Colleen Atwood, Where Are You?

Things change all the time—laws, governors, our understanding of the truth.... Today I wear the gray of a prisoner; tomorrow, who knows?

"What do you want to wear when you leave there?" someone recently asked me, and I froze, unable to give a response.

Leaving prison after any amount of time is a life-changing event. After more than twenty-four years inside, its significance can't be overstated. The state of Missouri has curtailed my day-to-day choices and provided my wardrobe for nearly a quarter of a century—twenty-odd years of gray pants and white T-shirts. To have my choice restored sounds great, but like trying to order dinner from the menu at Cheesecake Factory, the infinite possible choices intimidate me to the point of paralysis.

Clothing is a fraught issue for me. In school, as I struggled to understand what made things "cool" or "uncool," classmates invariably ridiculed my poor judgment. Once I entered my morbid teen years, every day was Halloween. My makeup and all-black wardrobe attracted not just mockery but violence.

Even without a good understanding of how, I was keenly aware that clothing played a big role in our daily performances. "Every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp-dresed man" aren't just cheesy song lyrics, they're recognitions of a truth: that how we drape our bodies in everyday life plays an important role in how we're regarded by our fellow humans. It's why uniforms and designer labels exist. It's why they use costumes in movies and theater. It's why the term "personal style" was coined.

In short, how we're dressed is who the world believes we are. Asking what I want to wear when I leave prison is akin to asking who I think of myself as being.

So who am I? Buddhist teachings caution against confusing the self with the skin bag we call a body. We're ultimately so much more (and less) than this crass material form suggests. For that reason, Buddhism aims at lessening practitioners' attachment to adornments such as jewelry, clothing, and hair, which reinforce our ego-clinging. (Hence, why Buddhist monks and nuns are bald.)

I don't mind wearing the same uniform day in, day out. In fact, having my identity defined by my character and actions, not by my clothing choices, is nice, in a way. It takes the pressure off. Going back to a world where I'm judged by my wardrobe means that I have to decide, to some extent, who I am.

For as long as I've considered the question, you'd think I'd have an answer by now.

I do know that I'm not someone who wears patterns or a lot of color, and I don't care for leisure wear, being uncomfortable in shorts and sweats alike. I may be closer now to fifty than to forty, but I'm still a weirdo. There's just less of an edge now. Teenage Byron could wear black velvet and thigh-high Docs to dinner; what's the age-appropriate, toned-down version of that look like?

I watch the Netflix series Wednesday and think, Gomez Addams was a snazzy dresser—would there be anything wrong with a pinstriped three-piece suit? Is that too much? Am I too much? And if I am, then what's really the matter with that?

When I brought this question up to a friend, he had some sage advice. "Whatever your raiment," he said, "appear as the person you are. That's not just good. It's better than good."

It's nice to hear that from a friend. What a shame that most people believe clothes make the man.

Black Celebration: A Personal History of Goth

Can someone join a subculture without knowing it exists? Is it possible for a single person to comprise a sub-subculture — a clique of one? These are questions I contemplated a lot, based on how I spent my teens and young adulthood.

The riotous colors of 1993 hurt my eyes. Worse yet, its hot dance-poppy tracks (think: Haddaway, Tag Team, Ace of Base) burned in the open cut of my deepening depression. I rejected all of it. The alternative was literal: alternative — as in, alternative music, as in, more specifically, grunge, which to most minds meant Nirvana, a band I could barely stand. Mainstream culture left me feeling conspicuously out of place. Aimless and alone, I stumbled down the gloomy, unlit path of goth.

Before all-black clothes and eyeliner became my daily wear, I'd never heard the word goth. It's likely that I encountered the iconic look — the pitch dark hair, the deathly complexion, the silver-buckled, -spiked, and -chained accessories — in a movie, on TV, in a book, or on the streets of a foreign city before adopting goth's dark splendor for myself. But contrary to what you'd expect, I never set out to dress that way. My transition was organic, a product of several factors.

