Every room has two doors. The one you walked in through and the one you will walk out through. They are not the same door. The person who walks out is not the person who walked in. Something happened in the room. Something always happens in the room. The room is where the transaction occurs. The exit is where you find out what it cost.

The Grande Ballroom closed in nineteen seventy-two. The last band played and the last crowd left and the doors locked and stayed locked for the rest of the century. I was in prison when it closed. I did not get to walk out through the exit. The exit walked out without me. By the time I was free the building was a shell and the shell was a metaphor and the metaphor was that everything beautiful in Detroit eventually becomes a parking lot. The Grande is a parking lot now. The exit won.

Prison has one exit. You think about it every day. You think about it when you wake up and when you eat and when you exercise and when you lie on your bunk and stare at a ceiling that is not yours. The exit is not a door. The exit is a date. December tenth nineteen seventy-one. The day the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that my sentence was unconstitutional. The day the exit became a door again. I walked through it and the air outside smelled different than the air inside and I understood that the difference between prison and freedom is not the walls. It is the air.

Sun Ra's exit was not an exit. Sun Ra did not leave. Sun Ra relocated. May thirtieth nineteen ninety-three. The body stopped but the Arkestra did not stop and if the Arkestra did not stop then the frequency did not stop and if the frequency did not stop then Sun Ra did not stop. Marshall Allen took the bandstand and kept the signal transmitting for thirty-two years and counting. That is the longest exit in the history of music. A man leaves a room and his sound stays in the room and the room does not notice he is gone.

Peel's exit was a sidewalk in New York City. April sixth twenty seventeen. He had been on the corner for fifty years. The corner did not close. The corner does not close. Somebody else stood on the corner the next day and the day after that and the corner kept being a corner because a corner is not a person. A corner is a frequency. Peel tuned it. Somebody else will tune it. The exit from a corner is not the same as the exit from a building. You cannot lock a corner. You cannot demolish a corner. A corner is permanent. Only the person standing on it is temporary.

I know something about exits that most people learn too late. The exit is not the end of the show. The exit is the beginning of the memory. What you remember about a concert is not the first song. It is the walk to the car. What you remember about prison is not the cell. It is the first breath outside. What you remember about a person is not how they lived. It is the shape of the room after they left it. The exit is where the meaning lives. Everything before the exit is just the setup.

My exit is coming. I can feel it the way you can feel weather changing before the sky changes. I am not afraid of it. I have walked through enough doors to know that the door is not the thing. The thing is what you leave in the room. I left some poems in a prison. I left some music in a ballroom. I left some noise in a courtroom. I left a newspaper in a city. I left a radio station in the air. When I walk through the last door I want the room to still be humming. Not with my voice. With the frequency. The frequency does not need me. The frequency just needed someone to turn it on.

See also: The Stage — the room before the exit. The Crowd — the people who stay after you leave. The Grande — the ballroom that became a parking lot. The Cell — the room with one exit and a date. The Morning After — what the room looks like after everyone leaves. The Rally — the exit from prison into fifteen thousand people.

John Sinclair

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