EXPRESS YOURSELF

One of my wannabe book's less interesting chapters:

Orientation class for soon-to-be-surrendering defendants given by the Eastern District was a bad joke. While I’d done my research and figured I knew what I was in for, what harm could there be in attending the class? It turned out to be almost a total waste of time. Mostly, what we got was a boatload of misinformation.

The officer teaching the class was coincidentally my favorite pre trial officer. But he couldn’t answer any of my numerous questions. And worse, he claimed that there would be computers for word processing, and musical instruments to play. With the former, he was just dead wrong. And the latter? It took me fully 7 months to get near a guitar.

And so, for somebody who lives to express himself via music and words, this presented a serious hardship. Every day of the previous 50 years, I had played a musical instrument. And similarly for the previous 20 years, I’d sat down at the computer and written something in words on a daily basis. Suddenly, I had to go cold turkey.

I decided a full court press on the musical instrument room was in order after I heard the infamous Dr. Ho playing the violin rather poorly from within an enclosed room next to the library. Apparently, the prison did have musical instruments for the inmates’ use. But convincing somebody to let me near them was another matter entirely.

After making numerous requests of the education department head, I was getting nowhere. So I switched gears and asked to see a shrink (which we were allowed to do). Once I got into the psych's office, I came clean. “There’s nothing wrong with me that getting out of this horrible place wouldn’t fix. But I can’t get near a guitar. I came down here to see if you could somehow back door me in. Can you do that?” I asked plaintively.

“How long have you been here?“ she asked. To which I responded honestly in the neighborhood of 4 or 5 months. She thought that wasn’t enough time. After a few more months, maybe Volpini would relent. What the fuck?

In the meantime, I discovered that one of my friends had been commuting downstairs to help put together a little musical review, and he’d been allowed access to a guitar as part of the show. His take on accessing musical instruments suggested a quid pro quo with the institution. You had to do something for them if you wanted to play an instrument. As in participate in some sort of lame performance to entertain the troops.

Invited by my friend to come down for the show, I arrived wondering exactly how proficient any inmate would be on a musical instrument. And I certainly was not disappointed by their mediocrity. With just one exception, musicians who committed a crime they were not. Criminals who’d picked up a musical instrument and thrashed on it at some point in between committing felonies they were! It was rough - and not a program I really wanted to be part of. 

But still, I persisted trying to access a guitar. And one day, I was finally allowed to sit down with one of the prison's poor excuse for a musical instrument. I'm not sure which sounded worse...the guitar - or the guy playing it. It was not a gratifying experience.

To add insult to injury, my friend rushed in to join me in an impromptu duet. That just made matters worse. As brilliant as he was (PHD in Astro-physics from Berkley), the dude was not exactly a session player. I really couldn’t tell him to get lost as he was about the only prisoner with whom I could relate. Eventually, I left depressed and never touched the guitar again. I’d learned my lesson. 

As previously mentioned, I did sit down to write a Paul Manafort piece for the Daily Beast. But beyond that, I did no writing to speak of with the exception of composing two or three songs.

If I had to describe my year at MCC with just one adjective, I might use the word unproductive. Or maybe bored. Or fallow. Just no way to really express yourself in prison. 

Oddly, when I got home, it took a while to return to a daily writing routine. It was participating in Quora that actually got me back in the groove. I decided to become the most read author in the categories “Prisoners,” Prison Life,” and Incarceration.” And within 6 weeks, I was #1 with a bullet in all three boasting almost 4 million views. 

It was an amateurish exercise with no payoff, but one which helped me organize my thoughts and shift me out of neutral. So it was good for that. Sitting and doing nothing in prison created a sort of inertia which thankfully, I managed to break out of - no thanks to MCC’s constraints on any creative impulses.