The Novelist Portent
12.10.14

JOHNNY MAHAFFEY SAYS:
"Another madhouse milieu!"

I came to prison as a lost twenty-something (well, a twenty-eight who still got carded in nice restaurants when ordering wine), but now I'm somehow 36.

Death looms over me daily and to see 50 under these circumstances would be both an extreme accomplishment and living hell. The blood drained to the floors around me, spilled a couple of days ago by fellow prisoners carving each other with box-cutter-like drunken hobos in an alley over a half-empty, half-full bottle. It's drained with time, all of that twenty-something immortality I once had. Replaced with the wisdom filtered through a straw, a straw squeezed by societal misconception placing me among these masses. Unknown but perhaps deserved, my twenty-something blinding glasses skewed my ways at seeing myself. Not guilty of what they've claimed, but guilty of a heart that went dead.

My own.

Unable to take back what hurts once said.

I'm a father without his kids (even on their birthdays). I'm a husband without his wife. A racer without his car(s). A businessman without his business. A son without his mother. A brother without his sister. A hell without its heaven. Many things without many others. Mostly, I am just here!

I never drank coffee before, not often anyway. Now, I drink it like water, water that's as dark as fresh tarmac, with a similar smell and what I'd guess to be its flavor. And as I sit here in this lockdown, days after the blood was all cleaned off the walls, the floors, the officer's desk, I am a prisoner of body, but never mind.

This coffee in hand puts these keys into motion as I think of my daughter and another missed birthday. To say I'm sorry once again has no point. I miss all of my kids. Not so much my life. If only I could be there for them to work and give them funds for college. I could at least give them that. In these environs, however, I'm just lucky to keep my life.

There was a lot of blood, and it won't be the last of it I see. And I'll always be nervous if, one day on that floor, is me.