by Ryan Chapman
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I hope you will not think less of me for the unsavory measures I’ve had to take to protect and barricade myself in the Media Center—measures I may take again with, I fear, increasing unsavoriness. I assure you with hand over heart and other hand over keyboard I only wish to give myself more time in the service of an official accounting of events, as they happened. To wit: I’ve urinated onto the doorframe. The plastic lip bordering the carpet forms an escarpment with the hallway tile, a handy sluice for my noisome volley of psychological warfare. Or is that biological warfare? It strikes me now, as I think about it, the tactic will deter only like-minded individuals, i.e., mentally balanced individuals, and will prove futile against all others. Which begs the question: What is the efficacy of psychological warfare against the psychopath? Must I, as the Hilton Hotels advance man once advised, think as the enemy thinks? Doing so might well guarantee my safety: it would not take much imagination or labor to render this place forbiddingly disgusting were I to continue down the path of uric and fecal redoubt. But at what cost? This cost: completing my final work of literature with the clarity it demands. I will “stay the course,” psychologically speaking, with the burdensome knowledge my near-term trespassers will not think twice about a piss-laden entryway. If they take notice at all, I now realize, it will provoke further enragement, serving the opposite purpose of my original intention. (One might argue the urine is an apt metaphor for this entire Holding Pen debacle.) But they can’t kill me twice! And yet, now that I recall those involuntary courtship rituals in the showers, there’s a remote but real chance the scent of urine may act as a proverbial bell to the Pavlov’s dog of . . . well, I hate to put such vulgarity in print, as it were; in short, a most unwelcome “way to go.” And what if I were rescued? My good fortune would be instantly compromised, and I would become the crazed fetishist micturating on high-end furniture.
To add further impugnment, on-the-scene interviews by WXHY Action News with Taghkanic police and CERT officers place the blame squarely on yours truly. Me! Your humble editor, while Diosito and the others escape scrutiny and recapture.
Not to mention Warden Gertjens. While the mantra of the embattled egotist is the immortal “The whole thing was his idea,” I would be remiss if I didn’t say the whole thing was his idea. In that fateful meeting last July, I sat uncomfortably in a wingback leather chair in the Warden’s office while he ranted about the arbitrariness of Albany’s profligacy: $40M for a Staten Island landfill to blow its toxic air south, $9M for a new high school football stadium in the Bronx—whose fertilizer, the local adolescents quickly learned, produced a powerful hallucinogen when dried and smoked—and Warden Gertjens’s favorite offender, the One Smartwatch per Child initiative for at-risk preschoolers. I confess I only half listened to all this, transfixed as I was by the view outside his windows. Between wooden blinds stained the color of dark-roast coffee, I could just make out the erotic blur of the interstate and the comet trails of long-haul semis.
You may be interested to know this was the first time I’d ever heard the Warden’s voice. I’d heard stories from guys on the intake bus, caught a glimpse of the man during his cameo in the orientation video. Legend has it Warden Gertjens found his calling as a university student in The Hague after a fateful reading of Le Corbusier’s journals, specifically some eight-word parenthetical aside on prisons. It was within those parentheses the young man would live—and indeed, would thrive. In the past decade he’s scurried up the corrections ladder from mealy-mouthed DOC clerk to a star CPA in selvedge denim jeans (retired at the first hint of whiskering) with a stated willingness to relocate his wife and two young daughters at a moment’s notice should a better position arise. He filled his intellectual diet with nightly binges of dense academic journals: Criminal Psychology, Incarcerated Psychopathology, and the brutal elegance of Institutions. Looking around his office, I noted framed commendations from prisons in Oklahoma, Alaska, even California. Which is not to ignore his greatest skill, the very reason for my fateful meeting. For Oot Gertjens was a born rainmaker, adept at navigating Albany’s labyrinthine back channels, playing tennis with the DC machers, and defending enhanced interrogations in op-eds for The New Republic and Apartamento. The Warden was not without his flaws, of course, but unlike most visionaries he operated in an environment in which his most vocal critics could be shackled and sedated.
