The Prison Writer

By Joshua Ryan

This story is for adults and about adults only.

It is also fiction.  Any connection to real entities is purely coincidental.

Chapter 1

I’m Steven Meres, and I met Deputy Sheriff Dean Brannigan at a brunch given by my agent, Jerry Canto.

Jerry was a flighty, flamboyant queen, but why should I stereotype anyone?  After all, I’m a novelist; I should be above all that.  I’m just trying to explain why I was surprised when I got to the restaurant and found Jerry sitting next to a person whom he would undoubtedly have described as a superhunk.  I was prepared to be envious, but Jerry let me know right away that the man was, “unfortunately for me, only a friend.”

“Steven, client, meet Dean, gambling buddy.  I mean, buddy who gambles,” Jerry said.

The guy stood up to shake hands, and my first impression kept being right.  Six feet two, 100 percent muscle.  The long-sleeve tee did nothing to cover it up.  Neither did the jeans.

“Gambling buddy?” I asked him.

“That’s just Jerry’s way of saying we’ve been playing poker off and on.  Since high school.”

Jerry cut in so I could give him my ritual hug.  “I said gambling buddy,” he told me, “and I meant serious gambling.  Mr. Wonderful here is just back from Vegas.  And it appears that he had a winning streak.”

“I’m having one now,” the guy smiled.  “I’m happy to meet my favorite mystery writer.”

“Consider that an enormous compliment,” Jerry said.  “A cop should know whether you’re any good or not.”

I always got confused when somebody called me a mystery writer.  I thought of myself as a writer, period.  As a novelist.  Yes, like Melville.  Like Tolstoy.  It’s true, I’d been writing mysteries.  So did Faulkner.  So did Conrad.  And that’s how I made Jerry his money.  But I was only 29 years old — I shouldn’t be permanently typecast.  Especially as a bit player.

“Sheriff’s deputy,” the guy corrected.  “But OK, it’s a kind of cop.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Jerry said.  “Dean, here, is holding the fort in the jungles of Patna County.”

“All right, all right,” Dean grinned.  “Not my fault if it’s sort of suburban.  But I do love your work — Steven.  The Danny Brant stories are some of my favorites.  I wish you’d write a serious novel sometime.”

He smiled when he said it, boyish and naïve.  Which would be terribly attractive if he hadn’t uttered something so stupid and insulting.  Naiveté is really a crime.  It causes half the trouble in the world.

“I thought my work WAS serious,” I said.

The smile grew broader.  “Sorry!  I like Danny a lot, he’s great.   What I meant was, he’s there to solve mysteries.  That’s his purpose in the books.  He’s not like a real person with serious — problems.  Problems of his own.  But what am I saying?  You know all that.  It’s not like it’s supposed to be totally realistic.”

“I should have warned you,” Jerry said to me.  “Don’t rev this guy up.”

“Don’t worry,” I said.  “I want to hear what my readers think.”  Substitute “random assholes” for “my readers,” and you’ve got what I had in mind.

Dean certainly wasn’t worried.  He just went on.  “What I’m saying … Danny has all the answers.  Never any doubt that he’ll solve the case.  The dude is totally in charge.”

“No,” I told him.  “I’m the author.  They’re my stories.  I’m the one who’s in charge.”

“No offense, dude,” he assured me.  So, first Danny was a dude; now I was.  Obviously, Dean thought our mental age was exactly the same as his.  Excuse me, I thought, how exactly am I on familiar terms with Mr. Police Force here?  “I just meant — everybody knows that Danny’s gonna wind up on top.  He always knows what to do.  He’s got no problems.  Unless being gay is a problem.  But not anymore.  Look at me — I’m gay, and I’m a lawman.”

First the guy critiques my work; then he starts in on being gay.  Like I needed a lecture on sociology.  Yeah, sure, I was mildly surprised to meet a gay cop, but what was I supposed to say — “I’m SO happy that you’ve fulfilled your career goal”?

“Your approach is irresistible,” I said.  “But you’re wrong about Danny.  In fact, if you’ve read ‘I Surrender’ …”

“OK,” Jerry said.  “If you two are gonna talk dirty like this, I’m gonna hit the young men’s room.”  And he left me confronting the smiling face of the man who’d sent me into defense mode.  Was I making it up, or was he actually more intimidating when he smiled?

“Sure I have,” Dean said.  “It reminded me of a hot little story called ‘The Hard Walls.’  The one where Matt, the detective, goes to prison.”  My face must have turned white, because he added, “Yeah, I like all the ‘Adventures of Matt’ stories.  But I’m not gonna tell your agent that you have an unrepresented source of income.”

