Swing, Batter! Suffer, Byron!

One of the most popular XSTREAM Media programs is easily Game of the Week. This in-house production produced by my coworkers and me is nothing more than video footage of a Recreation Department-sanctioned team sport being played in the previous seven days of its broadcast. Sometimes the game is Pickleball, at other times it's basketball. Whatever the sport, I dislike having anything to do with it.

For years, every annual "King of the Hill" sports event at ERDCC was recorded with a single video camera, then broadcast without graphics on the person's closed-circuit TV system – and it was fine. That all changed when one of my coworkers bragged about the last prison he was at, saying in our boss's presence, "Back at Potosi, we used to tape every basketball game." It wasn't a week before the boss bought two $1,200 shoulder-mounted Panasonic video cameras and told us to start producing weekly sports broadcasts. So we do. I designed a logo for XSTREAM Sports that transformed the head of our vaguely menacing octopus logo into a basketball. Then I made a Pickleball version. Then I did one for softball. If they ever allow prisoners to play soccer in Missouri, I'll probably have to make a version for that, too.

If only that's where my responsibility ended. Every Tuesday, because no one else is available, the three members of Team XSTREAM who are too nerdy and/or crowd-averse to play team sports – Ridhwan, Jason, and myself – gear up and head out to the diamond to record another "exciting" round of ball-and-stick. For the record, for those who don't know me or haven't followed this blog long enough to know, videotaping a summer softball game is pretty close to being as un-Byronic as an activity can get. (Attending the performance of a Journey cover band, accompanied by two excitable children, would be one that goes a step further.) I'm basically a human-mushroom hybrid and thrive in cool, dark places. There are three simple reasons why: (1) I don't tolerate heat, (2) I quickly scorch when exposed to direct sunlight, and (3) I don't understand the rules – nor the mass appeal – of sport in general. Nevertheless, there I go, every Tuesday, up onto the volleyball stand, to train a camera over a fence and record two back-to-back games of slow-pitch softball. The camera I run sits just beside the batting cage. The commentators who mike up and feed audio into my camera are a couple of wise-asses intent on roasting every player they can: "His teeth look like he just ate a box of Cheez-Its and didn't brush." "Here comes Charles Manson up to the plate." "Armstrong is a terrible player. Terrible." "His pants are so tight, they're cutting off circulation to his brain." "It's Sammy's birthday today. He's 88 years old and still pitching." And so on. About half the time, I get a headache hearing their yammering through my headphones for two hours at a stretch. It would help if they were at least funny.

Alas, sunburn and a sore neck seem to be my weekly lot in life now. It's a peculiar place to be. We don't have Nielsen ratings, just word on the yard. Like I said, though, the population seems to like it – which is what really matters.

Pain Rains from the Sky, Come Summertime

I've seen the injuries, from bruises the size and color of plums, to lips cleaved bloodily open, so I know what a dangerous place the prison yard can he. Fortunately, it's only for a few months each year, then softball season's over.

A track, handball courts, a big paved walkway, basketball courts — everything on Crossroads' two yards encircles the softball field occupying each side of the facility. This means that pop flies, when the softball gets hit at an odd point and launches up instead of out, can hurt people in any direction. Everyone freezes when one's sent flying, their eyes frantically scanning the sky for that day-glo yellow orb of pain hurtling along in an errant arc. It's usually older prisoners who get beaned, unable to hear the players shouting "Heads up!" again and again. Someone seems to get hit every game, yet the administration hasn't banned the bats, balls, and gloves.

Softball for some, dodgeball for the rest of us. And because of players' work schedules, games mainly take place in the evening, during the otherwise enjoyable three-month "night yard" period when the powers that be deem daylight sufficiently long for Crossroads' population to spend one hour of our evening recreation outdoors. I look forward to night yard not because I delight in summer temperatures or want to OD on vitamin D, but because it's my only way to get any rec on worknights.

