Adam Lawin

Adam Lawin is from Waterloo, Iowa. He has a BA in Biology, with an emphasis in Biomedical Sciences, from the University of Northern Iowa. He was an industrial chemist before being indicted for conspiracy to distribute MDMA (ecstasy). When released, he wants to write professionally—both novels and screenplays— and hungers to live his own Hollywood dream of starting a production company and producing feature films.

WRITING IN PRISON

Nonfiction

There’s something like a million books published in the world every year, and only a handful come from authors in prison. Why is this?

Writing in prison sounds like a retreat. Ten years in a quiet room with no distractions and no responsibilities. Think of all the work that could be done. Or at least that’s what people tell me when they tell me how lucky I am to have all this free time to write.

Outsiders speak of prison as if it’s some writer’s Eden. A place where you can sit around outside with the birds chirping, or find some quiet corner with an ergonomic chair and type on a computer for twelve hours a day. But that’s not reality. Reality is less fairy-tale and more B-rated horror movie.

For this story, let’s skip forward into my sentence five years, past USP Leavenworth and FCI Sandstone, which didn’t offer computer access at all. Let’s start at FPC Yankton, ranked one of the Top 10 Cushiest Prisons in the BOP.

At Yankton I was initially put in the Kingsbury dormitory, a three-story brick building that lacks air conditioning everywhere except the officer’s offices and the basement. For weeks on end in the summertime the rooms hover around ninety degrees. Relentless, musty, and everyone’s irritable--in this environment I get to write with sweat pouring down my face.

My first day in Kingsbury I brought my notebook to a lounge on the main floor.

There are two booths in the main lobby that get overflow air-conditioning that are accessible to inmate college kids who want to study. But there is no open space for inmate use until 6 p.m. If you want to write you have two options: Every floor has its own Trulinks/study room with kiosk-computers to email family with and study tables

lining the walls. But these rooms are scorching hot, easily ten degrees hotter than the rest of the building. Or you can go to the library and write. But their air-conditioning was broken during my first year here. There was no escape from the heat.

So I’d write in the stairwell sitting on the stairs, and during count I’d write with my shirt off in my room, hunched over a chair, glistening with sweat, seeing by the dim glow of a book light. I shared this room with five other guys--guys who liked to sleep until noon. A heavy blanket covered the window to keep out the heat, but it kept out the light as well.

The worst part about living in Kingsbury was knowing that right across the compound was a vacant housing unit equipped with AC. But two months into living in Kingsbury, Yankton opened up that air-conditioned unit-Lloyd--and moved everyone in. Lloyd was like getting ice cream on a hundred-and-ten-degree day. Ice-cold dormitory-style living. It’s crowded, there’s no privacy, but it has a designated “study room” the size of an office with tables lining the walls. If there was anyone upstairs to thank then, I thanked them. I had an air-conditioned office to write in, only a few steps from my bunk.

I wrote there when I came home from work at my job in the kitchen. I wrote there on the weekends and when the computer labs weren’t open, writing and editing by hand. On my days off I was in there after breakfast was served, a cup of thick black coffee in hand, and stayed until 4 p.m. count.

And, yes, some inconsiderates would come in with their headphones blaring or have full-tilt conversations, and college students raised their voices over Accounting 101 problems, but it was still the quietest place on the compound.

It was heaven.

It didn’t last.

Two months in and I came home from my kitchen job and everybody was staring at me, laughing at me. I had no idea what it was about.

“They took away your study room,” someone said.

“What?” I asked, confused.

“Go look.”

There was a new sign on the door that now said, “Quarantine Area.” The tables had been taken out and two bunk beds put in their stead.

This was four months before COVID-19. It was a quarantine room for the upcoming winter flu.

I was irate. Where was I going to write? It had been the only place in the unit that was semi-quiet. Dozens of displaced college students were sent looking for a new place to study and write.

