by Ryan Chapman
It’s comical how my countrymen insist on long-term thinking in defiance of the face-slapping truth: catastrophe will bring you low soon enough, so live every day like it’s your last.
Now, that’s easy for me to write on this, my actual last day. But I would argue I’ve always lived this way, I’ve always “woken up this way.” I challenge the record to find otherwise.
Speaking of lasts, that would be the last time I saw Rajit. I haven’t thought about him much, and I hope he found the nightclub and the white woman he sought. I spun through the subway turnstile as an R train approached, he had to refill his MetroCard, you know how it is.
Where was I? Ah, yes, those first weeks inside. I was relieved when I earned a nickname; it seems in retrospect a real turning point, an end to the beginning (or the beginning of the end?). I give thanks to the Latin Kings for my Westbrook handle. Juan Pablo made a few inquiries, heard about the Bernaise blue-hairs, and found a parallel in Jessica Tandy and her trusty driver in that one eighties film. Then he simply rounded up from brown to black. So MF I became, and am, though of course I still publish under my Christian name. I will credit my minority status to a (relative) comfort inside, if not at present, obviously, then before. It was quite easy to move among the different groups at Westbrook, an outsider to all. Diosito, O’Bastardface, and the Mohammeds knew I was beholden to the written word and the written word alone.
I must also credit a lifelong talent for disarming strangers, well honed from those years in hospitality. Despite my one felonious transgression I remain, as McNairy has said, the very picture of innocuousness. While I’ve often felt my literary success the work of the fates operating my mouth and limbs like a marionette, my boyish appearance has afforded journalistic access closed off to most others.
I’d like to share one of my tricks for commissioning material for the first three issues (Volume I, Issue One [“A New Frontier”]; Volume I, Issue Two [“Geographies”]; and Volume I, Issue Three [“Badlands”]). Naturally, this proved challenging, convicts aren’t inclined to devote free time to composing stories for an upstart literary project whose only recompense is three contributor’s copies. Reactions spanned from “Fuck you say to me?” to the more polite “What the fuck you just say to me?” I learned to counter with a story from my time at the Bearnaise. I’d take my union break at one of the concrete benches lining Central Park West; it may have been Ms. Rothschild’s, her family plaques dotted CPW like wind-tossed pollen. I found myself sharing the bench with an aggrieved parent and her mewling charge, a boy of five or six. I thought, Kid, we’re all suffering, but he found it necessary to express this with full-force sobbing, a real capacious howl, his whole body slack. His mother wasn’t hitting him or yelling, nothing like that; she was rooting through her leather tote for a Tupperware of Cheerios. No, these were the cries of a boy glimpsing for the first time how truly unfair life can be, and, worse yet, he had so many years of unfairness ahead. The race had just started for him—the rest of us can take comfort in numbness from overexposure—and he must have realized it was all rigged from the beginning. After five minutes of this, I entered a new headspace, somehow freer; the boy’s concatenated sobbing became simple noise. I slid a hand over to his and pinched the fold of skin between the boy’s thumb and index finger. He was really wailing now! The sound took on its fullest expression, it was primal, earthy, made to fill canyons. It was, I realize now, quite special to hear, and the expressions on the faces of passersby, expressions of “I can’t believe it got worse,” these were wonderful to see. His mother, oblivious, continued her search for Cheerios.
I’d tell the story and even the most grizzled hardcase would shake his head: Kids, man, what are you gonna do? This tactic was so successful, as longtime readers have noticed, we swiftly outgrew our initial page count. Two features became three, three became four, four became whole new sections—“Fiction,” “Essays,” “Lyric Memoir”—crowding out those front-of-book diversions I’d included as bait. I admit I’d been surprised by this respect for our readers’ tastes; I had underestimated and I had misjudged, assuming these first Holding Pen readers preferred the lascivious tableaux of page four’s connect-the-dots to the “dirty realist” short fiction. Yes, I know, I said as much in the Editor’s Letter for Volume I, Issue Five (“Dreams”), and this is no time for repeating oneself.
Many of you know the early days of The Holding Pen and write asking of my own early days inside. They weren’t altogether terrible. I’d made the mistake of having cash in my wallet at processing; it never made it to my commissary account. I wish I’d brought a fleece for the winter nights; I wish someone had told me that was even allowed. (Perhaps an update for that terrible BuzzFeed article?) But I adjusted. I adjusted and I acclimated. The volume inside Westbrook was new to me, or rather the sounds, not the volume: there were fewer of them. Six months passed before I realized I missed low-flying planes.
