THE GRAYBAR HOTEL: STORIES

Fiction


The petty and profound

THE GRAYBAR HOTEL: 
STORIES

By Curtis Dawkins

224 pp. Scribner

Reviewed by Sarah Corbett Morgan

Who would imagine that a murderer serving life without parole would have an MFA in writing and create masterful short stories? Not I, that’s for sure, but this is exactly who Curtis Dawkins is. His new collection of 14 short stories, The Graybar Hotel, destroys other assumptions about prisoners and prison as well. 

This funny, sad, heartwarming and just plain astonishing book is Dawkins’ first published collection. He has published essays and shorts previously in several literary magazines where his publisher discovered his short stories.  

It’s unclear how many of these are autobiographical; they take us from the beginning of incarceration—jail—to a court trial, the judge speaking to a defendant via closed-circuit TV, a bus transfer to a Michigan state prison, and then a life inside. We know from the acknowledgments at the back of the book that Dawkins was convicted of first-degree murder in a botched robbery in 2004 and is serving his life sentence in the same Michigan system where these stories are based.  

Some are written in first- and some in third-person, and he even throws in a bit of magical realism in one short where a prisoner practices disappearing. All of them take us inside the thoughtful and profoundly observant mind of Dawkins, who uses his time, his talent, a state-issued floppy ink pen, and his fellow inmates to create stories that haunt. He captures the unfurling of time served and to be served—the petty and profound and the long days of tedium.

In the first story, “County” the narrator says, “I’m not in prison yet. I’m in jail.” Jail is where you go while awaiting trial and during a trial. Prison is the Big House. The character knows he will be awaiting trial for a long time and spends a good deal of it curled up in a corner detoxing. 

In “Human Number” the prisoner is bored, so he begins cold-calling people. Collect. It’s surprising, he says, how often people will accept the charges—after all, the calls are ID’d as coming from jail. It makes him think it's because so many Americans have relatives locked up these days. He’s also learned to say a cool, anonymous “Hey it’s me” so they accept faster. They also pay because people love to talk. He listens past the callers’ voices, straining to hear the sounds of their houses. Kids playing, stray outside noises, traffic, a neighbor playing a piano, birds, and once, the mumbled conversation of a demented woman who forgets the phone, lays it on the table, takes a cake out of the oven, and speaks lovingly to it. Normalcy. Freedom.   

Dawkins creates a cornucopia of characters with monikers like Kitty-Kat, Peanut, Little D, and Popcorn. He writes of men who lose all hope and figure out ways to die (challenging guards in the yard watch towers), men who suffer as family on the outside become sick or die and they are unable to be there for them, violent men, humble men. He also writes about bartering systems, TV soaps, baseball, debts, hand-rolled cigarettes, homemade candy, tats, and liars. Prison is full of them. “When fucked-up people end up in prison they can be whoever they want,” says one of his characters. Some are better at lying than others, and a healthy dose of skepticism by cellmates is a requirement. Dawkins deals with all of them with compassion and insight. And humor. 

Unlike Jack Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast, I didn’t sense anger on Dawkins’ part, and he certainly doesn’t blame others for his incarceration. In his acknowledgments, he says that he struggles with his guilt, so overwhelming at times he feels he might explode. “But, you learn within twenty-four hours of hearing a prison door slam shut, either you will die regretting the past or you’ll learn to live in the present.” He has a lot of it stretching out ahead of him and all the material he needs; I will be looking for more of his stunning and provocative work.