December 11, 2019
My brother John and Zachary, my youngest son, are waiting to pick me up outside the gate, and they look worried. I’ve just served eighteen years for robbing banks with a toy gun to support an ambitious drug habit. Feeling like a refugee, I have five big green trash bags filled with my unpublished writings and two similar bags bursting with magazines and journals containing my published work, all of it on a wobbly cart I was given to empty out my cell. True to form, the guards refuse to let me take the cart twenty yards into the parking lot to my son’s car, and I cannot physically carry all seven bags out of the damn prison. Mere seconds from freedom, I’m stymied. The guards don’t care and won’t help — and casually threaten to lock me back up if I don’t get moving. Surely they can’t, but only the witless test prison guards. Unable to part with my works-in-progress, I dump two heavy bags of my published oeuvre in the trash, saving only a tattered Oxford Thesaurus, too precious to abandon. It’s discouraging, and yet it does not matter. I just want the hell out.
