Mysterious Logic

By William White-acre

Setting: New York City. Time: 1975. Barry Ashdown is living on the streets, a hand to mouth existence. A man he meets will alter the trajectory of his life, forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William White-acre
• Release date: Dec 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370753109

William White-acre

Photographer first, scribbler second. Lived a long time. When your life resembles an epoch, well, it is scary. Just hope I can entertain.

Book preview

MYSTERIOUS LOGIC

WILLIAM WHITE-ACRE

Copyright 2017 by William White-acre

Smashwords Edition

white-acre-wixsite.com/photography

*other books by the author:

Surrounded By Mythology

I. The Hero

True For X

Forgotten Faces

A Rush Of Silence

Heaven On Earth

Memory 2.0

Table Of Contents:

Chapter 1 Square The Circle

Chapter 2 The Forseti Society

Chapter 3 God Is

Chapter 4 Moral Slippage

Chapter 5 Germaine To The Pattern

Afterword

Chapter 1 Square The Circle

It is just after the eleven a.m. lunch here at the Riverbend Max Security Institution. We eat early because--actually I don't know why. Prisons have there own rules and, as I have found out now after so many years behind bars, belief system. Let me get this out of the way early. I am on death row. Neatly said. I killed a man. Two actually. I really want to concentrate on the first one I murdered though. The second one was what they like to call collateral damage and came later, after I had escaped from prison up in New York. Oh it wasn't really all that much of a jailbreak. Not one that would support the plot of a movie or anything. It amounted to carelessness on the part of the facility (Thanks go to an overworked corrections officer and a monumentally stupid kitchen supply company rep, who thought I was who I wasn't. Enough said.) and a stroke of good luck. I got out. Sneaked away. Absconded, if I want to throw in a thesaurus. On the lamb.

Unfortunately, for me and a certain unsuspecting police officer in the Volunteer State, I didn't fare too well. I had been behind bars for so long I wasn't prepared for my sudden freedom. Decades had passed and the world had moved on, apparently at some kind of light speed velocity. When I went in, Disco was still around. That probably sums it up. Jimmy Carter was in the White House. No PC's and of course no cell phones. Not to mention the Internet. People actually used pay phones to make calls away from home and their landline. Pay phones? Germs! And no Purell. No keyless entry. We actually had to use keys to open our car doors. Imagine.

It was a primitive world, one where you had to use a typewriter in order to complete your term paper. That is relevant because my personalized ordeal began in college, in New York City. My present situation, here in Tennessee, was a corollary to the event in New York. After escaping the pen in the Empire State, I made it as far south as Tennessee, where things ended badly. I stole a car. I ran from the cops. I ran over a police officer. I like to think I had no choice in the matter but then again you always have some kind of selection to make when fate and chance meet head on. Homicide by vehicle, with intent. The intent part is debatable. I certainly didn't harbor any homicidal intention when it came to one Officer Loften. He just got in the way. Run down. Left a wife, a kid, and another on the way. My trial went fast, blisteringly so. Kill a cop, it is a one way street to where I reside today.

If you wanted, and I don't know why you would, you can go to the Tennessee Department of Correction website and bring up my photo, a mug shot. Not flattering. I look like a criminal. Oh, wait, I am. That's a not so private joke around here. The link has my TOMIS number under my picture and my name--Barry Ashdown--because, realistically speaking, in here we are all reduced to six digits, numbers that specify our futures. Here on the Row you only find the ultimate deadenders, with no place to go but hell, if you ask most of the public, especially the people intimately touched by me and my colleagues in capital crime. The very Bible says we deserve to be done away with, and we are, even if it is usually set on a delayed path, passing through the labyrinth of legal trapdoors to get us to give it up and open our veins for the potion dispensed by a needle. Edgar Allen Poe would have to be dug up and called in to provide the proper amount of poetical lyricism to capture the mood around here in my temporary digs, the jumping off point for the afterworld.

