In order of appearance
Song – Artist – Album
The Lighthouse Trembles – Natalia Beylis – Mermaids
Mind Shifts – Michel Banabila – The Unreal Realm
Acqua – Las Olas – Las Olas
Not In Our Name – Pierre Bastien & Michel Banabila – Nuits Sans Nuit
Vertigo – Zoroxxe – Zoroxxe
Mermaids – Natalia Beylis – Mermaids
Après La Pluie – Memory Scale – And All Things Begin to Drift
Revoluciones (mirco) – Zoroxxe – Zoroxxe
Good Grief – Sereptie – Sulpher’s End
Intemperie – Glitch Bird – Intemperie
A Listening Voice – Russ Young – Cloak
La Inmanencia del Ser – Interspecifics – Reducción
Tigre de Papel (feat. King Klavé) – Quixosis – Zen & Caro
Chanclas de Mercurio – Quixosis – Zen & Caro
Sentimental, Sedimentary – Dialect – Under~Between
Vertigo – Zoroxxe – Zoroxxe
Lágrimas de Sangre II – Ezmeralda -Patrimonio Inmaterial de la Nada
The Process from Birth – Michel Banabil – The Unreal Realm
Paisaje Oblícuo – Zoroxxe – Zoroxxe
We’ll Find Out – Timber Timbre – Timber Timbre
Chahuarmishqui – Quixosis – Acid Juanito Reloaded

MICHAEL: You find out what your beliefs are when they’re put to the test. If they don’t stand up to the test, then you damn well better re-evaluate to determine what your beliefs actually are. Because otherwise you’re just living a facade.

When you step forward and take a stand for something, there’s intimate knowledge associated with that stand. Elsewise, you wouldn’t be taking it. You see? My intent is not to stand against anything, but stand for. And there’s a difference.

It’s about relationship. Whether you’re riding a 2,000-pound bull that doesn’t want you on its back, or you’re in a knife fight, there’s an intimacy there.

Can you think of a specific example of a fight that you were in where you especially felt that sense of intimacy and connectedness with the person you were fighting with? 

MICHAEL: Sure. I took a knife away from a guy once that was intent on killing me. I felt it as I was getting ready to walk by him. And then I just took his arm and I pushed it into the bars. And he had a knife in it. So I held him there and took the knife away from him. I took him down. And he pled for his life. He begged me. 

You were holding him down on the ground or what? 

MICHAEL: Yes. 

With a knife to his throat? 

MICHAEL: Mm, close. He wasn’t going to move.

Choice was mine. Within prison culture, I would have been perfectly within my rights to take his life. Because he was going to take mine. But that’s not how I see it. And that’s where ethics comes in. And the intimacy associated with that is I made a decision not to take his life. There was no need.

I choked up on the knife and I tattooed a circle around his heart. Lasting circle. 

And that was a very intimate act. 

I hope this doesn’t sound like a weird question, but the way that you talk about people you’ve had fights with, it almost sounds like you’re talking about past lovers or something. 

MICHAEL: Mm!

And does it, does it feel like that to you at all? 

MICHAEL: Isn’t that great? I think that’s great.

* * *

ARIEL: Everybody dreams of having a great love in their life. They have daydreams about being heroic or whatever, but that’s a dream. If they ever have to test their mettle, of being courageous or heroic or having a great love, I think most people will not make it.

Our real motives, our real desires are for comfort, security, having things to be easy, pleasant. I can’t blame anybody. That’s just human. But sometimes, if you want something great, you have to make a lot of sacrifices. 

Chapter 1: Ariel

ARIEL: My first memory as a child was a flower farm across the street. 

There were acres and acres of Hawaiian flowers. I grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s in Hawaii, mostly in Honolulu. I was a flower child — quite naturally because I was born and raised surrounded by flowers.

It was just really laid back. And as a matter of fact, I didn’t like it because it was too laid back for my personality. I was just a very uncomfortable person, probably, to be around, and not very Japanese. I don’t think I was really well liked even in my own family. 

As I grew up, I found out that there was another whole world out there outside of the islands and how people were living there that’s so different from how I was living. And I wanted to experience that. I wanted to be there. I just felt like I’d probably fit in better. So when I got a chance, finally, I did move. 

And after I left, I persisted in my flower child kind of mentality. I was a poet, teaching children in schools, you know, how to write poetry. 

I saw something that disturbed me. And that was that, you know, all children seem to be gifted with unlimited potential when they were younger. It didn’t really matter whether they were rich or poor or Black or white or brown or yellow. It didn’t matter whether they were male or female. It didn’t matter. They were all just so full of curiosity and positivity and potential. 

But by the time they were in, I would say by seventh grade, sometimes earlier, it was all different. You could see which kids were not going to succeed and which kids were going to succeed. It was very clear.

I got a grant, a small federal grant to teach in a school in East Palo Alto. Now today, East Palo Alto is a zip code. I mean, [laughs] it is a good place to live. It’s full of tech people who have a lot of money, and now East Palo Alto is a happening place. But when I was teaching, it was full of poor Black people, all herded into this one little area.

So I went in there, these were 7th graders. I’m so short. I mean, I had 7th graders who were like a foot taller than me. [Laughs] And, um, classrooms full of children, very unhappy with their education and very jaded by the time they’re in the 7th grade. That’s so sad. 

I was told point blank, “You’re never going to have these kids sit still for 15 minutes to do a lesson in poetry. Are you kidding me right now? But go ahead. You got the money. Go ahead.” They just kind threw me to the lions. And they did think that I was going to be eaten up and spit out very quickly. 