In Lloyd, the rear Trulinks room also acts as a game room where guys talk and shout and slap cards on the table. A speaker in the ceiling blasts out announcements every five minutes, summoning inmates here and there. Trying to concentrate in a TV room is like trying to write in the middle of a casino at rush hour. Horns blare, jackpot lights spring into action, people pound tables, followed by sudden bursts of excitement. It’s easier to concentrate in a trash compactor while the walls are closing in.

Sympathetic to our displacement, someone on staff put a table in front of the case manager’s office next to the phones. I wrote there for a few mornings in a row before a new sign was posted: “Study Area only from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.” and a few days after that the table was gone. People were being loud.

I went on the prowl for another place to write. After some searching I found a mop closet hidden in the corner that was large enough to house a fold-out table. It housed vacuums and dustpans, chemicals and cleaning rags. Push brooms hung on the walls.

The orderlies complained on the first day--the table took up so much room they couldn’t get to their cleaning supplies. Then the “Beaders” got wind of the quiet spot and decided to make it just as loud as the rest of the unit. Stringing beads on thread doesn’t require you to be quiet any more than driving does. And no matter how much we

tried to keep the place quiet, it never was. Sure, you can tell one person to be quiet, but then you have to tell every person to be quiet. And you don’t want to open that can of worms.

In March, the coronavirus hit the U.S., a novel strain called COVID-19. The virus ravaged the states, overwhelmed hospitals, killed doctors, exhausted supplies of ventilators, masks, and other PPE.

Every day I’d get emails from friends and family saying, “It’s really bad out here,” or “It’s madness out here.” There was no toilet paper on the shelves, tissue was sold out, hand sanitizer non-existent.

By the end of March, the BOP reported only two COVID cases in the prison system. Rapist Harvey Weinstein had gotten it in a New York jail. A Latin American prison rioted over the virus. The complex in Oakdale, LA was completely ravished. One inmate died, sixty in quarantine, nine guards infected. The VICE news article came out on March 30, the whole BOP locked down on April 1.

We thought it was an April Fools Joke.

Fear in the prisons spread like wildfire. A seventy-yearold inmate called out to the Associate Warden, “You know that if I get the virus it’s going to kill me, right?”

The father of the guy who lives in the bunk next to me died two months before he was set to get out. The mom of the guy in the bunk across from me died of natural causes. What am I supposed to say to them?

I’m worried about my own elderly parents. I’ve lost my job, haven’t had a paycheck in three months. Fear and anxiety and false hope--this is the world I have to write in.

A hundred inmates are on my floor. Now there’s nowhere to get away. There’s constant noise around me. The mop closet was taken over first by HobbyCraft guys, then by guys looking to do calisthenics. I’m now in the main lobby.

With the prison locked down, I’ve lost any access I had to a computer. I’ve lost its speed and efficiency. And while creatives around the world are locked at home with MacBooks in front of them and cranking out contents by the truckload, I’m sitting at a noisy fold-out table on a hard

plastic chair writing every page by hand.

Editing is just as inconvenient.

Two sentences need to be spun around? Rewrite the entire page.

Single spelling error? Rewrite the entire page.

Zigged when you should have zagged? Rewrite the entire page.

One guy in my creative writing class said, “I’m not writing without a computer.” Another said, “I’ve been working my [butt] off for the last ten years. I’m using this time as a vacation.” A third said he can’t write outside of the secluded space he made for himself. And a fourth writes from 10 p.m. to midnight when everyone is in bed.

Losing the computer wasn’t that big of a blow. For five years at Leavenworth and Sandstone I wrote by hand. And the computers here are approved only for class assignments, not recreational writing. If you want to write a book, get out paper and a pen. The only room open in Education on the weekends is the library, where everybody congregates. Sandstone’s library was wall-to-wall packed on the weekends, and Leavenworth’s library wasn’t even open on the weekends.

I write out in the main lobby now, every day from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. or later, breaking for lunch and counts, getting less than half the work done that I could do with access to a computer.