As a side note, the brilliant minds in Tennessee have seen fit to give the executioner a choice of the needle or the chair, providing they committed their crime (s) before December 31, 1998. Alas, my crime didn't make the cut, so I have no choice but the needle. Good thing, I guess, since there has been some consternation by the state authorities as to the working order of old sparky. It seems the designer of the death machine isn't too confident it will get the job done. He has gone on record saying that the contraption may just cook the unlucky person who sits in it, leaving him brain dead with burn wounds. Burning at the stake would be more humane, or so said somebody connected to the decision making process that goes into this sort of thing. Killing immoral miscreants is some dirty business. As it is the state had been on a 40 year hiatus for (from) executions. Then they brought it back for the new century. Imagine hiring someone for that job. Who exactly designs death machines anyway? Do you take a course for that? Just wondering.

All of us here deserve what we get, I suppose. Maybe there might be an innocent guy hiding in one of the cells, the victim of shabby jurisprudence and vindictive prosecutors. It happens. So you read all the time. Wrong place. Wrong time. Dark complexion. Jury not of your peers. Defense team asleep at the wheel of justice. Impatient judge. Altered forensics. You name it. Then again, even though I don't interact with most of them on the Row, something tells me a goodly percentage aren't going to be interrogated by that angel--what's his name--at the Pearly Gates and will probably be on a non-stop flight going into a steep dive.

The laundry list of crimes, if you must know: Rape and murder, by knife, gunshot, murder in the multi-category, also infanticide. The rape is gratuitous, really. We kill people, making us, minus the military, a select group of psychos. We have taken a life, sometimes in duplicate. Snuffed out one of God's creations, making us kind of like anti-creators. Religion, more or less, is about life giving, injecting a level of spiritual meaningfulness into life in general. Close to something like that anyway. Hey, I don't say yes when they ask me if I want to be visited by somebody from the clergy. I don't. What for? Are you kidding? I am the one the men of the cloth warn you about. Right? The fallen angel speaks to me. In my dreams. His words rattle around in my brain, echoing loudly, drowning out all other sensible thoughts. I'm exaggerating. Although the guy in the cell adjacent to mine does have some doozy nightmares, complete with bellowing screams and fingernail scratching episodes on the cell door. Doesn't like to talk about them, to me or, apparently, whatever shrink the state springs for to come around and compile data on just how fucked up we all are in here.

Now, the psychologist I'll talk to. We get to be interviewed as we are shackled, handcuffed and told not to cause any trouble. Be polite. Don't act like an animal. A guard is posted nearby, alert to any transgressions. The last one was a woman, on loan from, I think, Vanderbilt. Pretty, in a I haven't seen a woman in a long time kind of way. Tall. Well coiffed, as they tend to be down here in the South. Honeydripper accent. Attired in no nonsense outfits that tells everyone she is all business. Skirt just below the knees. Solid colored pumps. Unrevealing sweater that hides what I am going to guess are C cups. Makeup minimal. Still, it doesn't prevent me from imagining her naked in all sorts of poses, mostly having to do with limber sexual positions. I am heading towards my 60's but a man can exercise his mind to ward off the advance of Alzheimer's. You must remember I have been locked up since I was in my twenties, early twenties. Priests have a more active sex life than I have had; and don't believe all those stories you here about carnal abuse in the pen. Never took it up the ass or the other way around. Not that it doesn't happen.

Believe it or not, here at this institution an inmate can earn his way into the relative good graces of the powers that be and be given privileges. You are classified on three different behavioral levels: A, B, and C, with A being the highest. You can actually have phone and visitation privileges. Some even get to work around the prison, which, to me, is taking rehabilitation practices way too far. We all killed people, sometimes brutally. I think we should all be locked away incommunicado until which time our brains atrophy and we start babbling incoherently. I say that because as a previous escapee I don't get any possible shot at privileges. None. I am kept locked down twenty-three out of twenty-four, with one hour for exercise by myself in a little courtyard. My meals are eaten alone, such as they are. If it sounds like I'm whining, I am. Give me the needle already. Let's see what this judgement day is all about.

I was on the run for exactly 21 days before it came to an end down in this shithole the locals like to call a little slice of heaven. There I was cruising along in my life sentence, with no possibility of parole, when I said to myself: Go for it. After twenty plus years behind bars it was time for some different scenery, even if I was a model inmate, trusted by all the CO's to do the expected thing. The stupid guard left the back door unlocked. The step van from the supply company, with lots of boxes to hide behind in the back, was waiting by the door. I snuck out and was on my way. No plans. No hours of prep. No accomplices. It was just happenstance. Me and my desire to see the outside world one more time.

