One has to figure out how to kill time and expend creativity in prison. Neither is an easy task. The whole system is designed to use time as a blunt instrument of punishment, rather than a rehabilitative opportunity, and creativity tends to get reduced to the most out of context emphases on arts and crafts, for which one also has to pay a small fortune to purchase the materials through the prison vendor. So, if you are not craft-sy, you need to be crafty.
My friend Skateboard is crafty. I will, from time to time, present some of his creative work: comics that satirize the people, places, and attitudes of federal prison. I won’t present his opus in strict chronological order. After all the very first issue he ever produced was physically destroyed by one of the very people he poked fun at. A not unsurprising prison example of being able to dish it out but not take it. Skateboard persevered, however, and most of his other work has survived and been preserved by your truly. As the conservator of the Skateboard papers, it’s my duty and prerogative to give you a little bit of background and context before we jump into the oeuvre.
First a bit about Skateboard himself. Skateboard is a highly educated senior citizen with a white collar background. He was toward the beginning of a roughly 15 year sentence when I first met him. What happens when you put educated and life-experienced people in prison for a long time is that they don’t necessarily “reform” and conform to judges’ and prosecutors’ notions of the good, moral and innocent life. Part of this is because folks like this liked about 97% of their lives like that in the first place; they just happened to get caught on the other 3%. What people like this do experience in prison, however, is an increased sense of irony and absurdity that is super fertilized by, well, education and experience of the “proper” life. Let me put it this way: the kind of people who have read and enjoyed Catch-22 are the kind of inmates who can’t help but continually remark that Joseph Heller really was NOT terribly exaggerating in that novel. So, being crafty rather than craft-sy, Skateboard turned his attention to the social and systemic foibles of the injustice system. The second thing you probably want, but don’t need, to know about Skateboard is how he got the nickname. Well, let me explain. One day Skateboard was hanging out in my cell and expounding on some rather bizarre erotic attachments that another inmate had told him about. At some point he looked to me for an “Isn’t that strange” kind of affirmation, and I deadpan returned this line to him: “Hey, I don’t know what kind of sick shit you’re into.” The idea of being into “sick shit” struck him as aptly ironic. What is there in prison but one example of “sick” shit being strung seamlessly together with the next? Moreover, he was a bit flattered that he might be considered as possibly being presumed to partake in “sick shit” himself; it felt a like a little bit of vacation from the 97% of civic rectitude that been his life before. Well, immaturity and innuendo have a way of snowballing in prison, exactly as they do in junior high. Before too awfully long, my cellie, who had been party to our original conversation had come up with this pithy little bio: He would say to some random inmate, “See that little old dude over there, he’s into some sick shit.” Random other inmate replies, “Really? No way? Tell me though. I’m into some pretty sick shit myself.” My cellie goes forward with his story, “Yeah. Really sick. He’s into pregnant, amputee midgets who push themselves around on skateboards. He’s got all sorts of porn of it.” Random other inmate (in a mix of shock and admiration): “Damn, that’s really sick!” So, this just gets compressed into the moniker “Skateboard,” an odd enough nickname (especially given the person attached to it) that it often raises the question, “Why is he called that?”, thereby giving an opportunity to tell the whole bullshit backstory all over again and totally reinforce it. Anyway, as you read though Skateboard Comics!, you might notice that the author is fond of the phrase “sick shit,” and that is a grand testament to his ability to take it as well as dish it out.
Here are some other things that are worth noting:
- All the characters in the comics are caricatures of real inmates.
- Cheesecake is notorious for being a slob, as well as a chronic masturbator, and those were, at least in part, strategies he deployed in order to try to have a cell to himself. That didn’t always work out, however, when the prison got crowded, and he and his sweet and mild-mannered Pakistani cellmate did almost come to blows at one point. It was Cheesecake, however, who would have got the worst of it. When I told Skateboard this gossip over dinner one night, he took it as inspiration.
- FIghts aren’t all that common in prison, at least not as common as we tend to believe from a steady of TV and movies. When the do happen, however, they certainly garner everyone’s attention and provide a kind of distraction from the daily routine. They certainly give inmates something to talk about for a while.
- There are any number of transgender inmates in various states of transition.
- Skateboard’s comics are almost always rated R. Prison is an R-rated world every minute of every day. It’s not like the 97% of upright life that maxes out at PG-13. That being said, you should know that inmates are not allowed to watch R-rated films, by order of the Bureau of Prisons managerial bureaucracy. This is a prime example of Hellerian illogical intentions, misspent energy, and the injustice system’s utter lack of critical self-consciousness. Skateboard, however, sees beyond those blinders.
- F2 is the name of the unit on which Skateboard and I were originally housed together. He later moved out to a “preferred” housing unit, and I preferred to stay in “The Jungle,” as F2 was often known.
But enough of the prelims, let’s move on to an early Skateboard opus which he sent to me in an envelope return addressed to “Cecil B. DeMille.” Without further ado, the Skateboard Comic! “F-2: The Movie.”
Skateboard, who had had open heart surgery shortly after he was incarcerated was, after far too much delay, released to home confinement at the height of the COVID-19 crisis in the prison. He is likely now being considered for being placed back inside prison because, well, that’s how the Bureau of Prisons mentality (dys)functions. He really short stay out of prison, but at least if he goes back I’m sure there will be more comics.