The Futilitarians Read online

  So the next week, after his round of chemo, with zero immunity, he took his long-cherished drive to Angola, visited his client, fell ill upon returning home, and died within days. It would be narratively convenient, powerful even, to say Death Row finally killed him, but honestly, we’ll never know which handshake, countertop, doorknob, between New Orleans and West Feliciana Parish slipped him the enterococcus bacteria that finally did him in. Vulnerable as my dad was, the whole world was a threat, health care workers and children being more lethal to him than Death Row convicts, who lived pretty physically sterile lives, and I think he was more concerned that the associate he was driving up to Angola with had young kids and their empty car seats in the back were probably teeming with invisible peril. But since most narrative is part purpose, part accident, and the messiness of life always pulses up against the myth, I think we can claim it as a good ending for him anyway.

  One of the things my dad appreciated about his adopted state, where he married a sixth-generation Louisianan, raised eight kids, and buried two, is its ability to create and maintain its own myths, for better or for worse. He loved that he could drive from his home in Algiers to Death Row in Angola and back in one day, traveling these overlapping colonial histories, highway sign to highway sign, continent to continent to continent, through the snares of exoticism laid by our forebears, who were endowed with that pioneer privilege of naming places, subjecting generations to their desires, their enterprises. Sometimes the names become merely cartographical curiosities. At other times, their legacies hold. Angola, known also as the Farm, bounded by the Mississippi River on three sides and the gentle Tunica Hills on the fourth, was originally a plantation owned by a slave trader notorious for breaking up families. It was eventually bought by the state and maintained as such a medieval prison that in the 1950s a couple of dozen prisoners cut their Achilles tendons in protest of the conditions there. If Louisiana were its own country, and some would posit that it kind of is, we would have the highest incarceration rate in the world. There are over five thousand men in Angola, in that tight bend of the river, in the country’s largest maximum-security penitentiary, there because of bad luck, bad judgment, bad legal counsel, bad laws, or just fundamentally bad souls.

  Honestly, that Death Row envelope sort of frightened me and I had a very quaint moment, having to sit down on the red velvet couch, a Duncan Phyfe inherited from the frozen tableau of my grandmother’s front parlor, as my hands trembled with a piece of mail. But that was an interesting discovery—both fear and tenderness can be accommodated within the same instant. The letter was formal, deferential. He sent belated condolences for the loss of my father, whom he’d had the honor to meet. He talked about his warmth, charm, professionalism, said many of the same, particular things that people had said during the visitation line that snaked out past the brick walls of Saint Clare’s Monastery and onto Henry Clay Avenue the morning of the funeral. And I appreciated that there was some continuity of perception between Angola’s Death Row and Uptown New Orleans, and that my dad had been that vehicle.

  In his letter, my brother’s client was trying to set up a meeting with me, and needed a little more information for the required paperwork, “sensitive information” like my date of birth and Social Security number. During another dinner when my brother was explaining some arcane procedure of the capital-appeals process and I was pretending to follow what he was saying, he started talking about how tough it is to visit Death Row. If you’re not related you can’t just ask to visit someone and get access. “Unless you’re from Hollywood,” he explained. “Billy Bob Thornton or John Cusack or whoever. Those guys get access.”

  John Cusack, really? That name hit a lever in my brain and shifted something. Cusack and I had grown up together, he in John Hughes–type movies and I watching them in theaters that don’t exist anymore. Now we’re both aging, the skin under our eyes thinning, both taking on glum roles of middle-age discontent. About a year earlier, he’d become a sort of bête noire for me. One late night after watching Hot Tub Time Machine, I couldn’t sleep, as my then-four-year-old had come into our bed, snoring like an old man and driving my husband out to sleep on the couch. In the movie, Cusack’s character is transported back to the ’80s, via a malfunctioning hot tub and a Russian energy drink. Recently, I’d come across my own portal back to the ’80s, via an effusive evite for a high school reunion, to be played out on location in the French Quarter. Open bar, uncomfortable appraisals, balcony drama. Much of Hot Tub’s campy nostalgia and plotline seemed contrived so Cusack and his buddies could get busy with girls who were way too young for them. In the cascading credits was the name of Cusack’s personal chef, which I found depressing for some reason, and I remembered a picture in the newspaper of Cusack when he was in town filming another movie, riding a bike, all protectively padded as though he were going jousting or something.

