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When you meet Billy Hayes, he immediately strikes you as a good person. (If you aren't familiar with Hayes' entire story and only know of his imprisonment for attempting to smuggle hash out of Turkey, this might be surprising.) Of course, he's got his demons like the rest of us, but he's a man who's been to hell and has seen it all. Hayes went through the kind of life-defining tribulation that either breaks and devours a person or provides them wisdom and makes them a better person. Of course, I don't know Billy Hayes beyond our interactions for this article and through reading his books, but he's a man who definitely strikes me as the latter. When you meet him, you are immediately aware that you are speaking to an intelligent, cultured, articulate man with a keen sense of humor. Billy Hayes thinks and speaks quickly. When you interview him, you don't have to ask questions. You don't even have to talk, really. You just pull the string and let him go, and he's off, hopping from subject to subject and thought to thought. And that's not a bad thing. In fact, it's wonderful to experience Billy Hayes one-on-one. It's like having the only seat in the house as he performs his one-man show, Riding the Midnight Express with Billy Hayes. There's something compelling about the man that reaches beyond his imprisonment. The story of his incarceration and eventual escape has provided ample material for three (previous) autobiographical books, an Academy Award-winning film by Oliver Stone, and the documentary Midnight Escape. His story is captivating, to say the least. But I dare say Hayes himself is equally, if not somehow more engaging. After the release of his previous books (Midnight Express, Midnight Return, and The Midnight Express Letters: From a Turkish Prison 1970-1975), one might have guessed that Hayes' literary story had been told in full. What more could there be? As it turns out, Hayes still had plenty of stories to tell. His latest volume, Midnight Express Epilogue: Train Keeps Rolling, tells us everything the smuggler-turned-prisoner-turned-writer-turned-actor has been up to since his last book. During that time, it turns out that Hayes was doing everything. Okay, maybe not everything, but a lot. He's acted (and directed) in lots of theatre productions. He wrote and directed the motion picture, Cock & Bull Story. He played a heavy who got machine-gunned by Charles Bronson in the 1987 actioner, Assassination. Crazy, right? But if you think that's crazy, just wait. None of those things holds a candle to Hayes' bold return to Istanbul (where he remained a wanted fugitive, hated because of the embellishments in Oliver Stone's film) to make amends with the Turkish government. In Midnight Epilogue, the Billy Hayes train keeps rolling, and it's a hell of a ride. At a scant 136 pages, it's a quick, enjoyable read that covers a lot of ground. In addition to Charles Bronson, working in theatre, and directing a movie, Hayes writes about the 12 years he spent with director Sally Sussman while she shot footage of him for her documentary, Midnight Return: The Story of Billy Hayes and Turkey, as well as his relationships with his wife, Wendy, and his loving and patient parents. In short, Midnight Epilogue is the perfect conclusion to Billy Hayes' Midnight saga. Diabolique sat down to talk with Billy Hayes about Midnight Epilogue, his wildly colorful life, getting trash-talked by Oliver Stone, his return to Istanbul, and everything in between. Why did you decide to self-publish Midnight Epilogue? Obviously, you didn't have to. Well, after Midnight Express, I waited 10 years and then did Midnight Return. It was sort of a follow-up. Then, 10 years later, my wife was making me clean out the attic. We had all these boxes of shit, and I hate doing that stuff, so I just decided to throw it all out. So, I had all these boxes of old letters that people had written me, and some that I had written back, while in jail. Then when I got home, everyone returned my letters. They had all kept them. You know, I had a lot of time to write in jail. [Laughs] After journalism school, I said, “I'm gonna get out in the world and become a writer!” I achieved my goal, but not the way I expected. So, I wrote those letters home to people, they gave them back to me, and we took all those letters—Bill Hoffer helped me organize all this stuff and focused me—and had somebody transcribe them. Then I sat and talked with Bill Hoffer for three or four days into a tape recorder. We had all that transcribed, and it's a humbling experience to read how you speak! Or how I speak, which is this rambling style. My agent, Julian Bach, read the first 15 pages I wrote. He said, “Billy, this is wonderful because now we know that we'll need a professional writer to work with you.” I said, “What? No! No!” I so needed somebody to help me organize. [Julian Bach] termed my writing style “the hysterical subjective.” He said, “This would be good