Four Books I Spent My Spring Reading

When the time came to choose what to read next, our book club facilitator suggested we pick up Alice McDermott's novel After This. He was teaching a course on Catholic literature at Saint Louis University and, with characteristic forthrightness, begged our mercy in selecting a book he was already teaching, rather than adding another book to his literary load. After This is a book he loves, he said, which sounded promising enough. Then he went on to say that it was the one book from the course that his students suggested he remove from next semester's syllabus. "They think it's boring," he said. Being the type of readers for whom such warnings arouse curiosity, we assented almost immediately.

This was my first encounter with McDermott. She writes beautifully at the level of the sentence, with prose rich in meaning without ever being ponderous. Plotwise, I can see why contemporary college students struggled with this book: they probably couldn't relate to the world it depicted. Spanning a period between the end of two wars, World War Two and Vietnam, After This has at its center an Irish-American family in search not of happiness—because wanting happiness, in these characters' deeply Catholic mindset, would constitute a kind of unseemly greed—but of simple contentedness. Just to be okay with how their lives are going seems to be their aim. Their saga unfolds episodically, in a series of vignettes, with years disappearing easily between sections. Its 277 pages flip past with almost a breeze.

Freed in May from an onerous work schedule, I did my best to make up for lost reading time, leaping straight into several books at once. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones is a collection of Zen and pre-Zen writings compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki in 1957. It includes texts previously published as 101 Zen Stories, The Gateless Gate (called Mumonkon in the original Japanese), 10 Bulls (maybe better known as the ox-herding pictures), and an ancient Sanskrit text entitled Centering that emerged in India 4,000 years ago, more than two millennia before Bodhidharma famously brought Zen teachings to China. Unlike McDermott's novel, I took extra time with this book, ingesting it in small, meditative bites that never overwhelmed my ability to sit awhile with a given story, koan, or passage.

When Freedom Reads visited ERDCC a couple of years ago, I had to know its representatives' answers to two questions. First: what one book each of them read during their imprisonment most resonated with them. Then: what book they recommend for others in these circumstances. One response to the second question was The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writers Life in Prison, edited by Caits Meissner. This essay collection was put out by PEN America a few years ago, forwarding the organization's mission to celebrate and elevate the literature of writers "whose voices have too often gone unheard or been ignored." The Sentences That Create Us collects inspiring pieces by justice-impacted writers—novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, screenwriters, playwrights, memoirists, and everything in between—to reveal how prisoners whose minds remain free can create a different kind of life through their writing.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote about Zen the way he taught it: simply and with a directness that matched his subject. His book The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation was probably intended to be an introduction to the practice, for readers who were not yet intimate with the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Five Aggregates, the Paramitas, and other essential Buddhist teachings. Even though I've been practicing this stuff for a while, its good to go back to basics every so often and get a refresher. With straightforward pronouncements like "The person who has no compassion in him cannot be happy," and "Twenty-four hours are a treasure chest of jewels," Thich Nhat Hanh once again proves himself a teacher worthy of his beautiful reputation.

I'm not really sure where my reading will take me next. It's been so long since I had enough downtime from work to read much of anything. A visit to the prison's library is in order—my first in almost three years. Who knows what I might pick up.

Modern-Day Cave People

The Flintstones notwithstanding, I don't know where the term "caveman" came from. Although some might've taken shelter in occasional caves while hunting and gathering, our ancestors and the other early hominids—from Australopithecus to Neanderthal—tended to inhabit valleys, plains, and trees. So why do my neighbors, in this modern age, choose to live as troglodytes?

It's against prison policy to cover any window or overhead light. Still, the people next door to me do both. Lining the window with rolled-up towels, they keep their cell blacker than a starless night. Using contraband tape to hang manila folders over the fluorescent light fixture, they ensure that any light emitted will amount to no more than a dull glow. I doubt either of them have thought about the reasons behind these choices. If you asked, they'd simply say, "I like it dark."

And dark it is. I once had occasion to knock on their door. Let me tell you, that void was deep. Even light from the open door barely pierced the gloom. I'm baffled as to how they achieved such an effect. It's not like the canteen sells light-absorbing paint.

What I could see was a small clip-on lamp fitted with a cardboard sleeve, which functioned as a spotlight. Outside of its beam, my neighbor's face was nearly invisible. All you could see in the cell was the small circle of light on the desk where he pieced together a cardboard tractor—precision work that'd be so much easier if someone turned the damn light on.

They're hardly alone in practicing what I call the dark arts. Across the small stretch of grass visible from my cell window sits 2-House, ERDCC's administrative segregation unit. People confined there get "recreation" in wire cages like dog kennels three times a week. Otherwise, they're out of their cells virtually not at all. You'd think they'd want a little sunshine in their lives, but no.