I came by the pale skin honestly, thanks to genetics and insomnia. Being an overweight tween had inclined me to wear black, which seemed to slim away a bit of my huskiness. The mysterious, the Romantic, the (I'll just go ahead and say it) Byronic had always compelled me. Temperamentally speaking, autism spectrum disorder and major depression made me standoffish. Through my father's broad musical tastes and penchant for nightlife I was exposed to pulsing, subversive-feeling stuff that struck nerves I hadn't known I possessed. Shut in my candlelit room, writing tormented poems while darkwave beats, borrowed from my dad's music library, trembled from the stereo, I was like a caterpillar in its cocoon. All the stuff swirling around in there was bound to solidify into some new form of life eventually.

I emerged as a beautiful black butterfly shortly before turning fourteen. As my personal mythology has it, the trigger was seeing a daytime talk show on which a "troubled" teen spoke about why he wore that ghastly makeup and black velvet, lace, and leather. The dramatic monologue he delivered, about coping with darkness by embracing darkness, was my own angst given voice. Before that epiphanic Oprah episode (or whatever it was) I'd believed myself alone in feeling this way. In the egocentrism of youth, what teen doesn't think he's the first, the only — even when that exclusivity is to his detriment? Regardless, from that day forward, every time someone asked why I dressed all in black, I answered in one of two ways: either "Color is nothing more than trumpery and lies," or "Because the price of tomatoes has fluctuated again." I was a blast at parties. (No one invited me to parties.)

Better than any other lesson, school taught me that I did not fit. The adjective peerless implies good — unequaled, unrivaled. But I dropped out of my academically prestigious high school in large part because I had neither equals nor rivals. To be an outcast, that is, to be cast out, you have to first be in. I'd joined no clubs, hitched myself to no teams, took part in no extracurriculars. I'd walked to classes unaccompanied, literally on the fringe. Except in the eyes of one accidental girlfriend who mistook my awkwardness for cool, I was a non-entity.

I was eventually old enough for the clubs that, if only one night a week, played the darkwave and industrial (i.e., goth) music that lured palefaced youth out of seclusion. In preparation, I'd powder my nose, smear my eyes with kohl, take one last appraising look at myself in the mirror. My studded collar and high Doc Martens looked suitably fetishistic. My silver rings glinted. My lacquered fingernails reflected darkly. I'd head for the car, slipping a Djarum Black from its box. I'd light the clove cigarette and inhale. I'd turn the ignition key. I'd crank up the music and drive.

The parking lot would be scattered with vehicles and little groups of black-clad twenty-somethings, all rendered paler than normal in the sulfurous light. Most showed up every week, drawn by the camaraderie of other gothic oddities. The DJ was basically irrelevant; no one ever really danced. Like me, they huddled at the periphery of the dance floor and watched the poseurs do their thing. The poseurs were the worst. The poseurs were whoever they suspected of wearing color during the week, and anyone deemed insufficiently cool. Which was everyone.

Inside, the club's red lights would smooth and unblemish every face. "This Corrosion," a Sisters of Mercy song so stereotypical as to be almost a joke, would crash along while everyone feigned indifference. I'd stand, drinking my nonalcoholic drink, not talking to any of the people milling around, ignoring me. Many hugged each other, displaying affection more freely than you might expect from people wearing spikes and claw rings.

Although I looked the part, my club experiences were from a certain standpoint no different from school. Perhaps recognized by sight, I remained unacknowledged, unknown. I returned, week after week, in the hope of making a friend, yet lacked the wherewithal to break the ice. After a few hours, I'd go home feeling more alone than when I arrived.

Online newsgroups and IRCs (Internet chat groups) opened the world of goth to me, in the form of band recommendations, links to clothing boutiques, recipes for cocktails, lots of biting social criticism, and tips for coloring everything, from clothes to flowers, black. Goth's online contingent was even more fiercely cliquish and territorial than the clubgoers, but as long as I didn't try joining in, I could slink along the virtual periphery, reading their tips, quips, and laments, and silently judge those self-appointed arbiters of gothic taste and macabre fashion.

