HOW SOON IS NOW?

It happens more often than I’d like, triggered by songs while on the way to my prison job: that glassy-eyed expression, that emptiness in my heart. The music takes me back to where I am now: I am the son / and the heir / Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar / I am the son and heir / Of nothing in particular.

I teach the helpless, the misguided—the convicted. But my mind drifts to a sunken dance floor where a twenty year-old version of me moves across the floor without a care in the world.  It’s a Sunday night, the 80’s, most patrons are sitting at the bar, a few are dancing—I think of it as “independent play.”

The lyrics seem clearer; I understand the message; I feel the burn in my eyes and in my nose. I turn up the volume on my car stereo. I sing along, my voice shaky:

You shut your mouth

How can you say

I go about things the wrong way

I am Human and I need to be loved

Just like everybody else does

I feel numb to my surroundings, as if the reverb from Johnny Marr’s guitar has entered my soul. My twenty-year old arms swing with reckless abandon on that sunken dance floor, but my forty-nine-year-old foot taps the accelerator, disengaging the cruise control, slowing me down.

There’s a club, if you’d like to go

You could meet somebody who really loves you

So you go, and you stand on your own

And you leave on your own

And you go home

And you cry

And you want to die

But I’m alive and in better physical shape and I’m working and moving forward and the holidays are fast approaching. I’m not too far from the correctional facility. I’m searching for the entrance through the fog.

When you say it’s gonna happen now,

When exactly do you mean?

See I’ve already waited too long

And all my hope is gone

I suck it up; I’ve sucked it up for twenty-some years. I put my game face on. It’s a short work week behind the razor-wired fences and gun-towers. I have plenty to be thankful for. We all have plenty to be thankful for. Damn Morrisey. Damn The Smiths. “How soon is now?”