sea of fertility
This time of year, Rikers Island turns into a germ pit.
The metal gates that slide open and shut in the corridor we walk to go from our work room and interview area to where the court hearings are held, I imagine them coated with the things that had been coughed and sneezed into hands. In the interview rooms, the glass is smudged and streaked with what's been left there by sweater and DOC-issued pants-clad prisoners. The only other time we see them without their handcuffs is when they're brought into the hearing room to face the hearing officer for their preliminary hearing or the administrative law judge for their final hearing. Otherwise, the handcuffs glint around their wrists. One prisoner takes off his slippers and socks to show a foot swollen from untreated diabetes. Another, when he speaks, reveals the spaces in his mouth where his teeth have rotted away. Yet another presses his intake photo to the glass, showing the bruises he received at the hands of the police who arrested him.
I caught my cold wearing a suit. A navy blue number with a slim fitting jacket and a similarly colored neck tie. I had a thick winter coat over my shoulders, leather gloves over my constantly flexing fingers, and a Baltimore Orioles beanie over my ears. Too cold to see my own breath, yet everywhere was sunlit. The facility buses made their regular rounds and correctional officers in various states of official dress scurried either in groups or alone out from the Perry Control Building behind me to their buses. Laughing, joking. Someone who worked at the jail lit a cigarette to my left.
The shuttle that was to take me to the Judicial Center where clients and the judges who would sentence them for violating their parole had not yet arrived, and wouldn't for 2 hours.
Eventually, I get to where I'm supposed to go and the day passes, as it is its wont at Rikers, in a blur.
It's gotten easier and easier to lose track of the weeks. Things happen, wonderful and otherwise, and unless I note them immediately, they fall into the morass of "previously on..." They become part of the episode recap.
For instance, two wonderful bits of news:
The Oxford University Press published a small piece I'd written on the new Ta-Nehisi Coates run of Black Panther and Netflix's smash hit Luke Cage.
On the heels of that, my short story "Screamers" appeared in the pages of Omenana Magazine, and the wonderfully startling thing that happened in its wake as been the praise and kind words I've been receiving from friends who, having read my non-fiction (in the form of essays and Facebook status, had not necessarily read my speculative fiction. When it gets to be award season, I may now have something eligible to put forward.
Among other beautiful things that happened recently, I saw Moonlight a week or so back. To say I loved it would be to speak in criminal understatement. The first time I saw it was with a woman very dear to me and the second with a college friend and her roommate. After having seen it once and, knowing what to look for, I found myself even more moved upon the second viewing. An old friend from my Tisch days, and now culture writer for MTV News, has written much more eloquently about the film than I could hope. It was a remarkable lyric poem splashed onto the screen, an experience more than a movie. So much of the joy I took from it was in the way it deconstructed myth and left us with human complication. Juan, the drug dealer who becomes a father figure to young, obsidian-colored, nearly mute Chiron, was the first deep blow in a movie that hit me expertly, with precision, without a hint of manipulation, leaving me with the certainty that I was watching something crafted entirely out of love. Juan teaches Chiron how to swim. He also sells his mother the drugs that will ruin her life and further devastate Chiron's. The leitmotifs sprinkled throughout reveal the deft handiwork of a craftsman who does not operate in the absence of emotion but rather lets it guide without overpowering. This is a felt movie. The water when it holds little Chiron aloft, guided by Juan's hands; the music, chopped and screwed, that booms in adult Chiron's car; the moonlight when it glows on teenaged Chiron's fingers gripping the sand on a beach and renders him blue against the dark. Tactile and mystical all at once.
Then, just this past Friday, I watched a beautiful woman I'd known perform in a play with David Hyde Pierce. It was to be a surprise, and the look on her face when she caught me in the elevator before the performance would suggest mission accomplished. We'd met up while I was at the Attorney General's Office to collaborate on a project, but other than that, our contact was restricted to the occasional Facebook exchange and me seeing her on television. It was wonderful to see her in person, and the perfect antidote to the malady that had infected me, the poisoned air that had surrounded me, ever since what friends and I have alternatively dubbed The Red Wedding, the Apocalypse, the Death Cry of the Republic, and Brexit Redux. She kept the cold at bay.
At some point either before or immediately after the carnage, I finished Styron's collection of essays, and I felt then how I felt after finishing Underworld by Don DeLillo: that what began the book should have been its ending.
Somewhere along the way, I started a podcast with one of my best friends from Tisch, one of the things that germinated from the rage and fear and disgust we felt after the election, and it's starting to turn into a beautiful thing. We get to be loud and profane and funny and talk politics on both the granular and macrocosmic level. We get to talk about race, we get to belly-laugh. We get to vote-shame, we get to speak to power. It is so much fun, and it happened so quickly, it slid into being.
Like Friday night. A ticket purchased months ago to support one of the first actors I'd ever worked with.
The cold is just starting to lift. A printed-out manuscript beside me on my living room table is festooned with sticky-notes. A "final" pass at this draft and then the weekend will close.
Diving back into this story, having gone to this play, it no longer feels like my best efforts are behind me, or that the most elegant, eloquent, and powerful parts of my early adulthood had been front-loaded. Or that all these episodes have for their inevitable end a passing into the blur.
My cold is starting to clear. On Thursday, I'll be seeing my family. So far, I have no stints at Rikers ahead of me, at least not for this week.
Fog is lifting. Though the temperature is dropping, the winter here, and its eve, acquires a particular clarity. Sharper lines, more forceful light, frost spiderwebbing the windows, the chill blasts mist out from between my ears. At least here, in this town, where I won't be stranded waiting for a shuttle bus to take me to see some others in the worst moments of their lives. That stuff is necessary, but so is this other stuff.
