The Last of Her Kind

About 35 miles outside of Phoenix lives an old woman with a very grandmotherly aura. If she misses your call, her raspy voicemail message says “Hi, it’s Mary Durand. Please forgive me for not being able to answer your call right now, but I swear things will get better soon.” She’s a hippie, or at least a former one, one of the dwindling number of people in the United States who spent portions of the Sixties and Seventies fighting injustice and protesting the war in Vietnam, desperately trying to bring peace to this violent and vile world from the bottom up, who involved themselves in a countercultural revolution which made its way into history starting in Haight-Ashbury. Safe to say, she is no fan of Donald Trump, and got a good, cough-filled laugh out of me referring to him as ‘the Cheeto with a hairpiece on Pennsylvania Avenue.’ She’s lived one hell of a life, to say the least; she’s been engaged to be married three separate times –all of her fiances died before their wedding day–, she spent four years in a convent before deciding the Catholic Church could stick its dogma right back up its ass, and finally settled on a career by taking a job as a social worker who works with convicts on death-row, fighting for life in prison rather than the chair. Her career is now in its twilight, and her legacy of legally battling the death penalty in the US is coming to a close.

Mary’s got the mouth of a sailor, but has spent generations trying to tame it, although she gets worked up sometimes. Then things get ugly, and there will be a warranted barrage of ugly language. An animated Mary Durand is an angry bull, one of those fuckers with a crazy eye you see in the shit-for-kicks towns in the northwest corner of Wyoming; places like Cody. An angry, aggressive, stern and wild beast with nothing to lose, solely a will to take a young cowboy –what the inexperienced debater in whatever realm the overzealous bastard who’s now got Mary worked up is– and leave his ass in the dirt, upside-down and twisted, in desperate need of protection from the Rodeo clowns. Give the angry bull of Mary Durand the chance now, without protection, she’ll pierce you just deep enough to end the cowboy’s career in that Rodeo. She’s the type of woman with that wondrous and dangerous twinge in her arsenal. It’s part of what made her so successful in her career.

“People yell at me because. . . well, nobody yells at me. . . umm, caution me about my language, because I say ‘fuck’ a lot. . . asshole or cocksucker. . . and I say I’d rather hear ‘fuck’ than ‘death by lethal injection.’” This, along with little clips of Mary cussing interjected in between, is the quote used to start a 25-minute short film, released in 2005, on the work Mary does, and is described as such:

Under Arizona law, anyone facing a possible death sentence has a right to a "mitigation investigator." This specialist's job is to find elements in the convicted killer's past to present to the jury in the hopes that they may assign a life sentence instead of the death penalty. Mary Durand is one of these investigators.

She knows what she does for a living, good and well. There was –sometime in the early 2010s when Mary came to town for a few days for a case she was working on and lodged in my mother’s basement– a point when she sat across from me at my family’s kitchen table, a point at which the conversation turned to her work, and she said something along the lines of “I have had some notable killers, but I can't really describe them as filthy scum or disgusting or repulsive. Yes, they have done some wicked shit, but once they are able to trust a bit and share the story of their lives, they are folks whose hard lives, combined with pretty ugly abuse, neglect, etc., have done something horrible by taking another's life. . . I don’t believe it should be legal to take the life of another human in any way. Ya know, honey, when they give these fuckers their injection and write up the report, the cause of death is listed as ‘homicide.’ Yup, that’s a true fact.”

Mary's right about that. When the state puts someone to death, the cause of death is listed as a homicide, simply by virtue of the fact that human life was taken by another human; the very definition of homicide. Her career, a very successful one, has seen its fair share of defeat as well; far and beyond twenty times, Mary Durand has sat behind glass and concrete walls, within the bars and razor-wire of prison barriers, and watched someone with whom she has spent hundreds of hours working and fighting on behalf-of breathe their final breaths.

She’s 76 now, in deteriorating health, and once-and-for-all preparing to settle into retirement for the rest of her days. She was diagnosed with M.S. years ago, but in a defiant act (which frankly surprised no one who knew her) told the doctors ‘fuck you,’ raised her fist to the sky, flipped the bird in the air, and shouted ‘just try and stop me, you son of a bitch.’ All of this is metaphorical, of course, although I’ve heard her cuss-out God enough times that, if someone told me a story somewhat like that, I’d believe it. The attitude she takes with the world is summed up well by a relatively famous line from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which goes, “you better take care of me, Lord, if you don't you're gonna have me on your hands.”

