#coachwriting

Timothy McVeigh, Oklahoma City bomber, before lethal injection, requested two pints of mint-choc-chip. 

For men on death row, their final square is controversy, character development, explanation, performance art. For killers who escape a life sentence with a bullet savoured for their own skull, a final meal eaten alone in a kitchen or car does not offer the same stage. 

Ted Bundy, no.1 serial killer, before electric chair, declined a final meal and so they gave him the traditional. Served on plaid lino, the press and editors dolled it up proper. Steak, cooked medium-rare, eggs over easy, hash browns, toast slathered with butter and jelly, a glass of milk, a glass of orange juice: The all-American meal for the all-American man - Bundy had to just sit and eat. So much achieved in saying nothing. People still seething when you’re six deep under.

Sat in the back of a Renault Clio, a bottle of piss warms my shins, a three-tiered chocolate cake is fantasy. To give my menu-choice would be an indulgence anyway, food for the crime-nuts. And the fun allowed with chocolate! The visual fun, photographed to be imitative of blood and butchery, meat falling off the bone, Happy Birthday to me, clutching knife and fork like a butcher’s tools, sharpening as I go. Every good artist makes their audience uncomfortable but I’m just hungry. Hungry for cake and hungry to leave a better stamp on my forty-two years of life. 

If I had the time I might make a real meal of it. Lawrence Russell Brewer did it right, requested a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, two chicken fried steaks, fried okra, a pound of barbeque, three fajitas, a meat-lover's pizza, a pint of ice-cream, and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts. Texas withdrew the privilege of final meals on death row as Brewer’s order was left untouched. What a runaround, what flair! So much achieved in doing nothing. But that’s been done and I’m not about to play at sadness or remorse. Or draw smiley faces on boiled eggs. 

Remorse is a sad school-tray of broiled veg, meat, and mash, cut into a grey Mondrian of sludge and stool. How liquid and veg is made artful by murder, a sachet-soup that barely maintains a working body, a working brain. These are men who could have taken out the lights of a hundred, a thousand, men but can’t get their shit together when they’re asked if they want their beans on toast. They let their heads be shaved, let the keys be thrown away, let themselves be told off and then eat gruel like sorry school kids.