Peter Kurth

Suddenly, in 1996 — when my “clinical profile” was sinking swiftly to the grave — medications came along that could, if taken properly, as prescribed, save your life, or at least prolong it. For all the relief I felt to be “saved,” it was still a shock; after all, I had grown used to expecting an early death. Before the miracle of protease inhibitors and the “AIDS cocktail,” I was on my way out. Then, in a split second, I was “Lazarus” (literally — I was “Lazarus” columnist for Poz magazine).

I confess: I became an angry, agitated, irrational, bona fide, in-your-face, fuck-you, pain-in-the-ass agitator and activist (which I can still be — watch out!). But mainly, now, I’m tired of it. All I notice are the skinny legs and the wasted muscles and a body that has aged beyond its years. Frankly, I think this is a bad joke, in poor taste. I think the least a person could do, after a quarter-century under the Sword of Damocles, is die, already. Only I don’t want to die. I never did. If I flatter myself into thinking that my survival is due to stubbornness — “piss and vinegar,” as my father would say — I still remember the others: Jon, of course, and so many of my friends. They didn’t want to die, either, but they did. Forever young.

In the old days of “AIDS activism” we all compared the thing to a war — not necessarily in the sense of two “sides” fighting each other, but in the sense of battling random, useless death. The Canadian novelist Timothy Findley wrote in his masterpiece, “The Wars,” about an old lady who lived through the First World War. Looking back, she remembered the feeling of death all around her: “Every day another friend. And what I hate these days is the people who weren’t there and they look back and say we became inured to it. Your heart froze over — yes. But to say we got used to it! God — that makes me so angry! No. Everything was sharp. Immediate. You met and you saw so clearly and cut so sharply into one another’s lives. So there wasn’t any rubbish.”

Which still leaves me with the question, How did I get so old — I, who was supposed to die with the rest, who never even imagined entering middle age? Indeed, when I was still living in New York, the therapist I had there — who was himself HIV-positive and died not long after I left the city — asked me if I thought I would live to see the age of 50. I said, truthfully, that I did not, not really understanding the question, as it seemed so far beyond possibility.

HIV-wise, I’m doing fine, superbly, these days — “stunning results,” no “detectable” viral load, “perfect CD4′s,” “wonderful percentages.” My last lab report was so good that the doctors wrote me to say, “You are going to live for a long time yet, and have plenty more opportunities for misery!” I am, it appears, no different from anyone else. And, crazy as it sounds, this is very hard to accept when you’ve banked half your life on being a “special case.” To find that you’ve wasted so much time worrying, and making excuses for yourself, when, in the end, you’re just going to drop dead like anybody. If I ever get around to writing my memoir of the plague years, I’m going to have to title it “So, You’re Not Going to Be a Tragic Hero, After All! Poor You!”

Now, after 11 years of “HAART” (Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy), I find myself in the same position any man of my age would be — “Monitor your cholesterol, don’t smoke, don’t drink. Eat right. Exercise. If you need help getting it up, we’ve got pills for that,” and so on. OK, so I do suffer a few uncommon ailments: the nausea, for one thing, whenever I swallow the gallons of rarefied rat poison I need to take every morning. Then, too, there’s a definite, proven “cognitive impairment” caused by both the virus and the pills. But could the same not be said about any person on chemotherapy? And if my body has aged and fallen apart to a large degree, it’s because I never thought it would be worth it to “pump up” at a gymnasium. “Why?” I asked myself. “For whom?”

By the time I realized that it was for me, it was too late: The doctors had diagnosed me with gout. “Who am I?” I wailed to my doctors and friends, “Benjamin Franklin? Queen Anne?” The disease had such an antiquated sound, something that befell a stout, old historical character, not an HIV-positive literary biographer in the 21st century. Everybody laughed.

The gout business was irritating enough before my urologist added another ailment to the pile: Peyronie’s disease. This news came in the wake of my first colonoscopy, which was a shock itself. I had gone to the urologist because my penis, when erect, had started to assume a scimitar curve, and other strange, contortionist shapes. (“It points north,” as a friend of mine says: “You’ll never get lost!”)

The urologist looked at me with that doctor’s expression that says gravely, “I’m afraid it’s true,” and, simultaneously, “Cheer up — you have everything to live for!” As he explained, “You may have noticed that when you get an erection,” he said, “it makes penetration difficult.” I wanted to tell him that I wouldn’t know, as it’s been years since I’ve tried to “penetrate” anything or anyone, being HIV-positive. But I played along.

Peyronie’s disease, the doctor then told me gently, is also called “partial penile disassembly.” It is a condition of “uncertain cause,” characterized by plaque, or a hard lump, or scar tissue, that forms in the penis and causes an abnormal curvature when the member is erect. Cases range from mild to severe. Peyronie’s isn’t “rare,” exactly, but it’s not “common” either. And it may or may not have anything to do with HIV or the medications.

“It afflicts men mainly in middle age,” the urologist shrugged. “The sexual problems that result can disrupt a couple’s physical and emotional relationship and lead to lowered self-esteem.”

While I was stuck on the phrase “middle age,” he carried on: “It’s just the roll of the dice for middle-aged men. My guess is your penis has suffered some kind of trauma.”

“Oh, Doc, you don’t know,” I answered, thinking of my whole checkered sexual history. “But the ‘trauma’ would have to have occurred some time ago, because my penis hasn’t suffered anything in about three years.”

Apparently there are only a few treatments for it, and my doctor tells me that none of them will work effectively for me. The first line of defense is massive doses of vitamin E, which the doctor can’t, in good conscience, give at the levels he would normally prescribe, as vitamin E would contribute to “hepatic toxicity” (liver problems), brought on by the other pills I’m on. The second option is injections of some kind — needles to the dick — “which hurt like hell,” the urologist said, “and they don’t work, either.” The third is penile implants, “but who wants a lead weight between his legs?” (I refrained from comedy here — I knew all too well what he meant.) And the fourth, and most drastic, is surgery. “But I warn you,” said the doctor, “you’ll lose two or three inches. No more Peyronie’s, but no penis, either.”

In the meantime, the doctor gives me his own simple prescription: “I want you ejaculating all the time.” It was a tempting thought, but I wondered how it was supposed to be accomplished, short of nights at the baths in the dark, since I have not voluntarily visited myself sexually on anyone in many years. Lamely, I stammered, “What is it about HIV infection you don’t understand?”

Suddenly, the doctor became very calm: “Peter, all I’m saying is, if you want your weenie to look like something other than a compass or a pretzel, you’ll do what I say. You can do the ejaculating on your own. But you must do it.”

As I left the doctor’s examining room, the receptionist addressed me. “He told you to jerk off a lot, didn’t he?” she said, wincing.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Oh, he tells that to everyone over 50. You’re over 50, right?”

And I had to think: Dammit, I am!

So here I am, a middle-aged man with gout and a permanently crooked erection, commanded to jerk off (whether I want to or not). And yet I can’t help thinking, Count your blessings, as your grandmother told you. Count your ejaculations, too, as Hemingway told you (he was afraid he might run out of them). And count me lucky to still be here under a bright sky in Vermont, when the wind in the trees is blowing in great, beautiful waves as summer turns to autumn, years after I pledged to Jon that we never would grow old.

On Dec. 6 of last year, I boarded a British Airways flight from JFK in New York on what was meant to be a four-day research trip to London, to examine documents recently released by Scotland Yard relating to a book I’m writing. I left the states on the spur of the moment, after I noticed that I had only seven days left on my passport before it expired. That’s why I went when I did — to take advantage of the time remaining. I expected to be back home in Vermont within a week — not knowing, or having forgotten, about a law in Britain that demands that you have at least six months’ time on your passport in order to be admitted into the country. This law has been on the books for ages, apparently, but, to my knowledge, it was rarely enforced. No longer: Travel documents and other identification papers are now screened in Britain with all the watchfulness of the doomed.

My flight was delayed by a couple of hours; it was nearly midnight when we boarded. By that time, I’d had a couple of scotches and a full dinner at one of the airport’s generic bars, but I can state for sure that I was not “intoxicated.” I certainly wasn’t “plainly intoxicated,” as the airline staff later told the courts, because if I had been, they wouldn’t have let me on board. (I also feel safe in assuming that they wouldn’t have offered me free bottles of wine after we took off: The last time I’d flown from London to New York, “security” actually canvassed people in the bars at Heathrow, interrogating passengers to see if they were “fit to fly.”) Everything might have worked out fine if a) I hadn’t discovered that my laptop was missing after about an hour in the air; and b) I’d been given a seat that wasn’t tailor-made to form blood clots in my legs. I’ve been HIV-positive since the AIDS epidemic began — I’m what they call a long-term survivor — and I’ve got peripheral neuropathy in both my legs: It’s impossible for me to sit shoved up against a wall for six hours, unable to move or lean back while the person in front of me reclines.

