The Best American Magazine Writing 2016

by Sid Holt

  I’ve stalked a fellow inmate who talks nonsense to himself all day due to having never come down after a PCP trip, suspecting that he might say something really weird that I could compare and contrast with the strange William Blake poems I’d been reading and thought this might be a funny idea for an article, and I was right, so do not ask me to apologize for this, for I shall not. I’ve been extracted from my cell by a dozen guards and shipped to another jail thirty miles away after the administration decided I was too much trouble. I’ve spent one whole year receiving sandwiches for dinner each night, but the joke’s on them because I love sandwiches.

  I’ve read through an entire sixteenth-century volume on alchemy out of pure spite. I’ve added the word “Story” to the end of every instance of prison graffiti reading “West Side” that I’ve come across thus far. I’ve conceived the idea of writing a sequel to the Ramayana but abandoned the project after determining that the world is not prepared for such a thing. I’ve been subjected to a gag order at the request of the prosecution on the grounds that the latest Guardian article I’d written from jail had been “critical of the government.” I’ve learned all sorts of neat convict tricks like making dice out of toilet paper, popping locks on old cell doors, and appreciating mediocre rap. I’ve managed to refrain from getting any ironic prison tattoos and feel about 65 percent certain that I’ll be able to hold out for the two years left in my sentence. And I’ve read Robert Caro’s four-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson over the course of a month, in the process becoming something of a minor god, beyond good and evil, unfazed by man’s wickedness.

  After being sentenced last January I released a statement reading:

  Good News!—The U.S. government decided today that because I did such a good job investigating the cyber-industrial complex, they’re now going to send me to investigate the prison-industrial complex. For the next 35 months, I’ll be provided with free food, clothes, and housing as I seek to expose wrongdoing by Bureau of Prisons officials and staff and otherwise report on news and culture in the world’s greatest prison system. I want to thank the Department of Justice for having put so much time and energy into advocating on my behalf; rather than holding a grudge against me for the two years of work I put into in bringing attention to a DOJ-linked campaign to harass and discredit journalists like Glenn Greenwald, the agency instead labored tirelessly to ensure that I received this very prestigious assignment. Wish me luck!

  In fact I had no intention of doing anything of the kind; it was merely the same manner of idle bluster that I’ve been putting out to the press for years now because I’m a braggart. Actually I was hoping to just sort of relax and maybe catch up on my plotting. But a month later, when I arrived at the Fort Worth Correctional Institution to serve the remainder of my sentence, the place turned out to be an unspoiled journalistic paradise of poorly concealed government corruption and hamfisted cover-ups. Even so, I was still reluctant to grab at even this low-hanging fruit. I’d spent the eighteen months prior to my arrest overseeing a crowd-sourced investigation into that aforementioned “cyber-industrial complex,” a subject which, although important, I also happen to find personally distasteful; the research end involved going through tens of thousands of e-mails stolen by Anonymous from the toy-fascist government desk-spies and jumped-up quasi-literate corporate technicians to whom the American “citizenry” have accidentally granted jus primae noctis over several Constitutional amendments. I hate all this computer shit and was actually a little relieved when the FBI finally took me down, thereby sparing me from the obligation to read another million words of e-Morlock jibber-jabber about Romas/COIN and Odyssey and persona management and whatever else the public is just going to end up ignoring until it’s too late anyway.

  So I was disinclined to sully the rest of my incarceration vacation by having to memorize a book of Bureau of Prisons policies and court rulings on due process rights for inmates to see which ones are being routinely violated by the prison administration, and then run around secretly interviewing inmates and getting copies of receipts and making Freedom of Information requests and all that. After all, there already exists here a clandestine network of inmates who do all of this and more and who routinely make significant discoveries ranging from procedural violations to outright criminal conduct by staff and administrators—and, naturally, all of these documented revelations are generally ignored by the incompetent regional reporters to whom the inmates occasionally send such materials. As I happen to know some of the 3 or 4 percent of U.S. journalists and editors who are capable of doing their jobs, I figured I’d just hook one of them up with the prisoner in question, hope that some instance of wrongdoing gets exposed in print, take more than my share of the credit, put out a victory statement reading, “No one imprisons Barrett Brown and gets away with it! Mwah ha ha!!” or something to that effect, and then spend the rest of my sentence doing whatever it is that I do for recreation.

