VINCE

August 10, 2014

Excluding good time, and any other early release programs, my release date is July 25, 2017.  If I am accepted into C.I.P.  I will leave prison six months from the day I arrive in Willow River.  The Challenge Incarceration Program there, otherwise known as boot camp, is designed to be as fast paced and rigorous as army boot camp, but also includes drug treatment, education, cognitive thinking skills classes, job training, and when that’s over there’s a 6 month intensive supervised release that they say is the real challenge.  For 6 months: every day is the real challenge.  For 6 months: everyday contact with an I.S.R. officer.  Drug tests 4 times a week.

Must spend 8 hours a day actively seeking employment until you have a full time job.  AA/NA involvement.  Community service, 8 hours per week.  I.S.R. officers can walk into your home at any time day or night with the key you have provided them.  They can follow you.  Their job is not to help you succeed.  Their job is to make sure they are there to catch you slipping.  They give you one fuck up.  Then they put on an ankle bracelet.  If you mess up again you go back to prison for your full term and they add on six months.  Id’ be out in 2019.  Oh, and to not be a burden to society, they take your pay check.  Pay your bills, give you some small allowance and keep the rest.  After that is parole for one year.  Then I’m free.  

Believe it or not the success rate is quite high.  Recidivism is low.  And everybody comes out of boot camp in the best shape of his life.  5 miles rain or shine, daily workouts, healthy diet.  Sounds like a challenge to me.  I can’t wait.  Oooh but I will.  My guess is that I’ll get to go to boot camp in roughly 3 months.  Until I leave St. Cloud, I’m locked in my cell for an average of 21 hours a day, 23 on weekends.

ANNE

After Vince does his time, he tells me, they’ll send him to boot camp. “What is that?” I ask. “Just what it sounds like, mom. Just like boot camp if I were going into the army.

“But you’re not going into the army.”

“Well I don’t know what the point is, but I’ll do whatever they want me to do to get out of here.”

Boot camp. Great preparation for army life, sure. But not for real life. An idea that sounds good, until you actually use your brain and think about it. Somebody’s ill-conceived, half-baked plan to “whip those criminals into shape.”

Boot camp seems to be the pat, knee-jerk answer to everything nowadays. Overweight? Sign up for booty-busting boot camp at your gym. Teenage son out of control? Send him to some boot camp-style ranch in South Dakota. What’s next, meditation boot camp? Colicky baby boot camp? Alzheimer’s patient boot camp?

I have never been through boot camp but my sister and one of my brothers have and I’ve seen all the movies and TV shows. My understanding is that every detail of your life, every waking moment of your day is tightly scheduled and controlled. All decisions are made for you. You have no choices except whether to stay or quit.

I have also heard the stories of young people discharged from the services, no longer with any routine or anyone telling them what to do, and they’re bored and at loose ends and don’t know how to manage their time and that’s where the drinking starts and then to your surprise they’re re-enlisting.

I in no way mean to disparage armed services personnel by saying that prison life seems much the same as being in the military. Lights on at the same time every day, sharing your personal space with lots of other people of your gender, make your bunk, meals served to you, a time for exercise, a time to make phone calls, a time to shower, lights out at the same time. No bills to pay, some routine job if you’re lucky.

Except ex-cons don’t come out as heroes. There is no GI benefit, Michelle Obama isn’t cheerleading for them, there’s no VA medical system (let’s hope a flawed VA system is better than nothing?).

VINCE

February 2006

Almost five years into sobriety, things were unraveling in my life.  Things assuredly appeared swell on the outside.  But my desire for chaos prevailed when I decided to practice for an upcoming Caribbean cruise by having a couple of drinks with my girlfriend Sarah.  I enjoyed a really good Italian beer, and a sip of her fancy woman drink that night.

The next night, sans girlfriend, I downed half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s alone at a local pub.  I woke up with the worst hangover I’d ever had.  I vowed I would never drink again.  And I didn’t.  Until the cruise the next week.

Viva la Mexico!

A few days after my relapse and before the cruise, Sarah, with whom I was going on the trip, broke up with me.  I really didn’t see it coming.  We had gotten along so well.  She was beautiful, smart, and funny.  All the things everybody looks for.  I took it pretty badly.  Blamed myself, then her.  Then me again.  But we still went on the cruise.

