Shortly after Christmas, Leonard’s email account went dark. At 9:22 a.m. Dec. 27, 2018, the only message displayed in the prison email system for William Leonard Pickard read:
This is a system generated message informing you the above mentioned federal inmate temporarily does not have access to messaging. You will receive notification when they are again eligible for messaging.
1. Only 11 states allow recreational use. The remaining 22 restrict possession to medical use.
2. Oakland went even further, legalizing all plant-based entheogens, including peyote and ayahuasca.
3. Among other findings, the RAND authors cited a tenfold increase in fentanyl deaths between 2013 (3,000) and 2018 (30,000); a growing preference for fentanyl over heroin among addicts; and an epidemic headed toward pandemic without government intervention—a prediction both Pickard and Sasha Shulgin had made decades earlier.
4. During a 2016 MSNBC broadcast commemorating the Wamego bust, former DEA agent Guy Hargreaves claimed Pickard made 3.2 billion doses, enough to intoxicate “the Western hemisphere.” A semi-retired Arizona real estate agent, Hargreaves worked the case under Nichols and Hanzlik and later wrote a memoir, Operation: Trip to Oz.
5. A charismatic serial killer, Schmid murdered at least three young women in the mid-sixties, was sentenced to death, and briefly escaped from prison after posting his poetry to Shelton. “For all the wrong reasons, I critiqued his work and discovered that he was quite talented,” he said. In 1975, fellow inmates stabbed Schmid forty-seven times, including once in the eye. He lingered three weeks then died. He was thirty-two. His crimes became the basis for one of Joyce Carol Oates’s earliest short stories, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
6. Known as Walking Rain Review before 2011.
7. Alexander Shulgin died of liver cancer June 2, 2014. He was 88.
8. Dead at 80, Al Reid passed on July 4, a month after Sasha.
Epilogue
To live outside the law you must be honest . . .
—Bob Dylan
JUST AS MYSTERIOUSLY AS IT switched off, Leonard’s email switched back on in April of 2019. He and USP Tucson’s other cyber literate were allowed to return to their CorrLinks1 accounts.
“They use me as a dictionary, for they are unfamiliar with spell check,” he said. “Today, I was asked to spell ‘regular,’ but my favorite was some years ago when a young kid turned to me and said, ‘How do you spell “pray” ?’”
Like all aspects of daily existence, prison censorship is vague, arbitrary, and routine. In June 2019, guards told Pickard he could not receive the Art Issue of the New York Review of Books because it was a threat to institutional security.
“My favorite recent rejection is the bio of Percy Bysshe Shelley by Claire Tomalin,” he said. “A scholarly work containing a chaste drawing of Shelley as a boy wearing a suit, from about 1812 or so.”
The drawing didn’t meet the “educational exception,” according to prison censors—an argument Pickard might easily have won in court if he had the $300 filing fee and didn’t mind waiting six to twelve months.
“The author of the prohibited work is a prolific British biographer of Victorian writers and a former Times editor,” he said. “I’ve worked my way through her writings on Thomas Hardy, and on Dickens’s companion in his later years.”
Not that Leonard didn’t understand the general logic of censorship. Prison is lousy with pedophiles, as illustrated by an incident some years back, when staff screened The Mission (1986) for inmates. The story of eighteenth-century Jesuits evangelizing the Amazon starred Robert DeNiro and Jeremy Irons and featured several scenes of naked and near-naked native children. Whether by threat or coercion, the inmates got the projectionist to replay those scenes to hoots and whistles, over and over again. A warped audience can interpret the most innocent portrayal as porn, and majority usually rules.
“While a Transformers movie or Swamp People or The Walking Dead is watched by all, the most popular show on TV for forty years is not,” he said. “In twenty years, I’ve never seen 60 Minutes.
“Pity about Shelley being rejected though. Love his poetics (e.g. “The Witch of Atlas”) and the Byron/Mary Wollstonecraft/Shelley triangle. I was just writing a scene set near Shelley’s sightless marble bust in the common room at Eton.
“I live in the nineteenth century as much as possible, while captive in the steel horrors of the twenty-first.”
Life is arbitrary.
“So tomorrow we are (all twelve hundred men—sorry, I mean ‘inmates’) to move one cell over, carting all belongings. My legal files alone are hundreds of pounds. No explanation.”
His companions range from the tattooed (“many full facial, often with skulls underlying the tissue . . . one whose sclera is dyed deep blue”) to pet lovers.
“They train small snakes and tarantulas to crawl across hands and over shoulders,” he said.
Some raise pigeons in their lockers while others construct “mouse wheels”: cardboard contraptions which rotate vertically as rodent treadmills.
“The mice seem to find it pleasurable and can run for hours until they’re flushed by staff.”
An entrepreneur nicknamed Spiderman created a Black Widow gymnasium by linking empty medicine bottles and peanut butter jars in an elaborate terrarium he furnished with sticks, a plant, shallow water and all the comforts that Wolf Spiders, et al, might desire. He assembled his arachnid army from the chain link fence in the exercise yard, fed them ants, and hosted great battles, betting on the outcome.
Everything comes back to money. Pets sell for “books” of postage stamps, the de facto exchange for gambling debts, drugs, food, personal services, etc. Even in prison, capitalism trumps all other brands of commerce.
And yet, there are sublime moments. One moonlit night years ago, Leonard witnessed a huge, silent white owl with an eighteen inch wing span swoop to an eave just a few feet away from his cell. He and his roommate watched by moonlight through the four-inch slit that serves as their window.
“We turned off the lights, invited