I said, “I know that you probably just walk to and from school trying to not look around you, but I want you to look around you tomorrow. And for the rest of the week, I want you to look around for beauty. And the beauty that you see, bring it to class and share it.” 

In order to help them, because I thought that in the beginning they wouldn’t really believe me, so I went through the neighborhood and I found wild flowers and little shiny things that somebody had thrown away. And I brought them into the classroom and showed it to them, and told them what I thought was beautiful about them.  They just were rapt. 

The rest of the week, they would come to class bearing in their arms or their hands, some little thing that they found — flowers, a rock. And they were writing beautiful poetry. 

They acted like nobody had ever asked them about who they were as a person and an individual. They just woke up. They were so engaged. In fact, I had one teacher tell me that these kids are writing poetry during recess, and she couldn’t believe it. 

People have it in them. And if they’re ever recognized for being an individual, you know, and having something to say and having their feelings recognized and validated, they would do it. 

About 1986 or so, I quit it. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I had a really hard time with the individual suffering I saw because of systemic failures. 

Did you have a plan? 

ARIEL: No. I had no plan. [Laughs] I’m not a very planful person, really. Um. I tend to do things with great passion until I burn out and then I have to reassess. That’s just my nature. 

So what did drifting around look like?

ARIEL: It started one day in a cave, I will never forget. 

Sorry, a cave? 

ARIEL: A cave, yes. I was exploring, um—

Where?

ARIEL: It was in Illinois. You know, there are a lot of caves in the Midwest. Some of them are what they call wild caves. And a lot of spelunkers like those caves. 

And I had a great time. I wasn’t afraid. I even went into parts of the cave that the only way you can get to it is to go in on your belly and crawl through—slide on your belly like a reptile, I had to actually do that. And I was just, like, perfectly happy doing that. Nothing was wrong. I thought, “Oh, this is so great.” 

And then the second time I went there, it was like somebody was moving furniture of my mind—and not just the chairs and tables, but the whole set. This is the only way by metaphor I can explain it. That’s what happened to my mind. My mind started to disassemble itself. 

So while my friends were going on, I said, “Ah, you know what, I’m going to just sit here for a while and for you to come back.” That was tremendously stoical because I was actually losing my mind at the time. 

So while they did that and waiting for them to come back, I sang every song I knew the lyrics to. Every song I possibly think, I sang it. I sang it out loud. Just to keep my sanity until they came back. 

That began my whole saga of panic attacks for seven years. 

I went through counseling. I went through re-birthing. I did all kinds of things. I couldn’t quite shake the vulnerability to having a panic attack. I was pretty much disabled for much of those 10 years because of that. I couldn’t even write. I had writers block the whole time. 

After seven years, I said, “I don’t know if I’ll ever get over this. I can’t wait my whole life to get over this. I’ve got to do something.” 

What would people pay me to do [Laughs] that I can do kind of naturally? And I realized, I can listen to people. People tend to want to tell me their problems. This happened to me ever since I was a little girl, people would tell me their life story. And I don’t know why, maybe because I just listened. 

And then my ex-husband, who was a public defender, and he said to me, “You should do mitigation.” 

I’d never even heard of it. And he said, “Well, I have an attorney who needs somebody like you to help him with interviews. Would you do it?” And I said, “Sure.” 

To me, it was easy. You sat there and you developed a rapport, you listened to their stories, you ask them questions, you wrote things down. The attorney wanted to pay me for this! And I thought, this is amazing! I get paid for listening to people. That’s how it started. 

So, I’m sure this is an oversimplification, but essentially after someone has been convicted, you come in and your job is to show a jury that your client should receive a lighter sentence because of mitigating circumstances. Is that more or less right?

Ariel: Right, right. It’s a simplification, but it’s not totally inaccurate. 

I work on principally capital murder cases, which means somebody’s eligible for the death penalty. I don’t work on whether the client is guilty or innocent. As a matter of fact, I pretty much professionally have to assume the person is guilty, even if he might not be, because my job specifically is to do family history—anything that goes into who he is as a person, an individual, and why he got into trouble in the first place.

Ultimately what mitigation comes down to is humanization. 

The prosecutor wants to dehumanize the defendant and demonize the defendant and make the jury feel like this is not even a human being. This is a monster of some kind — incomprehensible, can’t believe and can’t understand why this person would have done it. It’s so incomprehensible that the only thing you can do is just put them to death and get rid of them. 

My job is to do the opposite, which is much harder.

* * *

HEATHER: Believe it or not, Nick, when I was young I was dating a parolee. I just thought he was hot. And he looked like Robert DeNiro and he drove a suped-up Chevy Nova Super Sport. 

How’d you guys meet? 

HEATHER: I met him at the lake. I’m from the East Coast. Small town called Dalton, Massachusetts. It’s like three hours west of Boston. You know, where I’m from, it’s like a small town where everyone has, like, a lifted truck or a big, cool car, you know? And drives up and down the strip, you know, the main drag in the town over. It’s just stupid small-town living, you know? 

 So I was dating this guy, and he was bad news. 

Chapter 2: Heather

HEATHER: I was so in over my head, ‘kay? But I knew that he had been to prison and was out on parole, and when he was very young, he had committed some crime that got him in prison. I think he got arrested when he was like 19, and then by the time he got out, I don’t know, he was like 26. So when I was dating him, he was 26. I was 16. 

Oh my God. 

HEATHER: Yeah. And I lied and told him I was 18, and I used to lie to my mother and tell her I was going babysitting, and I, you know, I would go out with this guy. 