  Now, it was about three in the morning, I still couldn’t sleep, and I thought I heard some howling in the field across the street from my house, an empty lot that nature overtook when the city tore down a Section 8 apartment building, a little urban oasis littered with syringes, broken bottles, and plastic bags with suspect brown smears on them. The howling seemed alternately human and animal, and I got up to investigate, discovering nothing, just muddled shadows ringing the edges of the field. Wide awake now, I checked my email, which they tell you not to do when you can’t sleep, and a one-sentence message from another lawyer brother was waiting: “Dad’s doctor said he’ll be dead by the Super Bowl.” My dad and his oncologist were evidently combining the manias of cancer-death timelines and the possibility of a second world championship for the Saints. “Two dat?” my dad reportedly said. “Fuck dat!” I went back to bed, to the loud corrugated breathing of my little boy and the indeterminate howling. The ceiling fan needed dusting, my dad was dying, the ’80s were reasserting themselves in my consciousness, and I kept picturing that funnel vortex rising out of the hot tub at the end of the movie, sort of like the tornado from The Wizard of Oz. But nothing swirled inside of it, no witches on bikes or farmhands. It was an empty, dark, expensive CGI spectacle, its team of creators buried deep in the credits, down below even John Cusack’s personal chef. It was one of those middle-aged moments you sink way into, the past and future touching, the present crystallizing around you, tiny filaments in the air connecting icily to trap meaning.

  But maybe “trapping meaning” is a little wrong, and after all, it’s really only trapped in the fat rectangle of the previous paragraph. Its bars are palpable enough, though. Mortality, the parental conundrum, and also a certain anxiety of authenticity felt both generationally and personally, as a writer. What’s real? What’s manufactured narrative? What’s the relationship between them? Where’s all the noise coming from?

  See, there are times in your life like that, in grief, in love, when you walk around like a live wire, with meaning sparking off of everything, and go through the day dazzled and hurting. Maybe I was being oversensitive about the Death Row letter, but lately I was back in that place, feeling like Dante, “midway in our life’s journey,” lost in the dark wood at the entrance of the Inferno and holding back furry demons of worldliness before Virgil shows up to guide him. Like Cusack in Hot Tub Time Machine, Dante ultimately sees much of the redemption for his midlife crisis in the fantasy of a too-young girl, Beatrice. I guess men have always been built to disappoint. Though I’m starting to think that the dark wood isn’t really so bad. Sometimes you run into people you know, sometimes sympathetic strangers. There can be camaraderie there, like, Hey, we’re here together in the dark wood, can I pour you some more of this bourbon, can you recommend a good book? Was the letter from Death Row another low branch across the path or was it the murky green light that filters in between branches? And what about your kids? They’re happy enough, they’re fine, you can hear them in the sunny clearing nearby and you can always go join them. Sometimes you think it would be nice if we could widen these paths, make it easier
for our kids when it’s their turn in the dark wood. But I think the best thing we can do is make sure they’re equipped. They can bring their own machetes, their own bourbon.

  In New Orleans, as in much of the country, we hadn’t had much of a winter and we were enjoying a gentle glide into an early and perfect spring, the kind that blankets the city in a good mood. I read the letter a few more times, making myself late for work. The tall living room windows were filled with the bright flora of the improbable field across the street, trash trees holding their own alongside the sycamores, the busted light pole blooming yellow with a mess of cat’s claw vine. The letter suddenly seemed like my most important possession, and like all real handwritten, postally delivered letters these days, an instant relic from a previous era, before time and space collapsed and we started sending messages to each other’s pockets. Besides the thoughtful observations about my dad and the condolences, it was the letter’s valediction that got me: “With gratitude & sincerity.” Now I was really late. I set the house’s burglar alarm and opened the door to a morning that was quickly turning to afternoon.

