The Showers Will Continue

You write the best book you can – nothing more, nothing less.

Photo by Carson Masterson on Unsplash

I was showering the other morning and started thinking about prison showers. No, not because of that. But because I was in the process of reading and thinking deeply about John J. Lennon’s new book, The Tragedy of True Crime. I’m going to be in conversation with John about his book this Thursday. John, who is currently serving a 28-year murder rap in Sing Sing, will be calling me from his prison cell.

Early on in the book, John describes the ins and outs of prison life and spends some time describing the intricacies of prison showers — and in particular who showers where in a prison (there are multiple showers to choose from at Sing Sing, apparently) and why (much of this seems to be based on things like your relative status in the prison population, as well as your sexuality, among other things).

Perhaps that is why as the water rained down on me in my own shower I thought about prison. But I’m not really writing about prison showers here, what I want to tell you about is that this stray thought led me to another thought about talking to people on the phone in prison, which I’ve done a lot of in the past — both as a reporter, and also having had family members locked up at various points in my life.

I thought about how prison conversations — as opposed to normal conversations with free people who are not under the watchful eye of state or federal authorities — just sort of end. Often you don’t get a chance to say goodbye. The line clicks because your ten minutes, or whatever time you’re allotted, is up. I also thought about how when you miss a phone call from someone in prison, you can’t just call them back. You have to wait until they get a chance to call you again, and they, on the other end of the line, have to hope that when they do call you’re available. Because of this dance, and the many opportunities there are to miss one another, it can take days and weeks to actually speak to someone.

I recently chatted with John on the phone and discovered he gets thirty minutes for his calls, which seems like a king’s treatment when it comes to time on a prison phone. You can do — and say — a lot in thirty minutes. We spent our time trying to get to know each other a bit, and feel each other out, as later this week I’ll be sitting in front of a live audience in Miami basically chatting with him on the phone with the speaker function turned on. We figured before we do something like that, we should probably see if it’s even possible for us to carry such a conversation.

Thankfully, I think we can because John is very intelligent, and aside from being traditionally book smart — well read, intellectually curious, committed to his writing practice — he has that extra bit of streetwiseness that can only come from surviving hard living on the edges of society that I so admire and value in others. In other words, he’s the sort of guy that if I met in some other capacity on the street, I’d be okay having a circuitous chat with him anyhow.

As I was showering I kept thinking about our phone call and prison phone calls and more intricacies about them — such as the sounds you often hear in the background of men yelling, not so much out of pain, but just hooting and hollering, and making random noises to remind themselves and others that they’re alive, or the automated messages that randomly punctuate your conversations, reminding you that the line is recorded and subject to scrutiny, a reminder that many people often forget.

In fact, if you haven’t dealt with the criminal justice system much, it might surprise you to know that in many states you can request prison phone calls through a public record request. I was provided some of these during my time as a journalist — large zip files with MP3’s I could listen to as if they were album tracks, when really they were often intimate conversations between inmates and their parents, friends, and others. Recently, I saw the rapper Young Thug learned about this reality the hard way, as someone requested his calls and has been releasing them on the internet, blowing up how he gossiped about a lot of rappers he’s supposed to be friends with, and revealed infidelities, among other things. Thug recently released a seven minute apology track to all the people he talked shit about on his jail calls.

I kept thinking about prison phone calls, and then started thinking about my debut novel, Victim, in which one of the main characters, Gio, is locked up for a big chunk of the novel. While he’s in prison, he and Javi, the protagonist, mostly communicate through letters they send back and forth, portions of which I reproduce in the novel. But as I was in the shower, stretching this random thought about prison showers to prison phone calls and beyond, I thought to myself: Wait, why didn’t I have Javi and Gio speaking on the phone in the novel? Couldn’t that have opened up more possibilities for me?

Now, I’m sure that at the time I was composing my novel I must have thought of this idea, and I’m sure I must have decided against it for some reason. But now, roughly four years since I’d last written the book, or had a chance to change things in it, I suddenly saw new possibilities and opportunities I could have taken advantage of to make the novel even stronger.

But of course, it’s done. Printed, bound, finished and in bookstores and libraries. I thought about two last things in the shower related to this finality — and the ambivalence artists often feel around it.

One: last year when I was part of the Bronx Book Festival and watched Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah in conversation with Colson Whitehead. Nana asked Colson how it felt to be on his eighth novel and how he considers his past work. Colson said something to the effect of: All I try to do is write the best book I can write. When I was [insert age], the book I wrote was the best book I could write, when I was [insert age] age, the book I wrote at that point in time was the best book I could write, and so on.

I’ve always thought that was such a great way of looking at things.

Two: A poem by Anne Bradstreet called “The Author to Her Book” that I read recently, and that was published in 1678. In it, Bradstreet, one of America’s first poets, calls her work the “ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain” and laments that try as she may, she can never truly make it spotless or perfect:

Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:

I wash’d thy face, but more defects I saw,

And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.

By the end of the poem she accepts that she must eventually let go and live with the work as it is:

In Criticks hands, beware thou dost not come;

And take thy way where yet thou art not known;

If for thy Father asked, say thou hadst none;

And for thy Mother, she alas is poor,

Which caus’d her thus to send thee out of door.

By the end of my thought train, as I turned the shower off and reached for my towel, I realized I will probably always have thoughts like these about anything I write for as long as I have the good fortune of breathing and making this my life’s work. As I get older and wiser and read more and live more, I’ll likely always look back at work I made when I was younger, and less wise, and less experienced and think, I could have made that even better.

Thankfully, what brings me solace is my certainty that at the time I was composing Victim, I know in my heart of hearts that I did the very best that I could. I know that whatever talent and ability I could marshall forth at that moment were all aimed at the novel. So, I like to tell myself, as long as I keep doing that with each project I work on, I should be okay.

In fact, if I’m fortunate enough, one day in the future, I’ll be taking another shower, and this new book of mine I’m working on will be out and finished and in bookstores and libraries again, and I’ll have another random thought about how I could have made it even better, and things will continue on that way until the very end.

Peace,
Andrew