Lockdown (3 page)

I’ve felt bad in my life, but never so bad as when Mr. Cintron walked away. It was as if everything I had hoped for was gone. He had even put Icy on my mail list, and now I didn’t know if I could send her the letter I had written. I remembered what she had written, to think about her at nine o’clock and she would be thinking about me. But I couldn’t think about anything except that I had messed up again.

I wanted to see what the rest of the guys were thinking. There wouldn’t be any talking at lunchtime, but maybe I could see something in their faces. That’s what I thought, but Mr. Wilson brought my lunch to me and I had to eat it in my cell.

“Is that all you know?” he asked. “Settle everything
by fighting? Isn’t that the kind of low-life crap that got you in here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know, all Mr. Cintron has to do is to write you up and they’ll send you right upstate with that kid you had the fight with. Then the two of you can fight all you want,” Mr. Wilson said.

He looked at me like I was nothing, and that was the way I felt. But when he left, I thought about what he had said. Maybe he went home and dealt with his family and his friends like he wanted, but I had to deal with what I found at Progress.

I wanted to pray, but I don’t like doing that kind of stuff. I mean, to me, praying sounds lame. You’ve messed up and then you go asking God to let you cop a plea. One time I heard Mama praying. She was in her bedroom and I thought she was praying to get off that stuff she was using, and I leaned against the door to hear her. But she was praying for ten dollars so she could buy some food. I knew what she would be buying with the ten dollars if she got it.

Mom was a trip and a half. She was small. I was as big as she was when I was nine. She was pretty when she fixed herself up. And she spoke well. Like
Icy. Icy probably talked like Mom, really, but when Mom spoke, you could hear every syllable. Unless she was high. And as much as I loved Mom when she was straight, that’s how much I hated her when she was high. And she always tried to pretend she wasn’t using when I knew she was.

But the main thing was that I knew how some of the chicks around the way copped their money to get high. You can finesse people in stores or you can finesse people in the post office, but you can’t finesse no dealer. He knows what you need and what you’ll do to get it.

Sometimes I dreamed about Mom and me and Willis and Icy living somewhere together, maybe in Queens, next to the park. It was a good dream when it started, but it never ended up good. Never.

The whole joint was quiet and I figured the staff had everybody on lockdown. Sometimes, especially if there was a fight or something, there would be a silent lockdown. You couldn’t have a radio on or a television and you couldn’t talk. That didn’t bother me but it bothered some guys big-time. They had to have some noise going on all the time. I think maybe they were hearing stuff in their heads and
wanted to shut it out. Those were usually the guys on the meds line in the morning.

When dinner came, I was glad to march with everybody to the mess hall. Dinner was the same as lunch, a hamburger patty, a slice of bread, some creamed corn, potatoes, string beans, and rice pudding. It didn’t have any taste, or maybe I was just not up to tasting it, I don’t know.

My light went out at eight thirty. I’m a level one and it wasn’t supposed to go out until nine thirty. I wondered if Mr. Cintron had dropped me to level three, or even four. If I was on level four, I didn’t get to go to school or have rec time. I wouldn’t be going to Evergreen anymore, either.

Being at Progress, hearing the bars slam or standing in the halls waiting for somebody to unlock one of the steel doors, made me feel like maybe I was an animal or something. Going to Evergreen and seeing people walking around and smiling made me feel good even if they weren’t smiling at me. They were feeling good about themselves, and that’s what I needed.

The thing was that whatever happened to me, there was always something worse than there was
before. The first time I was arrested, when they sent me up to Bridges on Spofford Avenue for two weeks, it was bad, but the worst thing that could have happened then was that I got a record. That was like a weight around my neck that was going to drag me down even further the next time I got into trouble. Then the last time I got arrested, I came here to Progress, which is a lot worse than Bridges. When Wilson said they could send me upstate with Cobo, I knew that would be even worse. If Cobo did have a gang up there, they would just probably kill me like they were thinking about killing Toon.

I guess dying is the worst shit you can get into.

Morning came and I got roused up with everybody else. We lined up and I didn’t see Cobo. I was looking for him because he might be trying to sneak up on me and shank me or something. Play gave me a wink but Diego just looked away.

