Resignation

Joining the Speak Easy Gavel Club (Toastmasters club number 622676) six years ago, I wasn't interested in public speaking or enhancing my leadership skills. I was just looking to get out of the house at a new prison and maybe meet some other people inclined to self-improvement.

What I got was a rich reward. I found a friend, I landed a great job, and yes, I developed the handy ability to engage an audience through speechcraft. As valuable as these benefits may be, though, the well of riches had to run dry eventually.

I served as the club's Vice President Education twice, its President once. After that term ended, I announced my disinterest in running for another office. I wanted to set aside the organizing and delegating awhile and just do some speechifying—something that had taken a backseat to "higher duty" in the last couple of years. Nevertheless, at the next election I was nominated for multiple offices. It seems they didn't want to let me go. The position of Vice President Public Relations didn't seem like it would put an inordinate amount of work on my already heaping plate, so I reluctantly accepted a VPPR nomination and won it. Overwhelm, in retrospect, seems like it was inevitable.

As work ramped up its demands on my time, I started missing as many meetings as I got to attend. (I am living proof that, even in prison, time can get away from you.) None of the other members complained; nevertheless, I felt the distinct guilt of letting people down. I was not upholding my duty as an officer of the club. It was time to face facts: I was standing in the way of someone else who actually wanted to hold the position.

The resignation speech I gave to the assembled members at their last meeting was declared "eloquently straightforward." Then I was thanked for what I've done for the club and continue to do for the prison community. The Vice President Membership floated a motion to make me an honorary member—only the second in the Speak Easy's twenty-one-year history. As I left the lectern, the veteran Gaveliers led the room in a standing ovation. It was nice.

More than anything, though, it felt like a relief. I hadn't had to write and deliver a speech in almost a year, but there were member evaluations, committee efforts, mentoring duties, contest organizations, special event coordinations, fundraiser efforts, board meetings, and other responsibilities to tend to. Taking that away felt good. I had to wonder why I waited so long.

The Real Killer

Season Three of iHeart Media's The Real Killer podcast began last month, and everyone I know seems to be listening. This season of the podcast focuses exclusively on my case, digging into the archives for never-before-released audio and playing new interviews with both outliers and those closely involved. Four episodes have dropped so far, with each one drawing listeners a few more steps into the gnarled travesty that the case quickly became.

Even though there's been other media coverage brought to bear, The Real Killer seems to offer the most in-depth examination of the circumstances leading to my arrest and conviction. Listening to reports and interviews from my case has been an object lesson in past life regression. My own young voice—lighter and with intonations I no longer recognize—speaks on tape about people I've known, places I've gone, and memory sweeps over me, cold and brackish as high tide.

I know this story, it occurs to me, but not this particular telling. The host, Leah Rothman, presents fact upon fact, and even though I know it all, I have to keep listening. (Is this how Cassandra felt, in the ancient myth?) Because Leah conducted her own independent interviews in preparation for the podcast, there are plenty of new tidbits that strike me. Because the prosecution was unforthcoming as I prepared for trial, there are also lots of crackly old recordings that I'm now hearing for the first time. I don't know which feels stranger.

I can say definitively that I dislike the voice of Young Byron. It's not his tone but his enunciation that's hard to get past. Now I understand why so many people found me insufferably pompous; in those early interviews, I somehow manage to mouth plummy vowels while simultaneously losing a battle with lockjaw. All that's missing is a moment when I propose the lead investigator meet me for tea and finger sandwiches.

I don't know what direction the podcast is going to go. We're already almost halfway through the season, and today's is the episode when Leah and I sit down for an interview. I think I know how that went, but as those recordings from half a lifetime ago show, I'm not an especially good judge of my performance during such things.

Rewatching Donnie Darko

I loved Donnie Darko from the first time I saw it. And that's no understatement: I loved this offbeat sci-fi story and all it has to offer. High school drama? Check. Temporal paradoxes? Check. Patrick Swayze as a child pornographer? Check. In the autumn of 2002, my cellmate and I watched the film twice in two days on VHS, hungry to unravel its Möbius strip of a plot.

