Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair (5 page)

Crystal went to court and refused to plead guilty. “I wasn't a carrier, I was one of the innocents,” she says. “I just came to visit my friend, no harm in that, and they had no proof of wrongdoing on me.” While the case was being adjourned—Crystal's Legal Aid lawyer wasn't always there to represent her—she was arrested again, for a different offense.

C
rystal had continued to do poorly at Flushing High. Most days, she missed her first class. Some days, instead of going to school she and two friends from the group home travelled to Manhattan by bus and subway and went to the movies on Forty-second Street; the journey was only slightly longer than the one to school (she had complained about that journey to the group-home psychologist), and from Crystal's point of view there was more to look forward to when she reached her destination. The girls were careful not to return to
the group home before the end of the school day plus an hour and a half. Crystal didn't do her homework, but once, when she was assigned by an English teacher to read a play of Shakespeare's (“That language was too much of a drag, there was too many complications,” she says), she went to a movie theatre to see
Macbeth
instead. “I remember witches and a witch killed a man or a man killed a witch,” she says. “It was O.K., but it was corny. It was nothing like as good as
The Wizard of Oz
.” Crystal is unfamiliar with the names of most renowned poets—Keats, Emily Dickinson, and Countee Cullen, for example—but “one day at Flushing when I decided to play student out of the many days I cut” she was exposed to a Langston Hughes poem she admired and still half remembers: “Something about an old lady looking back and telling a little boy never to give up on hisself. She said something like ‘Life for me ain't been no crystal stairs, it had many boards torn up.' Because her life was not laid out on a red carpet, it made her want to do more, to get more better. It was saying to the boy even if he have to live in an apartment with no electricity, only candles, don't give up, you can always find something good at the end. I understood that poem.”

One day when Crystal had attended most of her tenth-grade classes, she and two friends, Tiffany and Stacey, went to Stern's, a department store near school, in the afternoon. Each teen-ager picked out several Liz Claiborne spring outfits. They had agreed to split up and meet outside the store. Stacey put her clothes in her book bag and was apprehended as she left the store. Crystal, at sixteen, was an experienced shoplifter. When
she was five or six years old, Florence often took her to “fancy department stores,” like Bloomingdale's, from which Florence stole clothes to sell for drugs: a child was something of a decoy to throw off security. If Crystal needed a coat, Florence would take one off a rack, pop the ticket, and put the coat on Crystal. Most of the time, Florence just concealed the clothes she selected to “boost,” over a special girdle and under her coat. Crystal was frightened when Florence was caught, arrested, and taken away for shoplifting, but she was too young to understand what the arrest was about. (She had also been frightened when Florence was arrested for welfare fraud and for selling drugs.) At eight or nine, Crystal and a group of her friends frequently stole Silly Putty and other toys from a discount store in their Bronx neighborhood. At the group home, she stole from department stores. It wasn't because St. Christopher's clothing allowance was low, or because she couldn't afford what she wanted, that she stole. Daquan gave her money regularly. Clarence, the father of Florence's youngest son, gave her fifty dollars here and a hundred dollars there. (A child-care worker who knew her well was convinced that she earned that money by going to bed with him.) Crystal stole because she calculated, “Why buy when I can just take? I can get me a new outfit and still have money in my pocket.”

That particular afternoon at Stern's, Crystal didn't feel comfortable. Stacey, from the room where she was being detained, overheard the store's security personnel observing Tiffany putting the outfits she wanted in her schoolbag. When
Crystal hesitated, Tiffany handed her the schoolbag, took the clothes Crystal wanted, and put them in Crystal's schoolbag. As Tiffany walked out of the store, she got caught carrying Crystal's clothes. Crystal was caught carrying Tiffany's. The three girls were taken to a precinct in Flushing. After they were booked, they were released because none of them had ever been convicted of a crime. (Crystal's drug case was still pending.) Tiffany and Stacey called their parents, who drove to the station house to fetch them. Crystal took the Q-17 bus and the Q-2 bus back to the group home. The child-care worker on duty had already received a call from the police.