“Whatever leads you to believe that I am somehow responsible for those …?”

“Erotic fictions?  I’ll tell you why.  The hero grew up in East Ambrose; you grew up in North Ambrose.  He went to Cornell; you went to Cornell.  He lives at 600-something Maple Street; you once lived at 468 Red Maple Court.  His name is Moore; your name is Meres.  He has dark hair and brown eyes; obviously you have …”

God damn!  Was this a life-changing event?  What was I supposed to do?

“I’m glad you’ve been tracking me,” I said.  “It makes me feel so secure.  But how did you discover all this private information?”

“Just call me a detective.  That kind of stuff, it’s easy for cops.  But your data is safe with me.  And,” he grinned, “it’s none of my business whether you’ve got a prison fetish or not.”

“Listen, Don …”

“Dean.”

“Listen, Dean.  Those stories may be … erotic.  But they aren’t exactly hardcore porn.  And they aren’t fetish porn.  Some of them don’t even happen in a prison.  And the ones that do …  I use prison because it’s an all-male environment.  Also, prison is a site where … well, where unlikely individuals can come to the fore, even when the cards are stacked against them.  I happen to find that interesting.  Reversals like that.”

Every author has a list of clichés he tries to avoid, and I seemed to be hitting a lot of mine, one after another.  “Hardcore porn,” “come to the fore,” “cards stacked against them,” even that stupid lit-crit “site.”  The guy had really rattled me.  All I needed was for somebody from the “Times” to hear about my second line of income…

“Sorry!” he said. “I never guessed.  I thought you were interested in how some guys get off on being locked up and humiliated.  But like I told you, your secret is safe with me.  And like I told you, I enjoy the writing.  But again, I’d enjoy it more if the stories weren’t so … what’s the word I want?”

“Over-literate?”

“Not exactly.  But I don’t want to make you mad.”

“I’m not mad.”

“I was just gonna say, there’s a lot of things in the stories that aren’t really real.”

“You sound like Plato.  ‘The doctrine of the really real,’ as my classics prof used to say.  The final reality, which we all can attain if we’re thinking straight.  So please tell me what isn’t really, truly, completely real in my stories.”

“Well, for one thing … Oh, welcome back,” he said with a smile to Jerry and a wink at me.  “We were just discussing penal practices.”

“Go ahead!  I like penises myself.”

“He didn’t mean that,” I told him.  “He meant prisons and so forth.”

“Oh, too bad.”

“Well, like I was saying,” Dean went on, “a lot of people — even writers, I guess — they believe all that Shawshank stuff, like it was true.  For instance, they think that prison officers are always struttin around with guns.  And they’re whuppin the inmates all the time.  Of course, that’s just bullshit.”

“Not true?” Jerry said, disappointed.

“No.  Not at all.  Even in an old-fashioned joint, the officers are never armed.  Too dangerous — might get your gun swiped right outta your hand.  Then where would you be?  The control is actually more … psychological.  And whips are just for S and M fans.”  He gave me a sidelong look.  Yes, I did put a whip in the second “Adventures of Matt.”

“S and M,” I said.  “That’s just a label.”

“Hey,” Jerry said, talking across me to Dean. “I am shocked, shocked.  What do you know about S and M?”

“I once had to read ‘The Turn of the Screw.’  That was real S and M.”

“You shouldn’t say that around our author here.  Henry James is his hero.”

“Not exactly,” I said.  “I’m very critical…”

“Speaking of the real thing,” Jerry interrupted, “Dean runs a jail, you know.  Or hasn’t he told you?”

“No, he…”

“I don’t run it.  I’m just a DEPUTY sheriff.  But I do spend a lotta time there.”

“Speaking of time,” a big voice said.  “I am SO sorry to be late!”

Another giant man appeared at the table, and Dean jumped up to kiss him.  “Steven, allow me to present my partner.  This is Mr. Craig Martens, a big man in real estate.”

“Glad to meet you,” said Mr. Martens, with an aggressively youthful smile.  That attitude must go a long way in real estate, I thought.  Craig was as much of a hunk as Dean, and just as friendly, but from then on, any sense of sexual relevance (mine, I mean) vanished from the situation.  Together with most of my ability to keep up in the conversation.  Craig and Jerry were very talkative, and Dean was an appreciative audience.

I did have one moment in the sun.  At some point when Jerry and Craig were being especially verbal, Dean turned to me as if he’d forgotten something and handed me his card.  Dean H.  Brannigan.  Deputy Sheriff.  Patna County.  dhbran@…  “Why don’t we have lunch sometime?”  He glanced around and lowered his voice.  “I think I’ve got a suggestion for you.”

