A Brief History of Time (Served) – Part 2

To read Part 1 click here

“There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.” 

– Samuel Johnson

“I’m telling you, keep messing with that chimo,” I say to Outtaline, “and find out what happens. He’s only got one move. He won’t fight you out, he’ll kite you out.” (“Kites,” known officially as inmate request forms, are the internal mail system of prison and thus, the rat’s silent weapon of choice.)

I’ve made it out of close custody at Walla Walla, and transferred to “The Building.” Medium Custody. The Building is outside the walls but still in their shadow, lest you forget where you are or where you could go. In this state, lower custody mainlines include undesirables – sex offenders and even some known rats – a feature of reality that clashes with the close custody mindset. In our world, privileges are purchased with acceptance. 

Each morning, Outtaline and Nailhead stop by my cell for coffee and conversation, a degree of freedom unknown in close custody. On his way down the tier, Outtaline taunts the local child molester, as he does most mornings. This time he parodies a child’s voice, wailing, “Oliver, why? Why, Oliver?” 

Oliver, who lives four cells from me, has rodentine features and hunches over like a question mark. Upon Outtaline’s approach he glowers in my general direction and skitters into his cell.

Outtaline has me by 40 pounds, and no one has ever convicted me of being small. At 6’7″ and nearly 300lbs, Nailhead dwarfs us both. Each of us is generally amiable and we do not read with any seriousness our own labels. Our main common ground is the ability to always find something in our world to laugh about. Although we often joke around, it’s unlikely we will ever be voted in as most likely to be trifled with. I dislike the cowardice of bullies, no matter the stripe of their targets, so I lean into Outtaline for heckling the shell-backed child molester.

“You gotta stop, man. Please.”

“Okay,” he says, “sorry, bro. To you. Not to the diaper sniper.”

Upon looking out my window we notice a phalanx of guards gathering on the breezeway toward the far end of the unit. A growing wall of blue. Fifteen, twenty guards amass. More straggle into line.

“Somebody’s cooked,” Outtaline muses. “Sucks to be them.”

Minutes later they swarm the tier, shouting for everyone to remain in their cells. Outtaline, Nailhead and I look at one another, blank-faced, as the sergeant leading the charge fills the doorway of my cell. 

“Sucks to be us,” I say to Outtaline.

We are each pat-searched, cuffed, and marched off to individual holding cells. When my turn comes, the lieutenant bellows and barks at me from behind his desk that he will bury me in IMU this time. He promises me a “program” of at least 18 months. He is built like a half-filled sack of flour and sweats aggressively. When I ask him what all this is about, he says not to take him for a fool etcetera, that I know goddamn good and well and it won’t fly anymore, not on his watch.

Days later, I am served with infractions for strongarming, extortion, and threatening. The three of us, it reads, were trying to make an all-white tier by strongarming non-white prisoners into moving elsewhere. Upon reading it aloud my belief is beggared at how preposterous it all sounds. The sum of the evidence? An anonymous kite.

I receive a card from my cellie’s mother, Joanne, whom I had spoken to once on the phone shortly after her son moved into my cell. He came in at 18 with a nickel to serve. Having known him since close custody, I’ve taken him under my wing out at medium. Joanne keeps her own counsel about much in life, including the character of whoever is locked in a cell at night with her youngest child. 

She makes a practice of reaching out to his cellies, gathering her own impressions each time her son’s living arrangement changes. She includes her number in the card, so I call during my next daily hour out of my ad-seg cell. I ask her to boomerang a message. I need her son to write down for me the names of several of our non-white neighbors, so I can send them witness statements. 

When I call again after a few days, Joanne has a list of ten names. I request witness statements from them all. By the time each of the ten is served with the appropriate form, word has gotten out. The unit guard calls ten prisoners to the duty desk for witness statements, but more than fifty men of all races show up, each wanting one to fill out.

At my hearing a month later, the hearings lieutenant reads onto the record twenty or so witness statements before thumbing through the stack and giving up. Each one declares that I am respectful and polite no matter the person’s race, a positive member of our community and so forth. And that I have never, would never, ask anyone to move or do anything else against their will. “Get the hell outta here,” he says. “This brand of sparkling bullshit pisses me off. Wastes my fucking time.”

