A Bike Out of Hell: Walking Bicycles Live Through Prison

The locker that holds the letters Jocelyn Summers wrote to her husband while he was in prison doesn't open anymore. The key broke off in the lock some time ago; she jams the stub in the keyhole but it won't turn. She reaches up through the bottom and pushes the door from the inside. She tries to pry it open with a screwdriver. No luck.

"We'll have to get it open eventually," she says. "My passport's in there."

I'm standing in the back room of the house, the office where the label the couple runs, Highwheel Records, is headquartered. A sliding glass door looks out onto a patio and small garden. A mid-afternoon August light shines in strongly.

Jocelyn's husband, Julius Moriarty, rifles through papers stacked in the bookshelves. He checks the other locker, the one that still opens. She is convinced that the letters are behind the broken door, but Julius finds them—one stack in an envelope on the bottom of a shelf, the other in a blue binder Jocelyn was sure contained poems from her childhood. Her passport, unfortunately, is still sealed away.

Jocelyn spreads the letters out on the floor and re-reads them. I wait for her to select passages to read aloud; I don't read over her shoulder. I feel like I'm looking at the most private possible text.

Julius and Jocelyn are a couple who share a look. They wear the same thick-rimmed eyeglasses and speak in voices streaked by nicotine; on the day that I visit them, they're both dressed casually in all black. Jocelyn's mannerisms are broader, more extroverted, more Midwestern, while Julius keeps up a slight East Coast guard. He wears purple-striped socks under his Converse and a sprinkling of stubble that's beginning to gray.

For a decade they have made music together, along with bassist Jason Leather and drummer Deric Criss, as Walking Bicycles. With Julius on guitar and Jocelyn on vocals, the quartet hauls doom metal's weight through post-punk's sharp corners. They wrote their new album, To Him That Wills The Way, after Jocelyn spent three years separated from her husband while Julius served time in prison.

Among the letters on the floor, there's a color photograph of the two holding hands in front of a Northern California shore. A slash of mountain juts from the Pacific; Julius and Jocelyn both have brown, wavy hair rustled by breeze. Jocelyn's from the Chicago suburbs but attended Humboldt State University in Arcata. There, she met Julius, who grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, near Boston. They are in their early 20s in the photo. They have known each other for 18 years.

The two of them started playing together when Jocelyn, who had always wanted to be in a band, bought Julius a guitar as a birthday present. He practiced, she sang, and before long, they had a batch of songs laid to tape. The band glanced off an early chance at corporate success when a few suits down in Los Angeles got hold of their demos. "We got this manager right out of the gate off these backyard shack demos that we did," says Jocelyn. "Our friends gave it to some people down in LA, and then they brought us into this big studio." They had been a band for less than a year, and they were recording their songs on equipment once used by Pink Floyd.

But Walking Bicycles' manager kept pushing opportunities that the band couldn't decline fast enough. "They were like, 'We're gonna get you on Vans Warped Tour,' and we were like, 'No! No. We're not doing that,'" Jocelyn tells me. "And then they were like, 'MTV wants to do a documentary.' A 'documentary'—we knew it was going to be reality TV."

"We just turned everything down," Julius adds. "We're an art band, right? We kept saying to our management that we didn't want that route. We're not a pop band, and we don't want that type of fame."

Eventually, their manager gave up on them, and Walking Bicycles put out their self-titled first record on their own imprint in 2005. Comprising just six thorny post-punk tracks, Walking Bicycles instantly distinguished the band from the glossy future their LA management had envisioned. Jocelyn and Julius moved to Chicago the same year, leaving behind their original bassist, but they immediately connected with other musicians in the area, including Jason. They found the kind of music community in the Midwest that they hungered for while playing shows in isolated, insular Arcata. This was a city where a new independent record label could actually thrive.

Highwheel has been home to Walking Bicycles' entire discography. They've also put out albums from local favorites My Gold Mask and Unicycle Loves You. Both bands lean a little more towards pop than the music Julius and Jocelyn make, but the couple found a kinship in their strangeness. "We like things that are weird, but we like things you can dance to," says Julius. "It's a fine line to walk."

