A month or so ago I began reminiscing in Street Roots about what I recalled of the Atlanta Prison Farm. I resided there a time or two (in fact, five) during the ’80s. "Out Key Road" was how everyone referred to it. I said I didn't know why I suddenly remembered it. It had been more than two decades since I was last there after all. It had been nearly 30 years since I first even became aware of it through the artist who often was deposited there. There really wasn't any apparent reason to suddenly think of the place. Best forgot, all said.
But I know now what brought it on.
I was pushing my walker, recovering from surgery and feeling old, like things were over, that even though things would get better, things were fundamentally changed, and it reminded me of the old men who lived out there on the farm. They weren't simply temporary residents as inmates. Key Road was their home, such as they had one. They would die there, quite simply. There or out on the street drunk during some brief vacation from the place. There was no adventure to look forward to. Nothing new around the next bend or corner. No train to jump or anything. They were merely familiars to their caretakers, the prison staff, who treated them all the same. Key Road was their "end of life" senior center, assisted living warehouse. To the staff who had known most of them for years, and by first name, they were nonetheless indistinguishable. "Hey, Joe" could have been "Hey, Bones." When they died, they were remembered the same, without emotion or distinction. Just a name. Which faded with each new replacement. Anonymous, replaceable parts.
So, I know it wasn't the fresh spring air that brought the place to mind, or the new leaves. I know that all those old men were 'new leaves' at one time and had amazing stories to tell, and when they fell to earth, they were just that. Dead leaves, once bright and green and lifted by currents of air from a new season. But out Key Road, they were leaves waiting to fall off the tree. Their edges curling and dry. Telling stories so worn from recitation upon recitation, their glory days had grown meaningless. The stories themselves dead leaves.
My favorite memory of the prison farm was one Sunday afternoon when some of the younger inmates, musicians, played for us in the dining hall. It wasn't like The Blues Brothers at Joliet or Johnny Cash at Folsom. Nothing cinematically engaging. It was a crowd of mostly old men momentarily staving off boredom, not there by choice, not dancing on the tables, playing the fool, but herded into place and wishing they could return to the dark invisibility of the dorm and sleep. Sleeping not dancing was the name of the game.
What the band played was country rock, good stuff actually, reminded me of the Allman Brothers or Chuck Berry in some of the tunes, and there was one fella, lead guitar who would dance in front of the others, high-kicking it from side to side, feet over his head, while jacking his guitar, just like that fella with The Showmen back in Virginia Beach, we used to love when I was a kid in the ’60s. At least those in the band felt some release, a lot of release it looked like at times, and something like a Saturday night, not a Sunday afternoon in the jailhouse.
Otherwise, when I looked around, the faces betrayed at most a handful of vacant grins. But mostly just tired relegation. Distant, unfocused stares. They could have been sitting on the can dealing with impaction. It reminded me of a photo I once saw of expressionless white college kids seated on the floor of the Savoy watching young black couples competing with unbridled energy in a swing contest during the ’30s. Doing the Lindy Hop. And those kids looked like they were sitting on their cans dealing constipation.
Fact is, many of the oldsters there in the Key Road herd had had their youthful moment during the late ’30s and during the war years. Kids transported from hobo camps to CCC camps to a worldwide conflict that has prompted some to call them "The Greatest Generation." Looking at them there, in the prison's colorless dining room, it would be difficult to imagine them seeing themselves that way. But that whole hype was somebody else's game anyway.
Memories. Dementia. A displacement backward in time over decades on decades, for some there the decades were too many to remember, even if they had wanted to. Like the century-old bunker of a prison itself. Demented and yielding to gravity. Built close to the ground for easy disposal when its number came up. And it didn't take long study to see its number was due.
At that time Tina Turner was enjoying something of a revival, I guess you could call it, and the song "What's Love Got To Do With It?" was everywhere, even in the cave-like dorms, resonating from the radio in the staff office or the kitchen which was permitted to have one. That was one song I don't recall the band playing. I thought it was gracious of them not to play it over us, the all-too-familiar, omnipresent, the daily anthem, when the all-too-familiar, the constantly repeated, was just another way of saying how old and sad and deadening the prison farm out Key Road was in its essence. (Hell! "In its essence"?! In its EVERYTHING!) It would have been like playing "America The Beautiful" or something. But this wasn't Jimi Hendrix playing the national anthem at Woodstock. This was prisoners killing time. "O Say can you see?" Yeah. Yeah, I still can. A clear picture of killing times.