I should have told the airline upfront about the HIV situation, my “no longer invariably fatal but still miserably complicated chronic manageable disease.” Indeed, when interrogated later by the police, I was asked why I hadn’t done this, and could only reply that I’m not accustomed to blaring the news around in public. It’s one thing to be “out” about your HIV status. It’s quite another to trumpet the news openly before 400 people who are already in a state of anxiety. So I didn’t explain that part of things when it might have helped. Neither did I bear in mind (since I was plenty anxious myself) that one of the medications I’m on — ritonavir, which has especially terrible side effects — is administered as part of the AIDS cocktail precisely because of its ability to inhibit a metabolic pathway and help the front-line antivirals circulate longer in the bloodstream.

Unfortunately, ritonavir has — or can have, depending on who you ask — the same effect with alcohol, so that “a couple of scotches” at the bar and a bottle of wine at 35,000 feet might easily send you to Cloud Cuckoo Land before you can say, “Fasten your seat belts.” I mention this not as an excuse, but as a possible explanation for the fact that I completely lost my mind on that plane. I hadn’t conceivably had enough alcohol to account for the reaction that ultimately led me to the clink.

My sins, in brief: When the cabin crew refused to radio JFK to see if I’d left my laptop at the gate and also declined to move me to another seat, “an altercation ensued” — not physical, but verbal, with the flight attendants becoming snootier by the minute and me becoming, well, let’s say, more American. I behaved badly in-flight, yelling at the crew, “I am an American citizen! You are our lapdog ally!” and other remarks of a vulgar and unhelpful nature. Very vulgar, I’m afraid: At one point I called that tired stewardess the worst thing you can call a woman — you all know what it is — but by then I was in full-blown air rage, something the airlines used to understand but, on the evidence, no longer do.

Finally, I went back to the galley and sat on what is called the “bustle,” which is where they keep those rubber slides should a plane go down in water and where, over many years of these flights, I’ve seen lots of people sitting and children playing without anyone making a fuss about it. But times have changed, and now parking your ass on the bustle constitutes “endangering an aircraft,” which is a very high crime under Britain’s new anti-terrorism laws, and can get you sent to prison for a minimum of two years. I was warned about this (so they tell me), but I still refused to move; and when we finally landed at Heathrow the next morning I was escorted off the plane by two of London’s finest — not the sort of “bobby” I remember from many years in London, but fully outfitted SWAT-team types, bristling with munitions and in no mood for smart alecks. They dragged me past customs straight to police headquarters at Uxbridge, an indescribably dreary, prefabricated suburb and corporate-operations center west of London, where “incidents” originating at Heathrow are all referred for jurisdiction.

It wasn’t until I got to the police station that I began to realize, slowly, the nature of the trouble I was in. A solicitor — in my case, the English version of a public defender — was rustled up from somewhere, and seemed to think that I’d probably get off with a slap on the wrist for “disturbing the peace” and be sent home. But I had no idea of the depth of modern Britain’s terror paranoia, and I was amazed to discover, after I was “cautioned” and formally “interviewed,” that the Uxbridge constabulary knew all kinds of things about me that I hadn’t told them. Evidently, the “suspicious” passport and the last-minute ticket purchase, not to mention the bustle business, had resulted in a call to Interpol or some other surveillance outfit. I’m guessing here (because the police aren’t obliged to tell you anything), but in the eyes of British law I apparently bore all the marks of a jihadi-in-waiting. Most surprising to me was the fact that the police had information about my family — specifically, that my father is a convert to Islam, married to a Moroccan woman; that I have two Moroccan half-sisters; that I have spent long periods in the Middle East. I was appalled to find out that such details are available “at the click of a mouse” to any squirt with a badge, and I must have indicated as much to the squirts in question, because their notes about my “attitude and behavior” boiled down to one word: “obnoxious.”

After a day and a night in isolation at Uxbridge, I was hauled the next morning, a Friday, to Magistrate’s Court, where I was formally charged with “endangerment” and … something else. I’m looking through legal papers to see what it was, but I can’t find any record of it. It had something to do with “bad behaviour,” a point I’d pass over if the British, under Tony Blair, hadn’t made “behaviour,” with or without damage to third parties, a crime in itself when it suits them. Did I know that “verbal abuse” was a criminal offense in Britain, the police had asked — I didn’t — and that the laws of Britain also apply on board a British aircraft?

At my first court appearance, bail was instantly denied, owing to the “gravity” of the charge, and that night I was bundled off to Wormwood Scrubs, to what they call the “First Night Centre.” This is, essentially, an induction wing, and fairly comfortable, all things considered — though I think it’s kept that way only to trick newcomers into thinking that the prison itself will be the same once they get there. A sad delusion: Wormwood Scrubs is a perfect shit-hole, as I would learn soon enough.

Please note that “bail” in the U.K. isn’t the same thing as it is here (nothing about British judicial procedure is the same as it is in the U.S.). In Britain, bail doesn’t necessarily involve money. It merely demands that you have “a fixed address” and that someone be willing to guarantee that you won’t “abscond” if you’re let loose on the streets. I’d been planning to stay with a friend in London during my ill-fated trip, but, helpful as he tried to be when he learned of my plight, he was scheduled to leave the country before the case could be resolved and was thus unable to provide the kind of assurance the court required. I know a lot of people in London, and I might have phoned any one of them, I suppose, except for two obstacles: First, their phone numbers were all recorded in my missing computer and, second, I wasn’t able to make a phone call at any time. While prisoners are assigned calling-card numbers for use on prison phones, mine never worked — and though I repeatedly requested to have it fixed, the matter was never resolved. In fact, until I was released in January, every bit of communication I had with the outside world was conducted through my lawyer and embassy. The whole matter might have been settled quickly had it not been Christmastime — what the British call “the festive season” — when everything in England shuts up tight like a drum and no court could deal with me until after the New Year.

So, that’s how I wound up in the most notorious prison in London, with some of the most dangerous criminals in the city, many of whom are black and Islamic. Be advised that I use the term “black” the way the English do, to designate anyone with dark skin — and I choose it to reflect the prevailing attitude in the U.K. right now toward “immigrants” in general and Muslims in particular. Believe me, the Brits are as nasty as we are, and just as hypocritical. At one point, even, a guard at the Scrubs advised me not to refer to “Britain” any longer. “We are English, Welsh, Scots, Irish and an awful lot of Muslims,” he said. “Please remember that.” Certainly one of the most horrifying moments of my incarceration came on the day of Saddam Hussein’s execution, when I heard one of the guards (female) talking to another about what she called “a double standard.” She wasn’t sayin’, mind, that she was “in fay-vuh of the death penalty,” but she’d “‘ad it up to ‘ere” with the Muslim prisoners, “‘oo’d ‘ave their bloody ‘ands cut off if they was in their own countries. But just listen to ‘em squeal when we take away their tellies!”

To that I say: It was the Muslim prisoners in custody who taught me the most about British justice as it currently functions, and who treated me more kindly, on the whole, than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. Britain has the highest rate of drug abuse in the EU and the highest rate of incarceration. At one point last month, there were only “four prison beds” remaining in the whole of the United Kingdom. The home secretary, John Reid, has proposed putting criminals onto ships, like they did in the good old days, when Britannia ruled the waves.

There’s a lot more to the diary I kept in prison than you’ll read in the excerpts below, and a lot that I didn’t write down at the time, not knowing from minute to minute when the guards might burst into the cell and confiscate anything they thought was “subversive.” The unutterable tedium of prison life is itself a brutality, and can scarcely be rendered in words. I assure you, you have no idea what boredom is until you find yourself in the slammer, with only mealtimes, twice a day, guaranteed to get you out of your cell for a few precious minutes.

Another thing you won’t read about here — with one notable exception — is the nature of sexual activity in prison, which is more or less constant, if also, always, nasty, brutish and short. Words are not wanted or required, although, obviously, sex among men is a perfectly natural occurrence in a place like the Scrubs. For me, however, as an “openly gay” man, it presented certain quandaries. The inviolable law is that everything is kept under wraps, and that anyone who presents himself as overtly homosexual will be beaten to a pulp. Thus do “straight” men preserve their manhood while never shunning an opportunity to get their rocks off. This required that I go underground, that I become closeted again for the first time in years, while quietly submitting to the whims of thugs — and if a certain “passivity” emerges in my writing here, I’d put it down to that. It’s difficult in prison to know the difference between “rape” and “coercion,” just as it’s difficult to know the truth from a lie. Everyone in prison lies all the time, whether they’re prisoners or guards. Worse, you begin lying yourself, seeking some advantage, avoiding some explanation. All you know is that you don’t want to get hurt, and you’ll do anything to avoid it. You become complicit in your own abuse. As Oscar Wilde remarked in “De Profundis,” commenting on his own imprisonment for “unnatural” acts: “I could be patient, for patience is a virtue. It is not patience, but apathy you want here, and apathy is a vice.”

Strangely, despite all this, a kind of solidarity ensues — to the point that, when the time came for my release from the Scrubs, I was afraid to leave. For what it’s worth, I think I understand the so-called Stockholm syndrome a bit better than I did, although it wasn’t my captors I began to identify with — rather, my fellow captives.

