Hiding Between the Lines
Over the course of 20 raucous years, J. J. Jameson became a fixture on the city's lively poetry circuit—a loud, drunken declaimer out of central casting. So his many friends were more than a little shocked when Massachusetts police came to town this spring and arrested him. He had been active in his church, loyal to a fault, unusually talented—and his writing revealed such intimate details of his life that people on the scene thought they knew him. But they didn't know he had been doing time for murder, and had escaped. They didn't even know his real name.
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Jameson first emerged on the Chicago poetry scene around 1991. He was a loud and opinionated figure, known for his inflexible ideas about what constitutes poetry, as well as for the catchphrase he hurled at poets who lingered too long in explaining or introducing their work: "Read the fucking poem!" He was a regular at Sunday night readings at The Green Mill in Uptown, at Coffee Chicago, at Higher Ground, and at a host of other bars and cafés that have since closed down. "He read often enough that everybody was aware of him in the scene," says John Starrs, the Coffee Chicago host. "He had a whole persona. He would pretend to be gruff. Everybody loved him. Everybody laughed a lot because he was a very funny man, and you can see it in his poetry."
Jameson's poems aren't bad. The better ones are written in plain language, and they have a self-deprecating charm. The worst are amateurish and vulgar. But there is no doubt from reading his work that Jameson was serious about poetry; he was no occasional scribbler. He always wore a jaunty cap, and he always kept a pencil tucked between the brim and the top fold. When his friend Shelley Nation cleaned out his car after his capture, she found piles of legal pads, which he always kept nearby.
The J. J. Jameson that emerges from reading Lady Rutherfurd's Cauliflower, his published book, and "Lord Rutherfurd's Rutabaga," the unpublished collection he was working on when he was captured, is a self-lacerating romantic with a juvenile sense of humor. He writes about women and their mysteries, about his body and its steady deterioration, and, rather poignantly, about his parents and his failure to understand or please them until it was too late. "Lady Rutherfurd" is a real woman, Jameson's friends say, a fellow Third Unitarian with whom he had an on-again, off-again relationship. She evidently believed Jameson was not good enough for her. In his poems about her, Jameson is alternately aggrieved and smitten, vicious and tender. "Their talk was the talk / of two half-old, half-baked, fuddy-duddies / who just wished to lie down / with a semi-live body / get up in the morning / go about one's business / without head-ache of all that romantic crap," he wrote in "The Authoritarian and the Control Freak," before going on to document the intrusion of "romantic crap" in the relationship. The cauliflower of the title is a reference to Jameson's thwarted attempts to ply her with flora: first a corsage, which she cruelly rejects, and later with a fresh head of cauliflower he offers to cook for Thanksgiving. She prefers frozen vegetables: "I politely told her, / I didn't want any of her / damn frozen vegetables / and I didn't want / any damn frozen relationship either."
Some of the poems are startling in retrospect. "I woke up this morning / feeling someone else's skin / around my bones," begins "Skin," a meditation on aging that reads now as a reference to the veil of lies that surrounded his life in Chicago. In "I Saw god Today," in which Jameson describes an encounter with God and wonders why he allows for war, there are these lines: "God spoke: / You know young man / god gets tempted too / he gets lust in his hearth / when someone with a 410 shotgun / is breathing down / the neck of a rabbit."
Jameson also wrote a poem called "The Lilac Fugitive," about hiding from his parents as a child under his cousin's lilac bush: "Hiding out from the world is an art." Shelley Nation says Jameson personally delivered a copy of the poem to her when he completed it-the closest, she now says as she looks back, he ever came to revealing himself to her.
Of course, the poetry was his undoing. C. J. Laity, a local poet and friend of Jameson's who operates the Web site chicagopoetry.com, selected Jameson as Chicago's "Poet of the Month" for March of this year and placed his photograph and a bio online. It was certainly not the first time Jameson had been in the public sphere. He had given innumerable readings, and he had appeared on the cable access show Labor Beat, with his friend Bob Hercules, a Chicago television producer. He was a guest on several local radio shows, discussing poetry. Indeed, he seemed to tempt fate: he was arrested twice, once for hitting a tree with his car in 1993, and again over a billing dispute with a person who did contracting work for him. He was fingerprinted for both arrests and knew that there was a risk of a match with Norman Porter's prints, but he chose to stay in Chicago and continue to use the same alias. When Shelley Nation was the victim of identity theft, he went with her to discuss the case with a prosecutor. For a time, according to both Gecic and Beaton, Jameson dated a secretary in the office of the mayor. Once he called and got her to put him through to Daley, so he could lobby the mayor to dedicate the renovated boathouse in Humboldt Park to a youth drum corps that used to practice there (Mayor Daley politely rejected the suggestion). Jameson did not behave like a man on the run from the law.
Porter's advocates now use that fact to argue that he led a spotless life in Chicago, which is not true. Aside from the drinking, he was not always forthright in his dealings with friends, says Wheat, citing a time Jameson bought a computer from someone and then never paid him. Gecic, who was a friend for years and continues to support Porter, told me that his relationship with Jameson cooled in part because Gecic was uncomfortable with what he felt was Jameson's abuse of his authority as chairman of the church board: for example, after Jameson became chairman, he directed rehab work at the church to himself and moved into a church apartment that was supposed to be rented to people in the community. Schweig, a fellow church member, says Jameson spent somewhere between $2,000 and $5,000 of church funds to buy tools and supplies for his own work elsewhere. Through his attorney, Porter denied misappropriating funds from the church and said that he did have a dispute with Schweig but that it was "quickly resolved."