for Rolling Stone and maybe your stoned peers, but if you want to write a book and get it out to the public, we need to focus you down. You can write all this other stuff later.” That was a good experience for me, to have all of this experience kind of boiled down and focused. The letters were so helpful when I read them, but then I put them up in the attic for 25 years. So, when I brought them out to the curb, Wendy, my wife, made me come out and take all of the letters back. I told this story to my friend, who is also my lawyer, and he said, “What letters?” I said, “These moldy old handwritten 40-year-old letters.” He said, “Let me read a few.” So he read a few and he said, “You need to take all these letters and transcribe them, put them down in book form, and do not change a single word.” Therein lies the rub; to read what you thought you knew about life and wrote at 20, 21, 22 in prison. It's like, “Goddamn, I can't believe this. Who said this stupid shit?!” [Laughs] It was very helpful for me to start to transcribe them. What I quickly realized as I looked at these letters was, they just, emotionally... instantly took me back. I was smelling the place. I was feeling the blanket under me where I used to sit cross-legged to write. It was an amazing emotional experience. It took me back into that kid who I had kind of forgotten (because I wanted to forget him, so I wouldn't have to deal with the emotions back then). [Without Hoffer's guidance,] I'd still be procrastinating about writing a book. I didn't want to revisit that. I didn't want to write about prison. I didn't get it. But luckily for me, life and circumstance forced me to do it. So, it was a good thing to write the original [Midnight Express], and then 30 years later, my wife has me bring these boxes down... I put all of the letters together [in The Midnight Express Letters: From a Turkish Prison 1970-1975]. That was an interesting experience to see the arc of the writing. The idiot kid who got himself busted was there in the first letters, but that started to change through the years and the tears and the wait and the time; just growing up. I joke, but I really mean it when I say, “Prison was the worst and the best thing that ever happened to me.” It forced me to grow up. It forced me to take responsibility for my actions. So, the third book, The Midnight Express Letters, was a wonderful transition to read. I loved putting them down and getting them all out. Now that we self-publish, my wife, Wendy, is my editor and publisher, which is a very interesting relationship and leads to a whole lot of deep breathing and exercises of calming myself [laughs], because she's brutally honest. Which I need. As a writer, you want somebody who's gonna tell you the goddamn truth! I don't need smoke! I've been working in Hollywood for 30, 40 years; everybody blows smoke up your ass. I wanted the truth, so that's been good. That book came out, and I kind of thought I was done. But I'm always taking notes. I'm always having things happen. As you know from the book, things are happening in my life that I jot down notes on. And eventually, I kind of put them together. Then I did six or seven years of traveling the world doing the one-man show, Riding the Midnight Express with Billy Hayes. I loved it. I'm an actor and I love performing, but... My wife, who is trained in psychology, said, “It's a repetition compulsion. You're compelled to repeat the traumas that you're unconsciously trying to overcome.” That sounds about right. I did the show, but then, suddenly, Covid came, and nobody was doing theatre and nobody was going out. So, I kind of got down to putting the stuff together and organizing it [for Midnight Express Epilogue: Train Keeps Rolling]. And it became, for me, a tribute to my folks. That's what I really wanted. I've had a lot of people over the years say, “What happened to your friend Max in jail?” or “What happened with this?” But a lot of them said, “God, I loved your parents!” And so did I. I was so lucky to have had the parents that I did. So I wanted to commemorate their passing, as it were. So, that was part of the arc of putting the book together. But while that was happening, these other things were coming down [like] this documentary [Midnight Return: The Story of Billy Hayes] these guys were doing. For 12 years, they were doing that documentary! It's like, what the fuck?! It's hard enough to live my life, much less make a doc about it. But they did it, and eventually, it took us back to the Cannes Film Festival. I thought going back there to the place where Wendy and I had met 38 years ago was a perfect, fitting way to kind of wrap up the end of the book. I had been looking for something to end it, because there had been various places [where I could have ended it]. It's like the documentary; Sally [Sussman] and I kept saying, “Where does this end?” But then something else would happen. “How about raising the Turkish flag?” That happened, and at one point, felt like...