I couldn't stand those elitists' mentality, the way they gazed down with gother-than-thou scorn from their obsidian tower. I soon disassociated myself from the lot of them, the online contingent and their real-life counterparts. I continued to dress the part, and certainly didn't give up the music I loved so much, but I wouldn't permit anyone to mistake appearance for substance. For instance, my father was on the phone in the next room one afternoon, talking to a friend about me. I heard him say, "He's too goth to go see Mrs. Doubtfire with us." Without getting up from my computer desk, I shouted, "I'm not goth!" And I meant it. However, this irony was not lost on me: in my browser window was a man in black lipstick, modeling a very tall pair of boots beside a crying angel statue. That picture made me really want to buy those boots. Deep down, I was goth as fuck. No impassioned arguments would change that.

A thousand essays and academic papers have been written with the title "What Is Goth?" Debates over what (or who) does and doesn't qualify as goth continue to rage on the Internet. Goth is what was once freely called a lifestyle — heavy on the style. It's precisely this quality of insubstantiality that I believe has made it so difficult to define. It's shallow, and you can't base an ethos, and certainly not a philosophy, on black clothing and minor-key music. So, what happens when the kids who dress in impractical, pseudo-archaic outfits and head for the club, as I once did, realize the vacuousness of this aesthetic ideal they've built their lives around?

I chose to dance to the beat of my own drum machine. I toned down the eyeliner. I put away the spiked leather collar. I embraced my ungothly geekiness full-on, with Frisbee in the park, They Might Be Giants on my stereo, and posters of the periodic table of elements in my kitchen. I grew up and all but forgot about the subculture that had seemed so tantalizingly close to my heart.

It sounds like a riddle: I clothe myself in shadow but will not be overshadowed. My sound is dark as night itself. I am forty and still love The Nightmare Before Christmas. What am I?

What Not to Wear

While they don't allow prisoners to mail order personal clothes anymore, the Missouri Department of Corrections does sell its own "brand" of casual wear through its institutions' canteens. This stuff is as well-made and stylish as prisoner-manufactured clothing sounds, a lot of it making off-brand factory seconds look like Prada, but being the only clothing option available means it sells like crazy. What the state issues us is, astonishingly, even less desirable.

You don't get to buy a wardrobe of Missouri Vocational Enterprises-made shirts, shorts, and sweats, then swagger around the prison in comparative comfort all day, every day, though. Rules dictate (of course they do) where and when "state grays" have to be worn. A lot of prisoners were real clothes horses on the street, and old habits die hard. Living prison-fabulous means enduring more daily outfit changes than a staging of Anna and the King.

Full grays must be worn in Medical, Education, and the library. You can layer this with a personal coat or jacket in the first two, but not the former, where only brown state-issued duck coats are permitted.

Around the housing units, you get to wear whatever you like, at least unless you're headed to the caseworkers' offices, which demand state-gray pants and some kind of shirt — even a tank top or sleeveless T-shirt will do. Unless you're going to, or coming from, a shower stall, or hanging out in your cell (where it seems that anything but full nudity goes), a shirt's necessary at all times. As soon as you go outside, however, bare torsos are permitted. I wish they weren't.

The state-gray pants-only policy also applies to Maintenance and the toilet-paper factory, and to anyone eating breakfast or lunch in a chow hall on weekdays that aren't state holidays. Hats are always verboten, yet any other clothes can be worn to meals the rest of the time. Open-toed sandals must be accompanied by socks, and shirts must have sleeves.

Nothing personal, except for stocking caps, can be worn to visits, even though the white T-shirt, gray pants, and navy blue slip-on deck shoes that you're admitted onto the visiting room floor with are issued on-site. They're provided to you after a strip-search, then returned before you leave the building. But presumably the rules exist for a reason, however stupid.

Got all that? Good. Now, just don't let your pants sag below your waistline at any point and you'll be golden.

Maytaggin’

In days of yore, stout scrubwomen squatting by the water gossiped and kvetched to quell the tedium of pounding their husbands' smallclothes against a rock for hours. Later, nuclear-age housewives, in Benzedrine daydreams of lives less laborious, mooned over the newest DeLuxeCo Auto-Matic Clothes-Washing Machine in their Sears Roebuck catalogs. And today, if the TV commercials are any indication, people still aren't content with the ease of washing their laundry, because Samsung has upgraded its machines with a small port in front, so you can add clothing items to loads without the agonizing burden of opening a regular-sized washer door!

