by Ryan Chapman
At the risk of seeming uncouth, these arrivistes know nothing of art. The incarcerated man knows art, or at least is exposed to more art than the man outside; there are always theater troupes and grizzled troubadours working the circuit, chasing the easy high of altruism—people who consider the gift of song the greatest gift of all. They’ve worn down the grooves of their Johnny Cash records, they’ve heard the stories of South African prisoners’ standing ovations for Godot. These actors long for such a performance, they crave it and they need it in a deep, almost embarrassing sense, they want one of the screws to openly weep at its apex, for the rest of us to whisper of it for years hence, to pass its wisdom to new fish in those somber tones familiar to anyone who’s suffered an uncle reminisce about Studio 54 in the old days, before all the OD’ing. Not a week goes by without mandatory attendance at one of these execrable productions. These playwrights and musicians know their audience, they’re stupid but they’re not ignorant, every one of them knows we’re the (way-)out-of-town preview. The material is often preworkshop and only recently post-table-read. To say nothing of the narrow breadth of its content, most often a chamber drama with a third-act revelation of long-buried incest; McNairy noted last August’s production of Beneath the Yellow Moon alluded to a wartime rendezvous of siblings that somehow occurred a month after the brother was killed in Afghanistan. The “urban” plays are worse, tendentious affairs staged by a local group named the Spike Lee Joints and always a year behind in slang. After the fifth or sixth production I detected an unintended feedback loop of mediocrity, closed to the brain-tingle of real art. This void at the center of every performance became clearer with every performance; in a way I came to recognize art by its lacuna. Cineastes will recall a similar feeling among the French New Wave directors, whose films acted as an antidote to the studio dreck they’d reviewed as critics. Am I saying that I’m the Godard of contemporary prison literature? I’m not not saying it. Sitting here and typing these words as the violence thrums down the hall, with Death’s arctic exhalations on the back of my neck, I can no longer pretend false modesty; the true fans of the Holding Pen expect no less. It is no longer the time for “being polite”; now is the time to “start getting real.”
I fear I may have lost the thread of this official accounting of events, as they happened, as it were, and for that I apologize. When Kostas escorted me to solitary, when I took my seat on the cold cement that would service as chair and mattress, when Kostas slid the mint-green door shut and my neighbors whisper-shouted “Who dat?”—hoping for an acquaintance or someone with fresh gossip—I must admit to a swell of pride. Surely, I thought, I remember, the Warden would get someone else to manage his pet project, someone who might better shoulder such responsibility. Wasn’t there a rapist in A Block who’d earned two PhDs by correspondence? Or Yancey, the embezzler in C Block—his head is so far up the screws’ asses he knows what they ate for breakfast.
The Warden bounced me after an hour and a half.
Incredible as it may sound, I now know with the benefit of hindsight, I hadn’t truly absorbed prison life at that time. I do not consider myself naïve and did not consider myself so; rather, I prided myself—and pride myself—on going into every situation with eyes open. How to say it? I knew the power dynamics of Westbrook, they were in the very air we breathed—heavy and sour in the flats, dehumidified and Glade-fresh in Times Square—but I hadn’t internalized the power dynamics until that moment. Perhaps it was easier to feed my denial on the morsels of institutional routine, which is necessarily self-effacing: you can’t take it personally. My mistake lay in misreading Westbrook’s capricious meteorology. As Kostas slid the mint-green door open and gave a You again? look I had the sensation of standing before a tidal surge making landfall. We walked in silence to the E Block flats, Kostas swinging his club in a short counterclockwise loop—an end-of-shift habit, reliable as a poker tell. It was on that walk I came to realize my professed approach to life “with eyes open” had in fact hid a second, deeper set of eyes, eyes which had been closed until that day. The Warden wasn’t going to let me stew in the hole, not when there was work to be done, and he certainly wasn’t going to let a rufie rider or a dethroned Credit Suisse exec handicap his PR dreams. To even call what I had with the Warden a power dynamic was false. The phrase implies an exchange between two parties, and I had nothing to give.
