Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling, and Activism in the United States

Routines

215 Routines anthony ross I wake up early in the morning. That’s when all the noisemakers have fallen asleep. Guys who incessantly engage in pointless arguments and banal babble: “If a gorilla and a grizzly had a fight who would win?” Shit like that.They make a racket during the day and well into the night, shouting over each other at insane decibels as if that would leapfrog their train wreck of logic to the forefront of the bedlam. Chaos is their escapism, a way to muffle the real noise in their heads, a way to avoid, if only temporarily , having to deal with the wretched reality of being on death row. It’s their routine. Two hours before dawn it’s real quiet. I can think. Get some work done. I pace back and forth in my cell as an alternative to meditation. It’s much more effective in setting the tone of my mental focus. I have a cup of coffee. I don’t eat breakfast. I stopped years ago when I found part of a rat in my oatmeal. That screwed up my taste buds for a while. I wash my face, brush my teeth, rake my fingers over my hair. I stretch while listening to classical music, then exercise for an hour: calisthenics, pushups, shadowboxing, running in place, triceps on the toilet, and curls with a towel slid through the bars. Statistically speaking, California death row prisoners are more apt to die from poor health or a drug overdose than be executed. I think it’s important to stay in shape. I’m manic about it. I don’t miss a day. After my exercise routine I take a birdbath in the sink if it isn’t my day to walk to the shower, something we get to do three days a week. It’s 6:30 a.m. when I look out the window across from my cell. I try to gauge the weather conditions. That’s my barometer for whether or not I’ll go to the yard—on rainy and cold days I stay in. San Quentin prison sits on a peninsula overlooking the San Francisco Bay. During the winter months the prison can get covered in fog. We’re put on lockdown. No one gets to go out in fog. The windows are behind the gunrail. A guard, cradling a mini-14 assault rifle and wearing a holstered 38 revolver on his side like a cowboy, watches the tiers. He rarely sits down. He rarely looks out the window. He eats standing up. For eight hours he walks the entire length of the gunrail, about a quarter mile, back and forth. If the alarm goes off, he runs up and 216 anthony ross down the gunrail, looking for the trouble. He doesn’t have to give a warning shot. He could kill without saying a word. That’s his routine. Any time I leave my cell I am searched. Anything I take with me is searched. A guard will examine every piece of clothing, every sheet of paper, and every cavity of my body. I have learned to disassociate myself from the procedure. I stare straight ahead, right through him, as I lift up my scrotum. I am numb when I spread my cheeks and cough. I don’t feel anything. Not anger. Not frustration. Not humiliation. There is a cold primal exactitude coursing through my veins, like a predator waiting for one precious moment.There are days when the cells are searched.What meager possessions I own get tossed about and ramshackled. I don’t take it personal . Afterwards I methodically return everything to its place. It doesn’t matter how long it takes me. I do it. This is prison. This is the routine. Alone. That’s how I processed the news of over a dozen people dying in my family. It is the only emotional arc that can stir up feelings of vulnerability . Each loss makes me acutely aware of my isolation—twenty-four years. Each death gave me a precise sense of my own physical impermanence . I live with an intense sense of immediacy. I engage every day like a man on fire. From a single visit I can absorb a lifetime. In a single letter I could, in vivid detail, translate all the passion of an imprisoned man’s heart. I have become stoic, knowing any time I call home there could be another death. There...