The future is here, people. I, for one, am uneasy.

My upbringing left me leery of certain levels of convenience. Blame the semi-crunchy environment my parents raised me in, which instilled an appreciation for the handmade, the homegrown, the slow-cooked. To wit: until age eight, I had no idea what Ho Hos were (and when I found out, their oily sweetness made me spit). One takeaway from my youth can therefore be summed up as “good stuff is worth waiting for.” The converse was implicit: what's readily had is better left alone.

Every morning, cell doors in Crossroads’ honor dorm open when the 5 AM custody count clears. Like a horse charging from the gate, I race the other early risers to the laundry closet downstairs, where I scrub and rinse yesterday’s wearables in my green Rubbermaid wash basin before breakfast. Others take less time. My bar is just higher. Can I drink the rinse water yet? If not, I rinse again, repeating until the answer’s yes. It's a chore that takes me twenty minutes, on average.

A chore — the word connotes drudgery, unpleasant obligation, routine. I used to like doing laundry. There's nothing quite as reliably comforting as the smell, texture, and temperature of a fresh load pulled from the dryer.

Modern laundry-washing is nothing. You drop clothes into a machine, you wait, you transfer the clothes into another machine, you wait again, you retrieve the clothes, you fold or hang them as necessary. It’s easy as pie — easier, in fact, since pie involves an iota of finesse. Any imbecile can do a load of whites. “Oh,” you cry, “but the wait is so annoying!”

Even when you do actually need to stay in the vicinity while your clothes tumble, as in laundromats where sketchy characters might filch unattended garments, a wait is only a wait when you’re not creative enough to otherwise occupy yourself. The way things are now, I’d be moved near to tears by the freedom to surf the web, sit people-watching, or play a Donkey Kong arcade game while a machine saved me hours of effort. Who in their right minds complain about such First World privilege?

Most here can’t bear the thought of doing laundry by hand when the institutional laundry service will take their bags of dirties and, a couple of days later, bring them back somewhat less dirty. They don’t care that everything comes back as crumpled as blow-in insulation. The service is free of charge and hassle… except when laundry workers rip bags open to thieve any less-than-yellow T-shirts.

There's a third option for getting your clothes clean in prison: using a Maytag. Some convicts hawk their artwork, some sell sex, some run gambling operations, some deal drugs. There are as many ways of making money in the joint as there are types of people. Maytaggin’ — hiring out your services as a human washing machine — hasn’t always been known by the same name, but it's as old as penitentiaries themselves.

In my wing lives the Laundry Gnome, a fuzzy little guy with glasses and graying red hair that nearly matches his raw skin. He looks like, before his incarceration, he might’ve smoked an itty-bitty corncob pipe. Now he smokes what he earns from scrubbing stains and body soil out of other prisoners’ workout gear and underthings. His knobby knuckles may always be cracked and angry, but he never wants for tobacco. I admire his dedication, if not the addiction driving it.

The Laundry Gnome scrubs his fingers to shreds because his customers want what you, dear reader, have: the luxury of dropping off a dirty load and picking it up wearable, no agitation necessary. He doesn't charge much. I could probably afford to hire him. The way I do it now, laundry’s become a grind, leeching time that'd be enriching if only I spent it with my nose in a good book. (I have nowhere near the number of leisure-reading hours I’d prefer.) But I couldn't stand myself if I paid to save a trifling fraction of an hour per day, solely in order to be lazy. Scrubbing in suds may dry my hands something fierce, sometimes, but it keeps my conscience and my socks clean.

When Prison Culture Meets Black Lipstick

Tony and I were walking from the dining hall to the housing unit when he caught up to me. He'd seen the teaser for MTV's 7 September episode of Unlocking the Truth, the one introducing my case, and of course wanted to tell me so.

"They showed a picture of you in drag, all painted up."

I practically snorted, thinking, Good one, Tony. The photo in question shows my pale young face, cheekily glancing away from the camera, wearing eyeliner and a black-lipped smirk. My black velvet shirt and black coat can barely be seen. My fifteen-hole Doc Martens are out of the shot altogether, as are the silver chains draped from my right shoulder. I don't recall wearing jewelry more outrageous than my everyday piercings and two handfuls of silver rings that evening, but that doesn't mean I didn't. Jokingly calling this gothy getup drag was typical Tony, and I accepted the dig amiably.

