A Day in Jail — An encounter with Ira Einhorn
A DAY IN JAIL – An encounter with Ira Einhorn
I have crossed paths with Ira Einhorn three times. The first, in 1968 or 1969, at the old Bandbox Theater in Germantown, where he had been invited to speak on some topic – probably related to expanding consciousness. My impressions of him from then are mostly visual. He had long hair. He spoke volubly and fast, a storm of energy and passion. I do not remember his words, but my sense is that I thought he was smart. I was a high school junior, 17 years old. I thought we were members of the same tribe and that, perhaps, he was one of its leaders.
The next time I saw him was in 1970 at the first Earth Day. I was in the crowd. I had earlier done my assigned task of picking up and bringing to the exhibition area of the Earth Day site on Philadelphia’s Belmont Plateau, a collection of diseased lungs in formaldehyde which demonstrated variously the deadly effects of environmental pollution and smoking on the human breathing apparatus. Ira was the master of ceremonies. He was on stage, a small figure at a great distance across the lawn. Earth Day was a gathering of the tribes to which I then belonged – weary anti-war warriors and the first wave of ecological activists. The movement to make a better world held multiple tasks, and I remember feeling pleased that mass activism had coalesced into this second front of resistance to the forces of ravagement and greed. But in the moment, what Ira said or did mattered little to me. I was happy to be outside, in the energy of the crowd on a lovely spring day in our great city park. From the stage, speakers talked about the whole earth as our Eden, reminding us of our responsibility to protect and ensure paradise. I had no idea that there was backstage wrangling for control of the event or that some of the political or academic leadership of the ecology movement resented Ira’s presence. When my girlfriend arrived, the day was complete. We wove our bodies together on our blanket, as hundreds of others around us were doing. We were all doing our part by being present. I felt, in the peace of that day, that something might have shifted, that some critical mass might have been reached where people began to realize that saving the planet from chemical poisoning and not making war on each other were of a single piece. I thought, at that first Earth Day “Celebration,” because that is what it was called, that the good people of my city were harbingers of some larger social change. I was 19. The national guard shootings of students at Jacksonville and Kent State were less than a month away.
Ira calls himself “the most famous inmate in Pennsylvania.” Like many things Ira says about himself, this is hard to verify. Mumia is in prison in Pennsylvania somewhere as well. And there may be others equally famous. As a temporary member of New Paradise Laboratories, an experimental theater company, with Artistic Director Whit MacLaughlin and company members Jeb Kreger, and Mary McCool, I visited Ira in jail yesterday. He lives in a cell with a roommate in a new medium security facility in Houtzdale, PA. He has been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for the murder of Holly Maddaux in 1977. Among the unusual aspects of his case are the facts that he lived with her body in a trunk in his apartment for two years before his arrest in 1979, and that he jumped bail before his trial and fled to Europe where he managed to live for many years without detection. His whereabouts were discovered and he was extradited in 2001.
We went to see Ira because we are working on a theater piece about Philadelphia in 1960’s and early 70’s, and we felt it would be valuable to talk to him about that time. It would be foolish to pretend that Ira was not significant in the local counter-cultural scene during that time, or ignore him because of his subsequent crime, though we considered it. Some people will undoubtedly think we should not have talked to him, not appeared to sanction his importance then because of what happened later. Mindful of those concerns, we set certain ground rules. We did not want to talk to him about anything that happened after his arrest – really nothing after his stage appearance on Earth Day. But like the paradox which suggests that if you tell someone not to think about pink all they will do is think about pink, even as it remained un-discussed, Holly’s murder hovered over our conversation.
We have been using a phrase which Ira coined as the working title for the piece we are creating. That phrase is one of Ira’s many self descriptions: Planetary Enzyme. Ira meant by this phrase that he was the catalyst for the connection of many disparate elements of the local community and in the larger global progressive and business communities during the 1960’s. That he knew and spoke regularly to leaders in business, politics, policing, and academics is indisputable. The importance of his influence on the connections between individuals and institutions is harder to verify. That the kind of networking Ira engaged in between 1964 and 1970 anticipated the face-to-face networking explosion of the 80’s, which itself anticipated the vaster networking enterprise of the internet, is likewise indisputable. That Ira contributed to the idea of it all is less verifiable. Ira is a supreme self-justifier, self-promoter, self-aggrandizer. According to him, many connections of importance which happened inter-personally at the highest levels of leadership in Philadelphia in those years, were caused by his intercession. That he seems to have been a tool for the local captains of industry, who used him to understand the booming generation they were about to need to market their wares to, seems to evade him. That he saw the explosion of sexual possibilities and drug use in the 1960’s as not only an avenue to achieve greater personal pleasure but also as a cultural metaphor for the desire to escape the dreary horrors of war or the seemingly unavoidable degradation of our planet is true. That he had anything more important to say or do about that than smoke lots of dope and have lots of sex is questionable.
