by Ryan Chapman
coming from the southwest
with bolt cutters.
On one level, Diosito’s intended reading is, I suppose, literally prophetic. But on another, deeper level, it is also figuratively prophetic. For how can one ignore the renaissance of the Latin American “narco-ode” in Juárez, in San Diego, in Cozumel? Is not the work’s literary influence the only criterion against which it can be judged and should be judged? Like Pound’s Cathay, the words shed their obfuscating “meaning” for a libertine clarity. The world could use a few more Diositos.
Fox News Live at 5 reports the poet and his two (or possibly three) associates are still at large. Roadblocks have been erected at all major and rural points of egress.
And so Diosito escapes to Nueva York while I type this selfless auto-panegyric from the confines of the Media Center, which will most assuredly become my tomb. If I allow a momentary digression, I am flattered by the Kickstarter campaign to print and publish this blog post in luxe leather-bound editions. My flattery only deepens with the knowledge these collector’s items are to be produced by Samuel Edmundson Jr., the artisanal bookbinder of Bozeman, Montana, with a twenty-thousand-square-foot workshop and MacArthur “Genius Grant” to his name. Journalistic ethics prevent me from linking to this fundraising campaign—at 55 percent of its goal after one hour!—not to mention the impermeable rules a work of literature abides by vis-à-vis merchandising. Still: flattered.
A word on the merchandising. Though many products and services bear the mark of The Holding Pen, yours truly has never sought restitution for even a thin slice of what I imagine to be a very large pie. There’s the O’Bastardface Triple Stout at celebrated Danish beerhall Tørst, in Brooklyn; a limited-edition Lucite slipcase for issues one through ten, designed by Tom Dixon and available exclusively at Opening Ceremony; jumpsuits in orange colorways by Osh Kosh Black Label; “Westbrook Poppers” at TGIF locations along the northeast corridor; the Moleskine, naturally; and room 213 of the Ace Hotel Bronx, featuring a custom wallpaper of Holding Pen covers and contributors’ mug shots. (I’m told the more licentious residents gyrate against McNairy’s wan expression, the moiré pattern contributing to his come-hither stare.) All that money goes straight to Warden Gertjens’s discretionary fund, and as far as I am concerned, it’s just as well. I am not a marketer. I am a man of letters.
Which is not to say I’m infallible, or that it was an easy road to hoe, as it were. Was The Holding Pen a success from its very first issue? Your comments say “Yes” and “Fuck yes” and in one case a confusing string of eggplant emoji. In truth, this august publication navigated storm-tossed waters and a mutinous crew to reach its present shores of literary Valhalla. In that fateful midsummer meeting with Warden Gertjens, he hadn’t given much direction beyond a name and a four-week turnaround for the début issue. The ebullience I felt in his office, sitting in the wingback chair, I remember, soon turned to doubt and then succumbed to doubt’s enabling cousin, outright terror. The doubt was nothing more than the feelings of inadequacy shared by all great men embarking upon a new project. The terror, on the other hand, was unique to my situation at Westbrook. How to cover a population whose criticism arrived “knives out”? To be clear, I take no issue with the debate over the journalist’s intention and execution—such give-and-take is the very meat and gristle of the profession. Rather, as I lay in bed that summer evening, unable to sleep, listening to the guttural rumble of long-haulers on I-105 bouncing off low cloud cover, I became fixated on the axiom “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” The words floated in the blue air of night, dreamlike and oracular. How to explain the nuances of the journalist-subject relationship and its inevitable betrayals to a pugnacious subject like O’Bastardface? Janet Malcolm, hear my cry! Surely your reportage never bore such short-fuse scrutiny.
I tell you with complete disclosure those first few days were hell on the gastrointestinal routine, as bad as my first month at Westbrook. I would like to note the toilets are cemented to the rear wall and so face the cell gate and, by extension, anyone walking past. The toilets themselves are molded from a single shell (made in Taiwan) with a cold-water tap and sink basin on the left. While this arrangement dissuades furtiveness—you can still make toilet wine, with a bit of practice and patience—it takes getting used to. New fish might puff their chests, but we are all united in Week One bladder shyness, a personal Everest every man conquers on his own, or perhaps a universal Everest every man must conquer in his own way. All but the most fibrous among us knows this and must conquer it in this most public fashion, sometimes under the unblinking eyes of a screw like Wooderson just standing there, staring and drawling, in the voice of an incredulous, much put-upon blaxploitation star, a long and slow “Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit . . .”
