THE THINGS I DID
The first thing my lawyer told me to do was to write down the things I did which was harder than I thought because I wasn’t sure of everything I should put on the list and my lawyer said that if I left anything out and the prosecutor found out something I would be in even more trouble, which confused me because what about every sort of untruth which is what we spend almost all of our days parsing and explaining so I started with the worst thing I did which so embarrassed me that I couldn’t even get myself to write the other things and do I count the bad things I did that were only to cover up the bad thing which looking back wasn’t so bad but once I did the first bad thing I had to do another to cover up the one bad thing which led to another bad thing and then another until I had no choice but to keep on doing more bad things and when I look back I was just trying to do things so I could be good again which is what I was always trying to be but now I did so many bad things just to be good that I can never be good again.
TAKING STOCK
I was born in a sanitarium in New York City but my mother said that was not what you think but I don’t know what I thought except sanitariums are not nice places and my mother said that it wasn’t true that I was born in New York City or in a sanitarium and that I was born in Mount Vernon where I grew up and that was always what my mother did which was always reassuring me because nothing was ever really what it seemed, at least when it came to me and when my sister told me by mistake one day that I had seizures when I was a little boy, my mother put a hand over her mouth and told me that it wasn’t true and what does this have to do with me now sitting here in prison at age seventy-seven and I don’t have the answer except that I’m trying to take stock of everything and this is where I started or where I’m ending or maybe it’s just another new beginning because I love new beginnings and I’ve compiled them my whole life but I have a blind spot for the end of things and my father told me that’s why I keep walking into mud or maybe I haven’t a clue as if there are any clues, despite we spend our lives looking for clues and reasons when there are probably no reasons as we just do our best to manage the turmoil of our lives because there are no ordinary lives, certainly not mine but I’m just starting to take stock because that’s what you do in prison and maybe I’ll find some clues.
WELCOME TO PRISON
I thought I was ready for prison but not even close and maybe because I could self-surrender and the false comfort of that and my lawyer telling me all along that everything would be all right but never kept working out all right and when I finally arrived and the door closed behind me, I was standing alone in a stark waiting room with overwhelming despair and panic as one man and then another man checked me in and then another man told me to go to another room and then another man told me to strip and bend over and put on some clothes and then another man told me to go into another room and a pretty but scruffy girl in a Red Sox hat came in to the room and told me that prison is not like TV and that I had to go to Solitary for three days before I was checked into the camp where I thought I was going but not yet she said and which sucks she said but that’s the way it is and then she left the room and another girl came in who was older and heavy set and said she was a psychologist but didn’t look like a doctor and asked me if I wanted to kill myself or kill anyone else and I asked her if anyone answers yes to these questions and she said yes they do and then she left the room and another guy called me out of that room and told me to go into another room with a large glass panel in the front with a dirty stainless steel toilet in it and I waited there thinking that was the room I would be in for three days but after a while another man came in who didn’t speak English very well and he handcuffed me and took me up a staircase and then outside where a long block building loomed and we walked along a stone path with barbed wire along it until we were inside a dark hallway with a crowd of men in orange jump suits and guards with tattoos and long beards who looked like the inmates shouting at one another and all the inmates in cuffs like me and one guard who seemed like the one in charge shouted to the guy holding me to take me into another room where they uncuffed me but told me to strip again and then gave me an orange jump suit to ‘put this on ass hole’ and then another guard with a very long beard like the baseball players wear nowadays took me down a narrow hall with steel doors on both sides and tiny windows in each door and frightening faces staring out until somewhere in the middle of this hallway they opened one of the doors and pushed me into a dungeon and I heard the steel door slam and the sound of keys jiggling as he walked away and I looked around at the dirty slimy cell and the filthy toilet and dirtier shower stall and the steel bed and a ceiling twenty feet above my head with a fan blowing cold air right in my face and I heard the guard shout as he walked away─”Welcome to Prison.”
HELL FREEZES OVER
I never thought that Hell would be freezing and not fire but ice the torture of preference for the Bureau of Prisons as we slept in overcoats and winter hats and shivering for hours tossing and turning our way to warmth and just when I managed to somehow find sleep there was the three AM count and the guards flashlight in my face and then another hour to try and morph my shaking into sleep and then the alarm would go off at Five AM and it was morning and time to get up in the meat locker and I’d ask the guard about the heat and he told me to “fuck off because all you guys are a pain in the ass─”whose hot whose cold─” and then I’d go to work in the kitchen washing dishes and scrubbing pans but at least it was warm for five hours and I’d finish up and go back to my bunk exhausted but still cold and ten minutes later I’d be shivering again. A different kind of hell.
