I walked into my cell, Michael still in front of me, and found Styler, Ferguson, and Addison sitting on my bunk, two of them smoking cigarettes. In the corner, wedged in between the bowl and sink, Tommy stood at attention.
Ferguson had his shirt off and kept his back against the wall. He patted Addison on the shoulder and winked, eager for the fun to begin. Ferguson seldom initiated any of the acts against us, but once they began, he joined in with a viciousness that belied his size and demeanor. He fancied himself a comic and was known to slap and kick inmates until they laughed aloud at one of his stories.
I looked around the room, heard the door behind me slam shut, and watched Addison, Styler, and Nokes undo their shirts. My body was wet with sweat and I felt weak enough to faint. I saw Michael open and close his fists and Tommy shut his eyes to all movement. I heard John start to wheeze, his breath coming in small bursts.
Nokes pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and asked me if I liked surprises. When I answered no, they all shared a long, loud laugh. Ferguson came off the cot and rubbed the palm of his hand across my face as he asked how old I now was.
“Thirteen,” I said.
Addison pointed a finger in Tommy’s direction and ordered him to turn and face the wall. Tommy, moving slowly, did as he was told.
Ferguson moved away from me and ordered both John and Michael to do the same. They walked to the wall farthest from the bunk and turned their faces to it.
Nokes, cigarette dangling from his mouth, tossed one arm casually over my shoulders. Addison put out his cigarette and checked his watch, moving back, closer to my bunk, leaving Nokes with all the free room he wanted.
My eyelids moved like shutters, trying to block out the droplets of sweat falling into them. My voice cracked from fear and nerves. “What do you want?” I managed to ask.
“A blow job,” Nokes said.
I don’t remember much more about that day. I remember being forced down to my knees, closing my eyes, my consciousness, to all but the laughter and jeers. I remember Nokes’s sweaty hands holding the back of my head. I remember feeling numb and wishing they would kill me before the night was over.
I never spoke to my friends about it, nor did they ever mention it to me. We tried as best we could to annihilate those moments—which occurred with dulling regularity after that birthday morning—as deep inside ourselves as possible. To this day, no clear picture of the sexual abuse we endured at the Wilkinson Home for Boys has surfaced in my mind. I have buried it as deep as it can possibly go. But it is there and it will always be there, no matter how hard I work at blocking it out. It occasionally surfaces, not during my most violent nightmares, of which there have been many, but in softer moments. It will show itself across more innocent images—a glimpse of a uniform, the sounds of a man’s laugh, a darkened room, the clanging of a fence. It lasts for the briefest of seconds. Just long enough to once more send a chill.
The details of those forced sexual encounters have been relegated to a series of stop-action blurs.
I see hands slap bare skin. I see pants torn and shirts ripped apart. I feel hot breath against my neck and strong legs wrapped around mine. I hear groans and frenzied laughter, my back and neck wet from another man’s sweat and spit. I smell cigarette smoke and hear mute talk once it’s over, the jokes, the comments, the promises to return.
In those blurry visions I am always alone and crying out against the pain, the shame, and the empty feeling the abuse of a body leaves in the tracks of the mind. I am held in place by men I hate, helpless to fight back, held by fear and the dark end of a guard’s baton.
What I remember most clearly from that chilly October day was that it was my thirteenth birthday and the end of my childhood.
5
I WAS WALKING next to Michael in the outfield of Wilkinson Park, facing empty wooden stands. It was nearing Thanksgiving and the weather was taking a cold turn. We wore thin pea-green jackets above our prison issues, hands shoved inside the pockets of our pants.
We had been inside Wilkinson for two months. Ten months of our sentences remained. In that short span of time, the guards at Wilkinson had beaten our bodies and had weakened our minds. All that was left was the strength of our spirit, and I knew it wouldn’t take much longer for that last part to go.
I began to think I might never make it out of Wilkinson, that my life would end within its walls. There were plenty of rumors floating around about inmates found dead in their bunks or in the shower stalls. I didn’t know how many of those rumors were true and I didn’t care to know. All that mattered to me was that I was being broken down by a system built to break people like me. I slept less than two hours a night and ate no more of the food than I needed. I had lost interest in most things and went through the routine of my day with shuttered eyes, closed to as much around me as possible.
It seemed even worse for my friends. I looked over at Michael, his face tired and worn, his movements slow and tentative, humbled by the beatings and the surroundings. His passion seemed dissolved, his strength sheared. All that was left beneath the sunken eyes and beat-up body was his pride and his concern for our collective safety. I hoped it would be enough to get him through.
John’s condition was even worse. He was sickly to begin with, and the constant beatings and rapes combined with the lack of food he could eat had reduced his body to a withered state. He spent more time in the infirmary than he did in class or in the exercise yard. He spoke in a low, raspy voice and was losing that sharp edge of humor that had always sustained him.
Butter looked the same on the outside, his body weight holding steady, his manner seemingly unaffected. But his eyes were lifeless, stripped of any vibrancy, emptied of their spark. He was cold and distant now, his emotions locked, his responses monosyllabic. It was a survival method, the only way he could think of to make it through one more day.
