by Ryan Chapman
I remember we’d not even had the chance to say hello before a fight erupted in the booth next to ours (my right, Betsy’s left). There was first a man and a woman, then a second woman burst through the visitor’s door and beelined for the first woman. The screws let it go on a bit, the sheer entertainment value was so high, and as the women scratched at each other’s faces I noticed my neighbor casually pawing at his crotch. Then Sanderson, an old front-of-house screw with truly impressive eczema blooming across the desert scrub of his face, he stepped in and evicted the sparring ladies. Typical. The visitation room was populated by the sorriest lot you’ve ever seen, scab pickers and bus-station rejects all. If inside is the place where hope goes to die, the visitor’s room is where hope goes to live in a persistent vegetative state.
Betsy was unnerved. I tried to lighten the mood, asked if she’d read any good books lately—a cliché move, yes, but also funny in retrospect, considering how les belles lettres have become the centrifugal force in our romantic and adversarial pas de deux. She pulled out a worn paperback stamped with the name of a Brooklyn secondhand shop, and in a mousy voice said it was some recent sensation, the memoir of a soldier who underwent gender reassignment surgery during a tour in Afghanistan, Tanks for the Mammaries; its story is likely familiar to readers with more catholic tastes. (Betsy had even read a few sentences to me before I stopped her, the author was too self-pitying.) Though Betsy revealed herself in time a bilious memoirist of the lowest order, a grad-school Judas for the ages, I warmed to her every remark. She told me about The Holding Pen’s “huge following” in the Braille community, “among sight-impaired and non-sight-impaired readers alike.” Her voice grew stronger and more confident, I noticed, as I tried not to look at her breasts. She retrieved a small pad of paper and casually asked if I had a pen she could borrow, as if I could just slide it through the Perspex. I said I didn’t have a pen, but they let us carry pocketknives, did she want to borrow one of those? She apologized and then apologized a second time, of course no, she wasn’t thinking, how horrible. I found it somewhat comic; you have to keep a sense of humor in life, otherwise what’s the point. I could see Betsy felt quite abashed. This created a silence so total, so public, I knew I would have to be the one to break it. She idly fingered a corner of notebook paper, creasing the edge into a triangle, until I said I could ask one of the COs to take one out of my commissary account. She smiled and nodded as I motioned to the screw posted at the door and explained my request. After a long glance at Betsy he said she’d have to keep it. I replied fine, not a problem, make it so, all the while feeling the sting of the institutional markup.
Suddenly I saw us as the vacationing couple, she demanding the upgrade to the seats with more legroom. Or strolling through SoHo, slowing her pace in front of Marc Jacobs. Ha! My laugh startled Betsy, for a second there was real confusion in her eyes. In that moment I wondered if my pique was Betsy’s intention all along, a small gift from the man who has nothing. It strikes me now there may have been an additional aspect to Betsy’s machinations, a Day One test of my malleability and credulousness. Bravo, Ms. Pankhurst, bravo. I passed with flying colors, which is to say I failed myself. It’s not enough to be under her thumb, one must volunteer to go under the wheel. I’m reminded of something the Hilton Hotels advance man once said: Sri Lankans were gluttons for punishment. How prophetic.
We must have radiated our mutual attraction, for Acosta appeared over her shoulder and said she’d had a cancellation if we wanted to squeeze in a quick portrait. Ho ho! This is moving along quite well, I thought. Acosta and her great eagle’s nest of hair escorted Betsy over to the Annex of Memories while I exited, signed in, signed out, shackled up, received a quick pat-down, and met them through a separate door. I’m not sure how long the portrait studio had been in operation, but it was always Acosta’s show, as it were, her side project and reward for a solid twenty on the job. I understand it’s a reliable source of revenue and increasingly common at East Coast min-secs.
