Another Short Story: Full Circle Apr 06 '03    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet The Bottom Line A Cal physics professor helped me with this one. I called him out of the blue, and he provided the numbers without hesitation. I enjoy people who love their work. I first met Senator Johnson at a party in Westwood. To be honest, he was pretty drunk, which I guess makes me lucky, because I don't think he would have spoken to me had he not had a few too many. I told him how I was about to graduate and he offered me an internship without even thinking about it. Now, I make $25 dollars an hour, slave wages admittedly, but I intend to apply to graduate school, so I see this as a good step. When I first saw the power plant, it struck me as cruel, but I then thought back to what Senator Johnson had told me, and it sort of made sense. The cycles are lined up in rows of twenty, ten rows deep, and the interns, like myself, provide the food, keep the TVs tuned to whatever channel the cyclists want, and in general help keep things going. I hope to be out of there within a couple of years--I'd like to be in private practice eventually--but this will do for now. It really is a good thing, as young people like myself can get jobs, and the convicts are put to good use. It still makes me wonder, though, to remember what Senator Johnson told me that night. "I used to be a bleeding heart liberal," he began, "until I got frustrated with the way things worked." I sipped my Bud Light and said nothing. "Back in the nineties, and even just after the millennium, I was a hard core Democrat, and thought I was going to save the world. I had a Masters in Social Work and hadn't even thought about entering politics." I realized at that point that he was about to launch into his life history, so I briefly excused myself and grabbed another beer. He did the same. "What got me started," he continued, "was the night my car got broken into outside Eli's Mile High Club in Oakland." I nodded knowingly, though I had no idea what he was talking about. "See," he said, "Eli's was a blues club in Oakland back in those days--long since closed down--which catered to the locals and also to the hipper among Berkeley's students. So there I was with this grad student buddy listening to the blues, and at about midnight, we decided to go home. So we head out to my car, and what do you know, the right-front window has been broken out and my stereo is gone. It was an Alpine, I can still remember. That was a good brand in those days. Geez--they even took my Seattle Mariners hat." I nodded again, remembering the Mariners, and wondered how long he was going to ramble on. "Well," he continued, "we called the police from Eli's, and waited, and then waited some more, and when two AM rolled around, they still hadn't showed up. So we called again, and the dispatcher said an officer would be right there, so we stood out front until we realized that we were the only people there, except for this white guy and a black buddy who were conducting some kind of business transaction." I smiled to myself. "About this time we realized that if they left, we'd be the only people left on the street, and the neighborhood wasn't the best, so we decided we'd better see if the damned car would start. Suddenly, the black guy said, 'Hey, you're the ones who got your car broken into,' and I nodded and he said 'Let me walk over with you and make sure your car's OK--I wouldn't want you nice fellas stranded here.' We said 'thanks' and he walked over with us. Well, the car started, so I brushed the glass off of the other seat, and my friend climbed in. "Interesting, I still remember what the guy said before we drove off. He said, 'I hope you guys know that this kind of behavior isn't representative of this community. There's a few bad kids here, and they give this place a bad name. Most of us hate this kind of thing as much as you do. I really hope you'll come back.' "We thanked him and drove back to my house, so we could call the police again and find out how to file a report. Well, we called the police and they said that they couldn't take a report over the phone. I said fine--send an officer over--and the woman on the other end said no, we'd have to come to the station. So we drove to the station, which was in an even worse neighborhood than the club, and asked a cop out front where there's a safe place to park, as our car had no right-front window, and he just laughed at us and said 'good luck.' "So we parked on the street in front of the police station and walked though the main entrance where we were almost overcome by the smell of urine. There were about ten street people sleeping on the floor in there, but not a single officer to be found. There was one person awake, though--a grungy-looking guy of about 55--sitting with his hands on his knees like a statue, given us the evil eye. I wondered if we were going to get mugged. "Well, we waded through the sea of sleeping transients with this guy's death-glare burning through our backs and finally found a desk of some sort with a woman in uniform behind it reading a romance novel. She didn't look up. I said, 'Excuse me' and she looked at me as if I'd interrupted the president and his cabinet. I told her that our car had been broken into and asked how we could file a report. Returning her eyes to her novel, she said, 'The person who takes reports isn't around.' I stood and waited for her to continue, but she didn't--she went back to her reading as if we weren't there. "I tried to look incredulous, but I was too tired, so I asked when that person would be returning, and she said she didn't know, so we sat down to wait. After about half an hour, she went off--apparently to the bathroom--and when she came back, she said, 'I don't think the person who takes reports is going to be back tonight. You should come back tomorrow, if that's what you're waiting for.' "My friend almost exploded. Through clenched teeth, he said, 'We called here an hour ago and someone told us to come in so we could file a report. That's why we're here--to file a report.' He started to move toward the desk, the veins in his forehead bulging, but I checked him with my right hand. I looked down at my watch, but my eyes wouldn't focus, so I looked over the woman's shoulder and found a wall clock like the ones we had in grade school--you know--with actual hands marking the time and a second hand moving slowly around--tick tick tick--in one second increments. It was 4:20 AM. "The woman said, 'Suit yourself.'" Senator Johnson had finished his beer and I found myself wondering if the flush in his cheeks was from the alcohol or the emotion that accompanied reliving his little story. I grabbed another and brought him one as well. He continued, "I honestly can't remember when we filed the report, but I do remember that it got filed, though, of course, nothing ever came of it. "Well, then a couple of weeks later, a friend of