Empty

Part One

The Writer had stopped writing.

It wasn’t writer’s block now or anything like it.

Maybe he’d run out of stories to tell. Maybe he’d written himself out. Maybe, and what was most likely, prison had just finally stifled him.

It wasn’t like that at the beginning of his sentence, his interminable impossibly long sentence. Back then, he’d filled dozens of the cheap notebooks they sold in the prison commissary. He’d kept notes and quotations from the hundreds of books he read, scribbled dozens of plot ideas. He wrote dozens of letters to senators, congressmen, psychologists, legal reform institutions. He wrote to government agencies and publishers. There were no substantial replies to his queries. Form letters, rejection slips, subscription offers were the only replies. He wrote novels,
short stories, essays, poems. Words and images and fictional characters constantly flooded his mind.

Slowly the flood diminished, became a trickle, a stagnant puddle… a dry spot. This was drought, not a drop in sight. He remembered how he’d thought in the beginning that serving a long sentence was like a walk on the high-wire, like some French guy had done decades before (so long ago, the Writer was a young man then) on a line stretched between the Twin Towers in New York. The most important thing was not to look down. Thinking of the long years ahead was like that, like looking down and realizing you were 110 floors from the unforgiving concrete. Maybe that was what had happened to the Writer. He’d looked down. The Twin Towers were gone now and that high-wire guy was either dead or very old. The Writer remembered some other high-wire guy falling during a stunt, but he wasn’t sure of the chronology. All points of reference were vanishing.

Fondly, he remembered characters and situations he’d created, many of which had come to him in dreams. His dreams now did not generate stories. More often than not he woke angry. He was angry with the world, with himself, with his judge, with the system, with his family who gradually over the years had withdrawn their support, no longer answered his calls or messages. He couldn’t really blame them. For all practical purposes he was dead, had fallen off the edge of the world. The same single cheap notebook he’d bought a year and half earlier just sat in his locker now. There were unfinished stories and half-baked ideas. Too, he was old. Older. He was losing it. He was a shitty old man inmate with a lockerful of bulging manila envelopes, writings
no one was likely to ever read.

Maybe he was finally succumbing to the cruel and deadening routine of the low security lockup loop, the noise, the idiotic passivity, the lunacy or nervous twitchiness of the inmates around him. There was little violence in the facility he’d been assigned to: an occasional shouting match, an unenthusiastic fight. Mostly, the place was awash in futility and stupidity, men as lost (and stifled) as himself. He knew he did not belong here. Hundreds of these men did not belong here. Still, laws had been broken and punishment had ensued. Society was imposing its fantasy of cleansing itself.

At the beginning of his sentence, for the first three years or so, he was exceedingly productive. He spent his days, almost every waking hour, in the prison typing room, even became the typing room clerk, in charge of managing the machines, primitive thirty-year-old workhorses that rarely needed maintenance. Laptops and word processors were forbidden in federal prisons and the old clackety office hardware was the only way inmates could produce legible manuscripts and legal petitions.

The Writer wrote by hand, then typed what he wrote, then edited and corrected, and retyped. It was tedious work, especially in the summers when the prison AC faltered and the typing room became a sweatbox, but it kept time moving. His work was like a cocoon he’d constructed that sheathed and shielded him from the ugly daily reality. He wrote futuristic sci-fi stories, dystopic epics with dozens of characters and improbable scenarios. He wrote about himself, his past, somewhat idealized, factually ‘amplified’, fancifully recast. In his fictions he avoided the day to day misery that surrounded him, psychotic inmates, lukewarm or outright freezing showers, filthy toilet stalls, intense cold or boiling hot living quarters, the human stink and racket of the open unit where he was housed, the recreation yard with the asphalt track and its sad baseball diamond and unkempt soccer field. These federal lows were like public schools in the ghettos, or bad community college dorms; the only difference being the presence of sadistic and inept guards and staff, the constant blaring of old PA systems, of shouting cops, of senseless rules, unpredictable lockdowns, and the inevitable handful of potentially violent inmates.

Then there came the years of pandemic, permanent lockdown, terrible trays of processed foods and paper-bagged snacks, frozen mystery meat, stale honey buns, not an apple or an orange in sight, tuna, PB and jelly on tasteless wheat bread, limited commissary, no rec yard, no library, no movement on the compound. Low security became a lot like maximum security. The psychology department handed out Sudoku and crossword puzzles, book carts from the library were occasionally rolled in.

The Writer wrote less and less. His reality intruded more and more, the hijinks of his autistic cellie, the stupidity of the unit supervisors, the larger sense of impersonal cruelty in which he found himself immersed. The wearing of masks during COVID became just another factor for the guards to use for bullying and humiliation, not for health and protection. Still, even then, the Writer had eked out a few short stories, two novellas. But he’d stopped taking notes and collecting quotes. He no longer read as much as he used to. His vision was failing. He tossed out many of the writings he’d kept, found no reason to hold on to them.

Maybe he’d lost his attachment to writing. He thought maybe his writing was just a simple survival crutch, something to provide a false sense of purpose, like his cellie’s obsession with health and exercise, the weight pile, the proper amount of daily caloric intake which led the guy to store several plastic packets of milk filched from the chow hall, stacked in his locker, some of them bursting and filling the cell with the stink of putrid dairy like baby vomit. The Writer wondered if his own stacks of manila envelopes were in some way similar to his cellie’s hoarded milk supply: attempts to thwart the temporal physical and mental corrosion of being locked up, equally foul-smelling in some way.

