Faithless: Tales of Transgression Read online

  And so—I’d embarked upon my career. Almost accidentally at first, then with purpose, mission. My goal was to expose the horror of government-sanctioned barbarism, to educate the public, and to help sway fickle public sentiment. What revolutionary fervor drove me! I might lose ten, fifteen pounds in the course of investigating and writing; fueled by a passion for truth, and often by Dexedrine, I went without sleep for as long as forty-eight hours. My much-noted prose was modeled upon Jonathan Swift’s elegantly corrosive prose, my touchstone being “A Modest Proposal”—that great text of savage indignation (which, I’ve heard, my younger colleagues with their watered-down B.A. degrees haven’t even read). I was a zealot, a firebrand, a martyr in the making. The Vietnam War was over at last; what of wars at home? Horrors at home? Unbelievable to me as to numerous others, including the equally vocal Claude Dupre, that the United States alone of civilized nations would condone capital punishment!—resumed after the Supreme Court decision in the mid-seventies to give back to the states the privileges of executing persons convicted of “capital” crimes. A reversion to barbarism! And how quickly certain states began to “reform” statutes, incarcerate usually indigent inmates on death row, and execute a disproportionately high percentage of black males.

  Look, I’m no sentimentalist. I know that the heart of man is sinful, capable of the most unspeakable cruelty. I know that our ancestors punished even minor crimes with death. But my point is, and has always been, not just that innocent persons might be (and have been) sent to their deaths under this system, but that the very principle of a government exerting its authority in committing violence against any of its citizens is in itself abhorrent.

  It all seems, or seemed, self-evident.

  But after my early, apparent success in Utah, I could not comprehend how, as I traveled about the country interviewing, investigating, writing my passionate stories, so many individuals in authority totally ignored me; refused to speak with me, dismissed my arguments, or gave no evidence of reading me at all. How could it be, I wondered in my youthful naïveté, that the controversial cases I wrote about, given public prominence in The New York Times, Newsweek, The New Republic, and even upon one occasion the mass-market People, nonetheless continued like gruesome clockwork—as if no one had intervened at all? After one of these miscarriages of justice, ending with the execution of a young mentally impaired black man in Oklahoma, I collapsed and was ill for months with what the nineteenth-century Russian novelists would have called “brain fever.” (My marriage of three years, already shaky, collapsed, too—but that’s another story.) When I recovered, however, I refused to listen to well-meaning advice from friends and family, and returned to Tulsa, to take up the very case that had devastated me. I spent twelve hours daily for weeks sifting through trial transcripts and related documents until I discovered errors committed by the defendant’s court-appointed attorney (who’d neglected to vigorously cross-examine a clearly lying police informant) and by the prosecution (which had “lost” exculpatory evidence suggesting that the defendant had been nowhere near the crime scene). I turned up witnesses the defense had ignored. I came to the conclusion that the executed man had certainly been innocent. Yet, still, I couldn’t get Oklahoma authorities to acknowledge my findings, still less to admit to their reckless, corrupt, and criminal behavior. But my ten-thousand-word article “Justice Denied in Oklahoma,” which appeared in the New York Times Magazine, received much public attention and acclaim; has been several times reprinted, and won the coveted Polk Award for Journalism. There was a rumor of a Pulitzer, which came to nothing; but, not long afterward, I was offered a position, a column, at a most distinguished East Coast newspaper.

  If you know me at all, recognize my name, it’s because of “Death Watch.” At its height of popularity, it was syndicated in forty newspapers across the country and sometimes reprinted in The International Herald Tribune.

  “Death Watch” was launched with much fanfare at the paper. I was charged with not just presenting anti–death penalty arguments (the paper, a liberal bastion, had long been on record opposing the death penalty) but with telling the stories of death row inmates, their families and lovers, their guards, chaplains, wardens. I might interview prison psychiatrists, mothers of the condemned, an executioner or two. Anything pertaining to “Death Watch” was material for my column. It was perceived by the newspaper’s socially conscious board of editors that there was, in the paper, a dearth of information about the downtrodden, the defeated, the doomed, and the despicable. Where a death row inmate was mentally incompetent, a yet more dramatic story might be forged. These were citizens of the underclass, the insulted and injured amid America’s affluence. It was my duty to come up with ever new and original and “entertaining” ways of dealing with them.

