A Taste of Fall

With a gentle knock, my friend Beau hesitantly brings his face to the narrow window of the cell door. His timing couldn't be much better; the movie I was watching just ended. I wave him in.

He's holding his mug, the same transparent plastic kind that everybody in prison owns. Amber liquid sloshes around inside. "Get a cup," he says with an excited smile. "You'll want to try this."

I turn off my TV and eye his mug with skepticism. For just an instant, I fear he might be trying to give me alcohol. I've gone decades without drinking any of the blinding trash-bag booze that some prisoners ferment under their bunks, and I'm not interested in trying the stuff now. Even though Beau doesn't have substance use issues, I have trust issues and can't help but wonder....

Beau grins, almost conspiratorially. He says, "It's hot apple cider."

I'm confused, that's the only word for it. There's a thriving black market for contraband foodstuffs here, but cider isn't something I've ever known to exist inside the prison fences. It just isn't the sort of innocent thing people here usually crave.

"Well, it's kinda apple cider. I made it. It's fantastic."

A little warily, I retrieve a cup, which he proceeds to pour two fingers of his concoction into.

I take a whiff. It smells like cinnamon. Cautiously, I sip.

He reads the perplexity on my face. This beverage is surprising, to say the least. We don't have access to apple juice, nor to fresh apples in quantities enough to crush for drinking. This so-called cider is something else. Either I'm delusional or it's a passable stand-in for the real thing—hot, tart, sweet, and appropriately spiced.

"I know, right?" Beau enthuses. He takes a swig and smacks his lips with delight. "Tell me that doesn't taste like camping and hikes through the woods and trick-or-treating. It's actually powdered lemonade, honey, cinnamon, and butter. Butter is key. It rounds out the flavor, adds richness."

This stuff is good. Beau's usually pretty successful at engineering interesting recipes. Maybe that comes with having a degree in organic chemistry. We stand in my cell, letting this cider's pleasant volatility entice our olfactory systems.

I try to think back to my childhood and autumn nights with family friends who lived out in the country. They always had hot apple cider on hand, and we'd sit beside a bonfire, our faces warm, our backs cold, as we nursed Styrofoam cups of scalding sweet liquid. I remember once burning my tongue and the roof of my mouth on it, so that I couldn't taste anything for days but still drank the whole cup and went back for seconds, afterward. Is Beau's "cider" actually similar to that cider, or can I simply no longer recall cider's flavor?

"Don't overthink it," he says, "just enjoy it."

So I release my weak grip on the past, and my lame philosophical fumblings, and take another sip.

Good Thoughts for Sam

My friend Sam's been gone from ERDCC for a few years. He'd been my neighbor, a friend in Buddhism, and a good, positive person to be around. I appreciated his seemingly endless energy and his willingness to point out when I was being too serious. The day he asked me to be the best man at his wedding surprised and humbled me in equal measure. In return, I got away with calling him Sam; everybody else here he made use his full name, Samuel.

Just weeks before the wedding, Sam was unexpectedly transferred to another facility. We stayed in contact by mail for a few months. Then the Missouri Department of Corrections banned communication between any prisoners who aren't related to one another. The last letter I got from Sam was handwritten on yellow notebook paper. It expressed mixed emotions about the Buddhist community in his new environment. He missed the dedication our group had when he'd still been here. The feeling was mutual.

Sam's a big-time videogame nerd, self-described. Get him talking about memorable titles and you won't be given a chance to change the subject for quite a while. His love for gaming runs deep. It shouldn't have surprised me that he'd find a way to get close to his passion in spite of videogames being banned from Missouri prisons.

Over at Farmington Correctional Center, fifteen minutes from ERDCC, where he ended up, Sam started a television show on one of the prisoner-run closed-circuit channels. The show was all about—you guessed it—videogames. Together with a gamer at FireTV, Farmington's video production studio, Sam created "LFG: Looking for Group," a show for imprisoned gamers to talk shop and watch walkthroughs of the hottest titles. I didn't learn about "LFG" from an exchange with Sam or from seeing the show. I only know about it because of Sam's TED Talk.

There's an app on prisoners' tablets called Edovo. It lets us read and watch all kinds of enriching and educational content, from Kahn Academy, MasterClass, the Marshall Project, and more—including a few podcasts and e-books. While using Edovo the other day, I happened across a program guide for the TEDx event that was held at Farmington last April. I knew about that event but hadn't really been interested in watching the footage, even though it's been available for months. Curiosity about the event's organization was the only reason I opened the TEDx program guide. Perusing its fifty pages, I happened upon a smiling headshot and recognizable name in the list of speakers.

Holy shit! Sam! My mind was blown. Why did I wait so long to get curious about this event?

I got such delight from seeing Sam talk alongside his "LFG" cohost. He looked a little nervous onstage, under those bright lights, but he delivered his message with characteristic openness and enthusiasm. I watched it and thought only, Damn, Sam, you did that!

After the video ended, I conducted a little amateur sleuthing. I learned that, a while after giving his TED Talk, Sam was released on parole. Today he's out of prison, enjoying a new life with the woman he loves, playing whatever game he wants. I feel so much joy for what he gets to experience now.

Someone asked me recently if I felt even the slightest sting, seeing people leave this place. "Not that there's no chance for you," she wrote, "but still, how do you cope with that?" Especially considering what I do for work now, it's a legitimate question. I considered my response awhile before replying.

I choose to be present and aware, and to nurture the good in others. On the path I've chosen to travel, others' successes are cause for celebration. It's like the opposite of schadenfreude. Jealousy gets in the way of our happiness in the same way that plaque builds up in arteries. Why shouldn't I be glad when someone makes it out of prison? They've completed their punishment. They deserve to have that new start so many of us dream about. They deserve some good, for a change.

Sam, if you happen to read this, congratulations! Here's my message to you:

May you be happy.

May you be at peace.

May you be safe.

May you be free.

A Friend Trapped in the Bardo

We were at work last Thursday morning when he was taken away. A guard in black-and-gray camouflage appeared in the doorway next to our shared desk, told Luke to come with him, then disappeared with my coworker and friend. Luke hasn't been seen or heard from again. As I write this, he's in the Hole, under investigation, not for a conduct violation, nor even for any suspected wrongdoing on his part, but for the nebulous charge of "staff familiarity" – a major threat, we are told, to the safety and security of Missouri's prisons.

