Doing Time (21 page)

For Charlie it will be the beginning of great things. Charlie got soul. If I could synthesize the heart of his verse it would be this: the longing of looking through iron bars at the real world. Real touching stuff once you get past the trademark ache / break and dove / love rhymes. Next time around he would probably push his more radical stuff, things like “Why the Parole Board Should Be Abolished” and “Why Media Coverage of Violent Crime Should Be Abolished” and “Why the Random Cell Search Should Be Abolished.” I just hope he won't start acting up when he discovers there isn't going to be a second time.

Prison Writing. The term reverberates in my brain case like kettledrums. The anger returns. I can't recall the psycho-speak, but I know it's like a form of Pavlov's. People are set off by certain sights, sounds, even smells, that affect them in very special ways.

Suddenly the gallery feels awfully quiet. I stare at my typewriter, which turns into a missile-control board. It's time to fire away.

I will call her Mother Nature, an artist who came into the prison to “find flowers where others saw only weeds.” I taped the Author's Release to the wall two weeks ago. I feed a blank sheet to the machine.

Dear Mother Narture.

Thank you for the opportunity you have given us to videotape our work for a showing at the Cultural Center. 1 think you are a unique spirit for daring to tap into the voices of this miserably dark place. However, I regret to say that you are on the wrong track if your intentions are to use this so-called Prison Writing Experience as a means for reform, simply because prisoners, although they understand what is wrong with the system better than any criminologist, judge, cop, or outsider, have the credibility of elves. In this sense prison writing's dead wood.

The only other way to look at prison writing is as a way of expression. And, frankly, who wants to hear about loneliness, hopelessness, despair, loss of autonomy, harassment, contempt, or civil death, except to feel real good that things aren't as bad out in the world? Please don't think that I will allow myself to be used as consolation for a civilian audience.

Finally, if you are on a true healing mission, seeking to change the minds and hearts of prisoners through a revolution of the pen, I will appreciate it very much if you'd begin with sending me some real food and vitamins to counterbalance the negative effects of the garbage I am fed. I could also use real medical care, you know, the kind that steps right to the business and doesn't doubt the patient, and doesn't wait for rigor mortis in order to proceed. That's all I got to say.

Very truly yours.

Dr.J.

Sorry, Charlie, I think you better take all your “I hurt” trash and your impossible solutions and rub them on your fat redneck chest. I will be a writer in prison, for now. You be all the prison writer you wish. Be a white gorilla in your cubicle bush with iron fronds and rock-hard soil. Moan your nightly if-onlys and grunt your morning sores of broken luck alone, my man, ‘cause I'll be traveling light with the Daughters of Sin. Their silken manes fall down their rears like pouring silver, and their moans are all 1 need for a cloak. Their touch is a tingle of mercurial dew, their panting a hot leaden mist on a desert of glass. I won't tell you about their kiss, not tonight, Charlie.

Charlie would never understand that nothing they do here is for his benefit. The language of his philosophical cutlery will be toned down, watered down, rekneaded to retain the basic dignity of the system, or rejected if he doesn't go along. Would any prison foster a printed attack on its own ways? Prison writing is as free as the author. Again I engage the machine and begin to spin out a little speech I Have prepared for my prison writing group, which I polish up as I go.

On the Subject of Prison Writing

Good evening, fellow writers. I would like to take a few minutes tonight to discuss prison writing and its place in the larger world of letters.

As we know, writing comes in many kinds. There is fiction writing, journal writing, junk mail writing, copy writing, textbook writing, speech writing, news writing, film script writing .. . you aim, I shoot.

Subject, genre, specialty — the writer enters it by choice. But prison writing is a matter of status. It comes with the bid and that's that. It must take as subject matter life in prison. Prison writing is literally forced upon the writer, who, incidentally, has been stripped of just about everything else. Now, that's supposed to liberate.

Hey, Charlie, you dumb ass! You big cigar-puffin' ignorant crass sack of southern white trash! You bemused witless serf!

A con may write fiction, but everybody will know where it comes from. His fiction wears the stink of prison for a belt. Her fiction is pregnant with loss disguised as possibility. His outlaws always get the better of a wicked status quo. Her heroines grope through a jungle of shame for their stolen womanhood, and perhaps a piece of heaven. A convict may write about Mars, the sea, rebirth, cats, needles and pins; without the “convict point of view” there is no prison writing. Take this goddamned place out of your art is what I am trying to tell you all.

My concentration is assaulted by my boombox-proud neighbot, who jacks up the rapper cacophony until the presence of the guard, like some magical wand, directs him to turn into a punk. (Whatever happened to cool smooth good ol' American jazz?) As soon as the guard leaves the gallery, he is King Kong again.

King Punk is confined to his cell for talking to another inmate two steps out of character. Although he got the brunt of it, violence has no victims here. Self-defense is without justification. If you're hurt, you shouldn't have been there. If you do not defend yourself, you're on a stainless-steel table with a sheet over your head, it's that simple.

And yet sometimes I think prison violence is all overstated, amplified, dramatized,
mythicized,
mostly by outsiders. Mybe I'm desensitized but prison life isn't really as dangerous as it's commonly portrayed. Much of the tension on the inside comes more from the perception of danger than from danger itself. That's why the sneak attack is the preferred mode of action — the little guy sticking a pen in the big guy's eye after the latter jokingly threatened to make him his girl. Although most cases of violence involve aggressor and prey, prison managers are unwilling to recognize assault because of the lawsuits. So they do their damnedest to make everyone look guilty or well-deserving.

