For Artis Monroe, Restoring Used Bikes in Prison Was a Path to Freedom
Behind the prison, outside the wire, hundreds of cast-off bicycles lean in a rainbow of disrepair.
There’s a Huffy cruiser with a rusty cassette and a Schwinn with downtube shifters. A tenspeed from the eight-track era. A Mongoose hardtail with tires so flat they puddle in the dirt. Each week more orphaned bikes arrive in every vintage and appellation. Peugeot. Bianchi. Renyu. Schwinn. Centurion. Bridgestone. Raleigh. They’ve been outgrown, replaced, discarded, abandoned, or forgotten in the darkest, mustiest, cobwebbiest corner of some garage. Some are in a sorrier state than others. This one needs a drivetrain overhaul. That one just needs chain lube. As the sun rises over the tangle of bikes on this day in November 2015, their steward comes out of a dormitory. On one leg of his blue pants, yellow letters spell PRISONER. He’s a redwood- 6-foot-5, north of 250-with a gentle voice. He has brown, steady eyes and an easy smile with a gap between his front teeth. Despite the streak of grey sprouting from each temple, he looks younger than 63. In the California prison system, this is inmate AA0462. His mother named him Artis. His father nicknamed him “Renny,” short for his middle name. The guys here just call him Monroe.
Artis Renard Monroe is one of the roughly 2,500 men incarcerated at California Medical Facility, a state prison 20 miles east of Napa Valley. A little more than half the size of its next-door neighbor, California State Prison, Solano, CMF houses general population inmates, as well as the elderly and sick. Its facilities range in security from Level 1 to Level 4. Charles Manson, briefly, was an inmate here. Most live in cell blocks or open dormitories inside the wire-a high-voltage electric perimeter-in a world of concrete, metal, fluorescent lights, and too many voices bouncing off hard walls.
“Inside, you have to wait for a C.O. (corrections officer) to open the door to let you go out to the yard,” Monroe says. “Out here, I can walk out the door any time I want. Unless it’s count time.”
“Out here” is what everyone calls the Ranch-the minimum-security quarters where 50 or so Level 1 inmates spend their last few months before parole. They’re still counted several times a day and watched from towers by armed corrections officers. But they have relative autonomy and considerable perks: sunshine and basketball courts and a million-dollar view-velvet hills studded with oaks and roaming cattle. They also have jobs-moving furniture, picking up cans beside the highway, landscaping the prison grounds-that pay 15 to 32 cents an hour.
Monroe’s job is fixing bikes. “There’s no better job on the Ranch than this,” he says. It’s “freedom within prison.”
On his daily walk to work, he signs out a box of bike tools from a corrections officer in the tool room, where such things are locked up every night. He loads the box onto a little red Roadmaster wagon and pulls it through the dirt to his office: a corrugated metal shed with a desk and a workshop. Above the door hangs a sign:
THE BIKE PROJECT
REHABILITATION THROUGH RESTORATION
This barrel-roofed shed is the headquarters of a prison recyclery where inmates restore donated bikes and give them back to the community. The program is designed to give them job skills and a chance to contribute something to the community they will soon reenter. This has been happening, quietly, for more than three decades.
Monroe is in charge of the recyclery, overseeing the flow of bikes in and out of the prison, and the handful of inmates who fix them. The program has waxed and waned through the years. Under Monroe, it’s seeing a renaissance. Other Bike Project workers come and go, but he has been a near constant for the four years he’s been at CMF.
Monday through Friday, he arrives at the shed at 6:45 a.m.-a good hour before anyone else. He can view the sunrise, listen to birds, watch deer wander by in the slanting light. He scatters bread for wild turkeys that waddle across the Ranch. It’s a moment of something like solitude, a rare chance to be alone in prison.
“I look forward to coming to work,” he says. “If you like what you’re doing, you forget you’re in prison for the hours that you’re here.”
He hangs a plastic baggie filled with water in the doorway (keeps the flies out) and reorganizes his tools. The officers in the tool room count them every night and leave them in disarray. He counts them, too, as he puts the box back in order. This is a privilege, being trusted with a whole box of tools. Most inmates are allowed only one at a time. He walks over to a Napa Auto Parts calendar hanging on a metal cabinet and draws an X through another day.
