by Ryan Chapman
Perhaps my fondest memory of the laundry ritual: pouring the Downy-scented haul onto my twin bed and separating the clothes into folded columns, an act, if I may be so grand, of rediscovering the molted shells of my former self. The I who purchased a baker’s dozen of white tube socks from a fast-talking West African on Canal Street, the I who walked the sartorial tightrope of the mock turtleneck, and the I who endorsed the Hoboken outpost of the Hard Rock Cafe (also Canal Street). My Bearnaise livery, on the other hand, was always Martinized and heavily starched by a specialist in Turtle Bay, a paunchy Chinese man with yellowed fingers and a silent daughter managing the register. I mention this only to emphasize the alien nature of my “off-duty” attire—alien to myself, that is, the very person to whom it should be most familiar. When I unloaded the pile of clean and folded clothing onto my twin bed, a sensation came over me, I remember, of communing with someone who was not quite me and at the same time more me than anyone else.
Inside, of course, it’s all yellow jumpsuits and gray jumpsuits. Before you let loose cries of hypocrisy, yes, it’s true I worked laundry detail before that fateful transfer to my present epoch-defining post. But if I’m being honest—and I hope that if we can be anything with each other or to other, it’s honest—we all know one’s recreational pleasure becomes tainted when transmuted into paid labor, exsanguinated of the motivations behind simple “play.” This is not to say laundry detail was a doleful enterprise. Sure, the summer months brought a noticeable spike in the human odors carried by the cotton-poly blends. But every now and then I would catch McNairy’s unmistakable costume amid a new pile, and those shifts made it all worth it.
McNairy, as you’ve no doubt grasped, was a deep pragmatist with an almost monastic approach to material goods. His one concession to flair, then, was what Wilfred would call a “doozy”: a single jumpsuit patchworked together from dozens of threadbare or otherwise ruined outfits he’d hoarded from his own time in laundry, which I remember he told me was about fourteen or fifteen months before my arrival to Westbrook. The final product was a magnificent quilt of lemon-colored madras. I had initially wondered why no one slashed it out of envy (or boredom, a more common motivation); the figurative abrasiveness of the place tended to become literal. For some reason McNairy and his costume were exempt. Now that I think about it, as WXHY Action News pans over the joyful chaos in B Block—despite one inmate’s attempt to peg the strafing helicopter with Frisbee’d cafeteria trays—I don’t think it’s a stretch to say McNairy’s jumpsuit possessed a talismanic quality inextricably bound to its wearer. Regarding which I can only speculate from within my decidedly biased viewpoint: at the very least let us agree McNairy’s “just that kind of guy.” If asked, he’d reply in his characteristically downplayed manner the jumpsuit is a nod to the back-pocket handkerchiefs of his dive-bar youth.
Perhaps it was the craftsmanship. As I said, even the rheumy-eyed Aryans on the base of the white-trash totem pole could appreciate the reinforced placket and back darts indicative of a high-quality garment. Perhaps it was the spirit of e pluribus unum the brothers and the Latin Kings so easily go in for. Or perhaps the respect accorded McNairy’s jumpsuit was an externalized form of the respect accorded McNairy himself. He premiered the piece not long after my own editorial project, and while all of Westbrook soon clamored for inclusion in the pages of The Holding Pen—hitching their wagon to a rising star, as they say—McNairy stood conspicuously apart, adamant his own name and person never be mentioned. And though it causes me great pain to break such a covenant now, I hope McNairy, wherever he is—be safe!—forgives my transgression and understands the extenuating circumstances under which I’ve done so and within which I type these, my final words. Thinking about him brings an ache to the solar plexus not unlike the feeling when the descending airplane first hits runway.
While everyone pleaded and cajoled for a piece of the literary spotlight, McNairy’s contrarianism—and I feel as though I can speak for all of E Block on this point—demonstrated rare and personal honor. It was deeply American in that ineluctable way.
