by Ryan Chapman
I see my outpouring of feeling has engendered the same in many of you, judging by the upvotes in Reddit’s r/mcnairyfanfic. I thank all of you for your support, your enthusiasm, and your—how to put it?—imagination. It appears as though #westbrookriot isn’t trending as highly as it was this afternoon; it’s to be expected, we’re approaching hour five, even Bollywood films have intermissions. What else is being served at tonight’s entertainment buffet? On Fox News you have “Stepdad Rescues Daughter from Teacher,” “Tiger Man of Utah (VIDEO),” and “Small-Town Parade Disaster (VIDEO) (NSFW).” The cornucopia of life in these United States, it’s quite beautiful. Let us never take a single moment for granted.
Though it would be opportunistic and distasteful to appropriate this riot for my own purposes, it must be said that people are dying out there and it’s important to make the best of it.
* * *
Yes, that was my hand; I know WBCS camped outside of the Media Center hoping for such a moment. The glass was cool to the touch despite the humidity inside; with my arm fully outstretched I could lay my palm flat against its surface, an almost penitential gesture from which I admit deriving a foreign pleasure, a foreign and childlike pleasure. Let the high-def image of my hand be my final portrait, my synecdochic adieu. (The Warden had the iMacs’ webcams disabled.) The same hand that pulled The Holding Pen out of the muse’s birth canal and into the light, the same hand that slapped The Holding Pen to beckon its first cry and gauge its respiratory response. A cry, if I may be so bold, that will ring out for decades hence. And more immediately, my hastily scrawled “Free Mumia” sign has spread with the visibility of a thousand billboards . . . Three minutes later, we’re once again atop and astride the national conversation.
Ah, yes, but for how long? Like everyone, in idle moments I’ve contemplated my own death, dramatized it in the cinema of my mind. As a teenager it was a melodramatic image, dying in the arms of my lover in the Galle Fort, my body riddled with bullets. At the Bearnaise I had plenty of time to envision a new scene, one with the detail and fastidiousness of one of those Brueghels at the Met: I would fall from a great height, seeing the world as the birds do, as our kind was never meant to. I wondered and do wonder if I would glean some particular insight before I hit the pavement—I always envisioned an urban setting—something approaching total clarity. Most often I crashed through the roof of an idling taxi, if only for the comic potential of the driver to perfunctorily reply, “Where to?” (You have to give people levity amidst the tragedy.) As you have likely suspected: Yes, I always chose the Bearnaise for my launching pad, as it were; that’s only natural, and besides, I’m not very creative.
Those idle hours at the podium made the transition to Westbrook relatively painless. For four years I was 3 West Seventy-Second Street’s consummate doorman, the custodian and sentry for a storied address built with Carnegie money in 1928, rehabbed by Halston in 1976, and managed by a Saudi-based holdings company since 2009. While its residents were almost exclusively among the most well-heeled bankers and captains of industry, the Bearnaise was not without a bit of spice in the stew, as they say. Jerzy Kosinski lived in 9F in the late 1970s, holding afternoon debates in the lobby and carrying on late-night assignations with Ms. Klatten. It’s said the lobby ashtrays had to be emptied every twenty minutes.
Any old fool can be a doorman. I was the greatest doorman, going above and beyond to ensure total comfort for the septuagenarian and octogenarian and, in the case of Ms. Beales, nonagenarian women of the Bearnaise. Many of our residents’ husbands had fulfilled their actuarial duties in predeceasing these ladies; I quite preferred the widows, truth be told.
Total comfort meant knowing where to unload the Gristedes bags in every kitchen in every apartment. Total comfort meant remembering which grandchildren Ms. Rothschild spoiled and which grandchildren to send away. (If only I’d known to block that GSSR conscript!) Total comfort meant cooing at Ms. DeWitt’s purchase of a Givenchy toddler’s bib, the same one she’d purchased four days previous, and would again purchase four days hence. Total comfort meant directing Ms. Hwang’s visitors through the maid’s door, as her site-specific Richard Serra barred entrance from the main foyer. Total comfort meant retrieving a battered old TV from the hallway closet in 303 and setting it on the upholstered Louis XIV chair so Ms. Miyake-Burns could watch The Price Is Right reruns and exhale lusty gutturals at Bob Barker’s face—she reserved impotent moues for the contestants who overbid on common household items like combination washer-dryer units and vacuum cleaners with attachments for hard-to-reach places. Ms. Miyake-Burns once confided she had frequent nightmares about appearing on the show and overbidding on herself: she was both contestant and product, speculating wildly amid vociferous suggestions from the audience. Every weekday morning I’d return at 9:30 to hoist the TV back into the closet.