“Really?” I said. “Thank you, Dean.”

Everybody likes an invitation from a big, handsome guy.  Even if it’s pointless.

“I’m serious,” he said.  “I love your writing.  I guess I’m too shy to give you any advice…”

This man wouldn’t be shy if he was standing in front of St. Peter.

“…but I was thinking about something that might interest you.”

“All right,” I said.  “I’ll send you an email.”

Right.  Sometime.  Why bother?

You could say that about the whole thing.  These gay brunches were like a Sunday service in a church you don’t believe in.

***

Back home, I made some coffee and went over my regrets.  I regretted accepting the invitation.  I regretted drinking so many mimosas.  Above all, I regretted letting that cop get under my skin.  “Under my skin” — another cliché!  The guy had upset me.  Not just because he’d violated my privacy, but because he fitted a pattern, a nasty pattern.

There’s always at least one review of your work — in other words, of you — that you can’t forget.  Maybe the cliché isn’t so bad after all — the thing does get under your skin.  It festers and bleeds.  You can’t get rid of it.  It shows your weakness.  When my latest Danny book was published, some so-called critic wrote, “Meres’ newest offering is all right for what it is, which is distanced and sterile.  Danny Brant may as well be the author himself, a disembodied intellect with no personal stake in the plot, present only to Figure Things Out.  This is a novel that has been Figured Out.  Even the violence is performed simply in obeisance to the genre of detective fiction.  Meres never changes — he remains a reassuring testimony to the conventions of escape literature, operating at a safe distance from anything that might create a genuine reality, or a genuine surprise.”

When that came out, it hurt.  It still hurt.  I hated that it hurt — hated having to keep explaining to myself how untrue it was.  Hated to admit to myself that I was so fucking fragile.  And now a cop, of all people, was saying the same thing.  Unrealistic, genre fiction … Another authority had spoken.

Of course it was nonsense.  Dean Brannigan wasn’t qualified to render any literary judgment.  And neither was any “critic” who took that tone.

“Darling,” Jerry had said, “why let one sorta bad review…”

“It was a terrible review.  In an important journal.”

“Why let one SORTA bad review curdle your creative juices?  Or whatever they are.  You’ve had an easy ride so far.  Be thankful.”

“Curdle.”  What a word.  But if I was Danny Brant or Matt Grandison I’d agree with him; I’d just power through it.  And he was right, in a way, about the “easy ride.”  When my parents died, they left me enough to finish college and spend the next year writing.  My first novel was a success — how often does that happen?  I’d never had to wait tables, like all the other “writers” I knew.  And I’d never had to live in New York just so I could make “contacts.”  But every author has lots of anger and resentment inside.  There are 100,000 words in a novel, and every one of them is a threat to your existence.  You’re on a tightrope.  You can’t make a slip.  You can’t leave something out there to get misunderstood.  Then somebody comes along and starts shaking the rope.  Like that fucking reviewer.  Like that stupid cop.

It was time for a brandy.  Of course, the cop wasn’t stupid about the fetish part of the “Matt” stories.  “Hard Walls” wasn’t about solving mysteries in prison; it was about going from life as a star attorney to life as a locked-down convict, numbered, uniformed, celled, restrained … And of course I knew the prison fetish was in the Danny stories too.  The scene where Danny handcuffs his friend Jason to the bed so he won’t interfere while Danny goes after the Fair Isle conspiracy … And that story where Jason has to spend a month in jail, so Danny can claim that the Delford culprit had been caught, thereby deluding the cop who was the real culprit.  “A Study in Stripes”: of course I identified with Danny, buttoned into that ugly jumpsuit, sleeping on a concrete shelf … I couldn’t explain it, and I’d stopped trying.  You don’t want the characters in your stories walking along with signs saying, “This is why I’m doing this.”  It’s not realistic.  You don’t want that in your own life, either.  But the cop said there wasn’t enough realism.  All right, so maybe he did have something interesting to say about prisons.  And after all, he was a cop.  And how many cops did I know?

When I started to get up for my third brandy I found it easier to remain seated.  I pulled my laptop toward me and opened my mail.  “Dear Dean—”  Too old-fashioned?  Too faggoty?  Maybe he’d read it as sarcastic?  Try again: “Hey Dean— Thanks for your invitation to lunch.   I’d like to accept.  Any time available in the next few days?  If not lunch, maybe dinner?”

I pushed Send and fell asleep on the couch.

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