I nod and agree wholeheartedly that the real outrage here is the misappropriation of 23 of his minutes. We are in nodding consensus, the lieutenant and I, that someone should most definitely get to the bottom of such a profligate expenditure of administrative time and energy over what amounts to a shinola-fest. That I’ve been in ad-seg for 41 days obviously pales in comparison, so neither of us feels it necessary to mention.

Nailhead also challenges the basis for his infractions and is immediately released after his hearing. Outtaline tells the hearings lieutenant to fuck off and the hearings lieutenant informs him that au contraire, Outtaline will be the one fucking right off, and shall continue to do so for no less than 12 months in his very own IMU program. Oliver checks in, requesting protective custody after someone in the unit did some scooby-dooing as regards the Mystery of the Great Ghost Kite. He is sent to IMU. Housed just a few cells away from Outtaline, Oliver discovers that the “protective” part of p.c. does not extend to what or whom one must listen to all day, and all night.

Joanne and I have remained in regular contact down the 15 years since all that occurred. She has become one of my dearest friends, a rock of support I can always rely on for honest wisdom when it’s most needed. The odds against forming a lifelong friendship from in here are staggering. Exponentially more so when that friendship involves a smart, successful freeperson. I am profoundly lucky to count her among my small but incredibly supportive network of loved ones. I’m also aware that who my friends are speaks to who I am, who I’ve become.

I arrived at prison alone in every meaningful way. What residual friendships I thought I had from before faded quickly. I knew no one here, and no one here cared to know me. Although I am getting out with no material possessions, I have become truly rich. Over the years, I have gained a wealth of freeworld friends that astonishes me even now. Soon, very soon, they will no longer be my freeworld friends. They will simply be my friends. 

No less than 22 of those friends are guys I’ve done time with, guys who are out there living real lives, cooking real food, breathing real air, but who haven’t forgotten about me although some are scattered from coast to coast. Six or seven are bringing their wives and girlfriends over the day after I get out. I don’t anticipate problems adjusting, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say how grateful I am to have brothers who’ve all been through this, and to whom I can turn should I need to.

* * * * *

“Sanity is a full time job in a world that’s always changing.” 

– The Black Dahlia Murder, “The Great Burning Nullifier”

As the tired but never more apt analogy goes, if you put a frog in a kettle of cold water and slowly increase the heat, the steady rise in water temperature will go unnoticed and the frog will swim calmly until he’s stew. The point is that we tend to ignore even drastic change, so long as it’s implemented gradually enough. 

I have no idea whether frogs are really that situationally unaware, or who would ever do such a thing to them even if they are. Imagine the unwavering malice, the requisite hours spent diabolically cranking the dial toward froggy doom, one cruel degree at a time. 

In keeping with our analogy, I’m the unfashionably late frog, the one who’s been chilling in the aquarium for 19 years, watching through filthy glass as everyone else ribbits about their new jacuzzi and how wonderfully bubbly it is. 

As I write, I have 50 days left. I am, in our parlance, shorter than a fat man’s pecker; too short to ask a question because I won’t be here for the answer. And soon, very soon, I have some steep acclimating to do. Freeworld 2021 appears rife with boiling flabbergassy bizarritudes to an ’02 frog. My only adjustment period will be a ten minute ride from the gate to the Walla Walla airport at five in the morning. And into the kettle I go.

To me, prison is as familiar as your first language, the one you speak without thinking about it. In here, “progress” denotes an added rule, more lessening, some new stricture diminishing our few privileges. The new menu always features smaller meals, concoctions even more offensive than what we’ve been enduring. A new yard schedule always denotes more cell time. I’ve wondered if an acquired aversion to “progress” is the reason so many prisoners in this liberal state are staunchly conservative, despite (as they’re fond of being reminded by me) their freeworld counterparts’ ongoing campaign to keep them here longer.

We learn at mother’s knee that change is the only constant. And thankfully so. Amish life doesn’t hold great appeal, even from here. But the rate of change over the past 19 years has been beyond the grasp of this simple frog. I’m a stranger about to enter a land grown very strange indeed.

When I came to prison, no one cared who you voted for. You might not even know which party your neighbor, or brother-in-law, supported. No one ever got kicked out of a restaurant or beat up for wearing a George Bush hat. I’m not even sure anyone ever wore a George Bush hat –aside, of course, from George Bush. Maybe Jeb.

In the past few years, political views have morphed into defining beliefs, the New American Gospel. Cultish at the fringes, we now behave like two tribes at ideological odds. On either side, articles of faith have become talking points, chock-full of sanctimony and satans – some orange, bombastic and insufferable, some evidently too daft to properly manage a Wendy’s let alone a country. I’ve been atheist toward every other religion my whole conscious life. What’s one more.