Only later, replaying our conversation in my head, did I realize that Tony might not have been kidding around. He's been locked up for a long time; might he not know the vast difference between drag and goth? And if he doesn't, what could that mean for others who see the show — people around the prison who don't even know me as tangentially as Tony does?

For the very first time since Unlocking the Truth started delving into my case, I was nervous.

The average convict isn't known for his open-mindedness or reasonableness. Penned in by razor wire and walls, the tattooed swastikas, neighborhood affiliations, and gang code on most prisoners' bodies speak to their intolerance of the Other. Ask almost any citizens on the street and they'll likely supply two accurate facts about prison life: (1) it's governed by a rigorously enforced power dynamic; (2) it's run through with a current of barely contained sexual frustration. What might the sight of me in the summer of my eighteenth year, made up and dressed for a party, inspire in the mind of Billy Badass, DOC number 40926, who's been down since 1981 and ain't never seen no shit like that in his jerkwater hometown, where only whores and queers wear makeup, and the livestock are all a little jumpy? Would his shuttered mind compute? Or would he default to the old mental schema, Lipstick is for girls. The boy in the picture wears lipstick. So he must want to be a girl. I will make him my girl, thereby inciting an unpleasant circumstance for all involved? You can understand my concern.

The episode in question, when it aired, glossed over any meaningful definition of goth, probably because MTV's demographic has grown up in a culture that's more inclusive than those of previous generations. I suspect that every Millennial had at least one goth kid at their high school. My lawyer's description alone, that labeling someone "goth" was how law enforcement, post-Columbine, branded that person as "bad," didn't seem like enough for the population of Crossroads Correctional Center to comprehend the goth subculture.

Walking the yard with my friend and former cellmate, Zach, the following morning, every comment that came my way (there were more than I anticipated) was complimentary.

A neighbor said, "I loved how, in your interview, you threw in a little humor. When you said, 'I was a weirdo — I'm still a weirdo,' that really got me."

Some guy I'd never before spoken with said, "That's exactly what prosecutors do: they dehumanize you to prejudice the juries. You got right to the heart of it, there."

Another guy: "When they came, at the end of the show, and played that phone call, I was like, 'Damn, people, he didn't answer her question because he doesn't respond the same as other individuals would: he's weird.' I just needed to let you know, I believe you, man. Fuck that lying crackwhore."

And so on, from countless strangers and acquaintances alike, for days. No one made so much as a peep about the party photo Tony saw in the teaser. If anyone was struck by my smoky-eyed makeup in almost every other pic, they uttered not a word about it to me. It seems like my concession to weirdness wiped away any questions about my particular, peculiarly dandyish, brand of masculinity.

For decades I've held that the elegance of honesty needs no adornment. My outspoken truthfulness sometimes lands me in trouble, but this time the maxim is right.

Writer’s Cramp #26

Getting Properly Wired and Hooked Up in Prison

There’s a popular misconception that prison life, especially in a maximum-security facility, is barely contained chaos — riots, brutality, and rampant criminal scheming. Other prisons probably do deal with such problems on a daily basis, but Crossroads is another species of penitentiary. Here, things are rigidly controlled and minor infractions are treated with relative severity. (Witness my trip to the Hole last year, which lasted thirty days, for making a three-way call during a podcast interview.) And every so often comes another tightening of the thumbscrews.

Last week the tightening took the form of a visit from the new housing unit manager — our equivalent of an overbearing landlord — who came on a tour of everyone’s cell, to ensure that all of us were in compliance with the posted regulations. His special peeves: paper bags used as trash receptacles, extension cords draped across cells, and sticky-backed plastic wall hooks adhered to any but three particular areas of one’s living quarters.

A few of us got advance notice of the walk-through. In my cell were a few unauthorized hooks still hanging where a previous cellmate left them, so I temporarily disassembled my fingernail clippers and used the handle as a prying tool to take the hooks off the wall. (Note the irony of making contraband to remove contraband.) My current cellmate had an extension for his headphones, so he could silently watch TV from the bunk. The cord was hidden behind his footlocker and resurfaced at the head of the bed but was nevertheless immediately seen and remarked upon: “Find something else to do with that, or it’s a safety violation.”

