by Ryan Chapman
That’s it. What I summarized in one paragraph somehow merited nineteen pages in Handcuffed, and I swear if she’d voiced any complaints with respect to pleasure on her part I would have obliged however I could in the time allotted. I should also note there was no BDSM play and no crying out for Mother.
I do recall spying a curlicue of my own chest hair on her modest cleavage; it remained while she put her clothes back on, a companion for the walk back to her roommate’s Honda Civic, back to her ivy-dressed campus, back to her apartment and its institutional fluorescents. (So much in common!) My follicular emissary would tickle her during Post-Colonial Lit seminars and cling for dear life during gin-fueled intercourse with the Cornell PhD candidate/fuck buddy.
I do remember our pillow talk, as it were; we were more efficient than I’d thought, or perhaps Wooderson was doing me a solid. I inquired about her studies, she demurred and said it wasn’t very interesting. Betsy asked if anti-Semitism was a problem inside. There were a few White Nationalists, I replied, they beat or stabbed guys every now and then, but so did everyone else. Judaism seemed an affront equal to getting a “better” portion on Sloppy Joe Day. Besides, Steve bought his weed from the Muslim Brothers, which to my mind indicates a flexible orthodoxy, or at least a pragmatic one. Everyone adapts, is my point. It’s a strength, the Hilton Hotels advance man told me, the world is always changing, you have to be ready for it. He said, and I’m paraphrasing, hardheadedness leads to zealotry, and zealots, besides making for the worst dinner-party conversationalists, choose conflict at their own expense.
Betsy was disappointed by my comments, I remember. She asked if McNairy was circumcised. I said what we do is private.
Many of you have been asking about hate crimes, and, yes, you’d hear the stories; there were stories about everything. Reports of p.m.-lineup shivs tended toward the dramatic: “It’s gang retribution,” “He disrespected him,” “You put Dominicans and Puerto Ricans together, what do you expect?” I once overheard Kostas tell another screw it was a cyclical thing, like allergy season, which I’m inclined to believe.
That was the last time I saw Betsy in the flesh; the supposed halcyon days ended with a lumpy couch and a chat about skinheads. She was wearing a tweed skirt and an orange merino sweater, perhaps a vintage find, and black leggings, a pair of duck boots. Did she already have the book deal in hand? Was it all a ploy? Did I break through the icy exterior? I’ll never know. The last thing she said to me, with lightness in her voice and an ominous insouciance: “Okay, then.” With the clarity of impending death I can now grasp the full measure of my time with Betsy, the five visits, the seventeen letters, the frantic consummation. How she turned these meager scraps into a 480-page tell-all is a feat to rival the best reality TV. Though I’ve often thought of something she said in that first visit, which felt complimentary in the moment but has since taken on the gray shade of disappointment: “You’re different than I thought you’d be.”
In my remaining time, these precious minutes and—do I dare hope?—hours, I must not grant Betsy Pankhurst any more “screen time” than she’s already wrested from this, the final issue. Though I will say it is not surprising to see the Cornell PhD candidate standing with Bronwen Taylor in protest, I recognize him from Katie Couric’s prime-time interview. In the segment he’s dressed in a box-fresh white button-down and jeans, holding Betsy’s hand, possibly the most unnatural pose for two people on a couch. From the Ethan Allen decor I assume it was filmed in the living room of her thesis advisor’s Tudor-style mansion. (Yes, we watch Katie Couric. No, it’s not a sex thing. We respect her ease with interview subjects and her hardball approach.) I must question the Cornell PhD candidate’s motives for joining the GSSR in light of what I surmise are very recent correctives to his assumptions vis-à-vis relationship exclusivity with Betsy Pankhurst. On the other hand, she does like her men radicalized. The GSSR’s chants are indistinguishable online and drowned out by helicopters IRL; my guess is it’s a supererogatory pop tune Taylor commissioned from a Jack Antonoff type. (A quick search on Spotify confirms my suspicion: “My Horizons, Your Dreams,” by Miguel feat. Bronwen Taylor & Carly Rae Jepsen.) While I applaud their conviction, I wonder why the GSSR doesn’t simply stop reading the publication, or divert their enthusiasm to one of the many also-rans that have debuted in the last six months. There’s Bars, a rather impressive quarterly from Annandale, outside of Boston, which, to cite their website’s About page, wishes “to apply a critical lens to the post-Foucauldian ([un]self)-imprisonment of the post-human”—likely a reference to Annandale’s population’s Fitbits, some start-up founder’s tax write-off—“and demarcate an aesthetics apart from the farrago of so-called penal literature . . .” It goes on for another ten thousand words; you get the idea. As a brief aside, and to respond to all the tweets about bandwagon jumping, I truly and definitively do not mind such efforts, I look upon it with the respectful gaze of a friendly patrician—yes, even Annandale’s forthcoming “symposia” with its corporate sponsors and facile programming (“Damien Echols & Fredric Jameson in Conversation”). Regarding such exegesis, however, my own principles are well established. In keeping with the tenets of the New Criticism, I reject the life of the author, or the life of the editor, as it were, and ask my readers to do the same. To be honest, I’m a little relieved to know I’ll soon be dead and free of interference, however unintentional. At the risk of lèse-majesté, I hope Warden Gertjens is also dead, for this reason only.
