The First Day of Everything After

I stowed my cardboard box with prison toiletries, a notebook, pen, and a transistor radio with headphones in my bedroom. The bunk wasn't much different from a barrack's bunk. There was a chest of drawers and a closet with no hangers. I looked out the window. A concrete path cut between the halfway house and another old apartment complex.I'd just checked in with the halfway-house administrators. Ms. Randall was a tall Black woman with the air of a den mother who knew which kids were the fuckups and you always thought it was you even though you hadn't done anything. The office manager, Mrs. Gutiérrez, was a short, heavy woman. The bangs of her black hair were feathered up and her long nails gleamed red. She stood just behind Ms. Randall like a mother monitoring her kid's homework even though the kid was a straight-A student.They looked through my file. My multiple mugshots, from the county jail booking photo through the federal prison system photo paperclipped to each intake form. My blond-haired, blue-eyed stare wasn't unlike my military ID photo. I thought again, as I had so many times over my sentence, how I'd gone from army recruiting poster boy to white trash convict and had the same look on my face. In each successive photo my hair had grown longer. Maybe now I'd get it cut to look respectable and not, as my parents said, “Look like a damned hippie.”The a/c hadn't been on in the apartment, so it held the heat of the hot summer day of 1987. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and sat on the couch stunned to be semi-free.A dingy slapped-together place, it had all the charm of a rent-for-afternoon-flings hotel on the seedy side of town. An hour earlier, Lynne, my ex-wife, had dropped me off at this North Vegas address with a kiss on the cheek and an invitation to come visit her and her new husband when I got a pass. It was sweet of her to have kept visiting me in prison. She was always a better person than I had ever given her credit for when our marriage became a casualty of drugs, alcohol, and adultery. Maybe she was looking for atonement by helping me out. I don't know for sure, but I was happy to believe she was a compassionate person.A year and a half ago, the BATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, had arrested me for my role in the theft of a machine-gun. When a friend started to steal the weapon from the National Guard armory where we were both soldiers, I helped him hurry along as I didn't want him to get caught. It was stupid, and why I didn't alert the First Sergeant right then as it unfolded I wished I knew, instead of being drawn further into the crime by helping him get rid of it.The sun's rays slanted crossways through the gaps in the curtain. The sun still had a long way to go before reaching the horizon. I was free to leave for a few hours, but I sat and thought about the probability of running into someone I knew. The odds of them being in this part of the city were pretty slim, if they hadn't left Vegas altogether. There might've been people who'd recognize me from the newscasts a year and a half ago when the BATF agents arrested me at the armory out of the battalion commander's office or the countless times the feds marched me back and forth from court. I'd been away a while, but still, I wasn't ready to chat up any old acquaintances or have any confrontations.Outside the office was a pay phone. I needed to call my parents and let them know I'd made it. I'd have to call collect as I didn't have a phone card. At the phone, I took a breath as I picked up the receiver. My stomach knotted as I pushed the zero and the operator came on. Within a few minutes the phone on the other end rang. My youngest brother, the third son, picked up and accepted the charges. I said, “Hey.”He asked how I was doing. We hadn't spoken in over two years and now it was strange to hear his postpubescent voice on the other end. Like I'd called the future. My next youngest brother, the second son, had graduated high school and had joined the Navy to be a SEAL. My sister was seven years younger than me, so I felt even more distant from her since I'd last seen her. I had no idea how they were doing in school or what they wanted to do other than the news I got in sporadic letters, like from a distant aunt who didn't travel from the Old World.He rounded up dad. Dad was glad to hear I made it okay. We made a plan for him to meet on Saturday to bring some clothes, a couple of books, some towels, and any other things he might happen to think of as he packed. I told him I'd like to have my daypack, the one I had for school and that probably still held schoolbooks and my last homework assignments from college.I thanked him for getting my stuff. They'd packed up my apartment after my arrest and taken things to Mountain Pass. Dad said people had ransacked the place. When he'd gotten there, the doorknob had been busted with a sledgehammer and the door left open. He didn't think anything was stolen. The manager kept the deposit.I'd seen mom and dad once when they came to visit me at Boron Federal Prison Camp in the Mojave Desert last summer. They sat across from me. Their eyes scanned me like a stranger. They scanned the others, no stranger than me as they had thought they'd known me. Now not so sure who I was. They hadn't seen me in over a year. What changes did they see in my face? The old man in his plaid work shirt, jeans, and sun-weathered face as if he'd just stepped off a horse after scouting ahead for the wagon train. Mom with her blonde hair curled, discrete makeup, nice blouse on for visiting, and all the quietness of a woman still coping with her oldest son's fuck-ups. They made chitchat. My dad said, least you ain't in Nam, and me thinking I'd rather have been given the choice to go to Nam or not. They didn't really know me. Like one of the guys on my cellblock who chose Nam the first time he ran afoul of the law like in the Bruce Springsteen song, “Born in the USA.” He went