Writing this introduction several months later, I find myself eager to make jokes about the experience and pass it off as just another wayward adventure in a crazy writer’s life. But the truth is it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t funny, and it wasn’t needed, either. It was degrading, dehumanizing, debilitating, terrifying, wasteful and ultimately damaging to my physical and mental health. It’s true, I think, that keeping a diary — in fact, being a writer, whose “third eye” never closed during the weeks I spent at the Scrubs — allowed me to preserve some measure of my sanity. Even so, on my return to the United States, the people I employ to keep my head together diagnosed me with “acute stress disorder,” which differs from the “post-traumatic” kind only insofar as it’s immediate, not delayed. Even now, I keep wondering if it is better or worse to be imprisoned unjustly or unnecessarily, but I still have no answer.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

12/12/06: “B-Wing” — First “full” day here after landing, arrest, night at Uxbridge police station, Magistrate’s Court and three nights in the “First Night Centre.” Before today I did not have a proper notebook in which to write.

No HIV meds as yet — this is my greatest worry. I try not to think about the future. Try not to worry about home or anyone there, since I can do nothing. Trying not to look anyone in the eyes or at them in the “wrong” way (although you don’t know which way that would be). Shower tomorrow — first in a week. I stink.

Cigarettes — you have no idea of their value until you’re here. People are willing to trade anything for them (I suppose drugs would be worse). I gave away too many at first, to anyone who asked. I’ll have to quit, I guess — but how in this place?

Meantime, Pinochet has died & Thatcher regrets the loss of a dear friend. Somebody announces that a terrorist attack on London is “almost certain” around Christmas. William and Harry have announced plans for a 10th anniversary “bash” for Diana — bad choice of words, I’d say, but lots of pop stars are already lined up. Everyone denounces and despises Bush, including the police. The Baker report was apparently very firm in its conclusions, and very gloomy. I haven’t seen a newspaper in a week, just television.

My roommate, Mick, cannot sit still. He literally stands at the TV and constantly switches the channel, as if he had a remote, which he doesn’t. He drinks endless cups of tea, all day and all night — and shits a lot in the open toilet, which has only a sheet strung across it.

I am praying, literally — at first this was just a response to anxiety — to quiet my mind. I try to be calm, I work at it. I behave myself. I show no impatience or reaction of any kind — those are deadly directions to go in.

14/12/06: No further court hearings until January 5 (and then merely procedural), as the case is to be bumped up from Magistrate’s to Crown Court, which doesn’t sit again until after the New Year. Pure absurdity, as the Crown has already agreed that the “endangerment” charge will undoubtedly be dropped. So I’m to be held indefinitely for something they know I didn’t do. Mick is going to court tomorrow, so probably I’ll have a new “mate.”

All is OK with the meds. Doctor today — the first one I’ve seen (out of four) who was decent and competent and knew what to do. Apparently the police at Uxbridge, knowing my HIV status, have scrawled “CONTAGIOUS” on my chart … I am urgently warned by the guards to let no one know about this, although plainly I can’t be the only one here in that condition. If anyone asks about the pills, I’m to say they’re for “high blood pressure” or “cholesterol” or both. “Just make it up.”

Things to be glad about:

1) Imprisonment gets me out of Christmas and New Year’s (and for all I know Easter)
2) A temporary but huge relief from financial worries
3) Plenty of time to write
4) Plenty of time to think
5) Plenty of time to read
6) Plenty of time to sleep
7) Great material
Character building — are you a man or a mouse? Or, as Alan Bennett says (I’m reading Alan Bennett’s “Writing Home”), “You must learn to take it like a man. That is, like a woman, without complaint”
9) I am snapped out of ritual and routine — only what is here is real
10) There may be more, but I don’t know what they are

Finished Bennett. I’m going to read “The Da Vinci Code” finally.

15/12/06: I think if I ever publish this, I should call it “At Her Majesty’s Pleasure — And a Few Other People’s.” Let’s not be coy. Subtitle: “Yes, Every Prison Story You’ve Ever Heard Is True.”

Mick left this morning, hoping for release — and once they leave, you never see them again. I thought I’d have a day alone and was looking forward to it — but no, suddenly the keys turn: “Kurth! You have a legal visit!” I think it must be the solicitor, but it’s a woman from the embassy. I sign a release forbidding any information about my case or situation to be given to the press, but that our congressional delegation be informed. Also get passport renewal papers, which I can’t complete because there’s no way to get photos made in here. And I can’t get the expired passport number because they won’t give me the expired passport, which is down “at reception.” Then on return: I’m being moved “farther in,” to C-Wing.

17/12/06: I can’t think of the outside — what I know is going on just over these walls. The TV is mostly a help, as it’s Christmas season, so it’s all unreal to begin with. But if you think about people right here in Hammersmith who might be on their way to or from work, popping into a Starbuck’s for a cappuccino or something — well, don’t.

There is no comfortable or relaxing position in which to read — but I’m reading anyway, “The Da Vinci Code,” as pledged. And what the hell’s with that? How did it become such a giant success? It’s not that it’s “bad” — it’s just not good enough — pedestrian — everything is explained to you instead of revealed — not a moment’s tension in it, or any doubt about the outcome, even though I couldn’t have sworn before now that the Holy Grail was actually Mary Magdalene’s vagina.

19/12/06: So, a new roommate — surnamed Stanton. He’s in for “conspiring to rob” — part of a street gang, “snitched on” by one of the others. (“Well,” he says, “he’s a dead man, anyway, yeah?”) He’s 25 — pumped up, black and Islamic — he arrives carrying a whole shitload, bags and bags’ worth, of his things — food and clothes and electronics and whatnot. He’s clean, anyway — very — rubs everything down with toilet paper before he touches it. We both slept well, in the end — I think I’m getting the hang of this.

Stanton was already here once for more than a year, just two doors down in No. 12 — he can’t believe he’s back, but there’s a kind of cheerfulness to him, as there is to a lot of the inmates: “Nothing to be done about it. Might as well enjoy yourself, know what I mean?” “Know what I mean” is one word: “No-wha ‘ahmeen?”

Smoking — well, plainly I have no interest in not smoking. When I go out for my medical “treatments” in the mornings I find myself scrounging the floors for discarded cigarette butts. (There are no filters, and anyway it’s a good place to keep your eyes — on the ground — it also gives you something very real to concentrate on.) Every now and then someone sees me doing this and pops out to say, “Aw, mate — c’mon!” and pushes a wad of tobacco in my hand, usually without the papers to go with it. Or they’ll give me the papers without tobacco so I can squeeze out the remains of the fag-ends I’ve found and roll up some “fresh” ones. I suppose you can’t get more disgusting or pathetic than this (well, yes you can), but to me it’s like nothing. Health? I’ve risked more, with worse.

[Note: there are signs all over about the risks of hepatitis B, but only one -- way inside the nurses' station where no one can see it -- warning about HIV infection: "A Condom Every Time!" or something like that. As if they'd give you a condom if you asked for one: "And what would you need that for?" Ostriches. There's a clinic here that offers HIV counseling and testing, but nobody speaks of it and I've never seen anyone enter or leave it when I've been downstairs with the doctor. It is open only on Thursdays. Imagine what can happen between a Friday and a Thursday.]

Now, suddenly, a discussion with Stanton about Islam. I suspect he’s Islamic for the sake of protest, but he does have a prayer rug, with a mihrab, and he does pray, not five times a day but sometimes. (There are also signs posted on every floor, with arrows pointing toward Mecca. It’s interesting that Stanton says off the bat, “Democracy can’t work under Islam. Everything in Islam is structured for good — there is one God and no need for anything else, no need for an intermediary.” “How can God have a son?” he asks. “He might as well have an uncle or an aunt, yeah?”

I tell Stanton about my father, who is a convert to Islam, and his wife, Najat, who is Moroccan — and their daughters are Islamic from the cradle. Stanton is very impressed — I remind myself that this story might come in handy. He completely understands about the family structure when I say, “I assure you, in the home, my father’s wife rules the roost.” He says, yes, this is what everyone doesn’t get. This is why marriage is so important: “It is half of Islam.” In this regard, a man must marry, otherwise “all is temptation and fucks up your head.” We speak of the television. He says it’s all temptation — “all those birds wrigglin’ their bums — it’s all sin.” This sounds completely bogus coming from a career criminal and whoremaster, until you realize that Stanton does not regard himself as “a sinner,” as a Christian might, but as being led into sin. There is no original sin in Islam — there is only temptation. Says Stanton: “One day, you will stand before Allah, and He will ask you questions, and you had better have some good answers, yeah? Because He didn’t do it — you did.”

20/12/06: Dreary, dreary, dreary day — depressed — last (half) cigarette smoked already. Stanton says prison makes him “angry and violent.” Says, “I’m not really like that, yeah? But it fuckin’ makes me angry, yeah? Prison screws up your head. I feel like killing someone.” Terrific.

21/12/06: Stanton is having some remorse today over “two things” he’s done in his life, only one of which he specifies. When he left prison last time he went to live on “an estate” [that is, a "council estate," what we would call "the projects"]. Everyone loved him there. Then he got “talked into” robbing his friends “of their drugs.” “Weren’t worth it, yeah? … as it was only a couple thousand pounds, yeah?” He feels badly about it, but doesn’t know what he can do. He asks me if he should pray for forgiveness. I stammer something back, like, “Well, I should think praying would do for now, until the way of making amends becomes clear.” He says, “Shit, man, you’re takin’ the piss on me. They’ll kill me first.”

