The breakdown didn’t work with all the inmates. But it worked with enough of them to keep the portrait intact.
The guards assembled their team much in advance, practiced as often as four times a week, and had full use of the fields. The inmates’ team was chosen the Monday before the game, eleven reluctant players selected randomly from the various ethnic groups, placed together, and told to play as a unit. They were allowed one two-hour practice, held under strict supervision. It wasn’t meant, in any way, to be a fair or equal match. It was just another chance for the guards to beat up on the inmates, this time in front of a paying crowd. And the way those games were played, you didn’t need a ref; you needed a doctor.
Nokes was captain of the guards’ team during my months at Wilkinson. Addison, Ferguson, and Styler were players. My friends and I knew, without having to wait for a roster sheet, that we would be chosen for the inmates’ team. Even Tommy, who had a badly swollen left ankle, the result of a recent battering he received from Styler. The guards were on our case for days, talking football, asking if we played it in Hell’s Kitchen, asking who our favorite players were. It was just their way of telling us to get ready for another beating.
We were twenty minutes into practice, surrounded by guards on the four corners of the field, when I was tackled from behind by a black kid with braces and wine-barrel arms. My face was pushed into the dirt, grass covering my nose and chin. I turned my head and stared at him.
“It’s touch football,” I muttered.
“I touch hard,” he said.
“Save it for the guards,” I told him. “I’m on your side.”
“Don’t need nobody on my side,” he mumbled, moving back to the huddle.
“It’s not bad enough that the guards are gonna hand us our ass,” I said, walking with Michael. “We’ve got these losers thinking they’re the Green Bay Packers.”
“What’s the point of even having a practice?” John said, coming up behind us.
“For them.” I nodded toward a group of guards at mid-field, arms folded, laughing and nudging one another.
“We’re like a coming attraction,” Tommy said, walking slowly, trying not to put weight on his damaged ankle.
“Maybe,” Michael said, looking at the inmates on the other side of the field. “Shakes, who’s the toughest guy out here?”
“How do you mean, tough?” I said.
“Who can talk and have everybody listen?” Michael said.
“Rizzo,” I told him. “Tall black guy with the shaved head. The one holding the ball.”
“A black Italian?” John said.
“I don’t know what he is. I just know his name’s Rizzo. He’s the main guy down in? block.”
“What’s he here for?” Tommy asked.
“Manslaughter,” I told him. “Involuntary.”
“What’s that mean?”
“There was a fight,” I explained. “He walked away and the other guy was carried away.”
“There’s gonna be another one if we don’t get back and play,” Tommy said. “Let’s not get Rizzo angry before the game.”
“They say he’s got his own crew on the outside,” I said. “He’s up from Harlem or Bed-Stuy. I forget which. And the guy he killed?”
“What about him?” Michael said.
“His mother’s boyfriend. Got a little too friendly with Rizzo’s kid sister.”
“That’s our guy, then,” Michael said.
“Our guy for what?” I said.
“I’ll tell you after practice,” Michael said.
RIZZO SAT BY himself in the library, at a wooden table in the center of the room, turning the pages of a football magazine, the top of his shaved head enveloped in a halo from the glare of the fluorescent lights overhead. I stood to his left, browsing through the library’s collection of adventure books, most of them paperback, many missing pages and covers, a few littered with pornographic sketches.
Michael, a copy of Tom Sawyer under his arm, walked to the table, pulled back a chair, and sat across from Rizzo.
“Okay with you if I use this chair?” he asked.
“Okay with me if you set yourself on fire,” Rizzo said, his voice and body more man than boy. “Okay with me if you die. I don’t give a fuck.”
“Thanks,” Michael said, and sat down.
They read in silence for a few minutes, Michael turning his head once to look back in my direction, his face a blend of concern and confidence.
“Rizzo,” Michael said in a whisper. “I need to talk to you. It won’t take long.”
“How the fuck you know my name?” Rizzo snarled.