The movie centers around Donnie (played by Jake Gyllenhaal). He's a brooding, troubled teenager living in swanky suburbs, circa 1988. He takes mental health meds, wanders the town at night, questions the notion of free will, and hangs out with a menacing six-foot-tall gray rabbit named Frank—truly, an all-American kid.

When we first meet Donnie, he wakes at dawn in the middle of a hillside road, a few feet away from his bicycle. What he's doing there, and why he stands up and smiles like someone who's just unexpectedly won a race, is only slowly—and partially—revealed. Along the way, we learn all sorts of things about time travel, the history of the Smurfs, and what's significant about the phrase "cellar door." It ends in a tragedy almost no one could see coming. Plenty of people have walked away from Donnie Darko scratching their heads or cursing the filmmaker, Richard Kelly, for making a movie that defies linear storytelling and forces them to go into analytical mode.

Echo & the Bunnymen, The Church, Joy Division, Tears for Fears, and that great Michael Andrews and Gary Jules cover of "Mad World" make the soundtrack really enjoyable, too.

I was twenty-three at the time. The prison where I'd recently been confined played seven videos per week. A staff member drove over to the local video store and rented two cassettes every couple of days. You never knew what you'd get. Each movie played for two days, alternating with another on the same channel. Donnie Darko played, and while it rewound, the other movie played, then it rewound and Donnie Darko played again. That other movie wasn't worth remembering.

The digital air channel Comet plays all kinds of science-fiction-y cult classics, so maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised when Donnie Darko popped up there. Other movies I've seen in Comet's recent listings include Space Truckers and Night of the Comet—hardly masterpieces of cinema, but entertaining nonetheless. (I admit, I may be too close to the issue to say whether Donnie Darko is objectively good or not. Critics liked it, but it bombed at the box office.) Last Saturday, the TV guide said that Donnie Darko would start at 4:30 PM, and I nearly squealed. What are the odds that one of my fifty favorite movies would play at a reasonable hour—even after you factor in the many commercial breaks for assistive devices and Medicare plans?

I made a cup of coffee. I settled in. I watched Donnie Darko for the first time in twenty-three years. What else was I going to do?

The film delighted me, but its true: you can't step into the same river twice. This viewing experience was radically different. I'm twice as old as I was when my cellmate and I sat in front of that tube TV in our cell, noshing on smoked oysters and smoking roll-your-owns. This time I didn't have a viewing companion to discuss the metaphysics of the movie's tangent universe, or to debate whether or not Donnie knew or merely hoped to know what Frank's prophecy foretold. More importantly, I no longer have the perspective of a kid drawn to the outré for its own sake.

Donnie's journey into a metaphysical realm of potential predetermination and madness seemed less urgent to me now. Put another way, the movie didn't hit me in the gut this go-round. Frank felt less threatening, while Donnie himself seemed more so. Details had been lost, but I knew where it was all headed, which, when I stopped to think about it, was quite fitting.

In a word, my love has changed. I suppose that's everything, always.

A Memory of Mail

Mail call used to be a big deal. As each day neared a certain hour, I would feel anticipation building—a physical sensation like an electrical charge in my abdomen and legs, which got stronger as the minutes ticked by. How much mail will I get today? If I heard the wing door open, I'd clamber down from my bunk and peer into the wing hoping dearly to see a guard with an load of papers, magazines, and envelopes in their arms.

This anticipation wasn't for mail, per se. Sentenced to life without parole at the age of twenty-two and never having felt so cut-off from everything I knew and loved, being forgotten terrified me. Mail, at least, was evidence of a lingering connection; people writing meant they remembered.

I used to get a lot of letters, sometimes seven or eight in a day. Cards came almost as often. There was no question: people cared. I subscribed to magazines, too, but didn't consider them "real" mail. If you paid for your mail, you were cheating. What mattered wasn't the stuff itself but the concepts and the sentiments behind the stuff.

One friend sent a letter from the road, written over a one-week period, on the backs of gas station receipts, concert flyers, and grocery store notices as she road-tripped through Canada. Someone else always made his own colorful stationery out of photocopied collages. Other friends created word art by writing their letters as spirals, mazes, word searches, and other ecstatic surges of mixed-media creativity.