It was summer, and I knew school was out back in the world. My main dog, Kenneth, would be playing b-ball in the Fourth Street tournament. K-Man couldn’t play a lot of ball two years ago, but now he was getting real good. Two teams wanted him to play in the Fourth Street tournament. I wished he could
come up and visit me. K-Man is real people.

“Reese, out of line,” Mr. Pugh said.

I stepped out of line, and he left-faced the crew and marched them off toward school. I was just standing there by myself but I knew better than to move. When Mr. Pugh gets mad at you, he can make your life two kinds of miserable.

He came back and told me to follow him. “Put your left hand on my belt and don’t take it off!”

I put my left hand on his belt. And he started walking toward the staircase. We went to the stairwell and down the stairs real slow. Sometimes Mr. Pugh would stop and flinch like he was going to do something. I just held on to the belt. He was letting me know that any moment he could stop and punch me in the face. I was knowing it.

We went to Mr. Cintron’s office. Miss Rice, his secretary, looked old. Mr. Wilson said she had been working at Progress for over fourteen years.

Mr. Cintron came out of the office and he told Mr. Pugh to bring me in.

“You want him handcuffed to the chair?” Mr. Pugh asked.

“Yes,” Mr. Cintron said.

He went around to the other side of the desk while Mr. Pugh cuffed me to the chair and left. Mr. Cintron shuffled through some papers and shook his head like he was disgusted.

What I was thinking was that if I went upstate and they were going to kill me, then it would be better if they did it right away. I didn’t want to have to walk around looking over my shoulder all the time.

“We picked you!” Mr. Cintron said, looking up at me. “We selected you for the work program because you had a high IQ, you hadn’t done anything violent, you had a decent reading score, and you sounded like you really wanted a break. So everybody on the board is going to be looking at the ‘model’ for this work project and making a judgment. And you’re here getting into fights. You really know how to screw things up, don’t you?”

“Sir, I’ll break my back to make it up,” I said. “I’ll do anything you say. I’ll work hard, I won’t get into any more fights. If somebody wants to beat me up, I’ll just let them. I swear it, sir.”

“Hey, you’ve already proven that your word doesn’t mean shit,” Mr. Cintron said. “So why are you giving me that bull now?”

“I’m giving you the only thing I know, sir,” I said.
“I’m not a snitch, sir, but they were talking about offing Toon. I just didn’t want that to happen, sir.”

“Reese, well, maybe we were wrong about your IQ,” Mr. Cintron said. “You’re in here with boys who can steal, who can shoot each other, who can kill. That’s the kind of life you chose, and that’s the life you got. And you’re one of them. So when you start running down some bull about you couldn’t let this happen or you couldn’t let that happen, it doesn’t mean a thing to me. You stole because you didn’t want something to happen. Deepak—the boy you call Toon—is in here because he wouldn’t behave himself. Tell me where I’m wrong, Reese. Tell me where I’m wrong.”

“You’re not wrong, sir,” I said. “I was wrong, but…”

“But what?”

“I was just wrong.”

“So, I have a number of options,” Mr. Cintron said. “The first is to write up a report on the fight and give you a nice label. How about ‘Aggressive and violent. Cannot control temper’? Then I can send in the report and have you transferred to an upstate facility. You ever been to one of the longterm facilities? In New York they usually put them
in nice areas upstate. It’s pretty up there this time of year. You can fight up there to your heart’s content. They have a half dozen gangs and you’ll be in one of them, and then you can get ready for your visit to Manhattan. You ready for that?”

“What’s that?”

“That’s when they send you back to the streets for a visit,” Mr. Cintron said. “It’s only for a visit because you’ll blow it again and be back in some facility. You’re lucky you didn’t get a longer sentence.”

“I can’t get another chance?”

“I don’t want to give you another chance, Mr. Anderson,” Mr. Cintron said. “But if I take away your chance, if I report this incident, that our ‘high-IQ, nonviolent, carefully selected choice’ has messed up, it’s going to stop the work program in its tracks. Why should we fund this program, pay the extra insurance, and pay for the extra staff hours if these
African Americans
are just going to throw it away? They’re going to look into my face and talk about recidivism rates and emotional instability and social understanding—but in their hearts they’re going to keep it a lot simpler. They’re going to be thinking that people like you don’t deserve a chance.

