The prison farm was set on what now would be a prime development opportunity. The Right-Wingers, I'm sure, would latch onto it as an “opportunity zone.” The campaign never ends, only people who give a damn run out, the attention spans, the caritas. And as the population explodes, the land becomes tighter, and there is money to be made. By students of the law among others.
A relic from a much earlier time, it's gone the way of all things developable and is by now pushing up fine tract housing or condos deluxe, I'm sure. It was magnificent Piedmont hill country after all. And all us prisoners were nothing but tombstones waiting to happen. But gracious land wasn't filled up back then. There was still room for the sordid, the reveling squalid, the wonderfully unkempt and free — and music. Poor New Orleans, it occurs to me. Are they packing the music into a museum as an attraction for the Casino trade? What's to be done about the roots?
The prison farm sprawled over more than 150 acres featuring cows and pigs and chickens. When animals were slaughtered they didn't wind up on prisoners' plates. The deputies' plates saw it, I was told. Which deputies I was never told. But there was plenty of work outside and fresh air. A relief from pounding pavement, but too dismal to dwell on any future. The sagging worn-out cots didn't provide for good sleep. They worked for the exhausted, which was us most of the time. But the cement floor would have done as well, looking back.
I would get up at night when it was completely quiet and take paper I'd secured from the desk guard and write. (Night works wonders for the soul.) I would sit under the solitary bare bulb in a corner of the dining area, surrounded by darkness, and scribble out a semi-dream. Some of the prisoners thought I was doing an article for some magazine. Reality was, most there were illiterate, so anyone who could read and write was called “writer” or occasionally, “perfesser.” Actually, I was trying not to lose my mind. I should have recorded something back when it happened, no doubt. When all the details were fresh. For Southern Voices or Southern Exposure, maybe.
Tell ya something maybe overly familiar. I'm a Southerner and miss the place — terribly. It was real and what I was raised in. But in reality I knew that whatever I produced, however much I might produce, whatever depiction of place, character, zeitgeist, whatever, would disappear shortly after my release. My first stop would be the liquor store. To wash the goddammed taste of the place out of my mouth. And I would simply wind up back where I'd been when picked up, no wiser it would appear to one of those suited observers, no doubt, no better housed for sure, no richer, just as resigned, and soon enough relieved of my notes — lost or stolen, as was the custom. As was the drill, back then. Nothing stuck but the habits that were my undoing. I hardly needed the county or the city's help to be in prison. I had my mind to contend with every goddamned day.
I got stoned on cheap vodka within minutes off the transport from the farm. A pocket of several bills from this dear woman who worked in the kitchen where I wound up toward the end of that first stay and subsequent stays, I'd promptly get a pint and sneak into a stall in the men's room in the Georgia State University Library — so original, so carefully planned, so aimed at improvement — and get spiffed. Just decompress and let the stress pass out of me. Having been away from the booze for at least a month (it took two months, for instance, to get the test results on my multiple vitamins! “You're clear to go, John,” they informed me. “Let's hope we don't see you out this way again.” And that was my first time out Key Road!), the first inhalation of booze was a thorough blast-off. A walk on the moon… my own private lunar place to be. Not that I wouldn't share it. For sure. I would have these surreal conversations with whoever was seated doing business in the adjacent stall(s). Or not. Theater of the Absurd on the cheap. Many fine soliloquies, I'm sure. Many worldly observations compacted during my stay out Key Road all came flooding out and not a word of it do I remember.
What was truly surreal was when another fella was pulling the same stunt. Now that was something to behold. A rare meeting of the minds. Two minds blending in their collapse and thinking they were providing a gift for all the world to enjoy. But frankly, for that moment in the stall, we did enjoy it.
And everything was so cheap. The disintegration, the self-immolation. Does that sound self-preoccupied? If it doesn't, it should. It's what it was all about. I would have died behind this shit if someone, or more than one, hadn't taken a little time, in their way, to salvage me. To give a bit of a damn. I don't have pride; don't waste time on it. It's not me that's kept me here. Ain't too forgiving of those folks who aren't inclined to take the time to be human. Those are the ones who maligned. Fuck ‘em. And I never meant a thing more in my life. Have too much respect for the good folks out there. Because at that time, and we're talking about more than two decades, I really didn't give a rat's ass about anything but the next thing in front of me to react to. And the booze to make it palatable.