  | To Be of Service...
By: newtoFL
Getting there early was a good decision, gave me time to adjust to time difference, ride cable cars, early evening walk at the Embarcadero, breath in the air, take a break from cramming to get my project submitted on time. I sat by myself at a crowded outdoor café, sipping coffee and enjoying a bowl of very good clam chowder, just taking in the sights and sounds.
A pudgy, sad looking woman, black, somewhere between 25-30, asked if she could join me, after all, there were no tables left outside and I was by myself. No problem. We talked. I’m there to present a new project for funding, she’s there to visit her husband. He is doing 15 to life at San Quentin, been locked up for ten months already. She saw him that afternoon and will see him again tomorrow before taking the bus back to Bakersfield and her two young daughters. He was a carpenter, they had a nice home and between them made enough money to live well. But he had a friend he grew up with, always in trouble, and they went for a “beer” one night, ended up driving the car while his “friend” robbed a convenience store, and the clerk was shot. So now they live with her mother and grandmother, and he is beside himself with suspicion that she is fucking other men. He berates her constantly on the phone, in letters and, especially, when she visits, once every 2 months. Add to this the fact that he is a racist. And that day’s visit was the final insult. She decided she would not wait 8 years until his first parole hearing, which means they will have to move to another part of the country and not tell him. In the meantime she wants to hit back. HARD!!! So if I wasn’t doing much… I can only imagine her glee and his angst when she mails a print of one photo in particular (both naked, her standing in front of me with a big smile, my arm across her breasts, both us in frame from just below her belly button to above her head, with my right hip showing, and me kissing her shoulder) it to him (something he can look at until his release) along with a letter describing the night she spent naked and doing “everything” with a white man, and has even more explicit photos to prove it. His berating was insufferable enough, but the fact that he threw away what they had because he couldn’t tell his criminal buddy who was more important to him, and for him to take his misery out on her by DEMANDING from behind bars that she grow old waiting for him to get out – so why would I not help her with that bit of payback? Aaaahhh, to be of service… |