I've been trying to organize my thoughts for days but still haven't arrived at a stable position. My friend, coworker, and fellow traveler of the Eightfold Path is suffering even more greatly than usual right now, stripped of his purposeful routine, his meaningful job, and even his clothes. (Prisoners in the Hole at ERDCC only get boxer shorts and a T-shirt to wear.) Worst of all might be the likelihood that Luke hasn't been fully apprised of the circumstances. What is it about law enforcement that they can't even be bothered to explain why they're locking someone up? They don't inform you of much here, they just do things. The last time I went to the Hole, eleven years ago at Crossroads Correctional Center, I wasn't informed of the circumstances of my confinement. That trip to administrative segregation echoed the circumstances of my initial arrest, over a decade prior; for my first couple of weeks in jail, I wasn't told why I was there, either. Luke doesn't use drugs, steal, gamble, or tattoo. He meditates. He's almost paranoid about having contraband and assiduously follows the many rules of prison, both official and un-. He's celibate. He freely gives his labors to our community of malcontents. He does CrossFit. He's an active member of Gavel Club. He goes to bed before 8:30 almost every evening. In most ways, he's the kind of prisoner that every employee of the Department of Corrections should want more of. Is the problem that he's worked in the Recreation Department for eight years? That he led XSTREAM from literally nothing, to being what the Prison Journalism Project dubbed a "media giant"? That he has made himself a respected member of the ERDCC community? That, despite his sentence of life without parole, he just earned a rare and much-coveted spot among the latest cohort of students with Saint Louis University's Associate of Arts program? The Department's prohibition on familiarity between institutional staff and the prisoners that they oversee might've been put in place with the best of intentions, but, at least as it applies to workers, the policy flies in the face of everything that corrections should stand for. If someone takes a job and proves themselves worthy of increased trust, even extra privileges, through exemplary performance during years of doing the job, shouldn't that be worthy of commendation? Luke is hardly perfect – if anything, he's deeply flawed – but if there's anyone I know who deserves somewhat elevated status, it's him. We all have a choice to either endure the uncertainty we encounter, or to lose our shit. I worry for Luke's sanity. He was supportive of me when I went through my midlife crisis. A week or so ago, he seemed mired in much the same mental swamp as the one from which I just emerged. We talked candidly and in depth about it, the way that only two people trapped in similar circumstances can. His job at XSTREAM meant more to him than almost everything else in his life. Our weekly Buddhist service kept him grounded as much as it did the other attendees. Knowing that these things have now been taken from him – and him from us – is difficult.

Prison strains all relationships, not just those with people on the other side of the fence. In the twenty-two years of my prison career, I've been separated from three friends by sudden turns of circumstance. Ben, at least, went willingly, when he signed up for the Intensive Therapeutic Community at Jefferson City Correctional Center. Zach stayed at Crossroads after the 2018 riot that resulted in my transfer here. I stayed in touch with them for years. Then the DOC instituted a ban on communicating with people in other prisons. There's now a chance that Luke will be transferred to another facility before he's released from ad-seg. There's also a chance that our paths won't cross again. I await with bated breath some word of his circumstances, desperately hoping that they turn out for the good and that Luke, no matter where he ends up, lands on his feet.

Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner

A box of Banquet fried chicken flies my way from a friend at work, quite by happenstance and without expectation of reimbursement. "Here you go, Byron," is all he says.

Free food is rare, especially in prison. Here, even a "free" chow-hall meal can be something you pay a price for eating. This box of chicken is doubly awesome for that fact. I offer sincere thanks and immediately start making dinner plans.

An hour an a half later, when I return to the cell, my cellmate, Bob, is vegging out on the bottom bunk. I announce that dinner's on me. Without actually moving from his supremely kicked-back position, he seems to sit up a little straighter and ask, "Do you need me to do anything?" "Just lie there and be cool." "Can do, boss," Bob answers back. There's a reason that I don't often cook my food in the wing. It's people. Merely walking the thirty-five feet from my door to the microwave attracts the gaze of every looky-loo in the place. As off-putting as cooking in front of a slew of hungry eyes might be, up-close questions about my meal make it even less appealing. I prefer not having to ask people to not talk directly over my food, which happens more often than you'd guess. Standing at the microwave in the middle of the wing, nuking four pieces of genetically modified fowl, a neighbor who's pathologically prone to argument hits me up for advice on how to properly format a survey. (There truly is no limit to the number of odd scenarios one encounters in prison.) This man has been known to turn "It's a nice day!" into a heated dispute, so I try to avoid extended conversation with him, knowing that every passing second puts me at greater odds of an unpleasant exchange. I explain to Captain Querulous why the precise wording of survey questions matters, all the while periodically checking my poultry. There's an instant when he takes a half-step back and turns his body 30° to the right – an avoidant posture that body-language analysts call "blading." I quickly change tack. He starts to sputter a refutation, but I barrel past the part he wants to disagree with, not letting him get a word in. Amazingly, it works. I change the subject and he seems none the wiser. A minute or so later, the beep affords me all the excuse needed to slip away before the exchange becomes a dispute. "Hot chicken, coming though!" Loitering conversationalists part to grant me passage. Someone clucks at me excitedly, and I pretend not to hear. I return to the cell just as the water for our instant mashed potatoes starts to boil. Setting the hot box to one side of the desk, I pour two cups, measured as precisely as my eyeball could manage, into the bowl containing a pouch of Idahoan Roasted Garlic and Parmesan mashed potatoes. I stir like mad to keep it from clumping. People on the outside know how important food is to the imprisoned. What they don't realize is the extent of the options available to us here. I've posted about the canteen before ("Prison Canteen Food Roundup," anyone?), but this was just a sampling of the four-page shopping list available to a Missouri prisoner every week. It's more than chips and cookies. Items like chili, beef stew, and lasagna – all in pouches, like military MREs – sell pretty well, and an assortment of shelf-stable meat and fish sells even better. Fried chicken is a twice-a-month treat, a fundraiser for the Puppies 4 Parole program, but even so, I've only bought it once in all my years. I'm worried that I might not have warmed it up properly. Bob produces a big bowl and accepts his half of the chicken pieces with a hungry smile. The mashed potatoes plop satisfying next to them. "The presentation isn't much," I say, "but enjoy." He shrugs. "I don't give a shit about presentation. This is better than what the chow hall's serving."

I do a little bow in acknowledgment of the creatures that lost their lives for it, the people who worked to prepare, cook, and package our little feast, and the friend who spent good money to give it to me, then bend to eat. Without question, it is better than dining hall food. I go to work with a full belly, walking proof that a person can find satisfaction in even unpleasant places.

The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything Is...

Turning forty-two in prison could've been an invitation for depression. Just as likely, it could've simply passed without fanfare, an otherwise unremarkable Monday in a place renowned for fostering undifferentiated days. Something like a conspiracy unfolded, though. The people I love took steps to make my forty-second special. They made not only the day great but the week as well.

Goodness began trickling in last week, with the first of the birthday cards and a bizarre video on my tablet. Those colorful greetings came from all over, from neighboring states and countries on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean alike, all of them wishing me good cheer, good health, and, of course, impending freedom. Each card I opened brought a smile, so very appreciated. In the middle of one night, I awoke to several envelopes slid across the floor by the door. I had gone to sleep assuming that a guard delivered Friday's mail without me noticing. That hadn't been the case. (Like most things here, mail delivery times are wildly inconsistent.) Curious, but not wanting to wake Jeff with the crinkling of paper at 2:30 in the morning, I had to be content with stacking the mail on my footlocker and waiting until closer to sunup before opening my little trove.

Then, on Friday my Amazon wish list shortened with a single visit to the prison's property room. I left work early and crossed the yard, expecting to pick up a book; the officer brought out a small stack instead. I suddenly found myself at my allowed limit. As I've said many times before, this is a nice problem to have.

"Don't make any plans for dinner Saturday," said Luke, apparently eager to add "personal chef" to the descriptors I already have for him – neighbor, work supervisor, Buddhist services facilitator, friend. "I'm making lasagna and garlic bread. Happy early birthday."