I snapped to attention as his speech rose in pitch. There was an unmistakable ebullience under his words, a childlike giddiness behind the probity: apparently a fence jumper in Nyack had buggered a bunch of latchkey kids. This, the Warden explained, I remember, was good news for Westbrook, as the escapee—John Ray Jones or Joe Ray Johns, something like that; you can look it up—had become an unkillable talking point for conservatives. Imus did three shows. Rush did five. (They both blamed the “soft-on-guns” guard-tower CO.) Sean Hannity organized his Million Concealed Weapons March on the National Mall. The constituency, the Warden said, pushing up the sleeves on his black turtleneck, was riled up. His tone reminded me of something I’d learned from Father Christopher—learned and then promptly forgot, and then recalled out of the blue that day in the Warden’s office. That is, the tradition of the hierophant. I felt it in my chest and in my bladder: here was an interpreter of the holy.
The Warden said Senator Moser, in all her Thatcherite wisdom, was in the process of adding generous earmarks for getting tougher on crime. Though I’ve always considered myself something of a political agnostic, I remember nodding, I remember replying that getting tough on crime was a good idea, a great idea, the greatest idea I’d ever heard. Warden Gertjens then outlined a new prison newsletter: a journal of the arts “sympathetic to the incarcerated subject and the reforms unique to Westbrook.”
I was now the editor in chief of a one-man editorial department. This was motivation enough to do my very best, and naturally I was well suited to it: my Jesuit education was a pronounced advantage in a job market of subliterates and philistines. The Warden also cited my lack of gang affiliation and—here he consulted some papers on his desk—my psych eval’s Rubin test indicated I was a Questioner, a rarity among the local population. If I grant myself a moment of self-flattery, it should be said I always “go the distance” in completing whatever task I’m charged with carrying out, I’m practically famous for it. The Warden concluded our meeting by saying failure on my part would earn ten weeks in solitary.
I should clarify: it’s true that a handful of inmates dedicate themselves to betterment through distance learning and our “Reform the Future!” workshops. But these studious souls are always child rapists, and their autodidacticism is both a function of and a solution to the endless alone time suffered by the incarcerated pariah. A total waste. The smartest men at Westbrook were the same men you never wanted to talk to and wouldn’t be caught dead with. From the very first issue of The Holding Pen, it was a matter of personal integrity to never publish their submissions—even though, as you would expect, their work showed the highest literary merit. At this moment these blighted scholars are likely somewhere in C Block experiencing a robust bludgeoning, the pedos are just magnets for abuse. I admit to a slight wince when I think of their work, forever lost to the dustbin of history.
(In response to @JenGrrrl98’s tweet: Do we enjoy Annie Hall less, knowing its director, writer, and star conducted sexual relations with his adopted daughter? And if we do enjoy it less, what of the contrast between the filmmaker’s moral ugliness and the very existence of his lauded artistic creation? Might this tension create an aesthetic criterion unique to the work and its ilk? Might we then enjoy less those otherwise “normal” entertainments by artists we’ve deemed faultless, cognizant—as we must be—of the absence of this new tension? And what might faultless mean in such context? It is an almost comic judgment, relying purely on the biographical information available to us, which, if impeccable, cannot be anything but partial. [In response to @JenGrrrl98’s response: charges of “the pot calling
the kettle black” only further proves my thesis.])
As for my own artistic position, it is undoubtedly shaped by the whiff of destiny that seems to accompany my adventures, misadventures, and multiple felonies. I would suggest a genetic predisposition to a life in letters, and perhaps the Warden intuited this on a subconscious or pheromonal level when he charged me with spearheading The Holding Pen. I would cite my paternal grandfather Eloy, by no means a learned man, who supplemented the revenue from his roadside mango stand with scuba excursions for expat Brits—at that time a degenerate lot, too louche for London but not louche enough for Tangiers. They would decamp to Ceylon, as they insisted on calling it—a name I’ve found degrading on a phonetic level in addition to the obvious colonial affront, sounding as it does like that anti-Semitic French novelist. Grandfather Eloy found steady work under none other than Arthur C. Clarke, a true undersea enthusiast and a true overland asshole. “Always talking,” Grandfather Eloy complained.