Some of the other doormen, particularly James on second shift, they avoided Ms. Miyake-Burns whenever possible. She was curt, it must be said, but I believe it was her past that put everyone on edge. She was the rare self-made widow in the Bearnaise, or anywhere really, alone at forty after an embolism blossomed in her husband’s skull one day at the trading desk. My white-collar readers likely recognize the name MB Holdings; Ms. Miyake-Burns was the eponymous head of the organization, something of a pioneer for creating a futures market in liberal outrage. (Her oft-quoted line: “I give Goldman a reason to expense their Times subscription.”) Her prescient decision to divorce it from the major exchanges meant she could incorporate 501(c)3 nonprofits, which later fueled a good chunk of activity and fees. As you can imagine, Ms. Miyake-Burns frequently nudged the Bearnaise staff for ideas, truffle hunting through the scandals of the day for the revelations with real staying power. I quite enjoyed it, though James called it financially vampiric, the obverse to that Joe Kennedy tale of exiting the market after receiving stock tips from shoeshine boys.
I remember the spring evening she returned from a Bloomberg gala, award in hand; she invited me up to watch TV with her, I thought why not, it was after eleven and the building pretty much retired by 9:00 p.m., we passed a pleasant thirty minutes or so watching Turner Classic Movies. Before she fell asleep on her settee, her slim frame weighed down by a Lanvin pendant necklace, Ms. Miyake-Burns pointed to the TV and whispered, “The actor who plays that horse is dead now.”
I’ve read enough biographies inside to know how little interest any of this holds, I cannot fault your flagging attention. We only wish to know the story behind why a known personage is known at all, if you will, without all the preamble. Everyone comes from somewhere, which is another way of saying everyone comes from nowhere; it’s just plain uninteresting, I agree. And yet, and yet: my years at the Bearnaise are as much a part of me as The Holding Pen, even if the latter has brought me this readership and infamy (and the former brought me nine consecutive life sentences). As much as I intend this final issue to be my apologia and an official accounting of events, as they happened, I must also be true to my own higher calling, and hope you’ll excuse a detour into autobiography.
I remember the smells of the Bearnaise, those return first, the ladies doused in perfume to ward off the decrepitude; they really poured it on for charity galas and visits to their geriatrician, usually a Max von Sydow type with an office on Park, I’d hold open a taxi door and inhale a fog of bergamot and ambergris. The scent hung in the lobby for hours, resistant to the mini-fan we kept behind the redwood podium, it bonded to the skin under the livery, and good luck trying to lose it with exercise or after-work beers. I wonder how much the olfactory barrage contributed to my bachelorhood: it was like carrying around a rodent drowned in patchouli oil; I’m sure I triggered many a memory of incontinent grandparents for whoever was unlucky enough to stand near me. This was all well before I’d awoken my artistic temperament, mind you, which I now know is sexual catnip. As Steve Martin said, it’s all about timing. I don’t think it a stretch to say the contours of my life back then fit closely to that of my job:
the job was everything, you see; I preferred it that way. Did I want for entertainment? From my Bearnaise post I could watch the entire world go by, and since it was Manhattan, the entire world did go by: tourists with their slow zigzags, one in four stopping to ask for directions; junior analysts walking three abreast in iceberg-blue dress shirts and tropical wool slacks, wolfing down burritos on their lunch break, with their sweaty cheeks it looked like something being birthed backwards; Hispanic construction crews debating fútbol and ferrying ladders and buckets, the neighborhood under constant restoration; Jamaican nannies and their charges in military-grade strollers, both of them wearing headphones; and the women, the women! It was all I could do to restrain myself from relief in the doormen’s coat closet, which I only resorted to a half dozen times, or now that I think of it more a baker’s dozen. Most often I’d look up and exhale through my mouth in a silent whistle; I’d look up and count the window A/C units on the Chatsworth across the street, little silver knuckles running up the stories.