If you have never been on a cruise, I have two pieces of advice for you.  #1: Do it!  #2: Bring all your money (don’t forget your savings).

I spent most of the cruise on a pretty good buzz.  We went from Miami to Costa Maya, to Grand Cayman, to Jamaica.  I almost drowned in Grand Cayman after my snorkel filled with salt water and I was in 7 feet of water.  Until then I had never been in a body of water that had currents.   I say I almost drowned because my lungs filled with burning water and I panicked.  Until then I was unaware that the dog paddle was so useless in a current.  In a lake, of which Minnesota has 10,000, you can float if you need to.  Not true in the ocean.

Thankfully, the current brought me right to a floating dock after about a minute of breathing a mixture of air and water.  I climbed up the ladder, threw up, and laid down until all the other assholes who knew how to swim were done snorkeling.  Then I did an Olympic dive of the dock and the 100-meter breast stroke of a lifetime to the shore.  Piece of cake.  People looked at me as if I had been chased by a shark.  Which was my motivation when I dove in.  Fuck the ocean.

Sarah and I didn’t speak much on the cruise, and I think only once after.  After that I hit the ground running in Rochester.  A couple days after I got back I picked up a nasty little meth habit.  Lost my job after I found out I could get two days off paid if I said I was going to a family funeral.  Suddenly, back to back weeks, both my grandparents suffered fatal heart attacks.  I was so traumatized by the second that I never went back to work.  But I got a huge check including severance.  And I used that to fund my new drug-dealing business.

ANNE:

We went home separately from the high school after his withdrawal/drop out was done, and stood wordless when we met.  I had threatened him that, if he wasn’t in school, he’d have to move out.  Education was how I had gotten ahead and it would damn well be his ticket to doing better than me.

So I told him to leave. He could come home the minute he decided to go back to school.  We could look at a different school, an alternative school, whatever.  But he had to finish high school—that wasn’t such an unrealistic expectation, was it?

He walked out the door with a pillow sack full of his clothes. I figured he’d be back in a couple of days, after he realized he couldn’t make it on his own making minimum wage.

When I hadn’t heard from him for three or four days, I went to the sub shop where he had a job as a dishwasher. They said he’d taken another job. Where? They didn’t know.

I didn’t see him again for a year.

I reported him missing to the police, who looked at me skeptically. “You kicked him out for dropping out,” one of them said as though that was perfectly understandable. “But now you want him back?”

These are Vince’s school portraits from 9th grade and about a year later, just before he dropped out:

I found the second one stashed in his room months after he’d left.

I talked to his friends in the neighborhood, but they said he had dropped them months before. They said he’d acquired some stoner friends whose last names or addresses they didn’t know. They did give me one lead, a kid called Mike, and I knocked on the door of that house two or three times during the year but there was never an answer.  My cousin, who lived a block away from their house, called me a couple times to say she thought she’d seen my son walked down the sidewalk but she’d been driving fast and wasn’t sure…

But sure enough, that’s where he was.  Mike’s parents were survivalists, home schoolers, and pot heads.  They felt sorry for Vince.  What a buzz kill of a mom he had!  So for a year, they all sat around and got high and drank and played video games like Grand Theft Auto.  They had been home when I’d knocked.

Vince’s using got so out of control that it was even too much for them, so they kicked him out and he showed up on my front porch, almost a year later, with his pillow sack.

[VINCE: Mike’s parents were good people. I never had one drink there. They both worked full time and wouldn’t let me live there if I didn’t. Mike was never home schooled and he got his GED before his graduation day.  I never smoked pot with his mom and only on occasion with his dad.  They let us drink when we went up north to their land.  But they made sure to keep an eye on us and always promoted responsibility.  When I was arrested my first time Mike’s dad told me that he wasn’t kicking me out, but it was time to find another home.  It was during my stay there that I worked as a security guard at Liberty State Bank, and overnights at a gas station off I94.  I don’t want anybody to think Mike’s parents ever did anything to negatively affect my life.  Mike’s dad accidentally shot himself in the stomach years later while making bullets.  He was nearly paralyzed and hospitalized for months.]