The State Correctional Institution at Houtzdale is a new facility but it operates in much the way other prisons I have visited for research operate. (I researched prisons during the 1980’s as the writer of Let the Doors be of Iron, the Ed Asner-narrated documentary about the history of Eastern State Penitentiary.) There is an indifference on the part of the employees to all issues except as they effect security. Minimal efforts are made to attend to the comforts of the inmates, and sensory deprivation is built in to the design of most modern prisons. Windows in the visiting area in Houtzdale, a large room filled with solid institutional furniture and vending machines, are high off the floor. Out of them, only sky bisected by razor wire is visible. Children visiting their fathers roam the room doing what children do, not awkward about the restrictive nature of the setting. The oddest feature of the room is a hanging rack of backdrops of woods, streams, and farms against which families can have a digital picture taken by a guard. The children pose as if this is absolutely normal. All of the men wear brown uniforms cuffed with yellow, a kind of weird motley which quickly identifies them as inmates. The uniforms are ill fitting and odd. Despite this, Ira does everything he can to make us comfortable. After an hour-long delay getting in – we were listed as media but did not have media credentials and the guards were wary of what a theater company called New Paradise Laboratories might actually make – Ira greets us like we are being let into his home, like we were delayed because of faulty directions he gave us. He wants us to believe in his clout, his stature, even here. He apologizes profusely before we take our seats to talk. It is disarming and absurd. It is a glimpse into his delusion. And it is sad, on the human level, that this is what any person is reduced to: sterile environment, lack of stimulation, and the inability to have simple human interactions like the exchange of hospitality without the overlay of restriction. I feel for the young mothers whose children play around me in the noisy room, more than I do for Ira, in part, I know, because I do not know the stories of the crimes their men have committed.
Talking to Ira it occurs to me that in some strange way, his disappearance was a good career move. By 1979 his interests had gone kooky. He had become a shill for Uri Geller, trying to get the scientific community to investigate the proposition that a man could bend a spoon without touching it, and that mind control might have a military or political utility. But the world had already moved beyond him. His style of free-love boosterism and ranging speculative intellectualizing was already out of vogue. Ira was nearing 40. The boomers who were interested in him a decade before had moved on. By disappearing when he did he was somehow able to remain the Ira of old, committing yet another goof on the squares, outsmarting the cops, surprising us all.
It is also clear to me, sitting across from him, that Ira is a sociopath. He is controlling and manipulative, not really interested in the give and take of conversation as much as he is in constantly taking the temperature of the attention of his guests to see if they are staying with him. He tells us that to display broad knowledge and not be taken as a dilettante he must be a virtuoso in every area. He is not daunted by the fact that this is an utter impossibility. He speaks with a commanding facility on a broad range of topics. On subjects that I know well (theater, literary subjects, history) he has at his instant recall references to obscure books that I have not read that seem to put him on the cutting edge. But it is a dodge. The edge, for his purposes, has probably always been a more workable place than the center. He has theories and ideas. But in the end, his theories are shallow, his ideas are thin. He is not a virtuoso thinker. He is a virtuoso talker. More than once in our meeting he presented an idea as his own that we all recognized as borrowed. He was probably a virtuoso seducer. But because he has no need of the person sitting across from him other than as a mirror of himself, he is dangerous. It is easy to see how people fell into his vortex. He aims his full energy directly at his listener when he is speaking. If one is easily flattered, easily swept up in the energy of a man of passion, he might be very hard to resist. He is affable. He is clever. He is amusing. Before his crime and flight, when his PR was all good, he must have been easy to trust. Perhaps, even though he is reported to have been abusive, he might have been easy to come home to.