As part of an anti-drug initiative, prisons around Missouri stopped allowing paper mail in 2022. I remember saying somewhere, years ago, that the Postal Service continues to exist solely thanks to Hallmark, distributors of coupon circulars, the elderly, and prisoners. Back then, I questioned the continued relevance of snail mail. Even though I adored the little works of art that used to reach me, I stand by that preference for efficiency. Not that it would matter if I didn't; the whole American penal system is becoming increasingly reliant on digital-age methods.

Today, I scarcely remember how it felt to wait on mail call. E-mail now reigns king in the dark realm of prison no less than it does in the wider world. I no longer need to wait for a guard to deliver letters to the wing. Mercifully, those hours of anticipation are a thing of the past. With just a couple of taps of my finger, at any time of day, I can check for new messages on my tablet. And just like anyone else, I get a little dopamine hit from seeing a friend's boldface name in my inbox, signifying a new message from them. It's cool, even if it's not the same. A high-res photo attachment is simply never going to have the same emotional resonance as a decent 5"×7" print in an envelope, and a friend's words onscreen won't weigh as much as they would on a piece of paper, even if they're typed there.

I'm not complaining or decrying the impersonality of digital communication. I love getting messages more quickly and more often than postal mail used to supply them. Sending out my writing in a conveniently editable format—just a copy-and-paste away from submission—is also a bonus. All I'm saying is that having to rely exclusively on e-mail for my nonverbal communication feels as fundamentally different as flying feels from sailing. Each has its own drawbacks and perks.

My correspondence has been airborne for a couple of years. It feels absolutely normal now. Weird how easily we habituate, how quickly the past, however emotionally resonant, can be set aside. And yes, this is the sort of thought that surprises my mind when I'm gathering myself together in the quiet, dark, early morning.

Two Books I Spent My Fall Reading

In the month of November, my book club chose to read The Plague, by Albert Camus, a book I last encountered seventeen or more years ago, in the 1948 translation. This new iteration, translated by Laura Marris in 2021, felt, for lack of a better word, punchier. Its language seems better suited to the philosophy that Camus espoused, downplaying some of the melodrama of that earlier version. The discussions we had in our meetings this season—about freedom, loneliness, religious belief, human nature, germ theory, bureaucratic inaction, the patron saint of wrongful convictions, Flannery O'Connor's opinion of Jesuits, and quite a few other scattershot topics—lent themselves to some very engaging Wednesday mornings.

Unstructured leisure time is at a premium in my life. The reading I get to do is split in several different ways. The New York Review of Books brings me joy, even though I take weeks to read a single issue and skip many of the political articles. The books waiting for my attention seem to increase in number weekly. (I've come to think of my to-read list as aspirational at best; I have e-book versions of several tempting texts and zero idea of when I might start any of them.) When I do get to pick out leisure reading, it's a special treat.

Recommended by a small host of writers whose opinions I trust, Anna Kavan's Ice proved to be an unsettling little novel. I bought Penguin's fiftieth anniversary edition, with a foreword by the writer Jonathan Lethem, and was floored. Kavan's hypnotic storytelling kept me rapt, chapter after chapter, as her horrific tale unfolded like a fever dream.

The book centers around one man's obsessive chase of a young woman—not motivated by love or even lust, but by an odious desire to possess. His quest leads him around a war-ravaged world on the brink of ecological disaster. Is it science fiction? Yes and no. The story takes place on earth, in a time very close to ours, but under the perpetual threat of "the ice," huge freezing shapes that will soon engulf and smother all life.

Despite the high concept at play, Ice is decidedly "soft" sci-fi, verging on Surrealism. Kavan gives us a phantasmal tale that doubles back on itself, revising as it goes, like a nightmare or a bad trip or a spell of amnesia. You think it's headed one way, until it picks up at another point, ignoring everything you just read. The girl dies, then she's alive again. Then something else is undone and done again, in a different way. Events aren't undone so much as un-done. Further confusing matters, the narrator's protean account continually shifts perspective. He describes impossible-to-know events and changes identities at the blink of an eye. The whole time, you hate him, but he gives you a window into this story that you can't help but stare through, mute and aghast. What a book!

In the months to come, I'll probably pick through a textbook, devour some Gothic horror, and ingest some philosophy—if I can make time amid my various commitments. Where there's a will, there's a way.