Impossible to work

Once upon a time, the members of Lucky Pierre came across a URL. That URL, no longer active, was a listing of the final meals of death row inmates in Texas. Here’s a cached version from The Memory Hole. This website spawned a rather large scale project of filming individuals (all volunteers) eating the last meals reported by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

I got an email a few weeks ago from LP requesting volunteers to eat meals. Like every other Lucky Pierre project I have known about, it sounded weird but fun. A meditation, of sorts, on the death penalty in Texas (is it, or is it not tacky to post the final meals of inmates to the web? I guess it is since the page is no longer active). Why not try it out? There was a free meal in it, after all. So this morning, I drove very far to the northwest side of Chicago and had the final meal of John William Cockrum.

I got there a few minutes early, learned that they were running a few minutes late, and sat down to chat with a pregnant woman who had volunteered. She was a lot of fun, and I’m sure she will be very interesting to watch, when they’re all done with this project.

When it was my turn to eat Cockrum’s cheeseburger, onion rings, banana pudding and iced tea, I went into a small room, with a table, chair, a piece of white paper covering the table, my meal and a video camera anchored above the table. Mary Zerkel took me through the routine: I would be filmed for 25 minutes. I would need to keep the food near the center line of the table in order to keep it in the shot. I would also need to not make any loud noises or look up at the camera. The video was shot in black and white without sound (or at least I think so).

Mary started the camera, held a piece of paper up it with the information about the meal I was about to eat and then left the room, leaving me alone for 25 minutes with my meal. The food was out of the shot initially, so I sat down and brought everything right in front of me. Since I knew that I was going to have 25 minutes to eat not a lot of food, I tried to take my time, prolonging the inevitable: having nothing to do but wait. I deliberately ate my institutionally flavored onion rings and cheeseburger, taking sips of the iced tea provided (which I really thought lacked authenticity. It was one of those jug iced teas you can buy that come presweetened with lemon. I’m going to guess that even in jail in Texas they brew their own tea and they don’t add lemon to it before you drink it. Iced tea being a matter of pride to those of us from the United States’ warmer climes). After about ten minutes, I had more or less finished the meal. I played with the pudding for a while, eventually smearing the small amount left all over the sides of the bowl.

Then, I sat and waited. I finished the tea, chomping on the ice. I poured the last of the tea into the bowl with the pudding. I started lightly tapping on the bottomof the empty cup of tea. Then, I started to count seconds. I don’t think I really had an experience all that similar to that of the late Mr. Cockrum (who was just a few months shy of 29 when he was executed for the murder of a 69-year-old woman near De Kalb, TX), but I do think I spent the entire time I was sitting at the table thinking about who might have eaten this meal before dying, how he (or she, as I only learned anything about the convict after I got home) handled this last real living activity, and what might have been going through his mind.
In the end, I became restless and was ecstatic when Mary came to let me out of the room. You only want to empathize with an executed criminal for so much time.