Saw the doctor again — Stanton, too — he has some kind of STD, but can’t remember which — “It begins with an ‘m,’” he says. [What the hell would that be?]

Apparently I am known prisonwide as “the airline geezer.” There’s another title if you need one.

22/12/06: — Friday: No more Stanton. He “had court” today, and while he asked me to try to save his place in this room, it was no go: “We aren’t saving anything for anybody.” So now I’ve got Phil. He’s “of an age” (mine, probably a little older), whom they’ve put in here, as he explains, because they told him he and I are “both intelligent and first-time offenders and you ought to get along.” Phil is a white South African, from Johannesburg, in for drug smuggling — some huge amount of cocaine — which he brought in from Boston by way of Trinidad, having picked up the stuff in Venezuela (Caracas). He says he begged “them” (he means the cartel) not to send him through Trinidad, as it would be (and was) a flag for customs at Heathrow. But I suppose these drug lords always make sure that a certain number of their “mules” get caught, otherwise it would look suspicious. Anyhow, Phil is really up the creek — facing 10 years. He did it because he’s been unemployed for five years — he’s some kind of geologist or metallurgical engineer, used to work for De Beers, but can’t get work in South Africa anymore “because I’m white.” His wife has recently run off with some other man and he has kids to support — who now don’t know where he is or what’s happened to him. He seems OK, just resigned. “Stunned” is a better word.

I was called to “Education” class today around 1:30: It seems my application for a prison job was very well received and I’m to be put to work on all kinds of things — tutoring someone here on C-wing who can’t read, working on the prison magazine, helping in creative writing classes and “English as a second language.” One of the teachers asks me how long I’ll be “in,” and when I say I don’t know, she says, “Well, with your qualifications and my luck, you’ll be gone in three days.” Somehow, I doubt it. The sheaf of legal papers sent over by the solicitors this morning was frightening in terms of a) its size and b) the potentially lengthy sentence — two years — if they do decide to go with the “endangerment” charge. Let’s not think about that.

24/12/06: Christmas Eve. I have absolutely NO emotion about Christmas — in fact it’s better than usual. I haven’t enjoyed Christmas in years, and now I just want to get through it without a lot of “carols” and recycled sermons about “peace,” since it’s nothing but commercial now — nothing.

Curiously, they don’t allow you any visits for a few days before and after Christmas, when you’d think they would — but I suppose it would overwhelm everybody: the staff (half of whom are “on holiday” now), and both the prisoners and their families. It’ll be interesting to see how the mates react to this — whether depression and anger increase. Elizabeth, my niece, has sent a card saying, “Hey, Uncle Pete — hope this Christmas suits you better than most.” Later, a card from Mother — trying to seem calm, when I know she’s not.

Have touched based with “Jack,” the inmate I’m supposed to be tutoring now, and brought him the books he needs to have (little “Dick and Jane” things). Having been very growly and sulky with me before — he works in the kitchen, serving meals, also sweeps up and hauls trash — Jack was ultra-friendly and apparently grateful.

25/12/06: Christmas Day.

A Christmas gift from — ? I never got his name — a wild Iranian who is kept in a cell by himself. Wears one of those little hats, the Muslim version of a yarmulke. While I’m waiting for my meds, he peeps out of his cell window and sees me fishing butts off the floor. He bangs on the door — “No, no, wait!” he cries. Apparently he wants to give me some tobacco, no strings — but his door is locked. He wraps some of it up in TP and slides it under. I say loudly, “I’ll pay you back!” but he says no, it’s a gift. He asks what I’m here for (all of this is shouted) & can’t believe it when I tell him. Later, I see him outside at exercise. He’s chatting with the guard (“Chico”) and gives me another roll-up — “Happy Christmas!” It’s amazing. He says he’s in for two and a half years, owing to his previous association with “wrongdoers.” Later, still in the yard, I walk around warming up — he’s with some of his mates, chatting away in Farsi or whatever and kicking cans. Suddenly he says, “Hey, America! New York man! Next time, blow up the fucking plane. Don’t pull out your knife unless you’re willing to put it back with blood on it.” Then he calls me “Bush” and everyone bursts out laughing. Finally, as I grin and wave, he yells out, “I AM NOT THE TALIBAN!”

26/12/06: A dangerous and frightening experience in Jack’s cell — the inmate I’m supposed to be tutoring. I went in after treatments to see if Jack has made any progress with the reading. There is someone asleep in the upper bunk, whom I take to be Jack. But suddenly, a total stranger leaps from the top bunk — someone I’ve only seen before in the kitchen — I don’t know his name, but apparently he is Jack’s roommate, and he pushes me against the wall, slams the door, tells me I’m in there to rob them. I’m quite amazed at how stoutly I answer that I’m not, that I’m only there to see Jack. “You’re takin’ the piss out of me, faggot, I saw you! I caught you!” Suddenly Jack emerges from the bathroom and … how to put this? … they take turns. I am stunned, shoved against the wall, but what can I do? I didn’t knock. “Wing-wise,” these are powerful people, with extra privileges and “out” time because of their jobs, and I am warned that henceforth I “belong” to them. Boy-o from the top bunk smacks me across the face and heaves me out of the cell. You can’t afford to piss off people like this — at the least, they control the food, and might spit in your dinner on top of everything else. We were told at induction that “bullying will not be tolerated at Wormwood Scrubs” and that it must be reported to the screws, but the old hands all doubled over laughing on hearing this, saying, “Right, Miss! And get your fuckin’ ‘ead bashed in!”

Oh, this is a bad day — a bad day. Now I really am frightened — this place suddenly seems utterly hostile. At dinner, Jack’s “mate” made a point of glowering at me and drawing his finger across his throat. As he handed me my “breakfast pack,” I again told him that he had made a mistake — in fact, that he was “full of shit” — but this is dangerous. I spoke immediately to one of the guards, leaving out the “taking turns” part of it, but simply saying I was being threatened. She said she’d “have a word with him,” which will probably make things worse, of course.

27/12/06: Gerry Ford has evidently died at 93. They’re going to hang Saddam Hussein within 30 days.

28/12/06: My parents’ 60th wedding anniversary (would have been, anyway). Slept very well, oddly enough. Tried to shake hands with my enemy downstairs this morning at treatments (the roommate, that is, Boy-o — I’m not bothering with Jack, who can learn to read by himself, if you don’t mind). Boy-o was having none of it: “I saw you! I caught you!” I answered effectively, “Suit yourself.” I stared him hard in the eyes, remembering my mother’s advice about standing up to bullies: “They will always back down.” I think I managed to convey to this creep that, however much power he thinks he has on the wing, I’ve got more, or can get more — I can summon the fucking American embassy! — and that he had better back off. He skulked away, of course. I can’t appear to be cowed.

Something is frozen inside me.

30/12/06: The death (I should say the murder) of Saddam Hussein. Obviously they wanted something public and symbolic, and if that’s so, they’ve certainly got it.

Hard to describe the silence here today — it’s eerie. I doubt if you managed to interview any of the prison’s Muslim population individually — and provided they told you the truth — that you’d find many “Saddam supporters” among them. But that isn’t the point — it’s the way it was done, and when — on the eve of Eid-al-Adha, yet another in what seem to be innumerable “holiest days in Islam,” a feast of self-sacrifice, commitment and obedience to Allah.

There are fliers all over the wing today instructing Muslims how to make their preparations for Eid in such a way that it can actually be done. I quote:

THE SUNNAH OF EID:

1) Wake up early
2) Offer Salaatul Fajr
3) Prepare for personal cleanliness, take care of details of clothing, etc.
4) Take a Ghusl (bath) after Fajr (in prison, the day before)
5) Brush your teeth (using Miswak)
6) Dress up, putting on the best clothes available, whether new or cleaned old ones.
7) Use Itr — religious perfume
On Eid-al-Adha, eat breakfast after Salaah or after sacrifice if you are doing a sacrifice
9) Go to prayer ground early.
10) Offer Salaat-ul-Eid in congregation in an open place, except when weather is not permitting, like rain, snow, etc.
11) Use two separate routes to and from the prayer ground. (In prison, left and right side of corridors)
12) Recite Takbeer (softly in prison) on the way to Salaah and until the beginning of Salaat-ul-Eid.
13) On Eid-al-Adha, Takbeer starts from Fajr on the 9th Dhil Hijjah and lasts until the Asr on the 12th Dhil Hijjah.
14) Takbeer: Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar. La ilaha il lallahu Wallahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar Wa-lillah hill Hamd.