I see that even mentioning my beloved provokes an outpouring of sympathy on Facebook and Twitter. I also see the usual FAQs, which I may as well answer on the record, before my time is up. One of the most common questions—besides the fan favorite regarding the incarcerated’s concupiscence and its unsanctioned satisfaction, with particular interest in the hows and whys of said release—one of the most common questions: Did I think The Holding Pen would become so influential and culture warping? In truth, I remember, no. Who could have? The sculptor chisels his marble: it may be another life study, it may be the very fundament of history. He does not know; he cannot know. The muse’s banshee scream deafens him to all else.
Yes, there were clues, little bread crumbs through the forest of artifice to the castle of immortality. The joint report from McKinsey-Ogilvy citing The Holding Pen as a “key trend driver” in the Hong Kong luxury market. Wait—no, that was later. Volume I, Issue Seven (“The Patriarchy”). Before McKinsey-Ogilvy there was the forty-seven-minute disquisition on The Holding Pen by Senator Tim Wagner (R-ME), couched within a nine-hour filibuster excoriating federal entitlements. At one point I skimmed the transcript, but in truth I retained very little of the speech. Suffice to say Senator Wagner held up The Holding Pen as Exhibit A for the Democrats’ bloated welfare state, a not entirely unpersuasive bit of rhetoric we later found germinated from his intern’s poli-sci thesis. How this fresh-faced BYU alumnus stumbled upon Volume I, Issue Six (“Flora and Fauna”), I have no idea. I do know Maddow and Maher picked up the baton—almost simultaneously, if I recall correctly—and rallied around our humble institution. Maddow: “I’ve been a reader since the beginning. Very gutsy stuff.” Maher: “Someone should tell the good senator it’s better to pick straw men who don’t shiv you in the shower.” While the media interest blossomed and died within forty-eight hours—something about North Korea, something about kidnapped Miss South Korea—our site traffic steadied at a respectable new plateau. We’d broken through. When John Doe of Buttfuck, Kansas, thought of post-penal literary magazines, he thought of us.
* * *
Apologies for my brief absence. Wouldn’t you know it, just when I was getting to the heart of the matter, to the white-hot center of this official accounting of events, as they happened, Devon the Pedo began banging on the hallway window of the Media Center. He’s a boiled potato of a man, glistening with sweat and the wild-eyed exuberance of an adrenaline spike in full flush. He had stripped down to his underwear—or had been stripped down to his underwear—with blood caked over his mouth and chin. My first impression upon seeing him was of a large newborn. “Devon, my good man! How are you?” I asked, between the bass thumps of his fists on the glass and his legato chants of “Let me in let me in let me in let me in . . .” I told him, “You look great”—he did, despite all—“but I’m afraid there’s no room at the inn. Scoot.” I pointed to the keyboard, coupled with what I hoped was a light-hearted bounce of the shoulders as if to say, “It’s a living!” He continued his arrhythmic pounding and I was reminded of why I never liked the man, besides the pedophilia, or in addition to the pedophilia—which, if I’m being honest, isn’t really a problem here, there wasn’t any temptation or anything; if pressed I would say the man was simply a shithead. I flapped my hand to shoo him away. Devon glanced backward, possibly in response to something I didn’t catch or couldn’t hear, mumbled a generic invective, then signaled his leave with a phlegmatic gob loosed right into my line of sight. A class act, that Devon.
To return: the Wagner filibuster was merely the mainstreaming of our popularity. Coolhunters and tobacco marketers both know if you’re going to get big, first you have to get the influencers: your Lego architects, your SXSW “experiential leads,” your prop stylists for Japanese workwear zines. I direct new readers to “We Have All Killed the Widows,” a rather thorough listserv of Holding Pen scholarship. The moderators claim with some degree
of confidence two distinct and near-simultaneous first sightings of The Holding Pen in the cultural underground.
