How I Learned Not to Screw Up in America

America boasts the sixth highest standard of living in the world. Every union strike and million-man march has lodged another carabineer into the face of liberty that we trust will hold us on our ascent to political perfection (excuse the Bushisms for a moment). We hold five percent of the world’s entire population but strangely; we also have 23% of its prisoners. That means that more than one in every 100 adults in America is in jail. The struggle towards freedom and rising incarceration exist in direct ideological conflict with each other. Thus a strange relationship exists between the rise of intangible political freedom and the decline of actual physical freedom. Free Americans are content with this relationship because the world of Un-free Americans is at a safe enough distance. This is the story of one of the Un-free.
Our first time in Provo, Utah, my band played at a club named The Starry Night after a mural on the inside that resembled what a 4 year olds fingerpaint impression of a Van Gogh would look like. There were holes in the stage. There were holes in the floor. The stage was the floor. The whole place sloped hard to the center, like a funnel, where there was a 3 by 4 foot rusted metal grate that regularly sent bands and kids to the hospital.
Brad was the soft, skinny 21-year-old doorman/soundman/promoter. He lived in a converted loft space behind the club; he had a tattoo of a good luck Indian shooting a star (the kind found on Tootsie Pop wrappers that were rumored to yield a free lollipop). I don’t know that he was ever paid or if he ever knew that he was supposed to run a show until a band pulled up and started knocking on his door (which was how we met Brad). He greeted us with a gentle smile and a firm handshake (rare), he talked to us (more rare) and showed a genuine concern for our well being (unheard of), especially considering the had never heard of or listened to our band. That night there may have been five people at the show including Brad. He bought a CD but I doubted he would ever listened to it.
Over the years we came to know Brad considerably well. He didn’t have much going on other than the club, a girlfriend, an outstanding record collection and an innocent whisky habit. He had a hand full of hipster drinking buddies and a small reputation in Provo for being a pretentious scenester. Most Provo high school girls had crushes on him and most Provo high school boys wanted to be him.
We talked about books, tattoos and the sad symptoms of small town citizenship; second layer conversations that are sewn in emotional investment and yield connections that are lasting. I felt a little guilty talking to people like Brad; good people raised in towns that were unfairly small in size and opportunities. The kind of towns where dreams never grow bigger than their cages. I could have easily been Brad.
On one of our trips Brad showed me a new tattoo. On his hip about the size of my hand was one of my drawings from the CD I sold him the first night we met; a girl in a dress dancing, arms outstretched with the words “hold me” below her.
The girlfriend became a fiancé, the record collection became a pregnant girlfriend and the whiskey habit lost its innocence. Brad stopped showing up every time we played and I would have to go find him at the bar next door to The Starry Night.
One night at the bar someone hit one of his friends. Brad’s friends were few and important to him. Brad, being drunk and loyal ended up putting his friends attacker in the hospital. This was the first time he had ever been in a fight.
A few weeks later I got a call from him while we were on the road. I didn’t recognize his voice. He told me he wasn’t going to be coming to our shows for a while and that there was a new doorman at the Starry Night. He told he was getting a new tattoo, the word “friendship,” across his chest. The guy he hit pressed charges and Brad was going to prison for assault. He wanted the word across his chest so that whenever anyone asked him or whenever he asked himself why he was in prison he had an indelible answer.
In America we have learned to imprison the convicted behind a safe stereotype. People don’t end up in jail, “those people” do. This has helped us to forget the severity of the 1/100 ratio as we become freer in ideology. We hide from recidivism statistics (63% with in the first three years) and a failed justice system ($60 billion annually) by removing ourselves from the individuals who are those statistics. Brad is not one of “those people,” and if he is, then I am too.