It’s possible the man’s memories were colored by bitterness. He was diving with Clarke when they chanced upon the ruins of the famous Koneswaram temple, a discovery of no small archaeological importance. This was of course the same temple the Portuguese had pushed off a cliff in the 1600s, and, like Tenzing Norgay three years earlier, my grandfather received no credit in the international press. (He won local renown; in Trincomalee this is akin to being named the tallest midget.) Clarke oversaw the Hindu temple’s rescue and preservation, enlisting my grandfather as a go-between for, it must be said, lucrative rates. I would argue this proximity to literature, if you will, seeped into Grandfather Eloy’s DNA in some osmotic fashion, recombining over the decades and biding its time until finding expression in these very words.
Some of you might be interested in a bit of family lore. Grandfather Eloy was a stoic character. One evening, as the skiff made its way into shore, Clarke asked him what occupied his thoughts all day. “Apes fighting,” Grandfather said, perhaps in jest, perhaps not. Clarke spit into his scuba mask, wiped, looked off at the receding waves, and replied: “Apes? . . . Indeed.”
It appears as though the Appeals have begun a chorus of jump-rope chants to liven the mood and promote light cardiovascular exercise: news cameramen on their union breaks are joining in with impressive fleet-footedness. I can’t make out the words in the Snapchat footage, but there’s a positive vibe to it all. My brothers in arms, I am with you in solidarity and 4/4 time.
To counter some of the pushback re: egotism and re: post-penal-lit hegemony, The Holding Pen does not imply any kind of monopoly on the cultural output of Westbrook. Far from it. In fact, The Holding Pen wasn’t the Warden’s first attempt at pecuniary support via “lefty ‘human interest’ ” stories, as he put it, I remember. For instance, there was the “I Made This!” initiative, named for a stamp on the belts exported to East Coast menswear boutiques, with accompanying tags featuring photographs of each felon “maker” in three-quarters profile, a total failure with the exception of those fashioned by Giuseppe Milani, fifth-generation leatherworker and first-generation arsonist. I believe a local garment-workers’ union scuttled the project a few months into my sentence.
As for the brief run of the sandwich shop Open Faces of Death, the less said the better.
If we were to narrow our scope to literary matters, The Holding Pen is but the most recent in a long line of rehabilitative écrits here at Westbrook. There are the writings of Mookie “Jeff” Sanders, who from his incarceration in 1988 to his death in 2002 (heart attack, the lucky bastard) churned out voluminous period romances for Avon under the nom de plume Raleigh de la Cruz: An Affair of the Heart, Scarlet Sands, The Francophone Lieutenant’s Woman. Sanders attributed his consistent sales at Bible Belt grocery stores to an unwavering formula of biracial female protagonists kidnapped by marauding pirates and, after a few chapters of lusty tension, rescue from implied sex slavery by a velvet-gloved naval officer with a nondebilitating physical weakness. (From his Rita Award acceptance speech: “Eye patches work. IBS, not so much.”) And folk-art aficionados may know Cromwell Eberhardy’s finger painting from the Artforum debate in the late 1980s: Should his work be read as abstract expressionism or, given the artist’s impaired mental and visual acuity, social realism? (Criminologists know him from the 1959 Eberhardy Family Reunion shooting spree in San Luis Obispo.)
