Poet goes to prison to get free

By John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times, January 14, 1993

CHINO, Calif. — John Thomas has a curious concept of personal liberty: He goes into prison to get free.

Twice each week, the 61-year-old poet with the white suspenders and cowcatcher beard leaves his Venice Beach apartment and sets out in a battered Volkswagen beetle for the human limbo that is the California Institute for Men at Chino.

There, he endures the suspicious once-overs from guards young enough to be his grandchildren. Thomas steps behind the lumbering electronic gates and walks down musky hallways to reach a room with twin American flags in the prison's belly of stone and iron.

Here, his men wait: Harry, Chuck, Roger, Bobby, Eric, Doc, Tom and Mel--Maniac Mel.

To the authorities who watch over them, they are ruthless outcasts: killers, thieves, former heroin dealers, prison enforcers and child molesters. Sociopaths.

But to Thomas, their friend and teacher, the men are budding writers coping with the horror and loneliness of their surroundings. Men seeking a private redemption for their crimes, who offer him insight. And hope.

They meet regularly to critique their work, sharing harsh observations of forced confinement, describing the despair of dealing with too much time, hatred and longing. And how the new "day dawns without, always without."

For a prison outsider like Thomas, the writing cuts deeply: Scenes of homemade "shank" knives plunged into an enemy's heart, the blood spattering geyser-like; of a solemn inmate mourning a butchered cat named Booby--the only thing he ever loved.

And stories of fear and swallowed pride, of stepping off a bus called the "gray goose," being stripped naked for orifice searches, of hearing constant screams that fill the prison night like some faraway jungle taunt.

And of how hard time can make a man forget how to smile.

Until 6 p.m. each Thursday, that is, when the burly Thomas shows up at the sprawling prison 50 miles east of Los Angeles, books in hand, ready to conduct the weekly creative writing class--the one he calls "The Thursday Evening Gentleman's Club."

For a dozen inmates, the class provides a welcome break from the primordial pressures of penitentiary life, where each day demands an unnerving tightrope walk between the whims of captors and fellow convicts alike.

During these brief, three-hour sessions, the men do not flinch from showing weakness--that invitation to violence and sexual slavery behind prison walls.

For Thomas, a private man who reads nine hours a day and leaves home only to teach, the class is a catharsis, a personal escape.

"I feel exalted to walk through those gates," says Thomas, a Beat poet who once was a protege of Ezra Pound. "It's something to peer through those bars and see Harry or Chuck smiling at me, knowing that our time together is likely going to be the high point of their week. And that I can give that to them."

Reading in booming oratory bursts, offering pointers on syntax and structure, Thomas marvels at the attempts the men make to understand their own frozen emotions, their childhoods, their former deeds. And their often-limited futures.

"I can see something gradually emerging from these grown men, something that was there all the time," he says. "When one puts his thoughts to words, there it is--something fine and beautiful and intimate that he didn't know he had. It's a very moving thing to behold."

Thomas is part of a network that reaches 24 state prisons throughout California; artists entering prisons to teach painting, ceramics, poetry and songwriting.

But in these chaotic economic times, the state's $2.5-million Art-in-Corrections program has moved toward solitary confinement. Last year brought a 5% cut, and more reductions are expected.

"Everything is under scrutiny," says Tom Skelly, artist facilitator at the Chino prison. "These programs are a form of security--not just holding a gun to someone's head, as is most often done. It's giving inmates some creative freedom. But we're up against people who believe the things we do in prisons like Chino just aren't worth a damn."

John Thomas believes in the program. A veteran poet who has been published in the United States, Germany, Italy and Japan, he took the prison job out of curiosity and a need for part-time work. A year later, he's hooked and uses his $200 weekly prison salary to supplement free-lance writing and editing projects.

Thomas teaches two classes at Chino--one inside the prison's minimum-security area and another at the place known as Central. His students make up the prison's permanent work crew, hard timers who will spend a decade or more behind bars, some with no parole date.