As for the volume, there was never true quiet—the prewar electrical system popped and buzzed without pattern or reason—but even the louder noises were manageable: a cry, a shout, barbells dropped. I would lie awake with ears tuned to the nocturnal soundtrack of E Block, its onanistic moans and the oneiric gasps rippling the surface; below, in the deeper water, the susurration of two hundred pairs of lungs; and, fifty-five inches away from me, O’Bastardface’s reliable, percussive snoring. More than once I mistook my neighbor’s breathing for someone in bed with me. On those nights I never dared to turn over and dispel the illusion, though it is true I’ve had fewer than four nights with a sleeping companion. (Colombo pros leave soon after end of session.)
It goes without saying I entered Westbrook unaffiliated and extremely vulnerable, but other new fish had it worse. One evening in the p.m.-meal slop line O’Bastardface walked up to a jaundiced fellow I’d nicknamed Summerteeth, probably a drugs charge in the hinterlands of Meth County, the poor guy had just enough time to put his game face on when O’Bastardface swept the man’s legs out from under him and directed his head onto the metal railing, sending tray, plate, water cup, and stroganoff up to the heavens. I quickly darted my eyes to a fixed point on the ceiling and whistled some show tune. This routine was not personal, mind you. First-timers all hear the same thing: Pick a fight with the biggest guy, it shows hardness and earns respect. O’Bastardface was constantly under attack. Even a brain-damaged glance around the mess hall would identify the Irishman as the most outsize of the bunch, an ideal target for establishing credibility. It went on that way for months, McNairy said. In the yard, at the library, didn’t matter, young pups jumped him after a mumbled chest-flexing taunt, O’Bastardface sighing, responding in kind, the whole thing over with a swap or two. As far as we could tell, he didn’t mind the arrangement: it kept him loose, mixed up the repertoire. But it was hell on the screws, they couldn’t bear the tension, their hands at the ready, eyes on the new fish, eyes on O’Bastardface, eyes on the new fish, on and on. Eventually Kostas told O’Bastardface it would make everyone’s life easier if he clocked the new fish at the outset. A welcome from the local panjandrum, as it were; the screws would look the other way. Incidentally, this new arrangement was how I first met the man: he turned from his first comer and relieved me with a light series of left hooks, my stroganoff also sent flying. Later I watched this scene play out for others, my role recast as the disinterested observer. Once you’re in long enough it’s all paint-by-numbers.
Poor Summerteeth. A handful of you have already guessed he was indeed the same man at the center of “Dispatched” from Volume I, Issue Three (“Badlands”). As with any gut-punching reportage, the genesis of the piece is itself an interesting story. Near the end of Sunday p.m. rec, as the late-September sky filled with clusters of migrating geese, we fell into single file for the count. White Mike and Steve lined up behind me like whistling shoplifters; the Aryans were never good at subtlety. White Mike leaned in and whispered, “Hey, MF, I’m your Deep Throat.” I registered momentary confusion as well as momentary
irritation—his goatee was scratching my neck—and began to outline my arrangement with my beloved McNairy, which I understood to be if not public knowledge then at least semipublic knowledge: we put up a bedsheet, what else could we be doing back there? We approached the faded blue metal doors, the CO’s listless monotone growing louder, “. . . forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine . . .” We’d be split off into different directions in a minute or so. White Mike clarified: “No, Nixon’s Deep Throat,” to which I replied, “You mean Mark Felt?” He said, “Who the fuck is—never mind. Showers tomorrow, second shift. Bring a notebook.”
Had this exchange occurred before The Holding Pen, I would have considered the request a fool’s errand, a transparent scheme to lure me into who knows what. I can admit now that by Volume I, Issue Three (“Badlands”) I’d come to recognize the higher calling of the Fourth Estate, heard it in my ear and felt it at my back. You can be sure this newfound confidence of the true believer was a novelty to an agnostic such as myself. The question was not whether I was going to follow up on White Mike’s tip—how could I refuse?—but regarded the nature and content of the scoop. Without casting aspersions on the man, White Mike was never at the heart of political intrigue or sexual intrigue or even bureaucratic intrigue. The mashed potatoes were starchier than usual; perhaps White Mike stumbled upon a campaign to slowly poison us? No; he’d more likely hoard a smoking gun than fire it. Suffice to say my expectations were low.