As soon as I entered the Annex—really just a wide corridor for the prison’s odds and ends—I was immediately met by the sight of an African lakeshore with all manner of fauna dotting the landscape: ocelots, toucans, and an old silverback, defiant and sage. This lush vista was to be the fabric backdrop to our couple’s portrait. If you’d told me at breakfast I would see a painting of a toucan that afternoon, I’d have replied, “No way, José.” Acosta positioned us over an X mark on the floor and ran a couple test flashes from her tripod-mounted camera. (If Betsy noticed the tripod was bolted to the floor, she didn’t let on.) Betsy stood in front of me like we were old lovers, she even pushed her ass against my right thigh. My cheeks went a deep crimson visible in the photograph. You might even mistake it for sunburn from a day on safari were it not for my jumpsuit and Betsy’s winter wear. She said she would make this her profile pic; I replied that I was flattered. This seemed to be the response she sought. We were shooed away for the next family in line, whose patriarch thinned his eyes at Betsy.
When we retook our seats across the Perspex, I recall now experiencing a fugitive sensation, one I’d long thought dead and gone. A glance at the wall-mounted clock told me we had sixteen minutes remaining. I became aware of the limits of small time, that old bugaboo. It’s a real killer inside, but still I welcomed it; small time was a cousin to that other rarity, sudden happiness. Of course, realizing as much tends to result in its dissolution, you may as well try to grasp the morning fog. I must have grinned at the thought, which Betsy would later embellish to—if I can remember the passage correctly—“the bone-chilling smile of the homicidal simpleton.” Betsy asked about life inside, the usual tourist stuff; I replied with a few lines cribbed from Kafka and Apocalypse Now. She asked about the Bearnaise, which I admit caught me off guard, I hadn’t expected such casual impertinence and, in any event, it’s all ancient history. You would be proud to know I held my own: there was no need to go into it then, just as there’s no need to go into it now; that wasn’t and this isn’t the appropriate venue. (Besides, that’s what Wikipedia is for.)
To respond to all of the #FritzLives memorials flooding the Twitter streams, I will acknowledge yes, Betsy did profess her affection for the work of Fritz “Balls” McGennehey from the legendary Volume I, Issue Three (“Badlands”). If there were anyone whose prose reached water-cooler renown in our twelve-issue run, it would be Fritz. I regret ever signing off on his scabrous roman à clef of abuse and malfeasance at Exeter Prep, with its tabloid bait half masked by thin pseudonyms, a tale primed for tickling the erogenous zones of the body politic, and, even worse, Fritz went and killed himself like an utter moron. Page Six, Prison Radio, “CSI: Miami,” the rushed-to-production dakimakura “body pillow”—these sealed his reputation across all four quadrants, as movie marketers say. Fritz’s fame hit its apex as The Holding Pen, qua literary journal, hit its nadir; that novella is truly a terrible piece of hackwork I included only because last October was a slow month. Had I known Fritz’s plan I would have pulled “Youngin” and let the moron hang for no reason. Though I suppose if his plan had been disrupted he might never have punched his clock, as they say, continuing to live and toil in artistic obscurity, like all the true artists, honing his craft and eventually producing something worthy of The Holding Pen we know and love, not The Holding Pen he took a giant shit on with his awful novella. Reader, you know all this. What you may not know is that Fritz tried to kill himself several times before, always during lulls in the news cycle, before the AP wire closed for the day. (Eighty-three percent of Westbrook suicides occur on Sundays.) Lest you think Fritz a depressive case, a romantic case—exactly what he would want you to think, you should know; I hate to gossip but it must be said—he just couldn’t master the hangman’s noose, he kept falling to his cell floor in a blooper reel of self-abnegation. And to put to rest the rumors once and for all, no, the coroner did not find a short story folded into Fritz’s rectum, that’s hearsay—though in keeping with the depths to w
hich the conniving bastard would sink—and so readers must disregard any new fiction bearing his name.
To his credit, the hangman’s noose is a wily knot which demands practice. Wilfred once told me it is not uncommon for a spell of failed attempts to break out every decade or so as the inmate turnover takes with it this particular institutional knowledge. Every generation has to make its own mistakes: none of us are exempt, except maybe Wilfred, who replied yes, he does know how to make a hangman’s noose; no, he’s not going to tell you.