“So I’m going to squelch this report. I’m going to
let Maldonado, the other kid, take the whole blame,” Mr. Cintron said. “Not for you, because I don’t have any faith in little punks like you, but for the next kid who comes along and might deserve it. So you’re going to continue in this program, Reese. But if you screw up again, you’d better send your soul right to God, because your black ass will belong to me and I will put a hurting on you. Am I making myself clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll find the worst facility in the state to send you to and warn them about you,” he said. “And if I do that, you’ll be sorry as long as you survive.” He pressed a button on the intercom and said, “Mr. Pugh, get him out of here.”

Mr. Pugh uncuffed me. When I stood up, I almost fell down, my legs were shaking so bad. Mr. Pugh took me back to my quarters and told me to wash the floor, and I started doing that.

The soapy water was cold and wasn’t getting the floor clean, but I was down on my knees scrubbing it the best I could. I was crying but I wasn’t making any noise.

The thing was that I didn’t know if I was going to mess up again or not. I just didn’t know. I didn’t want to, but it looked like that’s all I did.

“You sweet on Toon?” Mr. Pugh had me in a Ripp belt with my hands handcuffed to it in front of me. At least I was in the passenger seat of the van instead of the back.

“Why I got to be sweet on him because I don’t want to see the dude killed?” I asked. “You want to see somebody killed?”

“I seen guys get killed,” Mr. Pugh said. “In Iraq I seen our guys get killed and a lot of Raqs running off to meet Allah.”

“That was war,” I said. “This ain’t war.”

“Yeah, whatever. He didn’t ask you nothing about me?”

“No.”

We drove the rest of the way to Evergreen in silence. I knew what Mr. Pugh was thinking. He could have lost his job if Mr. Cintron knew he had split from the room when he saw what was going down. I wasn’t going to rat Mr. Pugh out because I knew he could do a lot more to me than I could to him.

We got to Evergreen, and he parked the van and came around to my side.

“You’re doing okay,” he grumbled at me. “Don’t mess it up.”

I wasn’t really doing okay. Mr. Cintron had been in my corner and now he wasn’t. He’d made that clear, but he’d also said he wanted me to make it happen for all the juvies who were going to follow me. I liked that.

Father Santora was in the lobby when we got there, and he came up with this big smile and reached out to shake my hand. I couldn’t shake his because Mr. Pugh hadn’t uncuffed me.

Once I was uncuffed, Mr. Pugh said he would be by to pick me up at four, and then Father Santora sent for Simi. She came down and he told her to have me working on the rest floor.

Simi was short and brown skinned. It looked like
all the help at Evergreen were colored and the residents were all white. She had a little gold tooth on one side of her mouth. It looked a little strange, but she had a nice smile.

“I have a cousin who looks just like you,” Simi said as we walked up the steel stairs. “Only he’s got good hair.”

“That’s nice,” I said, which sounded stupid even before it got all the way out.

The rooms on the rest floor looked a little like our quarters at Progress. They weren’t small but they weren’t huge, either. Each room had a bed, a sink, a chest with drawers, and a smaller room, about the size of a closet, with a toilet. They also had at least one window, which was cool. The beds were the kind I had seen in hospitals. If you pressed a button, the head or foot would come up.

Some of the rooms had oxygen tanks in them. We had an oxygen tank at Progress in the nurse’s office.

Simi, who looked okay, kind of Spanish and kind of black, gave me a big plastic bag and told me to go to each room and collect any garbage they might have.

“Six rooms. We had patients in seven rooms but
Mr. Cloder died,” Simi said. “You get used to that. All of these people here are very old. After a while they die and you say amen and you move on. After you collect all the garbage, then you go and you stay with Mr. Hoof. He’s not feeling good and he might need some help. Anything he wants you to do, you do it.”

“Which one is Mr. Hoof?”

“Can you read?” Simi asked.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, so when you go into the rooms, you look at the nametags on the inside of the door. When you see one that says Mr. Hoof, then you know who he is. All right?”