The question of a “prayer ground” for Muslim prisoners has not been resolved. They want their own place of worship (as they want their own showers), but in the meantime, when lined up and marched off to prayer, they are obliged to do it in the courtyard chapel — which also doubles as a church for both Roman Catholics and Anglicans. Questions about your religion are among the first you’re asked when you get to the “First Night Centre” — some kind of generic “chaplain” comes around (I suppose Church of England), with a weary air, but trying to be reassuring about “your opportunities for worship here.” You are asked to check a box on one of the inevitable “forms” designating your religious choice — C. of E., RC, Hindu, Sikh, Jewish [I have met only one Jewish prisoner], Jehovah’s Witness, Quaker and Muslim (which they put last, even though there are more Muslims here than anything else). There is naturally no box for Unitarian-Universalist, so I checked “N/A” and was off the hook entirely. Again, I think a lot of these people go to the services only because it gets them out of their cells. But I wonder: Might it help?

No, I think those days are gone — I don’t trust religious feeling in myself, having experienced it before as a kind of cult hysteria and knowing that it isn’t really about “feelings” at all. It’s about actions or it’s about nothing. When I stand before Allah, Stanton, and He asks me all those questions, He’s going to get the answers I’ve got, yeah? Whether “good” or not.

31/12/06: I wake feeling low, sad, sick of all this. I notice, however, that for some reason I’m not half so agitated, cranky, crabby, up-and-down or tired as I normally am at home. I don’t feel that I’m constantly dodging tasks and obligations and invitations and irritations, all of which, as I always say, are getting in the way of my work! This needs looking at. Thinking again that in a way I’ve obtained just what I many times have thought and said that I wanted — relief, release from my own life, a new place, new company, no past, no established ties — in this place I am anyone and no one. But the price is a total abdication.

1/1/07: 2007 — Well, well, well. It dawns bright and sunny, for a change. Lots of banging noise in the night, both inside and out, and the ones who regularly yell and scream were doing more of it.

“Legal visit” tomorrow night at 6 p.m. What is this about? The embassy? It’ll be something to do, anyway.

02/01/07: I awake agitated and anxious, worried about the multiplicity of tasks today. An interesting dilemma here is that everything happens at once (that is, when anything happens at all). You’re out for “treatments” and “education” and you need to talk to the landing staff and take a shower and it’s “kit change” and you want to get to the library for the 10 minutes they allow, etc. And if you miss something, well, you’ve missed it. Everything is designed to make you feel as small and harried as possible — and you can’t really argue, can you, because if it weren’t for your own mistakes, you wouldn’t be here at all. So you haven’t got a leg to stand on.

03/01/07: No one turned up at the “legal visit.” It was supposed to be the barristers, whom I’ve never met and still haven’t. And as fate would have it, the only other person called over with me to the “visits” place was Jack the Rapist, who asked how I was doing, at least, which I suppose is a good sign; of course we were with a guard. I sat for two and a half hours in that horrid, fluorescent-lit room, wearing the yellow nylon vest you have to put on if you’re expecting a visitor, for no reason. A couple of the screws (both women) came out and chatted a bit — they could tell it was “something of a disappointment” for me. But then they had to go home, so I just sat there … and sat there. Jack finally came out saying, “It doesn’t look good. The DNA results are back.” He’d mentioned earlier that he was in for drug dealing, and I gather now that “the DNA” has something to do with traces of his saliva, or snot, discovered on 20-pound notes — something that mysteriously will add a few years to his sentence (as if anyone should ever let him out — they shouldn’t).

05/01/07: Had court date. Just notes now — I am too tired. You need to understand what “going to court” is like. First, they rouse you around 6 a.m. Then they come back for you alphabetically and by landing — you may or may not have had time to brush your teeth. In any case, you must take all of your belongings with you — you don’t know if you’ll be returned to your own cell, or even if you’ll be returned to the same prison. So it’s always a goodbye. Naturally, you can’t sleep the night before. Phil was snoring, which gave me comfort — his life may be over, but he’s peaceful right now.

“KURTH! COURT!” You have to go through the whole process of “exit,” everything checked, searched, an anal probe to make sure there aren’t any drugs hiding there — frankly, I think the screws like this part of it, not for “sexual” reasons, necessarily, but because it humiliates you so completely. I really do not believe that anyone could be “one of the screws” without being a sadist.

I don’t even know what I pleaded to, finally. I didn’t think I was going there today to “plead.” But so it worked out — I pleaded to something in exchange for the dropping of the “endangerment” charge — very important: You don’t want to get mixed up with “endangerment” at such a critical moment in history! Was it “disruption” that I admitted? “Disturbing the peace?” “Vile language?” “Verbal abuse of a flight attendant?” “Drunk on an aircraft?” Probably it was that, although there is no evidence that I was drunk — no tests were taken, no “breathalyzers” hauled out.

Well, it’s over, it’s done, and the fine is 950 pounds — twice the cost of the airline ticket. “Well,” says the solicitor, when he comes downstairs afterward to meet me in the police cell, “that went well, didn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah,” I say, “terrific. Where do you think I’m going to get 950 pounds?”

“Oh” — he seems genuinely bewildered — “you don’t have to pay that, you know.”

“What?”

“No. You can serve it in time.”

“How much time?”

“Well, they can’t let a person out of prison on the weekends, so…” — he counts on his fingers — “I’d say, probably nine days?”

“Oh … well … nine days. What’s the difference? Can you get me back to the Scrubs?”

Of course it’s not as easy as that. The solicitor has many other derelicts to attend to, and I need to wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, and wait. Hours and hours and hours until there are finally enough people to warrant the departure of a bus. These buses are the most horrible things you have ever taken a ride in. Big white vans, like ice-cream trucks, only with tiny compartments, like telephone booths, where each prisoner, having been escorted thence in handcuffs, sits alone. It’s impossible to sit comfortably or even stably as these ghastly vehicles rock around London, tossing your body (and especially your head) into walls and windows. You think you’re going to die — you really do — and it’s made worse by the fact that most of the others are shouting and screaming, and demanding that the radio be turned up so they can hear Beyoncé. It takes an hour, minimum, for this van to go two miles.

I find myself thinking about Empress Alexandra of Russia, in 1918, being dragged from Tobolsk in a farmer’s cart to Ekaterinburg, where she met her death, and complaining in letters to her daughters that “the ride was rather bumpy.”

There were two really nice policemen at court. I told them what I’d done on the airplane and they said, “Not very clever of you.” Agreed. Then: “You know, you can bomb us, you can kill us, you can drag us into useless wars, you can rip us off — ”

I said: “Take the piss out of you, you mean.”

“Yeah. But you aren’t permitted to call us names. That is a crime!”

Great laughter. They said, “Shit, mate, get out of that stupid cell. Come on out and ‘ave a cuppa with us!” As I did — who wouldn’t? And we sat there for two or three hours waiting for that damned bus to get loaded up. They knew I was not a criminal, and not a “danger” to anyone but myself. Every now and then they had to clap the handcuffs on, if somebody “official” walked by, but it was far and away the nicest and most relaxing time I have had since I boarded that plane at JFK.

06/01/07: Interesting, I suppose, but not surprising, that as soon as a date of release is given, and a limit is set (a short limit, at that), the mind kicks up again in high gear — internal excitement and impatience. I will need to guard against this carefully over the next week. Tunes are running through my head again — this morning it’s the “Alleluja!” from Mozart’s “Exultate, Jubilate.” I think it’s going to be a tough week, with so much to do and no way to do it until I’m out.

The policeman at court yesterday confirmed to me what everyone knows — that “90 percent” of all the prisoners in the U.K. are banged up for something to do with drugs — using them, possessing them, dealing them, smuggling them and committing crimes in order to get them. Here, as at home, there is now a permanent class of people, not just “career criminals,” but “professional prisoners” (my phrase).

“Xiang,” a young Chinese man who wept on my shoulder in the shower one of my first mornings (which seems so long ago), finally tells me today that he’s here for trying to get out of the U.K., not for trying to stay there. He’s been in London for three years already, “studying English” (well, OK) — trouble was that he tried to leave the country on a forged passport. He is indignant and bewildered — facing six months, minimum — and says, “They’re always moaning and groaning about ‘illegal immigration,’ so the sensible thing would have been just to allow me to get home!”

Many things to solve: Money, ticket home, passport, pills…

OK — saw Xiang in the shower again today. He has the body of a god and the face of an angel, a sort of blurring mix of B.D. Wong and Joan Chen. I like to think that he took all of his clothes off because I had done it (most of them don’t, and Xiang didn’t the first time) — well, who showers in his underwear?

Answer: “the brothers,” the Muslims do. The physical modesty of Islamic males has been somewhat exaggerated, if you ask me, but there is a religious element to it, if they want — “cleanliness rituals” and so forth — and I realize, too, that probably a lot of them are just trying to get their shorts clean at the same time that they soap themselves (I do mine in the sink!). Stanton, who’s now across the hall, is of course his usual charming self. In the showers he’s singing “On the Street Where You Live.”

“I have often walked down this street before
But the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before…

08/01/07: After a while, as always with a “diary,” there’s nothing to say. I’m thinking about Nicholas II and all those Edwardian types who were trained to keep their journeaux intimes from earliest childhood, whether they had anything to report or not. So, Nicky: “Weather fine. Two degrees of frost. Shot 60 crow. Mama to tea,” etc. It was all about the discipline. My anxiety is much lessened, I slept well, woke only once or twice. Everyone on staff agrees that Friday will probably be the day — “Our prisons are very overcrowded.”