Though I’m heartened by the essay’s inclusion on so many J-school syllabi, I should articulate here, in my final moments, the writer’s wont to embellish. “Dispatched” spends a good nine hundred words on the attack itself, whereas the whole thing was over in a matter of seconds. (I indulge myself a roomy word count as un droit du seigneur.) Prison hits are executed with a necessary economy of motion, not unlike a fast-food crew at rush hour. I’d arrived early and found a spot in the rear of the horseshoe-shaped room. It was an ideal vantage to record the most intimate details, which I assure you were all faithfully transcribed—ignore the protestations by Summerteeth’s next of kin to Nancy Grace. I may come clean, as it were, about one moment not transcribed nor reported, a moment of both clarity and unsettling guilt. As Summerteeth first entered the shower, lured by what I would guess were the flimsiest of promises, he saw me and my notebook; he arched an eyebrow—he actually arched one of his eyebrows—I remember, there was a kind of situational irony of such an intelligent expression on so unintelligent a person walking into such mortal danger. (Also, I was wearing my prison grays; he may have registered the dissonance of the clothed in a nudity-standard environment.) On instinct I retreated three steps until my own back was against the mildewed wall; at that moment Summerteeth had the mark of death upon him, and sure enough White Mike and Steve entered from behind. I recall the sound of his heel catching on the linoleum, the sound of gravity winning over muscle control—it was the sound of the end for Summerteeth. White Mike slipped four or five of those quarter-inch thick rubber bands around the man’s head and over his mouth, filling the air with chalky dust and Summerteeth’s low groans. The lights cut out for a few seconds—I assumed this was planned—then I saw White Mike and Steve pause while Summerteeth flopped about on the grouty tile. This wasn’t all that uncommon, the electric was notoriously spotty, the Warden said no amount of money could fix the ancient wiring. Just last summer a fluke in D Block’s circuits made everything a good five percent brighter; it lasted maybe three weeks, and old Ellis mistook this literal enlightenment for a figurative one. In no time he transformed into a proselytizing vulture, swooping down on the carrion of philosophical debate: “That’s interesting what you’re saying about Marx, but have you ever considered the teachings of our Lord and Savior?” His lunchtime sermons drove us nuts until we learned to simply ignore him.
When the lights returned to the showers, White Mike and Steve resumed like two laborers performing their scutwork, with neither malice nor pleasure. After Summerteeth expired they nodded to each other and turned to me. I knew enough to pretend my pen could still write in the waterlogged notebook.
The next day White Mike and Steve interrupted my dinner: “How’d it look? Did it look good? We looked hard, didn’t we?” I nodded, yes, yes, the hardest. To answer a question I’ve received dozens of times, I felt not the slightest hesitation about covering Summerteeth’s demise, regardless of the outrage expressed by my left-leaning Pensioners. Did I feel complicit in boosting White Mike’s reputation? On the one hand, he didn’t need it: word spread quickly. On the other, my coverage was at that time an untapped resource and White Mike its first speculator. (To play out the metaphor, I suppose that would make the Warden a kneecapped SEC.) In the weeks following the publication of “Dispatched,” my concern grew in tandem with White Mike’s effusiveness and the adulatory letters from that fateful grad student—more on him later, time willing—and I confess, at the risk of even greater public ignominy, a brief desire to rescind the article. What kind of precedent would I be setting? The submission process provoked enough anxiety.
I can see with the clarity of the newly sober that Volume I, Issue Three (“Badlands”) is the fulcrum around which everything turned. Oh, to have remained undiscovered! I’d no idea how badly this would all turn out. I only knew, I remember, the deep intestinal shame, the cure for which was enforced isolation. Good news, then: I was in the right place for enforced isolation.