At the time, Crystal thought, Damn, those parents could have given me a ride, but, oh, well, anyway, life goes on. Once in a great while, she envied the few girls she had grown up with whose mothers didn't beat them; girls whose mothers gave them everything they wanted, including a steady supply of new clothes, and not just new clothes at the start of school, for Christmas, and for Easter, and hand-me-downs and stolen goods the rest of the year; girls who had never lived in an apartment lit by candles because the electricity had been turned off; girls whose mothers didn't embarrass them when they came to school, as Florence embarrassed her on the infrequent occasions when she was summoned, because her hands were puffy from skin-popping. (The other kids saw her hands and taunted Crystal, saying, “Your mother's a dope fiend.”) And, as she grew older, she sometimes envied girls whose mothers were there for them—who had apartments, so that their daughters weren't put
into foster care. Much of the time, Crystal simply acknowledged that her mother and her father, whom she hadn't seen in years, were drug addicts, who would never be the kind of family she hoped for, and, instead, looked on the bright side of group-home life.

Back at 104th Avenue, a child-care worker asked, in reference to her arrest, “Crystal, you doing it again?” and put her on a week's restriction—no use of the phone, no going out after school. Crystal handled the restriction in her fashion. She said she was going to school whether she did or didn't go, stayed out until 5 or 6
P.M.
, provided excuses for her tardiness (malfunctioning buses or subways, for instance), and made her phone calls before returning to the group home. “Stacey and Tiffany were probably getting preached at and punished,” she says. “I knew the rules. No one at St. Christopher's could put a hand on me.”

After the drug arrest, Crystal had been offered an opportunity to take advantage of the Queens District Attorney's Second Chance Program for selected first-time youthful offenders who had committed nonviolent crimes. She had maintained her innocence and had declined. But even Crystal, regarded as an expert at innocence and denial by the staff of St. Christopher's, could not deny her guilt on the shoplifting charge, so she now agreed to participate in Second Chance. Under the program, a guilty plea covered Crystal's two offenses; her criminal record would be wiped clean if she did a prescribed amount of community-service work and didn't get arrested
while she was in the program or for six months afterward. If she did get arrested, she would have to face sentencing for both offenses.

Crystal was assigned to spend forty hours cleaning up Cunningham Park in Queens. She put in the hours in August of 1986, after flunking most of her courses at Flushing High. She was the only young person from Second Chance assigned to a Parks Department crew in Cunningham Park. The crew consisted of three husky men who were regular employees. Crystal, a petite, slender young woman, didn't tell them about the shoplifting charge—only about the marijuana bust, an offense to which she assumed they would be sympathetic. With a “paper-snatcher” she picked up papers left on the grass by picnickers, but she didn't care for emptying trash bins and putting new plastic bags in them. “The mens who drove the trucks could have made me work, but they were getting paid to do it, and they were nice and told me, ‘Relax, relax, we got this. We'll meet you later at the basketball court,' so I worked an hour, then went off and slept and smoked a joint,” she recalls. By then, Crystal was fed up with her job at the grocery store: the customers wanted their groceries packed a certain way; the fifteen-minute breaks were too short for consuming pizza. “That scene just wasn't me,” she says.

In September of 1987, about six months after Crystal's arrest record was wiped clean and three months after she failed to complete tenth grade at Flushing High School for the second straight year, Crystal and her friend Tonia, from the group
home, went shopping for school clothes at a mall on Long Island. Crystal had plenty of money, and spent over a hundred and fifty dollars at Macy's on an acid-washed blouse, acid-washed jeans, two Guess denim skirts, and a pair of suede moccasins. She and Tonia saw some Bill Blass and Perry Ellis socks that cost between ten and twenty dollars a pair. She thought the socks were cute but overpriced (“Socks can catch holes after you wear them a couple of times”), so she and Tonia selected a number of pairs in assorted colors and put them in their Macy's shopping bags. They didn't think anyone would be watching the sock racks. In fact, store detectives had been watching them for a long time and stopped them. They produced receipts for their purchases but had none for the stolen socks. The store detectives notified the manager, who expressed his displeasure with young black shoplifters and called the police. The girls were handcuffed and were taken to jail for the night.