In January, the FBI began a routine crosschecking of the fingerprints in its electronic database to root out instances of duplicate prints listed under different names. The Massachusetts State Police had sent Norman Porter's prints to the FBI, and the Chicago Police Department had sent J. J. Jameson's prints from his 1993 arrest. Both sets were sitting in the database for 12 years before anybody realized they were identical. Lieutenant Joseph Pepe, now an investigator for the Massachusetts Department of Corrections Fugitive Unit, was a guard at the Norfolk Pre-Release Center when Porter escaped, and for 18 years had been assigned to find him. In February, he received a drab form letter from the FBI delivering the best news he had heard in years: Norman Porter had been arrested 12 years earlier in Chicago under the name Jacob A. Jameson.
Pepe assumed that Porter had done the smart thing and hit the road after the arrest, but the simple act of entering his name into an online search engine proved otherwise. There he was, Chicago's poet of the month.
Pepe and a team of investigators flew to Chicago and on March 22nd sent a pair of plainclothes Illinois State Police officers to the Third Unitarian Church-Jameson's online bio mentioned the affiliation. The officers didn't want word to get out that they were on to Jameson, so they carried a random photograph of another man and asked people if they'd seen him. While they were in the secretary's office, Jameson popped in to grab a business card. Amazed at their luck, the officers followed him out as he made for the door and showed him the photograph, asking if he'd seen the man. Jameson said no, and remarked how bad crime was in the neighborhood. They asked him his name, and when he said "J. J. Jameson," they put him under arrest.
"Initially, there was a shock," says special agent Todd Damasky, one of the arresting officers. "Like, ‘Oh, my God, they got me.' But after that, as we were walking out of the church, he made the comment, ‘Well, I've had a good 20 years.' He was resigned to his fate. His future had finally caught up to him."
Gordon Walker says he hopes to secure Porter less than the maximum sentence on the escape charge, which normally carries a term of up to ten years, and hopes to persuade a judge to let Porter serve the escape sentence concurrently with the remaining years he must serve for Pigott's murder. But the district attorney handling the case has indicated that he is in no mood to bargain. Walker also says he will eventually resurrect the commutation effort, using Jameson's life in Chicago as evidence that Porter has been thoroughly rehabilitated. In one sense, it's a perfectly logical argument: we don't need to wonder whether Porter could live a relatively harmless life outside prison. He already has. On the other hand, it is uniquely perverse for Porter to claim the 20 years of freedom he stole from the State of Massachusetts as evidence in his argument for release.
His friends understand this point, but they want to see him again. "I don't know," Gecic says when I ask what should be done with Porter. "He did lots of good stuff here. I mean, there were old ladies he made sure could get their groceries. And he helped a lot of people kick their drug and alcohol habits, even though he couldn't kick his own. But there was nobody to keep score. Because he left-because he escaped, there was nobody to keep score and see those things that he did. So they don't count."
"He has the keys to my house and to my car," says Nation. "If he came back tomorrow, he would still have the keys to my house and my car. I trust him completely. Something that has been done in the past doesn't change the J. J. I know and love. I believe that Norman Porter died in prison those many years ago. And J. J. Jameson, the whole person, came out that way."
Don Wheat, the former Third Unitarian Church minister, says he has complicated feelings on the whole subject.
If your liberal tendencies lead you to support Porter's release, Wheat says, what are you to say about the case of Edgar Ray Killen, the Baptist minister who was convicted in June of manslaughter in the 1964 deaths of three civil rights workers in Mississippi? "Everybody at Third Church would say, ‘Nail the bastard,'" Wheat says. "But J. J., they'd say he was helping society. I'm really mixed on this."
Dottie Johnson, Pigott's cousin, allows that J. J. Jameson may not have been a bad guy. "The things that he did I'm sure were appreciated, especially at that church. But there is still that life," she says, referring to her cousin. Porter "still has a debt to society."
There is a very good chance that Norman Porter will die in prison. If, as is likely, he receives the maximum sentence for the 1985 escape, he will not be eligible for parole until 2019. And parole is unlikely to be granted to a man who maintains, as he did to me, that his escape was "an act of civil disobedience" on a par with acts of Henry David Thoreau. He says he has suffered several bouts with cancer, and has by all accounts led a hard life. He looks much older than his 65 years.
Porter seems to know his fate, and he is keenly aware of how lucky he was to live 20 unmolested years of freedom-even those cold nights on Lower Wacker-in Chicago. There is no doubt, even to him, that his life has measured up far better than he deserved: "I've had a great life," he says. "I've been very fortunate, for a guy who should have been hogtied and sent to the nut house." When I asked him how he lived in Chicago-meaning how he got by-he flashed a broad smile and said, seeming to savor every syllable, "Wonderfully."
But MCI–Cedar Junction is not so wonderful and does not appear to be as hospitable as Norfolk was when Porter was the jailhouse intellectual. He spent his first weeks at Cedar Junction in solitary confinement-the prison thought his celebrity status might be disruptive-which was tough on him. When I met with him, we were accompanied by a Massachusetts Department of Corrections press minder who had ferried several other journalists.
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