It was an easy ask of McNairy. He intuited these kinds of things. I remember the briefest mention about my rising and corrosive influence before he replied, “A fuck and a tussle, then the hole?” We waited until a.m. lineup, he gave me a shove, I responded in kind, we exchanged blows, the screws broke it up. If you’ve never had the pleasure of staging a fight with a loved one, I highly recommend it. I remember it as if it were yesterday, our mutual goal of really selling it to onlookers restrained by mutual affection, creating a brain-stem confusion over hurting the one you love. Around the fourth knock to the ribs I felt something much deeper, McNairy’s unspoken concession to switch off higher-level thinking and really lay in, my endorphins flooding the senses: for two seconds this frisson of discovery brought genuine happiness. The Japanese call this wabi-sabi, though I may be mistaken.
It’s the nature of these fights that the defendant receives the punishment—something to do with screws’ reaction times. As Kostas walked me to solitary, it was all I could do to keep from whistling. I’d done one-day and two-day stints before, nothing too damaging. You want to avoid anything longer than that: you see it in the stoop-shouldered gait of the men who pull a ten—not even getting into the effects of a thirty-plus—they stand corroded and bent like hurricane-battered streetlights. I’d wagered three, maybe four days, just enough time to delay the production workflow of Volume I, Issue Four (“Horizons”). (Yes, the one with the spot-gloss cover.) My hope, I remember now, was to convey to Warden Gertjens my unreliability, a mercurial nature ill-suited for the steady hands of a Holding Pen stewardship. Wilfred made it to tenth grade; maybe he could inherit the job.
Perhaps I should address that fateful grad student, since so many of you are asking for my side of the story. Ben Kraus, short for Benjamin and pronounced, I’m told, like the twentieth-century German philosopher. Ben Kraus, a shaggy-haired “All But Dissertation” academic who discovered Volume I, Issue Three (“Badlands”), in Westbrook’s visitor’s lounge during a research trip for a paper. (Something something “late capitalism,” something something “institutional gesture.”) He struck up a correspondence. I confess we found little in common. For two months I received weekly letters from the earnest young man—he preferred not to meet in person—his manic scribblings dense with rhetorical cul-de-sacs and page-long sentences. The truth is, even a boring letter will merit a response from an incarcerated recipient. I thought nothing of his breathless news that his four-thousand-word think-piece was to be published by ###, an upstart literary magazine from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Of course, I now know the publication quite
well: they graciously send me the quarterly and its various sister projects. I gather it’s an intimate operation, a clubhouse of logorrheic Harvard grads and rotating piles of interns. Kudos to them and their dedication to the written word! In these trying times I can think of no goal higher than the self-imposed edicts by these fun-size Sontags to reshape the worldview of each and every Brooklyn millennial. Kraus’s article, I’m told, I remember, is in keeping with their general project. He valorized The Holding Pen as a landmark in “post-penal lit” (that lamentable phrase); McGennehey and Lopez were deemed New Voices You Can’t Ignore, which some commenters interpreted as a subtle dig at the common diagnoses of schizophrenia among prison populations, but Kraus’s naïveté trumps wit. His piece sported an unctuous dollop of white guilt, naturally, but in all fairness less than you’d think, and they even reprinted “Dispatched” and my first three “Reflections” columns through a syndication arrangement rubber-stamped by the Warden. If my Midwest and West Coast readers are unfamiliar with ###, I give it my strongest endorsement. Start with the most recent summer issue’s “Salman on the Mount” and “The Pornography of Pornography.” Great stuff.
I see activity’s picked up on #westbrookriot. I apologize to my many fans that I cannot address all of your queries. Would that I had the time! A cruel reversal, I think, of the usual state of affairs inside, the garrote of fate tightening around my neck with every burst of clatter and darting shadow down the hall. Are they close? There’s a trace of sulfur in the air. I dare not investigate: a great editor’s curiosity is tempered by an equal measure of forbearance. I will continue, despite the distractions and the acid reflux to provide an official accounting of the events, as they happened.
To respond to 99ponda_babas’s upvoted question in the Reddit AMA, I’ll sidestep the more obvious differences and invoke the ritual of folding one’s laundry. Quite often I’d return home from the Bearnaise utterly spent and further dejected by the midtown streets’ sea of inhumanity, too tired to haul a weathered sack of soiled garments to the laundromat. When it became utterly necessary—a fortnight and a day to exhaust my stock of Uniqlo briefs—I would run this most onerous errand, staring at the tumbling, wet bricolage in the washer and, if I was lucky, entering something akin to a trance state. (I also entered something akin to a trance state during the hours of inactivity at the Bearnaise, and in truth for the entirety of July and August when its residents decamped for Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons.)