10/24/10 8:40 p.m. Alcatraz

noi liwe vikcki latying on grfrounf a/b  ulnce  xcdoiming       This is how it began,  And when and where.  There are SO many ways it might have begun -  one of which is actually "it was a dark and stormy night".  No shit.  (Ed. note : if you live long enough and pay attention, all of this stuff comes home to roost.  i.e. imagine my childlike delight the first time I was at a big meeting and "proposals" were literally "on the table".  (The meeting ran long, as I recall - I could not stop giggling.)     So, "...it WAS a dark and stormy night."  Or, how about : "The San Francisco Giants had just won a golden ticket to The World Fucking Series : first time since 2002 !"  Or even : "As my sister lay in the haunting shadow of the old penitentiary on the slicky-steep gravelly hill in the dark of the storm, her screams piercing the wetly-striped night sky as the full moon that would never be struggles boldly through to try and look at whatever the hell seemed to be happening  on THIS particular part of earth."    As I pressed "send" on the garbled text message, I had no idea what was happening.  Shocked, appalled, stoned to the chair, gob-smacked.  Nature had me choose 'none of the above'.  I had no blueprint for this.  For any of this.  I actually thought that, somehow, I must have fallen and hit my head.  Hard.  Ouch.    "Unreal" magically became.."de-real" as my sister, Aunt, and I embarked on what was surely to be one of the strangest nights of our lives.  Which is saying a lot, for anyone who knows us.  And is probably just enough to pique the curiosity of those who don't.      It started out as a great birthday gift for me : a night tour of Alcatraz.  We went last October under a full moon.  Epic, it was - in the true sense of the word (not like "..oohh, Blair - your Juicy Couture yoga pants are totally epic !")  Alcatraz at night.  Too many kinds of wonderful for a birthday girl like Trudy.  Beautiful, dark, simultaneously silent as the grave and loud as high tide, creepy, forbidden, imposing, haunting, alive.  (And that was just looking for parking...)      A spooky and storied ex-penitentiary on an island under the full moon.  Dated (as in "old") graffiti from the Indian Occupation (11/20/69 - 6/11/71.  )  Try that today, and they'd nuke the whole state.  A 5 minute occupation...)  Legends, myths, spirits of old-school felons.  Crime was, somehow, cooler 70 years ago.  Fewer high school massacres and random shallow graves - more good old-timey bank robberies.  Stick 'em up, shee ?  Jimmy Cagney types.       Heavenly shit, man.  I have always LOVED Alcatraz, even as a young child.  I made my Grandma Ella buy me Alcatraz books at the Wharf in the early 1960's : I don't want a pink diary with a plastic key, how about this coffee table book on prison riots ?  I even took "The Sociology of Corrections" in college - taught by a lovely ex-con named John Irwin.    (ed. note : great semester - also took "The Sociology of Deviance" - our guest speakers were off the hizzle.)  I stayed after class one day to speak with Professor Irwin.  I tried to convince him that I could be a stand-up kind of a prisoner - a right guy.  People would leave me alone.  Respect me.  Not butt fuck me. (My Prison Plan B is just to act straight up scarycrazy - a good way to earn respect and alienate others.)  I could go to meals happily, shower with impunity, have full run of the exercise yard, work in the prison library.  Stay in my (cozily-decorated) cell and read and nap and write.  Maybe a deck of cards.  The Warden's Pet.  The screws'd have to act mean - but they'd all have my back.  Professor Inmate Irwin humored me and shook his head.  I get that a lot.  He also gave me an "A".       Aunt has a theory that I actually used to live at Alcatraz.  She decided this after watching me wander around the prison grounds with a faraway look in my eye.  Along with being my rock (Alcatraz - 'The Rock' - pun pretty much not intended) - Aunt has long been a kind of a...bridge to the spiritual.  She brought Guadalupe to us when our most excellent brother had the audacity to die.  Missy, my eldest, so young as to have not mastered full speech at the time, referred to her Aunt as "a God person".  If my sister says I used to live in prison, I think there's a pretty good chance I did hard time...      I walked slowly, from cell to cell - touching the "if walls could talk" walls, feeling the greasy scratchy crime-riddled state of California wool blankets.  Grabbing onto the bars, looking through at the others as they filed by, keeping up with the tour.  At one point, I found myself in kind of a nicely-appointed cell, and just stood there with my eyes closed.  So relaxing.  The shuffling mumbling feet of the tourists.  Clusters of penal-system looky-loos wearing what appeared to be prison-issue headsets.  I wore mine down around my neck as I floated through the cell block.   There's more to hear, I think.  The others shift, en masse, from talking point to talking point - listening to canned voices and looking at laminated, sepia-toned posters of sneering wise guys.  Along with the ambient noise of the great tiered room, I hear the taped sounds of slamming doors, clanging gates, shouting "prisoners", and blowing whistles.  I want to just sit on the floor.  (They used to have a leg of the tour that included locking you up with people not of your choosing in total and complete sensory deprivation.  Solitary..The Hole.  Certainly nowhere a model prisoner like me would ever find herself...   I imagine too many people froke, and they cut that activity out of the tour.   Myself, I always spent that time wisely : trying to imagine how I'd keep sane ( talking to myself, singing, exercising, inventing a language)      I continue to straggle behind the group, darting in and out of cells repeatedly, hiding from the guide/ranger so he wouldn't wait for me to catch up.  I continue to touch everything.  I try the "beds".  Not a lot of bounce and/or lumbar support.  I bet even the biggest trusty on Alcatraz couldn't have scored an egg-crate mattress pad in the 1940's.  Maybe if I split my job between the Prison Library and the Prison Laundry, I could wear extra uniforms home from work and pad my cot for the rest of my good time served.  A few care packages from home, the occasional visitor-through-glass - and I'd be as right as rain.  Ridin' that prison train.  Insane in the membrane - what ?       For a hot second, I could have sworn that I shot a man in Reno.  Just to watch him die.  Clearly, I digressed.  It was time to catch up with the tour group, before I found myself using ciggies to buy stuff at the Prison Gift Shoppe.  Early parole for Trudy once again.  Sweet.  A typically invigorating browsing experience.  Dozens and dozens of prison-y items for me to behold.  Everyone seems to want a t-shirt that identifies them as...an escaped psychiatric inmate from Alcatraz.  I feel like taking just one person aside and telling him or her that, if this was ever funny, it was 40 years ago.  Spring for a prison-striped coffee mug instead.      We spend, we tire, we are told that we can catch the first ferryboat back to San Francisco if we hurry.  I'm done, ready to not be on the island anymore,  Cold.  Rainy.  I'm missing the baseball game.  Let's leave our prison memories behind, and scram outta here.  I start to...semi-scram, as some harpy keeps screeching something about "..hurry ! You'll miss the boat !"  Fuck, bitch - it's wet and pissing rain out there !     Sweatshirt hood up, my formerly-felonious face tipped toward the driving rain...down the steep decline toward the dock.  I want to, in this case, avoid one of those...literal things again (aka "missed the boat".)    Then, the scream.  Oh the scream.  My skin, turned inside out.  Hair, on end.  Blood, curdled.  Urine - close to exiting body.       The scream.  Oh the screaming.