The way that movement is controlled (a hallmark of maximum security is its limitation of prisoners' ability to go from here to there), after being released from the staff dining room, I usually return to my wing and stay there. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, however, I can wait around in my cell for about twenty minutes before there's a loudspeaker announcement of "Rec!" and brief hysteria to get out the wing door. Then I'm out and free to my thing.

The air is Missouri-muggy, the beating sunlight is only slightly refracted through the atmosphere, and the yard is kicking up the heat that its concrete spent all day absorbing. None of these conditions speak to me, but rec is rec. I like walking laps, stopping to do two or three sets of bodyweight exercises every time I pass the south picnic tables. My friend Zach often tags along, for conversation. We circle until my muscles give out or the yard closes, whichever comes first. Either way, four eyes are better than two, and Zach's presence also protects me, in vulnerable positions such as handstands, from catching a rogue softball in the face.

So there's a good-with-the-bad component to my evening rec, just as there is with everything else. Pro: I get some physical exercise and stimulating verbal exchange. Con: my nerves become frayed, tuning one ear for so long to that frequency voices reach when potential bloodshed is imminent.

Nowhere on the yard is safe, but I'm only too happy to trade a modicum of freedom for a proportionate risk. Hot, jumpy evenings of fun, here I come!

Frisbee Goth

Springtime! The yellow sun smiled down from a sky as blue, blue, blue as a robin's egg. Little birds flitted to my neighbor's windowsill and peeped at each other, exhorting the beauty and promise of the season. High gentle breezes herded puffball clouds around like sheep in a field. But, peering through the slit my sleepy fingers found between the bedroom curtains, it wasn't a playful baaaaaah that I intoned but a Scroogelike bah!

No matter how well adapted I felt to living nocturnally, every so often there'd be a morning when, after my overnight shift at the hotel's front desk, my circadian rhythm dropped a beat and left me lying in bed, staring in the inky vicinity of the ceiling, curious to know what the hell was wrong with my brain that it wouldn't reliably shut down. This was one such morning. Hence the exploratory gander at the bright world of daywalkers.

"Experts" say that the best thing the sleepless can do for themselves is to just get up and go do something until they get tired. As much as it felt like acquiescing to the oppressive diurnal-normative agenda intended to marginalize us self-identified nyctophiliacs, I decided to get my ass out of bed. Slipping into my black kimono, I ventured from my Stygian hideaway to see if my roommate had brewed any coffee.

The Captain squatted in the hallway, elbows-deep in a cardboard box she'd pulled from the closet, and surrounded by books, electronics components, and geeky miscellanea. If the guys on The Big Bang Theory prepped for a rummage sale, it'd look a lot like this.

"The fuck?" she said at the sight of me. "No sleepies for owlie?"

Like creepy twins in a supernatural suspense movie, the Captain and I had our own special means of communicating. I answered, "Blarg."

She made sad-face, her small mouth curling down to the points of her jet black bob, empathizing with my pain. (Every ninety days, her job made her work a month of nights, and the insomnia was brutal.) She hitched her thumb kitchenward. "Fresh pot."

When you work overnight, you get a different perspective on the world, civilization, infrastructure, and even biology. You don't take for granted that anyone shares your lifestyle, too, because it's painfully obvious that most don't. I couldn't say how many accusations of laziness I got for not answering my phone during "normal" hours. Incredulous friends didn't get how I slept the days away, even after I pointed out the equivalence of my 2:30 PM to their 2:30 AM. Some people are stubborn in their ignorance of how the world works.

But coffee? Coffee is a universal. Coffee is critical for all late workers, all predawn risers — for burners of the midnight oil, and early birds alike. Coffee, we can all, I think, agree, is life.

I was on my way to loving life when I returned to the hallway with a mug of strong Guatamalan in one hand, a lit Turkish Special in the other, my cats doing synchronized figure-eights around my naked ankles. Everything would be okay, I thought, as long as I had the three Cs — coffee, cigarettes, and cats — close by.