He spent hours prepping. Near the end, I watched him carry a stack of bowls full of sausage to the microwave, what must've been six pounds of meat. My friend went all out. He presented me with a casserole-dish-sized Tupperware container full of the end product, plus two garlic-dusted bagels, for Jeff and me to share. Normally I get a food visit from my mother and friends. COVID-19 prevented that this year. But my early-birthday lasagna made for a good-enough substitute. Afterward, stuffed almost to the max, Jeff and I concluded the feast with some Little Debbie Star Crunches.

The mood that I met Monday with was one of quiet pleasure. Contentment. This is forty-two, I thought at my reflection above the sink. Not too shabby.

"I didn't get you anything," Jeff said by way of good morning, "But happy birthday." This sentiment from my cellmate, who usually just frowns on birthday celebrations, was cool. Maybe we can consider it progress.

At work I just loafed. My three coworkers offered me a free day, to let me just sit at my desk and watch whatever I wanted at the computer. I'm now nearly through all of David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return. Since I accepted that I'd never get answers after the original run ended, being so close to them now, twenty-five years after I first saw the series, is a uniquely fulfilling gift indeed.

Later, once I came back to the house, I made phone calls, read a bit, and began making thank-yous for the many people who made the day extra special – because what better way to celebrate the anniversary of my birth than by appreciating everyone who contributes to this precious life?

Tom Waits Time Machine

"Tango Till They're Sore" is the fifth track on the timeless Tom Waits album Rain Dogs, released by Island Records in 1989. It clocks in at less than three minutes but that brief amount of time can do a lot. Its effect on me is a kind of time travel, twenty-three years into the past.

The song opens with an off-key barroom piano, perhaps one that's missing keys, and a metronomic ticking like someone tapping a sliver of plastic on a sheet of linoleum. The plinking melody is soon joined, all at once, by an upright bass, a couple of brass instruments, and the plaintive vocals of the Vagabond, the estimable Mr. Waits, whose voice makes Joe Cocker's sound almost AutoTune-smooth by comparison.

Without ever adopting an actual narrative, "Tango Till They're Sore" takes the perspective of a hedonist ruminating in a flophouse, considering how he wants his death, and subsequent funeral, to be. "I guess daisies'll have to do," Waits croaks, a man resigned to dying because he plans to have a good time in the process. ("Let me fall out of the window with confetti in my hair," the chorus pleads.) His list of final requests, for the funeral and beyond, includes a roast pig, a rousing New Orleans band, and someone hang on to his beloved clarinet "until I get back in town." You could call this funereal optimism.

I once mentioned the song in a short blog post that functioned as a belated eulogy for my friend Justin. Lounging around his condo with my friends, following a late-summer evening our favorite local record store, I heard Tom Waits for the very first time and practically climbed the walls to get away from the minor-key cacophony of Rain Dogs' opening track, "Singapore."

I warmed to the sound eventually. It just took a few listens. If I've learned anything about music in my years since, it's that some of the hardest stuff to hear can become the most satisfying, the most meaningfully enjoyable music there is. That's what Tom Waits was for me. It got so I couldn't get enough of his scratchy growl, his song's surreal characters, his devil-may-care musical style, and his singular persona.

As for that song from Rain Dogs, it came to be associated with Justin, a friend whose death comprises one half of the single most harmful, most enduring, most resented event of my life. Even today I can't hear it and not think of how Justin talked and talked about his funeral, about the different ways he'd thought about dying. He'd never discussed the way he actually died, of course, taking his own life within hours of his girlfriend's mysterious, grisly death. And that incongruity has contributed to the endurance of my feelings about the song, which are somehow simultaneously scornful and tender.

I appreciate difficult music that doesn't give itself up to listener all at once, the way a pop song does. I like the intellectual struggle to understand what it is that a piece of music is intended to do; why it works, sonically speaking; what message, if any, it contains. Working toward an understanding deepens a listener's relationship to it. Deep listening enriches your relationship to the music, giving it a chance to sink into your bones as you sink into its melodies, rhythms, and lyrics. Eventually it might even become part of you.

"Tango Till They're Sore" became a part of me more than half my lifetime ago. It's not a song I hum in the shower, nor one that I find myself wanting, at random moments, to hear. But when I get in a certain mood and feel like cueing up Rain Dogs on a warm Midwestern night, the whiskey-warped melody that starts plinking along, eleven minutes into the album, throws me right back into the long-past past. A resurrection. A revival. A memory not worth indulging but there, and strangely enjoyed, just the same.

The Ohio Risk-Assessment System Doesn't Work on the Innocent

The wing's loudspeaker blares, "Byron Case, bravo two-oh-seven, report to the caseworker's office." However much I'd like to ignore the interruption or put it off awhile, I drop the book I'm reading and go. It's just downstairs, after all, and shouldn't take but a minute.

Being called to the housing unit's caseworker's office isn't unusual. Caseworkers in prison wear many hats. Privileged mail, what comes from lawyers or the courts, gets shunted straight to the caseworker offices, to be opened and its contents verified in the presence of the addressee. The caseworkers' duties also include witnessing signatures and fingerprints on the appropriate form when a prisoner sends money from his institutional account – for mail ordering books, buying art supplies, paying court costs, making child support payments, et cetera.

The page this time is not for me to pick up a letter or sign a check but to take a questionnaire.

"Have a seat," the man says as I enter his tiny office. I note the Millennium Falcon poster hiding a couple of square feet of one pitted, gray concrete-block wall. Something tells me I won't get out of here any quicker if I weigh in on the perennial Star Wars debate over whether Han shot first. He squints at the packet of about twenty stapled-together pages in his hands. "This is gonna take us a while."

He tells me that the Missouri Department of Corrections is implementing the Ohio Risk-Assessment System, which the packet concerns, as part of its parole assessments. "Bear with me," he says, slipping his reading glasses on. "You're the first person I'm doing this with."

Parole assessments? Someone must've made a mistake. Because I have a first-degree murder sentence, I'm not eligible for parole. I volunteer what should be obvious: "Um, I've got life without."

He sighs, "Yeah, I know. They're making us do these on everybody."

Pages riffle. Someone recently burned popcorn in the office microwave. It's not even 10 AM; who the hell brunches on popcorn?

"Okay, tell me about your crime."

"What do you mean?" I don't want to be doing this in the first place. The presumption of guilt just adds to its offensive nature.

The caseworker's hand swivels on his wrist, as if he's loosening up for a video game tournament. "Just tell me how the crime took place."

"How much room have you got?"

"Summarize," he says, in a tone that sounds, surprisingly, like one of patience.

I give him the facts: that my girlfriend and I were hanging out with my friend Justin; that we went to pick up another friend, Justin's girlfriend, Anastasia; that Justin and Anastasia had been arguing a lot and resumed arguing the moment we picked her up; that Anastasia got out of the car while we were stopped at an intersection; that I never saw Anastasia again, but that after Justin later left our company he went back to meet her; and that the next morning a sheriff's deputy found Anastasia's body lying in a cemetery, shot in the face.

The caseworker has been scribbling notes in pencil while I talk. At no point does he show surprise, nor particular interest.

"How have you taken responsibility for your crime?"

"It's wasn't my crime, so I haven't."

"Okay...." He scribbles some more, then asks, "What steps have you taken to rehabilitate yourself during your incarceration?"

