guards? You gonna hammer a nail—?”

That was going too far, Tessa had to admit, banging holes in museum walls. But she was running out of options. Downtown took only a few weeks of exploration before she’d covered all the historical sights. The hoopla surrounding a newly completed glass building they called “The Boat” seemed overblown considering where she’d come from. She’d be working on the mall soon enough, filing medical records for an insurance company. It had a desolate crypt-like feel away from Main Street’s older department stores. She’d sauntered around the neighborhood of her school back home and saw the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Suzy Parker. She cut class sometimes to wander alone in the village and check out the troubadours in Washington Square Park. Downtown Hartford got pretty old, pretty quick.

They planned their moves carefully and made many return trips to the museum noting the sleepy-eyed guards’ whereabouts. Because it was summer a heavy overcoat would only draw attention so they had to devise a way to sneak in the painting. It was a watercolor portrait of a clown, loosely painted on a thick sheet of Arches that they gingerly removed from a 9 x 12 block. Jude balked at making it into an abstract. “I’m painting it, let me do it.” Tessa saw the bigger picture and left Jude to her creation. Tessa signed it ‘Maurice Rageau.’ They framed it with the simplest one they could find at the art supply store and attached picture wire to the back. It looked professional enough and fit nicely under an old paint smock Jude would wear buttoned to the neck. They practiced roping her waist with a perfect tie that would loosen with a flick of the wrist. They purchased gummed hangers and tested them to hold the modest weight of the picture.

The final touch was the label typed on an old Remington in Jude’s father’s office behind the pharmacy he managed at the top of the hill where Farmington veered off Asylum. He was always pleased to see Tessa. Whenever they stopped in they were treated to grilled cheese sandwiches at the lunch counter and scarfed them down with cherry cokes. He enjoyed their giggling presence and did not interfere as Tessa pecked out the words: The Clown, by Maurice Rageau. $50.

On a quiet weekday under a dull sky they set out for the museum. For a brief moment they stood before the turreted stone castle and reconsidered. Jude’s heartbeat caused her to stammer. “We, we, shudda done a dress rehearsal.” She gripped the bulk she was carrying, feeling for the knot atop her stomach. Tessa breathed in deeply and steadied their resolve. “If you snooze you lose, Jude. We can do this.”

Moments later they were flying through the galleries, heading straight for the main entrance. They slowed past the lone guard who had not seen them arrive. He nodded to the familiar sight of a couple of teenage girls.

They tore across Bushnell Park, charged with adrenaline. The sight of the palatial sprawl of the Capitol building stopped them. They were joyous and sweating profusely. Relief came in a swell of laughter that forced their excited cries: “We did it!” “We friggin’ did it!” Breathlessly, Jude ripped off the ridiculous smock and threw it to the ground. A fresh round of laughter punched the air from them and they collapsed onto the grass, gripping their stomachs. Jude and Tessa stared at the overcast sky. “Can you believe it?” Tessa wheezed. “How easy was that? Now, aren’t you glad we did it?” Jude turned on her side and gazed at her friend. “I am,” she said giddily, “I’m glad you’re my special friend. Love you,” she whispered.” “Love ya, too,” Tessa laughed. Jude stretched her arm, a languid motion that landed her fingers above Tessa’s face. “I mean, I love you,” she breathed and trailed her fingers across Tessa’s cheek.

They walked home, barely speaking. Normal for the aftermath Tessa reasoned. Jude left her at Laurel Street. Tessa shouted after her, “Later!” Jude raised her arm in a half-hearted wave without turning and continued along Farmington Avenue.

…

Tessa flipped through her assigned carousel and pulled cards on file with names and numbers of those listed as deceased. It was deadly boring but she’d make a little money for her return to Manhattan in September, only a month away. Everything was planned now. She’d work in an art gallery that sold posters on Madison Avenue as little more than a glorified stock girl. At night she would attend classes at the Art Students League. She’d revived her friendship through letters with an old classmate and they planned to move into a basement apartment on Perry Street in the village.

