Joyce Maynard - The One Good Man

 

 

This is the story of an escape and escape through letters. I have to add, it's not just me. I think many of us escape this way. Men in prison are a good example. A man in prison who cannot touch a woman anymore often develops a particular kind of brilliance at letter writing. And this is the story of one's such man who, I will tell you, wrote the best letters I ever received. And I've received some good letters. [audience laughter] 

 

It was a really bad time in my life. My mother had just died of a brain tumor. I discovered that my husband was having an affair with our babysitter. Our marriage actually ended the week that my mother died. But my mother died first, which did allow my husband to take me to court for half of the small amount of money that my mother had left me in her will. 

 

So, I was spending most of that money on a lawyer trying to defend myself, also against the suit for the custody of our three children. It was, as I said, a bad time in my life. About the only person that I seemed to have to protect me, I had my friend, of course, was this $125 an hour lawyer to whom I was rapidly becoming so deeply in debt that I couldn't imagine ever getting out. And into this very dark moment in my life, I was living, I should say, in a small town in New Hampshire, and it was winter, came a letter. 

 

As I say, I get lots of letters and I've come to recognize what a letter from prison looks like. The address of the envelope is usually written in pencil. That's one giveaway. And the return address has a very long code number. This letter came from Folsom. The man who wrote the letter said that most of the time when the mail came to the cell block, the reading matter that really got the men going was the monthly delivery of Playboy or Penthouse. But what he really loved were my weekly columns in the newspaper about my children and my family that melted my heart. 

 

He knew all the little information about which of my children played the baritone horn, and which one wanted to be a pitcher, and which one was acting in Annie that season. He followed us all very carefully. He knew my recipe for apple pie. And he said that in the absence of any family of his own, he had come to regard me and my children as his special family. It was a very sweet and touching letter, signed Grizzly. [audience laughter] And so, of course, I had to write back. I sent him first a business like four-line note saying, “Dear Grizzly, it was really nice to hear from you. I'm glad you like my work and here's one of my favorite cookie recipes.” [audience laughter] 

 

So, I sent him my four-line note, he sent me a 10-page letter written very tiny letters in, pencil. I sent him a five-sentence note, he sent me a 20-page letter. I sent him a one-page letter, he sent me a 50-page letter back. That was the first week of my correspondence with Grizzly. 

 

Now, I would like to be able to tell you, it would be the more mature and sophisticated thing if I could say that I put this all in its proper procedure, but in fact, over the days and weeks that I began to hear from Grizzly with more and more frequency and sheer volume, I found myself being pulled into his story. The story that I'm telling you will no question give you abundant evidence of my poor judgment in life. But one thing I will attest to and I will stand on this to my last breath, is that I know good writing, and Grizzly knew how to do it. 

 

I have seldom read stories more powerful than the ones that he spun out in the growing stack of pages that were accumulating on my bedside table. I had started saving these letters till I went to bed those long, cold New Hampshire winter nights when I felt so alone in the world, and as if really my one friend and protector was this man 3,000 miles away in prison. He told me he didn't talk about prison life. He talked about his life before prison. He grew up on a citrus farm in the San Fernando Valley. His parents had both died tragically when he was very young, and he was raised by his grandmother. 

 

He wrote about women, the women that he had loved. He loved hard. Grizzly. That was one thing that I recognized about him. I have to say in my own defense here, at the point that Grizzly came into my life, I had been single out in the world of dating a little bit. I know there are women here tonight who will understand this that if you have been a single woman out in the world of dating, the fact that somebody's a senior partner in a law firm or they work for Charles Schwab, or they have tenure at NYU is absolutely no guarantee that the person won't be a true sociopath. [audience laughter] [audience applause] 

 

So, I actually came to believe that maybe I had found the one good man. [audience laughter] I really believed that I had found the one good heart. There was a kind of purity and honesty about his writing, about his grammar, about his spelling. [audience laughter] When major holidays came around, he had coloring book pages that he'd color in for me and put stickers on. He wrote poems for my children. He knew when all their birthdays were. He would describe to me, it came to be Little League season and there was nobody to warm up my pitcher son for the games, but me. He'd through the mails, give me advice on how to throw a knuckleball. 

 

He didn't think much of my $125 an hour lawyer. He told me in no uncertain terms, powerful language, what he would do to my husband if he was there. [audience laughter] He would make him eat his underwear. I almost felt that he could just break through the bars to do it. He was a man of so much power. He was not really a particularly physically big person. He'd sent me his picture. It wasn't that he was a particularly handsome person. In fact, I guess you'd have to say he was ugly. But I had married, in fact, a very handsome person. So, I knew about the lie of that one, too. 

 

Grizzly sent me a picture posed very carefully in front of the cinder block cell wall behind him, [audience laughter] wearing a bandage around his head. I never found out why that was. And a cowboy hat on top of that, a long beard, and his best shirt. He said that it was misbuttoned. I remember that. [audience laughter] Well, now it was worse than winter even it was mud season in New Hampshire, which is a really hard time of year. I just finished my winter car accidents, and now I was into my spring, getting stuck in the mud. He would send me advice about how to fix my car and how to check the rotors on my brakes. 

 

I don't even remember what all the parts were anymore. But he'd draw little diagrams and tell me what I should look for. I guess I'd have to tell you that I was falling in love with him. There were a couple of moments when I recognized that this really didn't make sense. I tried to cut it off. Every time that I would send him a letter saying, “You know what? Really, Grizzly, I don't see a future here.” [audience laughter] He would send back another story that would just break your heart. One was the time that he told me about his first wife. That was the woman-- His first wife had died in childbirth with their daughter. About two months later, I tried to break it off again. And that time, he told me the story of his second wife. And she had been the most beautiful woman in the state of California. They used to ride Harleys together. She got horribly disfigured in a motorcycle accident. [audience laughter] 

 

He told me he was getting out. He told me he was getting out of prison. And my friend said, “You've got to find out what he was in for.” I had thought that was a really rude thing to ask him. [audience laughter] It showed a lack of trust. I didn't have the good heart that he did. But when I knew he was coming out and he was coming to play catch with my sons, I thought I'd better do it. So, I called up the prison. I asked for the social worker. The social workers told me to another social worker, another social worker. I got the social worker. I said, “I've got to know what he's in for.” She said, “We don't do that. There are many procedures.” 

 

She said, “Why do you ask?” I said, “Well, I'm in a kind of a relationship with this person.” She said, “You know what? I'm going to break the rules. Sit down, honey. [audience laughter] Do you know why they call him Grizzly? He's in Folsom for the grisly murder of his parents. They were beheaded. He will not be getting out anytime in the next 300 years. She added that, “Please not to break it off quick, because he could do violence to her and she was a little afraid of that.” But I found it absolutely impossible to write back to him, although his letters began to pile up and up and up. 

 

And for over a year, the thick packets of letters continued to land in my mail slot. I read them for about a week, but they were so truly toxic and poisonous. And the same kind of power to create beauty now created the most ugly, vicious, bitter, scary writing that I have ever read. And I've read some of that, too. I never threw out his letters. I keep them in a folder in the back of my closet. I must tell you that I am haunted by the knowledge that somewhere in a maximum security prison in Southern California, there is most assuredly the Christmas photograph of me and my three children taped to a cinder block wall.