"I don't know about rehabilitation, since I don't think I was dehabilitated to begin with, but I'm always working to improve myself. I do a lot of writing, reading, mindfulness practice. I'm an analytical person by nature – you know, reflective. I think a lot about the kind of person I want to be in the world. I recently started daily meditation."

He looks up. "No programs?"

I know how remedial the DOC's programs tend to be, designed as they are around getting through to the uneducated, selfish, and hardheaded... when they're properly administered at all. A neighbor once took Anger Management and came back with a sheet of rebuses he said they'd been making the class do for weeks:

Years later, I signed up for a class that might actually teach me something. It didn't. I got a certificate for a class they never finished teaching. (I blogged about the tremendous disappointment of Mindfulness Training in 2015.) So I meet the caseworker's gaze, keeping in mind that he's just doing his job, operating under a particular limited mindset, not deliberately working to offend me, and answer him.

"No programs."

Scribble, scribble.

It goes on like this for a half hour. For years, I've said that I'm almost glad, in a perverted way, not to have a paroleable sentence, since it means I'll never be confronted by a panel of antagonistic board members who think they know the truth and are capable of accurately judging people's character. This ordeal of undergoing the Ohio Risk-Assessment System feels nearly as bad as I always believed seeing the parole board would. Will I have to do this all again next year? Shit, I hope not.

Happy Birthday, Dear Byron

Getting older is no picnic. Most Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers will probably tell you that after they turned forty, happy birthdays got a little harder to come by. This is at least doubly true in prison, where joy is thought to be as mythical as Santa Claus and racial equality. Somehow, though, I manage to summon enough happiness to smile about turning another year older. You might reasonably ask how the hell I do it.

When I was a teenager, people often thought I was ten years older than I was. Now that I'm "over the hill," everyone thinks I'm ten years younger than I am. Both perspectives have served me well. Appearances aside, however, age is taking its toll. My hair is thin. My vision sucks. My knees ache and crackle. My lungs are bad. Et cetera, ad mortuum.

Whatever. Age happens to the best of us. There are worse things, besides.

One of my lowest points, since the abduction that landed me in a prison cell, was my twenty-fifth birthday. I'd recently lost both an appeal and contact with a close friend. I slipped into a profound depression. Hitting the quarter-century mark seemed like a significant life event, and here I was, locked in a cluttered cell for days on end with a madman, not even allowed out for a shower, in the wake of a prisoner's vengeful assault of a guard. My severely mentally ill cellmate, Hoss, had schizophrenia and a hoarding problem, however, and being trapped in his presence, with his sloppiness and selfishness and constant whining about imagined injustice and persecution, made the pain of my wrongful imprisonment sting that much more sharply. Another item on my list of woes was that the institutional lockdown forced a cancelation of the special food visit I was expecting. Birthday cards and friendly letters poured in from all corners of the globe, but they only reminded me of all that I was being kept from.

Instead of wallowing for weeks in that gray torment, I turned to creative ventures. Art and (of course) writing got me through the worst of it, implicitly reiterating that old truth: that in life, ultimately, no one's responsible for your shitty moods but you. The next year, I took fun into my own hands. I bought some special foodstuffs from the prison canteen and shared a little birthday feast with my new cellmate. I also splurged by mail ordering a few music cassettes. (This was a long time ago.) The love and well-wishes my friends sent that year had their intended effect, and I sailed happily through my twenty-sixth birthday.

I can't legitimately claim all the credit for this. It'd be impossible to enjoy myself so much without that crucial ingredient to any happy birthday: love. Everyone out there who knows me personally or frequently reads this blog knows that I'm graced with the friendships of many smart, resilient, caring people. My connections to them are the glue that holds me together. To what state might I be reduced if not for them? On the anniversary of my birth, they shower me with cards, letters, and e-mails, as well as money, packets of pictures, and books — every type of gift that the Department of Corrections allows me to receive — and these mean the world to me. Locked in here, alone with society's dregs, my friends make me feel like a prince.

This Saturday I'll turn forty-one. Three of these wonderful people will be here to see me and share a meal made with love by my mother. We'll sit around a table and eat and talk and laugh. The joy of those hours will be palpable. Afterward, I'll sit in my cell, listening to an album I downloaded that morning, reflecting on forty-one years of life, grateful for everything that I have.

Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me.

Halloween in the Hoosegow VI: The Ritual

In prison, a mask is escape paraphernalia, even if it's just a paper cutout. If you're caught with one, you'll catch six months in the Hole. Giving anything away is similarly against the rules, assuming you're unlucky enough to be seen by a staff member petty and bored enough to write the conduct violation. Point being, taking trick-or-treaters at your cell door on Halloween can be a small challenge. I accepted it with childish eagerness befitting the season.

Housing unit rules be damned, on the first day of October, I hung six monstrous heads from the doorframe, stuck spiders and skeletons everywhere, and put a jack-o'-lantern on the desk. If guards wanted to act like Halloween haters, I vowed, let them come and tear my decorations down! They're not dangerous or offensive, and they all come down after a month, regardless.

I've been blogging about my love of Halloween for years. This semiannual series — my "Halloween in the Hoosegow" posts — has run the stylistic gamut, from straightforward nostalgia to overwrought horror-fiction parody, and, like the holiday itself, never gets old for me.

It takes a while to get settled, to find a groove in any new place. I celebrated my first Halloween at ERDCC in what's become my traditional way, sharing mega-nachos with my cellmate, the only guy here with whom I was really acquainted at the time. And while that was a fine, filling evening, Hopper wasn't the kind of guy who made much of a fuss over All Hallow's Eve (or any occasion at all). A certain élan is called for, nights like tonight, which is why this year is kind of special.

After a year and a half, I know some people. Several are in my sangha, the Buddhist group that meets in the prison chapel on Thursday mornings. I wanted to do something nice for them, so I bought some Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and jelly beans from the canteen yesterday and went full-on Martha Stewart, wrapping a Reese's and one of each flavor of jelly bean (except black) in a baggie, which I cinched with white thread and attached a black paper spider cutout to. I made seven bags — one to give to each member of the sangha.

While I crafted giveaway candy bags, Jeff, my cellmate of the past three months, busied himself making sour taffy for trick-or-treaters. His ingredients? Powdered peach drink mix, powdered lemonade mix, coffee creamer, and water. Where there's a will, there's a way. I was surprised by how well it turned out. We discussed how to deal with those who come to our cell door. Jeff proposed requesting paperwork proving they're allowed to participate in Halloween (i.e., no sex offenders). It's Jeff's candy, so I'll let him handle that bit on his own, if he chooses to impose restrictions.

I'll likely be too full to care what he does. The refried beans are already warming up. I'm prepping the rest of our copious nacho toppings, bumping my Halloween playlist as I slice the olives, mouth watering in anticipation. I'm cooking for four here. Luke and Tim, our neighbors across the wing, are going in on this meal. Preparing it early was necessary to accommodate their work schedules. The hour doesn't matter, though. Halloween is Halloween, no matter what time of the day you choose to celebrate it.

And as the dark of night creeps on, I'll slip into a comfortable position for the lineup of horror movies on cable TV, my hunger thoroughly satiated and my burst of seasonal rebellion ended. Tomorrow morning, I'll pack up the decorations and bury them in my footlocker. There's a time and a place. Of course, sometimes it's not the place, then you've got to make it the place — hence, "Halloween in the Hoosegow."