A young man named Nasar in my writing class entertains us — he is so talented you can barely believe it. Before we go in, he asks me, “They really put you up here for something like that?” — then launches into explanations about its sheer idiocy, “Imagine locking you up with a lot of criminals like me.” I say, “How criminal are you?” and he grins and says he’s here “for six to nine,” but doesn’t tell me why — later, that he’s in a “single” on “the Fours” for “everyone else’s protection.” He naturally starts to talk about “Islam” and what we call “jihad.” He says, “Look, when was the last time you saw a Nigerian suicide bomber? We’ll kill you, sure, but we’re not going to kill ourselves. How dumb do you think we are?” I have no answer for this. He gets quiet, then says, “Well, now you know what it’s like to be a black man.”

09/01/07: “Last day at Wormwood Scrubs.” Yesterday there was a dramatic escape from the prison — some “lifer” who faked an epileptic attack, and when the ambulance came to take him to the hospital, just 400 yards down the road, he’d arranged for several people on the outside, wearing masks and carrying A-47s, to overwhelm the guards and spring him free. Apparently this is his third escape [and they will catch him soon enough -- it seems to be the natural instinct of escaped prisoners to go directly back to wherever they came from -- usually a girlfriend -- the first place the police would look]. Anyway, everyone here is thrilled by it (including me), and now we know why they clamped us all down last night. HUGE noise in Britain about “the failure of the prison system,” but nobody has an answer.

Everything is going very fast. All kinds of official people appeared with forms, telling me that I will be released on Wednesday — not Friday, not next Monday — I guess once they’re through with you, they want you out. It is a shock. “Wednesday?! But I’ve just begun to get prepared…” Pills and the money I had sent to the bank … where are they? No one can say. It’s not that I don’t want to leave, it’s just that I don’t know how.

Tonight at treatments, a young, heavenly beautiful man, with dark hair, beard and gorgeous eyes, stares me straight in the face and says, “American. You’re American. I can tell just by looking at your face.” I have never seen him before and have not said a word, so he can’t tell by my accent. I figure German would be the best language to answer in, so I try it — “Na, Mensch, Du bist verrückt!” — but he says, “Oh, please, you are American and I know it.” I say, “Well, yes, then — and you? What are you doing here waiting for pills? What kind are they?” There is a long pause. Then he says: “Your enemy. I am your enemy.” All German leaves my head, and I say very loudly, “Not my enemy! Not mine!” He says, “Your country’s enemy, then. I am from Iran.” I am still in high heat: “Well, fine, but I have nothing to do with that — nothing to do with it!” He knows this and laughs: “Ah, but your Mr. Bush…”

I am terribly upset: “I had nothing to do with that either! I was one of Bush’s earliest critics, I write about this,” and he says, “Oh, come on. I am just teasing you. I know it is not you. The people of Iran love the people of America. The people of America love the people of Iran.” I say, “I hope you’re right. I hope it’s true on both sides, and ours in particular.” Then I launch in again to the story of my father and his Islamic wife — “Islam is in my family.” It’s amazing the effect this has on the Muslims, I really ought to write about it seriously someday.

For now, I get my pills, he gets his, and we never see each other again.

I say this not to slander the good citizens of Darien, New Canaan, Greenwich, etc., but only to make a point. If unhappiness could be measured like dollars in the till, you’d find as much of it here as anywhere else. And if gay liberation amounts, in the end, to a lawful ticket to depression and divorce — well, who am I to judge? I live in Vermont, the first state in America to allow some form of legal coupling between queers. This was the famous “civil union” bill, passed by our Legislature in 2001 under pressure from the state Supreme Court and signed into law by our (then) Gov. Howard Dean — “a certain former governor of Vermont,” as he was called on Thursday in the Christian Science Monitor by an unnamed Republican Senate aide.

“The fact that this is the headline in the news is something you can’t pay enough for if you’re Bush,” this aide went on, and I fear that he’s right: “It raises the profile of a controversial social issue that Republicans believe will work to their advantage.” If only for that reason, I’m against the codification of homosexual relations. I’m aware, more acutely than ever, that my community is under attack. If you doubt it, listen to the “Right Reverend” Robert Duncan, Episcopal bishop of Pittsburgh, who, during the recent flap over the appointment of an “openly gay” bishop in New Hampshire, said: “As is well known, promiscuity among homosexual men is not just the majority experience, it is the only experience. And even though divorce and promiscuity in America are rampant, the fact is that heterosexuals remain remarkably monogamous.”

And for as long as religious bigots and Republican swine condemn, obstruct and slander my own, I am forced, will-nilly, to break a lance for matrimony. But I don’t really buy it — I don’t buy it at all.

Remember, when they say “one man, one woman,” they mean one at a time. You can have as many as you want as long as you do it in order, i.e., my first wife, my second wife, “Cyndi” and little Ego Jr. — then long years of drooling idiocy and Viagra-popping to keep the old man’s plug in gear. There’s nothing sacred about that, I’m afraid. And until the defense-of-marriage people come down on divorce as hard as they do on gays, lesbians, women and abortions, their words will be as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.

Indeed, the chief result of Vermont’s dreaded civil union law has been to expose marriage for what it is — an economic enterprise and a statutory sham, based on a binding contract that, as Germaine Greer observed three decades ago in “The Female Eunuch,” wouldn’t hold up in a court of law for anything but marriage. Almost a third of Vermont’s civil unions have already ended in separation or divorce. The first gay couple whose “wedding” I attended broke up a week later, which only proves that fools are fools, that romantic delusion knows no sexual orientation, and that marriage, gay or straight, is good for business.

No sooner was Vermont’s law passed, in fact, than Susan Murray and Beth Robinson, the attorneys who represented the plaintiffs in the court case that brought it on, were advertising in Out in the Mountains, the state’s leading — indeed, only — “Forum for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Issues.”

“You’ve hired the caterer,” said Murray and Robinson, “settled on the music and flowers, reserved the date, and sent out the invitations. In planning your civil union, you haven’t forgotten anything.

“Or have you?”

Well, of course you have. You’ve “forgotten” all the things that aren’t actually written in a marriage contract — and thus a “civil union” contract — and which you won’t find out about until you try to break it. Why not get a “prenup,” just in case? Not that these hold up in court, either. They don’t, not if you have — that is, can afford — the right lawyer. As a matter of fact, we have them for sale! Isadora Duncan said it best in 1927: “Any woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.”

I supported civil unions when I thought they might be an alternative to marriage. I can’t if they’re only a substitution for marriage, specially created for “gay and lesbian individuals,” whatever those are, and so long as they fall back on the eternally phony cry of “The children!” for their justification. Here, I’m both with and not with the Massachusetts court decision — which stated that one reason to grant gay couples legal marriages was so that their children would be protected under the law. On the one hand, the decision plainly recognizes that any idiot can marry and that most of them do; on the other, it persists in believing that children are “better off” with two parents instead of one, or four, or eight.

There is no evidence whatsoever to support this. The nuclear unit has been a disaster for many children — isolating them, alienating them, imprisoning them, as often as not, with a pair of warring maniacs, caught in a struggle for love, power, money and “security” whose fuel is fear and whose goal is consumption.

So, all right, I’m a crank on this subject. The truth is I don’t give a damn about marriage and I haven’t ever since I got out of one — a marriage I entered sincerely and with the best intentions in what seems like another lifetime, but which no law and no contract could keep from unraveling. Neither could they shield “the parties” from pain, rancor and misunderstanding. It’s the nature of the beast, and no agreement, pre- or post-nuptial, will protect you from it. I’d hoped that the gay-marriage fight might lead to a reassessment of marriage itself, as an institution that’s plainly failing masses of people, but this doesn’t seem to be on either side’s dance card.

And now — what to do? When the religious right equates homosexuality with incest, alcoholism, bestiality and “disease,” I can’t be silent and I won’t be. When George W. Bush calls marriage “a sacred institution,” I know he’s talking through his Texan hat. (Just ask his brother, Neil. Better, ask Neil’s former wife, Sharon.) And when two grown men stand up in their tuxedos, holding hands and saying, “I do,” I’ll continue to roll my eyes and wonder why — why — why — my identity’s been stolen for this cause.

“Here I can keep the trophies and dangerous souvenirs I’ve collected from other worlds,” Superman explained. “Here I can conduct secret experiments with my super-powers and keep souvenirs of my best friends!” The fortress became a gimmick, convenient, for the retelling of tales, a window on Superman’s past adventures and a mirror of things to come. “I built it here in the polar wastes because the intense cold keeps away snoopers,” Superman said. Its precise location was never disclosed, only that it lay “in a region of ice and snow” and that no one would ever read the diary Superman kept there, a “gigantic book, made of metal,” which he wrote in Kryptonese with one of his fingernails, “while hovering in midair high off the Fortress floor.”

