How to Get Out of Gaol by Writing

The last time I really wrote I was in prison in England. I can't deal with these slimy keyboards. They feel like sticking your hands into a vat of muck and wiggling your fingers around. No matter what I do, my hands come up slimy. Johnson, the Welsh screw, always looked like an older, taller, more sane me. He would open the door, look, close it and lock and my stride wouldn't break. My mind was free. My body was stuck in that damned cell.

I knew that the wall to the prison was within jumping distance from my window. Well, that's what I saw anyway. The bars, though, presented their own problem. The way I remember them is like old fashioned steel bars, but they must have been retrofitted. HMP Brixton was an old gaol, in South London, and famous to me. The days stretched on, mostly in search of one comfort or another, a cigarette or cup of tea, the occasional cup of powdered coffee and books. Of course, writing kills time and days.

The US State Department came to visit me. That was fun. I was probably very poor in condition, but it was someone familiar to talk to. The only other Americanlike person was a Russian. Somehow he had his own cell, complete with binders and boxes of papers. He explained to me that he was being held because he had been raising metal from the sea bed between the first Gulf War and September of 2001. Everything someone says about why they were in there had something off about it. There's too much to go through, and I didn't ask questions because I wasn't so interested.

When you're locked in a room, you begin to look at getting out of that room. Not just, for example, to go get your food and return the room, but to get out of the building, complex, and her governors. In prison, or remand at least, my main interest was my defense. So this was naturally a good thing to write about and I did. My defense was: Let my punishment match my crime, and I do plead guilty, conditionally, though my prosecutors would whisper down the lane the facts as they have been sensationalised by the police. I was pretty fair about it all. The judge actually looked at me and said, "I've read your statement, and it seems you have some degree of education, and I don't think that you are a threat to society. Still though, the nature of your crime and the gravity of it is such that I have to pass a custodial sentence. He paused. 9 months." I had to stay in those cells for 4.5 of the months. They let me out early because of a weekend I think. I had already been incarcerated for more than three.