People say, “You’ve got all this free time. It’s easier to write in there.”

There are people slapping cards at the table next to me. At another table they’re getting into a shouting match over a Scrabble score. Two industrial fans run full tilt to create the white noise we need to sleep in this open dorm. Other inmates are huddling around the lobby’s double doors that offer the only windows in this place to see sunshine and grass; every other window is fogged. They’re talking over the fans and the noise and the shouting. In the TV room I can see they’re watching a movie I’ve never seen before. Three guys have already come up and asked me to put the

pen down and come play the board game Risk.

My good friend Mike Murphy, who’s in my Creative Writing Class, came up to me and said, “Adam, I don’t know how you do it.”

“What’s that, Murph?”

“How you sit there and write with all these idiots around.”

I look up at Mike and shrug. “I can’t just not write, Murph.”

And I can’t. If I stopped writing just because it was too hot or too noisy I’d never get anything done.

The temptation to put the pen down is overwhelming. It’s much easier to pick up a book or play cards or stare out the window with longing than it is to write. It’s much easier to say, “I worked hard at this for the last six years and I deserve a break,” or “I’ll wait until I get a computer,” or “I’ll wait until I find a secluded place that is the definition of tranquility.”

Even right now I’m writing this because it’s a lot easier than editing my books by hand, rewriting the same pages over and over and over again.

Prison isn’t the perfect writing environment. I live with a hundred guys in an open dorm. There are no quiet spots, no access to computers to tell the stories you want to write. That’s a privilege only people on the outside enjoy. If you’re not crazy in love with writing, you’re not going to get anything done in here.

THE PRIUS

Nonfiction

What goes through my father’s mind when he drives ten hours from Iowa to see me every month like clockwork? The first three years, passing through Des Moines on his Saturday journey south to Leavenworth. Then weaving through the snow-capped hills when I was transferred north to Sandstone, and the straight shot west along a flat stretch of Highway 20 when I relocated to the fenceless prison camp in South Dakota. How did those four years go for him, making that drive? Did he enjoy the change of scenery as he set his cruise control, not having to worry about missing a turn until he crossed state lines?

What goes through my father’s mind when he wakes up at three in the morning to make sure he’s the first person in line at the visiting room, the first man to pass through the metal detector, the first man to get patted down, and, finally, the first man to get waved through? What went through his mind when he had to cut costs by foregoing a hotel room and the good night’s sleep that came with it, or when he was forced to trade in his SUV for a Prius, and became the butt of jokes by both friends and family? What goes through his mind when he looks up at the clock after seven grueling hours spent squatting on hard plastic chairs, knowing there was a five-hour journey to get home? And through all this, how does he manage to smile at me so warmly?

What goes through my father’s mind when Wednesday comes and he knows he has to get the chores done early because he’s going to spend the weekend with his son at a place that allows one quick hug at the beginning and one quick hug at the end of each visit? What goes through my father’s mind when he wakes up Sunday with a tight, crooked back, worn sore by the hard visiting room seats and millions of highway bumps?

I don’t know what goes through my father’s mind, but I know what goes through mine. My heart rips with guilt. My

last memory of him in the free world haunts me every day. Before I went to prison, we hugged in front of the garage. We both hugged with tears streaming down our cheeks.

He told me, “Son, I won’t be alive when you get out.”

CLAY IN JAIL

Fiction

Clay stood at the pay phone on the cement wall of the jailhouse, receiver to his ear, pleading with his brother, “They don’t feed us in here, Johnny.”

“I’ll try and get you out of there, Clay,” his brother told him over the phone. “But your bond’s five grand and I don’t have it.”

“I can’t be in here, Johnny,” Clay pleaded. “I’ll starve to death.”

“You’re fifty pounds overweight. You’re not going to starve.”

