Free Thoughts on the Fourth

by Lucy S.

This post is not about U.S imperialism or any of the ironies inherent in celebrating “Independence Day” as almost all of us in the U.S. live so utterly dependent on the very undemocratic corporations for that old trio, “food, shelter, and clothing,” as well as other needs or deeply entrenched wants.

I am sitting outside in the late morning in the last hour of shade on our back patio, writing in a spiral notebook, free of my computer for the moment. 

Part way into the previous sentence, the phone rang and it was my cousin, Johnny. We talked for about 45 minutes, and then he said he had to lay down because his stomach was hurting him. He asked me to call tonight. “Just call me,” he said, “because it gets so hectic over here that I forget to call you.”  And I walked back out to pick up my pen again, my poetry book sitting untouched. His here and now consists of excruciating pain in his stomach. My here and now feels like paradise.

In 2007, my friends (family they are, really), Gloria and Martha, visited and helped us dig out a pond in half a day, with another minuscule pond above it from which water falls into the larger one. Then for two weeks, I worked sporadically, placing rocks, moving them until they felt right and sounded right to me and to anyone I had there, looking and listening.

It’s still in the 70s, though just now, walking around to take pictures which might convey some of this better – right now it was a little hot in the sun. But really, it is a perfect morning – as I am experiencing it, if I don't think about anything hurting some of the people I love.

Johnny and I hadn’t talked in weeks. I was worried, but kept forgetting to call at the right time.

After 17 years in a California state prison, he finally was allowed freedom from prison again. He was released. We rejoiced. Most of all, I know that his mother – my aunt Dolores – rejoiced, and so did his daughter. His daughter’s little girls were too young to know to rejoice, but they quickly became attached to their 49 year old grampa who they had not known before. Many others in the family rejoiced. I was, and am, thankful for long phone conversations that we could just sink down into for as long as we wanted. At times, I feel as though Johnny has been resurrected. Or I feel as if he has come home from a long war.

And he has. He has come home from one of the “War On Drugs” prisoners of war camps, also known as the U.S. prison system. David Simon, creator of the renowned cable TV show, “The Wire” says that the U.S.’s “war on drugs” is in reality a war on poor people. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/25/the-wire-creator-us-drug-laws Like other wars, it is profit driven. Simon asserts that the wealthy businesspeople have figured out how to “monetize the poor,” not as exploited laborers in this case, but as prisoners in profitable criminal justice systems. http://www.theroot.com/multimedia/david-simon-war-on-drugs  Attorney Michelle Alexander, in her book The New Jim Crow, makes a compelling case that the war on drugs is a war on people of color.

Johnny is both poor and a person of color. He receives $200 a month in general relief money and $200 a month in food stamps. He is Mexican-American, born in the Pomona area of Southern California, where he has lived most of his life – except for the bulk of those 17 years in prison. Johnny looks like a cholo, and he was one at one time, but now he is a 49 year old man trying to adjust to the house and family and society he was removed from when he was 32. He helps his mother, and she is his main day to day companion. He doesn't drink and is determined to stay clean, he says. He works on the house, cleaning and doing yard work wearing himself out because he begins these labors already so worn down. He insists on mowing the neighbor's lawn because he says the neighbor helped his mom and dad when his dad was sick, and Johnny wants to show them his gratitude. 

He talks about wishing he could get a job, but he’s sick. Today, he told me that part of him looks like an old man. He says his stomach feels bloated and that his arms look so thin, that the skin on them looks old to him. He has been sick, so sick that he went to the Emergency Room the day before yesterday, where the doctor told him he could have died. Eating a burrito at Knott’s Berry Farm two weeks ago gave him food poisoning. His mom and the others with them got sick, too, but it hit him far harder because his body is under such attack.

In 2011, he became ill with Valley Fever, a chronic disease carried into people by breathing in its fungal spores in the dirt which the wind blows into the air. Some people are minimally affected. Others experience chronic degeneration over time as the disease hurts the liver, lungs, and other parts of the body. The clinical name of Valley Fever is Coccidioides . The Centers for Disease Control say it is “a fungus found in the soil of dry, low rainfall areas. It is endemic (native and common) in many areas of the southwestern United States, Mexico, Central and South America.” http://www.cdc.gov/fungal/coccidioidomycosis/

Valley Fever is on the rise, and no one seems to know why. Most people in the U.S. have never heard of it, though they know of West Nile disease, which is far less prevalent. One NPR story from May of this year describes how it has affected some particular people and goes on to say:

Diseases that don't have a high profile also struggle for funding. Consider this: In the past 12 years, the National Institutes of Health has granted valley fever just 4 percent of the research funding it has directed toward West Nile virus. But valley fever has afflicted about four times more people than West Nile, with thousands more going undiagnosed. Valley fever has killed many more people, too. http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/05/13/181880987/cases-of-mysterious-valley-fever-rise-in-american-southwest