“I’d have to be stupid not to know,” Michael said. “You the guy everybody points to and stays away from.”
“That was true,” Rizzo said. “Till today.”
“We’re wasting time,” Michael said. “You interested or not?”
Rizzo took a deep breath and stared at Michael, his jaw set, his hands flat on the surface of the table, his eyes the color of lit cigars.
“Tell your friend over there to pull a chair next to you,” Rizzo said. “He ain’t smart enough to look cool.”
Michael smiled at Rizzo and without turning his head called for me to join them.
I walked down the aisle and eased my way toward the table, looking around the library, empty except for a guard standing by the entrance. I nodded at Rizzo as I sat down, a copy of Scaramouche in my hand.
“You been in here longer than a year?” Michael asked him.
“Closer to three,” Rizzo said. “Should be out come the spring.”
“How many of these football games you play in?” Michael asked.
“This one be my second,” Rizzo said. “Why?”
“The guards win the first?”
“The guards ain’t ever lost one,” Rizzo said.
“What if they did?”
“Look, white boy,” Rizzo said, sitting straight up in his chair, a tint of anger seeping through the icy veneer. “Don’t know what your play was on the street. Don’t care. But in here, the guards call the play and the play calls for them to win the game.”
“Why?”
“You think they fuck with you now,” Rizzo said. “Beat them Saturday and see what happens. Won’t be just you. Be all, in every cell block. Now, you tell me, white boy, we all supposed to get our ass split open just so you can look good in a football game?”
“They don’t fuck with you,” I said, inching closer to the conversation.
“No,” Rizzo said. “They don’t. But they’ll find them a nigger that ain’t me and make him eat it double.”
“I’m not saying we gotta win,” Michael said. “I just don’t want to take a beating.”
“You do every day,” Rizzo said. “Why’s Saturday special?”
“On Saturday we can hit back,” Michael said.
“You don’t need me to hit them back,” Rizzo said.
“It won’t work unless we’re all in it,” Michael said. “The only one who can make that happen is you.”
“Guards steer clear of me,” Rizzo said. “They stay back and let me do my time. I play the game, put a hurt on one of them, it might change my cushion.”
“You’re still nothin’ but a nigger to them,” Michael said.
“Easy, white boy,” Rizzo told him. “Just ’cause we talkin’ don’t mean we on the same side.”
“They don’t hit you or fuck with you like they do us,” Michael said, excited now. “They fuck with you another way. They treat you like an animal. A street animal. One they talk about when his back’s turned.”
“I don’t give a fuck what they say about me,” Rizzo said.
“Yeah, you do,” Michael said. “You give a fuck. ’Else you wouldn’t be the man back where you are.”
“And puttin’ a hurt on the guards is gonna change that?” Rizzo sneered. “That what you think?”
“It won’t change a thing,” Michael said.
That stopped Rizzo c
old. Now he was interested. “Then why, white boy?” he asked. He bolted up and shoved his chair behind him. “If it ain’t gonna change nothin’?”
Michael stood up and looked briefly past Rizzo’s shoulders at the guard to his right. He then leaned across the table, his eyes tilted up toward Rizzo.
“To make them feel what we feel,” Michael said. “Just for a couple of hours.”
Rizzo said nothing for the longest time. Then his lips curled up in what I can only assume was a smile.
“Hope you play as good as you talk,” Rizzo said, turning to leave.
“I hope so too,” Michael said.
It was the first Saturday in December.
The afternoon sun did little to contain the cold winds whipping around the grounds. The stands were filled with bodies buried under the weight of wool coats, flap-down hats, furry hoods, leather gloves, wrap-around scarves, and thick quilts. The crowd’s collective breath broke through the protective barriers of their clothing, sending waves of warm air snaking toward the slate-gray sky.
Vendors sold peanuts, hot chocolate, and coffee from their stations at the base of the stands. Armed guards circled the perimeters of the field, eyeing the crowd. Another group of guards stood in a straight-line formation behind our bench, watching with smirks as, shivering in our thin pants and sweatshirts, we laced our sneakers tight.