Clay put a hand on his big belly. His black and white jumpsuit was loose and baggy, and the Crocs on his feet were worn through the heel. “I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight, my stomach hurts so bad.”

“You should have thought of that before you threw a liquor bottle through a car window.”

“Can you at least put some money on my books?”

“I can either do that or I can post your bail. But you’ll have to choose.”

“Can’t you do both?” Clay asked hopefully.

“Right now I can’t do either. How much cash did you have on you when they booked you in?”

“A dollar in change.”

“Buy yourself a couple of soups and stay out of everybody’s way.”

“OK….” Clay answered, solemn. He clutched at his gut, mouth twisting in pain.

“The bondsman owes me a favor. I’ll try and get you out by tomorrow morning.”

“Love you,” Clay told his brother, but was met with a sudden click and dial tone. He stared at the beeping receiver, a sad frown on his pudgy face. He hung up and signed heavily, eyes cast on the floor, and raked a look over his new home.

Striped inmates played Hucklebuck around card tables in one part of the pod, and in another they craned their necks up to watch “The Price is Right,” mouths agape. They had watched Clay from the moment he was buzzed into the unit with a bedroll under one flabby arm.

Beyond the card tables, three vending machines sat next to a lone microwave. Clay was miserable and cold, and his stomach ached. He was drifting over, eyes lowered and curly red hair bouncing, when he noticed a pencil on the ground and picked it up, offering it to the score-keeper at the card table.

“You dropped this.”

The score keeper snatched it out of his hand. “Then let it stay dropped. Don’t touch my stuff.”

Clay recoiled for a fist that never came, and when the man turned his back to him, Clay quickened his pace to the vending machines.

What they served for dinner was criminal. A sandwich with green baloney, one slice of bread and one heel, a bag of chips and a few dribbles of juice.

One mouthful of food.

Their mother had beat him and bruised him and broken his arm, but she had never starved him. Even she wasn’t as cruel as that.

Saliva pooled under Clay’s tongue as he peered through the glass at the rows of chips, sandwiches, candy bars, beef jerky, ramen noodles, and single-serve instacoffees. It sent him fumbling at his pen pocket to make sure the vending card hadn’t disappeared through some black hole. He looked over the Snickers bar and the XXL Beef Burger but one was two dollars, and the other five. Ramen noodles were fifty cents. He could buy two.

Sliding his tongue wetly over his pudgy lips, Clay inserted his card and plunged the buttons. One noodle pack wound out, the other got stuck.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Clay begged the machine, his instant noodles dangling at the end of its row.

In bold red lettering across the glass, a sign warned,

SHAKING THE MACHINE WILL RESULT IN DISCIPLINARY ACTION.

Clay put a hand to the glass, lips pressed tight, willing the second noodle to fall. One pack wasn’t going to kill the painful twist in his gut. He gave the machine a testing shove, but it didn’t so much as rattle.

Clay snuck a peek over his shoulder. A sheriff stood behind his desk at the head of the room, all buzz cut and scowls, staring into the computer monitor with a dozen camera screens.

Determined, Clay threw his shoulder into the glass. The plexi let loose a resonant thud as it warped and sprang back. An entire unit of heads spun towards him, but the machine didn’t budge. Glancing down, Clay frowned. The legs were bolted on the floor.

“Hey,” the sheriff shouted, and beckoned Clay with the crook of a finger.

At the officer’s desk, Clay complained meekly. “My noodles got stuck.”

The officer spoke up, “Do that again and you’re going to the hole.”

Clay pointed across the pod. “But my noodles got stuck.”

“Do I look like I care?”

“No,” Clay admitted.

“Then get away from my machine.”

“But what about my noodles?”

A stern look from the officer and Clay didn’t press further. Around him, other inmates stared watching, learning.

Head low, Clay turned to beg for money. Someone in there would be kind enough to lend him fifty cents. But he watched, helpless, as another inmate stepped to the machine, inserted his card and dropped the ramen noodles out of their row, along with the one behind it. The inmate held up both packages for Clay to see, smirking. Clay’s cheeks drooped, defeated.

