It’s 3 a.m. and I’m awake. I’m five feet up in the air on a metal ‘cookie sheet’ bunk under the full-moon brightness of the safely lights in a Level II dorm with 200 other inmates in San Quentin’s H-Unit.
THE FIRE: How I destroyed my psychic delusion house by a crime
I can’t go back to sleep. My mind goes flying back to the place I seem stuck to. To the night it all went wrong. The night of THE FIRE.
It’s 3 a.m. and I’m awake. Not that hard to explain, I’m five feet up in the air on a metal ‘cookie sheet’ bunk under the full-moon brightness of the safely lights in a Level II dorm with 200 other inmates in San Quentin’s H-Unit. The old Indian with the white ponytail and feather neck tattoo has gone ‘Man-Down’ again.
He is parchment-pale with stage IV cancer and the meds are messing with his digestive tract. He has been heaving for twenty minutes. The paramedics are here and have strapped him to a gurney for transport to the Q’s clinic. It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve seen someone die at the Q. I’d just wish they’d be quiet about it.
The C.O.’s are making most of the noise. When the alarm goes off in one of our five buildings, they all come running to make sure it’s not a riot. Like cops everywhere, they have come to make of show of being busy in numbers. They are jaw-boning and making jokes as if they were at a Giants tailgater. I can’t tell if these self-absorbed ‘professionals’ are getting off on the suffering or just reminding themselves how they walk the ‘toughest beat in California.’ After all, they are working another boring night at the Q and rarely leave their podiums for anything approaching real work.
Either way, I can’t go back to sleep. My mind goes flying back to the place I seem stuck to. To the night it all went wrong. The night of THE FIRE.
As an LA Low-income housing boy, the fact I purchased this 1908 Edwardian upon my marriage was an accomplishment. It was the first place I could call HOME in my life. This HOME was my marriage made physically manifest.
My wife and I brought our children into the world here. Our married life existed only under its roof for over 14 years until THE FIRE. This is my psychic construct of my marriage tied to this Edwardian brick and redwood house — my HOME. I destroyed my HOME with the firebomb of my CRIME (I took a life driving while intoxicated — legally defined as Gross Negligent Manslaughter).
Now burning down a HOME, even a hundred-year-old wooden one, is not as easy as you might think. Sure it’s filled with combustible materials and has ancient gas and electric lines running all through it. But it’s been designed to withstand the worst and will not easily be destroyed. It has stood for over a hundred years, through earthquakes, storms and the like. A good safe place to raise a family, no doubt.
Like the concept of life-long marriage, designed for a bygone era, as with most Victorian/Edwardian homes, this one has two chimneys with six separate hearths designed to burn coal, not wood. Modern amateur fire-starters don’t realize that the narrow flue is not able to deal with the swirling embers of modern logs and life’s passion-hot fires. These modern fires put the house at risk and fill the living space with obscuring life-choking smoke. Still, that’s life right? Deal with it.
If you are curious about prison life and the real work that goes on there, read The San Quentin News or listen to Ear Hustle.
While the sparks of daily life may be the most common source of a FIRE (marital strife/divorce), the still-smoldering embers of old fires (other failed marriages) fanned by firebugs (those women that will never make the marriage bond nor bear children or others that failed at marriage) or the ‘Acts of God’ (lightning strikes of sickness and job loss) round out the top three causes of a HOME burning (divorce). My situation was different. I was a wonton alcoholic unaware of my power to take life itself. This FIRE was my doing.
YOU MUST BE EVER VIGILANT! (the risk of FIRE is ever-present)
I guess the real issue is what do you do when FIRE takes hold(how can you save a marriage when tragedy strikes in one of its multiple guises…)
When you notice smoke or the fire alarm of fighting/drinking goes off (the event that started the FIRE is no longer important). What will decide if your HOME survives are:
- What condition is your HOME in?
- Do you have the equipment to put out the FIRE?
- Who answers your call for HELP and how quickly do they act?
Regardless, you must have an escape plan too (how to divorce). How to save family relationships out of the destroying FIRE and save precious mementos of our LIFE together. You must focus on what can’t be replaced: moments in time that make yours a loving family (wedding, births, Tragedy & Comedy of life shared). The type of keepsakes, which, if destroyed, could never be replaced (the respect a child shows their father as in WHY DADDY and 500 Pounds of Happiness; the love of a wife unable to continue down the destructive path of her mate’s alcoholism “I can’t watch you destroy yourself….”).