After decades of trying to mentally neuter us, and weaponizing the Prison Rape Elimination Act to confiscate our bathroom doors, the Washington State DOC genius machine did a progressive pirouette. A few years ago, they decided that prisoners can claim to be any gender and everyone is supposed to pretend that’s what they are.

The most effective way, they decided, to address mass incarceration would definitely not be to modify the draconian sentencing guidelines of Washington State. Instead, they chose to start selling ladies’ undergarments and makeup to male prisoners. Because nothing exemplifies comprehensive prison reform quite like a gaggle of pot-bellied prisoners in bras strutting around the yard all painted up like tipsy Batman villains. I thought there might be some benefit for the rest of us in this perplexing change in policy, until I tried identifying as freemale. 

When I arrived at camp, I discovered our unit sergeant had the long, intricately painted nails of a well-to-do black lady. A startling accessory on a middle-aged, bald, white guard with a paunch. He said he identified as transgender, but no hand-plucked wig or shawl of wokeness could disguise the fact that he was a biological tyrant. He bullied his way around the unit, expecting unearned respect, even as he would occasionally hold up one hand and say things like, “Sometimes a bitch just needs a minute.” He claimed, in front of two of us, that the only reason his “community” had problems was because of blacks and Hispanics. They are, he said, all bigots.

After I transition to citizen in a few weeks, I might identify as an albino drag king, just to keep from getting myself accidentally thrown in Facebook jail for mentioning that I can see the emperor’s butt cheeks. My pronouns will be adverbs.

For the following three years, I had a supervisor who was a QAnon acolyte. He showed me several groundbreaking documentaries on his phone, journalistic bombshells. Turns out Michelle Obama has been a dude called Mike this whole time (surprise, Barack!), and the Clintons are vampire lizards. Don’t worry, like I did at first. They mostly prefer ethnic food, third world kids. My former boss legally carries a concealed firearm everywhere, even into Chick-fil-A, in case the stinking liberals declare martial law on chicken. I think I saw him in the January 6^th riot footage, wearing his shirt that reads: “Trump grabbed me by the patriot missile.” If he’s not on the no-fly list, I should probably take the bus home.

From here, I’ve watched four presidents crank up the flames beneath the kettles, each a little more than the last. We once politicized the way we wanted things to be. Now, we politicize the way we see how things actually are. We’ve figured out ways to euphemize our own closed-mindedness, one side calling opposing views or unflattering coverage “fake news,” the other “misinformation.” Now, when people say “diversity,” they definitely aren’t referring to viewpoints, and tolerance extends only to those from the same groupthink tribe.

In the world I knew, censorship was a tool of oppressive regimes and, in America, Christian conservatives. The Tipper Gores of suburbia waged relentlessly uncreative campaigns against most of the music, movies, and books I found interesting. I’m not a Harry Potter fan but I remember being saddened when they burned those novels for being chock-full of sorcery, until I found out they had to buy each copy first. When the internet rose into public view it was heralded as the antidote to censorship, a democratized forum for free discourse. 

But at some point in the last 19 years, a tiny cabal of sanctimonious tech twerps have become the arbiters of not only who gets to say what online, but what is true and what isn’t for the entire civilized world. How can it be, I wonder, that conservatives are the only ones openly lamenting the death of free speech? Sometimes irony is disheartening.

Recently, PEN – once a champion of the voiceless – requested that the Biden Ministry of Truth increase its already formidable role in censorship. As a winner of its Prison Writing Contest in 2014, once free, I will ask PEN to include in its pogrom for censorship my name and work. For nearly half my life I have lived beneath the iron dome, all communication fettered by those in power. Any proponent of expanding the thought police-state in the freeworld is no friend of mine. May the good folks at PEN send any link between their organization and me down the memory hole along with any other voice they find objectionable.

When I last walked in the world, what was considered racist was clear, consistent, and easy to remember. We all knew what not to say, wear or do, and what would start a fistfight. The past couple years, I’ve had to keep a notebook handy just to track breaking racism news alerts on CNN. Highlights from the list include: Dr. Seuss, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, To Kill A Mockingbird, Gone With The Wind, National Parks, comedy, the Founding Fathers, birds, master bedrooms, and the American flag. I don’t know how free people manage to remember it all, but I revisit the list like a pilot’s preflight checklist in the hopes I won’t inadvertently wind up with yet another label. Not on a plane, not on a train, should I so much as mention Tom Sawyer again.

