The Culture Bunker
by William (23-69930) Ham
Illustration by David Coscia
Editor’s Note: the following letter was found taped to the bottom of the box containing Lollipop‘s monthly supply of calves’-foot jelly rolls, by our associate slander editor just before press time. Although barely legible and coated with what looked like Cheese Doodle dust (but certainly didn’t taste like it), the staff felt it appropriate, after extensive translation, editing and dry-cleaning, to include it in this issue. Besides, we couldn’t sell an ad to fill this space.
Lollipop:
Forgive the poor quality of this letter, as I have been incarcerated in the Clifford Irving Maximum Security Literary Prison (a.k.a. Writer’s Island) for the past five days and have only this crumpled Helmsley House notepaper to write on. They have also confiscated all of my writing implements (“You’re in the pen, so you can’t write with one,” the guard said as he took my entire store of rare, diamel-encrusted EraserMates. Scarce wonder the Neanderthal was turned down for that fellowship.) so I have perforce been reduced to scrawling this missive in blood. Not my own, fortunately, but I think my cellmate is starting to get suspicious, so I’ll try to keep this brief.
Life has taken some unpleasant turns, as you can well imagine. I am serving a two-year sentence for plagiarism in the first degree. Some blinkered circuit-court judge has had the audacity to claim that my most recent play, A Streetcar Named Jim-Bob, was cribbed in toto from some obscure work by a dead fellow by the name of William Tennisball or something. How absurd. I would only have had to pay a fine if I hadn’t taken the judge’s gavel and inserted it into my pants in order to perform the Serbo-Croatian Lizard Dance for the court in a last-ditch plea for clemency. Regrettably, I was in a jurisdiction where premeditated interpretive dance had recently been outlawed, so the judge added two years to my sentence and assigned me 3600 hours of community service and a twenty-page essay on Beowulf. And they say justice is blind.
So it appears there’ll be no column this month. A pity, too, since I had come so close to finishing my essay, “Compact Discs – You Can See Your Reflection in Them, You Know,” and had just received a grant from the National Endowment for the Pointless to colorize the poems of Baudelaire. I still have fevered dreams of how wonderful Flowers of Evil would look in kind of an off-teal, and often when I wake I have to bite down on my cellmate’s ankle to stifle the screams. I have grown quite dependent on him for this reason. As the female protagonist in my play, Blanco DeBosque, would say, “I have always counted on the courtesy of people I don’t know.”
I must say that prison isn’t nearly as glamorous as films like Midnight Express would have you believe. The warden is a cruel, despotic, and twisted (but fair) man. I will never forget his address to all the newcomers on the day I arrived. Pacing back and forth in front of us with his mirrored reading glasses in place, he barked, “This here is a realist prison facility. If I see any o’ you usin’ allegory, you spend a night in the box. If I hear ’bout any o’ you maggots attempting a Wildean comedy of manners, you spend a night in the box. And if I, or one of my stereotypically weaselly underlings, find any o’ you tryin’ to pull some kinda epic novel exploring the essential amorality of humankind in a Godless universe with a touch of absurdist meta-satire a la Ionesco… well, then you go into the remainder bin. Any o’ you prose-slingin’ pockfaces got a problem with that?”
The cellblock was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. The warden swung around angrily. “Awright, who dropped that pin? Somebody spoiling to be expurgated?”
“Goddam mad dog.” I recognized that reversible mutter – it was Otto, one of the new kids on the cell block. His infamy preceded him. Otto is well-known to state and federal authorities for writing and speaking solely in palindromes. He arrived the same day as myself to serve the first of fifteen consecutive life sentences. (He hadn’t committed any crimes, he just annoyed the piss out of everyone.) He had an aura of intimidation around him, or at least he did until one of the minimalists stole it from him to keep warm. Even so, I could tell he was trouble.
The warden quickly singled him out. “What’s your name, convict?”
He didn’t flinch. “‘Palindrome’ Otto E. Mordnilap.”
“Not in my belletrist-detainment facility, it isn’t! From now on, you will be referred to solely by your Library of Congress Catalog Card Number! Is that clear, 73-18137?”
“Hah.”
“You think you’re tough, boy? A bad-ass? A real hardcore Clifford Odets motherfucker? We’ll just see how tough you are. Cletus, Fyodor… take this tough guy down to… Critic’s Row.”
If I live to be a thousand, I will never forget the horror of that scene – the look in Otto’s eyes as the guards dragged him off, screaming “Oh, god, no! On, dog, ho!” Fortunately, I’m not likely to live that long, so I’ll probably forget it by the weekend. Still, it was unpleasant.
I think one of the worst things about prison life is the lack of options. I spend most of my days lifting weighty tomes to keep in shape. It’s slow going, but I hope by the end of the month to be able to bench-press two copies of Gravity’s Rainbow and the unedited version of The Stand. When I’m not doing that, I’ve been in the prison shop, pressing license plates with the entire text of The Iliad on them. (Admittedly, the only vehicles they would fit would have to be eighty-six stories tall and take up three city blocks, but I hear that compact cars are going out of fashion anyway.) I figure that if I keep my nose clean and don’t split my infinitives, I’ll be able to get a job copy editing the graffiti on the cell walls before too long.
That is, if my appeal doesn’t go through first. I was hoping to be released on a technicality (instead of reading me my rights, the arresting officer performed excerpts from Cats, which I believe falls under the heading of police brutality), but my court-appointed lawyer has been of little help, especially since, due to a clerical error, I am required to grant him weekly conjugal visits. He promised to get my leniency if I strip down to my pasties and a pair of rubber Jockey shorts (my “legal briefs,” he calls them) and sing Dear jurisprudence, won’t you come out to play? I’ll forbear any further description, but I’ll tell you, if you’re ever in this situation, make sure your attorney clarifies what he means when he says “Don’t worry, I’ll get you off.”
Not that I would wish these circumstances on anybody. I am surrounded by metonymic murderers, consonant con-men, and rhetorical rapists by the score – in short, the dregs of erudite society. Just yesterday, I was approached by a member of one of the most brutal factions in the prison, the Elizabeth Barrett Brownshirts (a gang dedicated to white supremacy and Victorian love sonnets – a more hideous combination would be hard to imagine), looking to engage my services in trafficking some of the black market goods being smuggled into the facility. Drugs, Exacto knives, inferior translations of Goethe – you name it, the Brownshirts can get it for you. When I refused his offer, he reached down, fused my testicles together with his fist, then incapacitated me with a sharp karate chop to the proboscis. “Capote taught me that one,” he whispered. “Watch your back, Prince Myshkin. When you least expect it, one of my friends might pull a Jerzy Kozinski on your ass. And don’t try to report me – my last mise en scene got unmercifully panned in Entertainment Weekly, so I got nothin’ left to lose.” Don’t fear for me, though. I have made a deal with a rival gang, Hell’s Neoclassicists, for round-the-clock protection in exchange for a carton of cigarettes and three Cowardesque bon mots a week. A small price to pay, you will agree.
Well, my cellmate’s arm is running out of blood, so I’d best sign off. You may see me soon – Yossarian in the next cell has been planning to escape by hiding in the bin where the penitentiary’s used carbon paper is kept, and I’m thinking of joining him if the break is planned for after Norman Mailer’s monthly visit to search for protegees. So I may yet taste the sweet air of freedom again, even if I have to be indelibly stained and covered in backwards typos to do it. Best wishes to all.
Yours internally.
