Museum Piece

  My cellmate Duane showed me the oldest jar of Noxzema I have ever seen. He pulled a cardboard box from under the bunk, put it aside, and then pulled out the box behind that. As he rummaged through its contents, long, thin strands of brown and gray hair dangled in his face. His hair was a remnant of his past, a piece of the 1980s that he kept since 1991 when he was convicted of felony murder.

  He handed me the Noxzema, a golf ball-sized navy blue plastic jar with the label long ago peeled off. With the lid unscrewed, I could see the yellowed contents of what was once bright white. It had never been used, leaving the product a perfect dallop of what had come to look like warm margarine. But, it still had that distinct aroma shared by nothing else in the world. I can only describe it as a mixture of cologne and chlorine, powerful enough to linger in that jar for thirty years.

  Duane came to prison at the age of eighteen as a perfect specimen of the late-eighties era. He had a mullet, rocked out to big hair bands, and drove a '72 Dodge Polara, a car he describes as a "boat with wheels" for its width, adding that he could watch the gas guage go down as he stepped on the accelerator.

The closest I came to seeing the yound Duane was through the old photos in his worn-out album. In one image he was standing next to his prom date. Even though Duane was much younger and all dressed up, there was something familiar in his expression. His face said, "I'm surrounded by idiots." Now Duane and the Noxzema are a matching set, and in very similar condition.

  The twelve year sentence I received pales in comparison to what Duane's reality has been for the last three decades. During the first few months I shared a cell with him, I wanted to know if he felt the years slip away like sand through his fingers, like I did. I had to know what thirty years of this life felt like to him: thirty years of cheap fabrics, metal toilets, and dinners of slop. So I asked him.

  He said it wasn't always like this. The food used to be good. Before the state allotted only sixty-five cents per inmate meal, they used to serve quality meat, a variety of fruits, all the milk you could drink, and they had salads at dinner. Real salad, he added, with cucumber and tomato. Not just the handful of tepid iceberg lettuce they began to serve us once a month. These were the days when a prisoner could still spend a weekend with his family in a trailer and receive care packages of food and clothing. Duane said that in a way, I was lucky to come to prison after everything good stopped, that I did not know how much better it could be.

  After seeing incarceration from Duane's perspective, and serving almost seven years myself, I see the experience differently. It's not a shocking thing to hear about anymore. As prisoners, we all suffer the same effects of incarceration, both the obvious and the unexpected, even if we can't always put it into words. The old Noxzema spoke the words I could not find. Whether it's the stress, the change in diet, the hard water, or the ubiquitous grime in prison, something in here is not good for the skin. This was true in 1991 as it is today, and Noxzema reminds me of that. Of all the assorted cosmetics and remedies inmates use to preserve their visage, Noxzema stands out to me the most. The aroma instantly and too briefly takes me to a more youthful time. The passage of time in between feels heavier in these moments. They make me feel the surprising distance of my memories. Duane's old jar of Noxzema became a valuable artifact of incarceration. This reminder of the adjustment to prison was like a window through time, a little museum piece. I hope Duane keeps it forever. It is important we remember our journeys through prison, whether we carry them in Noxzema jars, heavier hearts, or the lines on our faces.