I nudged kitties back to clear space for myself on the floor. Bast nuzzled my chin; Isis sniffed my bare toes; the Captain extended a Ziploc bag and shook it at me, the way you do when you're offering someone a potato chip: "Capacitor?"

"Thanks," I demurred. "I've got my power breakfast right here. What is all this stuff?"

"It's from Mom's basement. Old stuff from school, et cetera," she sighed, repositioning her wire-rimmed glasses. "I'm deciding what to keep and what goes to Defenbaugh."

I read the spines of a few books beside her. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Semiconductors. A Dame to Kill For. Eclectic selection the Captain had.

A black-and-silver plastic something in the box caught my eye. I pointed. "What's that?"

I'd seen Frisbees in all colors, plus a few knockoff "flying saucers" with gaudy decals (typically at Everything's $1-type places), but never in black, with faux-chrome accents. This one, which the Captain introduced as not just a Frisbee but her Frisbee was an actual brand-name Frisbee Frisbee with grooves on top and a metallic silver design in the center, in imitation of that little three-armed plastic device you snap into vinyl singles to play them on a standard turntable. The Captain's Frisbee looked like a record.

It was cool, so I said as much, then added, "We should go down to Loose Park and play sometime."

Since way before I stopped wearing clothes with color, keeping my complexion milky with mail ordered Japanese SPF 70 sunscreen, and dying my hair a shade or two darker than India ink, I'd been going to the Jacob L. Loose Memorial Park — a scenic parcel of nearby land offering leisure-seekers a one-mile loop of pavement to bike or jog or promenade or walk dogs or push strollers; herb and rose gardens for olfactory pleasures; tennis courts; a picnic pavilion, complete with public-use barbecue grills; swingsets; fountains; a placid, attractively landscaped duck pond; ample rolling green lawns; a clutch of shady, fragrant pines; and a memorial to the historic Battle of Westport, with an account of the conflict presented on a series of large brass plaques alongside an authentic Civil War cannon that reeked of ammonia throughout the summer until park officials decided to plug the barrel, thus curtailing after-dark revelers' drunken games of Let's Urinate in the Most Inexpedient and Socially Unacceptable Places We Can.

Loose Park was great. Just because you're goth doesn't mean you can't enjoy scattering bread crumbs for ducks. Frisbee, though? That might have been pushing it, which is precisely the message I read in the Captain's eyes before she said the words "Are you fucking kidding me?"

Sure, my manifestly common-sense sunblock use, not to mention my clunky waffle-soled leather footwear's suitability for any number of potentially rough-and-tumble environments (most of them clubby or mosh-pitty, it's true), could seem to be born of a desire to be prepared, but I was not what you'd call outdoorsy. The Captain and I spent our workdays in front of computer screens; when we came home, it was to our PCs and hours of Internet, lobbing instant messages back and forth to each other from adjoining bedrooms — with the connecting door open. I'm saying ours was a sedentary existence. Yet somehow my roommate and best friend, a young woman who refused to order anything more adventurous than spaghetti red at every Italian restaurant we ever went to, believed that my all-black wardrobe and eyeliner made me less inclined to do something out of character than she was. I was almost offended.

What I thought: I can be spontaneous! I can cast off my gothy mantle whenever I want — go ride the bumper cars at Worlds of Fun, be the only white guy in a sketchy neighborhood's fried-chicken place, sing along with some poppy ’90s hit playing over a store PA, catch a demolition derby, make snickerdoodles, I don't know. I'm not a slave to my subculture, dammit!

What I said: "Whatever," then took a nonchalant drag of my cigarette.

A half hour later we were cruising up Broadway in the Captain's car, windows down, Gary Numan yowling from the stereo:

Down in the park
Where the chant is
"Death, death, death"
Until the sun cries morning
Down in the park
With friends of mine

Was it stupid to soundtrack our lives by picking a song "for the moment"? Probably, but we did it all the same.

We waited in our parking spot while the track played through, then set out on calf-high booted feet for where dogs ran and picnickers picnicked on weekends, this midday abandoned but for us, a couple of oddballs in black, come to toss around a color-coordinated Frisbee.