No, to truly shirk my duties I would need to self-harm enough to land in medical, to reach what Dr. Edwards called Total Incapacitation and Bodily Surrender. Would it come to that anyway, by the hands of an aggrieved Westbrook contributor seeking retribution? I weighed the immediate threat of disobeying the Warden against the generalized threat of obeying him. It wasn’t a moral calculus, more a moral arithmetic: my sense of self-preservation favored the specific. As you might expect, thoughts of safety and health are never far from the front of my mind, though there are of course the secondary, subcutaneous thoughts (McNairy, reputation) and, at a level just above inchoate nonsense, those tertiary, bone-deep thoughts (lust, anger). These are never fixed, mind you, they substitute positions with a frequency one might find worrisome or welcome, depending on the position substituted.
I fear the theme of regret will become central these last few hours.
While nobody could have predicted the chain of events that led to our present situation, I am not above administering a mild scolding toward the Warden with respect to what happened after Volume I, Issue Six (“Flora and Fauna”). He was there for the first real bit of vituperative criticism—or, rather, there in spirit. Had the Warden intervened, I wonder if we might have avoided this terrible ordeal, this “teachable moment.”
I had just put the issue to bed and was enjoying its brief afterglow. The next day I would begin the process anew with a kickoff call to the Oberlin interns. But first I took my daily constitutional about the yard, lazing through a 5K run-walk in 0.2K laps between the fence line, the outdoor gym, and the newer basketball court. Predawn storms had broken the dew point, creating a ripeness in the February air and a visual sharpness in the landscape: if I squinted I could just make out the interstate on the thin hump of land across the valley. As I hit my ambler’s high on the twenty-second lap, rounding the basketball court and the Brotherhood’s chess matches—stoic affairs with whole minutes of thoughtful chin scratching—one of the Hispanics broke from the deadweight station and stabbed me. A quick pull to the love handles with, by the initial feel, a whittled-down pen cylinder. Later one of the nurses would inform me the injury would have been severe had the wily assailant practiced the pinball-pull of twisting his wrist upon removal. Not a shivving out of anger, then. On my way to the ground I clutched the wound and exclaimed, “Good God, I’ve been stabbed!” It wasn’t too far from the spot where good old Lopez was himself shivved; I suppose everything here becomes a pattern if you’re in long enough. I felt the first rivulets of warm blood run over my fingers and onto the soft-hewn runner’s trail. As was custom, most of the bystanders let me be. The Brothers noted their positions, folded up their boards, and moved to the picnic benches. The men at the weights continued their reps. Then a figure appeared, blotting out the sun, and dropped something onto my face. I recognized the smell and feel of the new seventy-pound paper stock—Volume I, Issue Five (“Dreams”)—and turned my head to let it slip to the ground, I remember, taking a moment to silently compliment our new printer, a century-old family operation out of Iceland. The figure crouched down. I saw Diosito, his gold crucifix tickling my forehead and, as he peered closer, my nostrils. I unconsciously inhaled and hoovered the edge of the crucifix into my nose, along with the odor of the sweat-soaked weight bench a few feet away. One of Diosito’s lieutenants remained standing to his left, I had seen the man around but couldn’t recall his name; both sported a constellation of neck tattoos. In a creepy bit of stagecraft Diosito remained silent while the other man spoke. “Eh, papi, why nothing on the Kings in your little book? The Latin American voice isn’t valid or something
?” I started to reply but he continued. “Did you know Diosito’s niece’s boyfriend is a gardener for Luis Guzmán? Or is that not interesting to you?” My mind flashed back to the half-hour sensitivity training at the Bearnaise, and I said, I remember, “Gentlemen, I hear you. I hear you and I respect you. But what do you want me to do? A folio edition or some—” At this point Diosito grabbed my face and delivered what I believe is called the little butterfly, a rather painful cleaving of the lower lip with a vertical incision at its center. The shock of it left me with a rather stupid expression on my face, utterly unprofessional despite the pain—Max Perkins, give me strength!—I may have said “Huevos noches” before I passed out. I came to in medical with Dr. Edwards’s successor hovering beside me; it was clear he’d been instructed by the Warden to closely monitor my recovery. God, I loved medical, it was my favorite room in Westbrook (before the completion of the Media Center). First, the lighting. There was a softness to the air absent everywhere else inside, they hadn’t yet switched the old bulbs for the sterile CLFs, perhaps Administration simply forgot. Second, and this is not trivial, the on-duty nurse’s desk could be viewed from any of the recovery beds through a four-by-eight-foot plate-glass window separating the two rooms—the nurse herself was nothing to speak of, an old Greek hag who nobody had ever, ever seen rise from her chair—but her desk! She was addicted to those Facebook games which incorporated the latest celebrities into arcade classics: you know, the Oscar nominees rendered as Tetris blocks, or the G8 leaders recast as Mario Kart drivers. I cannot explain why this fascinated me so. But I would strain my neck for hours to glimpse the nurse’s desktop and her equally insatiable appetite for such entertainment. Perhaps, now that I think of it, there was something nostalgic about those games, nostalgic and at the same time informative. Whatever the reason, I took joy in watching the heads of Michael Caine and Amanda Seyfried tumble in an endless pixelated waterfall.
