About a year ago I ran into a friend whom I hadn’t seen in some time. He looked really good; like he had been taking better care of himself, rested, bright-eyed and had gained a little weight. I asked what he’d been doing to prompt this transformation, thinking it might’ve been rehab or just a few months at home with the folks in a quieter part of California. He responded by telling me he had been in prison. It had something to do with failure to appear in court for some old lightweight charge or another and a routine ID check by the cops and boom there he was in San Francisco County Jail #3 in San Bruno for six months. Being an average curious faggot, the first thing I asked him about of course was if he had a lot of hot prison sex, a question prompted by countless fantasy jail cell scenes in gay male porn movies viewed throughout the ages. He, like all other ex-convicts I’ve ever asked, promptly responded with a curt “No.” I guess it’s nothing like it was in Jeff Stryker’s Powertool. I kind of figured that it wasn’t really—no group cells with tan perfect depilatory-creamed gym bunnies in white briefs whose only crime must have been having cocks that were just too damn big, just waiting for lights out to begin long sessions of versatile manly sex play only to get caught by the warden and be punished in ways that don’t seem to be like punishment at all. “No sex whatsoever?” I asked. “No late night lockdown gang-rape? No blowjobs for cigarettes? No furtive expressions of love in the pervasive darkness of incarceration? No fondling of hormone-induced breasts on a nurse-killing murderer turned checkerboard chick? Who was Our Lady of The Flowers anyways? No secret sessions with a sadistic warden?” Nope, nothing like that at all. However, he did have another illumination from his time spent in the belly of the beast that he was all too eager to share, and frankly it was one of the finest compliments I had received since the time when someone tripping on mushrooms ran out of the bar where I was dj-ing and up to the next corner and were found on their hands and knees vomiting and crying out, “The music in there is so evil!” My friend told me that in his particular tier or cellblock or pod in that San Bruno facility, the official word was that, “Don Baird is the bomb Hole In The Wall DJ.” I should really reflect on why news such as this makes me so happy and, uh…well, proud, proud like Richard Speck must have felt when Divine said “I blew Richard Speck,” in the movie Female Trouble, or as proud as he must have felt parading around the prison yard with his new boobies. Well maybe not that proud. I’ve had Richard Speck on my mind lately ever since a friend told me about a web site called Electricchair.com, where I saw among other aspects of prison life on death row and mpeg files of actual executions, video footage of the famous and now deceased nurse killer cavorting around a cell with his black boyfriends snorting cocaine and showing off his new breasts. Oh the humanity! And how in the hell do they get hormones in prison, let alone video cameras! I want a video camera! I wonder if it was made from a blow dryer. I wonder if you can give a tattoo with it as well.
At any rate, it’s nice to know you’re appreciated, or held in high regard by a group of people somewhere, and for some reason the exact location of that group really thrilled me. I can’t really say why. Probably the same reason I kissed a boy I met for the first time after he told me of an unspeakably violent thing he had done. It was a few years ago outside of Club Uranus where I met this angelic looking punk rock boy with a Mohawk, small and fragile looking yet glowing with an aura of recklessness. I struck up a conversation with him and was instantly taken with his southern accent and composed sense of proper manners, a quality often forgotten here in laid-back-goes-high-tech California, where the hippie aesthetic eroded the basic form and now the Internet has catapulted it even further out of reach, creating a new realm of non-conversationalists lacking in social skills without a mouse in their hand or a lap-top in front of them. This charming punk rock vision proved that there’s nothing old-fashioned about being a gentleman. He was from Tennessee. We seemed drawn to each other in such a way that we were soon continuing our conversation in a cab to my house.
Once at my house, over cigarettes and coca-cola we each started sharing our basic backgrounds, where from, family things, etc. He explained to me that in the town where he grew up his father was a very rich and powerful man, in spite of his cruel nature and close-minded intolerance of such things as gayness or dyeing your hair purple. I responded by telling him that my dad was far from rich and powerful, in fact he was the janitor of the elementary school that I attended and to top it all off he had a wooden leg, his was missing from just above the knee. The boys’ eyes widened and he drawled out, “Oh my god, my daddy’s missing a leg too.” This was the second or third odd coincidence or parallel we had learned about each other, and this one gave me goose bumps. After calming down a bit I asked, “How did your dad lose his leg?” Without batting an eye he drawled out, “I shot it off with a shotgun, I can’t tell you how many times I tried to kill my daddy.” Of course that’s when I kissed him. What else could I have done? It seemed quite clear to me.
That kiss was placed so naturally for the same reasons I would literally swoon over such songs by The Smiths as “Sweet and Tender Hooligan,” or “Handsome Devil.” They romanticized a character who had committed criminal acts, even murder, making excuses for him, saying “Look into those mother-me eyes,” excusing an act of murder by saying of his victims, “But she wasn’t very happy anyway,” or “But he was old and he would have died anyway.” After junior high school years filled with novels by S.E.Hinton like The Outsiders and That Was Then, This Is Now, it seemed quite natural to place the misunderstood bad-boy teens with criminal leanings but a hidden and bittersweet sensitivity into a realm that was definitely heroic as well stirring in that love-that-dare-not-speak-it’s-name way. Hoodlum ways are always appealing to a younger impressionable starry-eyed boy. If you had to, you would lie for them, steal for them; even hide a gun for them if they asked. It would turn you on.
Of course, later on in college came the similar fascinations with Arthur Rimbaud and his entire renegade, consumptive and totally homosexual poetry—put out there brazenly and with no apologies, the absinthe-swilling, ass-eating, French dandy perv who was no stranger to jail and flamboyance. Then of course, came Jean Genet and his much examined absorption into the world and mind of the prisoner and the criminal, taking it to a whole new frightening and beautiful philosophical intensity. Upon closer inspection I guess I could understand the pleasure it gives me to know that prisoners in a facility hold me in some high regard. The feeling is mutual and actually not so mysterious at all. Come to think of it, how many proposals of marriage has Richard Ramirez the hillside strangler received from young women since he was apprehended? Hundreds I bet.11-21-1999