Naturally I didn't know just how unprepared I was to be out there beyond those prison walls. Time had sped forward. The world was different from when I last walked a free man back in the 1970's. Over thirty years. A generation. It was as if I might have been a space alien dropped down on America in the new century. I knew from nothing, so one of my classmates back in college might say.

Somehow I avoided a gigantic manhunt for three weeks. To my surprise, I discovered that people don't hitchhike much anymore. I stole clothes from a house. Dumped my prison monkey suit. Jumped a train. Made it to New York City. Dirty and hungry, I panhandled for some money to eat. They still did that. Walked the streets, soaking up all the sounds, the sights. Back to where my first crime had been committed so long ago. The city wasn't the same, needless to say. Still dirty. Noisy. With that usual almost desperate sense of exhilaration going on. Yet there seemed to be another veneer to the visual feast. As if it had been layered over my memories of the city.

My time had been in the mid-seventies, before 9 eleven and that martinet mayor who thought he was in charge, but was only a shill for the corporate bullies who wanted to remake Gotham in their own image. The mayor at the time was different in that he was a facsimile of the old party boss, a guy who wanted to maintain the status quo and keep the city from falling into complete ruin. Not an easy task. Half of Manhattan was teetering, on the brink of being a runaway ghost town. Former thriving districts were now vacant, eyesores, breeding grounds for squatters and vermin. The city's ledgers were bleeding red ink, sucked dry by greedy merchants of labor and stealthy graft. Streets went unrepaired. Crime waves bubbled to the surface more and more frequently. The subways were no-man's land in many boroughs. Central Park shut down after dark, a sinkhole of crime statistics. Half of the Bronx resembled the remnants of a bombed out war zone.

It still had its charm, the Big Apple. Pulsating. Energy seemed to thrive on the visible decline, like a strain of bacteria taking down its host. The city that never slept was beginning to suffer from its insomnia though. Every day urban post-mortem's were written up by the bards writing for the local media, ready to be delivered when the time came for the eulogy no one wanted to hear. Even the President, Ford, the accidental one, had told the metropolis to give it up, throw it in. Then what? Nobody wanted to think about that. America without New York City didn't seem possible or even logical. Sure the Dutch had founded the place and then the British had renamed it, but it was quintessentially ours now. The cynosure of the melting pot, a place that set the standards for taking all those immigrants in and making them think like all the rest of us. I must say though, as was always with the city, after spending a few weeks there on the run, America ain't going to like what we are all going to look like in a decade or so; tower of babble on steroids, with all the requisite hassles of living among cross cultural clashes is not pretty.

My New York bespoke of the less than glorious Punk scene, where the East Village was a forgotten place grafted onto the West Village and they weren't too happy about it, almost like an ugly cousin. The Yankees still played in a ballpark that had history and the other pro teams didn't have to drive to another state in order to be the home team. The towers, of course, were still standing, having just been completed not a few years before. They, to me, were an eyesore, two large columns that said the architect wanted to make a statement but lost interest half the way through. The architect, Yamasaki, was from the Formalism school of art, where compositional elements trumped everything else. Don't ask me what that means? I hate art. They were perched down in the battery and reportedly swayed in the wind they were so tall. Big deal. Height doesn't make for creativity, or so me and most of my friends like to say, sniffing, snubbing our collective noses at the hubris of some idiot builder who threw up the monstrosity in record time. Then they came down and you can't say that anymore. I can. I'm bullet proof that way. Murderers can get away with more than just murder apparently.

Think about it. There was no SOHO or Tribeca. FiDi and NOHO, nope. The lower east side still reeked of past emigration waves. The alphabets were seedy, contaminated by blight and decaying walkups. The Bowery was still over run with bums in every sense of that word. You could get a room in a flop house hotel for ten bucks, if you dared. The proprietors sat behind thick plexi, trying to avoid eye contact as they took your crumpled bills. I know. I stayed in a few after all night benders and my friends wouldn't give me permission to crash on their couch. You at least only hoped to come away with some creepy crawlies and not a GSW or knife wound. Know that too, from personal experience. A Bellevue graduate once tried to stick me with a kitchen knife he had pilfered from a local sandwich shop because he thought I was there to kidnap him. Like he had any money. Thought he was an heir to the J.P. Morgan fortune.

