Many Happy Returns

Dear Doug,

I'm placing this note on your side of the basin as a reminder that twenty-five years ago we entered the state penitentiary at Port-au-Prince. Happy Anniversary! I raise our shared drinking gourd to you!

Occupying a 2- x 3-meter cell with you for the past quarter-century has certainly been one of the most memorable experiences of my life. I feel I have come to know you well. Extremely well. I am familiar with your SAT scores (lower than mine), your high school class rank (higher than mine), your less than wholesome relationship with your boyhood neighbor in suburban Maryland, and above all, I've come to realize how deeply you value time alone.

Initially, upon entering prison, you were cold, refusing to answer my most basic questions or even to acknowledge me. I thought you held me responsible for our not spending Spring Break 1984 in Fort Lauderdale, but then remembered that that was your decision. Possibly you resented my suggesting we smoke marijuana that afternoon in Jacmel. I can only reiterate now what I told you then: I was woefully unaware of the severity of Haitian drug laws.

After a frosty four years, you gradually began to warm to me and no longer spurned my offers to shield you with the "curtain" when you defecated. In many ways, you are an ideal cellmate. I've grown to admire the dainty manner in which you eat your millet, the care you take to polish our basin, and the way you never forget Halloween (though you are curiously reluctant to celebrate Independence Day and insist on tearing down the red, white, and blue streamers with which I festoon the bars of our cell).

I've learned to live with your morning grumpiness just as you've tried (unsuccessfully) to hide your agitation while I attempt to master the harmonica. I've confided to you my dream of someday owning a chain of hearing aid stores in a state with no or low income tax while you've wondered if the small mineral hammer your brother smuggled to you will penetrate the prison walls (it won't).

The night you were gang-raped was a low point. In retrospect, I was unwise to voice to Jean-Louis and his friends the racial theories Charles Murray explicated in his seminal work, "The Bell Curve." For many months afterward (seventeen), you kept me at a distance. I felt your cold stare on me and knew not what to do. I was at sea, Doug, unmoored and adrift. During this period you expressed a wish to be transferred to a Russian prison "where the tubercular rate would be higher." My observation that, given your struggles with Creole, you would surely find Cyrillic a challenge, fell on deaf ears. Ultimately, you emerged from your shell. I'll never know if the gingham tablecloth I fashioned from a pair of pajamas did the trick, but I like to think so.

Of course, we have regrets. Though with the worsening economy and the current college admissions craze (applications up 14% this year at Yale and private college counselors charging $600 per hour), perhaps it's best that we neither reside in the United States nor have children.

Occasionally, I still sense a sullen anger in you, particularly on Wednesday afternoons preceding latrine duty, and I must tell you that this is counterproductive. Our lawyer shares my sentiments and is aware of your impatience when he explains that the wheels of Haitian justice turn slowly.

On this special day, let's not dwell on what troubles us, but look at the upside of our incarceration and treasure what we have: three square meals a day (except on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and during periods of social unrest), a brand-new tarp stuffed with farm-fresh straw, one of the best climates in the Northern hemisphere, a complimentary subscription to "Granta" courtesy of the prison librarian, and, most of all, each other.