Last December a restaurant named Napkins opened in the Mission District of San Francisco, the newest addition to celebrity chef Frankie DiCredenza’s growing empire. DiCredenza has the reputation for being as lax with his restaurants’ decor as he is meticulous with his crudo. It would not surprise any of his many loyal fans to learn his first Michelin star (French Stuff, in London’s Gravesend) was awarded only after fierce internal debate whether he even qualified: his plywood tables had been pulled from the refuse pile at a nearby wharf and gave the judges several splinters in their hindquarters. As for Napkins, the chef was dating a homeless teenager he’d found shooting up in the alley behind the restaurant; DiCredenza asked the young man to furnish the place for $800. Destiny pushed the doped-up kid into a nearby dumpster, and two weeks later Napkins opened to rapturous reviews about its duck à l’orange . . . and its curiously moving placemats. (That kid’s name? You guessed it already: Grammy-nominee and MTV Music Video Award winner DJ G-G-G-Ghost!!!)
On the night of Napkins’ soft opening, three thousand miles away at Brown University, a young graduate student was opening her mail. Anne-Elise Mulholland had pitched almost a dozen dissertation topics to her comp lit advisor, only to be rebuffed with the same excuse—the excuse heard by all the spritely academics in the world-historical moments before watershed scholarship: her thesis idea had already been investigated. Investigated, colonized, civilized, and overpopulated. Imagine young Mulholland’s frustration, this constant running into the brick wall, bloodying her intellectual nose, as it were. Even her advisor, an old-guard Henry James scholar (yes, just Henry James) sympathetic to the woman’s circumstances, vouchsafed a few alleyways of research: Might she wish to spend thirty months on the jingoistic effects of the Oxford comma in Scottish “bedside” novels of the 1880s? No, she might not. Of course we remember the contents of that fateful maildrop, we’ve all seen the “dramatic reenactment” on 60 Minutes. Mulholland’s cousin, a scrappy young Aryan National out of B Block, had sent her a copy of Volume I, Issue Three (“Badlands”), along with a letter Mulholland found, as usual, too prolix and racist to merit anything more than a cursory glance. But The Holding Pen: here was something new, she thought, she said later to Bob Simon, something vital and unexplored. In the 60 Minutes segment Mulholland began a slightly embarrassing reverie, invoking Cuban samizdat, the urophagic photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, and, I kid you not, “man’s inhumanity to man.” Let me be clear, I hold Mulholland and the good work she’s done in the highest regard and intend merely a light ribbing. The rest of her narrative is well-known and not worth rehashing here when time is so clearly running out. (The novitiates and the curious should search the Smithsonian’s site for her first bit of correspondence with Warden Gertjens, a real beauty, with phrases like “authenticity vogue” and “fresh claw marks across the commodity spectrum.”) And for anyone who doubts her bona fides, I direct you to the acknowledgments section of Betsy Pankhurst’s roorback of a publication and its sarcastic hat tip to the young scholar, noting Mulholland’s professional reticence in response to Betsy’s queries.
Here I must credit Warden Gertjens for his clear-sightedness. One evening he attended a Thiel Foundation fundraiser for sending tweens to intensive eight-month coding camps in northern Utah and found himself seated next to Benedict and Poopy Atherton, the power couple of all Dutchess County power couples. The Warden wasted no time, he’s always been one to strike when the iron’s hot: he pulled out a copy of The Holding Pen and said what he’d really like to do, what all the kids these days are asking for, is to bring his august print publication into the twenty-first century. The Athertons, who after five decades of marriage resembled identical twins, asked in unison, “Into the twenty-first century? What do you mean by that?” The Warden replied in hushed tones: “The Internet.” All he needed was a $3 million endowment and The Holding Pen could be shared with the entire world. Thiel kicked in an additional million when he heard Warden Gertjens intended to circumvent Albany for the funding, with the stipulation that English and Spanish copies of Atlas Shrugged be distributed to every inmate. And so we had our top-of-the-line, possibly overpriced content management system.
I don’t need to tell you how instrumental going online has been for The Holding Pen. While I still hold my first and deepest love for our print product—Volume I, Issue 11 (“Chacun à son goût”) has nine paper stocks!—the site introduced us to nineteen million unique visitors and counting. The Warden told me we were starting to receive dozens of letters and hundreds of slush pile submissions—“I read a few of them,” he said. “All terrible.” He graciously passed along the notes of adulation and encouragement.