“Yeah.”

“And knock before you go in, even if the door is open,” Simi said.

My conversation with Mr. Cintron kicked back in and I wanted to impress Simi with all the work I was going to do. I wanted to impress Mr. Hoof, too, but I didn’t know who he was yet.

I went to each room, knocked, and when whoever was in the room asked me what I wanted, I said I was supposed to collect the garbage.

“Why isn’t Simi doing it?” a man asked me. The
name on his door read
GONDER
.

“I don’t know, sir,” I answered. “She just told me to do it and she’s in charge of me, so…”

“Don’t take my newspapers,” the man said. “Sometimes I read them over to see if I’ve missed anything.”

“I do that sometimes too,” I said.

“Where do you live?” Mr. Gonder turned his head as if his neck was stiff.

“Just past the Bronx,” I said.

“Where past the Bronx?” he asked.

“Near the warehouses,” I said, not wanting to tell him I was at Progress.

“You should move to Harlem,” Mr. Gonder said. “They’re fixing it up nice. My uncle lived there years ago when it was a really good neighborhood.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t think you live up there,” Mr. Gonder said. “You look like you’re from Brooklyn. You from Brooklyn?”

“No, sir.”

“I can tell where people come from by the way they talk, too,” Mr. Gonder said. “They got a certain way of talking in Brooklyn. I don’t like it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Hoof’s room was the last one I went into. I saw his name on the door but it wasn’t
Hoof
, as I thought—it was
Hooft.

“Hello, sir, I came to collect any garbage you have,” I said.

“Where’s the colored girl that was doing it?”

“She’s in charge of me,” I said. “And she told me to collect the garbage.”

He was sitting on a chair near the window. He had a book in his lap and I thought it might be a Bible. I found a newspaper on the floor and asked if I should throw it away.

Mr. Hooft motioned with his hand and I put the paper in the plastic bag. He looked really old and thin. His face was white but he had a lot of dark marks on his cheeks that looked like birthmarks. I thought maybe he had a disease.

I finished picking up the stuff in Mr. Hooft’s room and took it out to where Simi was sitting at a desk in the hallway. She asked me if I had any trouble and I told her no. She took me to a closet at the end of the hall, opened it, and told me to tie the top of the bag up tight and then put it in the closet.

“The cleaning staff picks it up at night and puts it out for the waste disposal people,” she said. “So what do you think of Mr. Hooft?”

“He’s okay, I guess.”

“He’s nice once you get to know him,” she said. “Come on, I’ll give the two of you a formal introduction.”

I thought that was cool. I also noticed that Simi knocked on the door even though Mr. Hooft saw us coming.

“Hello, Pieter,” she said. “I want you to meet Reese. He’s here from the Progress Facility and he’s going to be working ten days a month for us. We think he’s going to do a marvelous job.”

“What’s the Progress Facility?”

“It’s a place for young men who have made a mistake,” Simi said. “But I think Reese has learned his lesson and now he’s on the right road. Aren’t you, Reese?”

“Yes.” My heart sank when I saw Mr. Hooft’s face. He was looking over at me as if he was scared of me.

He beckoned Simi over and pulled her next to him. I heard him say that he didn’t want me in his room.

Simi straightened up. “Mr. Hooft, you’ll have to
work with whatever staff we have. Reese is a very intelligent boy and he will be working with us. Now you two get acquainted, because he’s going to be assisting you with keeping your room clean, with your personal hygiene, and anything else you need. He’s a very good young man.”

Simi patted me on the arm and walked out of the door.

Mr. Hooft looked at me and then looked toward the door as if he might have thought about getting up and running. I saw a cane in the corner of the room, so I knew he wouldn’t be running too fast.

For a while we were silent, me standing in the middle of the floor and him sitting by the window looking at me. I tried to think of something good to say.

“Is there anything I can do for you, sir?”

He got up slowly and I thought he was going to leave the room, but then he went into the little bathroom. I didn’t know if he was going to stay in there, maybe lock himself up or what. There was a stool near the chest, and I went over and sat on it.

