I commenced my sentence knowing my aloneness for true now, my only comfort knowing Karl would care for my son as best he was able.
I wrote a few long rambling letters to Sam, trying to tell him something of who I was and where I’d come from, and a few of the things me and his mom had to overcome trying to give him a normal life. I told him to be strong and live proud. Oh yeah: and that I was innocent; that his dad wasn’t the kind of person that could or would have done the things they said I did.
He never wrote back and after a few years I stopped writing and focused my energies on doing my time.
Some things, the less said the better. Prison was like that – men dissolved here like oil slicks spreading across tainted water.
For years I dreamed about Angela and Sam almost every night. But after a while the dreams stopped coming, and Angela’s face grew harder and harder to see clearly in my mind’s eye.
Finally she subsided into a dim, almost archetypal presence: ‘The Abandoned Wife,’ sunk straight off the deep end to drown in the midst of a Lovecraftian submarine horror show.
All I had to do to remember Sam’s face, however, was study the nearest convenient reflective surface and mentally subtract thirty years. Seeing my mirror image showed me Sam as an adult man: A son who'd remember me only with bitterness and never speak my name; never have known me at all.
I’d leave no mark on the world other than the damage I’d done as a kid and whatever DNA Sam shared with me, my only legacy an anonymous prison grave when my carcass ran out of steam and followed my heart. After that realization my plummet took about as long to complete as it takes to describe, it was gradual as a roller coaster filled with screaming passengers soaring off the rails.
For a long while I drifted through a sort of waking trance. I spent months on end as this dimensionless drifting point surrounded by the infinite expanses of time and space that encompassed me. I guess technically I checked out of the human race all the way for a couple of years, just going about my business on auto-pilot as it were, one more sleepwalking robot.
Then by a total fluke I started reading, making up for dropping out of school in seventh grade: An old white-froed blood I crossed the color line to play occasional chess with turned me on to the Western Canon and my war dance with the Masters commenced.
Dostoevsky and Patricia Highsmith, Dickens and the Viking Sagas and Virginia Woolf. Sylvia Plath and Robinson Jeffers, Langston Hughes and Gracian and the Stoics. I lost track of how many pages I perused containing the brilliant thoughts of twisted geniuses, most long dust.
The Canon was great, if I’d ever been exposed to it in school I never would’ve dropped out. I figured my ‘teachers’ hadn’t gone out of their way to hide the classics from me, but they sure hadn’t gone out of their way to park them under my nose neither.
Please don’t think I was naïve enough to mistake any of these authors for friends. Please don’t think I ever humbled myself to them.
Never!
On the contrary: I
It was a tightrope walk to fend off their verbal assaults on my brain even as I did my best to glean what I could from the collective wisdom they’d constructed from nothingness and dust. I was as on guard with them as if facing an enemy – but I couldn’t put them down, couldn’t stop turning the page – and if these folk were reaching out from beyond the grave to infect me with the same ideas so many of them died for, then I’m guessing the damage was surely done.
I gravitated to some more than others of course. Herodotus chatted me up about the Spartans. Marcus Aurelius gave comfort despite letting it be known our lives were no more than blips in infinity, over almost before they began. Plutarch showed me that everyone had warts and all lives end, even the great ones – most of the guys he wrote about suffered travails making my current situation look like a leisurely dog walk in the park.
A false imprisonment like mine? Everyone had troubles. Much worse had happened many times before, and would occur many times again.
You had no rights, really. Does a man drowning in the middle of the ocean have a ‘right’ to keep on breathing? Does a man dying of thirst in the desert have a ‘right’ to water? Ask that question of the next desiccated corpse you stumble across in the Sahara – but you probably won’t get any answer from them.
The Canon was as much a curse as a blessing though: its light was a cold one, constituting one more layer of solitary confinement. But the old books’ diamond hardness helped me construct a center to cling to, sometimes the only thing that kept me from mentally fading away into the walls of my cell. Their most galling price tag was the humiliating knowledge of just how small I’d allowed myself to be.
Remember Bacon’s words? ‘We stand on the shoulders of giants.’ That phrase gave me chills the first time I ever read it.
But then the cosmic irony had bitch slapped me almost immediately: how insulting to the memory of those ‘giants’ that any ‘standing’ I’d do would be such a stunted version, given my current domestic arrangements.
Besides the mental sparring matches with my writer frienemies, I did pushups; I got up to a thousand a day on my fingertips. My shredded pecs got big enough I probably needed a bra.
Time passed in a crawl.