The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [21]
I saw whole groups of people waiting together to cross the street without looking at each other or speaking. People sitting right next to each other on a bench waiting for the bus just looked ahead as straight as an arrow, as if nobody spoke the same language. They seemed robotic. It reminded me of a science fiction series on television, The Outer Limits.
I watched two sets of parents almost side by side, pushing their babies in strollers. Only the babies tried to communicate, their tiny hands reaching toward each other, gesturing in thin air while the parents ignored each other. Drivers in the cars alongside us wouldn’t turn their heads to look at me, though some of them seemed to be talking to themselves. I could relate to that.
“Well, I guess folks would just rather talk to themselves nowadays—they’ve just become more accustomed to talkin’ to themselves!” I mumbled. The guard beside me started laughing. I laughed too. It was sort of crazy, like San Quentin.
“Nah, that’s not true,” he said.
“Oh, yes, it is!” I insisted.
A minute later a car drove up beside us, as if to prove my point. There it was again—another person talking to herself. I made double sure she didn’t have a cell phone in one hand before I pointed her out to the guard. “So, hey—you tryin’ to say she’s not, that she’s singin’ or somethin’?”
The guard started laughing again. “Mr. Masters, how long you been in prison?”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I know what I see! And she, that woman, is holdin’ a serious discussion with herself! Can’t you see? She has both hands on the steering wheel. And look, just look, she’s in some serious discussion, just a-laughing and giggling to herself.”
“Look closely,” the guard told me. “Look very closely, Masters. There’s a pair of thin headphones on top of her head. You see ’em? And right in front of her mouth, look real closely. You see that little piece of equipment?”
“Yeah, I think I can see something. You’re talkin’ about that curled piece of wire in front of her mouth, right?”
“Yeah, that’s it,” said the guard. “That’s a telephone. That’s an actual cell phone.”
“Nah, you kidding me,” I said, embarrassed. “You mean to tell me all the people I saw that I thought were talking to themselves had on somethin’ like that?”
“Mr. Masters, this is Marin County,” explained the guard driving the car. “If it’s out there, you’ll see it first in this county!”
“Well, I guess you learn somethin’ new every day, huh?” I mused, wanting to scratch my head again for some reason. At that moment I realized just how distant San Quentin was from this whole society, like an island unto itself, even though it sat right in the center of the Bay Area. And I’d been confined behind its walls for over two decades. On this day I’d seen a world I hadn’t known before.
Over the years I’ve tried hard to remember things as they were, to hold on to something that I could reach back to and reflect upon, so that I might not feel altogether severed from the world I wished to reenter. Now my memories started to shred. The impermanent nature of everything left me nothing to hold on to. Everything had changed. I asked myself: Hey! Would you want things to stay the same? Especially if that means you never grow in any way? When the castlelike shape of San Quentin suddenly came into view, I had so much to think about, so much to reflect upon.
How fortunate I had been compared to all the other condemned inmates on the dreadful first tier of the adjustment center, perhaps the most crazed in all of San Quentin. I’d actually gone outside the prison, if only for a couple of hours—and in order to have my ears tested! My spirit soared, wanting to rejoin life, wanting to redeem myself, wanting to do it a different way, regretting that I had not gotten it right the first time, and