I suppose what attracted me to the job is the simple truth that the liveried doorman is not an individual, and this is as it should be. It was thrilling to take a nine-hour vacation from myself to become pure function inside a well-weathered apparatus. That apparatus, thankfully, came wrapped in romantic delusion. Look to the classic American films of the 1940s and there we are: quiet, solicitous, taking Ms. Kelly’s bags, Ms. Hepburn’s bags. A white-gloved helping hand for the postwar magnates and their wives and children. We dialed their Dr. Feelgoods through the proletariat panic of the 1970s, their fixers in the S&L crisis of the 1980s, their Eastern Bloc party girls in the go-go 1990s.
The court-appointed psychiatrist later told me I should have been troubled by the thrill I derived from anonymity. I suppose for others it was more difficult to wear the costume of self-effacement, whereas I could remain stock-still at my perch for hours, gazing into the middle distance like a dutiful statuary. One night, after returning from a midshift tipple at O’Malley’s, I swear my head detached from my body and floated around the lobby like a balloon, without agency or direction. I consulted James. He’d put in the time, surely he could relate. I don’t recall his response exactly, but the gist was: Everyone thinks they’re a fake. Everyone’s lying constantly. No one gets caught. The lies are too complex to determine guilt, let alone any kind of reckoning. Calm down and stop worrying so damn much. James then went into a short rant about the lack of reckoning in society as a whole, epitomized by the recent drug scandals at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. I stopped listening and wondered instead how he might react if I pulled my dick out of my trousers and urinated on his shoes. I experienced many of these fugitive thoughts, more so near the end of a shift.
* * *
I see that bang-trimmed Mata Hari is taking live interviews with her dashcam, one of four talking heads on MSNBC, fielding tough questions like “How are you holding up?” Worse yet, her chyron identifies her as “Betsy Pankhurst, Author,” likely the work of her opportunistic publicist and, if you’ll forgive the nitpicking, only true in the technical sense. She is a destroyer, one joined on-screen by state senator Nina Vasquez, filmmaker Frank Darabont, and supermax architect Leonard Goodwin. I can see over Betsy’s shoulder a bit of highway signage spinning outward, as if in orbit; she must be rounding the exit 70 off-ramp. I know it is self-defeating to check in on her, to hear her voice crack as she tells Joe Scarborough, “My partner and I believe in love, we believe in justice, and we believe in America. This catastrophe is a total rejection of those beliefs and of those who share them.” I resolve to never again mention her spirit-draining obloquy. It is at best a distraction.
Despite my outsize imaginative capacity, I have no idea what Betsy will do upon her arrival.
I feel lucky to be granted the chance to “say good-bye,” as it were, before the quick and violent end. Well, an end sure to be violent, less sure to be quick. Either way it’s preferable to how the English satirist Jonathan Swift went out. He possessed a lifelong fear of aphasia, which he paid little mind—everyone thought he’d expire a young man, slain by one of his many enemies, Swift even carried a sidearm in response to the death threats (that may have been Pope; in fact, now that I think about it, I’m sure it was Pope); wouldn’t you know it, a stroke is exactly what befell the man. It would be funny in other circumstances: for the last five years of his life, Swift was bedridden and mute. To that I say, No thank you. Swift must have known the touch of history was upon him—or, rather, History—very few of us ever feel it, and those who do must profess a modest ignorance after the fact. Instead we resort to cliché: we were “in the zone” sinking that championship-winning shot or pulling that comrade from the flaming wreckage.
The touch of History is unmistakable. It starts as a cold scrotal grip, alarming and, at the same time, strangely pleasant. History cannot be confused with any other sensation, it travels up the urethra and pelvis, an armada of pinpricks, thousands of them, decidedly foreign but not unwelcome; all whispering, “You are part of something larger.”