  In late March I put my awesome plan in motion, using the inmate e-mail system to follow up with a journalist I’d provided with contact info for one of the inmate researchers and reiterating that the fellow had documented evidence of corruption within the Bureau of Prisons. Then, an hour later, my e-mail was cut off. After a couple of days of inquiry I was pulled aside by the resident head of security, a D.C. liaison by the name of Terrance Moore, who told me he’d been the one to cut off my e-mail access, as I’d been “using it for the wrong thing,” which he clarified to mean talking to the press. When I sought to challenge this plainly illegal move by turning in the BP-9 form to begin the Administrative Remedy process that inmates are required to exhaust before suing the federal official who’s violated their right to due process under what’s known as a Bivens claim, the prison’s Administrative Remedy coordinator simply failed to log it into the system for over a month, finally doing so only after the matter had been brought to the attention of the press; finally, on June 4 he deigned to register receipt of the BP-9, thereby belatedly starting the clock on the twenty days the prison is allotted in which to address one’s grievance—and then he failed to respond even by that illicitly extended deadline.

  I’ve since learned that this sort of thing is common here and that in fact I was lucky to get my grievance officially acknowledged as received at all; I’ve seen copies of forms that have yet to be logged five months after being turned in to the unit staff. That would be problematic enough anywhere as it constitutes denial of access to the courts. But it’s especially despicable at an institution like this, which includes a medical unit for inmates who require ongoing treatment—because to the extent that they don’t actually receive that treatment, the only recourse is to pursue the Remedy process so that their complaints won’t simply be tossed out of court on the grounds that they’ve “failed to exhaust” that process before going to the judge. I’ve included copies of the relevant documents in prior columns and will continue to provide updates as I take my case to the regional office, the national office, and finally to the courts, as of course it will be interesting to see whether or not the BOP takes due process seriously or, barring that, is at least willing to buy me off with a carton of Marlboros.

  In the meantime, I continue to have neat adventures. Last month one of the American Indian inmates invited me to attend their weekly sweat lodge ceremony, which is held in a fenced-off area that each federal prison is required to provide for ritual use by the Natives. The next morning I showed up at the appointed time and, having determined that it wasn’t an ambush, I began helping the twenty or so resident Indians break up tree branches for fire kindling, something I did very much with the air of a five-year-old who believes himself to be “helping Daddy.” Next we built a large bonfire (I assisted by staying out the way and being good) by which to heat up several dozen large rocks that would be used for “the sweat.” The fire-making process was expedited by strategically placed crumpled-up sheets of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which I gather is not a strictly traditional aspect of most shamani
stic ceremonies. As if to acknowledge this, one of the Indians declared, “The one good thing the white man ever did was invent paper.” Naturally all eyes were on me, and I knew that this might be my only chance to win them over. “We didn’t invent it,” I blurted out. “We just stole it from the Chinese.” This produced appreciative chuckles all around. “I got a laugh out of the Indians!” I thought exultantly, my triumph so complete that I was unbothered by the fact that what I’d said wasn’t really true.

  By and by we crawled into the lodge, a wood-and-canvas structure with a dirt floor, in the middle of which had been dug a pit to hold the heated rocks that would be providing the extraordinary heat we would need to sweat out our sins. The flap was then closed from the outside, leaving us in perfect darkness, and thereafter began the first of the fifteen-minute “rounds” of the sweat ceremony, which consisted of all manner of tribal songs, entreaties to the spirits, and sometimes just discussions and announcements. At one point my sponsor, a Lakota, declared that although superficially white, I might nonetheless have an “Indian spirit.” It was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said about me, this polite supposition that I might not really be descended from the fair-skinned race of marauding, treaty-breaking slavers whose Novus Ordo Seclorum had been built on a foundation of genocide. But insomuch as I’d spent the bulk of the ceremony not in prayer, but rather in a state of neurotic concern over whether or not my self-deprecating comment from an hour earlier about whites stealing paper could have perhaps been a bit more crisply phrased, I’m afraid my spirit would seem to be Anglo-Saxon after all.