I hadn’t been around a lot of old people before and I didn’t know how to act. There had been a program on television about teenagers robbing old
people. Maybe he had seen that and was getting spooked. Simi had told me to stay with him, so I just sat on the stool.

After a while the door opened and he came out and looked around the room like he was wondering if I was still there. I stood up and he looked me up and down.

Then he went back to his place on the chair.

“You murdered somebody?” he asked me.

“No, sir,” I said. “I didn’t murder anybody.”

“White or black person?” he asked. He had an accent.

“Sir, I didn’t murder anybody,” I repeated.

“You’re in jail now?”

“Yes.” I didn’t like saying I was in jail. I remembered when I first got to Progress I began thinking about what I would say to people when I got out, what I would call the place.

“You raped a woman?”

“No, man. I didn’t rape a woman and I didn’t kill anybody.”

“So what did you do?”

“I would rather not say.”

“Simi!” Mr. Hooft called out. “Simi!”

“Sir, please give me a chance,” I asked him.

“What did you do so terrible you can’t even say the words?” he asked. “Simi! Simi!”

Simi came to the door and looked at me and then at Mr. Hooft.

“What happened?” she asked.

“This man, is he a murderer?”

“No, he is not a murderer, Mr. Hooft.” Simi put her arm around my waist. “He’s a very nice young boy.”

“If he was a very nice young boy, he wouldn’t be in jail,” Mr. Hooft said.

“Sometimes, Mr. Hooft, people make mistakes,” Simi said. “And Reese will be working with you.”

She left again and I saw that Mr. Hooft had got his cane and was leaning on it as he sat. He was breathing kind of heavy. Then he turned his head toward me.

“So what did you do?”

“I needed money real bad,” I said. “I knew this one guy, Freddy Booker, who hung out on my block, was dealing prescription medicines. He was getting homeless dudes to go to certain doctors and get prescriptions for painkillers and Viagra and things like
that. They would give him the prescriptions and he would give them, like, two dollars apiece or something like that. Then he would get the prescriptions filled and sell the pills on the street. He would buy any kind of prescription that was either sex medicine or painkillers.

“I knew where this doctor had a storefront office. It was in a rough neighborhood and usually closed at night. I know it was wrong, sir, but I broke in and stole a whole bunch of blank prescription forms. The ones with the numbers on them. I sold them to the guy who was dealing prescription drugs.

“What happened then was this same guy was busted for dealing with a doctor downtown on 127th Street.”

“In Brooklyn?”

“No, in Harlem.”

“Then what happened?”

“When he got picked up, he snitched out everybody he knew, including me. They charged me with about eighteen counts of dealing drugs and unlawful distribution and stuff like that, everything the guy was charged with. I copped a plea to doing just what I did, and that’s how I got to Progress, sir.

“But yo, like, I’m trying to turn my life around and I’m not going to do anything like that again. That’s for sure.”

“I don’t like colored people,” Mr. Hooft said. “Nothing personal, I just don’t like them. And you’re a colored criminal and I don’t like criminals, either.”

“Right.” I had been standing up but I sat back down again. I knew if Mr. Hooft said anything negative about me, said I sassed him or anything, it was going to go against me, so I just shut up. Even if it wasn’t true, it didn’t matter. I was a criminal, like he said, and what really went down didn’t matter all that much.

“Did you know the doctor?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“But you stole from him anyway, and this other person, the one you were working for—what was his name?”

“Mr. Hoof, I wasn’t working for him—”

“Hoof
t
! With a
t
. Colored people can’t say that? P-i-e-t-e-r Hooft!” Mr. Hooft said. “Simi can’t say it and you can’t say it. There are certain things in your makeup which make you who you are. You coloreds
steal and use drugs and you kill people and you can’t even pronounce a name. Your brains are bad. That’s why you were slaves.”

What I would have liked to do was to hop to this sucker and beat his head in, but it would’ve been the same as beating my own head in, because I would be the one doing the most suffering. I didn’t feel I was letting what he said slide, but I held back from saying what I really felt.

When Mr. Pugh came to pick me up, I was ready to go back. He asked me if I had had a nice vacation.

“I was working,” I said.

“What were you doing?”

“Picking up garbage,” I said.

“Good job for you,” Mr. Pugh said.