When I went to trial, cops were exalted, the blue line of integrity beyond mistrust period. Their halos had 9/11 engraved on them as an automatic rebuff should you be unAmerican enough to cast aspersions on what could have been a Ground Zero hero. But somehow since then the police have managed to beat out birds and even master bedrooms to top the racist list. Half our elected politicians say cops, even the black ones, are tantamount to Klansmen. 

Sadly, it turns out the only thing more oppressive than racist police is the seventy thousand percent increase in crime that happens right after you defund them. As a recovering outlaw who’s been shot at and properly beat up several times by cops while being white and unarmed, I would have gladly marched to defund the politicians. Between the two groups, which has been responsible for more working class folks dying pointlessly in the past 20 years?

America has changed out from under me while I was looking away. I no longer recognize the terrain. It all feels like ma and pa got a divorce while I’ve been away at summer camp, right after they started taking LSD multivitamins, wearing underoos on their heads, and fighting nonstop over which of their hats makes them faster, Superman or The Flash. Is all change improvement? If some change is good, is more better? The answer to these questions is tied to whether people are happier in general now than they were 19 years ago. I can only say definitively that I know of one person who’s about to be.

I will be getting my voting rights restored just in time to take the sanity defense at the next election, maybe plant a few Ralph Nader signs in the front yard where I’ll stand like the old caretaker for the Yellow Pages factory, hollering at the kids to stay the hell off the golldern lawn. Now that’s freedom.

* * * * *

“The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.” 

– Friedrich Nietzsche

“A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline.” 

– Harvey Mackay, Founder of Mackay Envelopes

As I write it is September 21^st, one week and three days until I release. Let me rephrase that sentence in our speak. I have ten days and a wake up. No more reflecting, my retrospective musing is as kaput as my focus. At this point, my mind is scrabbling toward an imminent future like a caged feral cat in a house built of fish fillets. Thoughts burst forth like second graders on the last day of school, elbowing each other out of the way, squealing. At 4:11 this morning my eyes pop open. By 4:12 my mind is full-on parkour, wondering if they have three-person peddle boats I can take my two boys out on, where I might go to pet a horse, what happens if you google “Google,” and whether they let felons volunteer at the bacon factory.

For nearly 19 years the “Planned Release Date” box on the kiosk screen has been blank. I’ve only ever had an “Earliest Release Date,” the obvious implication being it could definitely end up being later. An ERD is as concrete as a CDC guideline, reshaped on the fly by hard data sets including infraction history, wind speed, and sentence re-auditing by way of Magic 8-Ball. One last layer of fuckability between you and freedom, the thing you long for like, well, like not one other thing in the universe.

But a PRD is etched in zeroes and ones, inviolable except upon commission of aggravated first degree nitwittery. Two weeks ago, the following message appeared on the kiosk: Your Planned Release Date is October 2^nd, 2021. I started welling up right there in the dayroom. My breathing went telenovela, my heart howling in my ears like a lost Siamese. I double timed it to the cell, jealously guarding my reputation in these parts for not being a big purse-swinging Sally.

Last week, I returned to the room on the education floor where I had my photo taken for my State ID, all those months ago. This time my appointment was to sign a form titled “Order Of Release.” My walking papers. I sat staring at the admittedly anticlimactic document displayed on the table. Let the word “release” resonate in my mind like a whisper in a cave. Ran my finger down the page like the cheek of a long-lost lover. Close read it top to bottom, and then revisited certain poignant passages in my internal Samuel Jackson reading voice. The records lady finally said, “Ahem. I hate to interrupt, but I need you to actually sign. Right here. And initial here.”

Lady, said my inner voice, I am savoring with great and furious joy these motherfucking words on this motherfucking order of release.

I sleep less with the passing of each day. Exhausting myself with two, sometimes three, workouts per day is key to getting all of six hours of sleep a night. The anticipation of freedom is like the sound of the Pacific Ocean when you live on the beach. It permeates every consideration, the crashing soundscape of every waking moment. Forgive me for inadvertently quoting Metallica when I say that right now, nothing else matters.

