The Sun Burns Cold

So, yeah well I still write. You know, when I’m not at work or out getting every last goddam cent out of my new camera. I already wrote two ebooks, in case I haven’t quite mentioned that like a thousand damn times here. Not that it matters. People will like button the shit out of my posts and go on about how I can supposedly write cool stories (bro), but nobody really reads the fucking books. A few people have, I mean even aside from all the copies I’ve ingloriously imposed unsolicited on friends and family members. Links to getting those ebooks can be found under my My Ebooks tab at the top of this blog, obviously.

At any rate, I’ve been working on my third one. And because it’s like so important as fuck to me that I generate interest and “buzz” amongst you generally bored as shit mouse potato hordes of potential readers (potential is the operative word. I know goddam good and well  hardly any of you are actually going to purchase and read it, or swap for yours, cause it’s going to be waaay longer than a meme or 1500 word blog post) I figured I’d post a segment from one of the stories. Where as the first two were sort of linear and bound together, this next one is just going to be a collection of short stories. Probably. I mean, I don’t quite know how the fuck it’s going to turn out yet, but I hope to have it finished this spring or summer. I have a bunch of stories laying around though, so I figure I should do some shit with them.

So, yeah, here’s the trailer:

 I still remember it. Every moment of it actually. Each one passing and building on the next, like pain when it wells up from repeated blows. We were in the back of the Sheriff’s car, had been for about two hours. I had to piss. You always have to piss during transports, and they never stop the vehicle to let you piss. It’s just one of those things, a guarantee in life like catching a cold some winter or old people bitching about the government.

 There I was watching the world go by outside the window of the cop car we were in. We were on the outskirts of Philadelphia. I was looking at the trees. It was October so they were bare and rather foreboding. The Sheriffs had some classic rock station on. We neared our destination. Neil Young was singing about keeping on rocking in the free world. The pressure of that irony near equaled the pressure in my bladder.

 We came up on the prison, the big main gate there at Graterford SCI. It loomed. I mean, things loom, but when you’re going on your first trip upstate and you get to the gate of The Big House…let me tell ya, that bad boy Looms. It slid, the big gate did, slid open and swallowed us right up whole like the mouth on a plate iron and stone Megalodon.

 We arrivcd at the sally port, the sort of garage type thing made expressly for prisoner disembarkation. That gate was yet another maw, smaller like a lower esophageal opening to the belly of the beast. There was a guard post there, inside. A couple of screws were gritting on us through the bulletproof glass. There was some talking over the radio. Squawks and barked orders. The prison guards knew this was their realm, and it sure sounded like they enjoyed being able to give orders to some hick sheriffs from the hinterlands of Lackawanna county. The Sheriffs got out and had to relinquish their firearms to a little lock box built out from the wall. One does not simply stroll into the joint packing a semi-automatic handgun, after all. There was grumbling involved. The Sheriffs looked like they wouldn’t mind emptying some clips into the assholes behind the glass. They lost though. They’d been effectively emasculated by the unarmed screws.

 As far as transport personnel, the sheriffs were alright. They didn’t break our balls on the ride down, and they asked us if the music was alright. They’d have been a whole lot cooler if they’d pulled off and let me have a piss break though.

 We alighted from the back of the patrol car shackled, me and this guy named Jeff who was going up on a two to four. Retail theft or some shit. I never made it much my business to be concerned with anybody’s charges. Except the tree jumpers. Once you knew someone was a child victimizer it was open season for extortion or just a potential punching bag if it was one of those days. They were the lowest of the scum, so it was always good to know who they were.

  Wasn’t anybody else I particularly gave two cockroaches fucking in an empty soup can about, charges wise. There were killers, sure. There were mob family types. There were gang warriors and all that shit, and dudes who slung kilos of dope back on the bricks. Didn’t impress me, none of it. We were all just bozos on the bus, really. And besides, I was more concerned about the next five and a half to eleven years of my life I’d be spending as a state prisoner for committing robbery and assault. It wound up being eight years. I didn’t know that then, that first day upstate, of course. At the time I figured I’d do a year or two and have my sentence reconsidered. After all, that’s what my lawyer told me when I plead out. I didn’t know a lot of stuff at that point.

At that point I just needed to find a bathroom and I was kinda hungry to boot.