Roger Keith Coleman VI: Remember Me
The other night I woke up with a start to the knowledge that I owed Doug Richardson some money. He's a screenwriter I knew many moons ago who helped me out when I came back from Canada in 1990 with a few strings missing from my marionette. He and his partner had just gotten a million bucks from Disney for a screenplay called Hellbent for Leather (which was never, made by the way) and he was feeling quite flush at the time. When he wrote me the check he said it would be a gift but I insisted it be a loan to be paid back some day. I had every intention of paying it back. I'm not a welsher.
That's the funny thing about memory. It's quite subjective. And selective. I don't like to think of myself as a deadbeat on a loan from a friend but that's what I appear to be at the moment and it got me to wondering about Roger Keith Coleman's diary, which was a powerful study in denial and how the reshaping of memory gave way to the rebirth of a kinder, gentler man. It got me thinking about why the subconscious has such control over the tricker parts of our nature, and just how self-aware we really are when it comes right down to it.
Coleman was a case in point. Until this meeting with Sharon and the gift of his diary I had only others' opinions as my guide for the who Coleman was. Here in the boardroom with a movie deal at stake, I was privy to a more personal relationship with him. Sharon Paul sat there silently while I flipped open the top page and started to read; I could feel her presence as she willed me to concentrate on his words and not on the snappy deal-making that was occupying Paul and Kitty down the row. A stack of plain paper without a way to keep it together, the diary was carefully typed on an electric typewriter, double spaced, with no corrections or hand-written notes in the margins.
My clearest memory of the experience of reading it first under Sharon's watchful gaze and then later at home was that the whole thing seemed, well, clean. There was as much white space in the economy of words as there was on the spotless copy. I don't know how many revisions he went through before giving it up to public view but the placid surface of his story was so convincing that I at first glance I began to doubt my initial suspicions. I suppose that was the brilliance of the man, because his simplicity and straighforwardness was what one would expect from an uneducated blue collar joe who'd never ventured outside his isolated mountian hometown. His transparency was compelling and I understood then why so many people had become his advocate.
But read something with enough stillness around you and eventually the subtext will make its presence known like some mysterious shadow puzzle. Great writers know how to tap into this river and weave the visible and invisible into a cohesive current that speaks to the truth of the experience. All of us are better critics than we may realize, for we do recognize and experience the unfolding events with the same keen grasp with which they were written, and the circle is complete. The act of writing is merely a conduit to what is happening all around us in everyday life. It is the world of another captured through a shared look, decisions made, futures altered.
And by the same token, when something is out of sync, forced, or manipulated, a warning bell goes off and we eventually disconnect. Unless our subconscious has another plan in mind for us....
In the presence of Sharon Paul, who had so much invested in the truth of these words, I saw at first only the surface of his thoughts and felt the real weight of his situation: The helplessness, frustration and an almost paralysing lassitude one gets when something is too big to overcome. He seemed a quiet, unassuming man who took his pleasure from the simplest of everyday moments, whose memory of his life growing up was blameless and generous to people whom you couldn't help feel were never the same way toward him. It was humbling.
And then, little by little, something of the shadow began to appear - what became clearer as I read through the days and weeks of meticulous entries was that Sharon lived in every word - clearly this effort had started in earnest once he had awakened inside her love and trust. This was a person who would believe in him. His little brown sparrow nesting in the narrow view outside his cloistered life, a memory of something so distant he must have wept with joy to find it again. And slowly, through the process of observing the life he wished he had once had he truly was becoming the man who was open and sincere, who sought emotional connection and reveled in the complex beauty of intimacy shared.
But it was a dream and I really began to see it in the few days that I had to meditate on the subtle messages in his writing. This was not the person he had been before his personal redemption. Someone without a conscience, driven by rage and fear. A serial rapist, establishing a pattern of stalking and preying on women from a very early age. In the end what I experienced was a methodical, almost painful focus down on what remained to him: the simplicity of his spare life in prison and the love of Sharon, another Lost Cause. She could never have him, and in his heart of hearts, he knew he would never have her.
Roger Keith Coleman was executed on May 20, 1992. He died a martyr, a man loved and waiting for redemption after death. Whatever darkness had been his life for so many years must have been well and truly buried because I really do believe that he trusted those who said he would someday be vindicated.
He and Sharon were allowed one visit together without glass between them. He was shackled to a chair. She sat on his lap and they held each other, nuzzled, and kissed. He wrote about every detail, every close whisper, every breath.
When Paul and I accompanied Kitty and Sharon out of the offices of Arnold & Porter, I took a small argillite box I'd been given the day I left Haida Gwaii by the people who knew how much I was hurting, how much I wanted to stay. Argillite is very precious to the Haida people, found only in remote mountainous areas of their island home, it is a soft, luminous black stone, easy to carve. On the small box an eagle mask relief was inset with abalone from the nearby sea.
"The sky is crying," my adopted Naani had said to the grey, rainy day of my departure. Inside the box was a silver heart. I wanted Sharon to have it. I wanted to get on with my life so it was time to let it go to someone who would need it until her time had come to move on.
We parted. Three days later, after Coleman had been executed and taken for burial, Kitty called to tell me that Al Pacino's company had been awarded the rights to his story. A movie was never made. His diary was never published.