In the present it is nearly impossible to listen to Ira talk about his life and not feel creeped out. He speaks in two ways about himself. Using the visual and sensual deprivation of the prison visiting room around him as his prop, the first way he talks about his life is as if it were cleaved in half: the good part — which occurred before “they took my life from me” – and bad part, after. The “they,” it becomes clear, is the original arresting cops, the detective the Maddaux family hired who finally convinced the police to go into his apartment two years after Holly’s disappearance, the CIA, who Ira still apparently contends had it in for him, and later, Lynn Abraham and the Philadelphia prosecutorial establishment and Pennsylvania legislature who were dogged in their pursuit of his extradition and conviction. But he also talks about his life a second way. In this version, it is trisected. The first part is in Philadelphia, the second in Europe, and the third is now. In this version there is a seamless continuum as if, at a certain point he had simply up and moved away, as if he were taking a new job or relocating for family reasons. This seamless version does not include Holly or his flight. They are simply omitted. This version includes his time as a social guru in Philadelphia, his move to Europe and his marriage, his happiness in France, his wife’s stellar cooking, and the vast, star-filled French sky.
The delusional are the world’s most fervent believers. Ira has a kind of religious belief in himself. As the now-captured, allegedly “most famous prisoner in the state,” he is able to revert to his old self, telling stories as if he were a retired general recounting the famous campaigns in a war he believes could sill be won if only he could lead again. He speaks as if there were a shelf of trophies lost when “his life was taken” which attest to his valor in the culture wars. Missing among them are his journals, turned over by the enemy district attorney to Steven Levy who wrote a “disparaging” book about him. He talks about sex in ways which are both insightful about the change in openness which occurred in the ‘60’s, and wholly retrograde. When he talks to us about sex he turns and looks at Mary. He says that women used to come to his door and beg to “suck my cock.” He brags that he has had many women but drops it when we don’t pursue it. That opens to door to thinking about Holly who is off limits and yet always present.
We spend five hours talking to him. The entire time we are with him we reach no moment that feels like regret, nothing that remotely seems like remorse. But for all of us, one piece of the conversation stands out. Ira tells us, early in our talk, about his theory of shock. He is talking about mind control, a subject that brings us perilously close in the chronology of his interests to the moment when Holly was murdered. He tells us that shock “is a mechanism whereby the body takes the rational mind out of commission” because “the mind works too slowly to do what the body needs to do to protect itself” when it has been put under extreme stress. This excursion into Ira’s understanding of biomechanics is on the specific subject of the relationship between the body and the mind, and our changing understanding of it during that time of experimentation with drugs and the expansion of consciousness. But around the table, the four of us register this as something else, as the self-justification of a man who has once upon a time, long ago, snapped and murdered a woman he professed to love. The theory suggests to all of us a hint of blaming the victim for causing the shock that sets the body explosively off. Everything that follows in the conversation, useful information, intellectual bullying, affable reminiscences, now takes another shape. In being the Ira of old, arrested in his development as well as in actuality, he reveals himself.
Driving home, we talk about him, share our impressions, which are remarkably similar. I am struck by the fact that I have in some ways continued to live in the tribe I joined in my youth, though it has changed as I have aged. It has morphed, deepened, broadened, splintered and reformed along the way. There are essential truths I learned in the joyous and open days of my youth that continue to propel my art and my life, and there were foolish notions discarded. I realize I am with another branch of my tribe in the present, working with this theater company that seeks to illuminate paradise on stage every night it performs. It undertakes an enterprise that is brazenly full of hope for joy, insightful and open to new insight, and remarkably un-deluded about the potential for sadness and hurt in the world. It has verities, and it encourages change, revision, speculation. It seeks to embody the scope of life’s meanings, and it accepts that there are mysteries.
As we left Ira in the prison waiting room, he followed us as far toward the security door as he was allowed under the prison’s security rules. At the parting point, he surprised me by clasping my hand. Shaking hands is what civilized people do when they part. It is a gesture of respect and closure, a physical act that suggests an equality of fellows. Outside the sliding gates of the visitor’s area, I duck into the men’s room and wash my hands. I am not acting out of the kind of shock Ira has described. This is a conscious decision. We are not equal. I am 54 years old. My country is back at war. My outrage feels all too familiar. My tribe is responding, slowly perhaps, haltingly, but responding. And Ira is where he belongs.
2005