Now his headphone cord drapes across the cell, precisely in the way of my moving from this typewriter. This is somehow safer. I’m having a hard time adjusting to the new placement of my drying clothes, since the spot I used for hanging damp apparel this past year is no longer acceptable. What would the inmates at Pelican Bay do in this situation? Probably burn something. Being no pyro, I’ll just sit here and take it. There are worse obstacles and unpleasantries that prison can impose on a guy.

Another Man’s Boxers: A Sartorial Lament

The inaugural washing precedes the inaugural wearing, always. If the article must be dry-cleaned, then the inaugural wearing will have to be postponed even longer. I will wear nothing straight off the rack. There’s no telling how many bodies have slithered through, nor how many hands have felt over a garment before my own. Washing also removes that intolerable starchiness, the telltale creases of articles that came in a package, and the whiff of plastic that all new clothing seems to carry.

Before the inaugural washing, there is a procedure to be followed — a preparation. Pockets must be checked for slips, collars for stays, folds for pins, hems for tags. I abhor labels, inside or out, and take great care to undo the stitching that affixes them, regardless of whether I bought the articles from a department store, a punk shop, or an upscale fashion boutique. My standards are uniform; I am very particular about my clothes. And yes, I recognize the apparent contradiction in paying $190 for a designer shirt, only to strip it of its fashion-house identification within moments of taking it out of the bag. It might even seem a tad rebellious — an act of protest against materialism, albeit a conflicted one, since I did buy the thing to wear — but all it is is an equal aversion to the scratchiness of clothing tags and the concept of becoming an uncompensated walking billboard.

Why buy designer clothes if I’m not interested in showing off a label’s name? I choose clothing solely based on whether it meshes with my personal aesthetic, and if I could do that by shopping exclusively at, say, Old Navy, I’d be fine with that. Unfortunately for my bank account, the clothes that tend to fit my self-image best can be a little spendy. On the ultra-rare occasions when I flip through a men’s magazine, like GQ or Esquire, my eye is only ever drawn to ads for military-inspired Burberry coats and the rock-and-roll schoolteacher look of the latest Belstaff line (yet indifferent to the presence of Ewan MacGregor therein). When I spot an item, in these magazines, that I fancy myself wearing, a glance at the retail price almost always sends me into sticker shock. It’s my haute couture taste versus my notoriously thrifty ways. Then, of course, there’s the further complications of black.

Waiting with a limo driver outside of a downtown Chicago bus depot, when I was twenty-two (a mildly amusing anecdote that will today go untold), I was asked, “So, are you in a band or something?” Calf-high Doc Martens, velvet trousers, a ribbed T-shirt, an ankle-length autumn coat — I suppose strangers should have been forgiven for mistaking one black-clad lad for the drum-machine programmer in some goth-industrial group. More often than I got the band question, though, I received disapproving looks. These generally failed to register. I only recognized the glaring physical difference between myself and Average Joe, ahead of me in line at the bakery, when he wouldn’t stop turning around to check that I was maintaining a safe interpersonal distance. Piercings, eyeliner, and occasional black nail lacquer didn’t help me blend into the crowd, either. So it was: I was a weirdo. At least I stayed true to myself.

I’d begun experimenting with my wardrobe palette shortly before my abduction by the state. Colors still tended to freak me out — wearing them felt somehow vulgar and false — but I had a handful of shirts in my closet that didn’t: one in a mute red, one in bluish gray, one in deep burgundy. I was becoming very comfortable with charcoals. The ties I donned for work constituted my most garish peacocking. A week’s worth of Brooks Brothers white button-downs hanging beside them were further proof of my assimilation efforts. Then, pow, all choice was taken away.

I spent more than a year wearing short-sleeved orange jumpsuits with “DETENTION CENTER” stenciled on the back, along with pinkish T-shirts, boxer shorts, and socks that, the previous week, had been worn by someone else. The tags in them could not be taken out, nor could the tang of cheap industrial laundry detergent. The scratchy collars and waistlines couldn’t distract me from my fretting about what festering lesions or microscopic parasites the clothing’s last wearer might pass along to me.