Each of the guards had chosen one of us as a regular target, tagged us as his own personal pet. In my case, it was Addison. He would call on me to run his errands and even had me wash his car once a week. His hatred of me knew no barriers, his abuse no gates. He would spend hours telling me how easy my life was compared to his, how I was lucky to have a father who cared about me and a mother who didn’t sleep around. He told me I should appreciate having grown up in New York City and been able to see all the things he could never afford to see. He told me I was lucky to have a friend like him in a place like Wilkinson.
Ferguson had it in for John, whose very presence would set off the guard’s explosive temper. He would kick John as he walked by or hit him on the back of the head with his baton. Often the abuse would be rougher, its ugly results visible the next morning when John walked the yard with swollen eyes or puffy lips. Ferguson had a villain’s heart and enjoyed whipping the weakest member of our pack. I always felt it was because he was weak himself, constantly ridiculed by Nokes and Styler. He couldn’t lash out at them, so he sought an easier target. He found that target in John Reilly.
Styler claimed Tommy as his personal property. He forced him to carry his free weights around the yard and left a pair of shoes outside his cell every night to be shined by morning. He slapped and verbally abused him at will, a muscular man lording his advantage over a chubby boy. Tommy’s presence set off in Styler too many reminders of his own impoverished childhood. He thought himself better than Tommy, constantly berating him over the most minor of infractions. He never let a day pass without attacking him in some form.
While Nokes abused us all, he took his greatest pleasure from beating Michael. He saw it as a match between two group leaders and always made sure that the rest of us were aware of his numerous assaults. He relished the cruelty he showered on Michael, forcing him to wipe up puddles of urine and wash the soiled clothes of other inmates. He ordered him to run laps around the playground track late into the night and then would wake him before the morning bell. He would slap and kick him randomly and trip him from behind while he walked the lunch line. I
t was all meant to make Michael beg him to stop, beg Nokes to leave him alone. But through it all, Michael Sullivan never spoke a word.
All four of the guards used sex as one more vicious tool in their arsenal. The repeated rapes were not only the ultimate form of humiliation, but the strongest method of control the guards could wield. The very threat of a rape kept us frightened of them all the time, never knowing when the door to the cell would swing open, always wondering when we would be pulled from a line.
We weren’t the first group that Nokes and his crew treated with such levels of inhumanity, and they weren’t the only guards to abuse inmates. All across Wilkinson, young boys were left to the control of the out-of-control guards. And the cruelty was all in the open, done without fear of reprisal. No one spoke out against the abuse and no one reported it. The guards who did nothing other than maintain order in Wilkinson could ill afford to bring attention to the situation; to do so might cost them their own jobs. The support personnel were in similar positions. The warden and his assistants were blind to what went on, at ease with the pretense that they fulfilled a necessary function by keeping kids like us off the streets. In truth, they were probably right in their thinking. After all, not many in town would waste time worrying about the well-being of juvenile offenders.
The town that surrounded Wilkinson was small and weathered. Most of the houses had been built around the turn of the century. There was nothing in the way of industry other than a few parcels of farmland, two dairies, and a large plastics factory that employed nearly half of the 4,000 population. The townsfolk were friendly, the police department was small and honest, and the high school football team was said to be one of the best in the county. There wasn’t much money, but there wasn’t much to spend it on, either. Church bells rang loud and clear on Sunday mornings and pork picnics were summer weekend staples. The citizens voted Republican every November and kept to themselves year-round. They would seem to have little time or patience for the concerns of boys sent to their town to live behind locked doors.
I stopped walking and stood looking around the fields, a group of inmates to my left playing football, a smaller group to my right huddled in a circle, talking in whispers and hand signals. The wind was blowing cold, the overhead sky dark with thick clouds that buried the autumn sun in shadow.
There were fifteen more minutes to go on our break. I left Michael to finish his walk and headed toward the library. We all needed to find a place of solace, and I found mine in the pages of John’s favorite book, The Count of Monte Cristo. I read and reread the novel, sifting through the dark moments of Edmond Dantes’s unjust imprisonment, smiling when he eventually made his escape and walked from the prison where he had been condemned to live out his life. Then I would put down the book and say a prayer, looking toward the day when I could walk out of Wilkinson.
6
VISITORS WERE ALLOWED into Wilkinson on rotating weekend mornings, for a maximum of one hour. Only one visitor per inmate was permitted.
Early into my stay, I had written and asked my father not to come, explaining how it would make it harder for me to do time seeing him or my mother. I couldn’t look at my father and have him see on my face all that had happened to me. It would have been too much for either one of us. Michael had done the same with the interested members of his family. Tommy’s mother could never get it together to visit, satisfied with the occasional letter he sent telling her all was well. John’s mother came up once a month, her eyes always brimming with tears, too distraught to notice her son’s skeletal condition.
No one could stop Father Bobby from visiting.
News of his Saturday arrival was always presented with a stern warning, delivered by Nokes, to keep the conversation on a happy note. He warned us not to tell Father Bobby anything and that if we did, reprisals would be severe. He assured us that we belonged to him now and that no one, especially some priest from a poor parish, could be of any help to us.