Where was I? Ah, yes, the Bearnaise. I alternated between the second and third shifts, I had no real control over my schedule due to a lack of seniority in the union coupled with the flexibility of what the IRS would call Single Income No Dependents. I’d clock out and change into civilian clothes in the discreet coat closet/storage space to the right of the entrance, its walls, I remember, lined with portraits of Bearnaise staff past and present, dot-matrix printouts of FedEx and UPS timetables, and an instructional poster on the Heimlich. Whether my shift ended at 4:00 p.m. or midnight, my custom remained the same: sidle up to O’Malley’s on Sixty-Fifth, order a Lion Lager from the gruff barkeep, Mick or Brian or Buddy, I can’t remember; I’d drink my beer slowly, waiting for it to warm to room temperature, as Rajit and I drank it in Trinco. On the weekends, when the house band played—a folk-inspired three-piece named Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Banana—I would forgo the bar for long walks across the island, threading the cement expanse of Lincoln Center to the Hudson, as if my ingrained compass always pointed to the nearest body of water. I would say I was alone with my thoughts, but in truth I don’t believe I thought anything at all. I do remember one August night, it may have been one or two a.m., I was startled by the cracking-wood sound of a horse-drawn carriage speeding down an empty Central Park West, an outsize, ship-tossed din. I turned as a deranged horse marauded past me, the carriage rocking on its axle like a glass about to topple, and the carriage driver giving chase two blocks behind, then three. As the horse sped by at what I guessed was full gallop, I searched his expression for . . . Bridled joy? Rabies-fueled exultation? The horse was, ultimately, inscrutable. And in the face of such newfound freedom—itself a form of terror—such an expression might be deemed equine courage. Yes: I deem it.
Even now I long to escape this room and do nothing more than stroll the west lawn. I would approach the WXHY Action News team and the WBCS news team and give a reassuring pat on the back to the cameramen, a manly pat on the back with a squeeze of the shoulder that says, We’re all in this together, and also says, You’re doing good work here, and also says, Wow, that camera must be heavy. I would walk to the tree line and slow my pace, absorbing the details. I can imagine the leaves mottled by caterpillars, the darkness beyond shading to reveal a muddy glen strewn with fallen branches and ancient beer bottles. All that earth roiling underfoot! I would bend down with the ease of a potato farmer and run my hands through the dark loam, releasing fertile odors. I would nod approvingly, as if some test had been passed, as if I were on camera, as if I had any part in such a beautiful place. I would stand up, part the branches, and step inside.
It is not to be. While Diosito and his cohorts raid Taghkanic’s cheese shop Mon Oncle, while the GSSR and the Appeals elevate their rival chanting—Godspeed! I wish them luck traversing the swamp of protest rhetoric—while the riot expands with inexorable progress: I will sit here and die. (Or, not just sit here and die. Jumping jacks keep the b
lood pumping.) If I may take one measure of solace, it is that my death will become an extratextual coda to Betsy’s book, rendering much of its power obsolete, or at the minimum incomplete, by the major news of the day. Today. My day.
Wonders never cease: WXHY Action News is interviewing Warden Gertjens. The wily bastard got out after all. He looks freshly showered and shaved, his trademark turtleneck and clear plastic glasses conveying a mastery of the situation: he’s the king of his castle. The castle may be stormed by peasants and partly afire, but it remains his castle. He’s responding to field correspondent Jay Minh, something about “a national tragedy” and “the exigent demands for building stronger china shops for ever stronger bulls,” plus a spurious disquisition on Westbrook’s historical dedication to safety. If you’ll excuse the digression, I’ve heard stories from the grizzled veterans contradicting the Warden’s claims. There was the rash of inmate suicides in the mid-1950s, a response to the widespread use of extended solitary and abandoned only after concerns voiced by the governor’s wife after her tour of the grounds. There was the rookie screw who slipped LSD into everyone’s soup in 1972; the entire population lay supine for hours, unable to be roused from their trips. Or—and this is decidedly apocryphal—the whispers of decommissioned land mines buried in the weed-choked knolls to the northeast, an escape deterrent dreamed up by the late Warden Brown in the booming postwar years. This particular bugaboo persisted for decades, in the way such idiocy does, belying the institutional logic of Westbrook: How would a cash-strapped warden have ramrodded such an improvident use of funds? And given the odd spike in escapes from 1955 to 1959, wouldn’t there be articles in The Times Union of exploding prisoners? (A search of the paper’s digital archives yields only a few results, mostly about Communists on our board of directors.) Any actual land mines would have detonated hours ago with all the trampling about by the WBCS camera team, the Fox News Live at 5 crew, the Appeals, the GSSR, the food trucks, and what appears to be the quinceañera of an inmate’s niece or daughter. They better get their portraits in early: the forecast predicts nighttime precipitation. Even now the sky is darkening with thick scud clouds; on any other day this kind of weather would send a nerve of excitement through Westbrook. I suppose it’s part of the magical thinking so common to prison life, rising barometric pressure sets the lifers gossiping about nor’easters off the Atlantic. Everyone daydreamed about twisters obliterating screw nests, hurricanes sweeping through with a liberating menace—hell, even the April sunshowers got us excited.