Oklahoma Dreaming: Going to Jail
by Donna Schoenkopf
My darling, brilliant, funny, handsome, kind, and generous brother had a drug problem. He acquired it due to the idiocy of the medical and pharmaceutical worlds. It was a long and slow descent into complete unconsciousness until one day he took a gun, put a crayon in the barrel, and robbed a pharmacy. Three times. In the same day. Actually, right after he walked out the door, he went back in. Three times.
When he found himself in jail, he tried to kill himself by jabbing himself in the neck with a pencil, until he made a hole the size of a plum there. He was taken to the fifth floor of Norman Medical where he was left alone by the deputy who went across the hall for a cup of coffee.
Bobby jumped off the ledge.
It was in all the papers and on CNN. There are pictures of him in midflight in his hospital gown.
It was a huge news story because he is an attorney. Or was. A renowned attorney. Somebody you would want to plead your case. He is so kind and good that he told me he never was great at cross-examination because he always felt sorry for the person he was cross-examining. He knew he could twist them into pretzels, but he just couldn’t do it. He is a good, good man. He still won almost all his cases.
He’s in jail now.
So on Sundays I make the almost two hour drive to Chickasha, where the Grady County Detention Center is, so I can have a 15-minute visit with my brother.
I leave at 11:00 am. I stop at the Tecumseh Sonic Drive-In for a Java Chiller and head east on Highway 9.
Highway 9 is a two-lane highway, straight as an arrow, up and down tree-covered hills. It turns occasionally into flat, expansive country with horizons that go on forever.
I turn on the radio, NPR, and listen to Ira Glass and his wonderful stories. I sip my delicious drink. I watch the road and countryside.
This is what I see:
As I leave Tecumseh, speed limit 25, I pass Granny’s Fried Chicken Livers on the right, which is located in a metal building behind some gas pumps. Mmmmmmm. Good. Nothing better than fried chicken livers with the aroma of gasoline wafting by. Eat here and get gas.
Do not speed. They will get you.
The speed limit signs slowly graduate to 35 mph, then 45, 55, and finally 65.
I pass through an area of large, substantial homes, on large acreages, with beautiful lawns and mature trees. They all have interesting portals at the beginnings of their driveways with names of their ranches carved or wrought in iron in the arches at the top. Some have acres of perfect, white fencing stretching up and down the gentle hills. Other ranches are open and graceful. They are all respectable and rich. Mostly.
The modest ones are small and shabby, with dilapidated outbuildings and old trucks parked outside.
Gradually I enter nature unbounded. Oaks, live here. Forests of them, with ash and hemlock and cottonwoods. Beautiful arching mimosas peek out here and there. A hawk or two circles lazily. (Music in the background, please.) The sky is a pale autumn blue, not the deep rich blue of summer. There are occasional trees of brown leaves—the oaks, which don’t turn the glorious colors you see in New England. It’s mostly brown here, in the fall, with a splash of yellow so light and lovely it takes your breath away.
Over more hills. More trees. The radio talks on and on, making me laugh or think. (One time I was so engrossed in Ira’s stories that I found myself on the Turner Turnpike to Tulsa without ever having realized what I was doing.) On Sunday morning everyone is in church, so the ride is solitary and sweet. No old geezers plodding along in front of me at an unnerving 50 mph. Turns in the road take us through Pink, a tiny town with only a few structures visible, the most prominent being a metal church building. It’s huge.
Little Axe is next, but the only evidence of it is a sign pointing away down a skinny, little road.
I pass a lowlands with a standing expanse of water and submerged trees, leaning in all directions, broken off half way up their trunks. Beaver dams pop up over the surface, and water lilies, thousands of them, float huge and round across the water. I keep reminding myself to stop and liberate some of those lilies one of these days for my own Chigger Lake. They’re $30 a pop at the pond store.
A little farther along is a wooden cross wearing a football jersey with flowers surrounding it. I pass it every week and notice sometimes that the shirt changes and the flowers are fresh, as fresh as the grief of the family who put it there. They want us to know that he existed. That he will ALWAYS exist as long as they’re alive.
I think of my son.
Seeing it also reminds me of how I almost died on this same highway 45 years ago, speeding along when it was a gravel road. I began my approach to a pretty high hill, going 70 (yes, kids ARE crazy!), when a HOUSE appeared over the top of the hill. Yes, a house. It was being moved somewhere by truck. Just in time I ducked under it by turning into the ditch alongside the road. You could have seen the hair on my head standing straight up if you had been with me that day.
Eventually there is a pretty sign for Norman, and I enter civilization again, through Norman traffic lights and modern, sophisticated buildings, rolling through without stopping, and then I’m past Norman, still on Highway 9 and out again into the country.
This time all ranch land, grassy and big. Rolls of hay, a buffalo herd, strange housing developments with fancy gates to show their importance out in the middle of nowhere with only one or two houses built, a prairie dog standing all cute and adorable watching the cars streak by, a dead deer, wind hard and strong fighting my car, vistas with big sky, a herd of cows with a contented donkey among them, longhorns with their fabulous art deco horns, bikers on a Sunday ride, and trucks with trailers carrying hay or mattresses.
Through Blanchard. (A town my darling Bill told me to watch for on weather reports when tornadoes are on the loose. It is in a straight line directly southwest of Tecumseh, and if a tornado blows through Blanchard, Tecumseh will be next. Bill knows. He’s a tornado expert for the federal government.)