Some inmates, the Writer thought, were lucky. They had religion. Along the way he’d lost his, across the long years of life. True, he’d been brought up a Catholic, had attended Catholic schools. But his parents had never been serious believers. They were ‘holiday’ Catholics: Easter, Christmas, weddings, baptisms. And they were lax about Sunday church attendance. In time, as the Writer read more, educated himself as a young man and on through the years, as the world made its way into his consciousness, he saw that most religion was fantasy, that God and Jesus were ghosts, fairytales. Particularly when he studied the history of the Bible and the Qur’an, he
began to understand that the foundations of the world’s religions were the rantings of uninformed agrarian societies. He began to see how most human systems and social structures had developed before the advent of science. In short, the Writer came to believe deeply – one might say it became his credo – that almost everything humans believed and put their faith in was nothing but simple unadulterated bullshit.

He knew that this fact automatically, cardinally, rendered him an outcast. This was confirmed recently when he heard a radio interview with the rock star Bono of U2 fame (who’d just become old enough to come out with a memoir). The Writer was surprised to learn that though Bono was not into organized religion, he claimed he’d give his life for Jesus. Bono said that some of his other bandmates were of the same belief. There was a lot of that in the world these days… people who didn’t go for organized religion but still held on to God, Jesus, Allah, Buddha, the angels and the demons. The Writer knew his absolute atheism made him an outlier. He simply didn’t believe in holy ghosts. That Bono had achieved such massive acclaim and popularity suddenly made sense. The guy was on the same frequency as most people on the planet. The Writer had no such luck. And to hammer that point home, society had locked him up. That’s what being different from the multitude got you.

The Writer had ZERO interest in sports, cars, homes, boats, computers, retirement savings, celebrities. He’d even lost interest in sex, even if it had been an obsession with pornography that had got him locked up. Now, young women with their fixations and flirtations, their projection of physical anatomical beauty, mostly alienated him. Their half-lidded, crimson-lipped come on looks did nothing for him. It was all an act. Seduction. Aggression. Hormones. Instincts. A magic trick he finally saw through. Maybe this was a variation of his misogyny. Or a reflection of his lack of energy. Maybe it was long COVID. Maybe old age. Or maybe, finally, he’d given up all his earthly connections, a prelude to dying. Whatever the reasons for his self-imposed marginalization, it placed him at odds with ninety-nine percent of the human population.

He was not tuned in.

He was out of phase with most of humanity. Discordant. Disconnected. And now also convicted.

And so, bit by bit, inspiration had dimmed, the muse had fled. He went from writing twelve pages a day to eight pages, to four, then to a page every four days, then nothing. The last notebook sat now in his locker, filled with hopeless scribbles. All that was left for him were endless hours of TV watching, walking the track, sleep, the chasm of nothingness prison amply offered, and at his age, slow death by wasting. There was wasting where once there had been
writing.

When he’d first come to prison, he remembered seeing old inmates just sitting in their bunks or in the chairs in the common areas for long periods of time doing nothing, just staring into space, catatonic. He didn’t feel pity; he felt disgust for them. They’d given up, allowed the system to win. Now, ironically, he found himself doing the same thing, sitting, immobile, afraid or unable to engage, to find some purposeful action.

His age: he had hit seventy and his body was beginning slowly to erode. It was becoming harder to move. He was stiff. His joints ached. He was like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. Left abandoned, longing for oil to be squirted into his elbows and knees and neck.

Tired. Silenced. Stifled.

Or had he stifled himself?

It could be that prison air lacked the fresh, clear oxygen he craved. But maybe he could relearn to breathe. Maybe there was some way to inhale the gaseous, joyless poison and still survive… maybe not only survive, but thrive.

Maybe. Maybe.

He hadn’t yet found it, that breathing technique, that possible alternative, that ray of hope.

For now,
he’d stopped writing.
Just
stopped.

*****

Part Two

Put this day away
file it under ‘GONE’
I’m going nowhere
and I guess I don’t care
life’s not fair
and I’m running on Empty.

I’ve lost my self respect
I may be living for effect
biological survival
nothing truly vital
like a bug
crawling up a wall
they’re hoping I will fall
they’re hoping they can crush me
stomp on me and flush me
but I hurry and I scurry
on Empty
I’m running on Empty.

I file this time as wasted
my spirit fried and basted
the questions come:
Who’s will be done?
There ain’t nothin’ up in heaven
you can’t buy at Seven-Eleven
no savior to protect us
only goons out to detect us
it’s a fact, Jack,
we’re just fodder for the
system
listen
you can hear their jackboots
stomp
it’s no romp
they’re out for blood
comin’ for the sinners
and I’m running
running
on Empty.

But hey, listen, no, I’m fine
I’m doing time
I’m leaving life behind
this day, this night
all the same
sunshine or rain
they try to wash away the stain
they’re reassembling my brain
they’re trying to deface me
erase me
but I hurry and I scurry
not sure why
I hate living with their lie
I’d like to sprout wings and fly
but sometimes I just wanna die
still
I find the will
and I’m running
running
running
running
yeah
I’m running on Empty.