To those who suffer from a similar malady, I cannot stress enough the importance of visualization exercises. I have found solace and ameliorative release, for instance, imagining myself in the climax of the 1986 film The Mission as Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons going over the primeval waterfall on that makeshift crucifix. (I suppose all crucifixes are makeshift.) I am père Irons the fallen (and falling) missionary and also at the same time I am the rushing gallons of viscous river water, a kind of anthropomorphized, fecal tumult that can best be described as freeing. Incidentally, Appeals members know The Mission was Father Christopher’s favorite film. McNairy’s own method, which I hope doesn’t breach a confidence in sharing with you: he travels in his mind’s eye to Giants Stadium on game day, where he is seated in the upper bleachers amidst an ongoing triumphal roar by forty thousand screaming fans. He looks up and sees his own face splashed across the JumboTron, his bathroom session broadcast to and accompanied by fellow diehards chanting “Go! Go! Go!” McNairy reports a 100 percent success rate.
Is that a bullhorn? Are the state police here? A quick glance at the geo-tagged Instagrams shows that, yes, the state police installed themselves behind the GSSR’s camp and are taking their sweet time strapping on the riot gear. My guess is they’ll wait a bit before rushing the place: the media exposure demands the most meticulous and professional adherence to protocol.
We’re all on display, one might argue—or I am arguing—including, unfortunately, the GSSR; it’s their bullhorn I hear, held my none other than Ms. Rothschild’s granddaughter. (I always suspected a fundraising connection between the group and the Bearnaise ladies’ next of kin.) I can’t remember her name, Tulip or Rose or Flora; I’d heard she was taking a gap year before Yale. Is she building wells in Papua New Guinea? Volunteering at the local Salvation Army? No. She’s waving what looks like palo santo sticks and chanting, “He took my Nana’s voice! Now let’s take his!”
It’s easy to find fault with the GSSR, but I do respect their passion. The Holding Pen’s splinter group of readers have published a half dozen manifestos on “intifada nostalgia,” which garner audiences out of proportion to the merits, and I suppose I should be more troubled by the group’s radicalization these past few months. The GSSR falsely alleges The Holding Pen’s best work was “its early stuff, when they were just doing it for themselves,” and calls for an abrupt “dismantling of the scaffolding of the infrastructure of destructive affection,” whatever that means. I admit even mentioning their activities and presence outside—and presence here, in these pages—taints the purity of this literary endeavor, and so I will do my best to ignore them.
I see my brief mention of O’Bastardface earlier has revived that old tempest. While I hope to avoid “feeding the trolls,” as Marty Baron once advised, I shall address the vociferous lemmings blitzing the subreddits. Much has been made of how a convict serving eleven back-to-back life sentences raised a six-figure legal defense fund at a three-day Festival of the Juggalos in Duluth, Minnesota. Much has also been made of his coterie of movie producers and their quarterly “research” visits to Westbrook, the fruits of which produced nearly a hundred cable-TV thrillers (Dark Blackness, The Knife of Evil, Blood Passion, Fetal Vision). Personal saf
ety prevents me from besmirching the man here, but I remain skeptical of the endless font of gory detail O’Bastardface provides his flopsweated sycophants year in and year out. A close reading strains psychological verisimilitude: at age sixteen he favored hammers; at eighteen, frozen bananas. His sole remaining mystery, the only story he’s yet to share with his rabid fan base, concerns the provenance of that Medusa-like face tattoo. Its rich greens and goldenrods had been inked in phases, indicating needlework by a professional (i.e., no stick-and-poke inside job). Because of the man’s imposing height you first notice the two webbed feet on his pockmarked right jowl, then the vertiginous legs enjoined in a lithe torso, convex like a kidney bean, expanding into a large anuran visage—with a showman’s grin and oversized eyes—and, traversing O’Bastardface’s ruddy forehead, a spindly arm and four-fingered hand brandishing a top hat with Vegas élan. Everyone inside knows to divert your eyes in the hallways, in the yard, in the showers. Personally, I find O’Bastardface’s tattoo a parenthetical levity to his otherwise brutal mien. (It should be noted face tattoos are fairly common, you have the Aryans’ inked eyebrows, the Latin Kings’ jawlined bumper-sticker phrases, the teardrops on everyone. O’Bastardface stood out because, well, his tattoo is a cartoon.) His witless defenders can flood the comment threads all they like. Their hero is likely disemboweling another inmate at this very moment, working his way through the riot like a salmon swimming upstream. Looking out the plexiglass window behind my desktop, it strikes me that he isn’t attempting escape at all. This is O’Bastardface’s Spring Break, he’s “going wild.” I only hope I can complete this testimonial before the psychopath breaks through my patchwork barricade.
