IN THE OLD DAYS I USED TO MAKE BOOK. I had prestige — and fun. Handing out the betting slips, chasing down the odds, hiding it all from the guards. But write a book? After fouteen years as a cell-block gangster the only respect I get now is from a skinny embezzler who spends all his time in the Russian novelist section of the library. Just the sort of ally I need when I’m trying to convince four young turks not to borrow my television set.
My first taste of literary success came at mail call. A letter from the editor of a small magazine congratulating me on winning their poetry prize. A cheque for sixty dollars was enclosed. Sixty dollars! For my vision! My light! The reward seemed downright criminal — on the other hand sixty beans would keep me in Cheetos and Dr. Pepper’s for a month.
To add insult to poet’s wages, the editor had put in a P.S. “As a fellow writer I envy you the peace and solitude to pursue your chosen craft.”
Peace? Solitude? Didn’t this guy know that when you close a cell door the flies can still get in? Maybe he thinks those convicts hanging over the range are hollering in sign language. Give me a break! Writing in prison is like trying to juggle chainsaws during Chinese rush hour.
For every hundred guys making noises there are at least another hundred that think I’m their private writer-in-residence. Every cell has a story; every prisoner has a letter begging to be written. It gets busy. I must be the only convict in the world doing twenty-one charlies who doesn’t have enough time.
I had to come up with a way to be fair so I listed all the requests in order of urgency. If a guy was over six-feet tall and could deadlift 400 pounds, it was urgent. If he was under 140 pounds, I wouldn’t write him a suicide note.
Meat, for instance, my latest cell partner, asked me to pen a love poem for his girl. “You know, full of passion and stuff, like Harold Robbins.” Meat keeps a knife in his sock and his brains wrapped in a bandana. I wrote:
Dear Mona,
Roses are dead
Violets are doomed
As will be you
If you don’t visit soon.
Meat liked it, but wanted to add “and bring lots of drugs.” Instead of a discussion on iambic pentameters and the poetic interruption of the fifth line, I reminded him he’d “only just met the girl once” and that he maybe shouldn’t be so forward.
Between winning sixty-dollar poetry contests and wooing Mona, I managed to type out the two favourite words of any novelist — The End. I rushed right down to the mailroom where it cost me a month’s wages to double certify and triple register my Pulitzer Prize-winning blockbuster to a top New York agency. Two months later I got the manuscript back with a note: “Great story — wrong decade. Sorry.” It seemed the market for bad guys was down.
It took a further two months and a half a dozen more rejections before I signed on with a bottom New York agency. Her office was a Volkswagen camper up on blocks. I had to write back care of a licence plate in Newark.
Still, she was a New York agent — well, a New Jersey agent, but close enough. It wouldn’t be long before I was being feted at one of those literary parties, sipping the bubbly and eating little weenies off toothpicks. Moguls would line up to buy my soul. Women would ask to touch my scars.
My Jersey agent got me a contract. The advance was six figures if you overlooked the decimal. With her end she bought wheels for her camper and moved to New York. We were on a roll.
I was assigned an editor. Her first letter was like a dentist’s promise. She stroked me for three pages and wound up by saying, “there’s some work to be done; it won’t hurt a bit.”
It hurt a lot. Near the end I wrote to her wondering if anyone else in the world spent two hours splaying their brains over whether to replace the word “and” with a comma. She wrote back saying “writing is war.” I had been at war all my life; I had hoped writing would be different.
Finally when we had all of my participles redangled and infinitives unsplit, the lawyers moved in. They slashed and burned anything that resembled libel, truth, or an interesting sentence. The smoking remains were typeset into galleys. But when my publisher told me how many copies were being released, I said there were Italian wedding invitations that had bigger print runs.
I got an invitation to my own launch and couldn’t go. My story was between covers but I was still behind bars. The parole board, instead of tripping over themselves to cut loose this literary lion, said I lacked insight. There were higher ideals at stake, they told me. I left the hearing with another year to think of some.
Meat was waiting in the hall. His lip hung when he learned I didn’t make my ticket. But his mood brightened at mail call; he got a postcard from Mona. She was threatening to visit. To impress her he went to get a new tattoo.
I used the time to jot down a few ideas for a new book, which I’d begin as soon as the warden returned my typewriter. He had all the typewriters arrested last week after some serial killer had used one to start a fraudulent chain letter.
At lockdown, Meat flexed his bicep so I could read his new tack, BORN TO LOOSE, as I lay there wondering how to do another year. Hell, I could do it in a shoebox — it was enough time to get a first draft on a second novel. Of course, it might take a bit longer, writing with a seagull feather and transmission fluid, if the warden didn’t give back the typewriters.
“Born to loose”? Sometimes it just works out that way.