Apart from its “fabulous trophy room, housing the hard-won memorabilia of more than a thousand adventures,” Superman’s icebound lair — “the most glamorous hideaway in the entire universe!” — contained a secret laboratory, where he labored in vain to discover an antidote to kryptonite. There was also a zoo — an “interplanetary” zoo — and an array of exhibits, weapons, robots and tools, along with chambers dedicated to Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Perry White and Superman’s real and foster parents — Lara and Jor-El, late of Planet Krypton, and the Kents, Jonathan and Martha, whose fortuitous truck-ride on the outskirts of Smallville allowed them to rescue the future Man of Steel, one sunny afternoon, from what might have been a fatal landing in a burning rocket “right out of the funny papers,” as Jonathan Kent said.

It wasn’t until 1949 that the Fortress of Solitude finally got a name; in 1962, Supergirl moved in, along with Superman’s fiercest opponents — Brainiac, Mr. Mxyzptlk, Lex Luthor, etc. — who existed as figures in the “Hall of Enemies” and were kept in check by kryptonite detectors and “booby traps of an unspecified nature.” The effect was to have everyone in the Superman saga present all at once, on demand, next to the miniature city of Kandor, once the capital of planet Krypton, now reduced to microscopic size and preserved inside a bottle, its buildings intact, its inhabitants alive, going about their business as if nothing had happened and hoping that Superman, one day, might restore them to their natural dimension.

Alas, this was the one thing Superman couldn’t do, along with neutralizing kryptonite. From time to time, when it suited a plot, he managed to shrink himself down, hop in the bottle and pursue his adventures in the Kandor of old, but not for long, and not without risk. In fact, the past can never be recaptured, only re-created and experienced fresh. It’s a lesson Superman might have learned if he hadn’t known everything already, and it’s the message, if there is one, of Jonathan Lethem’s astonishing book — “that to find one’s art is to kill time dead with a single shot … Maybe to perfect a thing,” Lethem observes, “was to destroy it.”

“Like a match struck in a darkened room,” his novel begins: “Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl roller skates with white laces, tracing tentative circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o’clock on an evening in July.” These are the Solver sisters, Thea and Ana, shining “like a new-struck flame” in the eyes of Dylan Ebdus, the currently five-year-old hero/narrator/recollected protagonist of Lethem’s mighty “Fortress.” The sisters are blond and beautiful, strangers, like Dylan, in a rundown New York neighborhood made up principally of browns and blacks. It’s 1972 and the Solvers are “the new thing, spotlit to start the show … The girls murmured rhymes,” Dylan thinks, or “were murmured rhymes” — it’s hard to tell “in the orange-pink summer dusk, the air and light which hung over the street, over all of Gowanus like the palm of a hand or the inner surface of a seashell.”

Gowanus is a part of Brooklyn, of course, not Krypton or Kandor, and Lethem is the new poet of Brooklyn — the new Whitman, even, whose bold imagination and sheer love of words defy all forms and expectations and place him among this country’s foremost novelists. Five years in the making, “The Fortress of Solitude” is Lethem’s “spiritual autobiography,” proudly claimed as such and following magically on the heels of 1999′s award-winning “Motherless Brooklyn,” the novel that introduced a detective with Tourette’s syndrome to the United States and marked Lethem’s departure from the hybrid but definitely marginal genres in which he’d previously worked — mysteries, westerns and sci-fi’s, sometimes all three at once. To say that Lethem bends the rules, pushes the envelope and extends the possibilities of fiction is to state only part of the case. He’s defiant, delicious, in his refusal to be pinned.

“I’ve been really rewarded for what a lot of people in the past have been punished for,” Lethem said in a recent interview, “which is refusing to repeat myself … I think my growth since my first published story [in 1989] is much, much larger than my growth previous to it.” On the second page of “Fortress of Solitude,” Dylan Ebdus will accidentally kill a kitten, one of “five, six, seven” in a litter that “squirmed … among the rubble and fresh-planted vines and the musky ailanthus sheddings” of his Brooklyn backyard, not yet “gentrified” from lowly Gowanus into upscale Boerum Hill, but already changing from an authentic, coherent, real-life neighborhood into a remodeled world of chocolate lattes and yuppie restaurants, with names like “Breuklyn,” “Berlin” and “The Gowanus Tart Works.” Dylan’s parents are among the first white folks to arrive, as Lethem’s were in the early 1970s.

“Dylan was too young to understand what he’d done, except he wasn’t,” Lethem writes about the murdered kitten; his parents “hoped he’d forget, except he didn’t.” It’s hard for Dylan to recall, nevertheless, in this and other cases, “whether he’d been there and watched it himself or only heard every detail, burnished into legend.” Either way, he’s afflicted with guilt, not just about the kitten, but about his own white status, his “middle class,” his intrusion on what he knows, deep down, is not really his world. Dylan’s father is an angry, lonely, bohemian painter who spends most of his time in his studio — his fortress of solitude — working on a hand-painted film that will never be finished, “painting at his tiny lightbox, making his incomprehensible progress.” His mother is the exact opposite, a gregarious Brooklynite and incorrigible hippie, half-mad with desire, who will abandon her family, send Dylan to public schools to teach him what’s what, and toss him straight out the door to play on the street with whatever dark children might happen along. Some are friendly, some hostile, and some dangerous, but most — the lion’s share — are merely indifferent, like the city itself and its streets.

“Dylan didn’t recall giving out his name,” Lethem remarks at one point, “but everyone knew it and nobody cared what it meant. They might bother sometimes to mention that he looked like a girl but it wasn’t apparently his fault. He couldn’t throw or catch but that was just too bad. Not everyone could was the general drift.” Early on, Dylan discovers that there are “two worlds” to navigate, inside and out, and knows “that he’d felt a yearning preference already then, that before the years of seasons, the years of hours to come on the street … he’d wished for the Solver girls to sweep him away into an ecstasy of blondeness and matching outfits, tightened laces, their wheels barely touching the slate, or only marking it with arrows pointing elsewhere, jet trails of escape.”

But the girls never did that; instead, they moved away and left Dylan alone, the only white child on Dean Street. Soon, he meets a new neighbor, Mingus Rude, four months older and light years beyond, half-black, half-white, the son of a one-time Motown singer fallen on luxury and cocaine days. Mingus becomes Dylan’s best friend, mentor, protector, betrayer, lover and partner in crime and adventure. He’s a former boy scout and future crack addict whom Dylan wants to “read like a language,” to keep for himself, to emulate, imitate and eventually exculpate, when life, as it will, takes them down different roads. Together, Mingus and Dylan collect comic books, stolen from local bodegas. They play ball, go to school, jerk off and “tag” the walls and trains of New York with Mingus’ distinctive signature, “Dose” — graffiti art of a time and place now lost to all but the camera and the mind, memory’s silent shore. Add to this a “flying man” with delirium tremens and a magic ring that bestows superpowers on those who wear it — the power of flight, the gift of invisibility — and, along with Mingus’ plain brown corduroys, “anything was possible, really.”

“If,” says Lethem. “If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan’s pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, the summer wouldn’t give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, it was dark out, had been for hours.”

“The Fortress of Solitude” knows no literal, actual time, even though the first part, called “Underberg,” ranges more or less chronologically over Dylan Ebdus’s childhood, from his mother’s disappearance and his father’s awkward efforts to make up for her absence to the “yoking” and bullying Dylan endures on the street; his academic success; the arrival of Mingus Rude’s shiftless, bible-thumping grandfather; a languid summer in Vermont; the rise of disco, punk, rap, crack, and the cataclysmic turn of events that puts an end to childhood for Dylan and Mingus both. The book is a Bildungsroman in the exact sense, the story of Dylan’s self-development in the context of place and time. It’s also a comedy, a history and a fantasy, where the strange and supernatural mix freely with the solid and austere, as they do in life, in memory, in everyone’s autobiography.

“Second grade was first grade with math,” Lethem explains: “Fifth grade was fourth grade with something wrong. Nothing changed outright. Instead it teetered. You’d pushed futility at Public School 38 so long by then you expected the building itself would be embarrassed and quit.”

Or this: “It was entirely possible that one song could destroy your life. Yes, musical doom could fall on a lone human form and crush it like a bug. That song, that song, was sent from somewhere else to find you, to pick the scab of your whole existence. The song was your personal shitty fate, manifest as a throb of pop floating out of radios everywhere.”

And this, above all: “Dylan Ebdus’s friendship with Mingus Rude lived in brief windows of time, punctuation to the unspoken sentences of their days … By the time Dylan saw Mingus again what had happened in between was too much to explain, for either of them. For Dylan sensed that Mingus had his own secret burden, his own changed world beating away under the silence. There was nothing to do but pick up where they’d left off, pool what they still had in common.” All around are the towers of solitude, some real and some self-imposed — the Brooklyn House of Detention, the distant towers of the Manhattan skyline, Dean Street’s one “abandoned house” and the emotional void of Dylan’s grown-up years. When the narrative shifts, midway through, from Lethem’s voice to Dylan’s, it comes as a violent shock. But that’s adulthood, after all, when the mixed and melted images of youth get stuck in the fixations of a fully formed personality. Only by going back and undoing — re-creating — can Dylan be set free, and, even then, you don’t know to what.