I turned to stare at the crowd, wondering who they would root for and how far they had come just to see a touch football game between a group of guards and a collection of teenage inmates. I also stared at them with a fair amount of envy, knowing that once the game was over, they were free to leave, to return to their safe homes, dinner waiting, our game reduced to nothing more than table conversation.
The guards came out wearing shoulder and elbow pads, the spikes on their cleats shiny and new. A handful were dressed in jeans and the rest wore sweatpants. All of them had on thick cotton sweaters, a few of them with hoods. We were left to play in our prison issues, from sweats to sneakers.
The two captains, Nokes for the guards and Rizzo for the inmates, met in the center of the field for the coin toss, a guard posing as a referee standing between them. Rizzo had insisted on being named captain, feeling it would send the guards an early signal that this was not going to be just another football game. Neither one attempted a handshake, but Nokes offered to skip the toss and let us have the ball first.
Rizzo turned down the request and called for heads. Nokes didn’t want any part of Rizzo, well aware of his reputation. But he couldn’t back up, not with the other guards watching and not with the warden sitting in the front row of the stands. He offered Rizzo a deal. He would go easy on him and the other three members of his crew who were on the team if he laid down and stayed out of the game. If not, Nokes warned, they would be as rough on them as they planned to be on the rest of the inmates. Rizzo listened to the offer without any show of emotion, his eyes never moving from Nokes’s face. He took several deep breaths and then, once again, asked for the coin to be tossed.
The coin came down heads.
Michael was in the center of the huddle, down on one knee, staring at the faces around him. He needed to see how rough the guards were going to be. He called a running play with me getting the ball. If I was touched as the rules called for, then we would be playing fair. But if I was tackled, as we all anticipated I would be, then we were in for a long and probably bloody afternoon. As Michael broke the huddle, Rizzo warned me not to fumble, regardless of how hard I was hit.
I stood behind Michael and next to Juanito, a fifteen-year-old in a T-shirt and torn pants. Tommy and John were on the line alongside Rizzo and a chubby black kid. Four inmates were spread at wideout, two on each side. The guards played four men up front, three in the middle, and four in the backfield.
Nokes and Addison were in the center of the line, both looking straight at me, their breath coming out in clouds, arms swinging at their sides, their bodies tense. Ferguson and Styler were playing deep, in a crouch, the front end of their cleats digging into hard ground.
“Watch out for the pass,” Nokes shouted to the guards positioned around him. “Those wideout niggers can really run. Don’t let ’em get in front of you.”
Michael grabbed the snap, took three steps back, and flipped me the ball. I clutched it to my side, holding it with both hands, and followed Juanito into the line. The guards came off the ball with a grunt-filled fury, Nokes leading the charge. I turned a sharp left, darting from the center of the crowd, looking for an open space.
Three yards in, I was hit on the side by Addison, his arms around my waist, his weight dragging me down. From the corner of my eye I saw Nokes, bearing down fast, primed to pin me to the ground.
The elbow came out straight and hard, a black blur that was felt before it was seen. It caught Nokes flush on the side of the face and sent him sprawling to the dirt, Rizzo hovering above him, a smile on his face.
“The nigger on the line can really hit,” Rizzo said to him. “Don’t let him get in front of you.”
“All right!” Juanito said, helping me up. “We got ourselves a game now, motherfuckers. We got ourselves a game.”
“That’s right,” Michael said, giving Rizzo a wink. “We got ourselves a game.”
For ninety minutes, spread across four quarters and a halftime break, we played the guards in the toughest and bloodiest game of touch football ever seen on the playing fields of the Wilkinson Home for Boys. For those ninety minutes we took the game out of that prison, moved it miles beyond the locked gates and the sloping hills of the surrounding countryside, and brought it back down to the streets of the neighborhoods we had come from.
For those ninety minutes we were once again free.