BEFORE THE FALL
I loved my life in our converted carriage house in that pristine village of ours and the greenery of our backyard out the bay window in our bedroom or some other color of another season’s magic when all of them were beautiful in their own way because our life was beautiful and only me to ruin it which I knew I was capable of but convinced myself that that was past and I was a changed man and of course I was because everyone was telling me that I was and in fact I was now a seer and becoming a legend and failure only a ghost I had overcome and of course I believed it and so we went on that way for years, decades even while the creeping conundrum festered opaquely and I purchased one new beautiful property after another so that the next one saved the other one and if that one didn’t then we could find another one that did until we had all of these wonderful properties that looked like a mini empire but were not an empire but together they hid the flaws because they were the opposite of the sum is more than their parts because the sum was less than their parts but I went on purchasing until there was no more purchasing to be done and then I started borrowing until there was no more borrowing to be done and then I started selling until there was no more selling to be done and my time was up and everybody fell with me which is the worst part about all of the purchasing and the borrowing and the selling because the more of it you do then there are more people that go down with you and it is them that haunts you because the web of them is so much bigger than you can stand so that the only way to survive it is to become vacuous and delusional which is what my partner said I was and maybe he was right and when I finally realized that the sky was falling and the world was starting to figure it out and pursued me day and night, there were countless nights of nightmares and wakeful lying in bed planning and plotting exits and tactics and outcomes and saving graces and last minute turn arounds and replaying turning points that go back so far that there were no turning points because they were just events leading up to the inevitable failure that was always there inside me and all of it was just forestalling and foreboding.
RECKONING DAY
My lawyer said there would be only five speakers against me which sounded like a lot to me and then he said after a while that there would be seven speakers but tried to reassure me that seven was ok and that we had five speakers but our five included me and my wife and my daughter which meant we only had two speakers and I knew as soon as the first speaker opened his mouth that I was done and I could feel everyone behind me getting as embarassed as me because it was so terrible all the things they were saying about me and even worse than the prosecutor and I knew it woudn’t matter what any of my friends or my lawyer or me said because there was no breath in the room and only heavy mist and anger and even when the judge took 45 minutes to deliberate I knew he wasn’t’ deliberating because there was nothing to deliberate but only to calculate when he finally asked me to rise and my legs trembling and the number coming out of his mouth kind of garbled so it could have been something not so bad but I knew it was bad before my lawyer wrote it on a pad in front of him because I heard my daughter sobbing as soon as he uttered the first syllable and so I knew I was going away and I would never come back, not by myself anyway and then I turned around and everyone was stunned not knowing what to do and what had happened even though everyone knew what happened but you just keep telling your self that it didn’t happen, nothing happened but of course it did, just that no one wanted to come near me and even my enemies were aftaid to look at me because they knew it was somehwere and someplace they never thought they’d be anymore than me and you realize what an ugly place the courtroom is even for the judge and the bailiffs and the lawyers and the prosecuors and the security guys in the lobby and probably the guys who clean up after as it’s just a terrible place where nothing that goes on there makes anyone feel good but only dirty somehow as I could feel the heavy air suffocating everyone and even the enemies all just wanting to get out of that room where all the bad things in life come to their deliverance because all the bad things are part of everyone in that room and at the end of the day as every one was walking out everyone felt bad for themselves and no one was off the hook. Not even the Judge.
PRISONERS LAMENT
I arrived in a state of disbelief and anguished farewells,
a pervasive unease as the door closed behind me.
I was given a uniform, like an invisible swaddling cloak,
prey and predator lurking like creatures in the canyons
of the seabed and it’s mysterious leagues.
There are no mornings, only dreaded waking,
a grim seizure of place and confinement,
and sleep no measure of solace, it’s prospect of
turmoil and dreams that always find their breath.
Over time yearning and longing find their way to cruel
memory and false hope and the sad delirium of counting days.
THE TRACK
A quarter mile of footprints in the ash and mud,
I calculate the dreams and exhausting tipping points,
plodding and weaving my way around it,
It’s lovely rural beauty and transcendent silence,
the comforting solitary radio and its bridge
to life and freedom.