I always, in my 16-year-old brain, always thought, this guy didn’t have the tools to assimilate back into society, which is why he would get in trouble and go back into prison.

You know, it’s hard to find a job when you got a conviction for a robbery or whatever it was he did, right? After being incarcerated for that long, you have a prison mentality. You know, and sometimes it’s kill or be killed in prison. I always felt like, hey, you know what? I think that these criminals need more help functioning outside of prison. 

Now, mind you, unbeknownst to me, Eddie—we’ll just call him Eddie—was using drugs and got really upset one night and popped out of the bushes and he punched me in the head. He had a cast on his arm. I saw stars that night. 

I didn’t call the police ’cause I was like, “Oh my God, like, he’s gonna get arrested, go back to prison and then it’s gonna be all my fault. And when he gets out, he is gonna come kill me.” Right? 

So he ended up going back to prison. Not ’cause of me, but for something else. I think he’s in prison for life now. But when I ended up coming out to California to go to college, I decided I wanted to be a parole officer and I was gonna help all the criminals assimilate back into society. 

I started working for the probation department in LA County and I was assigned to work in their narcotics testing unit. So I would, like, watch not-so-hygiene-conscious people pee in a cup to make sure that it was their urine for their drug testing. And I saw all kinds of things. 

This one girl barfed all over me one day, ’cause she, someone told her to drink Draino and it would give her a clean pee test. And then, like, one guy got busted with, like, a fake penis. You know, he had like a fake contraption that he had filled up with somebody’s clean urine and got busted.

There was all kinds of crazy stuff going on, and I thought, God, you know, there’s all these criminals who are actually drug addicts and alcoholics, right? Maybe if I became an alcohol and drug counselor, I could help society better that way.

I was getting my certification to be an alcohol and drug counselor. I was waitressing too, right, to get through undergrad. The night manager at the restaurant, his name was Jim Dutton. I used to swing my finger and be like, “You listen here, Jim,” and I’d just pop off about things I was upset about or whatever. And he said to me one night, “You know, Heather, you love to argue so much. Have you ever thought about being an attorney?” 

And I was like, “No.” 

Never in my life had that thought ever entered my mind, okay?

So fast forward, I’m at this group counseling session. You have to do, like, 600 hours of group counseling, like where you’re, like, volunteering your hours and doing this to get your certification.

And I looked around at all the people and I was just, you know, you’re listening to their stories, and a lot of these people had done some horrible things and most of ’em were in counseling ’cause they were ordered to by the corps to get into some treatment, or their family members were at their, you know, on their last leg of even caring, because they had stolen from their family members, depleted their life savings on rehabilitation that was ineffective. 

And I was sitting in this session and I looked at this woman and I thought, oh my God, if I had you for a mother, I’d be shooting up heroin too, right? Like, this lady was awful. And then I looked at the next guy and he was, like, eating, like, a scab off of his hand. 

And I just went through the whole room of these people. And I thought, “Every one of you needs to be locked up and have the keys thrown away.” Like, I had that moment. I thought, you have all just destroyed your family’s lives, done horrible things to other people. None of you actually wanna get clean. You’re only doing this because you’ve been ordered to by the court. And maybe I’ll help one of you. 

And in that moment, I thought, “I’m gonna become a prosecutor and lock all these fuckers up.”

* * *

ARIEL: In about 2000 and … yes, 2005, beginning of 2005, I got a case. It was a trial of an Aryan Brotherhood defendant. Michael McElhiney, or Big Mac as they called him. He was at that time facing the possibility that he could go to trial for capital murder. 

Chapter 3: Ariel

ARIEL: He was acting as his own attorney, so I took my orders from him. I met with him. 

And Big Mac was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood? 

ARIEL: Oh definitely. That’s the best thing that ever happened to Big Mac. Which says something about the things that happened to Big Mac. 

OK, you start working with Big Mac, and it’s already tense because he’s representing himself. 

ARIEL: Yeah, and he has a really bad temper. And somehow he’s getting his hands on pruno, so when I come to see him, he’s drunk. 

He gets his hands on what? 

ARIEL: Pruno. 

Like, bathtub wine. 

ARIEL: Right, right. Yes, exactly. Which is why you rarely get any ketchup in prison. Because they make great pruno out of ketchup, apparently.  I don’t want it. I think ketchup is bad by itself. But, you know, wine made with ketchup? I don’t think so.

But he would come drunk to our meetings, and he would make no sense at all. And he wasn’t any help to me in my job. And I thought, “This is ridiculous. I’m wasting my time.” But one day he gave me an assignment.

He said, “Here’s a list of all the Aryan Brotherhood dropouts.” It was not a long list. “I want you to go through this list, send a letter to each one of these MFing rats [laughs] and ask them if you could come and interview them for me.”

I said, “OK, what do you want me to get out of this?”

And he says, “Well, find out why they testified against the AB.” 

So I went down the list and I sent all these letters out. Some people didn’t even reply, but some people replied and said, “What are you doing?! I know you’re trying to get me! You’re trying to get me killed! I know what you’re doing!”

The only one who wrote back and said he would see me was Michael Thompson. 

I had written to him a pleasant letter saying, you know, “What’s it like out there?” And all of that. At the time that was, um, let’s see, where was it, Calipatria, I think. A desert prison. Real far south, horrible place. And he wrote me back the most wonderful little letter talking about the ecology of Calipatria. 

They have a lot of date… I don’t know if you call them groves, but trees, date trees.

And I went, “What?” 

The language was so educated and so precise, and descriptive that I thought, this is a guy who must have copied this stuff from a brochure or something. I mean, this stuff was, like, almost poetic.