When he asked, Tessa told her father that Jude was getting ready to move to San Francisco where she would take classes at the Art Institute. “We’re both busy, you know. But we speak on the phone.” Jude’s father told him another story. Tessa’s dad had stopped at the lunch counter at the pharmacy for a coffee. “What happened with you two?” he asked Tessa. “Mr. Kowalski said you don’t come around anymore. He said Jude is brokenhearted, like you guys had a falling out or something?” Tessa felt ashamed and angry at the same time. She was busy. They both were.

In the days after their escapade Tessa had planned to call Jude but one thing or another got in the way. Then, she started her summer job. She never told anyone about the museum caper. Once or twice she thought about walking over there on her lunch hour to see if it was still hanging. She didn’t, not because she thought she might run into Jude. She didn’t because she was busy.

Then she received a letter from Jude in the mail. Her father asked about it, was Jude already in San Francisco? Yes, she told him. But that was untrue. The letter contained a poem Jude had written. It was typed, Tessa could tell, on the old typewriter at the pharmacy. Jude’s hands shook as she read it in the privacy of her bedroom. It was a bold poem. Tessa was surprised at how good it was, but it struck her like a knife, tearing at her insides. Some clowns are worth tears, it said. You get what you ask for. She’d crumbled the paper tightly, unable to tear it up.

She would get what she asked for. She wouldn’t have to think twice. She would be all right. Freewheelin’ soon, like the song said.

BESPOKE CLOWN is an original short story by Linda Danz.

STORIES ON THE AMERICAN FRIEND Writers Guild of America, East #R28299

2011-06-19T14:55:00.012-04:00

Dawn is a fellow advocate to end the death penalty in the U.S.

This is her first person report from death row.

My First Visit With Robert Will

By Dawn Bremer

Yesterday, Thursday June 16^th, I called Governor Rick Perry’s office. I had two reasons for placing that call. Firstly, to protest the scheduled execution of Lee Taylor, and secondly due to Gov. Perry’s very public testaments about his strong Christian faith I wanted to speak with a member of his press office or anyone on his staff who could enlighten me as to where in the New Testament Jesus says it’s okay to kill people. The woman who took my call hung up on me without explanation. I followed that with a call to the warden’s office to verify that Rob was eligible for a visit on that date, recognizing that they may try to mess with visitations because of the scheduled execution. I was advised at 8:09 a.m. that I could visit Rob.

Around 11:00 a.m. I arrived at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas where Robert is incarcerated on death row. My car was searched before I parked. I entered the first building for searching and security clearance before I could enter the prison visiting area. After removing my shoes and jewelry I was asked whom I was there to see and then pulled aside. There was little information provided, but my understanding was that I couldn’t visit Rob. The officer in the glass booth had a short, handwritten list of names with Rob’s on it. The guard at the metal detector informed me that a major or the warden would personally explain what was happening. I offered that the warden’s office had already advised me at 8:09 a.m. that Rob was eligible for a visit today. He told me where to sit and I waited. A few minutes later, Major Joe Smith met me. He stated that: “…due to unforeseen circumstances, you cannot visit until after 1:00. You are welcome to return after 1:00 for your visit.”

If you drive a bright orange Jeep with a purple Coexist bumper sticker on the back, Livingston is not exactly the friendliest place to be, so around 12:30 I made my way back to the prison. The guard at the shack, who knew I was waiting until 1:00, approached my car. “It’s only 12:30,” he told me. “They haven’t transferred him yet.” Why was Rob being transferred and to where, I asked. He kindly explained that they had not yet transferred Lee Taylor to Huntsville and this was the reason I wasn’t allowed to visit until after 1:00. He did allow me to park and wait in my car until it was time for my visit.

After being thoroughly groped by a female guard, I was given my visitor tag and sent to the visitors’ center. Once there, I made one of my biggest rookie mistakes. Not realizing that any food purchased for Rob had to be consumed within those two hours, I reasoned that I’d stock up for him so he’d have semi-decent sources of protein, etc. in his cell. I bought $25 worth of trail mix, nuts, peanut butter crackers, sandwiches, yogurts, and the last apple and orange in the machines. Did you notice a beverage wasn’t listed? So did the guard. She chuckled over it—nicely, not in a negative manner—and helped me.

