Bash Compactor: This Won’t Be the Day That I Die
I dont think Ive ever actually been on the list before. So when the slip of a girl guarding the door scanned her clipboard, checked off a name and smiled at me, a shiver ran down my spine. She directed me to a subterranean level of The Lambs Club, where guests at a cocktail party celebrating the true story Killing Time already packed the bar.
The only things more glamorous than the company were the Hudson Whiskey ginger highballs, each athletically shaken by a showy young bartender. Black-clad wait staff vended petite bruschetta and glasses of anonymous red and white wine from silver platters. In a room so small, two feet made the difference between receiving service and being adrift in a culinary desert.
Hostess Brooke Geahan quieted the chatter and gave us a 10-minute warning about the panel and monumental discussion so boldly promised on the invitation. Spontaneous silence followed, as if the guests had finally realized that we were really gathered to consider the death penalty, and engaging in gossip beforehand was in bad taste. Lemony gold rushes served in champagne glasses fortified the crowd for the coming severity.
John Hollway explained of his book Killing Time, Once I heard [the story], there was no way I could not tell it. The wrongly accused death row subject of the book, John Thompson, was a New Orleans boy from his Southern drawl to his baggy T-shirt. He wandered through his horrific, 18-year saga of appeals and prosecutorial misconduct, then beseeched, Im begging that yall make that book number one. Public Interest author and lawyer Mark Green identified, The problem is that myth beats fact. People want to believe that if youre arrested, youre probably guilty.
In a gravely bedtime story voice, panelist Louis Lapham told tales of Thomas Paine and quoted Mark Twain to tie American admiration of Clint Eastwood to the practice of the death penalty. Geahan cried and fanned her mascara as she thanked Thompson for coming to an event with all these beautiful people.
After the briefest of question periods, we broke for more boozing and schmoozing. James, a gossip blog intern who wouldnt give up his last name or place of employ, guessed that the elevator music playing too loudly over the sound system was a song to calm the heart after its been stirred by deep passions. My hearts not calm, but I think its the lemon juice. Im a bumpkin I have to go take a Valium.
Mark Bernstein, an intern for Laphams charming but prohibitively expensive quarterly magazine, became as cerebral as he was intoxicated. He elucidated on disingenuous responses to tragedies of justice: To see the one case and bleed your heart over it... its not just this guy. Its a lot of people. He argued that incremental change only kept society afloat without really changing anything for the multitude of the wronged.
At half past 10, the bar closed and the remaining dozen nursed one last drink before leaving this bubble of glamorous intellectual activism. I ended up in an elevator with Thompson and his wife, who laughed loudly about finding a po-boy catfish sandwich anywhere but New Orleans and swished along the dark wood corridors of the Chatwal Hotel in a grey and pink tracksuit. Outside, Thompson blew kisses to the huddle of smoking guests as he and the missus disappeared onto Sixth Avenue.
I left the party feeling both more stupid and more cultured than when I arrived. I didnt end the death penalty, or even buy the book, but I did soak up the atmosphere of refined, cultured activism, and see how the people who are always on the list intend to affect change. Perhaps one of the countless lawyers at the party actually will.