We were down by a touchdown midway through the fourth quarter, our energy sapped by the cold and brutal tactics employed by the guards in their all-out effort to emerge with a victory.
Michael stood in the center of the huddle, the sleeve of his left arm drenched in blood, courtesy of a cleat-stomping he received from Addison and Styler on a long run shortly before the end of the half. Two thin streaks of blood flowed down the right side of his face. Tommy was breathing heavily, his ankle thick and purple. Johnny was barely able to stand, having been sandwiched a number of times by Nokes and Ferguson out in the middle of an open field.
I sat on my knees, spitting blood from a split lip, my breath coming in spurts, the pain from my rib cage too strong to ignore. I looked around at the others, all of them bleeding and raw. Rizzo’s right hand was broken, twisted in a pile-on four plays earlier.
Behind us, the crowd, so clearly rooting for the guards early in the game, sat stunned into eerie silence, stilled by the sight of a field filled with red-tinged grass. The spectators were left with little else to do but watch the drama play itself out.
We had come so far, our energy level as high as the pain we felt in our bodies. We were all tired from the long game and weak from the blows we had taken. A tall kid, standing next to me in the huddle, had blood running down both his legs.
We needed one more play. A big play, one the guards wouldn’t expect us to be able to carry out. It would have to be a street play. The kind that ends in a touchdown and a knockout. All the inmates had played in games that ended in blood. But for the guards this was a new experience, and they didn’t much care for it.
Rizzo called the play. Michael would fake-pump a pass to a wideout named R.J. and then turn and throw deep, about forty yards downfield, right to the edge of the goal line. Rizzo would be there, step by step with Styler, both of them reaching for the ball. Rizzo’s broken right hand was now hanging softly against his waist. It was Styler who had crushed the knuckles and bones and it would have to be Styler who was paid back, which now meant that the play required more than a touchdown to be successful. We came out of the huddle looking at six points for our team and a broken jaw for Styler. It didn’t matter which came first.
Michael called for a quick snap and d
ropped back as far as he could, one arm useless at his side. I stayed next to Juanito, looking to block anyone who crossed our path. The two front lines banged at each other hard, blood, saliva, and tiny pieces of flesh flying through the air. Nokes, bloody and bruised, came in from the left side of the field, leaping over one inmate and reaching both arms out for Michael. I jumped from my feet and met him square on, both of us failing within inches of Michael’s legs, just as the ball left his one good hand to head downfield on a spiral.
“You fucker!” Nokes shouted, slapping and punching at me with both hands. “I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you!”
“Get off him!” Juanito screamed, pulling at Nokes’s hair, grabbing one of his arms. “Get the fuck off him!”
Michael and another guard were pushing at each other. Two of the inmates were squared off against two other guards. Punches and kicks were being tossed up and down the field. Bodies were crumpled on all sides. Shrill alert whistles were going off in every direction. Guards, in uniform, armed with Mace cans and swinging batons, were running onto the playing area. The warden and his assistants were being driven down the sidelines, in a car with siren blaring, coming in from the goalposts to our backs.
Then the crowd, long silenced, erupted.
They stomped their feet against the base of the wooden stands, clapped their gloved hands in a wild frenzy, and screamed out in a uniform chorus of cheers.
Michael fell to his knees and pumped a fist in the air. Downfield, his arms raised to the sky, Rizzo basked in the applause, waiting for the guards to come take him away. He held the football in his good hand, a smile as open and as free as the emotion he felt spread across his face.
Styler’s body lay inches from Rizzo. He was faceup, his legs spread, his head at an angle, motionless.
From inside the prison we heard shouts and yells.
The other inmates, forced to watch the game from their cells or outside open gym windows, celebrated the moment, many screaming out Rizzo’s name. A number of the players rushed toward Rizzo, hoping to get to him before the guards, to lay a hand on the hero of the yard.
Nokes stood up on one knee, staring at me and Michael, the blood from his nose running into his mouth.