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July 2009
My cell was a 13x7 rectangle of cold white stone, the walls riddled with testimonies of its previous inhabitants. Some graffiti, mostly art—which I found surprising, given the types of people who dwelled here over the years. Criminals. Thugs. Degenerates.
This particular domicile was creatively sketched to give the occupant the illusion of being in an apartment. Nightstands with lamps, end tables with flowers. The penciled bay window opened to a vista of distant mountain ranges, drenched by a comically large sun.
The view through the panes was split down the middle by the bole and boughs of an oak tree growing directly outside this portal to nature, so close that none of the foliage was visible from this perspective. At the topmost junction, where wood decided to part ways and create their own paths in life, determining their own individual futures, was perched a screech owl, his gaze pinched and unpleasant.
Maybe the artist’s decision to place him there, with the sun closely approaching the noon hour overhead and clearly out of his natural element, raised his ire. I can relate, Mr. Owl.
The window was escorted on each side by solitary portraits. A man on the left, woman on the right, reminiscent of the old black-and-whites one might see of their grandparents. Above the metal plate, welded to the wall, which served as a desk, a bookcase was roughly sketched. Many books, but no titles adorned their bindings. Perhaps the sketcher could not bring any titles to mind, or—as I like to think—he purposefully left the spine blank for the future tenants to fill in with their own imaginations.
Many hours I spent sitting at that desk on its metal, tractable stool next to a graphite fichus, chewed pencil in hand, writing with an abbreviated version of its larger cousin—a less refined shiv-approved form of what you use to keep score at miniature golf. Until the pencil was worn down to a useless stub.
My only reprieve from boredom disappeared with that last strip of lead. Entertainment now consisted of a pictorial television sitting atop the dresser at the foot of my bed displaying a boxing match. Two men standing in the ring, eternally touching gloves to begin a fight that would never be.
My bed was a concrete slab, running the width of the back wall. It had taken a few days before I realized there was supposed to be a mattress in the cell. An oversight by the wardens. Though, the addition of the plastic-coated, worn padding granted little comfort to the accommodations.
The lengthwise wall of the cell was where the artist decided to place our living room, adorned with a full-sized couch that I lusted for. He even felt inspired to include a framed painting above the couch—four faces, intertwined, each sharing half of its face with its neighbor. An interesting concept in both symmetry and negativity.
Unfortunately, this entire homely scene was sullied by our illustrator’s decision to include a naked woman sitting on this couch. Arms stretched to either side across the backrest, knees spread wide to the point where they almost touched the armrests.
When tastefully depicted, nudity can be a beautiful concept in art, but the graphic detail in this portrait was clearly not artistic expression, rather that of lewdness and unfulfilled testosterone.
As much as I hated to deface this man’s work, I also could not stare into this woman’s depths for my entire tenure here. Upon scouring the room, I found the other half of my pencil stub where a chunk of pink eraser remained. For a moment I wondered if it may have been the same utensil used to grace me with my new living quarters.
The eraser apparently lost all function after years of neglect. It only smeared the image, so after half an hour spent freeing the graphite from its wooden tomb and fashioning a tip by scraping it against the sharp edge on the underside of my hardened stool, I was finally able to edit my living room companion to something slightly less offensive. Well, that was actually the second thing I did after honing my only outlet to the tedium of this place.
The first thing I did was write sideways, right at my waking eye level, “Good morning, Daddy. I love you.” It was a dream that still haunted me—my elusive family. The one I had hoped for with Susan, then with Haley.
So back to my “cellmate,” so to speak. I began by attempting to illustrate a bathing suit to cover her, but the process quickly dulled my pencil, and my scribbling across the rough surface did little to mask the deeply engrained renderings. It was then that I discovered that with the application of a little water, the filaments would combine, making a crude form of ink. Ink that could delve into crevices of the stone that even the most persistent sketcher could not reach. Applying this technique, I was eventually able to outfit her with a new, black two-piece, completely obliterating all traces of her former lack of attire.
Satisfied with my work, I turned to the task of cleaning my “paintbrush,” a thoroughly blackened thumb. After basically rubbing through the center of the already ridiculously thin, prison-issue disc of soap, I forfeited to the makeshift paint still deep within the recesses of my thumbprint.
I then decided to try my hand at my own attempt at art, using a single concrete block as my canvas, the mortar as my frame. I quickly discovered that my poor hand for drawing was not improved by the corrugated surface. All you have is time in this place, so I continued with my feeble attempt. A crescent moon in a star-splattered sky, reflecting off a lake below. The lake lined by tall grasses and reeds.
A cobblestone path led up to a small farmhouse, where the front porch runs the entire length of the house. Only one light illuminated the guts of the house, in the upstairs room, casting a glow on a section of porch roof directly below it.
A lone silhouette stood in the window frame, a darkened shape staring out into the night. Lonely. Afraid. But hopeful that one day the sun would again shine on that frail figure with the freedom of truth.