ANNE:

I’ve found myself brooding about the day Vince declared he would drop out of high school.   I asked myself, “Why am I thinking about this now?” I’ve always considered it the worst day of my life—and I’ve had some doozies—but it has been 20 years.  After a few days it struck me that it was bound to come back around because it was a milestone that marked when “it” all began.

A few months before Vince’s dropping out manifesto, I had been Absolutely Shocked to find out that he was drinking and smoking pot (and much more that, thankfully I didn’t find out about until years later). Well, lots of kids experimented, right?  I wasn’t happy about it but it was sort of normal.

Dropping out?  NOT Normal.

He was 16 though, so legally he could drop out.  I marched him down to the Vice Principal’s office at Central and announced to him, “My son wants to drop out! Talk to him!”  I figured he would be best equipped with the facts on how much less high school drop outs earn over a lifetime, how they end up homeless or in prison or, even worse, how my son might end up living in a trailer home, wearing Zubas, and working as a short-order cook.

But the VP disinterestedly slid a form across his desk and said to Vince, “Sign here.”  It was a waiver of responsibility or some such form, formalizing his “withdrawal” from school and absolving them of responsibility. I’m not clear on what I did then. Probably cried, pleaded, accused the VP of being an accessory to failure, cursed myself for thinking anyone had my back as a single mom. But the guy said, “If they wanna drop out, we can’t stop ‘em.”

Vince signed, and that was it. The school no longer had to deal with his truancy or factor in his failing grades into any reports to the school district or state. My son dropping out would improve their average scores, no doubt. He was no longer their problem.

ANNE:

Dear Vince:

I am looking through old photos of you—having a water fight with your auntie in grandma’s backyard, at the lake, at your Montessori preschool, you and your little friends in that subsidized housing project we living in that had a million kids your age, me spinning you on one of those twirling rides at a playground, birthday parties with my terrible lumpy cakes (but I did try!), a seder at the Levine’s, religious school (and you are smiling!), camping, birthday pinatas, your Big Brother, weddings, playing in the snow, doing your homework, you doing your volunteer dog walking at the humane society, at Paul Bunyan Land feeding a tame deer, another birthday cake decorated like a baseball (by me, the least sporty person I know!), Halloween costumes, you feeding your new cousin a bottle, our trips to Chicago and New York and Seattle, pet cats, Disney World, posing with your uncle for Boy Scouts, your aunt dressed in a gorilla suit for your 15^th birthday surprise party.

And then the photos stop, until you came back from Hazelden and Florida when you were … 21?

You would think I would just stop caring by now, or as grandma says, “Just don’t think about it.” She’s always said that, about anything unpleasant, not necessarily about you. I wish I could.

I think I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t ask myself, “What was I missing in all those photos?” He looks healthy. He’s smiling in a lot of them. Should I have seen some signs—gotten him to a shrink? Should I have been more strict? Less strict? Was it because we were broke for so long and lived on ramen and went to foodshelves? Was it because I was depressed for so many years—would a child take that as neglect and think it was is fault? Was it the whole awful chapter with [abusive alcoholic but filthy rich ex boyfriend I’ll call Kermit]? I take complete responsibility, being desperate to get married and have more kids, at the expense of exposing you to domestic abuse and all sorts of inappropriate shit? Was it how I stupidly told you about the brother you didn’t know you had, thinking it would cheer you up, which backfired? God, what an idiot I was!

Maybe I should have never told you how I smoked pot and drank in high school, trying to warn you against them. Again, my parenting backfired, when later you told me you took that as a sign that you could drink and smoke, since I had turned out ok. (Ha!)

I know you’ve said you were “over” not having a father but maybe you really aren’t? I think you tell me what you think I want to hear.

Or is your addiction mostly genetics? Me passing down my alcoholic/addict father’s genes to you, loaded with your father’s alcoholic/addict genes?

Do you really have Bipolar Disorder, as Hazelden diagnosed you? Are the drugs and booze medication?

I can hear you saying, “Oh, mom.” You’ve rarely talked to me about any of this, so I don’t know if you’ve ever given it a thought or if you even think you have a problem.

I hope it is not too awful there. I hope you’ll take advantage of whatever resources they offer. I hope you know that I love you, no matter what—always will, always have. You have dug your way out of some very deep pits and you’ll do it again. You probably don’t feel young anymore but from my perspective you are so you’ve got time to rebuild.

I Love you,

Mom