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.