  Although undeniably majestic, the ceremony was also something of a disappointment. I had gone into the thing hoping that I might mysteriously know exactly what to do—how to pass the peace pipe and all that—and maybe even start singing old Cherokee songs that the eldest of those present would barely recall having heard from their own grandfathers. Stunned, the Indians would collectively intone, “He shall know your ways as if born to them,” this being the ancient prophecy I had thereby fulfilled, and then I would unite the tribes under my banner and lead the foremost of their warriors on a jihad against our shared enemies, as Paul Muad’Dib did. Instead, the Indians had to remind me several times not to just stand up and start walking around during the ceremony.

  I’m currently in the midst of another adventure, having been placed back in the hole two weeks ago after a suspicious incident in which staff singled me out for a search of my locker and found a cup of homemade alcohol, or “hooch.” Next time, then, we’ll take a look at life here in the Special Housing Unit, or SHU, as the hole is more formally known, and where I expect to spend some forty-five days. And when I get back, there better not be any more Republican presidential primary contenders. You don’t need three dozen slightly different variations on right-Hegelian nationalist populism from which to choose. That’s just excessive.

  Santa Muerte, Full of Grace

  Last time I mentioned that I’d been thrown into the hole, otherwise known as the Special Housing Unit (SHU), after a “random” breathalyzer test that I passed was nonetheless followed by a “random” targeted search of my locker, not unlike the “random” drug test for which I just happened to be selected out of 350 inmates in my unit a few months back, shortly after filing a complaint against prison officials regarding—wait for it—retaliation. In fairness, they did find a cup of homemade alcohol in my locker this time, the clever rascals, but I was only going to use it to drink a toast to the Bureau of Prisons and wish the agency luck in defending itself against the various lawsuits that have been filed against it lately. Also I wanted to look cool in front of the bigger kids.

  Getting put back in Disciplinary Segregation was actually in some ways fortuitous as I’m now able to make a long-overdue inspection tour of this institution’s Special Housing Unit. (I’m very much the Eleanor Roosevelt of the federal prison system.) The timing is grand, too, as the nation’s tendency to keep prisoners in these sorts of twenty-three-hour-a-day lockdown settings for no good reason has come under a rare spate of scrutiny in recent months. But going to the hole isn’t all champagne and roses. By policy, one doesn’t receive one’s property, including legal papers, until after two weeks of confinement. And by negligence, one is usually left without one’s prescribed medications for at least three or four days. Bizarrely enough, there was also a shortage of the little pencils we’re supposed to receive upon arrival, and so it took me a while to get one of my very own. And after over a month of confinement, despite countless requests to the ranking lieutenant, I’ve still yet to receive a high-end gaming laptop loaded with a Super Nintendo emulator, a complete set of Super Nintendo ROMs, and the latest stable release of Dwarf Fortress, although I guess I can see how this might be regarded as a not altogether reasonable demand.

  But the most jarring aspect of going to the hole is always that period between arrival and the point at which one is able to get one’s hands on a worthwhile book. Some previous occupant had left a couple of paperbacks in my cell, one of which was an early-nineties thriller called The Mafia Candidate in which a major presidential contender turns out to be a tool of the mafia and not of Northrop Grumman or Booz Allen Hamilton or Lockheed Martin or Bell Helicopter or Kellogg Brown & Root, like the more respectable candidates. As the story begins, an undercover FBI agent joins some suspected drug runners on a Caribbean yacht cruise in order to gather evidence, rather than simply lying to a grand jury to obtain a warrant like a real FBI agent would do. Alas, the narc’s cover is blown and he’s held at gunpoint by the mob henchmen. “If this were an Indiana Jones movie, he might throw himself to the floor and roll under the table while all these guys with cannons blazed away at each other,” explains the author. “But this wasn’t the movies and things like that didn’t happen in real life. Or real death, either.”