And how many footprints have disappeared in
too many seasons that you can see in its condition
of overgrowth, rivulets and disrepair, the ones I
pass already disappearing with each turn.
Today I walk the best of winters breath,
and the falling sun at my favored hour,
a Beethoven riff a séance of sorts to
heal the despair of the fading light.
GRANDDAUGHTER’S VISIT
She arrived even in this tangled prison, her beguiling
innocence still intact, everything fair and starlight,
the magic of everyday life that only seven-year-olds posses.
Still not aware of her own beauty, nor the world hers,
we played like always, not a hint of place.
Three missing teeth, that rare beauty of absence
so special in a child’s smile, and stories of
the tooth fairy and magic pillows.
But on goodbye, she paused having grasped the scene,
and in the softest of words that only we could hear,
“Is it hard?” she asked. I wanted to say yes, but didn’t.
Enough perfection and innocence today to burn
a shameful hole right through you.
Then a final wave from that perfect face of
petals and smiles even I couldn’t spoil.
MEETING MY WIFE
It was one of those great early summer nights when all the waiting for summer was over and it had suddenly arrived and the excitement palpable and change somehow in the air and a friend introduced her to me and almost like I knew it would be or dreamed it would be but never really even thought about what it would be but it was everything I thought it would be before I even knew what IT was and it was even better than that because she was so beautful and she looked at me without a word but telling me with just one look that she knew everything about me and it would be ok and I wondered while waiting to fall asleep in my bunk one night with years of my sentence ahead of me if it was still ok.
THE WAVE
More like a sound wave or another invisible force of bottomless sinking when you’re not even thinking about anything or watching television or eating a meal or gathering your laundry and your lost life runs like a reel in front of you and managing the misery by pretense because that’s as good a solution as anything because there is nothing to hold other than the searing desire to do almost anything to go back and go back and you never stop going back to the redo’s and the tipping points that are all so obvious now because I couldn’t make better decisions or stay in one place and face the music or the challenges and remain in the trenches of the battles I kept creating endlessly and always walking into the mud as my father told me and I knew he was right but couldn’t stop and just kept on walking deeper into it until I’m now where I am in the deepest part of the mud and my beautiful family with me and there is no getting out of it and if I get out of here I’ll probably do it again or probably not because I’m just too broken to harness the energy to re-launch another life and so will just continue to replay the reel of this life wave after wave after debilitating wave.
SUICIDE
I’d be standing on the sidewalk outside my office, traffic teeming, cars, trucks, vans, cycles, moving from lane to lane fighting for position, left and right and ahead and you could feel the rush and the urgency and I’d stand there watching the walkway and the light flashing to summon me across and all the while planning my jump in the lane when the biggest, fastest, most out of control vehicle would tempt me and I can’t remember when I first started thinking about it but over time it grew to become a real option and then it became the only option until it became no option but I knew I didn’t have the courage even though I knew it was the best option but I don’t think I was ever really thinking about it and I never did it and looking back I don’t think I was really considering it as it was just another fake resolution I failed to grasp during years of building failure into a silent covenant with myself and everyone else but pretending it was something else.
THE ROADS
On certain days I can tune in a station from back home on the radio that I purchased from the prison store but only if I’m lying on my bunk in a certain position and tuned a certain way and the radio is turned upside down but the reception is staticky and intermittent so I have to turn the volume all the way up and I always seem to catch the local traffic report but I’m gripped and uplifted by what was once dreary and dull reporting of delays on the Triborough Bridge that I crossed thousands of times or the George Washington Bridge and it’s crushing merge from the Major Deegan Expressway that I always managed to just escape on my commutes and the FDR Drive bumper to bumper on all the north bound lanes every evening in my earliest working years and I recall myself stuck on all those highways from the Kosciusko Bridge after my first promotion and the Verrazano Bridge and its frightening length approaching from the Grand Central Parkway and the Tappan Zee Bridge and it’s seeming fragile crossing and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and its endless ramps and exits piled on each other and the VanWyck and its looming bridges to make you choose the Whitesone or the Throgs Neck bridge and the West Side Highway and its unmatched view of the horizon mixing it’s woodsy feel and lurch of the forthcoming city crush and the Hutchinson River Parkway that was always the road home and commuting on the impossible I-95 in early morning and night after night so I could almost draw it’s every mile and the ridiculous Long Island Expressway that just gets wider but never shorter and the dangerous New Jersey Turnpike and its profile of tanks and smoke that I drove so many times late at night coming home from the Giants games or returning from my sons’ college or visiting friends and family and business guys south of the bridge and all those signs on it like the Lincoln Tunnel and Holland Tunnel and exits for Manhattan and all there the summary of my life and all its nostalgia that was wrapped up on all those roads from my mother taking me to the dentist to learning to drive on the Cross County Parkway with its narrow lanes and hitchhiking to school and to all those roads taking my kids to hockey practice and my daughters dance classes that are so far removed from the prison camp where I reside now in an unknown quarter of northern Massachusetts that I never heard of and situated on roads I don’t even remember arriving on and only one local road that cars pass through every day with only silhouettes of the people inside but longing to be in one of them going somewhere or anywhere this road may take me and I don’t even know its name.
