The Personal Blog of Byron Case

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Like Oxygen
2008-04-08 03:18:00
She jokes that it's "airport affection" ? the kiss we're permitted when she arrives, the all-too-brief embrace, and the same when she leaves. In-between, our hands remain clasped almost constantly to the other's. Everything else is ephemeral: the lingering, wordless stares, the variegated conversation, the easy laughter. By the time she has to go our faces ache from all the smiling. These are visits. Our telephone calls are virtually a nightly event. The background noise here is not insubstantial, and I know that sometimes she must think there's a riot breaking out, but oftentimes I am so lost within the high vowels and tiny fire of her voice I don't even notice. Let them shout and carry on; I am a man deafened by love. And here is something I never before told her: many have been the times I close my eyes, the clunky handset passed tightly to my ear, and concentrate on assembling a precise mental picture of everything at her end of the line. I imagine myself there, a part o...
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Joe
2008-03-26 04:25:00
It is freeze dried and comes in a resealable yellow bag that proclaims "100% Colombian." Conveniently omitted are specifics, as though, at least where coffee production is concerned, the country is peerless in its inability to do wrong. The dubious provenance becomes all the more worrisome at first taste, which assaults with a body of what can only be described as meatiness before fading to a distinct note of soy sauce. Could they have been rejected beans from another, more finicky brand? Do the fields they were grown in lie adjacent to a reservoir of industrial run-off? Does Monsanto have a presence in Colombia? (An absurd question; never mind.) Assuming nothing, this terroir is still a terror. The canteen sells four brands of coffee ? Taster's Choice, Folgers, Nescafé, and this yellow-bag stuff. It's all instant, all representative of varying degrees of unpleasantness, but this one is by far the most popular. Price pays a larger role than palate; most inmates will spring for ...

The List
2008-03-09 17:56:00
In a "Talk of the Town" item from the New Yorker's January twenty-eighth issue, much was made of the reading list of folk rock icon Art Garfunkel. Since 1968, Garfunkel has kept a record of every book he's read ? all one thousand and twenty-three of them, all in chronological order. Given today's profusion of frantic schedules and the apparent decline of interest in the written word, his average of just over two books a month is laudable and impressive. It also got me thinking about my own reading habits and why I've not kept a list of my own. Having taken to avid reading at a young age, there have been very few times in my life when at least one book was not to been seen atop my desk, beside the bed, or in my hands at some stage of mid-read. By age twenty, keeping my bookshelves from overflowing was already a struggle: if left to the voracious acquisitiveness of my literary appetite and perpetual willingness to learn, the shelves would become unruly and start to bow under ...
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With Apologies To Hasbro.
2008-02-27 05:19:00
The prison canteen doesn't sell SCRABBLE sets, so we made our own. Tiles, stenciled and meticulously cut, came from the backing of a forty-two-cent writing tablet. A grid, drawn on a legal-size file folder, glued to the reverse of a checkers board and shaded with colored pencils became a passable simulacrum of Hasbro 's. The process took days ? me lettering and coloring, my cellmate, Jay, gluing and cutting. The thought crossed our minds, but we stopped short of coating the tiles with floor wax to make them smoother and appealingly shiny. We got a copy of The Official SCRABBLE Players' Dictionary, Third Edition to settle challenges. The Official Word List, that SCRABBLE aficionado's bible, was beyond our ability to acquire, owing to the prison's restrictive mail policies. We made lists for ourselves of every playable two-, three-, and four-letter word. We did drills. We anagrammed relentlessly, often unconsciously. We read about fanatical tournament players in the compel...