Perhaps that may be why Mary Durand has survived all of these years despite the circumstances of her life; she’s too pure of a soul, and too scary of an adversary, even for God himself. The head-honcho of the Cody Nite Rodeo wants no part of that bull in the pen down there beneath the bleachers. He does his job, plans his events, stops by the Irma in downtown Cody for a drink, and lets the bull with the batshit-crazy look in its eye be. Eventually, that bull will be let out to graze the pastures outside of Cody, northwest into the Absaroka Mountains, to roam in peace, no longer being called to action all-too-often, tied up and caged, only to deal with the next young fool that’s gone and made a terrible mistake and now sits behind bars with his fate tied to that bull’s back. That bull in the pasture, even when let free, will even then still bear the scars of rodeos-past.

That’s as close to heaven as a bull could ever get here on earth, and that’s as close of an analogy as to what, I suspect, the almighty plans to do with Mary Durand. She’s dedicated her career to serving a cause in which she adamantly believes, saving one life at a time however she can, and doing God’s work in the eyes of some (especially herself) because it is what she believes is right. She’s struggled through more than her fair share of loss and pain, physical and emotional, and yet, you couldn’t tell one bit without prodding. I’ve only ever seen her sport a few facial expressions:

A great big smile and a sincere look of complete and utter joy to see something or someone, may it range from a friend who she hasn’t seen in years to a basket of chips and salsa being delivered to her table at some shitty Mexican joint she likes because she knows the bartender from somewhere. . .

A look of horror, shock, disgust, and fiery rage all at the same time, usually observed whenever something, big or small, inconveniences her or gets in her way, like when some dipshit on the road doesn’t use their signal blinker, or when someone ‘gets her going’ for whatever reason, so help them, God. . .

What can only be described as a contentedness with annoyance, a look which sums up ‘c’est la vie’ perfectly, and this is how her face usually rests as far as I can remember. . .

But Mary Durand is one of the hundreds-of-thousands, if not millions, of bleeding-heart-liberal, warm-and-welcoming, confrontational, convicted, kind, and revolutionary citizens of the United States that are slowly fading from the face of this nation; she’s one of the last remaining, living and breathing, voices that began and joined a greater movement for a better world, and continued the fight beyond the mud and orgies and acid and electric-guitars of Woodstock. It all began with her hatred of the Vietnam War –or maybe it was before that–. Hatred of war, death, killing, Nixon, LBJ, North Vietnam, the Truman Doctrine in action, racism and racists, hypocrites. . . the list goes on and on, but atop it would be none other than Ho Chi-Minh. Mary has sworn off travel anywhere near the Southeast-Asian corner of the world out of loathing for the whole thing. Her sister, on the other hand, was brave enough to venture there, to the gravesite of that murderous communist Vietnamese pig once, where she proceeded to pour a small water bottle filled with her own piss out at the gravesite; as close as anyone will ever come to pissing on the grave of Ho Chi Minh. And, in spirit, that plastic water bottle contained the disdain, loathing, curses, and piss of Mary Durand herself, and physically contained that of her sister.

“The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults,” was a part of the opinion formed by Alexis de Tocqueville in his famous book Democracy in America. Three times in American history has this happened in a domestic sense: in 1789, when the Articles of Confederation were tossed aside and the Constitution became the governing document of the land; from 1861 to 1865, when the nation split in two and the Northern and Southern States slaughtered each other over which government had the right to decide if one human being could own another; and in the 1960s, when the ‘Hippie’ counterculture took center-stage, and began political, governmental, cultural, and social change which redefined something inherent about the American Dream. The first two, the Constitutional Convention and the American Civil War, while equally monumental and similarly consequential in their impact on America to the Hippie movement, both differ in one major way, and that difference is what makes the Hippie movement more ‘existentially American’ than its counterparts. The Hippie movement was, completely and totally, a movement by, for, and about the people of the United States of America. It was a movement that began from the ground up, not a conflict within government, but a conflict between the government and its people, a conflict between a society and its citizens, a conflict between the culture and those who continued it. Born from LSD and wacky patterns displayed in a protest of conformity in San Francisco came the Civil Rights Movement, came a change of the average American’s trust and confidence in the government, came the largest protests since a Hooverville appeared a few blocks south of the Capitol in ‘32, full of veterans demanding money promised to them –to be paid out at a later date, of course. The March on Washington, where MLK gave his “I Have a Dream Speech,” one of the most iconic, pivotal, historic and consequential gatherings in American history, the most notable single demonstration of America’s internal will and ability to repair her faults, in coordination with the eventual signing-into-law of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was the pinnacle of the success of the Civil Rights movement, a subsidiary of the Hippie movement.