Look, any long-surviving HOME will have issues. The greatest risk to a traditional HOME (marriage) is dry rot; not easy to see from the outside and you know you must repair it. As it spreads under the paint and shingles of a perfect marriage, it weakens both the structural integrity of the HOME and creates cracks and pathways for the FIRE to spread. Time, setbacks, criticism and contempt can create dry rot under the shiny new paint of your normal marriage/HOME.
Whether from sparks of daily life, a firebomb (of a crime), old coals of the Walden Lane fire (divorce of parents who still can’t talk with one another) or the still-smoldering ruins of the Pine Street fire (friends that had to freeze accounts and seek court orders to sunder their marriage), it doesn’t matter. Fire, once it takes hold, won’t let go easily. It grabs on and seeks the outside. Looking for fuel in the HOME and the very air we breathe. Fanned by gossip (Did you hear….), it is a living thing, needing to grow, spread, HAVE IT ALL.
You cry “HELP, FIRE!”
Who can you really count on to answer your call?
Let’s be honest, ‘neighbors’ tend to be more distant these days and ‘community’ has a hollow ring, whether at work or play. Your family and friends, surely, would rush over and help save your HOME, if they were available; not distracted by their own personal image in the reality-show of life. Acquaintances and strangers seem to catch wind of the FIRE and show up to watch the DRAMA. They arrive with a gleam in their eyes as they hunger to warm themselves in the fire of emotion.
Of course, you must rely upon yourself first and the equipment you have set aside for just such an eventuality. Quickly you pour memories of better times on the FIRE. You beg friends and family to do the same. You hope the fire hoses of Church (marriage rite & community of faith) and social communities (sports league, work, alumni network) will pump more stores of faith and duty upon the burning HOME.
Can the fire-retardant foam of potential futures/expectations help to stand the heat of the fire?
Even if you can’t save the HOME, who will run into it with you to save those delicate precious relationships, reputations, and memories? These took decades to create and cannot be replaced (wedding feasts, babies born and happier times — “We love you two together!”).
Without a HOME as shelter, how can those relationships and reputations survive?
Will all that is left be ashes and bitterness? (I wish I had never…, You made me…, Why did I ever…, a child asking if they can change their last name…,)
I run through all the cherished memories of a LIFE shared (Home) destroyed in the hungry undiscriminating flames of the FIRE caused by my own hand.
The gurney wheels are rolling now as they take the Indian out, still heaving, his body’s pathetic attempt to expel the cancer that is killing him. I can imagine the use of that same gurney taking my victim to the medivac that night on the I-5 out near Coalinga. Same cops all standing around talking as the paramedics work.
Me?
I am the cancer — the death bringer — that caused this CRIME. I am the reason the cops gather and the paramedics frantically try to save her life. My inability to maintain my SELF and thus using alcohol to hide from my SELF, my carelessness in driving drunk, I WAS THE CANCER. My victim could not avoid me any more than the Indian can heave up his cancer.
I am the fire-started that ignited my marriage HOME.
I can’t sleep. My mind goes flying back to the night of the FIRE….
Identified as CDCR # AN0094, the author was formally known as Wayne Boatwright. He is a fifth-generation Californian and inmate that served some 2,300 days of a 2,800-day sentence for gross negligent vehicular manslaughter. He still remembers being a husband, father of two pre-teens and a deacon of his local Church before becoming the destroyer of LIFE and donning CDCR blue.
How can you rebuild your own life after TAKING A LIFE (and destroying two families)?
This is a long solitary journey I have taken. In my mind, I have had to build new conceptual frames to survive this journey. I have divided this journey/work into such conceptual frames as destruction and rebuilding of my PSYCHIC DELUSION HOUSE, LETTER TO MY YOUNGER SELF AND ALWAYS THE FIRE. Much more is to come on how I have learned on this journey.
Free of the twin distractions of mobility and community, I spent my time pondering deep concepts — one was survival on the Main Line in an infamously famous and brutal prison, San Quentin.
I was able to develop my writing and learned to express myself in the narrative form under the tutelage of Zoe Mallory along with the creative writing students in Zoe Mullery’s class. This group has been meeting for three hours every Wednesday evening at San Quentin State Prison since 1999. If you want to know more, go to
A version of this story was presented to the class during my incarceration at San Quentin State Prison.
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