Bare Necessities
2008-02-17 06:42:00
The prison canteen doesn't sell SCRABBLE sets, so we made our own. Tiles, stenciled and meticulously cut, came from the backing of a forty-two-cent writing tablet. A grid, drawn on a legal-size file folder, glued to the reverse of a checkers board and shaded with colored pencils became a passable simulacrum of Hasbro's. The process took days ? me lettering and coloring, my cellmate, Jay, gluing and cutting. The thought crossed our minds, but we stopped short of coating the tiles with floor wax to make them smoother and appealingly shiny. We got a copy of The Official SCRABBLE Players' Dictionary, Third Edition to settle challenges. The Official Word List, that SCRABBLE aficionado's bible, was beyond our ability to acquire, owing to the prison's restrictive mail policies. We made lists for ourselves of every playable two-, three-, and four-letter word. We did drills. We anagrammed relentlessly, often unconsciously. We read about fanatical tournament players in the compel...
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A Tragedy At Ten: Justin
2007-10-24 16:54:00
He broke my cigarette. Just like that: took it and snapped it in half and laid the two pieces on the table like it was the most natural thing in the world. Then he asked to bum another. We started talking, of course, because how do you not strike up a conversation with someone approaching you in a coffee house that way? At midnight, after closing the place out, we carried our talk outside to the cold February sidewalk. It had begun to lightly snow. “You like tea?� he asked, looking at the sky distractedly, then wiping the moisture from his thick-framed glasses with his T-shirt. “Black?� “Sure. Is there another kind?� A friendship was inevitable. The irony now is that, as I sit here writing, I have to little to say about who Justin was as a person. He was a couple of years older than me – nineteen – and willfully eccentric. Most people who knew him might say he lived to make people laugh. If that meant exploiting his quirks, he’d do it. The way he’d ar...
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A Tragedy At Ten: Anastasia
2007-10-22 14:53:00
A full decade now, and the ever-widening wake of her death laps onward, continuing to rock and capsize in spite of the distance. Meanwhile, her memory on our horizon gradually melds with the glare of the sun. Though the precision with which I do so has been dulled with time, I will not ever forget her. Even as we strive to hang on to those we have lost, remember them just as they were, it is a failing of our minds to truncate and generalize our every recollection until, eventually, all we are left with are a few hazy snapshots, some, if we are lucky, slightly more vivid than others. This is what I remember most about her: her wide, white smile of rounded teeth; the way her narrow shoulders hunched as she laughed, when her head would dip slightly forward with the single, clear “HA!� like a small dropped glass. Always so easy to laugh, but so stingy with it, like she were being taxed for each additional peal. I used to strain so hard to elicit more – a sustained chuckle, a bo...
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Double Life, Part Two
2007-09-30 21:53:00
The rewards of my job at the bistro were to be found at the end of the evening, when I carried out a backpack full of baguettes, butter, and Styrofoam containers of soup. On my bike and out of the parking lot, I’d take a right down an alleyway, hardly three feet wide, between the aging brick buildings of Old Westport. The alley widened after fifty feet or so, and there, cloistered by the back sides of popular businesses in the trendy entertainment and shopping district, was an alcove in which a single wrought iron bench faced a narrow tree, both murkily lit by one sulfurous lamp. In those waning days of the summer of ’96, it was a favored place for homeless teens to loiter. Melvin, Kim, Joe, Elise, Doc, Dave – I remember them all well, and at least the faces of so many more. Some had come to Kansas City with the intention of staying; others considered it only a temporary stopover on their way to Portland, that great indigent Mecca so renowned for its agreeable year-round w...
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Double Life, Part One
2007-09-09 18:51:00
Twelve years ago, when I was not quite seventeen, I was paid a pittance to host at a little bistro of hazily European persuasion, in Kansas City. Its cramped kitchen was closed during the day; the place served coffees and light refreshments until late afternoon, relying more on the patronage of the shop in front, which dealt in imported candies and tinned goods, gourmet cheeses and sausages. Passing through the shop, diners were tempted with a savory selection of coffee beans, neatly wrapped Swiss and German chocolates, and rack after rack of wine – from middle-of-the-road Chardonnays to pricier vintage Shiraz. To walk down an aisle, one almost had to turn sideways, to keep from knocking anything off the shelves. The refrigerated glass counter that ran along the left, the length of the shop, bore an obscene variety of delectably fatty foodstuffs that would make any cocktail party or gallery opening the talk of the country club. Several long strides through the front door would car...
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A Compulsory Recollection
2007-08-30 21:36:00
On a wet night in April, windows down at seventy-eight miles per hour, came the smell of cedar – my father’s closet – and I, entirely unprepared for it, pulled to the shoulder, my face suddenly dampened by something other than the rain.All content is (c) Byron C. Case.