Valley Fever is particularly rampant in some California state prisons. The federal medical receiver has ordered the state of California to move many particularly at-risk prisoners from these prisons. California’s prisons are so overcrowded from the “War on Drugs” that its officials do not quite know where to put the prisoners if they move them. The state has known since at least 2006 about this Valley Fever risk in some of its prisons. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/29/valley-fever-prison-outbreak_n_3178843.html

Johnny was held in one of these at-risk-for-Valley-Fever-prisons until later in 2011, when he was finally moved to a rat-infested prison in Southern California, where the wiring was faulty, sometimes causing overhead lights in prison cells to catch fire while those locked inside screamed for help. And, he has told me, some of the guards there, as with the other prison he’d come from, enjoyed throwing "a small guy or a gay guy" in a cell with some of the meaner, more dangerous guys and leaving him there for a while as they walked away with the guy screaming for help.

At least the Southern California prison he was finally moved to later in 2011 was at low risk for contracting Valley Fever. But the move came too late for him, in more ways than one.  He had waited so long to be moved from a prison up north. Then he could be near his family. The move kept getting deferred. He had waited to see his dad, who was going downhill rapidly from a neurological disease. My uncle was too ill to make the trip that far, but he’d promised to go see Johnny once they moved him closer. And then my uncle died that year. I flew out to my family and from the house, I talked with Johnny on the phone a few days after Thanksgiving, listening to him cry, unable to do anything to help him. He of course missed the funeral as he had missed so much else in all the years locked away.  And by then, he had already contracted Valley Fever from the other prison, so the move came too late for him in that regard as well.

Johnny often struggles to breathe when I talk with him by phone. He can’t seem to get enough air.

Since he got out, everyone wants to take him out to eat, to have barbecues with him at parks, to plan outings.  They want to take him out into the part of the world that they believe he especially missed while in our government’s POW camp for poor and/or nonwhite people.

Johnny and my aunt Dolores were supposed to fly out here to visit, but he is afraid to until his health stabilizes, and I am afraid for him.

I suppose this here, this patio, my experience here, is part of the world I believe he missed out on. I suppose I am like the others who love him in this way. I want Johnny and Dolores to come here so I can somehow heal them with the sound of the water falling, so like a stream, and the sound of the bird calls, and all of this upper Midwest green, and flowers and vegetables and berries. I imagine us all being healed with long conversations that we can just sink into deeply, and crying and laughing, and food from our garden and other food from local farms.  Everything I eat.  Johnny drinks too much soda, I think, and they both eat too much fast food, I think. In this sense, I always think I know better. I always want to save them, to heal them on multiple levels. I so desperately want them to be fine.

Johnny does not live a flat-line life. During every call, he makes me laugh and makes me cry, often with the same story. This time, he made a reference to an earlier story he told me about his primary care doctor. The earlier story was that he was there on one of his continual appointments and she said, “Why is your blood pressure still high? You told me that if I had to drive with your mom, my blood pressure would be high, too, but this time she didn’t drive you, so what happened?”  He told me that she is one of those doctors who physically reaches out to her patients to comfort them.  He answered her by saying, “Well, you know, you keep on rubbing my knee and I been incarcerated for 17 years, you know?”  He said she laughed. And he laughed when he said it. I could hear the smile in his voice throughout this story. I laughed, too. I love the mix of Johnny’s raw honesty and his almost old-fashioned courtliness. And I loved that doctor in that moment. Bless this kind woman with a good sense of humor, I think, smiling while my eyes water. And damn this system for locking him away so long that he told his wife to move on years ago, and so she finally did. Damn them for stealing so much of his life from him.  Johnny said he told the doctor she looked too young to be a doctor, and she said, “How old do you think I am?” He said, “About 27.” She laughed and said, “Thanks! I’m 35.” Bless this woman one more time. And bless her for trying to make him well or at least more well than he is.

I ordered a bottle of Kyolic garlic capsules for him. This is my usual long distance response to illnesses I cannot heal in my loved ones – ordering something that may help, and talking to them. If we just keep talking, they will be okay, I sometimes think. Garlic is supposed to be good for fungal and bacterial infections. He says he can’t eat a clove a day, as some people with Valley Fever say they eat. They say it helps them. Part of me wants to say, “Just eat the clove, damn it; who cares if you like it or if you smell like garlic?! It might help you get better!” But I would never say that to Johnny. Johnny treats me with such warm respect, and I cannot treat him with anything but respect. And so I told him that I’ve ordered it and that the capsules won’t make him smell like garlic, and to be sure to take three a day, and he said he will.

It is Johnny’s first 4^th of July at home, outside of the prison, free in some sense, even as the fungal spores of the POW camp occupy his body. He said that he and his mom would probably just kick it at home, away from the heat. He needs to rest. He's in too much pain to do much else. And the pain of those I love occupies my would-be idyllic morning.  I would not have it otherwise. Happy 4^th, Johnny.  Love from your cousin more than 2000 miles away in another part of "the land of the free and the home of the brave."