A short line of inmates waited for the lone microwave oven, impatiently fidgeting. Clutching his only cup of soup,

Clay filed in line. Two inmates fell in line after him, soups in hand. When Clay looked over his shoulder at them, they scowled in a way that made him never want to look back again. An inmate, razored-bald, stood at the oven, his juice cup spinning inside.

The microwave dinged, the bald man popped the door open and pulled out a steaming cup of coffee. Next in line, Clay was stepping towards the open microwave door when the convict behind him shouldered him out of the way, shoved his bowl in the microwave, slapped the door shut, and cranked on the timer.

Confused, Clay stepped back in line, stomach trembling, his jolly cheeks a flush of rose. Other inmates watched, vultures scenting blood. Why weren’t there other microwaves in the pod?

When the microwave dinged, the guy grabbed his steaming bowl and sauntered off with a pimp’s limp. Salivating over the cold noodles in his hand, Clay stepped forward and put his bowl in the microwave. With his hand on the handle to slap the door shut, a man called out from behind.

“Hey, man. I’m next. You just cut me.”

“But I was....” Clay looked around nervously. “But I was next in line….” Hunger pains knifed at his gut.

“Are you calling me a liar?” The man stepped into Clay’s face, sneering down. A scar stretched from temple to chin, pink and cruel.

“No….”

“Then get your bowl out of my microwave,” the scarred inmate said through clenched teeth.

Sullen-eyed, Clay pulled out his bowl.

The microwave hummed, cooking the other guy’s food, and the stench of mackerel wrinkled the noses of card players at nearby tables.

Back in line, Clay looked over both shoulders and spun all the way around, asking the room, “Is anyone else in line?”

He got blank stares for answers, and taunting titters. But

nobody else claimed to be in line.

Clay put his noodles on the rotating disk, closed the door, and eyed the well-worn buttons, confused. Which one did he hit?

A man with a face of blotchy tattoos and hands full of Bicycle cards shared a conspiratorial look with the other players circled around, and called out to Clay. His voice was the deceiving kind of helpful. “You didn’t just put your food in there, did you?”

Clay’s eyes flicked around nervously. “Yeah.”

“What’s wrong with you? You can’t cook food in a cold microwave,” the card-playing man said. “You have to preheat it first. Everybody knows that.”

“Yeah, everybody knows that,” another chimed in, gaunt and holding back titters.

Clay volleyed glances between the microwave and the man. Everybody else had just stuck their noodles in. But maybe he was missing something….

“Preheat it?” Clay asked. “How do I do that?”

Something cold moved in the card-player’s eyes. “Take the noodles out, spin the dial to fifteen, and let it run. It’ll heat up.”

“Yeah, it’ll heat up,” the other echoed.

“Okay….” Clay said, taking his cup out and setting it on top.

“Make sure it’s nice and warm,” the card-player said. “That machine’s old. It doesn’t work like it used to.”

Clay cranked the dial and let the microwave run. His stomach rumbled. Why did he have to wait fifteen minutes? The machine gave the clank, clank, clank of being on its last legs. The fan wobbled, off balance. The bearing squeaked.

Another inmate fell in line behind Clay, waiting. His hands held a cup soup and his face held disagreeable scorn. A minute later another man fell into line, and another man after him, and another after him, each craning his head, impatient. What was taking so long?

Sweat dribbled from Clay’s curly red hair and stabbed at his eyes. He swiped it away with pudgy fingers, and

dried his hand across his thighs. As the clock counted from fifteen, restless grumbles began behind him. Behind him another pair of men fell in line, but Clay dared not turn around and look. The heat of their stares bored into the back of his skull.

One of the men shouted at Clay, irritation dripping from his voice. “I think your food’s done now, homie.”

Clay turned around. “It’s still got five minutes.”