Junkies ruled some of the narrow streets, frequently introducing you to the mechanics of a dog eat dog universe, where they wanted a source for their next fix. That being you, the guy with cash in his pocket. Sometimes even subway tokens would do. They could be exchanged for legal tender. That's right, the Metro system ran on tokens and not metrocards. Try carrying around a bunch of brass coins in your pocket for a while. Besides looking like you had a woody, they threw your back out of whack. The tokens did have a certain elegance to them though, with the distinctive Y cut out of the middle, like some long lost coin from an ancient realm. The fare was, if memory serves me right, all of 35 cents.

That 35 cents got you a ride on par with riding a thrill ride in some amusement park. Between quicksilver crime, person on person, and stoppages at any time of day, the subway system was a necessary evil for most New Yorkers. Above ground the buses were plentiful and, as usual, taxis made pedestrians fear for their lives, ever wary of being run over by those yellow tanks, the old Checkercabs, but, below, the numerous lines of the trains made for commuter movement in a city of such density. I took the trains religiously, having quickly burned that subway map into my brainpan, able to bring up what letter matched what train to whatever section of the city I wanted to go with ease. Like an idiot savant, or something, so said my friends. Ask Barry. Far Rockaway-Eighth Ave., A. Woodlawn-Lex. Ave., 4. South Ferry-Seventh, 1.

The talent served me well as I spent a large bulk of my time in the city on the move, going from roost to roost as it was. In my group of friends I was the only one not from New York City proper and therefore didn't have anyplace to fall back on when it came time for housing. Many nights were spent on those trains, zooming underground from point A to whatever other point it took to keep me out of the cold. You could ride the trains all night long, streaking along underground hour after hour, hoping the transit cops didn't interrupt your moving sleeping arrangement as you stretched out on those hard benches in a empty subway car, with the rocking train ushering you to sleep, serenaded by screeching wheels and muffled announcements over the intercom from the sleepy conductor. Train stops blended together. People shuffled on and off but by late night, after mid-night, you were left with an eerie underworld of flashing light and the prospect of unexpected injury at the hands of thieves and drunken dickheads out for some fun.

Never had a problem. Even the occasional cop on the beat just told me to move on. I would. There would be another train coming. Find a quiet car, hopefully not one where a homeless person had just been, leaving behind the usual toxic stench, a body odor that defied basic chemistry, like some fermented biohazardous material only a hazmat team could extinguish and remove. It was a refuge, simply. Not permanent.

My family was from Philly. We lived in a section of the city that liked to think it was impervious to the outside world. It was, for the most part. Working class standards applied, with most people putting labor in the word labor. Menial. By the hour. Skill set minimal. It was called Fishtown and it was a construct not of the city fathers but of a proximity to the Delaware River and the Shad fishing industry back in the day. It is now, or when I was growing up, predominantly a Catholic area, served by no less than three churches, where Poles and the Irish liked to worship. We were an anomaly of sorts because we were of British extraction and Protestant, not that we leaned religious or anything. My ancestors dated back to the 1800's there, being shopkeepers for the shipbuilding industry that thrived along the river. By the turn of the last century the Irish had pushed out most of the local population with British backgrounds.

Not my family though. They stayed on, living in a large apartment that my dad, to his credit, kept from falling into disrepair. Most of the landlords in the area were real estate bandits, eager to make a buck without having to foot any expenses. As childhood's go, I guess, it was okay. The parents were there for me and my two siblings, a brother and a sister, younger. We would all advance and get out of Fishtown, which, in itself, is an accomplishment because many of the people born there find themselves locked in, trapped by circumstances that are difficult to overcome. Of course my path wasn't exactly exemplary, even if I did break free. My brother and sister still live in Philly, but they have moved onward and upwards, as they like to say, one being an accountant and the other a nurse respectively. Good for them. Haven't spoken to them in over twenty years. Never did come to see me in prison, either one of them. Same for my parents. No bitterness here. I wouldn't come to visit me either.

