Danner Darcleight - Concrete Carnival

Crewed Up was first published in The Kenyon Review

Getting Out: Notes from the Road was first published in Fourth City: Essays from the prison in America

Copyright 2016 by Danner Darcleight

All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

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The Permanent Press

4170 Noyac Road

Sag Harbor, NY 11963

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dercleight, Danner, author.

Concrete carnival / Danner Dercleight.

pages; cm

Sag Harbor, NY : Permanent Press, [2016]

ISBN 978-1-57962-437-8

eISBN 978-1-57962-508-5

1. Dercleight, Danner. 2. PrisonersUnited StatesBiography. 3. Authors, American21st centuryBiography. 4. PrisonsUnited States. 5. Prisoners writings, American. I. Title.

HV9468.D47 A3 2016

365'.6092dc23

2016002729

Printed in the United States of America

For my mom and dad, kind and gifted people.

AUTHORS NOTE

I have changed names to protect the innocent, the not-so-innocent, and the bashful. I dont live in the land of the free, and prison officials have ways of silencing those who write about what goes on behind the wall.

But the larger reason is Ive learned from reading the work of prison writerscontemporaries like Piper Kerman, going back to Jack Henry Abbott and Jean Genet, and further back to Dostoyevskyand the prison experience is very much standardized across time and geography. Theres a tendency to dismiss nefarious goings on as something isolated to one prison or one statethe work of a rogue crew of guards, poor managers, violent gangs, a deteriorating physical plant. The differences that exist are differences of degree, not kind. As Andy Dufresne learned in The Shawshank Redemption, the names change, but the rackets stay the same.

Sea to shining sea, prisons are ubiquitous in America. You drive past, giving the walls and razor wire on the horizon barely a thought. If those of us inside are thought of at all, it is as the Other, a homogeneous group lacking all the traces of humanityfears, loves, disappointments, desires, talentspossessed by those in the world. My aim is to make specific the men and women our culture treats as indistinguishable. I am an American, a prisoner, one of millions, and I write about what it is like to be alive inside the criminal justice system.

The meaning of life must be conceived in terms of the specific meaning of a personal life in a given situation.

VIKTOR FRANKL

Buy the ticket, take the ride and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON

ONE

GETTING OUT: NOTES FROM THE ROAD

Whats your road, man?holyboy road, madman road,
rainbow road, guppy road, any road.
Its an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.

JACK KEROUAC

T he prison wall stretches like a dark gray band in the vans rearview mirror. As we speed away, the gray line tapers downin under a minute its gone, and Ive covered more distance than I have in almost a decade.

This is the first time Ive been outside of a prison wall in all those years. Im relieved that the feel of driving hasnt made me throw up farina onto my shackles (a tale of car sickness that Ive heard from peers whove gone on medical trips to area hospitals). My handcuffs are tethered to a waist chain (think praying, but at crotch level), the leg irons limit my gait to one-and-a-half foot baby steps. The vans windows are tinted and its cozy.

The transport officers are a friendly sort, road guys, pros. Gunslingers. They get hazard pay and beaucoup overtimeand everyone likes leaving prison, even guards. Especially guards. The one riding shotgun, M, pushes aside the morning paper and turns to speak to me through the black metal cage. Chuckling, he says, You really pissed someone off. Hes fishing. Like most of the prisons population, hes been fed the tiniest morsels of my story, and is hungry with intrigue. M knows I didnt do anything wrong aside from entering into a relationship with a prominent woman from the community. Something like this happens often enough for the Department to have an unofficial policy in place: flick the inmate to the far end of the state so fast his fucking head spins. Luckily, the powers that be didnt hang a bogus charge on me and ship me out via the Box.

Be that as it may, Im not going to give either of them something that will anonymously appear in the local rag. Its time for this tale to disappear. I misdirect. Get this, I tell him, on my way out the door, I was told never to come back. The pair glance at little old me, shake their heads, and laugh at the absurdity of it all. Darkest pit in the state and Ive been eighty-sixed, and barred from returningadmittedly, Im wearing that with pride.

Two hours ago, I was in the mess hall when an odd hush fell over the place. A guard and a sergeant escorted me back to my cell, where I had forty minutes to pack everything I ownclothes, books, papers, toiletries, canned food, and assorted miscellanyinto four duffels. I gave away practically half my cell in order to hew to the four-bag limit. Guards inventoried everything while I stayed moving in a thrumming frenzy of distraction. Its a good thing that Yas was at workif he were around, wed both be teary-eyed, brothers being separated. Whit, another close friend, carried the bags downstairs for me and put them in a cart. The effort left his flimsy white state undershirt absolutely drenched with sweat. This I learned when we hugged good-bye, natural, close. He drew the back of his hand across his forehead with a characteristic humble gesture, and fixed me in a melancholy gaze. Well likely never see each other againthats what this prison life is all about. Impermanence and loss are offered as a crash course. Walking out the door of the cellblock, I turned back. Oscar and Whit gave me sad waves. Under escort, I pushed the cart with my property through the halls, drinking in the scenery one last time, waving good-bye to confused friends. Passing more than one checkpoint, I overheard a guard pick up a phone and report that Id just walked by.

The fact is, were driving away from this beef at fifty miles an hour, blowing the speed limit so they can get me to a depot prison in time for a large transport bus. The trouble is behind me, and I feel good, better than I have in a week. I am on my way to a new home, and taking this show on the road.

The trip ahead of me promises to be sedate motoring through scenic countryside. Therell be a few stops as we spend the night at prisons along the circuitous route. Despite being shackled and under armed guard, I feel an exhilarating sense of freedom traveling through the world, sharing the road with citizens.

We crest a large hill and Im greeted by the slow, waving arms of a cluster of wind turbines. How many times have I stared at the whitish blades from the distance of my window, the sun rising behind them as I sat in bed, penning quixotic paeans to their kinetic beauty. Wonderful, I realize I just said aloud. P, behind the wheel, glances at me in the rearview. The wind turbines, I say. Theyre beautiful.

We make it to Prison B in just over an hour. Since were not allowed to travel with watches (or any personal effects), I catch the time where I canthe vans digital display, a hacks wrist as he removes my cuffs. Its just before noon. An inmate porter lugs my four heavy bags of property away to a staging area. I tell the transporters that it was a good ride, and then wish them both well. P tells me that he worked for a time at Prison F, where Im headed, that its a shit hole, but that Im a smart kid and will be fine. I thank him for saying that.