  For the first several months, “Death Watch” drew a barrage of letters, and delighted the editors of the paper. Here was controversy, here was “social responsibility”! But by degrees interest waned; readers dropped off, or failed to respond. Our crowning blow was the reinstitution of the death penalty in New York state, long and bravely opposed by a liberal governor and swept in by a Republican-conservative triumph at the polls—a shocking, demoralizing, and embarrassing development. The newspaper’s editors were made to see how little influence they wielded; my column was discreetly shifted from the editorial page to other parts of the paper. Like a cork bobbing in choppy waters it began to turn up in the second section, or the third. At the time of the Birdsall execution in Alabama it was appearing at erratic intervals in the nether regions of the fourth section, adjacent to the obituaries. To have sunk so low!

  Syndication, too, was down—by three-quarters.

  Roy Beale Birdsall would be my twenty-sixth execution since I’d launched “Death Watch” only five exhausting years ago and I was close to extinction myself. Can’t do it. Not another time.

  IN THE END, the execution of Roy Beale Birdsall by the sovereign state of Alabama took place exactly as scheduled. Despite the controversial nature of the case, there was no last-minute postponement or commutation of sentence by the governor. Nor was there even any suspense, any glimmer of anticipation or hope.

  I almost missed it. Drinking for hours alone in my motel room, which is a habit I’d vowed I would break, and waking dazed and panicked at 11:20 P.M.; rushing to the prison and grudgingly allowed inside, checked through by surly guards and led on a brisk hike to the death row wing at the rear of the prison where, in a windowless alcove resembling a warehouse, the electric chair was located. I could hear inmates throughout the facility shouting, stomping, banging against bars and walls, protesting the imminent execution. “Apparently they never get used to it,” I said, meaning to make conversation; and the guard said, shrugging, “They like making noise, is all.”

  As I was ushered into the viewing room, I began to shiver; I’d broken into a cold sweat.

  There were only two rows of hard-backed wooden chairs, and mine was in the first; reserved for me in the name of my newspaper, as if I had no identity otherwise. Claude Dupre was sitting behind officials, journalists. Several ravaged-looking Birdsall relatives, no mistaking they were relatives, among them a heavyset older woman whispering, or praying, to herself, and a stocky man of about fifty, bald, dirt-colored, who resembled Roy Beale Birdsall closely enough to be an elder twin. The Birdsalls were of that class of Americans for whom fate is purely bad luck. But I’d written of such people too often in the past and had exhausted my capacity for sympathy.

  Everyone was sitting, staring straight ahead, through the plate-glass window, at The Chair: the peculiarly mustard-yellow Hartsfree electric chair, many times photographed and commented upon. An aesthetic object more evocative than the human sacrifice strapped into it. The one custom-made by art, the other mass-produced by nature. But I couldn’t write that! Not for “Death Watch.” This chair was both a familiar object and a monster-object; made of wood, as if by a painstaking craftsman (which, in fact, might have been the case), it
exuded an air of homespun, rough-hewn, rustic-American earnestness, a Norman Rockwell innocence even as it was malevolently tricked up with straps, clamps, electrodes, and a crown-like device to fit tightly on the condemned person’s head like something in a low-budget horror film of the fifties. The Chair as iconic image. And the brightly lit execution chamber, like a stage awaiting a solitary performer.

  On this side of the glass there was silence except for husky, hoarse breathing and the throbbing pulse of a wall air conditioner. My own breath was coming thick as mucus. In the motel room I’d paced about drinking, smoking one cigarette after another, imagining myself as a man so sensitive to another’s imminent death he can’t even sit still. I’d been thinking about Roy Beale Birdsall’s last meal: Had he liked it, had he even been able to eat it? Lobster à l’américaine—why had I chosen such a specialty? Birdsall had the look of a man (I loved turning such clever phrases; such phrases turned themselves in my brain without my volition) who’d never tasted lobster in his life. And salmon roe, and the risotto—my mouth watered obscenely. But what a disappointment Birdsall hadn’t been allowed a single glass of wine.