My departure came right after my 18th birthday. I had made it through High School, barely, and was intent on going to New York City. Philly, being so close to the Big Apple, has always had an inferiority complex when it came time to share any limelight with its more famous neighbor. Sure Philly had a music scene and some sports teams that made some noise in their particular niches, a championship here or there, but it was still Philadelphia, Ben Franklin notwithstanding. We had the Patriot and founding father cred going on, sure, then again, so what. Liberty Bell? This is a city that put a statue of Rocky on municipal property. If that isn't embarrassing...then what is?

The city does have an Ivy League college but it is second tier and often confused for some other university with a better football team. Philly cheesesteaks. Hoagies. It's never good to be recognized for your handheld culinary items. What else? There might be something but, honestly, I can't remember any. It has been a long time.

My breakaway, such as it was, didn't take a major undertaking. You can get from Philly to New York on Amtrak in no time at all. Since I didn't own a car that was how I arrived, getting out in Penn Station as a young, naive teenager, walking around the Garden area taking in the sights. It wasn't my first time to the city, having been there a couple of times with my family on outings to see an aunt who lived on the Eastside, but not in a desirable location, more towards the East River in an area over run with Hungarians, I think. They had several bakeries that liked to make pastries stuffed with poppy goo. Pretty good. Sweet. Cheap.

I had maybe a hundred dollars in my pocket, hard earned funds from odd jobs in the neighborhood and squirreled away allowance. Me, the intrepid traveler, had no concrete plans but to see what New York was all about. Little did I know I would become infamous in a few short years, leaving the local media to throb with salacious stories until which time I was pushed off the front page and replaced by that insane bastard the Son of Sam. The New York journalistic world loved a good story, especially when it contained equal parts mayhem to accompany a serial and ongoing plot. My only mistake was to get caught too early, forcing the daily scribes to fill in the back story.

That part will come later. I don't want to tease the story but I do have to lay down an explanation. Presently, in my small cell, I am putting this whole thing to paper on a typewriter, one on loan from my lawyer, (Where he got it I can't imagine.) an earnest guy assigned to me by some do-gooder organization that thinks human beings shouldn't kill other human beings, even if it has been sanctioned by laws and a disinterested jury. They think I am, while not precisely able to be rehabilitated at least worth keeping alive to live in a concrete block for the remainder of my days; which is, with any luck, probably another ten years or so. Another decade. Could be less. Lots of cancer in my family. Dad died from pancreatic. Mom barely survived breast cancer before giving up when she was my age. Sis had an ovarian scare, I think. We don't talk. My brother is most likely still living, although he did drink a lot.

This writing exercise wasn't a popular idea around here. My lawyer had to go to the mats in order for me to start and complete my memoir. It seems some people--that would be you warden-- aren't too keen on having murderers exorcise their demons by telling all, and we certainly aren't allowed to have any recompense from it. Like what am I going to do with any money if I had it, providing the book did sell? Ever typed on a typewriter? Low tech is not the word. Smudged paper. Worn out ribbons. Typos. I don't know how the world existed before computers and I'm not even computer literate. Never touched one. A virgin. I'm worse than Rip Van Winkle waking up. Can't drive. Haven't seen a movie in two decades. The last TV I watched was on a 13 inch screen, in analogue. The only war I identify with was Viet Nam and I was too young to participate. Never used a microwave, or cell phone. Penicillin was the last anti-biotic I was prescribed. My fillings are all mercury based. The razor blade I last used before I started growing my beard had one edge. The last Pope I remember was Italian. There was an ABA basketball league, with teams in Kentucky, Virginia, Pittsburgh and St. Louis, and they played with a red, white, blue striped ball. Gas was under 50 cents for a gallon. People had pet rocks and weren't humiliated by that fact. It was a different universe.

Now, as the prison sounds around me echo in my ears, a mélange of closing doors, shouts, and compressed human energy, I type out my thoughts, a stream of consciousness that has the warden on edge and keeps my diligent lawyer busy. It is ironic to note that one of my ancestors was a jailer--gaoler--at Newgate Prison in London back in the early 1800's. I found out this little genealogical tidbit from a histo-psychologist one day during a therapy session. If you don't know, and I certainly didn't, a histo-psychologist delves way back into your past in order to examine your psyche, taking the whole Jungian archetypes a little too far. He had told me that my ancestry has as much to do with my current mental state as my immediate parents. If you say so. I lost count of how many therapists had a go at my mind over the years. There seemed to always be some bozo wanting to add me to their research. I found it a nice diversion, a brief escape from prison life, an easy way to entertain myself.

