Sleepers

  “You’re dead,” he said. “You are gonna pay for this in ways you never dreamed of. All of you. You’re all gonna pay.”

  “You ain’t worth shit, Nokes,” Juanito said to him. “We always knew it. After today, everybody knows it.”

  “Outta my way, you fuckin’ spic,” Nokes said, standing on both legs, limping away to join the rest of the guards.

  Michael walked up to him, waiting until he was inches away. “Hey, Nokes?”

  “What?” Nokes said, turning, the hate in his eyes enough to chill the blood oozing out of our bodies.

  “Good game,” Michael said.

  8

  IT WAS MY second day in the isolation ward, my back against a damp wall, my knees tight against my chest, sitting alone in darkness. I was brought down to the place the inmates called “the hole” immediately after the game, dragged down by Ferguson and a heavyset guard with a red beard. They threw me face forward to the cold cement floor and watched as I crawled about, looking for a way to lift myself up.

  They laughed at me and mocked my movements as I tried to make my way around the room. Then they slammed the door behind them, bolting it from the outside, their heavy footsteps soon an empty and distant echo. There was no bed in the hole. There was no toilet. There was no noise. There was no food. There was no water and there was no fresh air. There was only darkness and large, hungry rats.

  In the hole there was only madness.

  I inched my way toward a corner of the room, trying to ignore the dust, the blood that still flowed from my football wounds and, most of all, the soft squeaks of the rats moving somewhere in the black of the cell.

  I spent my first day in the hole sleepless, moving my legs from side to side, hoping to keep the rats away from my cuts, knowing that sooner or later I would have to give in and close my eyes and they would make their move.

  My hours were filled with terror. Any noise, even the slight whine of a floorboard, sent fear through my body. My clothes were drenched with sweat, my face was wet to the touch, my hair matted against my forehead. I took deep, shivering breaths, my eyes open wide, looking out into the stillness that surrounded me, my hands and feet numb from the cold.

  I could not distinguish morning from night, dawn from dusk, each passing moment awash in a darkness that promised no rescue. The guards had not brought in any food or water, and the stench of dried urine and feces was overwhelming.

  I was not alone in the hole.

  I knew that my friends were somewhere down in the depths with me, each in his own cell, each in his own pain, suffering his own demons. Rizzo was there too, brought down by the guards, his other hand broken on his way in. There was no use shouting out to them; the walls and the cell door were much too thick for sounds to slip past.

  I knew enough about the hole to know it was the place where the guards put inmates who had trouble adapting to their system. It was where they earned their control. The usual length of time spent in isolation was a week, never more than two. No one came out of it the same.

  I had been there only a matter of hours when I began to think about death. It was what I most wished for, the only thing worth praying for to any God willing to listen.

  I do not know how long I had been there when I heard the click of the lock, the bolt being pushed back, the handle as it snapped down. The sharp light that filtered in sent the rats scurrying into corners and forced me to shield my eyes. I heard footsteps approach as a large shadow hovered near.

  “Thought you might be hungry, football star,” a voice said. It was Nokes, standing above me, a large bowl in his hand. “I brought you some oatmeal.”

  He placed the bowl down by his feet, in the center of the room, sliding it closer to me with the edge of his shoe.

  “Looks a little dry though,” he said. “Nobody likes dry oatmeal. Tastes like shit.”

  I heard a zipper slide down, watched him spread his legs and listened as he peed into the bowl of food.

  “There,” he said when he had finished. “That’s better. That should help it go down easier.”

  He walked out of the room, a set of keys rattling in his hand.

  “Enjoy your meal, football star,” Nokes said, closing me back into my dark world.

  The minute I heard the lock turn and the bolt shut down I rushed for the bowl and ate my first meal in the hole.

  I STARED AT the rat, inches from my face, watching him nibble on the skin of my stretched-out fingers. I was resting flat against the hard surface of the cell floor, my clothes soiled, my body empty of feeling. I had lost any sense of time, any grasp of place, my mind wandering back and forth on the cloudy road between delusion and nightmare. Rats crawled up and down my back and legs, feasting on my cuts and scabs, nestling in the holes in my clothes.