But, as Hunter Thompson put it, again from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, “America [is] just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.” America remains as such (although it’s a lot more like three hundred million now). That was true when Eisenhower kissed his wife and said “happy 1960, honey,” it was true when Dr.King told the world his dream in August of ‘63, it was true when Nixon slammed his fist and said “I’m not a crook!”, and it is still true today, as Mary Durand winds down her career.

But the Hippie movement instilled something within this nation, as they marched on and on about issue after issue, and as they slowly re-situated themselves within the society they felt they had worked to make better. They went from being gathered at Woodstock and the base of the Lincoln Memorial back to their posts as used car salesmen, insurance reps, wholesale tire distributors, farmers and ranchers throughout American cities and towns. Eventually, almost every one of them retained their sentiments, gave up the fight, returned home with a sense of self-righteous accomplishment, and retired to vocally supporting what they believed in rather than working for it.

Mary never did that. Mary’s never given up before. In any fashion. She’s been beat, but she has never once given up. Persistent? Relentless? Convicted? Call it what you may, Mary Durand has whatever quality it may be. And she’s the rare person who thinks from her heart and filters it through her brain. She’s turned her compassion, her conviction, her sense of right and wrong, into a mighty and vigilant fight against the injustices of the place she lives, which she lovingly refers to as “Dumbfuckistan.” Arizona is a red state, ergo part of ‘Dumbfuckistan.’

Dumbfuckistan is a large place in Mary’s mind, more than just a physical or geographical location. It certainly includes the nursing school in Minnesota she was thrown out of for drinking. “They asked me to fucking leave, or said I ‘may be better suited somewhere else,’ the cocksuckers, just because my friends and I sometimes crossed the river into Wisconsin where the age to drink was 18. We’d all go drink and shoot pool and have a grand old time. And think, there are kids I’ve met doing fucking forty years for marijuana. Half of the shit I did when I was young they’d have thrown me in jail for. Goddamn fucking pricks,” she said about her time there, laughing. Dumbfuckistan includes any place in which the use of “ni**er,” is commonplace, or even not-irregular. Mary’s never been apologetic about how she has behaved, how she speaks, the things she’s done and the life she’s led, nor quiet about her opinions. Dumbfuckistan is the phrase she uses for a time or a place in which things Mary disagrees with on a moral level –which is most issues she is passionate about– are present. She’s been fighting her part of the fight, in a noble and grandiose-at-minimum, free and kind-hearted fashion her entire career. But, soon, that fight ends, and with it ends the work of yet another revolutionary still fighting.

As the passionate generation of committed idealists of the Sixties counterculture leaves the working world for retirement, or pass on to the next stage of existence (or lack thereof depending on your personal beliefs), the fire which once ignited a broken society into a ball of political and civil strife, which, to this day, still burns in the depths of the souls of people like Mary Durand, becomes reduced from low flames to nothing but embers. Mary Durand is the last of her generation’s kind, and, as was inevitable, is now a woman finally outlasted by the existential burden of time.

I know not if the soul is immortal, or even existent, but I know that Mary Durand will live on long after her body leaves this Earth. Questions of souls, God, the flaming pit of the doomed be damned, Mary Durand will live on through the kindness she’s shown, through the memories (of hundreds, near a thousand most-likely) of the people who have found themselves aghast at her profanity, and through the peoples’ lives she’s saved. She will undoubtedly haunt the dreams of some Judge or Clerk or boss she offended along the way, and she has touched the lives, for better or for worse, of the people she’s come along since she moved to Arizona after being told two more years in Minnesota would put her six feet deep.