Well, another reason. Though he and I spoke of it only once, the issue of editorial ownership remains a sticking point. The Warden, I remember now, likened me to a midwife and The Holding Pen, to extend the metaphor, Westbrook’s offspring. We were reviewing my draft of the TOC for either Volume I, Issue Five (“Dreams”), or Volume I, Issue Six (“Flora and Fauna”), I can’t remember which, at some point he leaned back in his Wegner chair and expounded upon the unique circumstances under which my so-called intellectual property had been manifest, specifically as the output of inmate work detail, which is of course subsidized by state and federal taxes. The Holding Pen is best thought of as an allodial fixture under Westbrook sovereignty, a self-enclosed, nebulous commonwealth. Furthermore, he added, as a consequence of a 1989 “civil death” statute in the penal code, the New York DOC regarded all writing produced by state prisoners as state property, just as a chair assembled in the woodshop belonged to the state. But it is not to the letter of the law that I appeal, rather its spirit, its cri de coeur, its “flavor savor.”
I worry that I’ve gone thoroughly “off the rails,” as it were, in my apologia. I’ve begun paging through the archives; it was Wilfred’s idea to keep a set on a beautiful cherrywood bookshelf here in the Media Center, and the nostalgia brings a tear to my eye, I don’t mind telling you. The closer we come to the end, the warmer the embrace of the past—and the greater the temptation to romanticize and misrepresent. We are inevitably nostalgic for our youth, though perhaps that’s imprecise. Rather, it is our potential we miss, potential unfulfilled, or fulfilled by the wrong choices. Here I must take solace: regrets, I have none. Or, rather, I regret not living to see the publication of those unfulfilled Holding Pens. Volume I, Issue Fourteen (“Feelings”). Volume I, Issue Fifteen (“Kiwi Watermelon”). The oversized fifth anniversary volume with Rizzoli. The page-a-day calendar with Andrews McMeel.
Ah, Volume I, Issue Seven (“The Patriarchy”)! A stunning issue, time has only burnished its inner verities. A. F. Aguilar’s “Cocina Muy Caliente,” whose stanzas dance across the lips of Hispanic matriarchs everywhere, whose opening couplet is the bumper sticker of Cancún pedicabs—usurping the old standby “How’s My Driving? Call 1-800-FUCK-OFF”—and whose repeating line “Cocina! Cocina! ¿Donde está el viento?” has become a call-and-response standard in the Sonoran EDM scene—thousands of ravers chanting “Vientooooooooooo” on the breakdown with a pantomime kiss to the DJ . . . The poem is well on its way to folk-myth status. And Volume I, Issue Two (“Geograp
hies”), such an improvement on our début. This is where we really “came into our own,” excepting Lopez’s lachrymose contribution, otherwise it’s strong front-to-back, courtesy of a design rethink executed by Pentagram pro bono. Peter Beirut said they didn’t change The Holding Pen so much as “allow it be what it was always meant to be.”
I will not discuss Volume I, Issue Nine (“Heritage”).