I was returned to my cell that evening, my convalescing lip protruded and pursed in the gesture of a kiss, an expression that earned catcalls from pretty much everyone in E Block (“MF got Botox! The better to kiss Gerty’s ass with!”). As for the laceration on my left side, it was nothing more than a lingering sensitivity and a few days of wine-dark urine. Diosito intended to scare me, nothing more, and in many ways the most unnerving aspect of the entire experience was the tickle of his crucifix in my nostrils.
Naturally I included the Latin Kings’ submissions in subsequent issues. I instructed the Oberlin interns to fast-track anything from Diosito, Manuel García, Juan García, Martin O’Valle, or any of their associates, and I felt and still feel (for the most part) this was a worthy compromise. Nothing stays pure forever, and at least we remained advertising-free. (The Warden had brought that up around Volume I, Issue Ten [“Paradise”], there was intense interest, cigarette companies mostly, but the board of directors forbade it.)
* * *
There was a loud smash against the exterior windows just a moment ago. A bird? People breaking in? No, that’s too rich, even for my blood—ah, I see. According to Twitter it was a slingshot iPhone, sent with an excessive velocity by the Appeals. My fans, my true fellowship, I hear you! You have been there from the beginning, and it brings a tear to my eye and a catch in my throat to have you here at the end. My feed is rife with #solidarityselfies, hundreds of earnest readers sporting pins of split black ribbon, apparently the official protest accessory for the riot and/or preservation of the legacy of The Holding Pen. (It’s unclear.) At the risk of “advertorial,” the pins are just $2 at the Appeals’ merch table.
My friends and allies, feel free to volley as many smartphones as you can spare, perhaps one will crash through, though it’s not likely, I tried the windows with a few iMacs myself.
There, again! Another smashed phone. It is the sound of protest, a percussive accompaniment to your improvised negro spirituals (“Oogum Boogum in the Wheat,” “Someday Parole’s Gonna Come”). I am emboldened. I can see from WBCS’s footage the detritus of several phones around the perimeter of E Block and the Media Center.
It appears as though the streetwear label Supreme is shooting a lookbook out there as well; @fre5hpre55ed and @drmarbles tell me the label is quite savvy. I direct the reader to their Instagram feed: one model is reading a vintage Boy Scout Handbook in front of the burning A Block, another is staring into the middle distance and chewing gum with bovine exactitude, and a third young man is standing just behind the WXHY reporter, mouthing along to the woman’s reports in near-perfect pantomime. Good for them, I suppose.
The WXHY reporter’s oval face and heavy stage makeup reminds me of Betsy, I can’t help it and I wish it were otherwise. She has the same high forehead and, well, now that I recall, Betsy’s forehead is quite different, the reporter looks nothing like her, people are always reminiscent of someone until you really look. The last time I saw Betsy—in person, that is—it was quite a memorable afternoon, which I credit to a revisionist somberness—revised in the light of her betrayal—and not because it happened to be my last sexual encounter with a woman. The Warden inferred all he needed from spying Betsy’s name on my visitors’ carbons—since early January she’d visited every two weeks with clockwork precision—and he told me, with his repugnant Dutch grin, that I’d be receiving my visitors in A Block henceforth. He needn’t have said anything more. A Block housed the least violent offenders, a real milquetoast lot kept mostly separated from C, D, and E Blocks. A Block didn’t need Perspex dividers; they even had a small room retrofitted for conjugal visits.