Ranger and survived long-range reconnaissance patrols and boobytraps and time-stopping firefights. He wished he'd had the chance to go to war the second time instead of sitting in a cell. Maybe dad and I just knew different horrors and talked past each other. Maybe he thought he was cheering me up. They talked about how my siblings were doing. Grandma was still gardening and canning. How things were at the house. Told how life went on. How things changed all the time but didn't. They only asked if I was okay in a general way, and never probed for specifics. Some shit was better left unknown. I'd said fine.Dad said he'd be at the halfway house around 4:00 p.m. He handed the phone off to my mom. She asked if I had enough food in the apartment. She'd send leftovers along with Dad to make sure I wouldn't go hungry. I told her I was planning on grocery shopping after our talk. We said our goodbyes, and I hung up the phone.I regarded the phone, thought how it closes distances but opens gulfs between us. I needed to get food for dinner and the next few days. I'd need breakfast before going out to look for a job. I needed to act like a normal citizen again and escape institutional thinking. I wanted to cook for myself and not have someone else on an assembly line cook and serve me. I wasn't sure what, but I figured to cruise around the store to see what hit me. I left the apartment and signed out under Mrs. Gutiérrez's suspicious gaze.Litter, tumbleweeds, and dirt blown in from out of town filled the gutters. Graffiti decorated some walls and the sides of stores. Neon casino and bar lights blinked nonstop. I wondered if my favorite bartender still served up cocktails at my favorite bar where Lynne and I drank underage. I wondered what Lynne was up to now.Some dudes in front of a liquor store panhandled me. “Help a man out. Spot a brother some change.” I automatically sized them up. Ever since being jumped in county lockup, I gave strangers space, so I had a chance to fight back.At the store, I cut through the parking lot measuring people as if going into a prison dining hall. In the past, my concern had been idiot drivers. Now it was the potential for mayhem where people gathered and the warning signs I'd learned to spot like sudden movements—an arm raised too fast, or an inmate's lowered gaze, bloodless face, with body tensed for attack. Funny how terror binds itself into a person's DNA.The automatic doors whooshed open, and the light and noise gave me pause like when I was a kid before entering a carnival. Where do I go first? In the supermarket, I wandered the aisles, making great looping circles. A black haired chick berated her boyfriend in rapid machine-gun bursts of Spanish. I loved the sound of her words and the frenetic pace of the language and wished for a second to be on the cuss end of that conversation, but only for a moment. The cart's wavering wheel made me force it to turn. I still wasn't sure what I wanted. I felt out of synch, like a time traveler who found himself in a not-too-distant future. A time and place not totally alien, but just unfamiliar enough to be disorienting. I hadn't been around people in street clothes, people with money, people who were women, and kids loud and racing and crying and screaming for treats.“Mom, I want chips now!” The mom hauled off and slapped the crusty snot right off the face of her eight-year-old in front of racks and racks of chips.“That'll learn you.”Not likely, I thought. I bet the kid's face had been struck harder in the past, and given where I'd just come from, slapping the shit out of kids didn't necessarily slap the bad or the madness out of them. It'd just be pushed down, festering for the want of a needle to lance it.I looked at myself in the mirrors on the upper part of the wall reflecting the store. I tried to see through to the other side where security was surely sizing me up. In the racket of a market in full cleanup-on-aisle-five mode, old people tottered in the middle of aisles, men slouched around the frozen food, and women jockeyed carts like chariots in Ben Hur for the cashier line.The women, though. Trying not to look like a freak, I breathed in deeply as they passed me, taking in their smell like the traces of faded desire and hope. Housewives, college coeds, women off work in pantsuits with heels clicking like the seconds on a biological bomb, some on welfare, some choosing between name brand and store brand, some with hair up in a quick afternoon ponytail, some sprayed and lacquered, some fat, some skinny, some in between. Old, young, middle-aged. I had missed the presence of women, the sounds of their voices and their laughter rippling the air like egrets over still water and their touch.In the frozen foods section, I tossed some frozen pizzas into the cart. The door frosted over as a cold mist breathed out. When it closed, I saw my reflection in the whitened glass. My big shot at normalcy. Had I ever been normal? I felt stoned and uncaught and something else, that the world watched me from behind the mirrors above, in security-camera footage broadcast on the news, undercover officers tailing me and reporting back to a command post, and to their from fuckups like me. for me to it up and send me but you tried to an for have to come with The system was full of people who'd been their and back in prison some had a for some some with a some with a in need of an or being back a street when the up in their in with we got a few for know anything about a along with the of that someone I or with in the county jail or prison still had it out for me and for me in an my through I tossed some in the cart. An old woman at me, and I I into the middle like a on a in a I again at the just to look at the like so many for at some for to and the to the and who was in the halfway so it became one more they up for if we had a I hadn't had a in a year and a half didn't I didn't at the thought of got some and and a as I hadn't had a for a long as I one in the I wanted to I'd come from