In January of this year, DNA tests from a small sample saved by his faithful followers was finally tested. To their shock it proved to be his semen taken from the body of Wanda Fay McCoy, left dead on the floor of her small home with her neck cut from ear to ear.
When asked to comment on the findings, Sharon Paul, who now lives quietly in Seattle said that no matter what the results said, she still believed Roger was innocent.
That's the funny thing about memory. It's quite subjective. And selective. I don't like to think of myself as a deadbeat on a loan from a friend but that's what I appear to be at the moment and it got me to wondering about Roger Keith Coleman's diary, which was a powerful study in denial and how the reshaping of memory gave way to the rebirth of a kinder, gentler man. It got me thinking about why the subconscious has such control over the tricker parts of our nature, and just how self-aware we really are when it comes right down to it.
Coleman was a case in point. Until this meeting with Sharon and the gift of his diary I had only others' opinions as my guide for the who Coleman was. Here in the boardroom with a movie deal at stake, I was privy to a more personal relationship with him. Sharon Paul sat there silently while I flipped open the top page and started to read; I could feel her presence as she willed me to concentrate on his words and not on the snappy deal-making that was occupying Paul and Kitty down the row. A stack of plain paper without a way to keep it together, the diary was carefully typed on an electric typewriter, double spaced, with no corrections or hand-written notes in the margins.
My clearest memory of the experience of reading it first under Sharon's watchful gaze and then later at home was that the whole thing seemed, well, clean. There was as much white space in the economy of words as there was on the spotless copy. I don't know how many revisions he went through before giving it up to public view but the placid surface of his story was so convincing that I at first glance I began to doubt my initial suspicions. I suppose that was the brilliance of the man, because his simplicity and straighforwardness was what one would expect from an uneducated blue collar joe who'd never ventured outside his isolated mountian hometown. His transparency was compelling and I understood then why so many people had become his advocate.
But read something with enough stillness around you and eventually the subtext will make its presence known like some mysterious shadow puzzle. Great writers know how to tap into this river and weave the visible and invisible into a cohesive current that speaks to the truth of the experience. All of us are better critics than we may realize, for we do recognize and experience the unfolding events with the same keen grasp with which they were written, and the circle is complete. The act of writing is merely a conduit to what is happening all around us in everyday life. It is the world of another captured through a shared look, decisions made, futures altered.
And by the same token, when something is out of sync, forced, or manipulated, a warning bell goes off and we eventually disconnect. Unless our subconscious has another plan in mind for us....
In the presence of Sharon Paul, who had so much invested in the truth of these words, I saw at first only the surface of his thoughts and felt the real weight of his situation: The helplessness, frustration and an almost paralysing lassitude one gets when something is too big to overcome. He seemed a quiet, unassuming man who took his pleasure from the simplest of everyday moments, whose memory of his life growing up was blameless and generous to people whom you couldn't help feel were never the same way toward him. It was humbling.
And then, little by little, something of the shadow began to appear - what became clearer as I read through the days and weeks of meticulous entries was that Sharon lived in every word - clearly this effort had started in earnest once he had awakened inside her love and trust. This was a person who would believe in him. His little brown sparrow nesting in the narrow view outside his cloistered life, a memory of something so distant he must have wept with joy to find it again. And slowly, through the process of observing the life he wished he had once had he truly was becoming the man who was open and sincere, who sought emotional connection and reveled in the complex beauty of intimacy shared.
But it was a dream and I really began to see it in the few days that I had to meditate on the subtle messages in his writing. This was not the person he had been before his personal redemption. Someone without a conscience, driven by rage and fear. A serial rapist, establishing a pattern of stalking and preying on women from a very early age. In the end what I experienced was a methodical, almost painful focus down on what remained to him: the simplicity of his spare life in prison and the love of Sharon, another Lost Cause. She could never have him, and in his heart of hearts, he knew he would never have her.
Roger Keith Coleman was executed on May 20, 1992. He died a martyr, a man loved and waiting for redemption after death. Whatever darkness had been his life for so many years must have been well and truly buried because I really do believe that he trusted those who said he would someday be vindicated.
He and Sharon were allowed one visit together without glass between them. He was shackled to a chair. She sat on his lap and they held each other, nuzzled, and kissed. He wrote about every detail, every close whisper, every breath.
When Paul and I accompanied Kitty and Sharon out of the offices of Arnold & Porter, I took a small argillite box I'd been given the day I left Haida Gwaii by the people who knew how much I was hurting, how much I wanted to stay. Argillite is very precious to the Haida people, found only in remote mountainous areas of their island home, it is a soft, luminous black stone, easy to carve. On the small box an eagle mask relief was inset with abalone from the nearby sea.
"The sky is crying," my adopted Naani had said to the grey, rainy day of my departure. Inside the box was a silver heart. I wanted Sharon to have it. I wanted to get on with my life so it was time to let it go to someone who would need it until her time had come to move on.
We parted. Three days later, after Coleman had been executed and taken for burial, Kitty called to tell me that Al Pacino's company had been awarded the rights to his story. A movie was never made. His diary was never published.
In January of this year, DNA tests from a small sample saved by his faithful followers was finally tested. To their shock it proved to be his semen taken from the body of Wanda Fay McCoy, left dead on the floor of her small home with her neck cut from ear to ear.
When asked to comment on the findings, Sharon Paul, who now lives quietly in Seattle said that no matter what the results said, she still believed Roger was innocent.
posted by vallie at 11:17 AM
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