  We hung out in our borrowed fortress for a few hours afterward, talking, listening to music, and waving away the papery swirls of termites if we stood too close to the lights. The writers slammed beers to recalibrate their nerves for conversation and exchanged cagey compliments. We never officially convened an ECRG, but throughout the evening Kevin, Ellen, Nate, Susan, Tristan, and Brad all acknowledged their recognition of the dark wood, though we didn’t belabor it. Kevin said he was most struck by the “bourbon and machete” metaphor. Our sons have been best friends since they were about three, and the fear and pleasure of parenting constitute an ever-deepening element of our friendship. After the crowd strode and rode away through the devil’s ass, the ECRG hung back and loaded up the trucks with the chairs and tables, podium and lights, unplugged extension cords, and abandoned the outpost to its quieter, more furtive uses.

  The week following the reading, I made the drive up to Angola with Soren to meet his client. I couldn’t sleep the night before, and my stomach felt tight with nerves and dread the whole two-and-a-half-hour ride. As he drove, Soren talked about his client’s case and his shoddy initial representation. When he was assigned the appeal, he was handed a thin three-ring binder, the sum total of the defense, unconscionable for a capital case. Soren said that his first trial ever as a young attorney had been for a dog bite, and there were boxes and boxes of evidence for that. In East Baton Rouge Parish, the public defender assigned to his Death Row client had no experience in criminal defense, had begged the judge to be taken off the case, but the judge kept him on—as a sort of punishment for some past misdeed, Soren believed.

  Some of the long drive up I-10 is elevated over swamps thick with palmettos and miles of dying cypress groves, fuming refineries in the distance. Once past Baton Rouge, you turn down Highway 61 and its fields of soy and rust-bitten industrial plants. Entering West Feliciana Parish, 61 becomes the green Scenic Highway of oak alleys, Spanish moss, plantations turned bed-and-breakfasts (the disconcerting superimposition of genocide and Southern Living), gas stations stocked with excellent boudin and gumbo. Then you turn left at the Daiquiri Shack onto LA 66, drive the languorous, wooded two-lane road also known as Tunica Trace, which ends at the front gate of the belly of the whale, Angola.

  There you are confronted by the blunt power of law enforcement. As an attorney, Soren was allowed to drive across the prison grounds to Death Row on his own after being questioned and having his car searched. He would wait until I was finished with my visit and then take care of business. As a regular visitor, you enter through Angola’s nondescript processing center, are allowed only an ID, a single key, and paperwork, which an officer checks against the computer and then writes “DR” with a ballpoint flourish across the top. You’re escorted to a plywood box with a fan at the top and a grate near the bottom, where a drug-sniffing German shepherd is stationed. When you enter the box, a guard turns on the fan, directing your scent down to the grate, and you can see a paw or a bit of snout through the metal slats.

  After you exit the box, you’re patted down, sent through a metal detector and into an area that looks like a rural bus station, which is almost entirely full of women of all ages and a few children, and you wait for your prisoner’s name to be called. When it is, you board a Blue Bird school bus painted white, fear and anxiety now total throughout your body, and you register the lovely pastoral drive through the fields of beans and corn and squash, inmates in different shades of blue chambray shirts working those fields, the Tunica Hills artfully shading the perimeter. You note the carefully painted, expert signage on the buildings, the explosive murals of Native Americans on the water tanks, you make stops at fenced-in camps A, B, C, etc., to let off fellow riders, you glimpse, behind a stable eating some straw, a camel, a permanent resident and featured player in the annual Passion Play performed by inmates in the rodeo arena. Soon, you are the only person on the bus and the driver asks you if this is your first time visiting Death Row, yes, and you wonder what the giveaway is as you approach a lovely cattail-fringed pond, a waterfowl preserve that attracts herons, egrets, and roseate spoonbills, the kind of place John James Audubon would’ve set an easel in front of, which is yards away from the bus’s final stop, the Death Row complex by the levee, its coils of razor wire topping rows of tall cyclone fencing. Enjoy your visit. Once the guard tower buzzes you in the first gate you are trapped in the threshold until the next gate tag-teams your entry with another loud buzz. You walk the short path to the building, which looks like a pleasantly landscaped suburban dentist’s office. Inside is just as banal, you could be in any office anywhere, dark wood-paneled furniture with tasteful molding, framed family pictures, good-natured office banter among the staff, thick-leaved plants in baskets that could be real or fake—hard to tell. At the reception desk, you sign in and are handed a menu.