If WCBS’s cameras can zoom in, it appears as though, yes, it’s Miller, one of the screws from E Block, he’s made a break for it through the west lawn. His uniform has been rent to rags, exposing numerous cuts and bruises; he’s cradling his right arm; still, he should be happy to be alive, he must have been close to Times Square when this all started. Miller’s one of the good ones, or at least not one of the bad ones, though not without his quirks. I remember it was my second week inside, I shuffled by the E Block station while he complained to another screw about pulling monitor duty—a six-hour shift in front of a bank of surveillance feeds, squinting to see if the grainy shapes cohere into activity that might be considered suspicious—Miller said, “Sometimes I imagine the cameras go deeper. They show the bones, the organs. No skin, no tattoos, no eyes. And not just them. The COs, too, just these piles of muscles and bones ambling from room to room.” I wasn’t surprised to hear this: prison was like a sensory deprivation chamber. In other ways prison was like a monastery, and in other ways prison wasn’t a metaphor for anything.
Those first months are the hardest, don’t let anyone fool you, your body and your mind refuse to adjust to the rhythms and limitations of prison life: first your bowels will not cooperate, then they cannot be stopped. You’ll write letters to everyone you’ve ever met, then you’ll have nothing to say. You’ll take a morning jog and discover your ankles have shrunken overnight, sending you to the ground three times before you give up. Then a curious thing happens: the days go on, they flatten out, and in their accumulation mithridatize you to the poison of time. McNairy chalked this up to American resilience; Wilfred called it the awful mutability of man. Still, good to see Miller made it. I suspect many of his colleagues haven’t fared so well.
It’s become quite clammy in here, I must acknowledge the clamminess and the back-sweat, I’d never before considered the room temperature of my final day on earth. Someone has cut the A/C, and looking over the computer monitor and down the hallway I can see the first clouds of smoke, still quite thin, the visibility remains more than generous. The sulfurous tinge to the air is stronger, plus the smell of burnt tires, however improbable that may be. If I can hazard a brief expedition into the hallway, perhaps I can suss out just how much time I have left, how much time we have left.
Do I dare? Dismantling the barricade of Aeron chairs, footlockers, teacher’s desk, and Britannicas might take eight or nine minutes, and less time to rebuild it (practice). The longer I wait, the more dangerous my expedition becomes.
* * *
I’ve returned. I do not exaggerate when I write my esprit de corps for you has magnified in the last fifteen minutes, it has magnified and it has multiplied. I needn’t bore you about my desperate reconnoiter, especially when I have so much left to confess and impart in this, the final issue of The Holding Pen; suffice to say the riot proceeds apace. The fires in A and B Blocks hindered any escape through Central Booking, directing the truculent masses into C and D Blocks. I can only express my deepest hope for McNairy’s safety. If there is a Westbrook after today, I will happily accede editorial control to my inamorato; he would make a capable steward of The Holding Pen II: A New Beginning. As I’ve said, I believe McNairy’s geist touches every page, every word, every tittle. Have I mentioned his interest in the etymology of American axioms? Or, to be more specific, his interest in the etymology of American axioms he surmised to have originated with convicts: “You can’t swing a dead cat in here without ________,” “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” a few others I’m forgetting, in all likelihood similarly feline in content.
If you’ll forgive a moment of woolgathering, I remember our meet-cute, it happened, as they say, on a Tuesday. I was shuffling down the cafeteria line for p.m. meal, always a dispiriting endeavor: nothing says endless routine like passing a twelve-gallon tub of mayonnaise nestled behind the prep trays. In those early days I remember my foolish optimism regarding the pudding; this was before Wilfred informed me its bargain-basement viscosity had been responsible for at least one choking death. As was customary I kept my head on a swivel, taking everything in, silently chastising everyone’s poor back-posture, row after row of men bent like supplicants. (Except for the Muslim Brothers, they sit erect with sphincters fully tightened.)
