Get It One Last Time

by Peter Nathaniel Malae

What you remember about places like this is the first time. I’d gotten out the pen on a Friday afternoon and had 48 hours to report to my parole officer. I hustled out to the East San Jose Parole Unit that night, but everything was closed. So I went home and tried to sleep and came back Saturday, Sunday, but everything was shut down over the weekend, too. I was going back to the pen on a violation, was ready.

I rolled into the Unit Monday morning, absorbing the whole setup without even consciously trying, that’s what institutionalization does to you: You’ve always got your radars going, like an insect. There were little framed signs up, the kind you find in convalescent homes: FOOTSTEPS IN THE SAND and CHICKEN SOUP (FOR CONVICTS). Bullshit to keep you from thinking about the loaded deck of the system.

And an educational pitch from Bill Cosby. Touting a book by James Baldwin with the word READ at the bottom of the poster. Bill Gates, too. Really absurd stuff. The Microsoft billionaire’s gonna save us cons from 25-to-life peeking over the cover of The Old Man and the Sea, the eyes behind his specs zany with money. I’d read that good book 26 times in three years because they didn’t have anything else to read in the East Block of San Quentin save Louis L’Amour and Sidney Sheldon, but I think it’s a fair prediction that I won’t be making too many pretty pennies on Hemingway, not now or ever.

And the ceiling 16 feet up. An opera balcony jutting out from the wall eight feet from the ceiling. First consideration, anywhere you go in the system, is always the safety of the staff. If some pissed-off homeboy came stomping through the Unit toting weapons and swearing vengeance, the staff had a good distance on him, could appraise the situation from up top, rally and proceed accordingly, militarily sound stuff. And then it doesn’t hurt their cause either to assess your felonious ass from the highest soapbox in California, State-appointed Peters at the Gates of Heaven and absolute clout with God.

One Agent Abbott was assigned to me, and I waited there in the lobby for two and a half hours. I thought for sure he was getting the paperwork ready to send me back. When he finally came out his office and peeked over the balcony, it was hard not to laugh. He was so short, he barely got his head over the rail. He said, “Ulufale,” and I said suspiciously, “Yeah,” and he came down the steps and out the door to the lobby.

He was just over five feet tall, a little bearded midget. He grabbed my arms and said, “Hey, hey, hey. You’re a big one, aren’t you?”

I followed him up to his office. At his desk, he said, “What are you, Samoan?”

I nodded.

“Don’t want to tie it down into rows or braids?”

I shook my head.

“Hey, hey, hey. I dig Afros just like anybody else.”

He never said a word about the 48 hours and I naturally kept my mouth shut.

Abbott’s claim to fame was his second-uncle John Henry. Norman Mailer’d gotten second-uncle John Henry, a lifer, out of Sing Sing by writing a letter to both the governor of New York and the parole board on his behalf. Some probationary pardon was granted, some gift. One week later, second-uncle John Henry went and killed one of his bunkees in a halfway house, so his second-nephew’s big joke was always, “Now don’t go stabbing anyone in the windpipe like Second-Uncle John Henry, huh, huh, huh. All it got him was a sentence and a period, huh, huh, huh, get it, huh? Big scholar was killer Second-Uncle John Henry.” I’d read his Second-Uncle John Henry Abbott’s book once in the county jail awaiting trial and, probably to Agent Abbott’s liking, see no similarities whatsoever between the relatives....

Peter Nathaniel Malae lives in Santa Clara.