The Warden's Birthday Party

The warden’s birthday is by the most eagerly anticipated event on the Mahomesh Men’s Medium Security Detention Facility’s fall calendar. The races mix in a way you just don’t see the rest of the year. The Aryan Brotherhood will invite a motherfucker from MS-13 to have brunch with them. Motherfuckers from the Mexican Mafia play squash with members of one of the several Asian triads. Motherfuckers usually content to slob around in T-shirts, PJ bottoms, and flip-flops suddenly find cigarettes and crack with which to bribe motherfuckers who work in the laundry to launder and press their dress chartreuses to perfection. Even the surliest correctional officers have smiles on their faces.

This year, some of the motherfuckers with musical talent decided it would be fun to put a band together to play at the warden’s birthday party. The warden is known to love The Eagles, Tom Petty, and Public Enemy, and the idea was to learn maybe a dozen of those acts’ biggest hits. D’Mock Ra-C and LaDrayvon Willis, from the Crips, were the obvious choices to play drums and bass, respectfully, as they’d backed a popular Beyonce imitator in Los Angeles. Gonsalvo Gutierrez — Double-G to his “homies”— came in on trumpet.

No fewer than four members of the Brotherhood, the Scrodham twins, Feekle and Aynl, Butch Whatever (I suspect not even the Department of Corrections knows his last name), and Butch’s “girlfriend”, Leon(a) Willits, all wanted to play guitar. The chaplain, who’d been put in the charge of the project on the strength of having been an assistant choirmaster at of Texas’s biggest megachurches, thought four guitarists was probably two too many, but Butch pointed out that many of the most popular Southern rock bands of the 1970s and ‘80s — Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Marshall Tucker Band, The Gypsy Kings, et al — had as many as half a dozen guitarists, usually with really hideous hair — and the chaplain demurred.

Early rehearsals were disheartening. None of the four guitarists actually knew how to tune his (or, in Leon(a)’s case, “her”) Telecaster, Gonsalvo seemed to think of himself as the Latin Dizzy Gillespie, and never shut up, and the Crips rhythm section’s disdainful sneering hurt his and the white musicians’ feelings, to the point at which Butch Whatever tried to cram one of D’Mock's drumsticks where the sun don’t shine, and was expelled from the band.

To everyone’s surprise, the warden himself wanted to replace him as the band’s lead singer. He claimed that whenever he performed at a karaoke bar, everyone just loved it, but it must have been because he was heavily armed. Feekle Scrodham was overheard to remark to Leon(a), “Motherfuck couldn’t carry a tune in a Department of Corrections bus.” Thinner-skinned than is a good idea in the entertainment industry, the warden ordered that Feekle’s execution be fast-tracked for two weeks sooner than originally scheduled.

Tom Petty himself sounded pretty feeble in the chorus of his hit Free Fallin’, with an apostrophe, barely winging the first note {“free”) in passing. Far better that, though, than the warden seeming to decide that the chorus should be sung not only in a key at odds with the rest of the song, but heretofore unknown. “Yo,” LaDrayvon chuckled after the group’s first run-through of the song, “we be in G. You in H.” The warden made some calls and got him too fast-tracked for execution, though insider trading had never been before been punished by death in Minnesota.

Behold My Pathos!

Eddie Money, two years my junior, dies, and I’m reminded that I’m living now on borrowed time. The girl after whom I lusted most implacably at 14 and 15 (and to whom I was of course too shy ever to speak) died of some awful degenerative disease three years ago. I feel as though being hustled down a long corridor lined by the locked doors of shops that no longer desire my custom. Someone must have come in the night and replaced my American passport with one from a country to which one gains (is condemned to) citizenship only at the age at which he wakes up aching and barely recognises himself.

My life in a nutshell. I was very successful as a writer starting at 21. I didn’t think I was very good, thought the world was playing a cruel practical joke by celebrating me as avidly as it did, and hid beneath a layer of feigned arrogance. By 27, I’d apparently passed my sell-by date, and have spent the past four-plus decades trying to regain some semblance of my early stature. I’m a thousand times better now than I was then, and a marginally better person, And I can’t get arrested. Behold my pathos! Struggling not to surrender the boredom and depression that have been trying from the age of six to drown me from within, I spend my days trying to make things — songs, short stories, graphic design — that will amuse and interest others, and maybe even inspire their admiration. They’re nearly universally ignored, not least by my wife. In desperation, I try to make people laugh on Facebook, hoping someone might say, “Wow, John, you sure can write/ sure are hilarious.” Few do. The world is in a meeting every time I call.

People mock Donald Trump (11 months my senior) and Joe Biden for having lost several miles-per-hour on their intellectual fastballs. There are terrifying signs that I might have begun my own descent into the dementia that robbed my mother and grandmother of so much of themselves. I read my purportedly amusing comments on FB the day after composing them, and am horrified by the number of errors they contain. Some months ago I designed a meme that depicted Donald Trump with the inscription Find the Cure. Ten days after posting it, I checked to see how many had commented (as usual, a tiny handful) and discovered that it actually said Fund the Cure. 

I pride myself on not being pot-bellied. I have worked out, in one way or another, pretty much every day since the age of 29, but my days of sleekness are numbered. My principal exercise now is walking, but my knees are making clear I shouldn’t make long-range plans for them. My arthritic right shoulder has been replaced twice. The left one has been whining less and less ignorably, “Hey, what about me?” I pump (an old man’s share of) iron for definition, and my shoulder screams, “WTF, dude!”

I don’t like my own country any more, and am bored senseless with my life in the UK. I think of moving to Spain, but because my Spanish refuses to get good enough for me to have the sort of probing conversations I love, laced with irony and innuendo, I will spend whatever time I don’t spend in solitude with others my own age. Expat retirees, talking about their grandchildren. I find the prospect terrifying. 

I don’t feel I’ve done a sensational job of being alive, but am frightened of ceasing to be. I am weirdly grateful about the fact that I’ll probably be gone before the climate apocalypse. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to die in agony. 

The world has no way of knowing who I’ve been — and who, for better or worse — I remain within. No one can tell from looking at me that I was once a dashing rock god, an avid seducer of pretty girls, a writer of international repute, one to whom women in diners slipped their phone numbers as I swaggered back to my table from the gentlemen’s room. The creases in my face grow deeper and more numerous. My multiple orthopaedic problems severely limit my swaggering. There’s hair on my head, but it grows ever thinner. I must remember not to open my mouth very wide, for I have grown long in the tooth. The world looks at me and sees: An Old Man — mutton dressed, in my skinny jeans and motorcycle jacket, as lamb.

I am not only older, of course, but wiser, if by wiser you mean acutely aware of— and deeply, deeply aggrieved by — what a jerk and fool I’ve been for much of my life. Given a choice between the wisdom the decades have bestowed on me and the beauty and sexual charisma I never really believed I had (growing up feeling like the dregs of humanity will do that to you), I’d take the beauty and sexual charisma in a heartbeat.