Then I arrived at prison. I was given a uniform — three of them, in fact, all in gray. It felt so good to be out of the jumpsuit, with its eye-searing color, its lack of pockets in which to relax my worrying hands, its baggy midsection that I unnecessarily grabbed to keep from sagging every time I stood up. The prison uniform’s battleship gray was a relief, too. I knew some prisons issued uniforms in blue, some in white, some in green, some in tan. I knew also how much wearing any of these colors would depress me, as daily reminders of how far outside of my element I was being forced to live. Gray doesn’t deserve its drab reputation; I was actually happy about this chromatic bit of compatibility. It almost made up for my continued deprivation from long sleeves.

Better still, the prison clothes were issued to me. They even had my name printed on the pockets, below my assigned DOC ID number. It would be my responsibility to keep them in good condition, to wash them, to not lose them. No one else had worn them, and no one else would. The clothing situation could have been so much worse. I was even allowed to remove the tags, first thing.

Years went by. Those uniforms have been replaced, piece by piece, many times since. There are schedules that dictate how long each article must be kept — boxers and socks, six months; T-shirts, a year; gray pants and shirts, three years — and I have mostly exchanged my old for new as those time frames allow. Financial cutbacks changed things. Staff who issue clothing here may now hand over an allotment of used T-shirts as likely as they might new ones. Ditto for gray pants, gray shirts, and underwear. Going to trade in my fraying, worn-thin items, I have thus far been lucky to get replacements that are still stiff from the box. I’ve hung on to a number of clothing articles for longer than most would. I have no desire to be given pre-worn boxers.

About the boxers, it’s tempting to joke, “There are many pairs like them, but these are mine.” Except they aren’t mine. They belong to the state of Missouri, the same as gave me a number that I wear because the rules here demand it, but to which I lay no claim. I wear these cheap white boxer shorts because there’s no alternative. If I’m ever handed a pair someone else has worn, I suppose I’ll wear those, too, for the same reason. For now, I’m trying to make the pairs last that I’ve already got. There’s no way for me to know if my next clothing exchange will yield more unworn stuff, or if my luck will hold. This strategy is a gamble, like a game of roulette. I hold tightly to the hope that I’ll one day soon have the option back to bet on black.

Faded Finery and Frankenfeet: Entropy's Effects on the Prisoner's Wardrobe

When you first "come down" — that is, when you enter into the custody of the Missouri Department of Corrections — you're issued three pairs of elastic-waist gray pants, three short-sleeved gray shirts, three white tees, four pairs of whitish socks, five pairs of white boxers, a pair of black brogans, a brown coat, and a fluorescent orange stocking cap. The pants used to have fancy accoutrements like pockets and zipper flies; the gray shirts used to button up and have handy breast pockets; the hats used to be a muted blue. The issue used to be larger, too, including more clothes and a belt. If you wanted more — anything colorful or warm or, I don't know, hip — you had to mail order it through a catalog. Lots of inmates used to do so.

Then came Missouri Vocational Enterprises. MVE uses prisoner labor, paid substantially below minimum wage, to manufacture all kinds of important things for the Department, from cleaning supplies and toilet paper to office furniture and, yes, clothing. When the DOC awarded MVE the contract to be the exclusive provider of clothing to its canteens, inmates were suddenly barred from ordering personal hoodies, socks, jogging shorts, and so forth from any outside vendor. The era of Dickies, Nike, and Hanes came to an end. MVE, with their cheap material and weak stitching, has since been the only show in town. Where its profits go is a closely guarded secret, as is how the enterprise evades federal wage laws.

The old personal clothing was grandfathered, so no one's FUBU or Kansas City Chiefs gear got confiscated, but it has been many years since MVE got that lucrative contract. Not even well-made clothes hold together forever. So you see them all over the prison: tattered Jordan tees, once-red football jerseys gone high pink, puffy coats disgorging white tufts of fill at the elbows. The wearers are as proud of these rags as could be, even though some cling by only a few threads to their bodies. They strut around the yard, cocks of the walk, just pleased to be wearing something that isn't state-issued gray — a touch of individuality, even at the cost of looking like a hobo.