FATHER BOBBY WAS sitting on a fold-out chair in the center of the large visitors’ room. He had placed his black jacket over the back of the chair and kept his hands on his lap. He was wearing a short-sleeve black shirt with Roman collar, black pants, and a shiny pair of black loafers. His face was tense and his eyes looked straight at me as I walked toward him, not able to hide their shock at what he saw.
“You lost some pounds,” he said, a trace of anger in his voice.
“It’s not exactly home cooking,” I said, sitting down across from him at the long table.
Father Bobby nodded and reached out his hands to touch mine. He told me I looked tired and wondered if I was getting the sleep I needed. He asked about my friends and told me he was scheduled to see each of them later in the day.
I didn’t speak much. I wanted to tell him so many things, but I knew I couldn’t. I was afraid of what Nokes and his crew would do if they found out. I was also ashamed. I didn’t want him to know what was being done to me. I didn’t want anybody to know. I loved Father Bobby, but right now I couldn’t stand to look at him. I was afraid that he would be able to see right through me, see past the fear and the shame, right through to the truth.
“Shakes, is there anything you want to tell me?” Father Bobby asked, moving his chair closer to the table. “Anything at all?”
“You shouldn’t come here anymore. I appreciate it. But it’s not a good thing for you to do.”
I looked at him and was reminded of everything I missed, everything I couldn’t have anymore. I needed to keep those thoughts out of my mind if I expected to survive. I couldn’t fight through those feelings with every visit. If I was going to come out of Wilkinson, I was going to have to come out of it alone.
Father Bobby sat back in his chair, then pulled out a Marlboro and lit it with a butane. He blew a line of smoke toward the chipped ceiling, gazing over my right shoulder at a guard standing at rest. “I stopped over at Attica on my way up here,” he told me. “To see an old friend of mine.”
“You have any friends not in jail?” I asked.
“Not as many as I’d like,” he answered, smiling, cigarette still in his mouth.
“What’s he in for?” I asked.
“Triple murder,” Father Bobby said. “He killed three men in cold blood fifteen years ago.”
“He a good friend?”
“He’s my best friend,” Father Bobby said. “We grew up together. We were close. Like you and the guys.”
Father Bobby took a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaled slowly. I knew he had been a troubled teenager, a street brawler with a bad temper who was always being dragged in by the cops. I felt that was part of the reason he went to bat for us. But it wasn’t until that moment that I knew he had served time in Wilkinson.
“We were both sent up here,” Father Bobby said, his voice lower, his eyes centered on me. “It wasn’t easy, just like it’s not easy for you and the guys. This place killed my friend. It killed him on the inside. It made him hard. Made him not care.”
I stared away from him, fighting off the urge to cry, grateful that there was one person who cared about me, cared about us, who knew what we were going through and who understood and would respect our need for silence. It was not surprising to me that the person would turn out to be Father Bobby.
It was also a comfort to know it hadn’t killed or weakened him, but that somehow, in some way, Father Bobby found the courage to take what happened and place it behind him. I knew now that if I could get out of Wilkinson in one piece I had a chance to live with what happened. Maybe I would never be able to forget it, just like I was sure Father Bobby had visions of his own hell every day. But I might be able to live my life in step with those painful memories. Maybe my friends could too. All we needed was to find the same strength that Father Bobby found.
“Don’t let this place kill you, Shakes,” he told me, the bottom of his hands squeezing the tops of mine. “Don’t let it make you think you’re tougher than you are.”
“Why?” I asked.
“So I can come out and be a priest?”
“God, no,” Father Bobby said with a laugh. “The church doesn’t need another priest who lifts from the poor box.”
“Then why?” I asked.
His voice softened. “The road only leads back to this place. And it’s a road that will kill you. From the inside out. Just like it did my friend.”
Father Bobby stood up from his chair, reached his arms out, and gave me a long, slow hug. I didn’t want to let him go. I never felt as close to anyone as I felt to him at that moment. I was so thankful for what he had told me, relieved that my burden and that of my friends could be placed, if we needed to, on his sturdy shoulders.
I finally let go and took three steps back, watching him put on his jacket and button it, a Yankee cap folded in his right hand.
“I’ll see you in the Kitchen,” I said.
“I’m counting on it, Shakes,” Father Bobby said before turning away and nodding for the guard to open the iron door leading out.
7
ONCE A YEAR, in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the Wilkinson Home for Boys sponsored a touch football game. Local residents were invited to huddle in the bleachers surrounding the football field, at a price of two dollars a ticket, with the money going back to the town. Children under ten were allowed in free.
But it was never about football. It was about the process of breaking down an inmate. First, the body was taken, ripped apart as if it were a tackle dummy, toyed with as if it were a stage prop. Next a young man’s mind was molested, hounded until all he saw was a guard’s face, all he heard was a prison whistle, all he feared was to break an unknown rule. Then, to complete the process, the guards would parade their creations onto a football field in front of the good people of a small town and play a game against them. A game they were too sick, too beaten up, too mentally ruined to compete in. All this was to show off the perfect picture of a perfect institution.