And so I brought that to Big Mac and he said, “Ha ha! Yeah, Thompson. I knew that expletive deleted would say yes. That overbearing expletive, expletive. He used to be true AB! Ask him what happened to him. Why did he become a rat?” 

So I thought, “OK, Mac, you want to send me to Michael Thompson, who bucked the whole AB, dropped out, and testified against them? And you think I’m gonna go there and convince him to take back his testimony? To recant?! What am I supposed to use or say, or what’s the incentive?”

He says, “Oh yeah, use your feminine wiles.” And I just laughed. I said, “I don’t have that many wiles, number one. And number two, even if I had all the wiles in the world, this is a man that did this.” 

I went out there, and I thought I was going to get a face-to-face interview with Michael Thompson. So I was surprised when I arrived there to find that he was behind glass.

Obviously, I introduced myself. And he knew, obviously, why I was there. We had already corresponded.

I suppose we talked about the case and everything that was going on with the prosecution and so forth for maybe an hour or less. Every once in a while a correctional staff would come in there and look in to see if I wanted to leave. But I was just immersed in conversation and it didn’t even occur to me to leave.

What were you guys talking about? 

ARIEL: Everything. 

It was just like one thing led to another, mostly about spirituality and our beliefs. It was just, like, a very free-ranging conversation. It was not very structured. 

He talked about his Native American beliefs. Some of the things he said to me floored me, because it was like listening to myself talk, except on the deepest part of me. Things I would never share with anyone, he was saying them to me.

I was just stunned that I would have a conversation like this with an ex-gang leader in a Level 4 prison in a desert in California. I had the best time. When it finally came time and the guy came back again, the correctional officer, and I was thinking to myself, “You again? We’re not done yet.” And he says, “Uh, you have to leave.” And I said, “Why? What, what time is it?” And he said, “It’s 2:30,” or something. And I was shocked because I had been there for six hours. 

Do you remember what you were thinking to yourself on the drive home?

ARIEL: I was thinking to myself, this is not a man who should be in prison. I was just confused. Why is this man still in prison?

* * *

HEATHER: Were you as charmed by him as everyone else is? 

Um… 

HEATHER: You don’t think he’ll whack me, do you?

Chapter 4: Heather

HEATHER: I first became aware of Michael Thompson when I was assigned to cover a parole hearing. We as the prosecutor have the opportunity to go and oppose the release of those individuals. And present any evidence at those hearings that we perhaps have, or any arguments as to why that person shouldn’t be released. 

So I just coincidentally got on the list—it’s kind of an alphabetical list where they, you know, ask you, hey, are you available? I read through the transcript from the prior hearing, I also read the entire file that I had.

Did anything jump out at you in his file? 

HEATHER: Well, the fact that he was in prison for murdering a couple people. But moreover, it’s not just the original facts of the case, it’s what they’ve done while in custody.

Mr. Thompson had been locked down for many, many years by the time I went to oppose his release. And so when I looked at all of the quote-unquote trouble that he’d been in while in prison, you know, you get written up for having too much peanut butter in your cell sometimes, which I believe was one of his violations. But as a prosecutor, I don’t see that as a deal breaker for him getting released— 

Right.

HEATHER: —by any stretch. I’d probably be hoarding peanut butter if I was in prison, but—you know, or anything I could get my hands on. The board of parole sometimes sees that as like, oh wow, you can’t follow the rules. Which I get, you know. But me personally, when I’m looking at that, I look for big things like violence, things like drugs, anything that’s indicative of some type of criminal activity while in prison.

Mr. Thompson had been on video talking about how he is an incredibly violent man.

MICHAEL (ARCHIVAL): I’m probably one of the most violent individuals you’ll ever meet in your life. No brag, just fact. It’s that simple.

HEATHER: To me, that should be a huge red flag to most people that this inmate should not be released ever.

And then you know, obviously, you look at the seriousness and the nature of the original crime and the callousness, and also the inmate’s ability to actually come to terms with really their motivation for such a crime. Like, what would drive you to commit such a hideous, heinous act against another human being?

I studied psychology in my undergraduate schooling. And I also used to do a lot of counseling with addicts and whatnot, and I think that I have an eye for people who manipulate other people, and that’s served me well as a prosecutor.

One of the biggest things that stood out to me in Mr. Thompson’s file, but it wasn’t even as apparent on paper as it was when I was in the presence of Mr. Thompson at those hearings, is just how truly manipulative he is.

Were there any incidents that jumped to mind?

HEATHER: When he was speaking in front of the parole board, he would twist things ever so slightly. There were two women that were on the board. And I was, sat there watching this and they were enamored with him. 

HEATHER:  He’s a very charismatic, charming man, OK? He’s attractive. He used to be much larger when he was younger. He’s, I’m sure with age, probably gotten a little bit thinner and a little smaller, but he was a very large, imposing man. And he speaks in a manner that is so calming. And his voice is somewhat soothing. And he comes across as a very calm individual, very composed.

They were like, “Wow! Oh, Mr. Thompson, we applaud you for getting your PhD.” And I’m like, PhD?! I think that’s bullshit, OK? Sorry. Can I say that? 

Yeah, yeah. Please.

HEATHER: I smell bullshit. But I also noted what I did see was a pattern. And I 

brought this up to these women at the board. And I was bold in my argument. I said, “If you look at the pattern and practice, he’s, like, capitalized on keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

As soon as law enforcement is on to him, as soon as they smell like, whoa, whoa, whoa, he’s engaged in some illegal activity, he immediately will turn state’s evidence and say, “Hey, whoa, whoa, you know, look over here. I know about these dead kids, let me tell you where their bodies are at.” And law enforcement thinks, “Oh, well this little, you know, insurance scam or this scheme or this is nothing compared to us solving these unsolved murders.”

