SAN DIEGO — When I visited a jail, it was a lonely ride, made lonelier by the barren landscape of empty hills and valleys. My V-8 powered, beige pickup truck, which easily climbed and descended the steep grades was the same color as the landscape. My final destination was a desolate outpost that could double as a frontier fort if Mexico decided to attack the United States in a refrain of the Alamo. The border is just over the next hill or two.
I wasn’t in the handcuffs or the leg chains that prisoners routinely wear as jewelry ornaments when entering the George F. Bailey Detention Center. I was there to visit Paul, the son of a very close friend. He had been arrested for being involved in a drunken bar room brawl, accused of kicking out the four front teeth of another combatant.
I stood in line for twenty minutes in a crowded waiting room. While waiting, I took an inventory of my fellow visitors. A casual look suggested this was not a good place to view the face of multicultural America. Ninety percent of the anxious faces, mostly women, were Latino. A few were black. I counted four gringos, myself included, in line. Another observation was how obese most of the women were. They were all there to visit their loved ones, the majority of whom are in jail because of crimes related to supporting their drug habits or drug business.
Paul, whom I was visiting, is no stranger to the penal system. I had known prisoner #98173238 since he was thirteen years old. He was now thirty-seven. Paul has already been locked away for five years of his life, on three separate occasions, for crimes against the American people. When he was free, he was a great salesman, earning commissions of $75,000-$100,000. However it all involved illegal drugs. He probably could have earned the same amount selling the legal stuff, it just might have taken a little longer.
Paul is very bright and charming, which is characteristic of the gene pool from which he descended. His deceased father was a successful psychologist and attorney. His mom, a former teacher with a master’s degree in Human Behavior, counseled troubled adults for years. She now needs to be in the chair, the one her client normally sits in. She needs relief from her “tsoris.” The English translation for this Jewish word is “trouble.” However this is not an adequate definition. “Tsoris” begins where “trouble” ends. The hands are held to the sides of the head while it shakes from one side to the other. There is an audible groan, accompanied by the chant, “Why me, why me?” Paul has ‘trouble,’ his mother has “tsoris.”
To reach the visiting area, I followed a blue line (the color I was assigned), down a long corridor. I was struck by the silence. Jails are usually noisy places. Normal discourse is a shout. I know this from personal experience. Whenever I’ve walked by the multistory jail in downtown San Diego day or night, the noise from the inmates roars like a broken water main out the barred, and screened windows, and spills out onto the streets below. Many years ago I counseled alcoholics inside the same jail listening to the angry shouts of caged men not able to live peacefully in society.
At the end of the blue line in the passageway, there was no pot of gold, nor a gold container of “pot.” Instead, there was a door leading to a room, that leads to another room. I entered the outer room where ten stools are positioned for visitors to sit and peer through ten framed, shatterproof glass windows into the inner enclosure. The inmates could be viewed inside this chamber like animals at the zoo. On each side of the window was a telephone for prisoners and visitors to use to communicate. The green painted window frames on the visitor side were heavily scratched with graffiti, exposing a white layer beneath that accentuated the mindless calligraphy. This technique, called scraffito, has been used in church mural art for centuries. I couldn’t help compare the graffiti on the outside with the human graffiti on the inside. Paint wipes out the foolish, brief, fame of the spraycan artists, just as surely a prison sentence wipes out years of a prisoner’s life.
When I entered the room, there was one other visitor, an attractive woman of Mexican descent. She was visiting her brother. While we waited for the men to appear, she told me a story similar to Paul’s: her family was wealthy. They owned a well-known resort in Baja California. Her aging father was nearing retirement. He wanted his only son to take over operation of the resort. However, the son in his early thirties had been in and out of trouble with drugs all his adult life. In Mexico, his father’s influence was always able to get him out of trouble. Now, he was in an American jail, and he could not be helped. His father’s dreams were shattered.
While we were talking, a few more visitors entered the room. Simultaneously an automatic door on the inner room slid open and the inmates, in dark blue pajamas, appeared. The last time I saw Paul was four years ago when he visited me in the hospital where I was recovering from a heart bypass operation. It was my turn to return the favor, to comfort him in his self-caused agony. I didn’t recognize him at first, but figured it was him, because he was the only gringo in the group.
We talked like family. He knew how close I was to his mother and stepfather and this gave me his instant trust.Tears came into his eyes early in our conversation. He was aware he made a stupid mistake, being at the bar, and should have left immediately when the fight broke out, but he got caught up in it. He admitted to me that he kicked the victim, but Paul is sure someone wielding a pool cue knocked out the guy’s teeth earlier in the fight. He asked for a jury trial because he thought he was innocent of the charge.
Our conversation turned to other matters. I told him I didn’t want to preach to him, but suggested he make the best of his time there pursuing educational opportunities. He told me there were no books for him. The only books available were those designed to help one to get a high school diploma, which he already had. I then suggested he start writing a journal of his feelings and experiences, which he never did
The allotted forty-five minutes flew by and I heard a loud speaker on his side of the glass barking the end of the visit. We rapidly spoke our last words until the phone abruptly went dead. I put my open palm up to the face of the glass to say goodbye and Paul placed his to match it. Our eyes met and we shared unsaid feelings. The automatic door inside the cage slid open, and the blue shirted prisoners passed through and descended a steep flight of stairs into a hell of their own making.