It's the kind of skill that sticks with you, Frisbee-throwing. Like riding a bike. I was never especially good at that, either. My Frisbee flings banked right too often, crashing into the grass and rolling far afield of their intended target, but the Captain didn't complain about chasing them down, so long as I cast a few into her waiting hands. Don't let her long-sleeved Nine Inch Nails T-shirt fool you; over-the-shoulder slings, boomerang flicks, behind the back catches — the Captain's masterful discmanship exposed her secret teenage flirtation with hippiedom. (And I happened to know she also played a mean game of hacky-sack.)

Beneath my velvet pants, my skin was feeling a little dewy, to which the Captain responded, "Eew!" She was feeling the effects of our fun under the sun's cheerful beaming, too, so we retired to a concrete bench in the umbra of tall pines, blanketed all around by their shed needles. Light gusts of air stirred their fresh scent, and I yawned. So quiet, so dim. I could just lie down right....

"Hooman?" the Captain prodded my elbow. Translation: Are you ready to sleep yet? I nodded, suddenly feeling drained.

She drove us home. Without another word I shut my bedroom door, barely getting my laces undone and boots off before collapsing into bed like a corpse. I didn't even care that I was damp; more laundry for later, was all. The only thought in my head, just before I lost consciousness and plummeted through enough restful hours' sleep to get me through that night's work, was, Huh, the experts were right.

Writer’s Cramp #34

Touchdown!

Each year, around this time, something is unloosed that causes everyone in my vicinity to lose his mind. That something is football, and we might as well have it out in the open right now: I don't care for it.

I don't hate the sport, mind you. Saying I hate football would be unfair — an overstatement on par with claiming I abhorred the existence of, let's say, monosodium glutamate. While it's true I'm no fan of MSG, and generally request the cooks not sprinkle my Chinese take-out moo goo gai pan with it, I won't die (not right away, at least) if they do. Recognizing this fact, I don't give a lot of thought to MSG unless I'm studying a menu bordered with the signs of the Chinese zodiac. So too with football; out of sight, out of mind. Unfortunately, football is more difficult to avoid than a box of General Tso's chicken.

The season starts unexpectedly, usually when I am profoundly lost in a book or writing project. All at once, out of nowhere, the entire wing of inmates — all seventy-one of them, my cellmate included — erupts into a violent cheer that startles the hell out of me. My train of thought is derailed every time.

It so happens I have a neurological condition that meshes poorly with the sort of chaotic outbursts football elicits in the guys here. They reach a certain pitch and fervor, and I will feel in my teeth a sharp tingling, bordering on pain. Unpleasant. All it takes is that initial evening's exposure to pigskin-induced psychotics for me to invest in earplugs. Some say I look ridiculous, going around all day with OSHA-orange plugs jutting from the sides of my head, shouting, "Huh?" at everything. Feeling like I have just chomped down on a wad of aluminum foil every time the Kansas City Chiefs gain a few yards — that's no way to spend half the year. Injury to my already questionable image is preferable.

The Superbowl is especially trying, thanks to the frisson it invokes in others. There are, however, a couple of good things about it. One is that it marks the official cessation of my football-related discomfort for another eight or so months. The other is nachos.

Longstanding and widespread penitentiary tradition holds that, if one has any money, one must stock up on fixings from the canteen the week of the big game. Groups of inmates pool their resources, potluck-style, beginning late Sunday morning. They gradually assemble gargantuan spreads of tortilla chips with all kinds of artery-beplaquing toppings — most popularly, chili from a pouch, summer sausage, squeeze cheese, and ranch dressing. By nightfall these heaps of junk food have been wolfed down and are being drowsily digested.

What I have found is that, if you throw in a couple of dollars' worth of ingredients during the preparation phase, the die-hard fans are willing to overlook that you're not remotely interested in their sport of choice. Bring a few cans of soda to the table and they'll likely even forget about your bulky, fluorescent ear accessories. Go, local sports franchise!