But he’s full of shit. He’s full of shit. That’s all there is to it. He can be as good looking as he wants. He’s lying. He believes his own lies. He’s truly pathological. I do believe that he believes his own lies. 

And the first parole hearing I went to, I didn’t leave that prison till almost 11 o’clock at night. I was like, oh my God, I’m going to take one in the head in the parking lot right now. I was definitely concerned about my safety when I went to my car that night.

* * *

ARIEL: I don’t believe very much in romance. Romance always seems to fade and become something else. But, family? Family is another thing. Family is that unspoken, blood commitment to people that you will help them no matter what. You may not approve of them, but because they’re family, you have a kind of visceral connection. You just love them.

That’s how I felt about Michael from the very first. In fact, he felt more like family than my own family felt. Like somebody who is so much like me in a kind of spiritual way, emotionally close. I could understand him so well. In fact, when I started to write him letters and he would write back or he’d tell me, “I don’t understand how you understand me so well.”

HEATHER: He is a smart man, because he understands people. He has a confidence about him that is very attractive to people. I wasn’t going to let fear or apprehension stop me from doing my job and from standing up for something that I believe in and for the safety of the people of California.

ARIEL: I said to myself, “I’m going to help get him out. The world would be a much better place with this man out of prison.” And I wouldn’t say that about too many people. You know, whether they’re in prison or not in prison, the world would not be one way or the other changed. But he is so charismatic, just naturally. It’s like a light just kind of pours out of him. And I was determined to help that light get out into the world. 

END

In order of appearance
Song – Artist – Album

Momenta Neo 1 – Quixosis

El Ascenso de la Luz – Interspecifics – Reducción

Shown in the Corner – Sereptie – Sulpher’s End

Living Branches (feat. Chrysanthemum Bear) – Oliver Coates – Throb, Shiver, Arrow of Time

Inmutable – Interspecifics – Reducción

Vértigo – Zoroxxe – Zoroxxe

Repíteme Tu Nombre – Zoroxxe – Zoroxxe

Cetácea – Humano – Agua Salada

Ausente – Julián Moreno – Albán

winter // tungsten – Interbellum – Februari

Spaghetti Western – Andrew Heath & Mi Cosa de Resistance – Café Tristesse

Under the Igloo – OdNu – Ronroco Rococo Memories

Sword Weather – Boduf Songs – Abyss Versions

False Drain – Sereptie – About My Brother

ARIEL: You don’t really understand who you’re looking at until you do their history. I don’t understand why people even date other people without doing a family history, you know? Because you learn so much more about who you’re sitting in front of by knowing everything about their history. 

* * *

OK, there he is. I see him walking down the road.

Hello, hello. How you doing?

MICHAEL: Good, you?

I’m good, yeah. 

MICHAEL: Wanna, why don’t you just park right there? 

OK, great. Shall we?

MICHAEL: Yeah. My little trailer. 

Right. 

MICHAEL: All right. We’re on air. 

Chapter 1: Michael

MICHAEL: I haven’t done ceremony this morning, so if you want to go outside, we can do ceremony, and you can record that if you like. But the idea is that not to put too much ha ha on it, you know, I’m not going to, you know,  “Oh, oh, oh, oh, great spirit,” you know. That’s just not me. 

Sure. You do it however you do it. 

MICHAEL: And, uh, there’s, there’s, there’s no, there’s no theatrics. 

You’ll notice that I’m facing east. Of course, the sun, just now rising, we say that’s the truth that always rises. 

(Did he love me?)

(Don’t know. Never said.)

(I loved him.)

(With the exception of Ariel, Walks on Top was probably the greatest influence in my life. I say that because I attribute so much of what he taught me to having survived prison. I sometimes think that it was almost as if he knew that.)

See where I stand on the sacred hoop of life, and pity me.

What were you like as a boy? Like, did you get into trouble at all? Or like what—? 

MICHAEL: No, I’d never been in trouble.

I had been off and on the reservation in Big Pine. My mother was attempting to raise a number of kids by herself, which is ultimately how I ended up on the reservation. My mother, in her attempt to care for so many children, kind of farmed me out, I guess is the best way to put it, with relatives there. My eldest sister was married to a man that lived on the reservation.

Got it. So she was ostensibly your caretaker. 

MICHAEL: Yeah, I guess that’s one way of saying it. 

OK. 

* * *

MICHAEL: Life on the reservation was about survival. I slept underneath a travel trailer. I don’t recall ever being inside. Back then the rez isn’t like the reservations you see today, with all the big houses and everything because of the casino money. That didn’t happen until the Congress passed the Casino Act in 1988. So you had a lot of tar paper shanties, dirt floors. It was about, really, surviving, staying alive.

I can remember making the rounds to the different shacks. The staple was fry bread. I would go to one shanty in the morning and ask if there were any chores I could do or anything like that.

The mother of the household, whoever that may be, would be making fry bread. And so I would get a piece of fry bread. Then I’d move on to the next one, and of course that always created a minor dilemma because, say I’d been at Mother Janet’s house and had fry bread, and now I went to Mother Kathy’s house and I was going to do some chores there and get a piece of fry bread.

And of course, Mother Kathy would say, “You were at Mother Janet’s?”

And I’d say, “Yes, Mother.”

And she would say, “Did she give you fry bread?”