  At 12:01 a door to the rear of the execution chamber opened, and lanky Reverend Hank Harley entered solemn-faced and glowering with piety, carrying a conspicuous Bible; behind him came poor Roy Beale Birdsall between two guards like a man in a dream. It seemed a final insult that Birdsall should die in his prison garb—a baggy uniform the color of dishwater. His head had been brutally shaved and resembled a bowling ball. His face was puffy and flushed as if with exertion. Like a clumsy barnyard animal he was shackled as before at his wrists and ankles. Globules of oily sweat shone on his forehead yet he was trying to smile, a ghastly I am at peace, Christ is in my heart stretching of the lips. I wondered if he would see me, if he would remember me? He was resolutely not looking at the bright yellow chair; his head turned toward the plate-glass window, he was frowning and squinting into the witness room. Searching out his relatives who stared at him in speechless chagrin and wonderment. And then he caught sight of me, and a light came into his glazed eyes, his smile twitched in recognition and he tried to raise a hand as if to signal OK with his thumb and forefinger. Yes, he’d liked the meal! Fantastic meal! Surely did appreciate the meal, thank you, sir.

  Or so it seemed Roy Beale Birdsall meant to communicate.

  The ritual of execution proceeded like clockwork, and swiftly. That’s the horror: Once it begins it won’t stop. A living man enters a room from which he will be carried a corpse. I sat transfixed and staring at the activities on the other side of the glass, scarcely twelve feet away. How could I have imagined that Birdsall’s death would be routine, this execution stale from repetition? I flinched as Birdsall was forcibly seated in the chair and his shaved head fitted to the metal contraption; as leather straps were buckled at his wrists and ankles and across his chest, which had begun to heave in panic. The sleeves and pants legs of his uniform were neatly folded back to expose pale hairless flesh to which electrodes were attached. An attendant trained in the craft of electrocution prepared the “condemned man” for death as impersonally and deftly as a robot might have done. And all this while Birdsall was trying to maintain his vague strained smile as if to assure us he was still in control, his soul was his own.

  Reverend Hank Harley was reciting Bible verse in a sonorous voice, asking then with grave solicitude had Roy any final statement to make?—and Birdsall was distracted and seemed not to hear so Reverend Hank repeated his formula-question and Birdsall drew a deep breath straining at the straps and murmured in his Alabama drawl a rambling nasal prayer. I would have liked him to protest his innocence and the barbarism of what was being done to him—I would have liked him to curse the state—but of course he did not. “… Just gonna put my faith in Jesus like I been doin amen …”

  Next, the attendant fastened a plain black cloth over Birdsall’s eager face even as the man’s eyes darted about with animation, hope.

  I wanted to shout, “No! Stop!”

  But of course I sat silent, mute; watching through half-shut eyes; my fists clenched. For always witnesses sit silent and mute and impassive, making no move to intervene. It never seems possible that powerful currents of electricity will be sent through the body of a human being in our presence, and no one will intervene, yet that’s exactly what happens when a person is executed; the wonder is that it happens every time and it happened that sulphurous-warm September night in Hartsfree, Alabama. After seven years of anticipation the end came abruptly, and rudely: Somewhere out of sight a switch was pulled, and invisible electricity coursed through the condemned man’s body; the first jolt lasted a full two minutes, one hundred twenty distinct seconds, at the start the man’s fists clenched and his body went rigid until consciousness drained from it and he “relaxed,” slumped. For Birdsall it was over, he’d passed out of reach, but the procedure continued with more jolts, and more. The heartbeat has to be completely extinguished, the brain absolutely gone. A small spiral of smoke curled from the electrode attached to Birdsall’s left leg, the flesh of which was now pinkened, flushed.

  More smoke, a delicate bluish aura appeared about the motionless rigid head. Roy Beale Birdsall’s departing spirit, fading even as we stared.