The work crew inmates wear denim smocks and pants, a contrast to the blood-red jumpsuits worn by other prisoners. They perform computer, plumbing and office jobs throughout the prison, sleeping separately in partitioned quarters they call "houses," knowing their chance at freedom might never come.

It's fighting this sense of hopelessness that bonds Thomas to these men. In 13 months, he has glimpsed into the craws of convicts and their heinous crimes. And he's seen something of himself.

"We all have the murderer within us," he says. "I have watched these men, listened to their words and gauged their reactions to the world. And I haven't encountered anything in them that I haven't encountered in myself."

He has seen writing submitted on neat, typewritten pages. And scrawled on toilet paper. Some efforts are fledgling, others accomplished--such as the work of Breeze Todd Allan Drange.

Serving time for killing a man while driving drunk, the 33-year-old San Bernardino man became a published poet under Thomas' tutelage.

"John gave me the largest slice of self-esteem I've ever had in my life," says Drange, paroled last February after serving 25 months. "He gave worth to what I did and helped me create from my own pain and tragedy."

In prison, Drange wrote as an escape and to describe his surroundings.

"I was in a high-security yard with people who had no respect for life, people who were always testing you, who hated you because they didn't understand you, who would kill you for a pack of cigarettes."

Now free, Drange has published half a dozen poems, including one tribute to Thomas:

He came to the prison,

this old man carrying poems,

poems that pointed the way .

From the start, Thomas promised the men he would ignore the terrible tales, the warnings about the con men who would "steal your dentures while you yawn."

Their slates, he said, were clean, and he has kept his word.

With the disheveled poet perched at the head of a wood-vinyl conference table, packing his pipe, his denim-clad convicts huddled around him, the session takes on the half-looped atmosphere of a Mad magazine brainstorming session.

In his "bullfrog rhetoric," the deep-voiced Thomas reads the night's selections, including the half-crazed, streetwise work of his friend, Los Angeles writer Charles Bukowski. It's a polished delivery that, as Breeze puts it, "could make the classified ads sound bitchin'."

The men respond. There's Tom, the Vietnam veteran who cusses like a construction worker but whose poetry is measured and considered. And Chuck, the muscle-bound country kid who never saw college but writes about prison loneliness with a practiced eye.

And Harry. At 44, he's spent the most time behind bars--20 years for a murder that now seems committed in another life.

Often denied parole, quiet Harry has kept his cool. Thomas says that if he could choose three people to live with on a desert island, Harry would be among them.

Harry doesn't write about his violent past. Instead, he deals with his fear of sharks, describing how he won't climb into a bathtub without first seeing the porcelain bottom, always fearing the deadly fin. He writes about being eaten alive by an apologetic shark who tells him: "Nothing personal. I'm just hungry today, that's all."

As Thomas reads aloud samples of the inmates' poetry, Harry boils water in an electric kettle, then doles scoops of instant coffee from a makeshift vitamin bottle.

Finally, after three hours of shouting, confessing, critiquing and laughing, Thomas offers voluntary assignments. Unlike the prison world outside this room, nothing is demanded here.

At 9 p.m., the teacher reluctantly watches his disciples hurry off for a lock-down count. Doc, a former chiropractor, lingers, speaking softly--until impatient guards chase him off.

In the end, Thomas is nearly at a loss for words. "Those are my men," he says, knowing that as long as they write, they're free men behind bars.

And so he offers his ode to them, his poem called "The Tiger Cage," which reads, in part:

So you'll be teaching at Central?

You're going into the tiger cage?

She laughed. 'Well, let me tell you ,

don't turn your back on those guys. . . . '

Well, every Thursday night, now,

I teach writing at Chino, at Central .

That is to say, they teach me --

Harry, Mel, Chuck, Roger, Bobby, Eric, Tom,

the rest -- and what they teach me

is rare and precious, can't be written down.

I owe them. I owe them.

And as to turning my back?

I'll never turn my back on these men.