I should note before I commence with a well-earned erotic reverie that I do not wish to slander Betsy Pankhurst. I aim to rise above her own slander of me in providing my official accounting of events, as they happened. She may take to the morning shows and attempt to spin what I’ve shared here, but I am beholden only to you—to you and to the truth. Also, I will be dead by then.
The Warden relayed my good news on the first Thursday in March. I had three days to obsess over Betsy’s visit, though my obsession was misdirected, or at best futile. To explain: for some reason I became fixated on her pubic hair, it filled my thoughts and dreams. I imagined, I remember, her hair silken from long baths, enriched by products with French names and imbued with botanicals, whatever botanicals are. A two-inch tuft better kempt and more loved, I daresay more respected, than anything in Westbrook. More than anything in life, really. Even starving African children, if they could see that treasured pubis—threaded by the evening light through A Block’s cross-hatched windows, rising and falling with each breath—each and every child would say, “Keep your money, buy more botanicals, this is the bush of a goddess.”
The visit began similar to the others she’d made; I’m not sure she even noticed our new arrangement, side by side at a plastic picnic table affixed to the ground. She launched into conversation by relaying her mother’s good fortune, apparently Dr. Pankhurst—a respected veterinary radiologist with a midsize practice in Stamford—had been awarded Field & Stream’s top ranking in their annual “Best Doctors” issue. I watched as she talked and talked. There was an anecdote about a woman named Tiana, Betsy had seen her at security intake a few times and they’d become friendly—thinking about it now, it may have been Francisco’s girl—and Betsy had invited Tiana to a dinner party she was hosting. Tiana showed up early with pigs in blankets and something else, I can’t remember; the gist of the story is somebody stole pills from the medicine cabinet, Betsy and her two roommates confronted the guests over peach cobbler, there was a painful minute of silence with eyes on Tiana until one of the roommate’s boyfriends admitted he’d swallowed all the Xanax because he “found you all so terribly boring.” I chuckled to let Betsy know I was listening.
It was then Wooderson caught my eye: he gave the slightest nod to the left—well, his right, my left—and I intuited at once what was happening. “Listen,” I told Betsy, “I believe this might be the only time we can do this, it’s a lot to ask . . .” Here I sho
uld admit I will provide details only in counterpoint to what you may see or hear about in Handcuffed, as we both know I am and have always been a model of propriety, a model of restraint. It is also worth noting we had but ten minutes of privacy; Wooderson said they were backed up for the day. I instinctively cursed, thinking of those lax A Blockers’ discourteous approach to time. Betsy mistook my umbrage for a minor act of rebellion against Wooderson himself and squeezed my hand as we crossed the threshold, as it were.
The room itself was nothing special, an old couch against the back wall, condom resting on one arm and a folding card table in the center. I dashed to the couch and tossed the cushions to pull out the folded bed frame underneath, only to discover the steel arms had locked shut with overuse, or perhaps misuse. Betsy helped me reset the cushions; it was then I realized we hadn’t said anything, it was all understood. I see now this wasn’t my golden opportunity, it was hers, she knew at once the material the occasion would provide. In any case we disrobed with alacrity and assumed the missionary position, I’m not sure why that one in particular, it was of course a total mistake, owing to a lump in the couch which pitched her lower back up and her pelvis down, such that I couldn’t lower my own hips enough to enter and penetrate upward. I was like a child reaching up into a vending machine, the prized bag of chips just out of reach. Further complicating matters was the small Band-Aid just above the nipple of her left breast, I wanted to ask about it, I became obsessed with asking about it but knew this was not the time, and in truth I may have simply been allowing myself to get distracted. I was never one for focus when it was most demanded of me. Betsy made a circular motion with her index finger, we flipped over, she on top. I came. She did indeed have a wonderful pubis, perhaps the only authentic and beautiful part of Betsy Pankhurst. Certainly not her postcoital manner, a raising of the eyebrows implying all sorts of performance-related anxieties best not made explicit here. She pretended to look at her watch, dismounted, and did me the courtesy of tying off the condom. If memory serves, we left it on the card table.