and now the market might of I and it with and and no one me. I get different of one for each day of the work I a of I all the and not to one and go for a of all and in a few and or so with and as to the on my and my the the like around The kept me the section, I at the I my mom and you always the of a cook by how their out. I picked out a It was A my Funny to it by the I to a as to Prison ain't I get more than one out of this and like I was make a life I'd never much before my and this a way to the old me from the new me. A prison said I needed to the boy I'd been was and for him and a new way of being in the I the in the and back to to get a and some to with it. My mom and to a and and and I'd have a I back to at the A deeply and woman with a voice of a asked me, A sweet woman her as she blinked She me of my from who ran around with in their hair all day Saturday to look in the a nice day What else to on the first day of and all the of a at I the she saw the Vegas so one and tossed it on the it to the I out the to her. I only had about from my prison and from my old so I only a few things to get through a couple of the halfway Mrs. my grocery for and “Look at she said to Ms. They the and then me. you in a bad a be I as they looked to each other and of Randall said, got any about that let me I me through with a of her and on the her nails and in the apartment, I the to I knew be to a high It was but I was so might as cook an There was no one me when I and up the and them in a I the on I and on the and then the and it into the chest I the into the I looked at the and wondered how long I but my mom it took a long so an hour felt started looking through the for my I was to be an a security an a and two of me at this in my The that me was how to myself to I was a from of the and college to in a halfway house. I wanted to it behind me, on from the and make something of my to go to the for to see if I get on as an At I as an so thought I had a shot at it. In the were a lot of of a people out of When I'd first in Vegas and for a I called the in the went in at something like and was of by all the people into to a by getting a credit all of from with to guys like me in a and The lights made me as if I were in a where we were all a for My first I sat with a in a who stood all the time he had the he told me to along and any for when he was a The next day I was on my and as it the was the in a for and a of I was had a taken a and My first Vegas in Vegas It'd be a idea to a few some for I how the me with out of the I the over I a and the only to the out to it on the I my front door and Ms. Randall the out of her face. She saw me over the at the said you for thought I had it She me my under some cold the and got an and some a She it up and handed it to she I the open, the still had How did I to make the the My mom and might've had a or two about Randall said with a didn't the frozen did me with my a box of the was out of the apartment. Ms. Randall back to the office as I the one else had come My might've still been or out as he didn't have to be in I wondered who he was. with strangers me. At least I didn't think my new me in my The and I got the A but it wouldn't before I leave and go out and around the but I sat on the couch at the Where was to go in this city that wouldn't get me into with a and It was a to don't in to and another when with a woman in a and as my jumped to after being up. It was something I didn't want to not this my first day didn't even to on the The noise of the city the like someone a in the back noise for all I knew. over me. My body felt it had from the of the from the into the past through the of my and back into the My was out there, and I'd in my to see what might like not see past the I needed to someone to me. I needed to myself in front of a from the of my was not to be to be given the chance to I wasn't a that I'd an in that never happen I'd learned my like a kid I be passed and filled the as I sat and at the in the A and and I I was to be told to go to to of the had but I still it along with the I a to the and I didn't want to be a bad this I wasn't with a the street I and It was the of laughter kids make where you if happy or Maybe they were looked out the window. A light over each door like lights from The on some and with the light of The big into the The wall with the the to the The office had the lights on and no someone was doing the of A as it through the It around the and and I let the and sat on the a long people and had me. I'd grown up in a big and after I'd had and then gone to and in then Lynne and I always had someone over or were over at someone place or out doing something in the Vegas and of and the and of from the of hadn't been for a long it since being a boy by myself in the where we at where my dad had found a or when we in for over a year as we tried to a house from and in the I for the of or into looking for water and I wandered in of something new to or an and other times I to the and place in the of the I'd to a around to see if a always a It Had I seen the in and in the in the my I a in I was a the of the through me and I felt a of the big and not a my I with the of my on and off again, but I always to make it back to that of being in the In the I further into a and of any A who was some of to told the of a man up the by a I felt were to make people their for a that to their even if it as I the I if all life then the life was even as he on his of I might not be but that didn't a It a bad person the couch in the halfway I thought about to a new me at that didn't the of a or the of madness I felt to me. I to me a I got up and looked out the wondered at the city out I to wondered who might be the the and what stranger might be in the I was in the of one stranger. this I was as as I'd never even in the of the with the through like the apartment wasn't a bad way to I started to a of that old in the went to the for a of The still gave off I looked at the in the and wondered if I'd ever the of a