Happy Baby (11 page)

I come to a large door and adjust my tie against my reflection. Inside there’s another door, and then another, and the intake for the jail and the administrative offices, where the secretary sits in front to greet and vet visitors. The secretary, years ago, was a beautiful Hispanic woman named Camilla who took everyone’s name into a green binder as they were admitted. I never spoke to Camilla but I remember her. Everybody does. She was removed for having an affair with one of the inmates—someone’s dream come true. He was seventeen years old, being tried as an adult. It was his last good time. I was twelve then and knew only what I heard in the lunch hall. They were caught in a broom closet with her skirt up around her waist. But there are other places to have sex in Western, unused offices, of course the showers. The doors to the rooms don’t have windows and are locked from the outside and it’s two to four boys for every room, so opportunity exists there as well.

Camilla is a nice memory for me, though I didn’t know her at all. I just remember her red skirt, and the short pointy heels on her shoes, and where her skirt stopped and her legs began.

I thought about her every day I was inside and by the time I got out she was gone.

“I’m here to see George Washington.” I almost want to laugh. I’m asking about a young black house-robber named for the founder of our country.
It’s no wonder you like to steal
, I’ll tell him,
you’re on every quarter
.

“What’s your relation?” the lady asks. She’s not pretty, like Camilla, this one. She has wiry black and white hair, piled on her head like a dead nest. She looks dead. She’s old and salty. A safe bet, I suppose, a dead woman.

“Caseworker,” I tell her. She looks at me skeptically. I’m dressed in black pants and a button-down shirt, my clothes stuck to my skin from the heat outside. “DCFS,” I say, to show I know the lingo, speak the language. State not charity. DCFS as opposed to Board of Ed, or HHS or federal, which would be ridiculous but you never know. As opposed to guardian
ad litem
, for which I would have to be a lawyer. And I’m obviously not family. DCFS is easy enough. Department of Children and Family Services and the family-first policy. Caseworkers change all the time. I went through twelve caseworkers before I was eighteen and didn’t know who was looking after me. Most of them I never met. I’d just see their name on a piece of paper or they’d call to cancel an appointment.

“They’re in the yard now,” she says. She must have taken this job to pass the time after retiring, because she was bored. She wanted to spend her final years in a penal institution helping to punish bad children. I wait in front of her, behind the long brown partition. I don’t want her to think I’m going to leave and I don’t want her to think I have all day. I’ve thought all my actions through. And I’ve thought that I could fail. I’ve imagined them finding me out, coming to me from the sides and behind with a net, pulling a mask over my head, zipping it from the back, taping my hands to my skull, cinching the net around me, and dragging me along the linoleum floors back into a locked white room with a view of the freeway, and leaving me there. Forgetting me again, this time forever. So I wait, tapping my finger lightly on the countertop.

She buzzes the glass door next to her and I grip onto the handle and click inside. The air is like a television tuned to static. I follow her past cubicles, each divided with six-foot-high walls of fabric. Some of the cubicles are empty and others contain people sitting at computers entering data or talking into the phone. This is the administrative heart of the detention center but it isn’t necessary. All you need in a jail is inmates and guards. You barely need guards.

***

I’m left in a fluorescent room with a table and two chairs, a large ashtray, and a stand with magazines piled across the top of it. I place my notebook on the table and a pencil next to it. Caseworkers always do this. There’s always a notebook. I place my hands behind my head and try to relax.

The first time my girlfriend was robbed was three months ago. We had only just started dating. I met her at the restaurant where we work. I have a hard time sleeping and she doesn’t like to sleep until morning. She’s in law school at Loyola and she waits tables. I had picked up a second job cashiering at the restaurant to keep me busy at night and because of some trouble I was having. That’s where I met Zahava.

When she was robbed that time, we were in her bed with the covers off and we heard a sound from outside and she wondered what it was and I said I was sure it was just the cat. When we came out of the room, a few hours later, we were still naked and the bicycle was missing and Zahava’s Guatemalan backpack was in the middle of the floor, the front pocket open, her tip money gone. She shook her head and pulled a Lenny Kravitz album from its sleeve. and lowered the needle onto the vinyl. She would have to get another bicycle. She zipped her bag and placed it on the couch. She turned to me and smiled. Easy come, easy go.