  I sat for a while in the visiting booth, waiting, my anxiety dispersing as I studied the photocopied list of options that was formatted like an order form, with boxes to check. Typical south Louisiana fare: shrimp and catfish platters, steak, hamburgers, sandwiches. Except I hadn’t seen prices that low since about 1985. After twenty minutes or so, guards led to the door on the other side of the thick Plexiglas divider a man who looked uncertainly through the narrow security window, then smiled, almost in recognition, though we’d never met. He entered the room alone, shackled, and then bent down with his back against the door to allow the guards to unchain him through a slot. He was in his early forties, broad smile, blue chambray shirt, the lines from the laundry press sharp across his chest and arms. He was also wearing a watch. We sat on small stainless steel stools bolted on either side of the barrier. He thanked me for coming and I thanked him for having me. I asked him what he would like for lunch. He ordered a fried seafood platter and a Coke. Earlier Soren had recommended the catfish, but I ordered a grilled shrimp plate instead.

  It was late morning and the window behind me created a glare that superimposed a reflection of myself and everything in the window onto my side of the divider; the only way I could clearly see him was to line up my reflection perfectly with his face to block out the glare, so we sat eye to eye, talking for almost two hours tethered to handheld phones. A fidgety and physically impatient person, I was forced to be still. For most of the visit, I could really see only his face and what was reflected from the window behind me, coils of razor wire along a wall and the occasional bird flying through the frame.

  We talked easily and fluidly about his six children, my two, a Dan Brown book he was reading, his religious faith and initial fear that his epiphany about Jesus being his savior a couple of years into his incarceration was just jailhouse religion, not the real thing. But religion had stayed with him and fortified him over his sixteen years in prison. He asked if it was much of a hassle getting processed. I told him it was fine and remarked on the mostly female visitors on the bus. He said that sounde
d about right. All of his male friends and cousins had stopped visiting him after a couple of years, and now it was just his mother and sister and daughters who came.

  What we could not talk about, for legal reasons, was his case, especially since everything was recorded in the visitation booth. I only knew the details from the Internet and from my brother. He had been convicted of murdering two employees of a restaurant in Baton Rouge where he’d previously worked as a dishwasher. He was reportedly witnessed riding up on his bicycle before the restaurant opened, greeting the bartender, then shooting him twice in the back as he entered. The bartender survived, but the manager who was calling 911 and begging for her life did not. The cook hiding in the freezer also begging for his life did not. Seven thousand dollars was stolen from the office. He was arrested soon after, with friends and former co-workers all testifying against him.

  Our lunch arrived in Styrofoam containers. We awkwardly maintained the conversation, maneuvering the phones and plastic cutlery, the talking and eating. I kept losing him to the glare as he shifted focus to the seafood platter. Soren had long raved about the food they serve for visitation on Death Row. And he was right—it was really good. Fresh, well-seasoned, generous portions. The inmate who delivered the meal was wearing a chef’s hat. My brother’s client assured me that it was not what they were regularly served, that their diet is heavy on cabbage and light on protein, that he has to supplement it with tuna packets from the commissary. During their single daily hour out of their cells, some guys had figured out how to do a little improvisational cooking in the microwave they have access to. He walked me through a fellow inmate’s recipe for Death Row pralines: a half-full jar of peanut butter, water, a microwave, a plastic spoon, and whatever preferred candy is available from the vending machine.