He flips through a blue paper folder to review his handwritten inventory. As of today, there are 96 bikes restored and ready to go to new homes. They wait in a shed behind the workshop, out of the sun and salty Pacific air that wafts past Alcatraz, crests the East Bay hills, and stirs the towering palms lining the road into the prison. On pretty days, he imagines the eucalyptus trees rustling in Stern Grove or the waves crashing on Ocean Beach. So close. And so unreachable.
Monroe’s supervisor, Landon Bravo, is the prison’s community resource manager, and oversees several programs. He wears stylish suits and shiny shoes and doesn’t hover over the shed. As long as Monroe has enough inventory, Bravo leaves him mostly alone. They like each other, and they like the arrangement. Bravo drops by now and then to deliver bike requests. A teenage boy wants a mountain bike. The Moose Lodge needs a raffle prize for a fundraiser. A recovering alcoholic lost his license and needs a ride to AA meetings.
Monroe walks among the fixed-up bikes and chooses just the right one for each new owner. He pulls them aside, tags them, and delivers them to the prison gate, where drop-offs and pickups take place. It’s kind of like playing Santa, or Cupid, for strangers he will never meet.
Sometimes he imagines the face behind the handlebar. He envisions some little kid’s smile as he gets his very first bike. (He remembers being that kid.) He especially likes the image of one of his bikes carrying a drug addict down the road to recovery. Someone who was a victim of the reasons he’s here. It’s his second time to prison, he says. (Prison records say it’s his third.) What got him locked up the first time, in the 1980s?
“Possession for sale of narcotics,” he says. “Distribution.”
Back in his twenties, he did time in San Quentin, California’s oldest prison, which has its own zip code. “I didn’t learn anything,” he says. “I was young.” He got out. Grew up. Cleaned up his act. After his mother died in 2000, he got angry. “Lost perspective.” Fell back into trouble.
“I go back to doing stupid stuff around people who have no morals,” he says, “and end up back in prison for conspiracy to run a drug organization.”
Out here, in the shed, he says he has time to think about that. He speaks about his renewed faith in God, and the peace he finds in helping someone quietly and anonymously. “This is an opportunity for redemption,” he says.
One of the first bikes he fixed was for a recovering addict who needed transportation to appointments to graduate from drug court. Monroe picked out a black 3-speed Schwinn cruiser. It came in with flat tires and a broken chain. He pulled fresher tires from another bike and shined the chrome until it winked in the sun. When he was done, the bike looked so badass that one of the prison staffers coveted it. Monroe called it “the Deebo bike,” from the 1995 Ice Cube movie Friday.
After he left the bike at the prison gate, he didn’t give it another thought. He didn’t know the guy who got the Deebo bike was a father in his midforties, a drug addict and alcoholic who had relapsed over and over since his first recovery at age 16. His license revoked, he was ashamed to ask his parents to drive him to all the places he needed to be in order to graduate from drug court. AA meetings. Drug tests. Appointments with his case manager. At least four meetings a week. Monroe didn’t know his Schwinn had gotten the man to every one of them, that he had never been late. Or that after getting sober (and staying sober) the man gave that bike-which he really wanted to keep-to another addict entering drug court.
In a way, these details don’t matter that much to Monroe. “It’s fulfilling something,” he says. It’s enough to feel the sun on his neck and his hands on a bike, helping some stranger in this one small way.
Once in a while, Monroe comes across a special bike. It might be a European relic from the days when Tour de France riders smoked cigarettes in the saddle. Or an early Schwinn with original parts. Sometimes brakeless fixies come in, or carbon road bikes worth four digits. Two unicycles of different heights lean against the shed.
Today he pulls out a little red bike that has seen a lot of miles. It’s heavy and dated and so old-fashioned it’s actually back in style. Butterfly handlebar. Twenty-inch wheels. A chain guard and a coaster brake. The banana seat has long been removed and replaced with a BMX saddle, shoved low and tilted back.
The name on the frame is obscure: Vista Torino 400. Monroe has never heard of that brand, but it looks familiar. He recognizes a perfect knockoff of a Schwinn Stingray. That was the bike every kid in the universe wanted when Monroe was 10 years old. It needs work. The chain is black, coated with the grit of a thousand backyard odysseys.
Its frame bears the scars of every crash, and its head badge is missing. The tires are worn thin by a million turns through vacant lots and magnificent mud puddles. The faded paint is a testament to an endless parade of summers. If bike years are like dog years, it’s well beyond ancient. In people years, it’s around 50. But even through a half-century of grime, Monroe can see the bike it was-and could be.