Beyond the metrics I began to appreciate our greater social influence. Commenters linked to our mentions in contemporary rap songs, where The Holding Pen had achieved meme status, be it A$AP Rocky (“Hold’er in the pen she do that trill shit / Off-White jumpsuit she gonna unzip”), D.R.A.M. (“I’m gonna post my love note inna Holding Pen / Cause you’re a cutie / Take you to the mess hall for dinner / Cause I’m a foodie”), and Kanye West (“. . . bring the club up to penal code / Grecian goddess wanna hold my pen and pen an ode / I bring her up VIP she want me unload, haynh?”). And let’s not forget the striking image by French artist JR of Lopez’s mug shot blown up to several hundred feet and plastered like wallpaper to San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid, as part of the Levi’s x JR x Blackstone Group collab.
Sure, the publication process was laborious at first. Writing out the daily posts in longhand while seated in a windowless office at the end of Times Square, delivering the pages to Kostas to give to Warden Gertjens’s PA for transcription and uploading. The Oberlin interns added images, A/B tested headlines, moderated comments, that sort of thing. (I’d brought them on after Volume I, Issue Five [“Dreams”]; our scale had made it necessary to enlist a dozen undergraduates to copyedit and track order fulfillment. I believe Westbrook received a small stipend from the university in exchange for the privilege.) I’m happy to report my column “Reflections” consistently ranks among the most-read posts.
As I think on it now, sitting in the Will and Edith Rosenberg Media Center for Journalistic Excellence in the Penal Arts, with the smoke filling the sky and the rhythmic klaxon blare down the hall, I admit to feeling a minor tremor in the otherwise unshakable confidence regarding my editorial stewardship. Perhaps it was Henry Kissinger who said, “Given the circumstances, I did my best.” Could I have done more? Yes. Could I have been truer to my internal compass? Debatable. I know the true measure of my personal agency, as minute as that of my fellow incarcerated men the world over, and yet my masters are not penitential, or not exclusively penitential; indeed, the historical and social forces at my back are so strong I swear they take corporeal form: a hand on my shoulder, a whisper in my ear, and, when I glance backward at the metaphorical beach of life, one pair of footprints where the historical and social forces piggy-backed me through the hard times.
Dear reader, I know what you’re thinking. The GSSR has gotten to me, I’ve “turned,” in the parlance of spycraft. I swear to you now I brook no other interpretation of my success and, in the delicious phrasing of my younger fans, let me state clearly and definitively I “give zero fucks” about the GSSR.
Pop culture enthusiasts are no doubt familiar with their majordomo, the charismatic Bronwen Taylor, heir to a Toronto cardboard-packaging fortune and two-time X Games medalist in motocross freestyle. With his shoulder-length copper locks—professionally maintained by Quebec’s most expensive stylist—his lacrosse player’s physique, a retrograde philosophy of polyamory articulated in an infamous series of Snapchats, and his freakish run at last year’s World Series of Poker, Bronwen Taylor has become a media darling for the TMZ and VMan set. As I understand it, his celebrity status and regular appearances in “Who Wore It Best?” has formed a protective extrajudicial membrane ar
ound his activities and, to an extent, the activities of the GSSR. If you’ll recall the newsstand shootings in Hamburg, Lyon, and Antwerp on July second—assassinations in protest of the debossed cover of Volume I, Issue Nine (“Heritage”)—Taylor’s claim of responsibility for the killings was followed by their ceremonial naming of the fall guy, some wide-eyed Reed dropout with a martyr complex and, it goes without saying, the short straw. The poor bastard, I remember, was arraigned the very same day of Taylor’s guest-host spot on Live with Kelly and Ryan, a guest-host spot which critics and fans agree was handled competently. (In one clip a blushing Selena Gomez complies with Taylor’s request to touch his “righteous abs.”)
I disavow wholly and definitively the actions and opinions of the GSSR. Let them bomb our printer’s factory. Let them poison the gazpacho at our benefactors’ gala. I will not be cowed by Taylor or his kind. I see them now behind the line of news vans in their slate-gray Jil Sander jumpsuits, unfurling what looks to be a protest banner the length of a school bus, indecipherable in the Instagram posts. Ars longa, vita brevis, plus some additional Latin nonsense?