  JUST AHEAD of me, walking briskly, a middle-aged man in a shabby leather jacket with a graying ponytail straggling between his shoulder blades, we were urged to leave the prison premises as quickly as possible and no one wished to linger. Claude Dupre sighed as I caught up with him but neither of us spoke until we reached the parking lot where, in bright beacons of light, swarms of moths and smaller insects roiled like crazed molecules. In a brotherly gesture of disgust Claude lay a heavy hand on my shoulder, muttering, “Another! Another.”

  Politely I shook off the hand. “No. He was like no other.”

  AND NEXT MORNING on an early flight to New York I am working inspired, typing furiously on my laptop. Death is original, death is always present tense. I will speak of the death of a man named Roy Beale Birdsall in the electric chair at Hartsfree, Alabama, in such a tone, in such a voice, with such passion, with such conviction that no one who reads my words can escape them or forget them. I am sure! For hours the night before I’d been awake in my motel room, pacing, too excited to sleep, taking notes, speaking lines aloud in a state of euphoria I haven’t experienced for years.

  The thought even comes to me, slantwise, sly: Now New York state has reinstituted the death penalty, I won’t have to travel far to cover executions.

  We are thirty thousand feet above land. The Carolinas, though invisible. Below the hurtling aircraft is an opaque mass of cloud, like frozen white-water rapids. How happy I am to be alive, and to be headed north, and to be writing with such purpose, such a mission. A delicate bluish aura … about the motionless rigid head. A few seats ahead of me in coach class sits my old classmate and rival Claude Dupre, unshaven, disheveled, shoulders slumped, staring at a window past which vaporous cloud-fragments stream, stream.

  IN ∗COPLAND∗

  It was last March I was almost killed in ∗COPLAND∗.

  It’s June now. I’m barricaded in my house most days. I’m protected by electronic surveillance. I have my own spying devices. I applied for, but was denied, a homeowner’s license for a firearm. (I have another application filed, and I’m waiting to hear.) You’d recognize my face if you saw it, which is why I keep hidden much of the time.

  Possibly I’m not now, for TV viewers’ memories fade quickly, but I used to be famous in northeast New Jersey. Within the orbit of WNET-TV “The People’s Power Station” of Newark. I was S. of EXPOSÉ!, broadcast Wednesdays at 7 P.M. I’d been on the controversial EXPOSÉ! team for three years.

  Three years is about the time most EXPOSÉ! reporters burn out. S. was just getting started.

  Maybe I sound vain. I’m just being honest. My injuries don’t show in my face, which remains a handsome if slightly vacuous, youthful face. The cops who beat me were careful n
ot to injure my face.

  I know—I can’t prove they were actual cops. The thing about ∗COPLAND∗—I can’t prove it’s an actual place. Even if I could find it again, which probably I could not. Even if I left my safe house in Deer Trail Villas, a private residential community in Lakeview, New Jersey, to search for ∗COPLAND∗ in Newark, which probably I could not for psychological as well as medical reasons.

  This is a fact: my naked, bruised body, bleeding from a “badly lacerated” anus, was found amid trash in a Dumpster in Hoboken, New Jersey, by city sanitation workers, early in the drizzly morning of March 29. An ambulance arrived and carried me away, unconscious.

  Luckily for me, no rival TV camera crews or photojournalists were present. My face would have been recognized immediately. Media captions would have been taunting and cruel: EXPOSÉ! REPORTER EXPOSED!

  But none of it seeped into the press. I was an “anonymous” body until my wife came to claim me. I’ve kept a low profile since.

  Press charges? You’ve got to be joking.

  Next time, the cops would kill me. This time, I think it was mainly for laughs. And they left my face untouched.

  Why? Not out of kindness, or mercy. It’s a PR thing, I suppose. Because facial injuries, in news photos or on TV, are so much more lurid-looking than bruises on the body or even broken bones. Because a face is an individual, and a body is anonymous. My attackers exercised professional discretion.

  Knowing the injuries to my genitalia and anus are “evidence” I’m not eager to share with the public.

  My wife, M., was horrified by the beating I’d received, yet strangely thrilled, too. Staring at me as if seeing me for the first time in years. “Poor darling. You’re lucky to be alive.”

  The subtext being luck. Lucky to be alive. How can you complain? What a complainer you are!