Crystal's first night in jail, after the drug arrest (“City jails are casual,” she says), had not intimidated her. Only her belt and her sneaker laces (“things they think you'll commit suicide with”) had been removed. This time, her bra, socks, shoes, jacket, and barrettes were taken away; she was left with nothing on but her panties, pants, and a short-sleeved shirt. She was locked in a cell furnished with a bench (but no pillow or blanket), a sink, and a toilet (but no toilet paper). The mild September day became a chilly September night. Crystal was shivering, but the woman corrections officer insisted on leaving
the cellblock window open. Crystal kept requesting tissues—she pretended to have a bladder problem—and the officer gave her a few at a time. Although the officer could see Crystal's cell on a television monitor and knew what she was up to, she doled out tissues for a couple of hours. By then, Crystal had used the paper to wrap her cold feet. The officer finally gave her the tissue box with the remaining tissues. Crystal put the box under her head for elevation, put her cold arms inside her shirt for warmth, and nodded off at 4
A.M.
At the end of the night there was cold coffee, “nasty hard eggs on a hard roll,” and another child-care worker from St. Christopher's to drive her home. Back at 104th Avenue, Crystal took a shower, threw out the clothes she had worn in jail, and went to bed. “I would have burned the clothes if I could have,” she says. “I felt nasty and dirty. I felt like a whole lot had been taken from me—my self-respect, my pride. Macy's dropped the charges—I guess they figured they had taught us a lesson. I never shoplifted since. My worst fear is having to sleep in jail again. I won't steal even an eyeliner. Now if I don't have the money I do without, much as I hates doing without.”

Crystal still tries to avoid doing without. A while ago, she passed a Woolworth that was having a going-out-of-business half-price sale. She went in and bought a package of mascara—Maybelline Great Lash—and some other odds and ends, like soap and Kotex. When she got home, she emptied out the Woolworth bag with her purchases, and for a minute she didn't see the mascara. When she found it, she decided to return
to Woolworth the following day with her receipt to ask for the mascara that the clerk, according to her, had failed to put in her bag. She went back to Woolworth with a girlfriend, sought out the manager, told her story, and was given a replacement mascara. “For a minute, I really thought I had been done out of my Maybelline, and by the time I found it I already got the idea in my head to ask for it and there was no turning back,” she told her friend. “It beats putting it in my pocket and having it taken away, and I likes beating the system honestly.” Crystal's friend, a sheltered girl, who is perennially astonished by Crystal's adventures and misadventures, asked her how she had the nerve to ask the manager to replace the unmissing mascara. Her eyes narrowed merrily, and her lips widened into a grin. “My name is Crystal,” she replied.

T
he longer Crystal remained at the group home, the less inclined she was to obey its regulations. Serving restriction for having shoplifted designer socks would have cost her too much face with Diamond Madison, a twenty-two-year-old drug dealer she had started dating a month earlier. Diamond Madison had plenty of money and was open-handed. “If he had found out, he would have said, ‘What I'm going to steal for, I had the money in my pocket,' ” Crystal reminisces. “He kept me in line a lot.” Crystal is fickle, and most of her sexual relationships have been fleeting. Diamond is the man she has loved best so far.

By the time Crystal was four, she had been sodomized by one of her father's brothers. At twelve, she had been sexually abused by a Mr. Jones, the elderly superintendent of the last apartment Florence had in the Bronx before she was evicted for nonpayment of rent and moved in with her cousin Hazel. Mr. Jones knew that Crystal was confined to the house, taking care of her younger brothers, and that Florence beat up on her a lot, so Crystal would be grateful for a chance to get out. He told Florence that he had a sister in Harlem named Hattie who was in a wheelchair and that Crystal could clean her apartment on Sundays.

“When I got there, I saw his sister wasn't old and in a wheelchair—she was like any other old lady able to clean up her own house,” Crystal says. “He made me drink liquor, he made me smoke reefer, then he made me get in the bed with him and rubbed against me. He warned me about telling my mother. He said she wouldn't believe me.”