Blanchard has the Donut Palace Drive-Through. Yes, you can get donuts at a drive-in here. And there’s quaint Main Street. Go slow. They mean it when they say 25 mph.
Then a curving, beautiful 23-mile road on into Chickasha over smooth, rolling hills.
I won’t describe it. Just let your imagination roll on. Real pretty.
But then ...
Chickasha. The ugliest town you ever saw. Dirty. Old. Shitty. Sad. All brown and gray. A crappy gray silo and railroad tracks face you on the way into town. Every building has peeling paint or is covered with grit. Art Kell’s patrol car sits on the side of the road, with his name emblazoned on the side, as his "Vote for Me for Sheriff" sign.
I’m depressed.
I turn right on 3rd Street. And there it is.
Grady County Detention Center.
It’s a nice new building. Government funds at work.
I park and climb out of my car and join the other families and wait for the guards to open the door. They are always late. We visitors stand crammed in the hot lobby, kids toddling around, people not talking much. Lots of Latinos, way more than the percentage of the population. I feel my nostalgia for California, seeing them. One Latino guy, my age, is there every week, too. He wears the clothes of a rancher—jeans, boots, cowboy hat and cowboy shirt. His wife is peasanty, with long, thick braids and a peasant skirt. They are so sweet that I can’t help speaking to them in my broken and hilarious Spanish. Oklahoma has the toughest laws against illegal immigrants in the nation and I want this couple to know I love them and I would never, ever turn them in, and that I am GLAD, yes, GLAD!! that they are here. The white folks look at me suspiciously when I lapse into Spanish.
One pretty white mother has a couple of beautiful children. Her daughter looks like a fairy princess with hair the color of milk. The little girl sits with a pretty little black girl, a little older than she, eating cheddar crackers on the steps outside. The wind blows the tendrils of her blonde hair across, around, and above her face.
Pretty White Mother’s other child is a toddler, a little boy. His name is Gunner. His nickname is Bubba.
There is a Croatian (?) couple, several black women lookin’ good, more white folks. The Latino children are perfectly behaved and help each other.
There is a hulking, unattractive woman, in her thirties, with lank brown hair. I ask out loud if anyone had heard complaints about it being too cold in the jail. She turns to me, Bible in hand, literally, and says that they deserve what they get. Maybe next time they’ll think twice before they do anything bad.
I tell her that my experience as a teacher has shown me that all the kids who were whipped at home were the kids at school who were violent and angry at school. And were the discipline problems. And that we weren’t supposed to have torture in the United States of America.
We glare at each other. Everybody else shifts their feet uncomfortably.
A white guy, middle-aged, with a goatee, speaks up and says his wife had called the jail about it being so cold and they told her it was to keep the inmates calm. Frozen is more like it.
Finally, time to go in. The guards are sweet. They make jokes with us and apologize for being late.
We leave our keys on the window ledge with our drivers licenses. Get wanded. Go up the elevator, somber-faced and quiet, to the third floor for our 15-minute visit.
Bobby is HAAAAAAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPPPPPPPYYYYYYYYYYYYYY to see me! We laugh and talk and talk and laugh. He looks better than he has in a long time. His crushed pelvis has knitted, his pancreas has been repaired, his lungs have refilled.
He tells me the food is good. (He had nothing but baloney sandwiches and water for a year in the Oklahoma County Jail until he and the other federal inmates were rescued by the United States Federal Government because of horrendous treatment by the nasty jail administrators there.)
So now Bobby eats food Aunt Bea from Mayberry would make. Meatloaf and eggs and milk and vegetables. And little squares of cake! Sometimes with icing!
But it’s cold. So cold the prisoners can’t come out from under their skimpy blankets. He begs me not to say anything. In here, he says, it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the trouble, not the oil.
Our 15 minutes are up and it’s time to go, the friendly guard announces, apologetically.
Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. We blow kisses through the glass.
Our guard unlocks the visiting room door. We walk out, looking back over our shoulders, waving.
We squeeze into the elevator. We are all smiling. Down we go. We walk out of the jail into the wind. We get into our cars.
And go home.
donna@fourstory.org
Comments
While I am no friend of Art Kell or his lousy department it sounds like you are more about making excuses for peoples criminal acts than having them acccept responsibility.
My 23 years experience as a federal agent would greatly differ from your California outlook on missbehaving. Kids that didnt get spanked at home yesterday are the ones committing the crimes today.
I really love how you felt the need to identify everybody waiting in the entry way to the center by their race. As for the Latino couple, I have no idea whether I want them in my county or not as you failed to mention if they were Americans, legal immigrants or illegal alians. The first two catagories are welcome to stay. The last catagory belongs on the other side of the bars.
As for Chickasha, it doesnt sound like you have ever made it much farther past the railroad tracks than to the Law Enforcement center to visit your criminal brother whom, as nearly as I can tell from your essay; you view as a victim of society and the system, rather than an aspiring lawyer who had all the benefits but chose to throw them away for a happy pill.
Sounds like the lady with the Bible was right. He is getting what he deserves. Hopefuuly once he pays his debt to society he will get out and make something of himself rather than crying about what a victim he is.
2010-06-07 by Stephen Mills
Oh, mom. This part made me well up:
A little farther along is a wooden cross wearing a football jersey with flowers surrounding it. I pass it every week and notice sometimes that the shirt changes and the flowers are fresh, as fresh as the grief of the family who put it there. They want us to know that he existed.
Great story. Keep it up.
2008-11-10 by John Schoenkopf