Happily, The Holding Pen remains a respected journal despite the blemish of the McGennehey affair. In the past two months alone I’ve been called to blurb new releases from venerable trade houses and university presses alike: Boys Will Be Beuys: The Arboreal Penetration of Negative Space, “A devastating monograph”; River of Dawn, “A devastating first novel by one of the premier voices of the French-Korean experience”; and The Mathematician’s Daughter’s Diary, “A devastating inquiry into the secrets buried between fathers and daughters, and the ineffable movements of the human heart.” (I never finished that last one.)
I’d lost the thread there for a moment. My apologies; you know your mind takes the most circuitous paths inside. Someone should conduct MRIs on convicts to see if we’re wired differently. Memories—that’s where it really begins; every new fish and old-timer will tell you the same. You have your frame-worthy classics, maybe two or three dozen, the old reliables brightening your internal wattage. After a few months inside something in the archive breaks—it happens to all but the dimmest inmates—your endless inventory begins retrieving half images, unbidden, ghost traces of the nothing days of youth. An insomniac night debating whether the refrigerator from the Hell’s Kitchen apartment opened from the left or the right; you’re certain the one in the de Silvas’ kitchen opened from the left; your hand crossed your body to grip the long, shallow arc of the handle, a gesture you repeated a million times—this you knew with certainty. But the Hell’s Kitchen apartment? Maddening. And the rub was you couldn’t share this with anyone, nobody wanted to hear it, it’s worse than listening to someone recount last night’s dream.
The very act of writing this down brings new memories forward. Or perhaps I should say new memories of the vexing struggle to piece together old memories. Around month ten I noticed an encroaching Technicolor filter, the hues richer, the soundtrack cleaner. I suspected my imagination and my sense of self-preservation were working hand in hand. I’d attempt to recall the moment in Montessori when Ms. Gunesekera asked each of us to recite our home address; it must have been an exercise in self-reliance, we were just out of the crib and already they’re terrorizing us, Ms. Gunesekera comes to me and I freeze, I don’t know the house number or the street—even worse, I don’t understand these demarcations or what they signify. We never received any mail, and West Trinco didn’t get street signs until the construction boom. I knew every second of my panic would only provoke suspicion from the teacher and students. Was it the same number as the previous student, plus one? I could manage that. Perhaps it’s my birth date? That would be convenient. I decide to wing it, declaring, “Four, six, eight, eight, one, three, seven, six, five, two, four . . .” until Ms. Gunesekera’s gentle smile twists in one corner and she asks me to stop and to be sure to ask Father Christopher that evening.
It’s a well-trod story, one which never failed to charm the biddies at the Bearnaise, though now I wonder: Did I really wear faded blue overalls? Was this invention? Wasn’t Ms. Gunesekera older? My recollection was interrupted by the higher mind, which, sensing the attempt to see it whole, assembled a self-defeating feint. At night I would spend hours debating these changes, measuring the revisionist damage, wrestling with the greased pig of memory. The unfortunate truth is this detective work fostered a recursive paranoia wherein the objects in question changed under such questioning. I knew better than to keep working at it. There was a real danger of losing my mental bearings; the Ourobouros of suspicion, once established, is enough to rend it all. I acknowledge this is how lesser men go insane.