I am an organized person under normal conditions. I rarely misplace things or forget scheduled activities. But Shorttimer’s Syndrome has taken its toll. My attention span, if not completely out the window, is perched on the sill waving at passersby. I have to time my workouts because I can no longer count sets, and often have no recollection of what exercise I just did. I read the same page the same page read the same page more than once most times. Sustaining the concentration required to write this is like juggling in a hurricane while on a hoverboard. Sometimes it’s all I can do to finish a…

I will get no transition out of prison, no work release or halfway house. But if I have honed one skill through practice, it is being able to land on my feet. This will be the first time I will do so while following the rules. To that end, I’ve done all I can to lay my own groundwork with the help of some incredible friends and my family. I have been making deposits into the bank of preparation for years. It’s time to make a massive withdrawal. Within the first two days, an appointment for my driver’s license test. I have a job waiting for me in a successful tattoo shop owned by a friend, a wastewater operator’s license should that not work out, and an inroad at the carpenters’ union if all else fails. It won’t, because I won’t. I prefer to dig my wells before I’m thirsty. 

I am enrolling in a two-year graphic design and web development program at a nearby college, with my first freeworld classes starting in January. I’ve been in the digital design course here for a few months and now know more about web development than I do web surfing. I’ve never taken a selfie – or any picture with a digital camera – but I know Photoshop well enough to get hired as a Kardashian gardener. I don’t really remember what websites should look like, but I recently built my first one. It is all about cats, so I suppose you could say I built it from scratch. Hold the applause, if you please. It’s not as if I have the chops yet to make one about dogs. 

My plane departs the bustling airport of scenic Walla Walla at 6:05 the morning of October 2^nd. An hour later, I will arrive in SeaTac, where my two sons and my mom will be waiting. Lucas, my youngest, just turned 18. Caleb, his older brother, is 31. I could not have dreamt either of them would turn out to be the well-adjusted young men they are. Nor how close I am with both of them. We have a million moments to catch up on, the three of us, and all the time in the freeworld to do it.

* * * * *

This is my farewell to you, the Minutes Before Six community. For nearly a decade, we have shared this Third Place, the space between my mind and yours, exploring together the particular human condition that has been my life. Over the years, you have wandered beside me along the shores of institutionalization, across sea beds of addiction, and into the slippery caves of street life and criminality. We’ve gazed upon the tortured face of mental illness behind bars, and tried to fathom the bureaucratic absurdities distinct to prison. I came to you with music, the rarest of exports from this land. And infinitely more impressive, you answered my call to action and rallied forth a stupendous wave of support for Thomas in his darkest hour, helping to spare his life, literally minutes before six. We’ve been through a lot, you and I, and you have kept coming back for more, week after week. 

I have held to the light my truths, both grainy excerpts unique to prison life and stories universal in their themes. Some I penned to illustrate the stark contrasts between our two worlds, some were meant to remind myself as much as you that despite our disparate backdrops we still have in common all the important bits, the ones that make us human.

Writing is a solitary sport, one played entirely in your own head, and where winning involves not simply reaching the finish line, but reaching for the least worst one you can imagine. I have spent thousands of hours staring into a concrete cell wall, blocking out everything but the story, the thought, the line, living out lifetimes in the desolate gulf between this sentence and the only one fit to follow it. I have at times set out to enlighten, at others to entertain. Whether I achieved either is a matter of your opinion, not mine. 

My most sincere hope is that along the way I made you feel. Because despite our hyper-connectivity as a species, we have become a world divided: by politics, by race, by concertina wire. We are all guilty of forgetting that bridges are up to us to construct from common ground, the fertile soil where empathy takes root. By inviting in one another’s stories and granting them airtime in our internal bustle, allowing them the mindspace needed to trade perspectives even if only for a naked moment, we come to know the vulnerable heart of someone else’s struggle. We feel their plight, their triumph, their suffering. In doing so we recognize ourselves in The Other and remember that ultimately we are all members of one scattered tribe. This singular goal is Minutes Before Six’s raison d’etre.

I will remain involved with MB6 on the other side, wandering the proverbial halls with a dustmop and making coffee for Dina or fetching toner cartridges for Teri. But in ten days my voice will no longer be among those who need to be heard on this unique and invaluable forum. May my fellow writers never lose hope or the will to keep fighting the inertia of circumstance, to live and write another day. May all of us never lose sight of the precious few bridges between us, and strive to build more. Thank you for allowing me into your mindspace all these years.

Bartholomew out.

Steve Bartholomew