A Poem

Visitation

"I remember your son well," says one.
"We weren't friends but worked great together. He

was the perfect man to manage the front desk —
handsome and always willing to go that extra mile

for a guest." The mother smiles and nods
in the way one does, accepting condolences.

The elderly woman he's with looks elsewhere.
"How long has yours been gone?" the first mother

asks her, wincing, knowing the wound's too fresh.
The second works her toothless mouth in preparation,

then mutters, "Fifteen years last January."
She still burns a candle almost nightly,

lights a little flame for him, her youngest,
taken in his prime. And the mothers

look around them then and apprehend
the gathered. Those come to pay respects

are brothers, daughters, sisters, sons,
pals, partners, mothers too —

everyone attired for this occasion
differently. The charity jog freebie T-shirt,

the patterned dress, the hipster jeans, the inevitable
blue suit. Conversation ranges. Insurance, love

lives and lacks thereof, TV, illness, children —
one of whom looks up to see, in a flash like

a fish in an aquarium, his father's face
in the window glass. He cries out,

"Daddyyyyyy!" and the whole assembly turns
to watch him pass with Mama through

the waiting room's double steel doors.
Another family reunited for a few hours on

the prison's visiting floor.


* * * * *


The term visitation is defined by Oxford thus:

n. an official or formal visit, in particular: • (in church use) an official visit of inspection, esp. one by a bishop to a church in the bishop's diocese. • the appearance of a divine or supernatural being. • a gathering with the family of a deceased person before the funeral.

Multiple meanings of a word are like catnip for poets. I wanted to play with this one because its use by prison administrators has seeped into the vernacular. A lot of everyday people use "visitation" when they're talking about going to see little Johnny in the slammer. A lawyer or politician going to see a prisoner is one thing, but not Mom and Dad. The formality of this usage always put me off, the same way that saying "utilize" does, when "use" works perfectly well.

There are of course parallels between someone dying and someone going to prison. In the event that the sentence is life without parole (as mine is), even the courts formally acknowledge the similarity, employing the grim term "civil death" when addressing one's diminished Constitutional rights. So I set out to write "Visitation" as a poem that upends the reader's expectation — it starts out with all the trappings of a funeral gathering, then reveals the true circumstances only in the final lines. Whether or not it's successful I'll leave for you to decide.

Ch-ch-changes (Turn and Face the Strange)

I mean, of course it was going to be different: new prison, new policies, new people. For most of the years I've "been down," my number one rule has been Don't get too comfortable. Spend long enough in the same place, though, and certain mores and means are going to worm their way into even the most mindful lifestyle.

I spent almost exactly sixteen years at Crossroads Correctional Center, in the podunk nowhere that is Cameron, Missouri, one hour north of my hometown. I heard countless complaints over those years — about Crossroads' food, its policies, its staff, its job availabilities, its canteen selection, its yard, and anything else you can imagine. I chalked this up to bellyaching. Many prisoners, maybe even most of them, just can't accept that prison is supposed to be unpleasant. For me, being so close to home meant getting a lot of visits. As long as I had the company of my mother and my dear friends, I'd have put up with any number of worse torments than Crossroads could dish out.

After my comrade in the literary craft jumped ship — not abandoning writing, only boarding a lifeboat to Jefferson City Correctional Center, nearer his familiar shores — Lefty wrote that he'd try to persuade me to follow if not for my mother. JCCC's computer center, extra recreation hours, and all-around modernity sounded good, but he knew that regularly seeing Mum meant much, much more than any of that stuff could. I never even thought about leaving, except in the sense of leaving prison altogether.

Then leaving was forced upon me. A whole other set of parameters thrown into my face, I was so tipped over that, for a short stretch, I couldn't even reliably keep track of the day and date. Sleep came fleetingly and without much depth. I was relieved that at least there's no 5 AM head count here — it's 6:00, and the added hour makes a world of difference now that I'm approaching normal sleep again. Part of the trick lay in finding a position where light from the wing and the yard, blasting through the cell windows, didn't shine right in my face.

The cells here at ERDCC are slightly more versatile than I'm used to. The metal desks aren't bolted down, and an honest-to-goodness chair (plastic, armless, beige) can be set wherever. The bunks running widthwise, not lengthwise, took some getting used to. Because there's no shelving, everything has to fit in or on the desk and our footlockers.

When I got around to hooking up and turning on my TV, I was pleased to find not only AMC and FX, which show the only series I care to watch, but also TCM , three channels of in-house movies, two channels that play music and music videos (Gothic, Industrial, Electronic & New Wave, every Thursday and Sunday!), and one that plays entire TV series, for bingeing things like all three seasons of Fargo, or the anime series Bleach.

Being relegated to general pop means more restrictive conditions than life in the honor dorm entailed. Until my status can be upgraded, as I'm working toward now, being locked down for eighteen hours a day (and a less unpleasant fifteen hours, on recreation days) is my new normal. My current cellmate isn't very clean, so I do a lot of spill-wiping and hair-sweeping when I'm not writing, but at least he stays out of my stuff and respects typing time. A short-timer here on a parole violation, he's got other shit on his mind. I let him watch my TV and he mostly stays quiet. Quiet is key.

The forty-minute periods we're out, morning, afternoon, and evening, to shower, use the telephones in the wing, get ice, play games, socialize, enter our canteen orders for the week, or see a caseworker, are always over too quickly. I can hardly wait until the tablet PCs arrive and make e-mail possible, so that some of the disconnect I feel will diminish. The Wi-Fi antennas are already installed in the wings and outside of every housing unit. It shouldn't be much longer….

My first week wasn't out before I hit the gym. Everyone gripes about its size, but it not only seems comparable to Crossroads' (minus one basketball court — good riddance), there are more available machines here. Moreover, acoustic tiling keeps the ballers' screaming from deafening anyone nearby. I'm still not sure if it's my imagination or if ERDCC is just a cleaner, better maintained facility. All of the equipment looks new.

The library actually is small, but there's a selection that'll keep me reading awhile. On my first trip there, I found eight books that were on my wish list. That was just from a five-minute perusal of the fiction shelves. The legal computers sat empty, every one. Research is going to be a breeze. I even submitted a job application while I was there. Unlike at Crossroads, the honor dorm here strictly requires residents to have jobs. I'm laying a foundation for greater freedom here, as well as for in the world at large.

Everyone knows about prison food. The word was that ERDCC's was some of the worst. Sorry, but I happen to find most of it a marked improvement. Besides the fresh bananas, Granny Smith and Fuji apples, and, improbably, kiwis, there's actually onion in things here. And meat. Only two entrées have put me off, so far: the tamale pie and the chili. One look at either one and you'd understand why.

No one prepared me for the visiting situation, how informal and unintrusive an environment the visiting room would be. When Mum got that wild hair and packed the car for a Saint Louis road trip, then tooled down I-55, bound for Bonne Terre, on the first Sunday of my stay, I fumbled my way to the opposite side of the facility and onto the visiting room floor virtually blind. Sitting down beside Mum's wonderful, familiar face, I was not overcome by the sense of being scrutinized at every moment (even if we were), but of sitting in on a spaghetti dinner in a church basement. Maybe the Sunday afternoon crowd was responsible — grandparents, children, mothers, a wife or two, babies. At our table, with smiling, friendly people milling around, Mum and I studiously took in our surroundings, then lost ourselves in conversation for the next three hours. It was a period during which I felt myself again, totally comfortable, in spite of where I was. That felt different, too.