And I’d say, “Yes, Mother.”

She says, “Is her fry bread better than my fry bread?”

And I’d say, “Oh, no, Mother.”

You don’t know it’s a tough life because you’re just living life. 

You were just kind of left to your own devices. 

MICHAEL: Yes. 

OK. 

MICHAEL: Literally. 

Yeah.

MICHAEL: Left to my own devices. 

OK. 

* * *

MICHAEL: One of my earliest recollections, it’s, um, not necessarily a good one… 

Would you mind sharing that story?

MICHAEL: No, I don’t mind sharing. Let me do it like this. 

That sound you hear is my glass case. Now I’m putting my peepers on. Those are pages turning that you now hear.

It was mid-morning, and a boy came running up to me and pointed at a group of men standing by the bridge that crossed the creek. “They want to talk to you,” he said.

“What for?” I said, with some apprehension. I recognized the men as a group of older men who would have crossed the bridge over the creek that bordered the reservation from time to time and get liquored up at the general store in town.

“Don’t know,” the boy said. “They just told me that they want to talk to you.”

As I crossed the meadow walking toward the group of men, I could see that they were drunk. I walked up to the men, who were laughing, and turned and pointed at the boy and said, “He said you want to talk to me.” Before I could turn completely back around, the man closest to me snatched me off my feet and began to club me with his fist. First, on the side of my head as he gripped me with his other hand under my arm. Then directly in the face. Soon another man joined the first man and grabbed me by my long hair.

I screamed and struggled to free myself as the man holding my hair reached and pulled my shorts off with his other hand — the only clothing I was wearing. He grabbed my penis and testicles in his fist and lifted me bodily into the air. “Let’s cut these off before they get any bigger and he starts fucking our women,” he shouted to the other men. He released his grip on me to unsheathe the knife he wore at his hip. And I hit the ground hard. I was terrified, bloodied, and it felt like my groin had been on fire.

But I no sooner hit the ground when I scrambled on hands and feet to get away. Fortunately, all the men were drunk and staggered after me, but they would have had better luck catching a greased piglet. I made it to my feet and ran for the tree line. The men didn’t pursue, but instead cursed me while laughing amongst themselves.

When I gained the tree line, I went a little further into the forest and finally stopped in a small clearing with some granite boulders jutting up from the ground. I climbed the smallest boulder but decided it wasn’t safe enough and climbed up the front of two larger boulders. Sitting down I was dazed and confused, sobbing and had the hiccups. My nose wouldn’t stop bleeding and my chest and belly had a sheet of blood commingled with dirt and debris. I held my head back and braced my arms behind me on the boulder, to try and stop the bleeding. 

I was looking skyward and could see the trees moving in the wind. Suddenly I had the sense that, just as I was aware of nature, nature was aware of me. It immediately calmed me. It was an unexpected moment of mutual recognition. Like when you look up and see a beautiful woman at the same time that she sees you. I knew then, that an intelligence existed in nature with which I shared an intimate relationship. I knew this intuitively, even as a child. But until I encountered Walks on Top, I didn’t know how to develop that relationship and build on my child’s intuition. 

Since there was nobody to claim me, they put me in Joplin Boys Ranch, which was kind of like a stepping stone to foster care. They put me into juvenile detention.

So, sorry, they put you in juvie without any kind of conviction or anything?

MICHAEL: They couldn’t put me in juvenile hall without something, and so my mother made the claim that I was incorrigible.

Incorrigible about…?

MICHAEL: Life, I guess.

OK. 

MICHAEL: You know, it’s, it’s not really a discussion that I’ve ever had with her.

* * *

A letter to the California Board of Parole, November 2011

My name is Jacqueline Miller. I am the mother of Michael Lynne Thompson.

Chapter 2: Jacqueline

I wanted to correct some things that have been said about me, Michael, and our family.

 I am told some psychiatrists say that I abandoned Michael and he must hate me. It’s true that I did not raise Michael after he was about 13 or 14, but I never abandoned him. I have always been part of his life to this day. 

Michael knows how hard it was for me to raise seven kids on my own. He understands that I left him in the care of other people only when I felt I had no choice. I think if this has damaged Michael in any way, it shows up in his choice of women. 

We are not perfect, as you can see. We have made mistakes. We’ve also had our share of tragedies, but all of us have worked hard to survive without accepting charity and to better ourselves — including Michael.

We are not a criminal family. 

* * *

Do you remember your first meeting with Walks on Top? 

MICHAEL: Yeah, I do, as a matter of fact. 

How old were you?

MICHAEL: I was 12. 

Chapter 3: He Who Walks on Top

MICHAEL: He owned the whole left side of Modjeska Canyon. As you go into the canyon, that was his ranch in there, and then it went back into the mountains. On the right side of that, there were other places, you know, other ranches, small ranches, and there was what, the place they called the Pink Castle, where all the hippies hung. But then you just go over the next hill, and that’s Trabuco Canyon. And Joplin Boys Ranch was in Trabuco Canyon.

So during fire season, they would bring heavy equipment in and they would cut firebreak up over the ridges and everything else, but there were some places they couldn’t get to. So they would gather up the boys in a stakeside truck and take us out to areas that needed firebreak.

Apparently, one day we were out cutting fire break, and it was in close proximity to his place, and he saw me working. I’ve always had a good work ethic. And I was a big kid. When I was 12 years old, from the time I turned 12 to 13, I weighed 220 pounds and was already over 6 feet tall.