A bike is a vehicle for so many things. A ride to school. A paper route. An escape from the world of parents. Through the years, it becomes whatever its owner needs it to be. Then one day, its kid stops needing it, or wants things it cannot be. That’s the day the wheels roll to a final stop, or maybe spin for someone else.
“These little bikes,” Monroe says. “They bring back real memories.” This one carries him to the shadow of Candlestick Park, and his first great love: the Giants. He was 10 years old in the summer of ’63, when Juan Marichal, known for his high-kick windup, tossed a near-perfect game against the almost-perfect game of the Milwaukee Braves’ Warren Spahn. Monroe’s hero, Willie Mays, hit a home run in the 16th inning, before roughly 16,000 Candlestick fans, to win the game 1-0.
While he works, Monroe often listens to baseball games on a radio that was stateof-the-art during the Reagan era. The crack of a bat sends his heart soaring, and the hours disappear in the roar of the crowd. In his mind, he is threading a baseball glove over the handlebar of a borrowed bike and racing his buddies to Candlestick Point.
When he wasn’t playing sandlot ball, he was hurtling down hills on his best friend’s bike. Those were the days of skinned knees and no helmets. Curly had a Schwinn Stingray. Curly let him ride it-they had to take turns-but young Artis longed for a bike of his own.
One day, when he was in middle school, his father surprised him. This is one of his favorite stories, though each time he tells it the details change. In one version, his dad tells him to get in the car, they’re going fishing. In another, they’re going to a barbecue. Yet another has them going to the Candlestick parking lot for a driving lesson. Once they get to the parking lot-it’s always Candlestick-his dad tells him to wait right there.
“Go over there, Renny,” his dad says. “I’ll be right back.”
His dad disappears. Then someone comes and leads Artis Monroe to where his dad is standing for the big reveal. Two bikes-a big one and a small one. They pedal to a hill on the other side of Candlestick and ride down it together, flying.
That’s one of the lovely stories. In another, the bike (just one this time) is hidden in a wood-paneled Country Squire wagon. Sometimes the father and son race across the shimmering tar of the parking lot. Or he rides off with Curly, who also gets a new bike. In another telling, the bike is leaning up against a tree at the Gilman Playground, near Candlestick, where everyone’s having a barbecue.
“There’s a little bike there, Renny,” his father says, nodding at the tree.
“Jump on it. It’s yours!”
He can still see it, a blue Schwinn Stingray with three speeds and a banana seat. (In some versions it’s not a real Schwinn, but a knockoff from Sears, Roebuck and Company.) Whatever it was, that bike carried him to the edge of the world and back. He recalls rattling through fields, riding with no hands to impress the girls, and jumping mud puddles (or aiming for the middle). He remembers the feeling of racing down San Francisco hills as steep as ski slopes.
Some of the details may be warped by time, age, or nostalgia. The one thing that doesn’t change is the feeling. That feeling is as true today as it was a half-century ago. Freedom.
Monroe knows just what to do with the Vista Torino 400. He scavenges for newer grips, a banana seat, and whitewall tires. It takes parts from three bikes to make this one whole. He wipes away cobwebs, douses the frame with Simple Green, and scrubs off five decades of dirt. Underneath, she is still a beauty. Timeless. She has plenty of miles left to go.
On a tense day in Cctober 2016, the prison is on lockdown. Last night there was an escape. The fugitive did not dig a tunnel or cut a hole in a fence. He simply walked off the Ranch.
Monroe won’t go to work today. Neither will anyone else. During lockdown, all inmates stay put in whatever place they go when it’s count time. Monroe is the only inmate allowed outside, a generous exception made by the warden for this writer, who traveled 2,000 miles to talk with him again. Their one-arm, nice-to-see-you-again hug is aborted by a corrections officer in a spectacularly awkward moment.
A lot has changed in the last year or so. Other guys paroled. Landon Bravo, the supervisor with the shiny shoes, got a promotion. Which means Monroe got a new supervisor. He wasn’t too happy about that. The thought of starting over, building trust, was almost enough to make him quit. But the new guy looks him in the eye, treats him with respect, and asked him to stay. So here he is.
A lonely baseball sits on his desk in the shed, beside the radio, calendar, Giants’ schedule, and pictures of pretty places. It has been a year since Candlestick Park was torn down to make way for an $8 billion development. The guys who once played softball on the Ranch have long since gotten out. New men sleep in their beds. These new guys don’t care about baseball. They just want to play football and basketball.