He will admit that the first track of To Him That Wills the Way is not exactly a dance number. "Impending Doom" hits like projectile barbed wire, a three-minute cacophony of raging distortion, winding bass lines, and Jocelyn's fractured howl. It might be the heaviest song Walking Bicycles have ever made; it certainly describes the heaviest time in the couple's lives.

"'Impending Doom' is the darkest because it's about being arrested," Julius says. "Being arrested but not being incarcerated yet. That's the worst part of the period."

In January of 2008, Julius was arrested for possessing what he describes as "a large amount" of marijuana. He was in a time and a place where having the drug on your person was considered a very serious crime, and he and Jocelyn spent the rest of the year trying to come to an agreement on a sentence. "There was a year of us negotiating with the state—where can we meet in the middle and settle on something?" he says. "I'm not a rat. That was taken off the table immediately. It's not in my constitution. I knew I was facing this alone, and I was going to deal with it."

Despite his resolution to take full responsibility for his arrest, Julius describes the period of waiting on an arrangement as the most difficult part of the whole process. "That year was the worst because you can't just start counting days. You don't know. You're in this limbo. That's 'Impending Doom'. That's why it's the heaviest song. You know that things are going to get worse before they get better. You know that it's going to be a tough situation.

The end of 2008 brought the end of limbo with it. Julius agreed to a six-and-a-half year sentence with parole after three. "I sat down with my family and we understood that it wasn't the end of the world. I had my last Christmas, and then a couple days later we signed the paperwork, and I went in. It was a breath of fresh air, in a sense, because something's over, and you can start knocking days off the calendar. You see an ending to it. Three years is a long time, and it was horrible. But you get out, and you can move on."

"Life moves," Jocelyn agrees. The band released their third record, ¿GO?, just days after Julius began serving his sentence. It would be the last music they'd make together for the next four years.

From start to finish, To Him That Wills the Way follows the emotional journey of the couple's ensuing separation. During those three years, aside from the visits they could manage, Julius and Jocelyn communicated entirely through the handwritten letters they saved in the same room where they now pack records. It was a big shift for their marriage, but instead of alienation, Julius and his wife unearthed a new intimacy on the page.

"Most women don't even get one letter in their lifetime like the three years' worth I got from him," says Jocelyn. "Sometimes I would read these letters and cry out of joy. We got to know each other on a level that I think a lot of people don't get to know each other. They were the sweetest, most amazing love letters."

When she looks at them now, it's the handwriting as much as the words that brings back memories of that period. Her lettering looks ragged; it spills past the college rule. His is neat, tight, parallel to the line. "He had nothing better to do, so he would write these letters and they would be perfect," she says. "He would rewrite them so there were no scratch-outs or typos." Julius took as much time as he could with them. "If I'm writing all these letters, I'm going to write amazing letters," he says.

By translating their marriage into prose, Julius and Jocelyn developed an uncanny intuition for each other. They started writing about the same things at the same time, unaware of the synchronicity. "We got so psychic with each other," says Jocelyn. "He would write a letter asking me a bunch of questions and at the same time, I would be writing him a letter telling him all the answers. You look at these letters side by side and they were written on the same date. It's so crazy. That happened a lot."

"Yeah," says Julius. "That didn't happen once. That happened a hundred times."

Jocelyn details their letter-writing in the songs "Words" and "The Messenger", describing the strange feeling of togetherness inside absence, of seeing a relationship grow through words alone. The rhythm section rears huge on both songs, as if Deric were measuring physical space on his drums—space that Jocelyn bridges with her echoing, pleading vocals. "When you're separated and you have issues, you have to actually handle them by writing it out," says Julius. "When you do that for three years, you learn a lot. You grow probably in the healthiest way possible."

Julius admits he lied to his wife in many of his letters. He sugarcoated his descriptions of the reality around him in an attempt to minimize stress for Jocelyn. She knew, even before they spent hours talking face to face right after his release, that he was diluting certain topics and dodging others. He is not the type to complain, even from prison.

Despite everything, Julius didn't feel bitterness toward his surroundings. "There isn't time for resentment. You wake up every morning and you battle your way through to the end of the day. That's pretty much it." To make the hours go more quickly, he'd run in the mornings. He'd write Jocelyn letters. He read hundreds and hundreds of books.