Though in all honesty “psychopath” is not exactly correct. O’Bastardface used the term, a reflexive act of bravado common in Westbrook and exaggerated among new fish: “Oh, sure, son, I’m bipolar with violent tendencies.” “Me? Respect, I got that impulse disorder; I got that oedipal complex with rage issues.” (New fish were also known to butch up their rap sheets, trading drug sentences for vengeance-fueled homicides cribbed from the cinematic work of Denzel Washington.) This boastfulness went unchecked until twenty-three months ago, with the retirement of octogenarian prison shrink Dr. Gareth Edwards. After decades of halfhearted psychoanalysis, or possibly full-hearted and incompetent psychoanalysis—nobody aspires to land at a place like Westbrook—Dr. Edwards is gone but not forgotten, as they say. He left his Freudian thumbprint on the old timers’ psyches, ask any of them about childhood and they’ll ramble on about recovered memories of their father touching their penis, or their brother touching their penis, or their touching of their own penis, but, you know, aggressively. The rumor is Dr. Edwards retired to a Dutch Colonial fixer-upper in Old Chatham; I always saw him as a Bucks County type. Anyways, to return to the thrust of it, his successor was an eager Young Turk out of MIT’s Comp Neuro program, combining the work of poststructuralist Jacques Lacan and network theorist Albert-László Barabasi. I tip my hat to the clever inmate who first deduced the good doctor’s particular weakness: any appeal to his pride—“Doctor, you seemed to do so well with Rodriguez’s OCD; he’s finally on the path to balanced mental health”—and the young doctor couldn’t help himself. “I’m glad to hear that you’re taking this practice seriously, though to be fair to Mr. Rodriguez, it’s nothing more than mild neuroticism, not the woefully over-diagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your friend’s problems can be traced to the divorce of his parents during prepubescence.” You can guess what followed. When virulent psychopathy was reduced to yawn-inducing “Baran webs of circumstantial hostility,” everyone became a pussy. Well, almost everyone. The worst among us—O’Bastardface included—confounded the young doctor and escaped his progressive diagnoses, the maniacal peccadillos hiding in plain sight, as they say. These men interpreted this label-free label as a badge of pride around the flats. I am beyond science! I am beyond language! Or that’s what they would have said if the circumstances of their psychoanalytic quandary did not preclude such self-knowledge. I for one remain thankful for the doctor’s corrective influence elsewhere. Fact-checking The Holding Pen’s contributor bios was difficult enough: “I grew up hard on the streets of North Orlando. I was jacking cars by ten and icing snitches by twelve.”
As if there weren’t enough pressure to faithfully complete this final Editor’s Letter, as if my editorial foxhole weren’t already assailed by the shelling of naysayers and myopic old-guarders, it appears as though Betsy is en route, wending up the Taconic in what I believe is her roommate’s Honda Civic and wearing her boyfriend’s college sweatshirt—I’m told he’s a PhD candidate in Cornell’s school of rooftop agriculture. Betsy’s polluting her Instagram stream with battings of eyelashes and poorly drawn peace signs. My readers and confidants, if you have any respect for my editorial project—nay, my life’s work—you will ignore her meretricious “Who, me?” faces. And though I am not the type to dwell on the hypocrisy of others, New York State’s texting and driving laws are quite stringent; the woman providing ample evidence of breaking such laws is the very same whose holier-than-thou position infests Handcuffed with lines like “The 240 residents of the Bearnaise—a bastion of old-world money on one of Manhattan’s toniest blocks—had little reason to suspect their trusty doorman was a monster hiding in their midst. That is, until it was too late.”
No, her arrival is most unwelcome, and I admit I do take a measure of solace in her inevitable delay by the crowd of upstate weekenders sharing the road, a mile-long centipede of Saabs and Audis inching along the parkway.