I arrived here before the MVE monopoly, and could have been one of the guys boasting a colorful wardrobe. I wasn't planning on being imprisoned long, though; getting comfortable was the last thing on my mind. Anyway, I like battleship gray. Then, in autumn of 2003, I broke down and ordered a charcoal-colored sweatshirt through the mail. Winters here get blustery. That sweatshirt was stolen a few months later, which I chose to regard as an object lesson in the ultimate pointlessness of acquisition (Fight Club's Tyler Durden would be proud). I did not replace it. I did, however, later buy an MVE fleece jacket that, at seventeen bucks, is hardly an extravagance. Everything else I wear is still state-issued — why spend money on more than what I need? Besides, the available clothing is nothing like what I wore before prison. Wearing tank tops or shorts now would make me less comfortable, not more.

But even I am guilty of going to the preservationist extremes my fellow prisoners employ, where certain items are concerned. One of my thick rubber shower shoes snapped off my foot mid-stride last week, en route back to my cell with a damp towel over my shoulder. I broke into a limp, sliding the broken left sandal along the walk as efficiently as I could, avoiding flesh-to-concrete contact like a practiced germophobe. Then there was a choice to be made. Either I could replace them with a pair of the flimsy new foam-and-rubber flip-flops sold now on the canteen, or I could sacrifice a perfectly serviceable needle and a length of thread from my sewing kit to stitch together my outmoded, cloven footwear.

The needle bent and blunted. I stabbed a finger bloodily. When the job was done, erratic black stitching zigzagged the shoe's top like the handiwork of a drunken frontier surgeon. But it held, so I've still got my shower shoes. I suppose such efforts are no different from someone else awkwardly patching a holey shirt he's had since 1994, even if that shirt's little more than a collar with a meager web of fiber that links tenuously to sleeves. We cling to what we can.

Cold

Ghosts of my fingers linger on the faux glass a moment, then fade. I smile at the chill. The temperature outside is low, but not yet hat-worthy. Good thing; I don't care for hats. Besides, after the week I've had, the wind on my scalp will soothe my overheated gray matter.

I have had cellmates criticize my weather-assessment method. With the Weather Channel just a couple of button-presses away, they think a glance outside and a touch of the cell's tall Lexan window is insufficient. Given the circumstances, it's silly to want to know the current dew point and three-day forecast. Few here own a truly warm coat. There are those, few and far between, who have been locked up since the days when you could order parkas and windbreakers and such. Even so, everyone settles for dressing in a sorry approximation of adequacy for the weather. A tactile check presents me with my binary options: hat/no hat, coat/no coat. It's not quantum mechanics. There aren't even scarves or earmuffs available to complicate the equation.

The charcoal fleece jacket I slide over my shoulders is mainly a symbolic thing — a gesture offering the illusion of choice. At least I can say its pockets are useful. In one I stow my CD player, in the other a couple of discs. My plan for this morning's chilly recreation period involves laying claim to one of the concrete picnic tables at the south end of the yard and watching hawks reel on their thermals for a couple of hours. If the sky offers no hawks, I can always turn my idle observations to the hunched shoulders of shivering loners as they rush along the boulevard. Someone is always en route to somewhere warm, indoors. Comical. As a person who enjoys temperatures below 50°, I am in a minority here, where they revel in the sweltering miasma of summer. The usual frenetic crowds will be absent today, my solitude guaranteed.

There's a piercing beep. From outside the cell comes the indistinct voice on the speaker calling, "Rec!" Everything announced over the speakers here sounds like the trombone-speak of adults on the Peanuts cartoons. It always has. Not even years of daily practice have helped me, nor anyone else, discern what is being said. Intuition and guesswork (and a little luck) lead me and five die-hard handball players toward the door. By the look of things, everyone else is sleeping late.

On the yard, I cross the grass and find the spot I'd been hoping for. I take my seat backward, elbows on the tabletop behind me. It's the sleepers' loss; the morning is a crisp and beautiful one. And with my music to drown out the distant hollow popping of a handball, it feels like it's all mine.