And, uh, he observed me. And so he contacted the director, Ray Stripe, of Joplin Boys Ranch, about me. And of course they were looking for a foster home for me. So, Stripe called me in and told me that he had this place, and, you know, what it was and, you know, did I want to meet the individual? And I said, yeah. And so they took me to meet him. 

And did he introduce himself as Walks on Top? Or did he— 

MICHAEL: No. No, he didn’t. He introduced himself as Jack Martin. 

And Walks on Top, he was white, right? 

MICHAEL: He was half white, half Nez Perce, yeah. Mm hm. He lived in two worlds. He was highly regarded in the Native communities all the way down into South America for his knowledge of traditional Native ways. People say medicine man. But he was what’s called wicasa wakan, which is “man of spirit.”

What were your first impressions? 

MICHAEL: I think I was excited. He was a rancher. And, uh, he was a man’s man. He chewed tobacco on both sides, had a cigar in the center. Wore a Stetson hat, Pendleton shirt, buckskin vest, Pendleton pants, Wellington boots, gold watch stuck in his belt. He didn’t have any eyebrows, he had two scars there from brass knuckles. He looked like what you would always envision a western man would look like. 

You don’t hear much about the alpha male characteristic, and I don’t believe that most people even know what a true alpha male is. The presumption is that an alpha male is that individual, you know, that’s a warrior and stand up, and just devastate you, and this and that. That’s not at all what I mean by an alpha male. The idea that someone like Trump, for instance, is an alpha male. My goodness, he’s anything but. His disrespect for women, his disrespect for elders. I mean, you see his disrespect for just a number of situations, and you think, that’s not a leader. That’s not an alpha male.

You know, an alpha male, as Walks on Top would have told you, is that individual who provides for his family, who looks after the children, who looks after the elders, who, if there’s a threat to the village or the camp, remains in the village to protect it. So it’s to provide and to protect.

You got that sense from him. One, that he was very powerful, very competent, and extremely confident. And so, he didn’t really talk much. Spit his tobacco juice and say what he had to say, and that was pretty much it. And he was looking for agreement from me that I wanted to come with him, and he essentially said, “You come here. You’ll work.”

I said, “I don’t have a problem with that.”

So, he picked me up.

Terrible driver. Terrible driver. 

* * *

He was not an advocate of education. He believed that everything you needed to learn you could learn in nature. He was very fond of saying, “Nature doesn’t require a mathematical equivalent.”

I learned horsemanship, from floating their teeth to trimming their hooves to being there when they foal. Riding. I showed them in the arena. Taught me how to build things, maintain a ranch, hunt, fish. Those were all the things, as far as he was concerned, that a man needed to know. 

When Walks on Top was teaching you all of this, when you were 12, 13, how did you take it at the time? 

MICHAEL: Oh, I loved it. I loved everything about him. It didn’t take me long to begin to emulate, you know, him and his dress. He would observe me. He saw that I had a natural connection to nature. And that when I was engaged in ceremony, that it was natural. He said, “You have a blood memory.” 

Even in drumming, the first time he handed me a hand drum, he didn’t have to tell me how to use it. It was as if I knew. You know, that heartbeat. You know, that heartbeat is very simple. It’s just, it’s just a — tuh-tum, tuh-tum, tuh-tum.

He was part Nez Pierce, but was eclectic, I guess is the best term to use, in his approach to his spirituality. You know, it’s just like, I might align myself with the Anishinaabe, for instance. With reason. And the Midewiwin Lodge, the Healing Lodge, and everything that goes along with it. But I’m also trained in Lakota way, Anishinaabe way, Nez Perce way, Cheyenne way, Miwok, Kumeyaay, and their languages and their songs. 

Did Walks on Top teach you bull riding? 

MICHAEL: Yes. Walks on Top pretty much taught me everything. 

The bull is no different than any of us. I mean, he wants to be left in peace. Now I know it sounds odd, but what I really mean, he wants to be left alone. Get the hell off my back. But I don’t know if you’re familiar with bull riding or how it occurs?

Explain it.

MICHAEL: OK, it’s real simple. What they do is they put a cinch between his hind quarters and in his ribcage. It’s really right at the point of his scrotum. You set yourself on his back and it pulls right up into his scrotum. And it’s painful. You see?

It’s not so much that he wants you off his back, he wants that damn strap off his scrotum. But the point is that bull just wants to be left alone. And I’m not going to compete with him for that, you see. I’m going to merge with it. See, I don’t fight it. But if you merge with it and go with that rhythm, all of life is a rhythm, all of life is a dance. That’s my belief. And it’s no different than riding a bull. You know, he just wants to be at peace. He wants to be left alone.

Well, I get it, but meanwhile, in those eight seconds, I’m going to merge with your energy. I’m going to cooperate with you. So as you twist left at the front and twist right at the back to dislodge me, you see, I’m going to compensate. And there’s a flow in that. There’s a movement in that. It’s no different than fighting.

* * *

MICHAEL: When he first started to teach me how to fight, that came as a result of an experience that I think kind of chilled him. 

What happened? 

MICHAEL: I think we were building a bullpen. And it was hot. This is in a high mountain valley. And noontime came, lunch break, and I had my shirt off and I was sweating, so that even the rim of my breeches was wet with sweat. 

And as we walked into the breezeway, he said, “Lay on the floor.” He didn’t explain himself. He just said, “Lay down.” And it triggered me.

Whenever someone gave me an order like that on the rez, it usually involved a beating. Something bad, I’ll just put it that way. And so I thought, “oh damn, here it comes.”

I started shaking as I started to lower myself to the floor. And he turned around and he said, “What’s the matter with you, boy?” (That’s what he used to call me, “boy.”)

