When you’re headed to prison there’s an inevitable contraction in your life. A divestment of what you’d held onto as a free person. Everything you do is predicated on a countdown.
“Last pizza…last time I’ll go to a coffeshop…last time I’ll wear this shirt…etc.”
All the mundane details are a screen for the larger prices you’re about to lose.
“Last time I’ll be able to do this particular activity as felons can’t etc.”
“Last time I’ll see my mom.”
“My last night with my wife.”
If you go straight in from arrest or plea then the process is abrupt. You’re on the street one minute, in a car the next, and then in a cell with your sole sojurns into the world being court dates. It’s fast and dirty. But one can see the advantage in us expediency. Sutures get ripped out fast. Less time to fester.
Now federal bond bond on the other hand is a deliberate animal of gradual deprivation. You count down the days till sentencing and then the days till what you hope will be a self report into prison.
(Last thing you want now is to get yanked at sentencing. Then it’s the worst of both worlds. That terror and sadness wracked waiting and rhen a plunge into max security holding and maybe even the hell of transit.)
It’s the subtle, slow, and inevitable chiseling of the life you once enjoyed with such blithe ease into that of a prisoner.
You make ad hoc arrangements for bills and utilities. You scramble to get medical care as where you’re going will have none. You attempt to gameplan for a nonexistent future. And you want.
But largely you say goodbye. Last time you’ll walk in Frick Park is coming soon.
Last time you’ll see New York already happened in 2020.
Last Thanksgiving. That was sad. Beautiful but so sad.
Last Birthday. That one hurt. A lot. More than words can convey. Weird to survive to 40 after everything just to be on bond ready to do one of America’s last cannabis mandatories.
In the absence of a discernible future save prison you wander your past somewhat, at least those memories that in their beauty aren’t too painful to replay.
When was the last time you left the country?
Cartagena, Colombia, X Mas week 2018. You remember the visual potpourri of aquas,, ochres, yellows, and oranges on the homes. The narrow lanes. The vermillion seafood stews and the press of the calles. The wildstyle graffiti murals juxtaposed with whole cobblestoned walks capped by awnings of deployed umbrellas strung as artful canopy.
The coffee, exquisite as nectar decanted from carafes in the sitting room of an archbishop’s palace now a hotel, rounded steps smoothed with age and a cornflower blue tiled pool where brilliant green lizards amble as guests of their of phylum. The hot wind at sunset that licked over the Pirate era fortifications where you’d sit with your wife and watch the local families queue up for ice cream as the sky combusted in atomic violets and explosive oranges. Breakfast with your parents under the austere Spanish glares of colonial nobles long deceased and now encased in oil paintings for eternity.
The barrier islands and old ocean forts now given way to bougainvillea and white sided mansions whose boundaries run right up to the ocean.
You think about how you went everywhere.
Bullet trains to Osaka, Pendelinos to Lapland in winter. Brazilian streets packed to riot at 4am like Times Square at noon, ambient body heat and cacophonous smash of noise as music forcing everyone to sway . The Balkans, the Townships in Joburg and the cave that man came from on the blonde savanna. Paris, Rome, Tangiers, and Montreal. The way Mexico City unfolded like Inception, whole districts loading as if in a video game, a four piece chessboard clicking open in a “Game of Thrones Style Schematic” as the car sped past varrio after varrio to the center. The castle in Poland where 1000 kids bounced up and down as you held the mic and jumped with them.
You remember how the first thing they took was your passport.
**This is where you becomes I.
In the absence of kids I became attached to other things. Maybe I should have gotten a pet but that always felt like consolation to myself and her. We figured we’d become parents first and then get a dog or a cat or some fish. Something for the child and us.
Combine that with the fact that I was a lonely, sensitive, overimaginative kid who ascribed personalities and faces to all manner of animals and inanimate objects. This led to overattachment to things, stuffed animals and action figures then notebooks and certain pens. Even an air-conditioner was granted a name and traits. I never stopped doing this but rather performed the trick of emotional prestigidation that all traumatized kids do as adults and incorporated it into the one man comedy shtick that masqueraded as my personality while I performed an emotional high wire act between prosperity and annihilation.
So my passport was like my pet. Or an extension of myself. I mean it has a little picture of me, glaring back at the camera like the high profile arrestee I subconsciously always knew I’d become. And it’s imbued with magical powers beyond any security blanket or special He Man. With a wave betwixt my fingers it allowed me to teleport to other societies and civilizations. It took me over oceans with ease. I’d could wake up in Tokyo walking through the stratotowers and mazes of holograms like Akira anew and end up in Mendocino under the redwood giants with the cold sea battering the cliffs under every star the sky could muster.