In response to her latest venomous GIF, let me defend myself and say: I love women.
* * *
A single rat darted across the hallway, just now, I caught a frantic movement as I glanced away from the computer, through the window of the Media Center. He was on the small side, with soft brown hair and the cautiousness of an emissary in hostile territory. Colonizer! I should have expected as much—rather, I do expect as much: the Media Center is just a few days old and it’s only a matter of time before the rats move in. Everything gleamed at the dedication ceremony last month, I’d been invited to attend as window dressing for the photo ops. The Rosenberg kid—a towheaded alpha male sporting the tan of the permanently “summering”—spoke with casual eloquence at the ribbon cutting. He referred to his notes only in passing: “My father has been called a pillar of the community. He’s been called a model citizen. But to me he will always just be Dad. The man who would play games of horse in our driveway for hours. The man who stayed up until midnight just to Skype during my Morgan Stanley internship in Tokyo. My father wasn’t the type for greeting-card wisdom. But he did say something that I will never forget. At my Wharton graduation he took me aside and said, ‘Live your life with a vision of what they’ll put your name on after you die.’ It could be a street, a park bench, the wing of an art museum, maybe . . . a presidential library? Ha ha. But I believe this place honors my father, and it honors my mother, and it honors their twin passions for rehabilitation and computer solitaire. I hope you incarcerated gentleman use this facility and someday become the pillars of your community.”
The rat is inauspicious: whoever drove our little friend here must be getting close. For now the hallway has the fresh absence of a school corridor in summer, peaceful and unnatural. It will not last.
It’s six p.m. Six p.m.! I’d lost track of time, incredibly enough. On any other day six p.m. would be religious services, continuing ed, anger management sessions, NA, AA, what have you. McNairy and I might donut if the screw on duty looked the other way, knotting a sheet over the bars for privacy, sliding a one-pound weight over the shaft of McNairy’s dick, and working up to a rutting I always found refreshingly choleric. The cold cement plate against the buttocks operates as a choker might in a BDSM coupling, with the synesthetic bonus of semilegible indentations courtesy of the plate’s raised MADE IN USA. (But, you know, backwards.) Donutting’s very hot; I cannot recommend it enou
gh.
It’s incredible how open I’ve become inside. I remember my nervousness our first time; to be precise I wasn’t nervous until the moment of, as it were, we were shuffling past a janitor closet after p.m. lineup and McNairy took cheeky advantage of my blind spot, tossing me in as one might toss his shirt into the hamper. Naturally my first thought was, here comes the stabbing. I’d been in ten or eleven weeks, I’d observed my surroundings, and though I am not a fearful man, I am a realist. If you’ll excuse the gallows humor, I was surprised (in more than one sense) by the other kind of stabbing which followed. McNairy’s rough approach was essential to remove my lifelong politesse, as I’ll call it; he assured me I wouldn’t enjoy it the first ten times as he “fucked the Catholic out of me.” (Cries of apostasy went unacknowledged.) Afterward, in the humid quiet, McNairy took a pretend drag on a cigarette and said, “You know the three rules of anal sex?” I shrugged. He counted on the fingers of his right hand: “Location, location, location.” Sweet McNairy! Even now I can see that slight discoloration at your navel, it hangs before me like a celestial burst of lusty melanin; how I yearn to kiss and lick it one more time, to bite your thick rope of stomach and fill my mouth with your sweat.
I see your #westbrookriot tweets, where I’m told donutting is popular in the Georgia and Arkansas institutions. Who knew?
I could write of my sentimental education for hours, but I must “look past the fence line,” as Dr. Edwards would say, and return to my confession. Though my editorial stewardship has been called “revolutionary” (The Nation) and “reminiscent of early Gaultier” (Vogue), I still put my jumpsuit on one leg at a time. I prepared the inaugural issue of The Holding Pen in an unused vocational studies room, flailing without compass or rudder. Three or four days passed before the answer struck me with forehead-smacking clarity: I should copy someone else’s work. But whose? National Geographic is a revered publication, and reverence is nothing if not pliable. I reasoned I could reshape it to fit my needs and hope for an afterglow of professionalism. (I should note that I hadn’t yet actually read National Geographic, which speaks to the power of its brand.)