Halloween in the Hoosegow IV: Rise of the Octoberfeast Cult

1.
Wolf slammed bones at his usual table, howling every time he scored. Batty flitted around the wing, searching for someone to bleed, the mooch. Some poor wretch wailed a forlorn dirge. The zombies trudged in circles. It seemed like just another evening in B-Wing of Housing Unit 3.

I was on the phone 1 discussing matters inconsequential with a friend. Idly, the way one does in voice-only conversations, I glanced about. The nothing-spectacle held little of interest, just the usual skulking creatures, the gargoyles peering from their vantage, and the ghosts of men drifting through my sight. Then there came, from the shadow of a doorway, two pale men.

Leading, looking chronically unrested, was the one of average build. His backswept black hair vaguely reminded me of some unplaceable movie star. His portly peon wriggled up the staircase behind him, protectively hunched over something gathered in the hem of his shirt. I thought of a child afraid that her skirtful of freshly picked daisies might blow away in an errant wind.

Both men reached my door at the top of the stairs, knocked, and sneaked sidewise looks in my direction. What was this? My mild amusement gave way to nascent suspicion.

Doyle, my cellmate, opened the door and they spoke. His expression, as he apprehended whatever the Grub's shirt held, bespoke doubt. The three of them turned my direction, said a few additional words, then averted their gaze again. It was starting to feel like a conspiracy, unfolding right before my eyes.

The Grub stepped into my cell. He re-emerged in a moment, shirt empty. I said goodbye to my friend.

We passed on the steps, the odd pair and I. The tired-looking superior smirked in response to my inquisitive look, exposing a single gleaming canine, but he said not a word. When I entered, Doyle, bewildered, was arranging several tiny heads on the desk.

"They heard you're into Halloween," Doyle said. He rotated an origami skull to face us. "The movies, the candy — they know about the nachos, Byron."

"Then these are an offering."

Doyle nodded. "Seems so. You gonna let 'em in?"

2.
Dawn was hours away when I tracked them down, the men who left the heads. Bobby's eyebrow peaked and the Grub's cheeks plumped with a smile at my approach.

"We knew you liked Halloween," Bobby explained.

"Like, that you were super into it," added the Grub, obviously alluding to my infamous All Hallows Eve ritual.

"Well," I said, "I can't say I ever decorated my cell before. Besides putting up whatever Halloween cards I get from friends."

"We got this book of origami monsters — witches, demons, dragons. It's pretty cool." Bobby hiked his thumb at his larval companion. "All he's been able to make are the heads, though."

"The scarecrow's fucking impossible," the Grub said, scooting his wireframes up the bridge of his tiny nose.

"I draw the faces, then stitch the loop of string on top. We hang ours along our shelf, like little sombrero dingle-balls."

If they were trying to bribe their way into my Halloween-Night Nachorama, I thought, this was a soft pitch. Neither mentioned candy, chips, or Brett, the mutual acquaintance who no doubt spilled the beans to them about last year's celebration. (Although, anyone else might have. The whole wing witnessed us transporting his half of the feast like a corpse, on a beach-towel improvised stretcher.) Theirs seemed like genuine love for the holiday.

The Grub intimated that he had more decorations coming in the mail. Cardstock window dressing. He offered to share some with me, "Y'know, if you want."

I did want.

3.
Bouncing around to Oingo Boingo's "Dead Man's Party," I scattered olive slices. Above the desk dangled six grotesque little boxy heads on orange thread — a werewolf, a ghost, a reptilian beast, a rawhead zombie, a skull, and a ghoulish scarecrow. From the wall leered a magazine clipping of a Chris Mars painting. A paper cutout jack-o'-lantern seemed to laugh at the obscene size of my culinary monster.

This was the year of the largest nacho spread yet, big enough that one could use it as a crunchy bean-and-cheese-filled pillow. The Grub wriggled expectantly, hungrily watching me put on the finishing touches. In his fingers, the sheet that he and Bobby would use to move their third of this massive undertaking downstairs. Bobby and Doyle chatted about their hopes for tonight's American Horror Story. It did feel like a party.

I drizzled a perfect white zigzag of ranch dressing. Brett arrived.

"It's candy pizza," he told us, passing out everyone's container of his own outrageous invention. "The crust is graham crackers and vanilla wafers."

I inspected it through the plastic. "Peanut butter cups, Butterfinger, peanuts, M&Ms…. Are those jelly beans?" Brett nodded.

"I used Hershey's syrup, too. The white stuff is melted ice cream."

"You're a madman."

A neighbor peeked over everyone's shoulders to see what the fuss was about. "Holy shit," he laughed. "Y'all are goin' crazy with this Halloween thing."

Bobby wielded his menacing eyebrows. "You could join us…"

"Yessssss," I hissed. "We demand only the smallest sacrifice."

The neighbor vamoosed, and we descended on our frightful victuals.

A Tragedy at Twenty: Justin Bruton

Twenty years after he blindsided everyone by sending a shotgun slug through his own skull, Justin Bruton is as much a cypher to me as ever, despite reams of police reports and the fact that there was a time, in the months prior to his terrible suicide, when I called him my best friend. Obviously, I didn't know what friendship really was.

Eighteen and socially handicapped, your "best friend" is the person who finally accepts you unquestioningly. Justin saw past my black-and-white screen-starlet makeup, conflation of funny ha-ha with funny strange, and adeptness at conversation equivalent to how well a three-year-old ballroom dances. He shrugged this stuff off and invited me to come throw powdered donuts at rich people. You know, what best friends do.

Look at the perpetual adolescents of Jackass, The Dudesons, and Can't Kill Yourself: lots of boys play rough. It could be that Justin wasn't trying to put out my eye when he embedded that blowdart in my brow from a few feet away. Maybe this was how he channeled his fraternal affection, through acts of minor violence. What to make, though, of his pain experiments, when he laughed in disbelief at my silent responses to various stimuli he administered — thumbtacks colorfully studding my forearm, hydrochloric acid drops eating the flesh of my open palm, electric shocks to wherever he could reach out and touch with his stun gun? Were these forerunners to the sado-motivational tactics of Tyler Durden, in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, or were they nothing more than cruelty to a trusting younger kid?

What did I know about Justin? At the time, virtually nothing. I knew that he'd lived in Tulsa and come from money. He disdained familial meddling yet depended on his parents for literally everything. He had a sister, my age. He once dated a girl who seemed cool, the first and only time we met, but whose name I subsequently forgot. He'd been suicidal on multiple occasions and was prescribed Prozac for depression. He dug PJ Harvey, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, and French surrealist films. There was undoubtedly more to him, but this was all that he was willing to reveal.

Similarly, whatever his feelings about Anastasia, his girlfriend of maybe seven months, I was privy to only their external effects. The couple's countless arguments became almost normal, given his hot-and-cold affections, her fixed and potent passion. Justin never verbalized his feelings, for Anastasia or anything else of consequence. I'm unsure how much of that reticence was symptomatic of his unhappiness, and how much led him to collude with her to bring about their deaths.