They brought Rob to the little booth. By “booth,” it’s really more a long counter of partitioned phones with a dividing Plexiglas where there is an even more confining “booth” for the inmate to be locked into while talking to visitors on phones with loose wires which cause static connections. Rob held paperwork on his property which had been confiscated during his time on Level-III that he was showing to a Lieutenant. Sgt. Ferris had re-inventoried the property list. The list was no longer categorized as confiscated so that it could be returned to him and/or released to me. He said it would be up to the Property Officer, whose name I can’t remember.

This visit was the first time Rob and I have seen each other since he was arrested, and we had a lot of personal catching up to do. We also discussed actionable items. Rob asked me to liaise more directly with Mr. Williams regarding his case and also to contact the ABA regarding a referral to a corporate/large law firm to assist in his case. I sent an email to the ABA’s Death Penalty Representation info email address this morning regarding this. Because Rob’s mother works at a large law firm, as was the case in his original trial his original trial, the firm will not represent him. This is most unfortunate because of the resources at their disposal.

Rob said that the drains had finally been cleaned out, but that they were now sealing off the bottoms of the cell doors, effectively preventing Rob and other inmates from sharing books, etc. Despite the TDCJ form which Rob sent which showed his write up on May 13, 2011—putting him on Level III—that stated he was not being given what is known as foodloaf, Rob said he had been put on foodloaf during that time. Rob said he is also in great need of office supplies to continue his work. The visit ended with Rob in dispute with the property officer about what the true status of his formerly confiscated property was. In the end I left our visit with none of his property released to me. Rob had asked to see which items she intended to release, so she decided not to release any. She also did not acknowledge that what had been itemized as confiscated had now been re-inventoried so it was no longer considered confiscated.

Unfortunately I am not able to visit Rob on Tuesday, June 21, as he requested. Milton Mathis has been scheduled for execution that day. I will, however, be visiting him on Friday, June 24. That will surely be a more productive and fruitful visit for organizing purposes now that the visitation kinks have been worked out.

I regret that I have not better conveyed how special it was to see my friend after all these years—to look into his eyes, to see, again, that incredibly infectious smile—to hear his thoughts and perspectives on a myriad of subjects. For some reason I haven’t slept well at all the past few nights. And then the high adrenaline that resulted from my first visit yesterday coupled with the subsequent crash today has caught up with me.

Words cannot adequately describe the beautiful soul who is Rob Will.

Pax e bene,

Dawn Bremer

Please go to Rob's websites to learn more about his case and read his updates from death row.

http://www.freerobwill.org

https://www.facebook.com/FreeRobWill

PHOTO COURTESY OF DAWN BREMER

2011-05-28T22:57:00.013-04:00

UPDATE FROM DEATH ROW

Here is one of Rob Will's updates from Death Row at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston Texas. My small contribution to his cause is to volunteer to type his handwritten updates that he mails to me or that he sends via his many dedicated supports who visit him. I urge you to read his story and find some way to contribute to ending the horrible practice of capital punishment that persists in this country.

5.10.11 Tuesday

“People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically or not more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in. When I declined to give up my seat, it was not that day or bus in particular. I just wanted to be free like everybody else.”—Rosa Parks, My Story

Refusing To Give In To Oppression

Yesterday I conducted another protest demonstration—when my recreation time was over I refused to leave the recreation area (i.e., I conducted an occupation of the rec. yard). Ranking officers arrived on the scene and I explained why I was committing the act of civil disobedience. I addressed many of the issues concerning the new rise of oppression that have been going on around here initiated and instigated by Warden Lester and Major Smith.

In the past there have been situations in which we had to engage in protest campaigns because of the deplorable actions of rank and file staff members. For example, some years back a certain group of sadistic C.O.s had formed a gang, an actual gang they named “The Grey Shirts.” They wore rags in their back pockets and all. A few lower ranking staff members allowed them to exist and to oppress until we put a stop to it. In the Art of socio-political resistance direct actions can be used as a form of sanctions: If oppressive acts occur, we engage in acts of protest that create a breakdown in the functioning of the daily routines and shine a very revealing light on the oppressive actions. We did this and thus forced the disbanding of the little “Grey Shirts” gang.