Twenty-four windows of 2-House can be seen from my cell. More than half of them are completely covered with some kind of detritus. A couple have identifiable items hanging in them—shirts or sheets—to thwart the sun. Others are papered with what I assume are Health Service Request forms or pages torn from paperback novels that float around the Hole every so often. As questionable as those works of "literature" usually are, and as little love as I hold in my heart for direct sunlight, I just can't condone vandalizing a book.

The number of cells in ad-seg with covered windows far exceeds the number in general population. The number here in the honor dorm is even lower than that. Based on a quick, informal poll I took before starting this post, only about one in eight cells have some form of window covering. Most of those are temporary fixes—a shirt hung up in the afternoons, for example, when the sun casts a glare on someone's TV. The same held true at Crossroads, the prison where I spent the larger part of my sentence. There's no accounting for taste, but the consistency of these numbers between prisons doesn't seem like mere coincidence.

Are the prisoners who keep a dark cell trying to block out their surroundings? Is their pitch-black room an outward manifestation of depression? Is it merely a sleep aid? There are probably reasons I'm not even considering—some sort of superstition, maybe, about light.

Whatever reason these people have for living that way, I don't relate. Prison may be hard-edged, dirty, and visually unappealing, but I'd rather not have to fumble around blindly to find my coffee cup, my toothbrush, or my surface-dwelling humanity.

Breakfast Line

Queued up for breakfast in the dining hall, it seems to be a mostly ordinary morning. Shouting is at a minimum, since much of the population's still waking up. The smell of this afternoon's lunch—fish patties—has yet to permeate the place. The only real negative is that, directly behind me in line, a frustrated soul won't stop ranting about how his elderly cellmate pissed all over his freshly cleaned floor.

"It wouldn't even bother me so much, but when I mentioned it he just waved me off and said, 'Eh, it'll be okay.' No, it won't! It won't be okay! I have to clean it up!"

This is what I get for asking about his morning. Ahead of me, our mutual acquaintance half turns and rolls his eyes. The line hasn't moved in several minutes, which isn't unusual, really. Anyone who transfers here from another prison will tell you that the chow hall at ERDCC serves more slowly than any other institution in the state. The joke is that the servers are too "deuced out" on K2 to do anything. It's not a joke at all, actually.

"Just sit down! For Christ's sake, if you know you have prostate issues, don't stand to piss!"

Up ahead of us, another person takes a tray from the window, and the line immediately stalls again. Have the prison's biscuits and gravy ever been good enough to warrant this level of discomfort? I venture to think not, then check my privilege. At least you're getting fed, Byron.

"So I ask him, right? I ask him why he didn't just sit down, instead of just spraying and dribbling over half the cell, and you know what he says to me? You know what he says?"

I shake my head, my face expressing what I hope is a kind of nonchalant half-interest. I don't want to encourage this, but I don't want to abruptly shut him down, either. The line continues not to move.

"He says, 'I didn't want to pull down my pants in front of everybody.' I was like, 'The cell door was closed! There was nobody around!"

People behind him quietly snicker at his tirade, and while I've not quite reached a point of being ready to bail on this breakfast venture, I'm definitely wishing the servers would get their shit together and resume pushing trays.

And just as this uncharitable thought about the kitchen workers develops—wonder of wonders!—the line's moving again.

"He just expected me to wipe it up like a water spill. I'm like, 'And let it start stinking? No way! I'm gonna get down there and bleach the whole area all over again!' The dude's gotta be senile, or else he was born before germ theory existed."

Baby steps nudge us closer to the window. At least we're around the corner now—the home stretch, with fewer than ten people in front of us.

The guard posted a few feet ahead commits to his vacuous stare as not just one but three line jumpers retard everyone's progress. It's like landing on one of those disappointing spaces in an even more disappointing board game: "INCUR DISRESPECT! Go back three spaces." I let loose a sigh.

"I should tell the case manager he's incontinent and get him moved to the ECU. I don't know how many more pools of piss I can stand to clean up."

Here comes my food, at last. I take the lip of the brown plastic tray and see that something's missing. A quick inventory tells me there's no gravy, jelly, nor butter. All I have is corn flakes, a box of raisins, two dry biscuits, and a half pint of milk. If breakfast is truly the most important meal of the day, this bodes ill for my afternoon.

At least I can get away from the barrage of bitching. Holding my tray in one hand, I pivot and assume escape velocity, course set toward an outlying table. Behind me, still at the window, I hear the complaints change tack.

"Hey, what's up with my gravy?" he yells into the window. "Are you guys too high to work the ladle anymore?"