The next evening, Paul’s mother called and said the trial she thought would be postponed was due to start the next day. I picked her up at the airport early the next afternoon and we went directly to the courtroom presided over by Superior Court Justice E. Mac Amos, a Cheshire cat. He is a genial man with a friendly smile concealing his reputation as a fair but firm judge.
The jury was chosen that afternoon. The twelve panelists selected all seemed bright and alert, although they leaned heavy on the law and order side. I thought this would not help Paul, a previously convicted felon. The jurors were attentive throughout the trial, and I noticed only one blonde-haired young man occasionally drifting off
The trial was held jointly for Paul and a 25-year-old man arrested in the same brawl. The fellow who had his teeth kicked out declined to press charges, but the State of California persisted. Deputy District Attorney Stein laid out the case to the jury. Stein, medium height, dark hair, and trim build, looked to be in his mid-30’s. His appearance and demeanor confused me at first. Paul’s’ mother said he was Jewish. “No,” I replied, “he doesn’t look or talk Jewish, and his shoes are not Jewish lawyer shoes! His shoes are plain-toed with a single raised detail cutting across the top. Jewish lawyer shoes are wing tips. Stein’s shoes, within Jewish law, only qualify him for rabbinical studies.”
I thought he was Italian or Lebanese. He showed no Jewish body language. I will say though, he probably played a considerable amount of schoolyard ball, the way he deftly moved around the courtroom and gestured with his hands.
The Deputy DA accused the two defendants of wreaking mayhem on one of the brawlers, and effectively showed the jury repeatedly a picture of his battered face.
Now it was the turn of the two defendants’ lawyers to plead their cases. The other defendant’s lawyer did not show good physical presence. He seemed to have modeled himself after Gordo, an old comic strip character in “Smiling Jack,” which I read while growing up. Gordo of the comics was a man with a huge belly that protruded over his pants. He was always losing a button on his straining shirt. Waiting patiently beneath his belly to catch the inevitable popped button in his beak was a scrawny chicken. I didn’t see any sign of poultry in the courtroom, but did notice that during lunch recess the barrister headed straight toward Kentucky Colonel Sanders establishment across the street. I will say though, when he laid out his defense, it was organized, reasonable, and believable.
Paul’s lawyer, “Jimmy Cagney,” a short, red headed, pugnacious kind of guy, seemed like he could, and would, take on anyone in the court room with his fists or tap dance on the tops of the tables. His constant buttoning and unbuttoning of his suit jacket during his presentation to the jury was a tip-off to the nervous tension within him. I was impressed with the clarity of his presentation too.
The trial lasted for three days. A fairly clear picture of what happened unfolded. Some fifteen-to-thirty liquored up men in a bar in Ocean Beach began fighting over nothing of consequence. This area of town was notorious for bar rumbles on the weekends at closing time. Fighting is so common, that the police have a permanent detail stationed on weekends in the immediate area just to handle these melees.
The instigator of the fight, and the drunkest of the bunch, appeared to be the fellow who finally lost his teeth. Sometime during the trial I began to hear banjo music in my head, the kind of music accompanying a John Wayne bar room brawl movie- every one has a good time fighting and goes home with their arms around each other after it’s all over. “Hey, nobody takes a drunken exercise of this sort seriously,” the script goes. However, the DA did, and there were laws on the books to back him up.
Of the two defendants I thought Paul’s testimony was more credible. However I was concerned the revelation of one of his felony convictions, and his gorilla like walk, developed in self-defense in prison, would go against him. The other defendant’s words, I thought, were taken apart by the DA. In his summary, Stein was relentless and continuously waved the picture of the victim’s battered face into the face of the jury, just like a symphony conductor would wave his baton during a concert. Gordo gave a well-reasoned summation, his shirt strained to the bursting point. Jimmy Cagney sat rocking in his chair during the entire presentation. He seemed to be restraining himself from leaping onto the table and proclaiming through his tap dancing his client’s innocence with a series of energetic pirouettes. His summary was forceful and covered all the arguments effectively.
At the conclusion of the trial, I was confident the jury would see how the ambiguous and conflicting testimony would plant a seed of reasonable doubt in their minds. I was sure a quick acquittal would follow. I anxiously awaited the decision.
Paul was convicted of both charges, and the other defendant of one lesser charge. Three weeks later on a gloomy rainy Wednesday morning, we gathered in Superior Courtroom 4. Black robed Judge Amos, high up on his bench, poured forth a torrential storm of thunder and lightening, washing away the next eight years of Paul’s life. The other fellow got four months.
Epilogue: After serving his 8-year sentence Paul was released, lived primarily with his mother, did odd jobs in landscaping including working for me. He went in and out of jail a couple of more times, and then died on the toilet from an overdose of heroin he had injected into himself. He was fifty years old.
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Ira Spector is an author and freelance writer based in San Diego. This selection was republished from Spector’s 2011 work, Sammy Where Are You? An Unconventional Memoir … Sort of. It is available via Amazon.