I needed my passport to get a replacement ID. This now involves a process wherein my lawyer transmits a motion to the court and the judges decides whether or not to grant it. If granted then the information is transmitted to U.S Probation and then a window is established for it to be obtained and then relinquished. Duplicative forms must be signed at each stage of this action.
So one morning I arrived at their office to receive my friend foe the last time. It’s expiration date drew nigh and under normal circumstances it would be filed with my other momentos and brought out lovingly to have its pages regarded as those stamps are mere data sticks for the memories they contain.
The passport was given to me in an envelope bearing my name and case caption. It had been cut open at one end like a body bag producing my friend’s inert form. My heart leapt at the sight of it. I turned each page and ran my fingertips on the deep navy front page with the faded gold eagle who now owned me as well. It felt right in my pocket. Where it belonged. It was happy there. My friend and I reunited for even a short span.
When I walked into the windowless room in the U.S Courthouse with the glass partition and the door one can be taken through never to return, I buzzed to let them know my presence and a PO emerged from their redoubt to the kill zone of the waiting room.
She spoke to me and I to her in the stilted, overly polite fashion of two individuals skirting a radical power imbalance. We were two Caucasian adults chatting amiably about an errand. She was a person who now owned my most prized possession and would have dominion over me upon my return from imprisonment.
A strange idiomatic detail about POs: when you’re on bond they hate discussing your inevitable incarceration. When you’re back from prison it’s all a lot of them want to discuss.
Dispensing with this temporal paradigm I was blunt:
“Is it possible for my family to get my passport back after I’m in prison?”
So odd that the word prison affects someone in such a visceral manner that their profession creates entire lexical avoidance strategies for it and yet that same profession exists for serve incarceration, that’s all they do.
“Normally in the event of your potential incarceration we’d not release it to your family.”
“I understand. This isn’t potential though. I’m going to prison on a mandatory. 100%”
The slightest ripple courses the air between us. The masks make this exchange all the more polite.
“That’s not normal procrdure-“
“I understand. It’s about to be expired soon anyways. It has…sentimental value.”
She regards me with a mixture of quizzical and benign contempt. Like a weird slug that slithered in off the porch but somehow possessed emotions and the ability to mourn a slug sized passport.
It’s my time to hand it over.
“One moment..”
I say. I remove my friend from my pocket and slide his odd corpse into his sad, paper, coffin.
Just before doing so I whisper to him.
“I’ll come back for you. I promise. I’ll bring you home.”
I hand his casket to her and depart. Tears in my eyes. Systematic diminishment of a person in constant, grinding, motion.
Maybe I affixed so much feeling to the inanimate so I could matter more. Could be ego. Could be anything. I don’t know.
In the absence of “nexts” you tend to have a lot of “lasts”.
I went to an event run by Illicit Gardens in Missouri to tell my story of what happened to me. It occurred in Tec 9s studio.
The strange circular orbits of life were ever present. Kansas City is where MacLethal is from. It was opposite him that I achieved the modicum of underground renown I milked for all that travel and then abandoned when market forces and my inability to make good songs commanded it.
The protocol for the recording of my story was an odd simalcrum of touring days. A long delayed flight, polite handlers, other artists performing before and after, and the lonesome transit to isolated hotels on the periphery of major urban areas.
My last flights. My last hotel room.
In the absence of a tolerable present you live in memory. If you’re in prison or going then it’s embrace is far warmer than your current conditions. It beckons you to disassociate and slip into its Byzantine oblivion. It’s better there. Water’s warm and clean and cerulean. Sands are cocaine white.
I sat my last night in the hotel room eating chicken and Mac with my bare hands as I was too fatigued to venture to the lobby and procure a plastic utensil. A frightening full orange moon peered over the strip malls at an almost hallucinatory lack of distance.
I awoke to my morning panic attack and saw the my last hotel Vista.
A desiccated wheated winter field where birds alighted intersected with freeways and hazy commercial structures in the distance so prosaic now but palatial monoliths to earlier iterations of man who’d never see them. A railroad track lay like stitching on the wound of a snow dusted hillock and boasted a rare find to the watcher: an actual passenger Amtrak as it wended its way across the map headed to downtown KC and then Chicago.
That was my last view. Last thing I saw.
Wish it were the terraced alleys of Beirut where a medieval sized door from the time of Saladdin would contain an alimentary with a plug in Nestle’ ice cream freezer situated in the 4 foot width thoroughfare guarded by an imperious Phoenician Cat with the jewel of the ocean in the distance past the high rises with balconies large enough to play soccer on and the avenue of palms that swayed in the Mediterranean trade winds.
Or the blinking, faceted jewel of Manhattan in the haze of mid-town traffic where a channel between old tenements and luxury high rises framed my joint smoke exhaled from my balcony on Kenmare Street.
Really anywhere but this. Anyplace but here. Any life but mine. But here I am.