So: Justin Bruton, question mark. Interested organizations with resources and authority far outstripping mine have looked into solving the riddle and come back empty-handed. His family won't talk, out of some sense of Southern propriety, embarrassment, fear, or snobbery — which doesn't help. The sole insight that I've gained since his death is that he'd been born in Texas. Thanks, Internet, for nothing.

Justin Bruton was my friend — or "friend." What's that even mean? Together we watched some great movies, had a few laughs, debated political and ethical systems, sang a few stupid songs, took memorable road trips, and drank too much coffee while daydreaming of lives with meaning. The way things ended up for me, though, leaves no doubt that our association was far from meaningless.

A Tragedy at Twenty: Anastasia WitbolsFeugen

Anastasia died at eighteen, twenty years ago today. She'd been a clever, spirited girl. In school she joined the National Junior Honor Society, Latin club, and academic competitions of all sorts. A couple of months before her untimely death, she started classes at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. The world had been her oyster.

A different version of the truth is less palatable.

Anastasia died at eighteen, twenty years ago today. She'd been a temperamental depressive for at least a year. In her diary and in e-mails to close friends, she romanticized death, expressed emotional volatility somewhat greater than typical teenage impulsivity, and fixated on a fickle boyfriend. For weeks before her seemingly inevitable death, she spiraled into a textbook example of suicidal behaviors, isolating herself, dropping out of college, and talking openly (and often) about killing herself. She didn't stand a chance in this indifferent world.

The dead have it easy — their reputations are projections of might-have-been, forever idealized, unburdened by their foibles or survivors' beliefs that anything but the best had been in store for the beloved deceased. The culture fetishizes potential. While those who die young remain for all time in grace, the living must forge our legacies through successes and failures — the actual.

Which is fine. Whitewashing who Anastasia WitbolsFeugen was wouldn't be terrible, just an anodyne comfort, except that another life hangs in the balance between her pristine reputation — Anastasia, the young light extinguished too soon — and the ugly alternative — Anastasia, the doomed soul. Mine is no longer young but had (and still has) potential at least equal to hers. By not allowing her to be seen from less-flattering angles, her eulogizers obscure the truth that contradicts the righteousness of my imprisonment.

Anastasia was my friend. We hung out in coffeehouses, discussing our naive ideals and cackling at life's absurdities. We went to movies together. We lent each other books that we each considered essential reading. We commiserated about shittiness and shared the happiness that kept us going. When she died, it was like no grief I'd yet known. I struggled to cope, to keep myself together in the aftermath. Even in that confused state, I clearly saw that the Anastasia portrayed by the funeral sentiments was a caricature, largely unrecognizable to many of us at the service. Frankly, she was no one special. The Anastasia we knew was complex, flawed, and passionate to a fault — a person we all thought eminently worth being friends with.

After two decades lived in the shadow of her death, having matured and made discoveries against which ordinary relationships are immune, I'm now less sure of my friendship with her. Personal documents seized during the authorities' homicide investigation showed me yet another facet of Anastasia. She lied about people behind their backs. She engineered squabbles between friends, probably for drama's sake. She had terrible self-esteem and vied for attention at every opportunity. Her flaws go on and on. She was, after all, only human.

Teenage relations, those gossipy, mercurial, emotionally heightened filters that distort one's world like the wildest Instagram effect — they don't even begin to explain why the night we parted ways struck me as both perfectly typical and utterly unexpected. Knowing what I now do is similarly befuddling. Was her death planned? If so, by whom — her or Justin, or by both, mutually? Either she wanted him, her flaky, intermittent love, to put her out of her misery, or she intended to do the deed herself with him looking on. Or, just as they decided one day to pack and move to New Orleans by the weekend, the two of them might've intended, with no plan whatsoever, to wing it, take a gun to a cemetery, one after the other welcoming oblivion.

So much for the pretty notion that there are no secrets between friends.

Ten years back, I wrote in this post about Anastasia's death, "the ever-widening wake of her death laps onward, continuing to rock and capsize in spite of the distance. Meanwhile, her memory on our horizon gradually melds with the glare of the sun." Pretty words for the gruesome results of teenage self-centeredness. I can't muster this kind of poetry for it anymore. Anastasia WitbolsFeugen died, but I'm the one who's rotting.

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!

Before Breakfast, at the Old-Man Table

Another morning in 3B. Three plastic mugs of coffee steam on the table in front of us, still too hot to swig from. Jim is filling little squares with letters. Opposite him, Chris's glasses perch at the tip of his nose as he studies the latest New York Review of Books. I'm focused on blinking, following six and a half hours of having my eyes closed. Our usual fourth is unusually absent from the table. Larry's usual laundry day is Friday, tomorrow, yet I spot him (fuzzily) wringing out a T-shirt in the utility closet. He'll be along shortly.

"Okay," Jim pipes up, pausing to ensure that we're paying attention. "The clue is 'Tesla CEO Musk.' Four letters. I think the third one's — "

"Elon," I tell him. "E-L-O-N."

"Sounds like a cologne. Who the hell is Elon Musk, and why should anybody know?"

"The CEO of Tesla," says Chris. "Pay attention."

"As in Nikola Tesla, the electricity guy? I think I went to school with him." Jim's absurd exaggerations might mitigate his unease about getting older; he turned sixty-seven last month.

Chris says, "I have no fucking idea what Tesla is." His face reveals evidence of appreciating ten thousand bygone jokes.

"Well then how do you know who's its CEO?" Jim demands, setting down his Bic in exasperation.

"Because Byron just said."

"Oh, fine. Fine. Let's ask the nerd a question about something not computer-related and see how he does."

"Tesla makes electric cars," I say, and both of them suddenly register total recall. Typical. "Jim, why don't you just give up crosswords and take up a more age-appropriate hobby — like cave-painting or inventing the wheel?"

"Or getting your affairs in order," Chris adds.

One of Jim's most amusing characteristics is a willingness to let his sarcasm unspool gradually. "I'm pretty sure my affairs are about as ordered as they're gonna get, in this place. My legacy will be you guys squabbling over my newspaper clippings and half-eaten bag of pretzels. And that's only if you're lucky enough for me to die before I can eat them. Granted, that's looking pretty likely."

"Pretzels? Woo-hoo!" It's Larry, joining us at last, his Droopy Dog features perennially at odds with his six-shots-of-espresso enthusiasm.

Jim flails his arms like a windblown scarecrow. "Oh, great, now Larry's here. Can my day get any worse?"

Larry ignores the slight. "You know, I did two years in the service — airborne division — and never once jumped out of an airplane…"

"Oh, here it comes." Chris covers his eyes.

"…they had to push me every time."

Groans all around. Jim says, "God damn it, Larry, nobody laughed at that last week. What, did you think it'd be funnier a second time, or are you getting too senile to remember who you tell your shitty jokes to?"

"I told you, but Chris and Byron weren't around to hear it."

"And our lives," I say, "were measurably better for that fact."

"No doubt," says Chris, ruffling his paper like a man shaking off an unpleasant memory.

Jim invokes his usual archaic stereotypes, calling Chris on his failure to side with a compatriot. "Or is it only when there's whiskey involved that you Irishmen ride together? Bunch of potato-eating hypocrites."