He doesn't talk about the worst of it. Even now, Julius hardly ever brings up prison to his friends. If he does, it's to make a joke, to tell one of many hilarious, absurd stories that could have only happened on the proverbial "inside." The creative outpouring that he and Jocelyn experienced after he finished his sentence (they narrowed down the album's track list from more than a hundred sketches) was all the release he needed. "If there was two percent of a fire of resentment from having to do three years over something I really don't have moral qualms with, the album was my way of venting all that," he says. "Once the album was done, it was all done. Everything. This is it. It's ancient history and I move on from here."

The whole experience lent the couple a sense of perspective and patience they'd never had before. "There's a strength and a bond that comes out of a relationship that goes through something like this," says Julius. Jocelyn agrees: "Our life is so much better since this happened to us. We never sweat the small stuff now. Everything that comes to us, we're just like, yes, life is amazing!" The record is, in certain ways, a celebratory one: a document of survival, of endurance and the flourishing that follows it. "It leaves you with a triumphant feeling of success," Julius says. "I went through this hell and we made it."

Julius and Jocelyn are big believers in balance, in carrying the bad stuff in turn with the good. Spend three years in the worst place, and you eventually get the chance to make art out of it with your partner and friends. Julius stresses the contributions that Jason and Deric made to the record. He and Jocelyn lived the experience, but the other half of the band did the hard work of translating it. On the record, Jason's unnerving bass lines and Deric's relentless drumwork mix seamlessly with Jocelyn's screams and Julius's squalls. It's a singular engine of sound, one that aims for relatability outside the couple's specific history. "I tried to write vaguely enough that anybody who's had any type of struggle, any type of heartbreak, any type of doom in their life… it's just a word to the wise: Yeah, you got this, but you have to be positive and grateful for the good things in your life," says Jocelyn.

The original inspiration for the band name sums their philosophy up in a single image. When they were still living in Arcata, Jocelyn passed an old man pushing a bicycle up a hill, a Sisyphus figure made real. It was a rainy day, and she felt a wave of sympathy for the man as she drove by. "And then I look in my rearview mirror right as I'm passing," she says, "and he's totally grinning. Happy as a pig in shit. And I was like, either he's batshit crazy, or he's just stoked. I'm out here, I'm pushing my bike, I know when I get to the top of the hill I'm going to glide down."

The metaphor keeps reasserting itself as they move forward through their life together. The imagery of the bicycle wheel represents the swing of the good and the bad. It ties into a quote from the movie 24 Hour Party People that they love, a concept imagined by the sixth-century philosopher Boethius and retold by a homeless man on the streets of Manchester: "It's my belief that history is a wheel. Inconsistency is my very essence. Rise up on my spokes if you like, but don't complain when you're cast back down into the depths. Good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away."

"Things are cyclical. This saying really touched us long before this experience happened," Julius explains. "The best of times will become the worst and the worst will become the best. It's just the nature of life. If you're at the bottom, feel it, because that's life. Soak in the despair, because that's amazing, but know that it's only temporary. And when you're at the highest of your life, love it. But don't be a braggart. It's not going to be like that forever."

That sense of fleetingness gives the record its urgency, like even these moments of reflection will be gone all too soon. The last song, “Badada”, ends suddenly without fanfare. There's one last chorus, and then the whole thing cuts out—no trail of feedback, no exhalation. It's just over.

"The world's going to shit on you sometimes. It's just going to happen," adds Julius. "If you grab that strength, you can make it through, and you'll be a better person on the other side. You definitely will be."

Before I leave, Jocelyn gives me a silver penny-farthing charm that she ordered on Etsy to sew onto dropcards of the new record. They'll sell them at Walking Bicycles' upcoming release show at the Empty Bottle, a venue that welcomed the band back with open arms after their four-year absence. They will play their new songs, and then they will go back to practice and write newer ones, hopeful ones—they've already started to. The band and the label, the biggest labors of their love, have only grown from the hiatus they took from normal life. They are together again, home in the city that's stuck by them. I get the sense they're gliding.

Sasha Geffen is a writer living in Chicago. She's on Twitter - @sashageffen

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