I felt eyes on me. Mind you, I was still on edge after that first bit with O’Bastardface, still quaking when the shower water hit my face. All to say I could feel the eyes on me before I could see the eyes on me, before I turned around and met them in kind. I was startled to encounter the friendly expression of a man three inches shorter, solidly built, and deeply freckled. He grabbed a quesadilla and said in that cockles-warming idiolect, “Come here often?” I laughed despite myself, a surprise of a laugh that was more spittle and cough than anything else. McNairy laughed too. Then he became serious and motioned to a table, far from the other new fish. I followed, naturally; he set his tray down and said, “You’re the guy from the city papers, correct? Those midtown widows?” I nodded, seeing no need to correct him—the Bearnaise is technically Upper West Side—and felt, from something in his voice, mildly flattered. “And such small hands too,” he said, wrapping his thumb and index finger around my diminutive right wrist. Nobody around us said a word or even acknowledged us, my first intimation of McNairy’s status. He released my wrist and leaned in. “Look, I have an eyelash below my eyelid. Right here. Can you get it out?” I needn’t tell you, the second my services were requested the old doorman habits returned. I nodded and grasped McNairy’s head with my right hand, hooking my thumb at his eyelid, gently pushing downward. I’ve had superlative dexterity as long as I can remember; it even saved my life back in Trinco with the Hilton Hotels advance man. He paid me handsomely to clear the scrub before principal construction, which meant sweeping for residual LTTE land mines, which meant the softest of soft touches while crawling the expanse between the Nilaveli beachfront and Pulmoddai Road. Of course, I’m no fool, you can only perform the job for so long before you blow off hand, leg, or face. The prudent man allays his risk while still netting maximum profits. After a week of crawling I followed my employer’s lead and outsourced the labor: a hundred and thirty rupees per mine. My friends were happy to earn the money, and since the work carried a whiff of masculine/humanitarian violence, their raised stature with the nursing school students made for a most appreciated bonus.
To return: McNairy’s eye watered over, and if he blinked the eyelashes would become too slippery to hold—with these things you have just one real opportunity. I spotted it at once, floating in a shallow pool between reddened sclera and the thin band of tissue. The world disappeared, with a slow pinch of my left thumb and middle finger I plucked the errant lash, and before I removed my fingers I paused, McNairy’s pupil was directed straight ahead, which is to say straight ahead at me; he hadn’t blinked once. It’s an incredible thing how one minute people are strangers and a minute later they are friends, sometimes they are still strangers even while they are friends; and with lovers it’s worse, sometimes they become strangers again, though this is not necessarily unwelcome.
That’s how it was with McNairy—or, rather, how it is. Our courtship was brief, an evening or two drinking toilet wine during open call; McNairy favored a bracing variety flavored with anise: “That’ll put lead in your pencil. Now you just need to find someone to write to.” He told me about his side business in bleaching anuses, integral to his unique position of protected, yet apart. I can report it was a professional and hygienic setup, employing an off-brand gel he had smuggled in and would apply with a Popsicle stick; McNairy was very upf
ront about the burning. Whenever I inquired about the business, he’d shake his head and reply, “I’ve seen things . . .”
So have we all, my brother, so have we all. At the risk of purple prose, let me say in those moments with him I felt an openness beyond geography and beyond limit.
I would not think it a breach of privacy to share one of his more endearing traits, considering the circumstances, to record here for posterity. He’d follow his orgasm with an indecorously loud remark—“A celebration!”—said more to himself than anyone else; I don’t pretend to know its origins. I do know he was, and is, a true gentleman. He never asked for my version of that night at the Bearnaise, not once, and lest you think (as I thought) this some unspoken prison code, some two-way street—with McNairy I was always learning on my feet, as it were—he volunteered his own story: robbing an off-track betting spot, fatally shooting a minor. Though he spent the first nineteen years of his life in Jersey City, he rarely visited Manhattan, and McNairy thrilled to hear my stories of life on the island. I would run a hand over the musculature in his arms and legs, tell him about, say, the hundreds of immigrant workers buried in the Statue of Liberty’s crown, sacrificed during its many restorations; they just fell over and died and the guys behind them took over and worked until they fell over and died, and on and on. The world just consumes us and the lucky ones are cornmeal for the maw of art and the maw of beauty, dying in the service of something greater than ourselves.
Which is not to say it was all wine and roses: I do not wish to give a false impression of our relationship. We argued like any other couple, about communication, about making time for each other. Plus he harbored suspicions of Betsy from the start. I’d thought it was simple jealousy; of course now I realize it was simple deductive reasoning. He’d screw up the courage after hitting the booze, saying I’d gone soft, cunt-blind. Then he would collapse onto his bed slab—he slept with the mattress folded against the wall, said he didn’t like to get too comfortable—and I remember once he sighed, “Compassion, Jesus Christ, how inefficient. It’s exhausting, compassion.” We were strong, though, we are strong, and we would make up every time and on special occasions break out the pop rocks. McNairy, you taught me so much! With a swell of surabondance in my chest I dedicate my literary corpus to you.