I told him that I thought he was going to beat me. He said, “Well, why in the hell would you think that?” 

Why did he ask you to lie down? 

MICHAEL: It was a cement slab and it was cold. So he just offhandedly said, “Lay down,”  to cool off. 

OK. 

MICHAEL: But I didn’t get that. And so, I told him some of my experiences on the reservation. He didn’t say anything. He just very intently watched me as I told him some of those experiences. And then he said, “Well,” he said, “You know, what we’re going to do is we’re going to teach you how to fight.” 

* * *

MICHAEL: He carried a big bandana in his back pocket. I saw it quite often because  he chewed tobacco and whenever he’d spit, he had mustaches, and so he’d pull that out and wipe the tobacco juice off his mustaches.

He would take the bandana from his back pocket. He made a big to-do, big showing, about spreading this bandana out on the ground. And then he’d step up on a corner of it, and he’d say, “Get up on the corner, boy.” He’d say, “OK, put your hands up,” and I put my hands up, and he’d say, “Now hit me.”

I said, “Oh no, no sir.”

He would flick out a hand and he’d hit me on the side of the head and he’d say, “Come on, get your hands up. Hit me.”

I said, “Nah, no sir.”

He pestered me, antagonized me, to the point where I finally just tried to hit him. And of course that was never going to happen. He was extremely proficient in the vast majority of martial arts. He just slipped it, slipped it, slipped it. While he was clobbering me, I was trying to get him. And never connected once.

So that’s how the lessons began.

His style of fighting was in keeping with his body. I have an 82-inch reach, fingertip to fingertip. You know, his would be much shorter than that. It’s a matter of style. So while he was teaching me these techniques, he constantly emphasized make it your own, make it your own, make it your own. And I ultimately did. I mean, it took me probably till I was 18 to do that. But uh, it never occurred to me that I’d ever have a use for it. But as it turned out I did. 

* * *

MICHAEL: When Walks on Top and I would go to rodeo, I’d be in the bull ride. And he taught me a lot of things. A lot of his training actually helped me in my bull riding. So that I was young, and I’m besting these older, full-grown men in the bull ride.

And we’d be camped out. Most rodeos have olive groves or some type of orchard that surrounds them. And that’s where you camp.

The other bull riders would get liquored up. These were full grown men, and then they wanted to seek their revenge against me. And oftentimes it was more than one. The advantage on my part was that they were liquored up.

But Walks on Top never intervened. He could have, but he never did. Even if there was more than one, he would just kind of kick back and watch. And that’s kind of how I honed my skills.

But that’s the kind of thing, you know, if I’d knock a man down, I would step back and tell him, “Man, please stay down.” And they wouldn’t go for that oftentimes.

There’s an ethic associated with violence. Particularly if you fancy yourself a warrior. 

Some violence is necessary as part of the cycle of life, of the struggle to nourish self and family, and to be safe from predators and would-be enemies. But violence is never acceptable as a trivial act. As in a competition of rivalry. Because everyone else’s life is intimately connected to our own. In short, violence is checked and balanced by ethics. And ethics, in turn, arises out of the experience of interconnectedness.

Ethics are absolutely necessary to minimize the damage violence can do to the integrity of human society. Not to mention the trauma to the individual who experiences or perpetrates violence. Therefore, ethics are essential to any true warrior or warrior society.

Violence without ethics is brutality.

Walks on Top used to tell me that all the time. 

NEWSCASTER: The Los Angeles Times reports that investigators in Santa Ana opened a crude grave beneath what had once been a pigpen and recovered the badly decomposed bodies of two men believed beaten and then executed in 1973. Three men were arrested in predawn hours Friday: John Manuel Solis, Robert Sesma, and Michael Lynne Thompson.

MICHAEL: Did he love me? Don’t know. Never said. I loved him.

And the only thing he wanted to know from the commitment offense — he came to see me one time. He came up, came out to the visiting room. Shook hands with him. Sat down.

He said, “Did you do it?”

I said, “No, sir.”

He said, “That’s all I wanted to know.” 

He got up and left. That was it. Man of few words. And that was the last time I saw him. 

END

Series Producer: Meera Kumar
Managing Editor: Robin Amer
Additional Reporting: Brian Krans, Anya Schultz
Fact Checking: Nicole Pasulka
Visuals: Orla Mc Hardy
Contributing Editor: Allison Herrera
Contributing Research: Bethany Jones

Additional Voices: Katie Mingle, Lorrie Goldensohn, Bill Rohlfing, Peter Lang-Stanton, Adam Conover, Dave Shaw, Tina Antolini, Dan Conroy, Betsy Corcoran, James Spring, Lu Olkowski, Nigel Poor, Samantha Harvey, Valinda Lee, Ellen Horne, Brian Reed, Roman Mars, Avery Trufelman, Alice Lyons.

Special thanks: También Records, AudioBulb Records, RVNG Int’l, Rebecca Anderson, Avishay Artsy, Terra Friedman, Ellen Horne, Chioke I’Anson, Steven Jackson, Alexander Jerri, Cynthia Lotze, Jonathan Mitchell, Nigel Poor, Marc Sollinger, Rebecca Kanthor and Ashley Shi at NYU Shanghai, Stephen Match and Meagan Shrinker at the Law Offices of Loevy and Loevy, Jacqueline Swett and Lisa Califf at Donaldson Callif Perez LLP, Cowhouse Studios in County Wexford, Ireland

This series is dedicated to my parents, Bessel van der Kolk and Betta de Boer, and their respective life partners, Licia Skye and Henry Marshall. <3