Hoke - Wanted : a spiritual pursuit through jail, among outlaws, and across borders

For Richard.

I hope this does you justice.

And for Bob.

Thank you for welcoming me into a new world.

We have an altar from which those who officiate

in the tent have no right to eat....

Let us then go to him outside the camp...

Letter to the Hebrews 13:10, 13

CONTENTS

T HIS IS WHERE I TELL YOU WHAT TO EXPECT , why I wrote this book you hold in your hands.

Ill begin with a story.

During the darkest days of my early twenties, when I wanted to dispose of myself, I hid from my despair and demons one afternoon by slipping into a museum of modern art. High on the top floor in San Francisco, in what felt like an attic, I came across an ominous, nine-foot-tall work by Mark Rothko. (Look him up online if you dont know the artist. No. 14, 1960, to be exact.) I forgot about the rest of the museum. This one drew me close. It held me. I found myself leaning into it, nearly.

Like most of Rothkos works, this painting was only two fields of color, hung like frayed and glowing curtains, one atop the other, Dutch-door-style, as if between us and the world we were made to seek. I stood and stared. There was a familiar fire beneath all those layers of midnight blue and bloodlike paint. It looked like when you close your eyes while facing a light. Or what you might see if you had a window into a living heart. It seemed to swell, breathe. I wanted to step through the frame. I might have tried, evengiven my condition those days, reaching my fingertips to the canvasif there werent security cameras, alarms, and uniformed guards. But I kept coming back.

One visit, I read on the discreet placard beside this portal on the wall that when the artist was asked what he was trying to do with these heavy veils of pigment, canvas after immense canvas, he answered, I am trying to paint God.

This claim charged what hung on the wall with a danger, as well as a stranger beauty.

Since reading that, Ive seen his paintings differently. Just the shapestwo rectangles, one large, one a narrow banner above or belowno longer resemble doors in my imagination, but something else: the old WANTED posters of outlaws still loose in the world. In this sense, Rothkos WANTED portraits are blurry for a good reason. It is difficult to capture so elusive a subject.

I am trying to do something similar with this book. With these stories of wanted men, my relationships with criminals in various states of transformation, I am really trying to capture a greater subjecta divine presence that has yet to be held very long in any official custody.

The pages you hold in your handsa mix of true crime and spiritual adventurecan be read as a story, the story of my ongoing pursuit of this presence among the unwanted characters Ive met in the small county jail where I moonlight as a chaplain now. The story is mostly about my friendships with young gang members, set in a misty agricultural valley in the far Northwest, with one particular thief running through it all, ducking in and out of the chapters. And yet, I have resisted the temptation to force my memories into a seamless narrative arc, putting a narratormetoo squarely in the center as the main actor. Id rather think of these chapters as forensic sketches, a kind of mystical portraiture across time, varying in color, material, tone, and size. That is, after nine years moving in and out of the jail as an uncredentialed minister, learning to pray in a cathedral of tattoos and temporary release orders, these stories are my versions of Rothkos answer. I am trying to paint God.

Like Rothkos paintings, these chapters may look, at first, nothing at all like God, full of unsavory criminals, profanity, violence, death, and drugs. But I invite you to look more closely, to lean in and allow an image of God to surprise you, and maybe a presence to embrace you.

As with all WANTED posters, I have sketched these portraits because this presence has escaped me in recent years. Whatever broke into my heart in these dark places, it has left my life altered, and theres no undoing that. The purpose of WANTED posters, then, is to alert the public. My hope is that these portraits might raise your awareness of what could be just outside your door, still alive, slipping through the shadows on the edge of your county or your heart.

WANTED posters are created from the testimony of eyewitnesses on the basis of events remembered. The same is true of this book. And these sketches are colored by my own subjective experience of the events. Firsthand witnesses can be overwhelmed with the trauma of a murder, or the wonder of a snow leopard, so close at hand. It shapes their reports. I am no different.

Also, I have had to disguise the names of many people and a few places, to protect both the innocent and the guilty, including myself.

But all the events I describe happened. Dialogue is rendered as best I can remember it, significant portions often scribbled in my journals soon after conversations. Overall, though, I confess that these portraits are shaped less by a journalists sensibility and more by the images that continue to haunt me throughout the day and sometimes into the night.

I havent gotten it right. But I keep trying to find a shape for this presence that is still at large.

I leave my doors unlocked.

S OMEONE CALLED THE COPS ON RICARDO MEJIA AS soon as he was born. As soon as his fifteen-year-old mother had finished ridding him from her body, she slipped out of the Skagit Valley Hospital and left him there. When the nurse came in and saw the squirming newborn on his own in the clear plastic bin, she made no move to pick him up or cradle him. Instead, she picked up the phone and called the police.

Richardas family called himcould remember sitting in court when the state tried to force his mother to claim him. Many children suffer through watching their parents fight, and many others endure the anxiety of knowing those fights are the result of custody battles. Seated on a wooden bench behind the lawyers, his small feet not yet reaching the floor, Richard looked on as representatives of the state fought with his mother for the opposite reason: neither party wanted him. Sometimes the state won, and her begrudging hand would lead him out the courtroom door. But just as often, the small boy watched his mother walk out of court without him, her eyes avoiding his.

So, years later, Richard could hardly contain his delight when a helicopter and multiple squad cars chased him at high speeds through neighborhoods and down farm roads: the thrill of so many people laboring to keep him in their sights, sparing no cost to get their hands on him. As he swung the stolen sedan around corners of potato fields and long rows of beets, Richard shot his twitching, open-jawed gaze past one young woman in his front seat and another in the back and saw, through the rear window, how the squad cars would not give up on him. Richard had been burglarizing a house with these new partners when the police spotted them, and the hunt began. Richard managed to prolong this waking dreamsearch parties in hot pursuit of himfor three days, disappearing each evening. Being invisible was, after all, the state he knew best. The afternoon of his first escape from the chase, Richard veered the small Honda into tall fields of corn, plowing his own harvest maze of sorts. On hands and knees and alone, he disappeared into the field like a treasure to be hunted.

When a young woman flipped on the hanging light bulb in her small laundry basement that night, she saw a skinny, half-white, half-Mexicanlooking young man with a shaved head crouched in the corner smiling back at her, holding a tattooed finger to his lips. Methamphetamines had sucked his face into a near skull, but the gleam in his deep-set eyes above his high cheekbones still had the effect of a childs disarming grin. Each night he was at large, Richard made new friends this way.