Their process is succored by an important rule: Never believe what an inmate says except when he's snitching. In the old days telling was an abomination. Sooner or later the snitch would be found out and have to face the music. Today, telling is something of a sport and the facing up usually doesn't happen, as the snitch may conveniently check his cowardly ass into protective custody.

Underlying this apparent confusion is a beautiful symmetry. In the street, where self-defense is a legitimate act and telling is the bread of concerned citizens, crises tend to ripple off toward agreement. Behind the mirror's face, the littlest disturbance bears the seed of chaos.

After mopping the gallery catwalk that stretches like a giant steel blade past forty cells, I ease into my slippers and robe. On my way to the shower I pass Captain Lafane, whose harrowed look makes me wonder if it's me who is doing the time. He knows that my transition from systems analyst to prison porter has not been easy, but that is not the reason for his grief. His oldest son has AIDS.

I awaken to the chirping of birds. “With all the nooks on the outside, they had to nest in here. There are dozens of them, lodged in the stone bowers high above the uppermost gallery. Jailbirds. Now it happens that prison is also a state of mind.

Will there be any stabbings today? Any rapes? Who cares? No one will ever know the half of it. Just as I rake the stubble off my chin two guards rush past my window into the deep of the gallery. A minute later, two more guards go by with a wire mesh stretcher. Here we go.

Except for the crackle of radios, the gallery is dead-still. No one has been out yet. “We must have an overnighter. The portable mirrors go into peeking mode.

The guards are slow on the catwalk. Two are old and overweight; one just looks sick and tired. Their walk is like a funeral march without an entourage. As they approach my cell 1 pull my mirror in and look down at the stretcher. It's Jimmy G. I better hurry up and finish shaving before they yell for chow.

Questions are being raised about the night guard's rounds, which should go on every two hours. The coroner has established that Jimmy took his life sometime after two. Even after this leak, we know that nothing will be done beyond tightening up the rounds for a while. No jobs will be in jeopardy, even when Jimmy had been talking suicide a few weeks in advance. Even after he was taken twice for observation to a psychiatric center, and advised that there was nothing wrong with him. Even after he flashed his suicide card to his pastor.

In her letter of thanks to his church for having run a fund collection, his mother stated that Jimmy had a chemical imbalance, foreclosing any possibility of a negligence action. Anyway, thank you, Mrs. G. Now all of us who did nothing to prevent your son from giving up will feel better. It was all in his genes as luck is in the stars, we will say.

Jimmy was four-fifths of the way through a sentence for murder. If the truth be told, I can think of one thousand better candidates for Hades just on the basis of their bearing. Jimmy had found religion. Jimmy had found a good church girl to elope with.

We all knew that he had been distressed over his failed marriage, but in here a man is pretty much left alone with the affairs of his heart. It was a union blessed by God, not to be set asunder by another. Why did she have to have “a male friend” at her house almost every time he called…

It couldn't have been you instead of Jimmy, could it, King Punk, you rappin' tappin' slappin' wind-up moppet-faced big bad mouth cybernaut stooge. Even you, farther down, who would have your voice heard by the prison machine. How much are you willing to renounce? A noun-slice here, a verb-tuck there, perhaps a sentence-graft or two? Why don't you just sing praises to the Beast? Something might click. A new trend. Charlie, it might just make a difference!

Jimmy, perhaps you should have come to me. I would have told you their names:

I saw your humbled heart filling your mouth with hardened bread, and I kept silent. You should have known her, too, the one holding the wineskin, that fine hostess of spoils. Plethora will give you of her sac of ambrosia, and you will be made new. I will not risk offending, else I would bring her to you.

When I heard you smite your chest in penitence, I thought,
Jimmy, that ain't no way of doin' time.
Hedone will give you relish, comfort, a new zest. Frolic between the happy slopes and valleys of her Eden, for no one needs saving from love. Rest, Jimmy, rest now, and pound your chest no more.

But of the three, Cacoethes is the crown. She's the baddest, the goodest, the sweetest, the tartest, the hostess of play. She's the lifeline, the night life, hops, cheers, saturnalia again. Fandago, tango, fling, and boogaloo.

They say that she's full of bad habits. Not true. She's sport, gala, picnic, and game all the same. Overall, she's a labor of love. In a cinch she's Ways and Means, my man. For you, she would have plucked the hand that held the knife of infidelity, before it ripped your heart. When Mars directs the rouge over her lips, and paints her eyes for the battle cry, you know there's no staying and no praying for more. All in all, she'll save you from a two-timer wife. Cacoethes is the blood of my pen, liberation without the prison writing.

You won't be needing religion in the bowels of Earth. Neither do I in the belly of Baal. You may judge me unwise, but at least there is no falling from grace in this bed. One day I might tell you the meaning of their names, if you should resurrect.

But tonight I'm riding with the wind.

1994, Eastern New York Correctional Facility Napanoch, New York

It's a race between the roaches and me to see which of us is going to win final and total control of this typewriter

Will I finish my Great American Novel with all its inherent, time-consuming rewrites before these filthy things that huddle in the dark recesses of my battery-powered machine, scurrying in twenty different directions when I remove the case that swarm all over the printing head as it zings back along its track, sometimes jamming it that impudently crawl up and down a sheet of prose right in the middle of a tender love scene… I mean I'm trying to write some literature here, you repulsive !#@¥+
^**
&! bugs

… before they eventually chew through the electronic ribbon —the lifeline of my machine? Will I be able to complete my hook before they do all this? In past days I've noticed they've gathered in greater numbers on this critical ribbon as if planning a final campaign; it's worrying me sick