Par Avion
2007-08-18 21:44:00
The card depicts Notre-Dame at dusk, in all its twelfth-century glory, rendered orange by the western sun. In the foreground runs the Seine, the haze of street lamps reflecting from the bank. Their light is emerald on the water and dappled, making visible the subtle, intricate machinations of the current. I have stood on those ivied banks – right there, in the presence of antiquity – though it has been years, and the card’s sender had no way of knowing this. She and I have never met, nor, indeed, exchanged any words at all. We are strangers in the truest sense, only now linked, however tenuously, by this simple token of kindness from one human being to another.I receive these cards from all over the world – Australia, Texas, Germany, South Africa – signed with compassion, solidarity, or sympathy, and always with a little note to keep my head up, to stay strong, to remember the impermanence of all things. They never fail to bring me a sliver of happiness. It is too easy a t...
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Jamaica, 1987
2007-08-18 21:43:00
My father and I entered the warm water of mid-afternoon from the beach equipped only with his flippers, goggles and snorkel, and an inflatable pool raft with a slender bit of rope knotted to it. He was still in his thirties, still of average build, and wore the green trunks that were old then, yet would make an appearance ten years later on our final canoe trip. My trunks were red and, because I was only seven - too young for real adventure stories - devoid of such provenance. Both of us, as well as my mother, bore the darkened skin and sun-bleached hair of Yankees gradually succumbing to the siren song of the Caribbean: glorious scenery, welcoming people, the casual ethos, the culinary pleasures. I still get cravings for authentic jerk pork and an icy bottle of Ting.Our mission that particular day was primal hunter-gatherer stuff. We would swim out in search of conchs (large marine mollusks) to gather up, return to the beach, beat them from their shells in an exhausting and somewha...
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Shedding Light on Pitch Darkness ("You Dirty Pitch")
2007-08-18 21:42:00
On May twenty-first at six AM, a short, crude write-up about my MySpace presence appeared on pitch.com, the online version of a free Kansas City weekly. Of its perhaps five hundred words, slightly more than half are the author's own. The rest are quotes, either from this blog or from the Pitch 's original article about my case (a sensationalist front-page piece ominously titled "Cemetery Plot," which appeared in the paper five years ago). The author's half, such as it is, consists of hastily-drawn conclusions and trite observations unbecoming a man who presumably boasts the title "journalist." Still, it raised some eyebrows. The author, one Peter Rugg, first met my mother at a recent benefit for the Midwestern Innocence Project, where they spoke for a time about my case. Mr. Rugg wanted information too detailed for my mother to outline, so she handed him a flier and directed him to freebyroncase.com to do his homework. A few days later, he sent her an e-mail requesting she...
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Basking
2007-08-18 21:42:00
I was basking today. Not in the sunlight of an unseasonably warm day, though it has been one, but in the shade of the maintenance building where I work. (The sun and I don't get along; we have an understanding.) There was nearby chatter and the occasional clanking of metal and, every so often, a whiff of smoke on the otherwise healthy breeze. The golf cart in which I sat alone was parked in a row with others outside the garage, where, ordinarily, there would be none - everyone normally bustling about with parts for this or that, fetching equipment, answering work orders. The weather had left us impotent, torpid. We had done our work, made our rounds. By shortly after noon we had resigned ourselves to outright laziness. The smell in the air was that of spring: light and moist with the imminence of rain. It was bright; my eyes, unwilling to cooperate, were strained and began closing involuntarily against the midday light, so I permitted them the briefest of rests between gl...

Lunch
2007-08-18 21:41:00
Fifteen minutes to eat, but who times us and how precise their methods remains undetermined. Some days it seems like only five, others a half-hour. I shuffle with the rest of the herd through the dining hall door, in from a frigid northern wind, and patiently wait as the line winds its way past the tiny hole from which the trays are served. This is by now routine, although in my initial weeks here each trip up to that capacious, halogen-lit room was a frightening excursion into foreign territory. Today, I have my own regular seat. Today's five slots of ostensibly nutritious pap are potato soup, a grilled cheese sandwich, five bean salad, canned corn, and a banana. It is far from the worst meal offered. Behind me stands Larry, a pale, portly farm boy who lives in my wing. He is fifty, though he looks older, and serving a sentence of life without parole. He is talking - that molasses-slow falsetto of a voice - about comic book characters, and I am only half listening. "Of...
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Morning Nostalgia
2007-08-18 21:40:00
White. And there are only trucks down on the interstate as I look to the east at the murky sun. Between there and here lies an improbable distance - maybe a third of a mile - hyphenated by a fence, electric, razor-wired, and aglitter with ice. Within the prison the snow is clean and undisturbed, save but four sets of footprints left by the bundled corrections officers during the nightly perimeter checks, and if I angle my head sufficiently downward the fence and the prints and even the walls of my cell fade into the periphery and the drift beneath my narrow window becomes all I can see. Standing there like this, my cellmate silently breathing in his sleep a couple of feet away, I see the crystals at the crest of the drift one facet at a time as each momentarily casts the morning rays. The perfect ridge is close. I could reach out and grasp a handful, I realize, were it not for this thick plexi-glass. It is prison's familiar torture: looking with mandatory detachment while never bei...
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Beginning
2007-08-18 21:39:00
In considering what my first blog entry should consist of, I thought long and hard. What sorts of things, I wondered, could I write about that the average person would not consider tedious and uninteresting? After all, I'm writing from prison, where day-to-day life is largely regimented and therefore quite uneventful. Somehow, I manage to write several longish letters every week to friends and family, however, and those are universally reported as enjoyable, so I must be doing something right. Perhaps, if I'm able to write those letters, I will be able to find subject matter for an online readership, too. Then again, it's entirely possible no one will ever pay this any mind and it will remain one of the millions of disregarded pages on the web, gradually being cultivated for an audience of none. We'll see.While I don't intend to use this space to address the various controversies surrounding my conviction (there's already a site freebyroncase.com for that), it is inevitable th...