Anyway, inscribed over the front door to the place was: Venio Sicut Fur, which means something like I come as a thief. Back then, apparently, they hung people who stole, among other heinous acts committed on the accused. Burnings. Beheadings. Draw and quartered. They took their punishments seriously, often times leaving the remains out for public display. Nothing like a rotting skull for deterrence. Didn't work. The prisons were overflowing most times.

I wonder what my ancestor, a one Geoffrey Ashdown would say about me being behind bars, slated for execution. He would probably sneer and go off on our namby-pamby way of dispatching the guilty. Needles! Pish! Tie him to the rack and turn until quartered, mind the splattering guts. Got any available pikes to place his head on? Londinum, founded by the Romans in AD 47, then going on to be a cesspool of rife class warfare and percolating pollution, where the air was fouled by excrement, malleable morals, coal smoke, and blood. One of the few advantages of being interned for so long is that I have the opportunity to read. I know a lot of things, compliments of having been incarcerated for most of my life, where reading becomes the working substitute for living. Like having an ongoing education.

Reading is the gateway to many things, most undesirable. Back in my former prison it was responsible for a hefty percentage of half witted philosophers, the ones who had gotten their hands on elementary based philosophy books or, more often, religious oriented tripe masquerading as higher thought. Some were Muslim posers. Others, Christian apologists. With a few Eastern devotees for good measure. Not a lot of atheists, like me. Most people, just like on the outside, needed something to offer an explanation for why life, particularly their own, was so fucked up. God's plan and boy oh boy did you get screwed. Philosophical discussions in prison usually devolved into shouting matches, where you only hoped that a shiv wasn't coming your way when and if you got the polemical upper hand. In the shower. Down that narrow hallway that led away from the laundry room. Exercise yard, in the corner, the place that afforded your attacker an opportunity because of the blind spot that the guard in the tower couldn't see down into.

I suppose the prodigious reading by some was an attempt to avoid any self-judgment. Long term imprisonment is not only about the sheer act of acquiescence, and it is, but about the need to reposition a person's desires and expectations. You are interned behind solid walls and iron bars, made to sacrifice not only your freedom but all definition of autonomy. Monotony becomes your future. Physical limitations close in on you like a demonic geometric equation. Really, you read in prison to break the tedium of course, but you also read to have a mental reset of sorts, something to keep your sanity clicking. Being a lifer, facing nothing but a life span defined by official ordinances, I grasped whatever I could to still keep functioning.

I kept my mouth shut, mostly. Occasionally, when I was really bored, I would venture an opinion, usually laced with just the right amount of sarcasm. I was a lifer and most times got the benefit of the doubt. I had killed somebody. There was some street cred in that. In fact, I was a minor celebrity. Early on into my lengthy, permanent sentence, I had been feted by the media, the recipient of numerous invitations to spill my guts to a reporter, in print and on TV. I declined. There was one TV talking head, a woman of course, who almost enticed me to a sit down with her. I had been admiring her legs on TV for years. She had beauty queen good looks and smarts too, a combination that she utilized to climb to the top, appearing on some magazine style TV show weekly, with overly produced segments about anything from overseas coups to the heinous acts of the corporate world back home.

Couldn't do it. I didn't want to talk about killing another person, on TV, broadcast like some new rollout of a snack product. I knew I would be packaged too. There would be teaser advertising in the lead up to when they aired the interview. The interview itself would be heavily edited. I would probably come off as some lunatic, with a smile, sitting there avoiding eye contact with the camera, trying not to shake my manacles too loudly, while I furtively stole looks up her dress, wondering what those long, long legs would feel like locked around my waist. Her perfume would fill the small interview room like one of those air fresheners people buy to mask unpleasant odors seeping out from the kitchen. She always wore bright red lipstick so I knew I wouldn't be able to keep my eyes off what had to be pillow soft lips. I would leer without even knowing that I was, some homicidal loon too dangerous to be kept alive.