mine was in a gas station when these guys in their early twenties decided to drive off without paying. Now, my friend is an honest person, and she got a good look at the guys, but she probably wouldn't have chased them down and gotten their license plate number had they not smashed into her car while making their get-away." I chuckled and almost sent a gulp of beer down the wrong pipe. "So she calls the cops, and they tell her that there's nothing they can do, even though she got a description of the guys and their license number, because anybody could have been driving the car." I decided to speak, if only to give Senator Johnson a chance to catch his breath. I said, "Seems to me that the owner, if it wasn't them, would know who was driving his or her car that night. Why don't they..." "You're a smart lad," he interrupted. "You'll be good for the power plant, I'm sure. Of course, it's absurd! But there's more. The next week, I was driving east on 80, on my way home from a Sierra Club meeting, and I noticed that the right lane, in which I happened to be driving, was an exit only lane, so I put on my turn signal and merged to the left, after which a cop pulled me over and gave me a ticket for an illegal lane change. It turns out that the sign saying 'Right Lane Must Exit' is not a helpful reminder that that lane ends; it's telling you you'd damned well better exit or you're going to get a ticket! "So a couple of weeks later, as I'm sitting in driving school with a bunch of teenagers, watching movies about disemboweled victims of drunk driving, I start having visions of these guys joy riding with my friend's front bumper as a hood ornament, and some other guy driving around listening to his new Alpine stereo with my Seattle Mariners hat on, and there I am, the only convicted criminal in the bunch, and in that moment, the idea of the power plant was born." He looked at me knowingly and took a long drink of his beer. "So who were you more mad at," I asked, "the cops or the criminals?" "That's a tough one," he replied, shaking his head. "I really don't know. I'd like to say the cops, but I think I'd be lying. I was getting pretty frustrated with what could be gotten away with." "And that was the beginning," I said. "And that was the beginning," he responded. "I knew from my engineering classes that each of the two units at Diablo, the nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo, generated about a thousand megawatts of power. And I found out later that a cyclist, attached to a generator, could produce about two hundred watts. That meant that it would take the efforts of five million cyclists could equal the output of one of Diablo's generators. With only about 150,000 Californians incarcerated in 2002 for stealing, or more severe crimes, my plan still wasn't plausible." "You thought of all this in driving school?" "No, the details came later. But the fundamental part, and the part that was politically the most dangerous--the part that offends the most people--that did occur to me in driving school. Of course, I never mentioned it to anyone--not for years. The details came after Diablo, actually. After the San Luis Obispo nuclear disaster in 2010, anti-nuclear power sentiment ran really high in California, and I saw a window. Although we couldn't just eliminate nuclear power, we could begin to phase it out. At least that was my platform. The repaired reactor was safe at ninety-five percent of capacity, and more than two-hundred thousand Californians were in jail for at least stealing. If you do the math..." "I can't believe it flew," I said. "Neither could I," said Senator Johnson sheepishly. Now, as I sit and watch the inmates cycle, I ponder the fact that the most bizarre penal legislation ever to be passed in California had its origins not in some careful analysis of the criminal justice system and its problems, but rather in the early personal experiences of Senator Samuel L. Johnson. And to be honest, I still don't know where I stand on this one. To me, it's a job. At least that's what I tell myself when I try to distance myself from what I see every day. As I said, the cycles are lined up in rows of twenty, ten rows deep, and the interns, like myself, provide everything the convicts could want. And the cycles are comfortable: the seats are padded and at the right height; the food is good, hand-fed by young people with good hearts and sympathetic ears. I felt like a practicing therapist the week Oprah died--that was really tough on some of the guys. And the arm rests are comfortable too: padded and braced, such that the cyclists can generate maximum power on both the downstroke and the upstroke. But how can I not have misgivings? I saw Senator Johnson's eyes tear up as he confided that he wasn't sure he'd done the right thing. The race issue never goes away, for example. "Only 16 percent of the U.S. population is black," he said, "yet more than 50 percent of these young men--and women--are black. When I'm told the law is discriminatory, I can't really argue. Nothing punitive is ever really fair." "And how strange" he said, "for the state of the art in criminal justice to be modeled on Middle Eastern practices from before the Middle Ages. Things really do come full circle, don't they?" Each intern shares responsibility for one room with three others, so essentially I'm looking after fifty inmates. I work one of the rooms for thieves--the muggers, burglars, and such. I don't think I'd have the stomach for working with the rapists and murderers--the facilities are much less lavish for them (fewer TV channels, and no voice activated computer interaction, for example), and although their crimes were more severe, they're also angrier about their punishment. Does it really serve as a deterrent? Is it really cruel and unusual? I'll let the sociologists and political scientists argue about that. I really don't know. But I do know that it's painful to see the faces of the inmates--some accepting, some determined, many bitter, but most seemingly blank and resigned, as if in still in shock about the reality of their fate. Two years will be more than enough, that's for sure. I think the hardest thing for me is when I have to actually adjust the braces that hold their arms in place. At a distance, a roomful of convicts cycling away looks not unlike one of those fitness clubs that were so popular in my childhood. But when I see close up, and actually have to handle, the stumps that had once been forearms leading gracefully to hands--hands that could once play pianos, catch baseballs, hammer nails, caress a lover's cheek--I sometimes have to hide my own face. It's not an easy job. But as I said, it's just a job, and I hope to be in graduate school within two years, so I see this as a good step. I have to laugh, though, when I remember my mother complain about wiping butts in a rest home when she was young. If she only knew.

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