So is this other stuff.
The metal gates that slide open and shut in the corridor we walk to go from our work room and interview area to where the court hearings are held, I imagine them coated with the things that had been coughed and sneezed into hands. In the interview rooms, the glass is smudged and streaked with what's been left there by sweater and DOC-issued pants-clad prisoners. The only other time we see them without their handcuffs is when they're brought into the hearing room to face the hearing officer for their preliminary hearing or the administrative law judge for their final hearing. Otherwise, the handcuffs glint around their wrists. One prisoner takes off his slippers and socks to show a foot swollen from untreated diabetes. Another, when he speaks, reveals the spaces in his mouth where his teeth have rotted away. Yet another presses his intake photo to the glass, showing the bruises he received at the hands of the police who arrested him.
I caught my cold wearing a suit. A navy blue number with a slim fitting jacket and a similarly colored neck tie. I had a thick winter coat over my shoulders, leather gloves over my constantly flexing fingers, and a Baltimore Orioles beanie over my ears. Too cold to see my own breath, yet everywhere was sunlit. The facility buses made their regular rounds and correctional officers in various states of official dress scurried either in groups or alone out from the Perry Control Building behind me to their buses. Laughing, joking. Someone who worked at the jail lit a cigarette to my left.
The shuttle that was to take me to the Judicial Center where clients and the judges who would sentence them for violating their parole had not yet arrived, and wouldn't for 2 hours.
Eventually, I get to where I'm supposed to go and the day passes, as it is its wont at Rikers, in a blur.
It's gotten easier and easier to lose track of the weeks. Things happen, wonderful and otherwise, and unless I note them immediately, they fall into the morass of "previously on..." They become part of the episode recap.
For instance, two wonderful bits of news:
The Oxford University Press published a small piece I'd written on the new Ta-Nehisi Coates run of Black Panther and Netflix's smash hit Luke Cage.
On the heels of that, my short story "Screamers" appeared in the pages of Omenana Magazine, and the wonderfully startling thing that happened in its wake as been the praise and kind words I've been receiving from friends who, having read my non-fiction (in the form of essays and Facebook status, had not necessarily read my speculative fiction. When it gets to be award season, I may now have something eligible to put forward.
Among other beautiful things that happened recently, I saw Moonlight a week or so back. To say I loved it would be to speak in criminal understatement. The first time I saw it was with a woman very dear to me and the second with a college friend and her roommate. After having seen it once and, knowing what to look for, I found myself even more moved upon the second viewing. An old friend from my Tisch days, and now culture writer for MTV News, has written much more eloquently about the film than I could hope. It was a remarkable lyric poem splashed onto the screen, an experience more than a movie. So much of the joy I took from it was in the way it deconstructed myth and left us with human complication. Juan, the drug dealer who becomes a father figure to young, obsidian-colored, nearly mute Chiron, was the first deep blow in a movie that hit me expertly, with precision, without a hint of manipulation, leaving me with the certainty that I was watching something crafted entirely out of love. Juan teaches Chiron how to swim. He also sells his mother the drugs that will ruin her life and further devastate Chiron's. The leitmotifs sprinkled throughout reveal the deft handiwork of a craftsman who does not operate in the absence of emotion but rather lets it guide without overpowering. This is a felt movie. The water when it holds little Chiron aloft, guided by Juan's hands; the music, chopped and screwed, that booms in adult Chiron's car; the moonlight when it glows on teenaged Chiron's fingers gripping the sand on a beach and renders him blue against the dark. Tactile and mystical all at once.
Then, just this past Friday, I watched a beautiful woman I'd known perform in a play with David Hyde Pierce. It was to be a surprise, and the look on her face when she caught me in the elevator before the performance would suggest mission accomplished. We'd met up while I was at the Attorney General's Office to collaborate on a project, but other than that, our contact was restricted to the occasional Facebook exchange and me seeing her on television. It was wonderful to see her in person, and the perfect antidote to the malady that had infected me, the poisoned air that had surrounded me, ever since what friends and I have alternatively dubbed The Red Wedding, the Apocalypse, the Death Cry of the Republic, and Brexit Redux. She kept the cold at bay.
At some point either before or immediately after the carnage, I finished Styron's collection of essays, and I felt then how I felt after finishing Underworld by Don DeLillo: that what began the book should have been its ending.
Somewhere along the way, I started a podcast with one of my best friends from Tisch, one of the things that germinated from the rage and fear and disgust we felt after the election, and it's starting to turn into a beautiful thing. We get to be loud and profane and funny and talk politics on both the granular and macrocosmic level. We get to talk about race, we get to belly-laugh. We get to vote-shame, we get to speak to power. It is so much fun, and it happened so quickly, it slid into being.
Like Friday night. A ticket purchased months ago to support one of the first actors I'd ever worked with.
The cold is just starting to lift. A printed-out manuscript beside me on my living room table is festooned with sticky-notes. A "final" pass at this draft and then the weekend will close.
Diving back into this story, having gone to this play, it no longer feels like my best efforts are behind me, or that the most elegant, eloquent, and powerful parts of my early adulthood had been front-loaded. Or that all these episodes have for their inevitable end a passing into the blur.
My cold is starting to clear. On Thursday, I'll be seeing my family. So far, I have no stints at Rikers ahead of me, at least not for this week.
Fog is lifting. Though the temperature is dropping, the winter here, and its eve, acquires a particular clarity. Sharper lines, more forceful light, frost spiderwebbing the windows, the chill blasts mist out from between my ears. At least here, in this town, where I won't be stranded waiting for a shuttle bus to take me to see some others in the worst moments of their lives. That stuff is necessary, but so is this other stuff.
So is this other stuff.