“We were in a middle space then,” Lethem concludes, writing of Dylan and his father, but perhaps of Dylan, himself and us all, “in a cone of white … moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream.” Look inside the bottle, as Lethem does, and you’ll see that they’re all alive, not frozen, but moving, just waiting to be brought back to size.

The “Fearless Scholar” of “Out of the Flames” is the 16th-century Spanish physician, philosopher and mystical theologian Michael Servetus (1511-1553), the guiding spirit, though not an actual founder, of the Unitarian Church. The “Fatal Heresy” is Servetus’ denial of the doctrines of the trinity and original sin. And the very rare book, thought at the time of Servetus’ death to be the last copy in existence, is his “Christianismi Restitutio” (“The Restoration of Christianity”), which was strapped to his side when he was burned alive in Geneva in 1553, more or less at the connivance of his sworn enemy and Protestant rival, John Calvin.

You thought you knew about burning at the stake? You’ve haven’t read the Goldstones’ account. In the 16th century, burning was reserved exclusively for the crime of heresy, the worst on earth. “It was never over quickly,” the Goldstones write. Hollywood has it all wrong: “The whole point of burning at the stake was to subject the condemned to prolonged, horrible, unendurable pain.” Chained to a post, his neck bound with rope, Servetus was also forced to wear “a crown of straw, doused in sulphur,” at his execution. Green wood was used for the pyre, fresh-cut branches with the leaves still on them:

“The fire was lit. Green wood does not burn easily, does not roar up. It smokes and sputters, burning unevenly and slowly. And so Michael Servetus’ life was not extinguished quickly in a blazing wall of fire. Rather, he was slowly roasted, agonizingly conscious the whole time, the fire creeping upward inch by inch. The flames licked at him, the sulphur dripped into his eyes, not for minutes but for a full half hour. ‘Poor me, who cannot finish my life in this fire,’ the spectators heard him moan. At last, he screamed a final prayer to God, and then his ashes commingled with those of his book.”

Don’t the Goldstones write well? I guarantee you won’t read a more entertaining story this season — part biography, part history, part mystery and part plea for justice, told in a style so cheerful and clear that you can almost forget the hideous nature of Servetus’ fate. Other witnesses at his execution heard him cry out, “Jesu, thou Son of the eternal God, have mercy on me!” leading his enemies to say that if he’d only reversed the order of his words, from “Son of the eternal God” to “Eternal Son of God,” his heresy would have been resolved on the spot. Servetus would still be horribly dead, but the souls of the living would be safe from his error.

Mercifully, the Goldstones tell the story of Servetus’ death upfront, in their prologue; by the time he dies again, halfway through the book, they pass lightly over the details. The Goldstones are book collectors who write about books, and “Out of the Flames,” as promised, is as much about the fate of Servetus’ “Restitutio” as it is about Servetus himself. It’s also about the history of printing and publishing. It’s about humanism, scientific research and religious tolerance. It’s about Gutenberg, Luther, Erasmus, Voltaire, Catherine de’ Medici and Thomas Jefferson. “Out of the Flames” has something in it for everyone, including a happy ending — or beginning, since again the authors tell us, right off the bat, that three copies of Servetus’ work did escape the fire.

Indeed, without the survival of his writing, Servetus might have accomplished nothing in life apart from enraging Calvin, putting both the French and Spanish Inquisitions on his tail and earning himself a terrible fate. Born to the Spanish Catholic gentry in 1511 — at a time, the Goldstones report, when “the medieval world, the Renaissance, the Inquisition, the New World, and the modern world all met” — Servetus was marked in childhood as a prodigy and a brilliant mind: “By the time he was 13 years old, in addition to his native language, he could read French, Greek, Latin and, most significantly, Hebrew,” a forbidden language in most of Europe. “Knowledge of Hebrew meant that the Old Testament could be read in its original form,” the Goldstones explain — a dangerous idea, ultimately, on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant line.

Growing up in Spain, with its large population of Jews and Muslims, Servetus’ doubts about the Trinity took shape early — three gods in one, he thought, made the infidel harder to convert. Later, as feared, he read the Bible and discovered “not one word about the Trinity, nor about its Persons, nor about Essence, nor about a unity of the Substance.”

In time, Servetus would compare the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost to Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the entrance to Hell in classical mythology. All his life, he was frank with his opinions and brash in his remarks — it was a mocking correspondence with Calvin that later got him burned. “Servetus was so smart,” the Goldstones assert, “that it never seemed to occur to him that his arguments would be more effective if he didn’t imply that anyone holding an opposing view was an idiot.” From the beginning, “he learned to identify with the outcast.”

Servetus’ career followed the same veering course of all religious reformers and iconoclasts, taking him first to the University of Zaragossa, where he entered the service of the Franciscan friar Juan de Quintana, and later to Italy, when Quintana was appointed confessor to the Habsburg emperor Charles V. Having recently put Rome to the torch, Charles chose Bologna for his coronation, “the largest, grandest, most lavish affair of its time, a kind of inaugural ball, millennium party, and royal wedding all rolled into one.”

The sack of Rome was widely regarded as the judgment of God visited on a Catholic hierarchy that had teemed with corruption for centuries, and in Bologna Servetus saw all he could stand of popes and princes. The pope was an agent of Satan, he would shortly conclude, and the papacy the devil’s way of preventing the return of Christ. “Oh, the most evil of beasts,” Servetus cried, “harlots most shameless.” He joined the Protestant movement more or less on the spot.

For most of the rest of his life, Servetus was either in hiding or on the run: “Any remaining moderation he felt had been excised.” Heading first to Basel, a Protestant stronghold where his penchant for reckless religious argument ultimately forced his departure, Servetus moved next to Strasbourg, in mainly Catholic France, where he wrote “De Trinitatis Erroribus” (“On the Errors of the Trinity”) and got himself sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition.

“Not yet understanding the degree of animosity he had evoked,” the Goldstones note ruefully, “but seeing only how his book was on everyone’s lips, Servetus, like any new author buoyed by success, began sending out review copies. He tried to get quotes from Erasmus and Luther.” In Servetus’ day, however, buzz could kill.

When the Inquisition sent his own brother to entice him back to Spain, however, Servetus got the point — “I was sought up and down to be snatched to my death,” he complained. The Spanish heretic “Miguel Serveto” now moved to Paris and changed his name to “Michel de Villeneuve,” an identity that served him well for 20-odd years, until the publication of his “Restitutio,” his entrapment by Calvin and his death at the stake.

In the end, Servetus’ heretical pronouncements argued less for a rejection of the trinity than for its reevaluation. He rejected the dual nature of Christ, arguing that he had one nature, at once divine and human, and was not a separate aspect of the godhead but was God come to earth. Unlike Calvin, Servetus didn’t think that human beings are born depraved; thus, he couldn’t accept the redemptive meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection. Grace, moreover, wasn’t available to only a preselected few, as Calvin believed, but to all people with intelligence and will. “I say therefore that God himself is our spirit dwelling in us,” Servetus declared, “and this is the Holy Spirit … There is in our spirit a certain working latent energy, a certain heavenly sense, a latent divinity and it bloweth where it listeth and I hear its voice and I know not whence it comes nor whither it goes.”

It was this liberal line of thought, combined with the cruelty and injustice of his death, that endeared Servetus to the nascent Unitarian movements in Poland and Transylvania and later crossed the ocean to inspire the Deists and freethinkers of America’s Colonial age. “I confidently expect that the present generation will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the United States,” Jefferson predicted in 1822 — wrongly, of course.

According to the Goldstones, years of liberal religion in America left its practitioners still combing the Scriptures for guidance: “They had gotten so used to dissecting, parsing, and endlessly reinterpreting biblical phrases that they stopped doing anything else.” It was Emerson, say the Goldstones, who turned this trend around and “shifted the emphasis back from the mind to the soul.”

I’m leaving out big chunks of the story here. The Goldstones have built their narrative like a wheel, with the spokes aiming outward from Servetus at the center. No sooner are they through with Gutenberg, who died broke, than they’re on to Fust and Schoeffer, early printers in Mainz, who produced the first Gutenberg Bible and made a bundle on the deal. Next comes public literacy and the sudden dissemination of printed material in Europe, which leads the Goldstones to humanism, Luther, Paracelsus and, after Servetus’ death, to the Great Fire of London, the Empress Maria Theresa, the French revolution and those later physicians who, long after Servetus first discerned it, confirmed his observations about the circulation of blood through the lungs. This was “perhaps the single most important statement about the workings of the human body in 1500 years,” and a discovery for which Servetus rarely receives his full share of credit.

But Servetus had “a genius for indiscretion,” as the Goldstones know. He also believed that the devil entered the body through the lungs and that there were “Satanic” rituals of human sacrifice at the root of infant baptism. He practiced astrology, finding it “laughable that medical professors were too shortsighted to grasp that the stars affected the timing of cures.” And it’s doubtful that any contemporary Unitarian, no matter how ardent or New Age-y, could accept Servetus’ staunch belief that his patron and namesake, Michael the Archangel, would end the world himself and redeem its souls, sometime around 1585. The Goldstones can’t really be faulted for minimizing the loopier qualities of this astonishing martyr: They have so many interesting stories to tell, it’s hard to know where to begin.