In solitary confinement, the sounds in your head, echoing in your belly and coming up your throat and out of your mouth, are the sounds that you hear.
Even in general population, you have too much time to think.
Six weeks after my sideways-moving, lazy-lipped, go-with-the-flow friend Stuart collapsed in the exercise yard, he came back from the medical center. He came like a jug of water – half empty now. ‘They wanted to cut off my leg,’ he said. ‘The diabetes. They say I’m dying.’ He laughed. A huge, low rumble of a laugh. The laugh you would expect from a volcano if a volcano could laugh.
‘What’s the joke?’ I asked.
‘I’m escaping this goddamned place,’ he said.
On good nights in prison, I dreamed I ran through the woods, on a beach, on a track. From myself. Toward myself.
‘Play the horn for me,’ Stuart said. Stinking already.
‘I don’t have a horn,’ I said.
‘Play it anyway,’ he said.
Love is possible even in a desert.
We told lies in prison. Sometimes we told only lies. Lies about the girls we’d fucked. Lies about the families waiting for us on the other side. Lies about the superhuman acts of strength, cleverness, and daring we’d performed. But mostly lies of omission.
Once, early on, at the county jail, Coach Kagen brought me cookies. As if I’d gone to sleep-away camp.
For a long time, when I closed my eyes I imagined myself encased in a shell. A full-body aluminum jacket. A cowry with the gap sealed with a steel door. In general population, nothing can protect your sleep except your imagination. And, during the night, when dreams of running tumble off ledges into nightmares, the imagination is a traitor.
When a guard said, Hey asswipe, the proper answer was Yes, sir.
When another inmate said, Hey asswipe, the proper answer was a fork in the eye.
The night before Stuart collapsed again – and this time no ambling shambling nurse could save him – he said, ‘Beating up on your past won’t do you no good, Franky.’
I said, ‘The problem is, I don’t think my past is done beating up on me.’
He said, ‘Ain’t that the truth.’
Love is possible.