Obviously, neither of these precedents benefited from the Warden’s tutelage and resources. From Matt Biddle’s nine-thousand-word Washington Post Weekend profile, which I admit I’ve only skimmed: “Gertjens’s Manichaean nature manifests itself publicly as a beneficent modern Rockefeller dressed down like a bobo architect, with whispers of political aspirations trailing every successful initiative. Meanwhile his callowness expresses itself via eBay bids on Wegner ‘wishbone’ chairs one might characterize as both promiscuous and paroxysmal, in addition to fiscally irresponsible institutional expenditures that make the Sultan of Brunei look like Suze Orman.” I would never condone such defamation—Warden Gertjens has always ruled fairly, as they say—nor would I bite the hand that feeds. But if I may nibble it for a moment, it must be said the Warden was and is quite power hungry. You know the first thing he told me after he told me about The Holding Pen, on that epoch-defining day last July? I’m paraphrasing of course, but it was something like: “Those min-sec hippies at Bright Horizons just got themselves a Good Morning America segment for their Cupcakes Not Bombs program, if you can believe it.” An Ivan Boesky-ish born-again, transported at great expense from New Paltz’s gleaming big house on the hill to the show’s Manhattan studios, sat across from George Stephanopoulos and said, in the clear cadences of the media-trained, “I want to repay my debt to society in trade: if Iran will halt its nuclear production facilities, my fellow inmates and I will send every man, woman, and child in Tehran a delicious, gluten-free cupcake.” Those words actually came out of the prisoner’s mouth, on national television no less, Warden Gertjens said, I remember. (You can visit the GMA site and watch it yourself.) Cupcakes Not Bombs even received a generous NEA grant; a bit of fundraising jujitsu the Warden admitted he found novel and worthy a modicum of respect. As for Westbrook: he wanted to think bigger, something with exponential PR opportunities. How was Warden Gertjens to know The Holding Pen would become his undoing? He was quite narrow-minded—narrow-minded and self-interested to a (sizable) fault.
The Holding Pen is greater than Westbrook, your humble editor included, and as Sherman’s March rages through B Block and C Block—or more specifically Sherman’s Parade of Stabbing and Looting—it is important to consider the The Holding Pen in toto as a work of literature, with the appropriate critical framework this phrase implies and connotes and perhaps even denotes. A critical framework that is better imagined as, say, a critical latticework or, if you will, a critical escalier of faddish hermeneutics, correctional epistemologies, and Pinter-esque moments of silence during Slate podcasts: “Today’s topic, gentlemen: Who is the incarcerated man in the twenty-first century?” “Well, Dana, isn’t he . . . all of us?” Each of these threads, or, I suppose, all of these threads reticulate in a critical trellis up to the lofty balcony of understanding. We all know it is not true understanding we find on that balcony but a mere peek—and, sprouting up from the balcony floor, another critical latticework, vertiginous and hackles-raising, unnerving, seductive . . . the seduction, I would aver, of a work of literature.
One need look no further than the poetry that inspired the riot in the first place. If that’s the right word, “inspired.” It is a well-established fact 99.99 percent of penal verse is awful, the inbred cousin of slam poetry with the emotional range of a Wikipedia stub. Which shows you just how much the Latin Kings’ piece surprised me in the most pleasant way, and by that I mean the writing itself, not their submission process, which was decidedly unpleasant and need not be discussed.
There was an aspirational current to the language, a sense of (dare I say?) spiritual possibility untethered from their shopworn Roman Cat
holicism, and yet grounded by a rawness at the verse’s core: nobody would confuse it for poetry composed on the outside. Crucial to all of this was the acknowledgment of moral consequence, elevating the work above self-pity or self-congratulation. (Please, God, no more “street cred” villanelles!) Copy editing Diosito’s piece, I remember, it was as if “Mi Corazón en Fuego y Mi Plan de Fuga” didn’t end on the page, as if the last stanza were an appeal to the reader to continue the poem in his own head and in his own hand. This is the kind of voice the Will and Edith Rosenberg Media Center for Journalistic Excellence in the Penal Arts champions and was built to champion further, or rather was built with the goal of championing. I still find Diosito’s first sheaf of verse galvanizing, despite what happened later, or more precisely what happened ninety minutes ago. I presented the poem in Volume I, Issue Eight (“Journeys”) in the original Spanish with the faith and trust curious readers would perform the translation work themselves. (Folios are for plebes.) The Warden signs off on every issue, and I realized too late he doesn’t speak Spanish either. He must have felt the same force of talent, must have intuited its power despite the pedestrian hurdle of fluency. His editorial note read, I remember, “More like this. Ups the otherness, good for reaching across the aisle w/r/t $$$.” If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to reproduce a stanza from that first piece, courtesy of Google Translate:
At the magic hour we will meet.
I in yellow, rising
like the phoenix, you
in white the exterminating angel.
Coming from unnamed roads,