The situation at hand is much different—90% of the C.O.s and Sergeants and Lieutenants are not the problem at all. They think this sudden outrageously oppressive campaign initiated by Warden Lester and Major Smith is absolutely asinine nonsense. Of course, there are always going to be a small number of drone-like bobble-headed “Yes Boss! Yes Boss!” imbeciles who cannot think for themselves at all who will just oppress and oppress and do whatever the higher-ups say with an ass-kissing, boot-licking Satchmo smile planted across their cowardly faces the entire time, but 90% of the staff members hate what Smith and Lester have been doing. In some ways it seems that they have been screwing with the officers more than us! It’s really quite insane.

So I was addressing many of the issues and all of the staff members couldn’t really do anything but just look at me—whether they wanted to openly admit it or not they knew they agreed with everything I said. G.T. had occupied the other side of the rec. cage with me and frustrated with the staff’s lack of response he launched into an impassioned protest speech. Just then the SWAT team arrived in full riot gear. I was hand-cuffed and promptly conducted a sit-in direct action. Sometimes you have to sit down to stand up to show that you and others are refusing to give in to oppression. I didn’t immediately comply with the order to move to my side so the Riot Team leapt upon me with force. Most engaged in proper procedure but there will always be a sad, cowardly imbecile or two—one SWAT team member shoved my face into the rough concrete so hard that my face bled and another jammed the cuffs into my wrists so hard that there are still deep bruises encircling them. I was placed into the emergency carrier and carried back to my cell while giving a protest speech the entire time. G.T. conducted a sit-in behind me and did the same. Solidarity is lovely! And with that said, I’ll sign off…

In the Spirit of Tahir:

Rob Will

https://www.freewill.org

https://www.drivemovement.org

https://www.facebook.com/FreeRobWill

* My Offender Participant Statement from the 5.9.11 direct action is posted below:

TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Use Of Force Report

Offender Participant Statement

a. Name: Robert Will TDCJ#: 999402

b. Date force was used: 5.9.11

c. What happened before the UOF that may have caused officers to use force?

The Administration caused this UOF. The main problem is the new counter productive attitude the Administration—particularly Major Smith and Warden Lester—have created (counter productive to inmates and TDCJ interests).

d. Where were you when the force was used on you?

12 FF outside rec. yard.

e. What kind of force did staff use on you?

Major UOF was utilized—staff wrestled me to the ground and then carried me back to my cell.

f. If you think staff should not have used force on you, or they used too much force, explain why:

No, staff should not have used force. They should have congratulated me for having Honor, Integrity, and standing up for what’s right.

g. Did the force used on you leave marks on you or cause injury?

Yes.

If “yes”, what are the marks or injuries?

Severe bruising on my wrists, a scrape on my face, several light scrapes on my knees, small bruise on my shoulder.

h. Written statement:

Once again I have participated in a major UOF and it is so very inspiring! Another offender engaged in yet another UOF as well. Why? Because of oppression—that is the only word that can be used to describe what has been going on around here, OPPRESSION. And the root cause: Major Smith and Warden Lester. Why have they caused a record number of UOF and staff assaults? Why? It is thoroughly counterproductive to TDCJ-CID policy. It seems that they are on some type of outrageous egomaniacal warpath that is thoroughly unjustifiable. This all happened out of nowhere, no inmates did anything. We simply want to be left alone. Death Row used to be known as one of the most calm and ‘laid back’ places in the Texas prison system. Oppressive staff members, administration, changed this! They’ve created these problems. None of the staff members, from the Lieutenants on down, want to enforce the asinine policies. Why have Major Smith and Warden Lester caused all of these problems to happen? Why have they been viciously and violently assaulting us physically and psychologically? (As many academics have noted psychological violence is many times more harmful than physical violence.) We just want to be left alone. I hope the officials reviewing this will go to http://www.drivemovement.org and http://www.freerobwill.org and take the time to read about our perspective and understand what is going on. Much of the information and writings haven’t been posted yet but they will be up in a week or two. And on a personal level I am here for a crime I did not commit. Imagine how that feels! Yes, yes, I know that a large percentage of people in prison are quite frankly full of shit, but I have never lied to staff members. (I don’t lie in general.) Feel free to read up on my case, a capital murder of a police officer case, on my website. I don’t belong here, so I think I feel the oppression of this place more deeply than others. And it bothers me that even people who are guilty are being viciously attacked. It’s wrong. Guys just want to be left alone. Yes, there are some sorry ass people here (child molesters, rapists, etc.) but there are also guys who made some very bad mistakes, stupid mistakes and regret it deeply. Ninety-eight per cent of guys here haven’t ever been violent or assaultive towards staff nor do they bother staff. The easily could though. Think about that for a minute. There are many killers here and I know this from talking to them, the vast majority regret their actions and never want to harm anyone ever again. They just want to be left alone to be calm. Even though this environment—by its nature—attacks them viciously on a daily basis, they still remain calm and unproblematic. This is what people want. But this new rise of oppression is forcing people to protest. And it’s not going to stop. All tactics have been utilized against us, and when people are desperate they will fight and fight and fight. There is nothing to lose anymore. The new rise of oppression vastly overshadows the pitiful little things such as commissary and short non-contact visits that we are given on Level I. “Level I is trash” is the new saying that is circulating. Will you allow this situation to increase and get worse for both inmates and officers or will you help put a stop to it?

In the hope that TDCJ-CID
Admin officials will do the
moral and right thing:

Robert Will-999402

* D.R. used to have some of the absolute best conditions in all of the Texas prison system now we have the worst. WHY? The D.R. inmates haven’t done anything to deserve this. And once again this is bad for all of the lower level staff members as well.

* Why are we treated the same as g.p. Ad Seg yet probably 90% of the guys here on D.R. wouldn’t qualify as Ad Seg if they were on G.P.? If a person receives a Life Sentence for capital murder he is treated completely different than someone on D.R. (This is actually illegal.)

* 7:12 PM: This is a pitiful shame, an inmate upstairs just assaulted an officer; an inmate who, for about 7 years of being here, has never assaulted staff until this recent rise of oppression. Major Smith and Warden Lester did this. Will you allow it to keep occurring? Please don’t!!!

2011-05-17T01:48:00.006-04:00

RAPTURE

With apologies to Clement Clarke Moore

Twas the night before Rapture

When all through the house

Not a creature was praying

Not even a mouse

The Bible was wrapped

with the utmost care

In hopes that recycling

Soon would be there

The children were nestled

All snug in their beds

Veggies had washed

Sugar highs from their heads

Mama in her sweatpants

And the cat in my lap

Had just settled in

With a bourbon and schnaps

When out in the street

There arose such a clatter

I sprang from my laptop

To see what was the matter

Away to the window

I flew like an atheist

Tore open the panes

And let in the mist

The moon half open

On the street below

Reminded me it was

Too late for blow

When what to my wondering

Eyes should jostle

But a miniature cross

And twelve tiny apostles

There was a bearded fellow

So lively and nice

I knew in a moment

It was Jesus Christ

More vapid than sheep

His followers came

And he whistled and shouted

And called them by name

Now Sarah, now Glenn

Now Rush and now Newt

On Donald, on Geithner

On Barack, how cute

To the top of the headlines

Nobels and Bin Ladens

He rose like a reminder

Of what we’ve forgotton

He was dressed all in sackcloth

From his head to his feet

His heart was all tarnished

With what humans need

He worried for mankind

Shouldered his pack

His broad face and round belly

Never looked back

He spoke not a word

And went straight to his work

How could he have enmassed

Such a nation of jerks

And laying a middle finger

Upright he supposed

He’d had the last laugh

When he saw they rose

And I laughed

When I saw them

In spite of myself

Flinging themselves away from hell

As dry leaves that before

The wild hurricane fly, 

When they meet with an obstacle,

Mount to the sky,

And then stupidly, profoundly

Deflected from right

They managed to

Step into the fiery light

While the rest of us

Watched in confounded delight

Happy Rapture to All

And this time do it right!