'Joice to the world

In the courtyard, we were met by several staff people, and finally by Wolf, and two of his friends, all sweet and polite and clean-shaven, with Vietnam Vet caps on. We stood within the circle of prison buildings, in the center of concrete cell blocks, dining halls, classrooms, a hospital, a chapel. The grounds are brightly landscaped by the inmates, but the buildings look like a child's play structure that had been left outside for 100 years; a plastic and castley hodgepodge of stone and cement, crumbly, ornate, deteriorated.

There's razor wire everywhere, and a constant clanging and banging of gates and cells and doors. Guards carry arms, and keys that could be from the middle ages. Prisoners walk all over the grounds, as slowly as monks, with nowhere much to go. Of course, we saw your better inmates, the really polite ones, not the hardest cases, not the men on death row. The prisoners we saw and spent time with seem to be sliding by, relatively seamless and calm. They're mostly older; you sense their testosterone levels are down. I like that in a prisoner.

Wolf and his friends showed us the classrooms, the chapel and the hobby shop where they work making wooden cable-car jewelry boxes and stained-glass hummingbirds and crosses. "Should you guys be trusted with knives and saws and extremely sharp implements?" I asked nicely.

They laughed. "We earned the privilege by good behavior," Wolf told me. They showed us the old dining hall with the long walls covered in murals painted by inmates with black and brown shoe polish. The murals depicted California's history and their own -- the Native Americans, Sir Francis Drake, the missions, the mountain, heroes of labor, farm workers, artists, prisoners, saints -- and hidden inside these pictures were secrets that only they could see.

We walked to the main cellblock. The prison is overcrowded, by half. The prisoners are double-celled, double-bunked. The cells are grotesque, like a Croatian zoo. I understand how the families of victims think they deserve this, but seeing the prisoners stuffed in these cages affected me like the displayed corpses of Saddam's sons, where you had to wonder: Who are we? And what next? Bloody heads on stakes, outside the White House?

"What are you reading?" I asked the man in the first cell.

He held out his book: true crime by Ann Rule.

Finally Wolf lead us to the dining room where 60 prisoners had gathered in bolted-down chairs near a stage. Behind them, a kitchen crew of prisoners and guards were making the next meal.

What you might call the aesthetics left something to be desired -- it was an echoey, cavernous space, like a hangar, metallic with the racket of inmates and guards making and packaging food. It smelled like cheap meat and old oil and white bread.

I got onstage, took a long deep breath, and wondered, as usual, where to start. You start where you are, is the secret of life. You do the next right thing you can see. Then the next. I told them the same stuff I tell everyone: short assignments, shitty first drafts, that you own what happened to you. They listened dutifully.

Then I introduced Neshama, with a certain concern that the prisoners wouldn't quite get her -- this intense granny, with furry gray hair and a loud red plaid flannel dress, who uses her whole body to tell stories. I had invited her because I love her stories and I knew it would be more fun for me, and because some people, like Neshama, hate to write but love to read and tell stories.

I had extremely low expectations -- I hoped maybe a few prisoners would form a guild, like the one to which Neshama belongs, hoped they wouldn't hurt her, or overcome her, or make her marry them. Then Neshama walked to the mike, and told her first story, her version of a folk tale. It was about a man in the olden days with no luck, who comes upon safety, wealth and a beautiful woman, but is too busy looking for fancier luck, somewhere else, to even notice her. Neshama painted the story with her hands, leaning into the crowd, and drawing back, hopeful or aghast at the unlucky man's journey, smiling gleefully at the story's close. And the place went nuts. She absolutely stole the show right out from under me like a rock star, while I looked as prim and mainstream as Laura Bush. Here they thought she was going to teach them a lesson, and she had basically sung them a song. Their faces lit up with surprise. She was shining on them, they felt her shining on them, and so they shone back on her.

They asked her questions -- where do we find these stories? And Neshama told them: "They're in you, like jewels in your hearts." Why do they matter? "Because they're treasures, these memories, these images, ground of the same wisdom we all know, but that you alone can tell."

They stared up at her, mesmerized. They looked like family, and neighbors, black and white and Asian and Spanish, all in their blue denim clothes. Some looked pissed off, some looked bored, some attentive, and the older ones all looked like God.

When I finally got her off the stage, I gave them a second round of my best writing tips, and there was warm, respectful applause. Then Neshama got up and told a second story. It was about her late husband, and a pool he used to hike to where there was one old whiskery fish swimming around. She stripped her story down to its essence, because only essence speaks to desperate people. And they rose to give her a standing ovation. It was a stunning moment. I was only a little bitter -- medium bitter -- but mostly I was blown away. All she had done was to tell them, "I'm human, you're human, let me greet your humanness. Let's be people together for awhile."

She told them more about her storytelling guild, and some of the guards sat down to listen. We did a duet for a while, the two of us answering questions, telling them useful stories of our own work, and the writers we love who've filled our communal well of wisdom with life's truth, worn and honed from many years and different cultures.

We had evoked the listening child in these men, with the only real story anyone has ever told -- that the teller had been alive for awhile, and learned a little in surprising ways, the way the universe delivers truth. And while I saw these men through the haze of our desire that things go well, I also saw rough beautiful glass, tumbled in the turbulent and unrelenting streams of prison life. I saw that these men looked out for each other. I saw that they had nothing but the present, the insides of their minds, glimpses of natural beauty, library books, guilt, rage, growth, and each other. I saw that these lives were of value. I had a sudden desire to send them all my books, all of my father's and friends' books, too. Also, to donate all my organs. Why did these men make me feel like being so generous? Maybe it was all the fresh air we'd brought in, the wind and the rain and ourselves. It was like we'd brought in an accordion; we talked, and listened, and shared, and it filled the bellows. We squeezed, and some meanness came out, both theirs and ours, and we pulled the accordion open again, and breath went in, ours, theirs, the storm's. We opened and closed the pleats, letting air in and out past the metal reeds. And who but God knows what will come out?

In any case, that's all from me for awhile. Take care of each other. Rest. And try to get your 'joice back. The days will be longer again soon.

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