The talk around the block is always the same. Typical clucking braggadocio about loose women or what they will be doing with their wives when the mythical period of punishment and atonement is finally over. The sex, the beer, the freedom to be nothing. No talk of the magic dew on the grass as you struggle into the shower before climbing into a truck for a day of working wherever. No talk of life, just the fantastical rewards of men that have survived a battle. The battle with their government. The battle that others have forced them to wage in their own minds. See the demons you are, or have in you, with no distractions from everyday life! Nothing will make you not feel what you are.
There are no glass mirrors, you can’t smash polished steel to cut yourself or another and I’m sure they learned that requirement the hard way a long time before I was introduced to this system. All my education, all the things I have been taught and raised with as qualities worthy of a man are gone. I am soul-stripped naked and I lay bare for the world while they hide me away to protect my shame.
I have no common talk or prattle to offer about the things I will do when I am out of here. I have nothing outside of here. I am homeless, family-less, friendless and I am marked with the shame and duty I rightly deserve. The crimes I committed are not what brought me here for I am a monster that needs to be locked away. Yet they can’t see it. The things I have done will never ever be better. I could have all the money in the world, all the sex, all the political power and not one little bit of it will ever change what I did. Nothing will ever change what has happened to the woman I loved. I laugh at the weak reasons they have used to keep me here. They should give me the same slow death penalty I dished out. They should whip me and beat me, but instead they gave me a home and put me in a place where I have shallow friends. A place where I have a TV and a deck of fucking cards and some goddamn Cheetos for everything I did. They are hiding me from the world but I can’t hide from the cold eyes I see looking back at me. How do you punish a man that has done the deed to himself for years? Who’s going to make me want to embrace the life again? Say it with me. Irre-fuckin-pairable spinal cord injury.
That my life is forfeit to make hers live.
Done.
That I switch fates and live my life as hers.
Done.
God convinced me not to die. Saved me. Intervened in the course of another’s life to give me back the gift of my own. Do I inhabit these dens of prison and squalor or do I learn to be me again? No, not me anymore, the cold person I have become, infected and dying for the love and joy that I was convinced would be eternal. Some of these mornings are easier than others. The burden of my life is no longer the path of detraction and distraction. The drugs are too easy and too good and not helping. God has given me a gift. Told me that “the marrow of the Earth is mine to suck from the bones of my past.” The thing is, I have to learn how. Normal again. Me. The egotistical bastard smarter than anyone in this entire jail will be as helpless as a child when they finally let me go. I have forgotten how to be free. Institutionalized is what they call it. It happens to people that are in prison for ten or twenty or thirty years and I have it after 5 months. I’m scared and bored with the idea that this is my fate. Tired of the taste of blood and puke and the mildew growing in the corners. Too tired to talk about fucking. Too tired to even sing over the voices.
I thought I was crazy for a long time because I have had a song in my head every second of every day for my entire life. Sometimes mine, sometimes off the radio, but always a song, beat or a groove. The wilds of the Earth, one of my many gifts and a curse. The song isn’t there anymore. Not always. It’s the reverse equivalent of a deaf child suddenly being able to hear for the first time ever. Except the silence is disconcerting, my mind a wasteland, as cold as a snowstorm in the woods with thousands of little eyes gleaming out at me through the trees.
I have had a lot of nightmares while I’ve been in jail and recently I keep waking up in a sweat after having the same dream. I’m driving down the road in a car that I can’t really make out exactly what it is but it’s a small Honda/Nissan/ Mazda hybrid of some sort. The road is always filled with emerald green Mustangs. It doesn’t seem to matter exactly where I am driving but I am always familiar with the road every place I seem to be, even when the scenery changes abruptly. I run to get a hamburger and there is an emerald green Mustang parked in the sun outside glistening. I show up at work and someone shows me his new car and it’s an emerald green Mustang. I visit my dope dealer and I see him in a shiny new emerald green Mustang offering me free heroin. My parents are taking me back to their house and in the driveway is an emerald green Mustang for my birthday.
The worst dream takes me to a place where I am driving along in a familiar place and the shiniest, tricked-out, flossing, rimmed Mustang brighter than the sun pulls along side my little car with a gorgeous girl driving. Her windows are down and her college-length blonde hair is shimmering in the morning sunlight but she’s staring straight ahead. Her face and skin and beauty are always perfect beyond comprehension and sometimes she’ll make a sort of sly sideways glance with a slight smirk just to make sure I’m watching and to let me know that I know she knows I’m watching.
In my dream I often try and distract her; I roll down my windows and smile or wave, but the more I try, the more intently she focuses on the road ahead of her. She tears off down the road at a speed that seems casual but there’s no way I can match it in my little bucket. I put her image out of my mind and drive to where I am going.
Flash forward. I am staring at the twisted tree where I had my bike chained before I got put away and it was stolen. My bicycle apparently sacrificed itself for the tree previously by taking the brunt of a drunken frat boy’s car. It’s in bad shape and as I stare at the mangled mess of tires I turn to see the emerald Mustang with the beautiful blond girl racing towards me, quite obviously intending to fuck me the same way the frat boy fucked my bike. Her perfect girlish grin smiles as if to invite me to suck on her perfect small girl breast, exposed by a perfectly rumpled maladjustment of the sexy oversized tank top she always wears. Perfectly. I’m fixated on herbodyhersmilehersexher as the emerald front of the car, gleaming mystically brighter than any green can be, even as its custom front end, sharper than a razor blade, cuts me in half pinning me to the tree. My waist falls away under the car and she’s there watching and giggling, still playing up and getting off on the thrill of her own body, her own sexy come hither glance. Her eroticism is perfect but it’s as false and practiced as a porn star. Her body dances in its seat, wriggling as if to say, “come to me poor boy as you are dying, you’ve suffered so much at least let your last moments be filled with pleasures beyond anything you have known.”