On the subject of insane gestures, I might as well explain the facial scars. A few of you have noticed my fair appearance in newspaper photos and court renderings; in fact, I’d go so far as to say my skin was quite beautiful, moisturized and exfoliated thanks to a slew of Kiehl’s products. There was an unspoken rule at the Bearnaise regarding frequent haircuts and daily applications of avocado-based emollients to face and hands. True, we doormen wore white gloves on the job, save for Summer Fridays. I interpreted my employers’ desire for clean cuticles and unchapped knuckles as illustrative of a hospitality regimen ever more professional, ever more than merely skin-deep, as it were. Getting back to the scars, I’d read a BuzzFeed explainer on acclimating to prison life—“17 Ways to Protect Your Rep” or some such; I can’t find a link, they must have updated the site’s archive infrastructure—the article said cicatricial ornamentation acted as a kind of clubhouse password. The worse, the better. So my first day I used the two hours before p.m. meal to sharpen the end of my toothbrush across the cement wall. The low-grade plastic chipped off in powdery flakes and formed a small mound at my feet. I worried about breathing it in: surely the dust was toxic, they’re always trying to kill you in the most banal ways, we kill each other with violence, I remember thinking; they kill us with banality. Anyway, I used the toothbrush to carve an ovoid loop over my cheeks and forehead in an approximation of the rushed gesture of a back-alley assailant. A few weeks later Lopez confirmed what I’d already began to suspect: most new fish enter the cafeteria with mosaics of cuts and welts, they’d all read the blog post, or at least heard its lessons. It was quite clever, I can see now, a brilliant piece of perennial clickbait and self-fulfilling prophecy. (Ed note: Betsy found the scars “super-hot,” I remember, despite my portrait in her libelous tell-all as “spindly and lumpen.”) No, everyone ignored the scars, they had their own, it didn’t matter. McNairy said it was far weirder that I was Indian (“dots, not feathers”), or at least that’s what everyone thought at first, in for killing my manager at the House of Tandoori. You don’t get a lot of subcontinentals in the prison system, nobody knows Sri Lanka except as a Trivial Pursuit clue about tsunamis. I’d wager there are barely a dozen incarcerated Sinhalese across the entire country, charged with brief sentences for white-collar pettiness. Ethnically and historically I was quite unique—am quite unique—a gentleman Burgher among the proles. The Aryans didn’t know what I was, but they were pretty sure they hated it; the blacks performed double-takes and made derisive popping sounds out of the sides of their mouths, which, to be fair, was their reply to everything; the Muslim brothers were a bit more knowledgeable, but I ignored them and they ignored me.
In truth this wasn’t altogether different from my first year in my adopted country, meting out my savings, wandering Manhattan neighborhoods, absorbing, absorbing. I know how to adapt: it’s a national trait. Sri Lankans have been ruled by the British, the Portuguese, the Dutch, maybe even the Swiss at some point. (I tend to believe the Brits stole our well-practiced habit of keeping calm and carrying on.) Many of you have asked about my “lost year,” post-Trinco and pre-Bearnaise, and I tell you now nothing of consequence occurred in that time. How did I fill the days? I struggle to recall.
There were the weekly jaunts from the north end of the island to its southern tip, ambling down Broadway to the Irish bars dotting the seaport, each one competing for the distinction of the “oldest continually operating” establishment. Are there trade secrets to pouring a Guinness known only to seventh-generation barkeeps? Wasn’t the entire point of America that it had no past? Its people certainly practiced expert denial of their own bifurcated sesquicentenary eruption, which Rajit’s cousins brought up twice, possibly three times, during that interminable evening in Sunset Park.
In a total failure of a visit, Rajit snagged an emergency fare on a Qatari airline with the ostensible mission of visiting his expatriated relatives and an actual mission
of seducing white women. Or, to be more precise, a white woman, a notch-on-the-bedpost that I would be hypocritical to begrudge the man. If you’ll allow the brief indulgence, his first night stateside found us in some uncle’s vinyl-clad single-family unit in the middle of nowhere, with a dozen Sri Lankans decrying reconstruction efforts “back home.” The question on everyone’s lips that evening, expressed with varying attempts at the mid-Atlantic accent: Would Chinese investment doom this once-in-a-generation opportunity for healing and for authentic national pride? I fumed silently from my position on the cat-scratched Naugahyde sofa, unfrozen fish cutlet in hand. Who were they to turn down money for the fatherland, no matter how many strings came attached? Who were they to be so derailed by the UN human-rights inquiry? From where I saw it then—from where I see it now—this was yet another turn of the wheel, yet another cycle of boom and bust. What was our country if not a succession of disasters? Rajit, seated cross-legged on the floor like a doting pubescent, mumbled assent to his family’s casual madness while comparing local nightclubs’ Yelp reviews and forwarding me his “faves for the night!!!!” It occurred to me then that Sri Lanka’s the youngest ancient country on earth, wholly stunted, never more than a couple dozen years from its next destructive reset. The Indians, now they have continuity, however burdensome. They have the Buddha; we have . . . what? The sapling imported from the bodhi tree. Huzzah.