“Five minutes for what? You’ve already been up there for ten.”

“It’s still preheating.”

“Preheating? What are you talking about?”

Clay stepped aside to show them the countdown. The microwave dial rolled over, counting down from four.

Another inmate spotted Clay’s soup and pointed. “Man, that fool’s food is still on top of the microwave.”

“It’s still preheating,” Clay tried to explain.

“You don’t preheat a microwave, dimwit. You’re going to burn it up. It’s the last one we’ve got.”

Angry shouts built up behind him, melding together.

“He’s going to burn up the microwave.”

“What’s wrong with you, white boy?”

“This guy’s an idiot.”

The card players at the table snickered and Clay darted a desperate finger in their direction. “He told me to.”

The scarred convict slapped his cards on the table top and stood abruptly. “Did you just point at me, fat boy?”

“No, I, I....” Clay stuttered, drying his clammy palms across his black and white jumpsuit.

The men in line pressed in, cornering him.

A Hispanic, portly and balding, and an angry man with fiery green eyes and skin as pale as bone. A broad-nosed man with copper skin, and another to his side, black as ink. And a dozen more behind them, brows furrowed in hate, all circling Clay, pressing forward.

The microwave hummed noisily as he backed into it-clank, clank, clank.

Desperate, Clay turned, yanked the door open, and

shoved his food in. It was strange, the microwave didn’t feel any warmer when he stuck his soup inside. His cup spun on the disc, cooking. The clanking worsened into a rattle.

“Hey, man. You already had your turn,” the Hispanic’s brow furrowed.

“I had to preheat it,” Clay explained. Why were they glaring? They didn’t need to be so mad. “It’ll be done in just a few minutes.”

“You’re done; you had your turn. Get in the back of the line.”

“But I’m hungry.”

“We’re all hungry, white boy.” The Hispanic pushed Clay out of the way, ripped open the microwave door, and threw Clay’s cup on the counter. Clay caught it before it fell off the edge. It was warm in his hands and the noodles had swelled in the water.

The Hispanic threw his own bowl in the microwave and cranked the knob. The others pushed Clay away.

Then the microwave popped sharply. The noise startled Clay--everything startled Clay. The fan in the back seized, a wisp of grey smoke rose into the air, and a tang of burnt metal filled the pod. Eyes flicked towards the microwave, inspecting.

Clay took his bowl and stepped backwards as the other inmates crowded around the machine.

“What happened?” one asked.

“Magnetron cracked,” another offered.

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s broke.” He stood up and pointed at Clay, who was holding the last warm bowl of food in the unit. “That moron let it run without anything in it!”

Clay gulped, his angry flush vanished and fists unclenching. “Come on, guys,” Clay pleaded, backing away as inmates closed in around him from all sides. “I’m hungry....”

But still his nightmares closed in. The man to his left had the same wispy mustache as Clay’s mother, who constantly made a show whipping him with the buckle-end

of the belt because he was a “bad, bad boy” who’d never learn.

He got closer.

And so did the skinhead to the right who was chubby and aggressive, like his elementary school bully who used to beat on him under the jungle gym. The one who once handed him a swing and told him to hang himself.

He got closer.

And a gang of men inched in, each lithe and toned, like the football players in high school that took turns punching him in the shower and laughing as someone else made a game of snatching his clothes and running off.

They got closer.

And a group of bearded and burly giants finally trapped him in for good, like the bikers at the bar last weekend who cracked pool sticks over his head so hard he hit the sticky floor because he clumsily stumbled into a man and drenched him with his own drink.

Now the circle was closed, and Clay desperately looked around but found no place to go.

Clay cried out before the first fist was even thrown, a shrill womanly shriek as the nightmares approached, drowning him in their shadow. A blow to the back of his head sent his vision flashing and he crumpled to the ground in a ball. Boots stomped down, skin pounded skin, and they swarmed him as lockdown sirens wailed.