I pick up one of the
Men’s Journals
. There’s a picture of a man on the cover wearing sky blue shorts and no shirt and he appears to be running up a mountain. He looks healthy and content. His skin is smooth, his chin and cheeks perfect.

I read through the magazine while I’m waiting. It could be a while. There’s a whole system of doors and elevators to be negotiated in bringing a child down to the second floor. I read what foods I should eat if I’m going to have a pretty stomach. I learn how to improve my biceps by doing exercises with weights and tucking my elbows tightly beneath my ribs. And I learn that it drives women crazy if you pull on their clitoris gently with your thumb and your forefinger and then blow on it.

When I’m done with the magazine George Washington is in front of me with a guard. The guard doesn’t introduce himself. The guard says he’s going to lock the door and that I have to ring a bell next to the table to be let out. When I ring the bell someone will come and take George Washington back to the third floor, but it might take a few minutes.

“You’re not my caseworker,” George Washington says to me as the guard is leaving.

“I am now. Sit down,” I tell George. “Let’s get to know each other.”

He’s a small kid. Scrappy. He has a muscular face but skin like a baby. They’ve given him the haircut, his scalp covered in short, black fuzz. The door clicks and latches and George is looking at me, considering his options. Maybe there is something he could use as a weapon: a piece of metal to be quickly sharpened, a dull, heavy object. He could take me hostage, tell the police that he’ll kill me if they don’t let him out. They wouldn’t deal with him, and when the standoff was over we would both be headed back to jail.

“Cigarette?” I ask, taking the pack from my pocket. He takes the cigarette from me and tucks it behind his ear. He sits down across from me on the other side of the table. I light my cigarette and toss the lighter to him. “You might as well smoke it. They’re not going to let you take it back to the floor.” He must know this already. How could he not know that? Of course he knows. He’s been here weeks already. He considers the lighter but doesn’t take it. He leaves the cigarette behind his ear. Was I like this? No. I was scared and obedient. I would have smoked that cigarette down, hands folded into my lap, staring at the floor. And I would have said thank you. That’s the kind of child I was. People did whatever they wanted with me. George is strong and defiant. Fuck you, he’s saying, the way he crosses his arms across his small chest and stares at the locked door as if it was a personal insult, but he is stronger than the door and through his will he’s going to tear the door right from the hinges. There’s only one problem with his theory.

“I have a whole pack,” I say and push them across the table to him. He picks the pack up, stuffs the lighter inside, and shoves the pack inside the waistband of his pants. Now he’s smiling, kind of like the child he is, curious to see what I’ll do. I’m not going to do anything. I’ll buy a pack at the convenience store where the shuttle stops. They’ll search him before taking him back. They’ll take his cigarettes from him and divide them amongst themselves. What the fuck, they’ll think. What kind of a caseworker would give a juvenile offender a pack of cigarettes?

“So how are they treating you?” I ask. This is the refrain. I learned this over seven years. Every time I met a new caseworker they would ask me how I was being treated and I’d say “Fine,” instead of saying “I’m being raped.” I’d say “Good” instead of telling them the other boys jumped me and forced a bar of soap into my mouth. I’d say “OK,” instead of saying “I hate it here, they won’t let me go outside.” And they always ask the same question. They don’t change a single word. The administrators, guardians, caseworkers, volunteers, hospital staff. Always, “So how are they treating you?” Which is what I ask now, on the other side, but not really. I have a good idea how he is being treated. He’s not giving any back mouth to the guards and the guards are ignoring him. In the yard he stands near the pole. He’s getting in fights sometimes to prove himself to his gang. At school he’s in one of the classes for the kids that can’t sit still. I can see it all.

“Listen, you know, I put a lot of effort into getting here today. How old are you?”

“How old are you?” he blurts back. He’s gotten tired of the quiet game.

“I’m twenty-three.”

“I’m thirteen,” he says. Of course he is. It’s just the age.

“When’s your court date set for?”

“Don’t you know?” he asks. He’s suspicious. Children in this place are always suspicious.