  • • •

  Proud though I was at having discovered the worst line ever written, I was now in full-on lit-crit final form blood frenzy battle mode, and so instead of resting on my snide and pompous laurels, I went ahead and picked up the other paperback. This was Holiday in Death by Nora Roberts, a contemptible writer who appears to have amassed an unwarranted fortune for herself and her foul publishers by catering to the gauche sexual fantasies of the American soccer mom, cursed among demographics. Having already written every possible combination of English words that can be jammed into a conventional 300-page romance novel and having thereby churned out some 900 trillion best-sellers, this arch-priestess of darkness next saw fit to concoct an entirely new genre, “futuristic romantic suspense,” of which this Holiday title is listed as being just one of two dozen in a series.

  The setting: New York, 2043. The hero: a female cop who just happens to be married to THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD WHO IS ALSO RUGGEDLY HANDSOME. As the story begins, our pig protagonist is feeling sad because THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD WHO IS ALSO RUGGEDLY HANDSOME is on a business trip to space, presumably to attend the ribbon cutting for the Palantir-Pentagon Joint Orbital Omniscience Satellite Array or something of that nature. But then he picks up the space phone and makes a space call to tell his jack-booted thug-get that he’s coming home early because he just misses her so much. So he heads back to Earth, perhaps catching a space ride on one of Elon Musk’s space yachts along with Palantir chief Peter Thiel and the biomechanical meta-clone of Admiral Poindexter that serves as Thiel’s handler. (I should probably explain that I spent a pleasant afternoon creating a dystopian geopolitical backstory for Roberts’ setting whereby the United States and its client states have fallen under the dual control of DARPA’s Office of Perpetual Data Supremacy and the Shadow Council of Misguided Tech Billionaires. I wish I could say that this took a great deal of imagination.) When he gets home he takes his little cop wife by the hand, and what do you suppose he tells her? He tells her this: “The wanting of you never stops.” Rather than do the only decent thing by shooting him in the back and casually tossing her taser next to the body in support of a falsified
police report, this wanton cop-tart actually responds positively to her space husband’s deranged and overwritten declaration of space lust. There follows what is likely intended to be a sex scene, though it’s all rather abstract so they might just be doing tai chi in a humid room.

  Among the various tacked-on elements by which Roberts occasionally sees fit to remind us that this is the future, a list of the contents of someone’s apartment will usually include an “entertainment unit” or some such thing. Science fiction authors have been pulling this shit for literally eighty years now, sprinkling their projected futures with “comm units” and “food preparation units” and whatnot. It’s time to accept that no one is ever going to market their consumer appliance as any sort of “unit.” Things like that don’t happen in real life. OR REAL DEATH, EITHER.

  • • •

  Anyhoo, I spent much of the first couple of days talking to my cellmate. (Note that a stint in the hole doesn’t necessarily entail solitary confinement, which is not always viable due to overcrowding.) As far as SHU cellmates go, it would be hard to top the one with whom I was initially placed last time I was thrown into the hole a year ago, after allegedly inciting a demonstration: a white, red-bearded Texas Muslim with the words “Death Rain Upon My Enemies” tattooed across his back in Arabic, and who, when asked by a staff officer if he had anything to say to the disciplinary committee in his own defense, quoted Saddam Hussein’s reply from his war crimes trial that he did not recognize the authority of their court, and who enjoyed not only gangsta rap and PCP but also the work of Phil Collins and, I swear to God, Oscar Wilde. I wrote two whole columns about this guy and was crestfallen when he was shipped off to the maximum-security prison which he has no doubt since claimed as a province of Islamic State. Indeed, the truly heartbreaking thing about federal prison is the absence of video cameras by which to fully document the almost supernaturally bizarre array of people that the FBI has managed to bring together.