Mary had reached out to me through email, and sent me this message out of the blue:

Hey Chris, It's Mary Durand from Phoenix. I've been thinking of you for a long time as you are one of the nicest people I have ever met and now that the Nats are in the World Series, I think of you even more. How are you? Where are you? What are you doing? When are you coming to Phoenix?Things here have finally cooled off...it's in the 80's, not the 115's, so I'm really happy. I am also close to retiring as my last big trial is almost over and I only have a few cases to wrap up and then I'm done. I mean, no more work. Been a long time coming.Once that happens, I may well get into the car and just hit the road and see lots of fabulous people that I haven't seen in a long, long time. You are one of them. I will never forget your kindness to me and I hope that the day comes when I can return the favor. So when you have a minute, do let me know what's happening in your life. Take good care. -Mary

Mary Durand is someone of whom I have fond memories, and although I have only met her in person once –an extended period, a day or two short of a week– I sent her an email back with my phone number and told her to reach out whenever was most convenient. Over the phone, Mary and I talked of things far and wide, and relatively soon, we had gotten right into the muck of life.

“Honey, shit, you know, when I got to Arizona, I had thought, ‘hell, I’ll be dead by 35,’ so I wasn’t behaving as I maybe should have.” Mary did say, however, due to her mother's blouse-checks and strict Catholic-value based rules wherever she had found herself living, she had taken longer than one would expect to blossom into the absolute rebel she became. “I didn’t get laid until I was fucking 25! Ha! I never thought much about where my life was going; first it was set and controlled, and then I thought pretty soon I was going to be dead as a fucking mackerel. I went down to Arizona from Minnesota, and luckily some treatments came along and I began to stop fucking around. Life became too important for me. . . I felt it only right to do things for other people who didn’t and don’t have what I did when I was young.” Mary then told me about a high profile case she had won, in which a teenage male, who was still a minor at the time, attempted to murder his mother with an axe, and subsequently was transferred out of the juvenile court system and placed on death row.

It was at this point in the conversation at which, for some inexplicable reason, the static and connectivity issues which had been making the cross-country call rather difficult to hear, cleared up almost completely. Mary explained the specific, horrific details of the abuse the ‘man’ on death row had suffered at the hands of his mother and stepfather, and effectively, how she defied her superior and went straight to the Judge with her report. She described to me her supervisor in that case as “a repulsive swine worth no more description; fuck, [we] shouldn’t even think about that total fuckhead.”

Although she ‘retires’ quite soon, I’m not sure if she'll ever truly ‘retire’; she’s got conviction, arguably to her own detriment, which she will never abandon. The warm and welcoming heart of Mary Durand –someone who’s roommate she knows from long ago and was, recently, released after serving 30 years– continues to take pro-bono case after pro-bono case for people all over the state of Arizona. Within her lives the last personification of the ‘hippie’ cause in action; just as we celebrate the retirements of decorated and successful military commanders, Mary Durand deserves the same for the cause she has so faithfully served, and the compassion in her heart, but will get no such celebration, awards, or pension. Instead, she’ll spend more time with her Alzheimers-ridden brother a few miles down the road. She claims she’ll travel, but that’s subject to her health –mind you, she’s almost a year sober and fully embracing it, and claims her health has improved immensely.

None of us are immortal, that’s simple fact. But, our legacies can be, and, just as Bobby Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr., Harvey Milk, and Elvis Presley are etched into immortality so long as the legacy of the United States endures, Mary Durand has etched her place within that legacy. People are often not recognized for their work for generations after their deaths; and, many times, the dark realities of slow progress preclude any recognition of outstanding work of the past, leaving true heros near-forgotten. Mary Durand may never be recognized for all she has done to serve this country, but her contribution has earned a place in history, and her language a reputation which precedes her.

Mary and I spoke briefly again the other day: a call of little importance beyond friendly life-advice exchanged between two people with a nearly 60 year age gap. The call ended rather abruptly, as there had been some commotion on one of our ends. As we both prepared to hang up, having said our goodbyes, Mary said to me “hey, power to the people, babe! Power to the people!”