“I didn’t bring my papers with me, so I don’t know.” He shrugs his shoulders. OK. Fine. I lean back, he leans back. The light hanging over us is dim and fat. I’ve never been good with kids, not even when I was one. “Give me a cigarette,” I say. He looks like he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t even know why I’m here. I remember very distinctly standing on Petey’s bed two floors up, sometimes stepping on his legs, and looking out the window in our room through a patchwork of wire and saying to myself that if they ever let me out of this place I would never come back. But here I am. For what? To walk the red lines painted on the floor outside the classrooms. For this child who’s already stolen my cigarettes, who looks like all of the kids that used to spit on me and beat me up, a smaller version of Larry, the most fearsome kid in Western when I was here. The kid who eventually broke my leg, just days before they let me out. That’s what he looks like, this little bastard. He looks like Larry. I shake my head. Consider threatening him. It wouldn’t work. It’s what he wants. I went through all of this for George Washington. I bought these clothes, dark pants, button-up shirt. Cut my hair, bought this notebook. Took a day off of work, just so I could come here and give this thirteen-year-old asshole some information and now he won’t even give me one of my own cigarettes.

“If you don’t give me a cigarette,” I say, finally, staring into the fixture and the black marks on the ceiling above it, “I’m going to leave, and you’re never ever going to find out why I came here or what I meant to tell you.”

I can see him thinking about it. Curiosity is a weapon with children. Fear and longing for the unknown. What a horrible little room this is. Smells just like this place, too. Rooms smell different when you can’t get out. George relents. He takes the cigarette from behind his ear and rolls it across the table to me. I raise my eyebrow. He pulls the packet out from inside his pants, removing the lighter and placing it on the table then flicking it to me with his index finger. It slides across the table and lands in my palm and I light my cigarette with it and I slide the lighter back to him and he tucks it back in the pack and the pack back inside the waistband of his pants.

“What you want to talk about?” he asks now, lightly drumming on his thighs. “Why you messin’ with me?”

“The police,” I tell him. “I want to talk to you about the police.”

Zahava was robbed a second time, just a couple of weeks later. But we weren’t there then. After work we had gone with some of the other restaurant employees over to Sunny’s house. There were drugs, as usual. Heroin and cocaine in little white paper packets. Everyone pitched in. Zahava went up and I went down and I was sitting against the wall and everything was in slow motion. Heroin is the only thing that makes me relax. Zahava likes cocaine. She likes to have a good time. It’s hurting her grades, she says. But she always wants to go out. She was chatting rapidly with Scales, the bartender. Once, when we were at a bar near Belmont, I saw Zahava tuck her hand into Scales’s back pocket. She has better posture than the rest of us, and I thought to myself, wrapped in my drug-induced blanket, staring at her thin frame and beaklike nose, that Zahava is a door. She is a bridge, a phone booth. Things would work out well if I stayed with her, I thought. She’d teach me how to be like her.

When we came home in the morning my body felt like cake batter and Zahava was complaining of canker sores. Her gums were patterned with pink-lined white squares and there was blood around her teeth. I hadn’t been able to pee so I went to the bathroom. I stood in front of the bowl and waited. When I came out Zahava was staring at the wall with her hands on her hips, lightly biting at the inside of her mouth. Her stereo was gone, along with her music. “I hope they fry,” she said this time. “Why not just kill all of them?”

“What do you mean?”

She looked at me like I knew what she was talking about and I shouldn’t act stupid. She poked her chin forward and reconsidered. “I don’t mean that. Really. I was just upset for a moment.”

“I don’t care about police,” George says. He’s getting anxious. I can’t hold his attention. I’d think the ward would be unbearable for him, the small locked rooms, his eyes darting all over the walls.

“If you don’t care about the police why do you tell them so much?”

He shrugs his shoulders and knits his brow. He has a low hairline that starts almost immediately above his eyebrows. “I don’t know,” he says, angrily, because he doesn’t like that he’s been tricked and he doesn’t like that I’m telling him he’s been tricked. It may be too late. He doesn’t know his court date. Maybe it’s already passed. They tried him, found him guilty, decided his fate, and he’s sitting here waiting for it, waiting for it to come down on his neck like a mousetrap. And it will. They’ll split him wide open. But even so. There are other mistakes to be made. No matter how much they pull you apart there’s always room for another mistake, there’s always something left.