“Times change,” Monroe says. “We change.” He still goes through his daily motions on the Ranch. He walks to the prison entrance to pick up the bikes that donors have left. On an average day he’ll find three or four. There are 200 bikes ready to go in one shed. Forty-seven more in another. There’s a queue of 127 bikes waiting to be fixed, and around 99 organ donors.
Mornings are still his sanctuary. Bent over a bike, he thinks a lot. He imagines buying an ice cream cone in Golden Gate Park, attending a free concert in Stern Grove, and watching the sun sink into the endless waves crashing on Ocean Beach. He plans his first meal on the outside-it changes from catfish to oysters to lamb. He thinks about driving up to Lake Tahoe with friends.
“Just being able to do what I want to do,” he says, is what he thinks of the most. “Appreciate the freedom we have so willfully given up by doing stupid things.” It turns out that those “stupid things” are other shifting details. “Conspiracy to distribute narcotics” is not what the prison records say. They say robbery. Burglary. Theft.
Gently asked about that, Monroe begins to sweat. Mopping his face with a blue shop towel, he mumbles something about being “caught doing the theft of taking back something that was mine,” and getting the charges reduced for a shorter sentence.
Months later, after considerable digging, an old newspaper story will turn up another set of facts. It will name Monroe as a suspect known as the “Live-to-go-home bank robber.” Accused of robbing five San Francisco banks in five months, the suspect allegedly brandished no weapon-only a note. The note promised tellers they would “live to go home” if they gave him the money he asked for. In court, Artis Renard Monroe pleaded not guilty to 13 felonies, including robbery and burglary. The D.A.’s office confirmed his case had nothing to do with drugs.
What happens when the facts don’t line up? Where does that leave the truth?
We know this much is true: A prisoner fixed bikes. The bikes helped people. This may or may not add up to redemption. But it matters.
Monroe has a bike set aside for himself. He parks it near his desk, where it leans on a rusty kickstand. It’s a red-and-black Genesis RoadTech with a triple chainring and a gel-padded saddle. Walmart sells it new for $129. It may not be much of a bike, but it has been his constant companion in a world where everything else seems to flow in one direction: out.
He has been told he can keep it when he leaves. Maybe he will. He hasn’t decided. Maybe that gives him something to think about for four months and seven days before he walks out of the prison gates. Every day after work Monroe rides 15 laps around the shed. He may be going in circles, but it feels like moving forward.
A few blocks from the prison, in a park with playgrounds and bike trails, a little girl smiles shyly at the Vista Torino 400. Her name is Amaya. She is seven years old. She has big brown eyes and red earrings. She knows how to ride a bicycle, but this one seems foreign. Not what she expected.
“You can touch it,” says her mother, Tresa Andrews. “It’s yours! Touch it, baby!”
Her old bike was purple, with princess stickers. But both tires are flat, and besides, it’s too small. This one looks and feels a little weird. The handlebar is a funny shape. Her new helmet, donated by a stranger, won’t fit over her braids. The seat looks like nothing she has ever seen.
“This is a banana seat,” her mother says. “See how it’s long and skinny? That’s exactly what Mommy used to have when I was growing up!”
The bike reminds Amaya’s mom of the yellow-and-white Schwinn she’d shared with her little brother. Tresa rode it barefoot, in a bathing suit, all summer. For a minute, she’s that girl again: missing teeth, freckled cheeks, sun-kissed hair flying behind her. It took Tresa’s mom months to save up for that bike. Her brother got a pink hand-me-down. A few nights before Christmas, Tresa helped her mom spray-paint it blue. He didn’t know it was a girl’s bike, but the other boys informed him. He didn’t care. It was his.
That freckled girl is now a single working mom. Photos of her kids-two girls, two boys-are taped to her waitress’s notebook. Her oldest child is about to make her a grandmother. Her youngest is smiling with shy confusion at the bike she couldn’t afford, a gift from the local prison.
The Vista Torino 400 is a little too big for Amaya. She has to balance on the tips of her toes and sit on the nose of the seat. She scooters around, afraid to lift both feet. Then she pedals, timid and wobbly. The front wheel wags back and forth. Her mother runs next to her, holding on. Amaya keeps looking at the ground. Suddenly Amaya’s gaze moves from the ground to the horizon. She pedals fiercely, steady now. Her shy smile transforms into something else. Her mother lets go.
Postscript: By the time he was released on February 24, 2017, Monroe had restored more than 800 bikes. He did not take the one he’d set aside for himself.
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