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Into the Desert

Bill Tope

The call came in one Sunday night, collect from
San Francisco, their eldest son’s last known place
of residence. So my parents took the call. My
mom listened in silence for some moments, before
speaking. “Are you alright?” “Where are you?”
And, “What can we do?” Tears seeped out of her
eyes as her first born son wept in anguish over the
telephone. He was cold. He was broke. He was
alone.

Next day, the folks went first to the bank—they
didn’t keep hundreds of dollars about their modest
two-bedroom home—and then to Western Union,
where they wired bus fare for him to travel from
California to Illinois. Their son, my brother, arrived
two days later, nothing with him but the shabby
clothes upon his back. Even his sneakers had
holes in them.

Gary, who had left home for the Army at 18 in order
to avoid prison for a felony or misdemeanor I can
no longer recall, had tried to “go home again”
several times over the past twenty years, with little
success. The first time was after the Army and
after Vietnam, when he’d half-heartedly tried to
make a go of it. But he found that during the
early 1970s, most employers were clannish and
transactional and therefore unlikely to hire someone
off the streets, for anything more substantial than
flipping burgers and pulling root beers.

After being passed over for jobs that went instead
to fellow Kiwanis or Elks or the sons and nephews
of current workers, Gary did what he’d always done:
he stole. Didn’t take long till he was caught, for he
was almost always high. Neither my parents nor I
had money enough to hire a lawyer, so he got the
next worst thing: a Public Defender. Gary later
confided to me that his so-called attorney spent a
grand total of about 40 minutes with him and that
most of that time was spent whining about his other
cases. And that included his time in court.

Of course he was convicted and I spent the Summer
of 1973 visiting my brother at Menard State Prison,
in Chester, Illinois. His girlfriend would ride along
and have me to stop along the perimeter fence about
a half mile from the facility. There she would count off
the lengths of chain link and deposit a cache of pot
and other drugs, over the fence, that a prison guard
would later retrieve and split with her boyfriend. It was
funny: he joined the Army and got heavily into drugs;
next went to prison because of drugs; and then used
the prison system as a means of staying supplied—
with drugs. If he’d been willing to forestall his habit a
mere fifty years, he would have been amazed at the
change in the State’s attitude toward cannabis. All
they ever really wanted was their cut.

At one point he couldn’t even receive mail. He later
told me that he and his cellmate and stolen a five
gallon drum of peanut butter and a case of crackers
from the kitchen and were selling them to the other
prisoners for cigarettes. But they were caught.
“What are they going to do to me,” he asked
rhetorically, “put me in jail?”

At length, he was released, then promptly reoffended
and went back. I think they had his old cell waiting for
him. The second time he was busted for “possession
of burglary tools”: a screwdriver and a pair of pliars.
He did another year or two. Then he departed the
area for ten years; never a call, never a card, much to
my folks’ dismay.

So when he made his heartfelt plea in 1984, it was just
like old times: my folks giving, my brother taking. I found
I had no use for him anymore; he hadn’t called or written
me, either. When he arrived he made himself at home.
He made all kinds of promises: a job, a home, a real
effort, and on and on. What he in fact did was reconnoiter
with old high school friends and invite them over for a
flamboyant party. My folks were rather square: they
hadn’t allowed drugs in the house when we were growing
up and time had not mellowed them. And after all, this
was their home!

My dad took my brother aside, gave him a few hundred
dollars and told him not to return. And he did not. In the
meantime he stole everything that wasn’t nailed down
and absconded with his ill-gotten gain. It wasn’t until
35 years later, at my mother’s funeral, that my brother’s
erstwhile best friend confided that Gary had been living
in Reno, decades ago, when he perished. “Three went
into the desert,” he said simply, “and just two came out.”
Bad debts? Bad drugs? Bad karma? Who can say,
and besides, what does it matter now? There’s no one
left to mourn him.

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