Birds of a Feather Excerpt
The day I finally learned to fold the warden’s king-sized fitted bedsheets in a nice, neat square was the happiest single day I spent in my two and a half to five years in prison. It was just the way he liked them, and I had paid dearly to learn this laundromatic secret from a departing inmate.
Warden Brandeis—no, not from that famous judicial lineage (Louis Dembitz Brandeis)—this warden, Arnold Brandeis, was truly an ersatz and shameful figure if in fact he was at all related; but he was a stickler about his laundry being done correctly, and I dutifully obliged him, for I longed to keep this, the cushiest job in the entire cellblock, until graduation and freedom from this insane world.
It was a horrible, animalistic world so different from the one that I had not so long ago blithely, foolishly, and thoughtlessly jeopardized and now so desperately long for the simplest place to live in it and among the normal again.
I have yet to reach a state of exhaustion from the amazing jolts that I feel every time I am privileged enough to receive them. These humanistic jolts of which I speak are at first the products of real epiphanic imaginings in human form; they are real ideas of substantive man in real time in the real world, which in my more lucid and tranquil moments of uninterrupted meditation I am disposed to accept. In their glorious favor, I receive them directly through flashes of blissful thoughts through enter-cranial spasms that jump vivaciously, vigorously, and heartily across the synaptic gaps firing their new impulses of never-ceasing knowledge, reminding me daily of the peace and value of small and simple things. They chill, thrill, and dither me with ominous forebodings and lung-vibrating shouts to warn me away from breathing to deeply in my daily accumulation of dosages from the pervasive and airborne disease of ennui. Their timely alarms guard my mind against desultory and idle wondering too close to complacency’s cliff's edge, where the high risk of prison life’s fatal fall into the abyss of doldrums’ bottomless pit is always at risk. It is indeed a conundrum, a contradiction of sorts as to why the awakening of my once lethargic and careless mind only comes from the monotony of prison’s confinement, and after the soul-shattering loss of one’s personal freedom. Or is it not but my own stubborn refusal to have borne live witness and testament to my own life, while living it so blissfully well and secure in freedoms arms, that had brought me tumbling ass over dingle berries down.
I am a light-skinned black man, an oxymoron if I've ever heard one, who sadly had committed a white-collar crime, not something violent or seedy, dirty or even dangerous in the wide variety and scheme of things and crimes. It was a pure crime as crimes go and as clean as the colorful paper it had been written on: a bad check—it even had pictures of clouds and the sun shining them on its face. But alas and so sadly for me that very skin is why I spent two and a half years in Sing-Sing, a maximum-security prison in beautiful upstate Ossining, New York, instead of some relatively posh white-collar prison farm in an equally bucolic setting somewhere else. I guess they got confused when they saw me, and my sorta, kinda black face, and they just thought to ship me off to the place where even my diluted visage was more common than not rather than to the minimum-security prison where my staple of white counterparts—white-collar criminals—are in the majority.
Actually, the whole debacle, it was bittersweet as it was just a little over an hour—once she had boarded the train at Grand Central Station—for my mom, Gladys, to pull up in the prison bus at my front door, all the way up from the Big Apple. She would never accept a ride in a car from a friend; it would have been far too mortifying to be dropped off at the front gates of Sing-Sing Prison to ever live down in two lifetimes. It was bad enough that everyone important to her knew that I was boarding there; she wasn’t about to have them bear witness to it as well. The whole fiasco damned near broke her heart and mine; I love her so much.
Before my arrest and disgrace, everything was rolling along just fine, thank you very much. I was riding high, but all of a sudden—through bad acts of my own perpetration—the world that I had built along with my mother’s aide and love, it all just seemed to cave in all around me and mine.
The Lawrence Travel Agency was doing fabulously well; I had two offices going, one uptown in Harlem and one downtown in Heaven—as I always called the Upper East Side of Manhattan—and I was aiming on opening a third office on the Upper West Side. The economy was booming; and when that happens, New Yorkers, like most of the world, travel a hell lot more than when things are tight. We had survived a two-to-five-year downturn, depending on your particular business. During the difficult days, Mother always cautioned me not to worry, but it became increasingly difficult for me to see my business drying up.
During this period, I had stupidly and ill-advisedly kited a check or two to cover gaps and shortages in my liquid cash flow, but it always worked out; anyway, it was just for short period of times that I would pull this risky maneuver. And of course, I didn’t think I was hurting anyone, and I know I wasn’t the only small business doing this during this and even in more prosperous times. But alas, I was the one who later got busted; and looking back, I’ve got to be cool with that because going into it, I knew I was doing something illegal. But here and upon this rueful opportunity for reflection and truth, I was just being greedy; I was doing well enough to have waited my proper turn to expand—it was coming.
