A Place to Stand

Author:Jimmy Santiago Baca
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2001-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

Most people might assume that cons spend their time thinking about what they’re going to do when their time is up, fantasizing about the women they’re going to fuck and scams they’re going to run, or planning how they’re going to go straight and everything will be different. I did think about the future sometimes, but more and more it was the past my mind began to turn to, especially during those first days and nights in solitary.

The years leading up to prison had been a never-ending series of hustles. I was constantly conniving, focused on whatever screwed-up situation was at hand that day or planning tomorrow’s score. For a street kid, it was all about the basics: food, shelter, a little pocket change. Always moving forward, head down, never looking back. But things were different now. I wasn’t moving anywhere anytime soon.

Lying on my cot, staring at the concrete wall for hours on end, for the first time in years my mind’s eye drifted back over my shoulder, down the bleak road that had led me here. Remembering was a novelty. The territory I began to explore seemed just as fresh as anything I could dream up but free of the exhausting, overpowering ache of longing. Most of all, it helped fill the void stretching out in front of me, which was not nearly so black and terrifying this time around. It was just empty time. My first stint in the hole had been a nightmare, but I’d survived it, and I could do it again. Thirty days was just thirty days.

What began as an idle reflex became a habit of mind and then something else entirely. As my powers of concentration grew, I would revisit places and people from my past for longer stretches of time. Stretched out flat on my back, arms covering my eyes, I would replay the events over and over again like a sexual fantasy, adding details and names, redrawing faces, until they seemed as real to me as if they were right in front of me. Occasionally I’d be distracted by the sound of a guard’s footsteps or thoughts about the Mexican mafia gunning for me in the prison yard outside. But with nothing else to do but lie there and sweat, I trained my mind to shut out everything around me and travel back in time.

Revisiting the past wasn’t about seeking comfort at first, it was just something to do, like push-ups. But as I thought back on my unhappy childhood, I found myself lingering more and more on images of Estancia, the small village where my grandparents lived, all by itself in the vast prairie, in a certain lonely innocence.

I’d spent a few fleeting years of happiness in Estancia, during my boyhood, before my mother left and everything changed. The village was nestled under a grove of scattered cottonwoods, in the flatlands to the southeast of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I could see my grandparents’ small brown stucco house, the

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