Christmas
by Arthur Longworth

JimmDogg brings me a gift every Christmas. He's done this for the last 15 years, through three different prisons and on five different Yards.

It's always food. JimmDogg crafts culinary masterworks as extravagant as the food items we're able to buy through the prison commissary allow for. I don't believe he does it just because he likes to cook, rather it's his way of expressing something we don't talk about. Besides, we're restricted on what we can have in here, so it isn't like he could get me much of anything else that would mean anything.

We meet in the Yard. After ensuring no eyes are trained on us from the gun towers, JimmDogg hands me the package. It's always wrapped in a way that makes it impossible to discern what's inside.

The first Christmas JimmDogg did this, the package was light and I didn't know what to expect. When I returned to the filthy, overcrowded, and crumbling century-old cellhouse in which I was housed at the time, I opened the package and discovered homemade Rice Krispy treats sown with M and M's.

Another year, the package was heavy and square like a brick. Inside was a cheesecake JimmDogg put together from cream cheese packets, strawberry jam, graham crackers, and who knows what else.

One year when I was starving and freezing rain was falling in the Yard, JimmDogg handed over a package that was soft like a pillow and comfortingly warm. Inside were two oversized ramen-noodle burritos made with cheddar cheese and a sausage purloined from the staff kitchen. I know that JimmDogg roasted the sausage over an open flame in the back of the cell while his cellies watched for guards by holding a mirror outside the bars aimed down the tier. It's the same cooking technique that earned him a major disciplinary infraction and landed him a stint in the Hole a week later.

Last Christmas, the package was jumbo-sized and unwieldy. But I managed to conceal it well enough beneath my state-issue coat that I got past the line of guards at the Yard gate without it being confiscated. Inside I found a potpourri of corn chips, pretzels, sunflower kernels, raisins, and chocolate chips.

The idea of giving gifts during the Holidays seems odd to me. I think because it's a tradition handed down in families. And I've never had one.

JimmDogg does have a family though. I know because he's shared them with me for as long as he's brought me gifts: a mom who's worked an entire career at the post office -- a dad who spent time behind bars too when he was younger -- a brother who owns a business -- a sister in law -- and a niece who JimmDogg is super proud of because she's smart like a nerd, but down-to-earth and compassionate enough to work at a needle exchange for intravenous drug users in the city.

Last year, when JimmDogg's family invited me to join them at their table in the Visiting Room, I discovered that they know as much about me as I know about them. They treat me as if I'm part of their family, which brings me an inexplicable warm feeling. But also a sense of guilt.

I'm conscious that I don't deserve the unreserved acceptance of JimmDogg's family -- or gifts, for that matter. I didn't earn those things. In fact, I only have them because JimmDogg broke once.

I feel like I shouldn't tell you this -- because JimmDogg and I don't even talk about it ourselves. But you don't know him. So I will tell you.

JimmDogg fell apart one evening after mail-call, 15 years ago, in the inky unlit shadow behind a hulking four-story cellhouse built to house a maximum of 500 prisoners, but inside which the State crammed nearly a thousand. The letter from the attorney said that the State denied JimmDogg's appeal and upheld his 52-year sentence. He couldn't hold onto his mask of composure. Everything inside him he uses to stand up or move forward collapsed and turned in on itself -- his will to live inverted. Nothing was left.

It's the kind of shit that I don't think happens to people outside prison because it's peculiar to an institution inside which no path to redeem oneself exists. It isn't like we can work to prove ourselves in here and possibly earn another chance. There's no structure or program for it, because that's just not the way the criminal justice system or prison works in this country. At least, it isn't the way it works in the age of mass incarceration.

The inability to find inside yourself the will to persist in a circumstance as hopeless as mass incarceration isn't a condition kind words can cure.

"Get up." I pulled JimmDogg to his feet.

"Move." I pushed him forward.

"Walk." I had to pull and nearly drag him.

JimmDogg didn't want to move, but he didn't say anything. And I know why.

At the time, I had already been in prison 20 years. JimmDogg was young when he was sent to prison, but I was even younger when I got here. And my sentence is Life Without Parole. How do you tell a prisoner like me that you "can't"?

We walked the track on the Yard for an hour and a half. One foot in front of another. Not saying anything. Until the call came over the P.A. system that it was time to return to our separate cellhouses for lockup.

I'm not a good cook. Like gift giving, I think a predisposition for culinary craft is probably handed down in families too.

Even so, I asked Red for his peanut butter brownie recipe and a crash course on how to put it together. I believe I can do it. And I feel compelled to. Because, at this point in my sentence, so many years after JimmDogg and I walked those laps together that night on the Yard in Walla Walla, I know the only thing that’s kept me from breaking and my will to live from inverting has been JimmDogg's gifts during the Holidays and the kindness and compassion of his family.

No matter what I have to do to make it happen, JimmDogg is going to have something to smuggle back from the Yard this year.

© Arthur Longworth, 2019

Arthur Longworth is a six-time national PEN Prison-Writing Award winner and 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee. His essays have been published by The Marshall Project, VICE News, Medium, and YES! magazine. Arthur is the author of Zek: An American Prison Story (Gabalfa Press), which was nominated for the Washington State Book Award. http://www.arthurlongworth.com/

Christmas was read by Michael Petrocelli on October 2nd 2019 for Accident & Emergency