OBITUARIES
Death is in the air from the day you arrive and stalks you from the minute you wake up but there are breaks and I’d forget but just when I wasn’t thinking about it and checking my email, I’d see the prison bulletin announce a memorial service for a recently departed inmate and I’d click on it and a photo comes up of an inmate announcing his death and I’d have no idea who he is with nothing of note other than the date he passed and the same “May He Rest In Peace” caption and I couldn’t care about him because the picture is the photo on the ID card which gets taken when you arrive and they always look sinister and solemn and ugly and this particular one was out of focus and all I thought about was that I don’t want that to be me because you don’t care at all about the dead inmate because they always look like no one you’d like to know and there’s nothing more chilling than these stark notices of departed inmates because I’m seventy-seven years old with five more years to serve and my notice is coming with only the barest recognition of my life and nothing restful or peaceful about that prospect because I don’t care what anybody says about being prepared to die they’re all liars and pretenders because I’m sure even the most ardent “after lifers-God has a planners” at the last moment that they know or believe that the end is here, there is only fear and regret and I recall watching my father’s last few hours who was a solid “after lifer-God has a planner” and he was fighting it and fidgeting for hours standing up pulling on his sheets and standing up again and lying down again and then up again and we couldn’t get him to calm down and it was like we weren’t even in the room and someone in the room said it was the death rattle and he looked so scared like he could see a ghost but was not aware of any of us around him until he finally laid down again and fell asleep and never woke up again and the only peaceful moment was after he was gone and a blank expression that was more emptiness than peace.
FAREWELL TO PRISON
I started counting the deaths in earnest around March when it looked like the numbers were piling up and I could start to think about getting out of here and I didn’t care that it was ghoulish to keep on that way but my friends and me were aligned on this because it was the only way out of here and so we started to root for the daily count to get to five hundred dead a day and then one thousand and then it was two thousand and we were getting sick at thirty thousand a day and I found myself looking at the news first thing and at night before final bed check to get the daily count of new cases and deaths in Massachusetts where my prison resides and gathering at our bunks and huddled at our table in the dining hall and every other chance to exchange reports on the plague outside but also the fear of getting it rising as the warden came himself to threaten us if we didn’t wear masks and wash our hands and even sending some guys to solitary for not wearing their masks which wasn’t easy washing dishes for five hours straight in the heat of the kitchen and almost choking on that mask and taking our temperatures every day at Four O’clock but all of us still piled up on one another and living shoulder to shoulder and sharing toilets and everyone a threat so it became clearer and clearer that the plague was not a plague at all since it couldn’t be with a name like that and was instead the secret combination to the lock that confines us and all we had to do was follow it─ C-O-V-I-D-1-9 and the door would open and it did.
BURY ME─PLEASE
I told my brother that I want to be buried because he would understand that and not that I know what he will do because he doesn’t like to talk about those things and also because his wife was cremated and wanted her ashes spread over somewhere which I can’t remember now but he never did it anyway and not like my wife who wants her ashes spread over the little river near our first house on that beautiful pristine hill before we knew anything about what we were facing as it was the beginning of our lives really but of course we weren’t aware of it as you never are when you’re young marrieds and the last thing you’re thinking about is how you want to be buried but I don’t want to be ashes and spread anywhere because I want to be put in a box and know the weight of me will be felt by some unknowns who struggle lowering me down and it doesn’t matter that they don’t know me but only that they know that there’s somebody in there that was alive once and I take comfort knowing that but just don’t make me ashes and spread me anywhere because no matter where you spread them it’s really nowhere and I was here once and at least I’ll know that there’s a place that says I was here no matter what I was or wasn’t.
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