"Sour old Kraut."

"Sour, yes," Jim concedes, "but at least we Germans aren't lazy bottle-suckers."

"No, of course not. Whoever would associate the inventors of beer halls with drinking?"

"Well, we're industrious and efficient, anyway."

"Then why," I ask him, "aren't you finished with that crossword? It's almost time for breakfast."

"I'm taking it slow, letting you help, because I want you guys to feel like you're actually useful."

It's Chris who puts the brakes on this frivolity, asking Jim if he watched last night's episode of Nova. An earnest back-and-forth about science ensues, by a couple of blue-collar sexagenarians. Since Larry and I had no PBS in our Wednesday-night lineup, we're treated to a muddled (but amusing) recap before the table returns to silence — Jim to his crossword puzzle, Chris to his reviews, Larry to a new issue of Smithsonian, me to my janky eyesight. It's quiet enough that I hear someone's stomach rumble for food.

"Okay," says Jim, after a bit. "Here's one: 'Sailor, e.g.' Three letters."

All those nineteenth-century naval novels he reads, and yet… "Tar," I answer.

"Ohhhhhh, of course."

"See, this nerd knows all kinds of stuff, not just computers."

He squints. "What d'ya know about sailing, ye cack-handed lubber?"

"All kinds of stuff," I repeat. "I've even got jokes: which is a pirate's favorite letter of the alphabet?"

Rolling his eyes, Larry takes the bait. He growls "Arrrrrr!" with aplomb.

"You might think it'd be R," I tell him, "but it's actually the C!"

More groans. I go for a sip of my coffee and think, This is why I fit in so well at the old-man table.

Last Night on Earth

Why, still, the lifelike memory of that last night? It wasn't special, just a drive through town and a couple of hours with a friend. With renewed energy, at the conclusion of a long, violent week in bed (or, by appearances, in a grave), it was a kind of liberation: out of bed; black pants, black T-shirt, black Docs; earrings; concealer, powder, eyeliner; away.

"Hey, you pale and sickly child," sang Martin Gore. "You're death and living reconciled." In the car, the new Depeche Mode album compelled me along the streets and terraces. I could've driven anywhere — dropped in on the Captain, rang up Brahm, invited out that girl from the art museum, stopped by the coffeehole — except I wasn't fit, not yet, for that level of interaction. My friend F.C. was chill. F.C. was unambitious. F.C. was the perfect person to hang out with while affecting a resurrection. Such was his ease, when I showed up on his porch, he gave no sign of noticing, until "Coffee?"

We watched Requiem for a Dream on rented VHS. Darren Aronofsky directing the adapted Hubert Selby Jr. novel. Everyone in it loses their mind (and body) to drugs. One character overdoses on diet pills and hallucinates what's likely cinema's only scene involving, according to the credits, a "refrigerator puppeteer." Some have called the film depressing. I recall it being wonderful — the last thing I watched as a free man.

No want of a cigarette afterward, which felt weird. Being sick had kicked the habit — two and a half packs (or more) a day, for longer than I kept track — right out of me. It was a conspicuous absence. I wasn't sure what to do with my hands, so I knifed them into my pockets and told F.C. I'd see him around.

The car, my enormous silver car, belched a plume of exhaust. I tingled with amusement at the absurdity of it, the stink of wasted gasoline (eleven miles to the gallon, new, in 1974), the engine's out-of-tune havoc. I left F.C.'s driveway without cueing up a different soundtrack than its mechanical one.

There was swirling fog when I plunged into a low section of the barren expressway. Here was where the night was at its most potent, across that span of solitude, unfettered by any more pain or fatigue from illness. Here came the full appreciation for my liberty. I was piloting into the night, waves of mist sweeping around my vessel, which bobbed along nautically, like a boat on dark seas through which I could travel in any direction — any direction at all.

Foot off the gas pedal, for the neighbors' benefit, it was 1:30 in the morning when I coasted down my street. Ever the insomniac, inside, I logged on the usual IM clients and my webmail: four unread e-mails waiting — a band's tour dates, pics from my recent ex, adult-site spam, notice of a software update. I surfed art and humor sites until yawning.

I undressed. I slipped into bed. I slept dreamlessly. I woke up to guns. To shouting. To something altogether different from anything I'd known.

And that's where some think the writing ought to begin, yet here we are at an ending. Retrospect alone — the thereafter and the heretofore — is what gives these paragraphs relevance. I'm haunted, as I have been for almost sixteen years, by that simple night. Worse is not knowing when, or if, the memory will ever leave me be.

Halloween in the Hoosegow III: Fresh Blood

Rain claws my window as October's final light, shocking crimson, bleeds away. I am too intent on the task at hand to be distracted by Nature's fit, and barely notice when a crash of thunder tears the air outside. Tonight's operation is urgent and nearing its tantalizing end.

Chunks of once-living tissue are piled in the bowl at my elbow. I work my instrument — quick, deft incisions — through the green flesh on my workspace, transferring each sliver to the vessel containing the others, pieces destined to soon be hungrily devoured. My hands are slicked in their briny fluid. The scent is ripe and thick in the close atmosphere of the cell. Each excision makes me salivate a little more.

I turn, retrieving a second pouch, tearing it open and letting its contents, like small discolored eyeballs, roll onto my worktop, then resume cutting olives.

For years, the monstrous, unholy feast of Halloween night has been a rite I observed alone. Certain circumstances separated me from my longtime cohort, Zach, but the ritual's draw was more powerful than solitude, and I pressed on, constructing my cyclopean heaps of nachos — impossible for any mortal man to altogether consume — for myself. It was not always easy. The pendulous burden of so much refried beans, cheese, shredded chicken, picante sauce, olive slices, and ranch dressing laid to rest on a wide plot of tortilla chips was often nigh on too much for my body and soul to bear. Some nights I pushed away from the piles of it, gasping, fingers smeared with evidence of my atrocious hunger, and felt a sulfurous flare from the Abyss belch out of my throat, demonic and fulminant, then resumed my ravenous feasting.

Tonight, though — tonight will be different. Mine will not be the only constitution tested by this ritual of gross overconsumption.

My youthful initiate is named Brett. He came to me wearing innocence on his face, all wholesomeness, but I saw within him an emptiness, a kinship. Beneath Brett's aura of good health and respectability, a voracious beast-man, kept under psychic lock and key, howled and grasped for hot, melty, fatty cheese food product over corn chips. He'd read foul texts on my impious All Hallows Eve exploits. His curiosity about them was not idle.

In the weeks leading to tonight, Brett became my willing acolyte, and under my tutelage subjected himself to the fell rituals: Hersheys bars with Hellraiser, jelly beans with The Shining, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups with It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Brett is as prepared as any man could be. I have shown him the ways. Tonight he will prove himself.

Lightning shatters the gloom as a knock — a barely-there rapping — comes at the steel door. The look in exposes his fear at what he will see. I tell him he will have to stanch that timidity, standing aside so his widening eyes can apprehend this year's creation splayed across the surface where I've been toiling.

A profane word escapes his lips, further language beyond reach. Before such an abomination as I have made, its unspeakable dimensions, its colors beyond description, all utterances are meaningless. This way, dear reader, lies madness.

Brett hands me what he's brought: an icy Pepsi. I crack it open and the insanity begins.

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.