  One of my eyes wouldn’t open, feeling sticky and swollen to the touch. One of my hands was balled into a tight fist, the fingers locked in place. My lips were swollen and dry and there was steady pain from my neck to the base of my spine. I couldn’t compose a complete thought, and when I tried to call up memories, I could see only fragments of faces. I heard the voices of friends and enemies, the thick tones of my father and King Benny, the empty sounds of Nokes and his crew, the gutter accents of Fat Mancho and Father Bobby, floating in and out, words and faces mixing as one.

  I felt the open hydrants of Hell’s Kitchen on my body, the cool spray of water stripping away summer heat. I tasted Sno-Kones and hot pepper sandwiches and listened to Frankie Valli hit a high note and Dinah Washington ache with the blues. I tossed pennies against the side of a warehouse wall, dropped water balloons on the head of a passing stranger, ran into the winds of De Witt Clinton Park, and fished off the piers of 12th Avenue. Left for dead in that hole of despair, I sought refuge in the safest spot my mind could wander—the streets of Hell’s Kitchen.

  Only then, during those rare cloudless moments, could I escape my dark surroundings, clear away the dirt and the pain, the rats and the pools of urine.

  Only then could I move away from the wails of the walking dead and feel, for a fragment of time, that I was still alive.

  I WAS RELEASED from the hole after two weeks and sent to the prison infirmary, where my wounds were cleaned, my clothes thrown away, and my meals served on plastic trays. I was carried into the twenty-two-bed ward fifteen pounds lighter than the day of the football game, my body wracked with a high fever and a series of infections.

  The medical staff at Wilkinson was a small one, led by an elderly doctor with a chronic cough and three nurses years past their prime. For each, it was a last stop in an otherwise undistinguished career. While they all must have been aware of what went on, they lacked the desire or conviction to question it, let alone bring the abuse to the eyes of a higher authority. They had more to lose than to gain by such confrontation and would be outmanned, outmaneuvered, and outsmarted if they dared.

  “You’re lucky,” I heard the prison doctor say to me. “Another day in there and we wouldn’t be any help.”

  “I wasn’t alone,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper, my mind still circling around empty spaces.

  “They took everyone out,” the doctor said.

  “Were we all lucky?” I asked.

  “No,” the doctor said. “Not all.”

  RAYS OF SUNLIGHT came down through an open window, warming my face, my left eye still sealed shut. The bed and the sheets felt soft against my bare skin, white bandages covering whole sections of my chest, arms, legs, and feet. An IV bag dripped fluid into one of my arms and two plastic tubes were in my nose, feeding me air from an oxygen canister off the side of the bed. Somewhere in the distance a radio played a song I hadn’t heard before.

  I turned my head to the right and saw Michael in the bed next to mine. His left arm and right leg were in soft casts, his face was puffy and bruised, the rest of his body bandaged as heavily as mine.

  “I thought you’d never wake up,” Michael said, looking over.

  “I never though
t I’d want to,” I croaked.

  “John and Butter are at the other end of the hall,” Michael said.

  “How are they?”

  “Alive.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “Rizzo,” Michael said.

  “They killed him?”

  Michael nodded. “They took turns beating him until there wasn’t anything left to beat.”

  Rizzo was dead because of us. We made him think that going up against the guards in a meaningless football game had some value, would somehow make us better than them. That it would give us a reason to go on. And, once again, we were wrong. We had made another mistake. While it is normal in the course of growing up to have lapses in judgment, our errors always seemed to carry a deadly price. We were wrong to take the hot dog cart, and that mistake nearly ruined a man and landed us in a juvenile home. We were wrong to go to Rizzo and talk him into taking part in our silly plan. That conversation cost him his life.

  The mistakes we were making could never be repaired. I could never give James Caldwell back the feeling in his arm or take away his pain. I could never give the hot dog vendor back his business or his dreams. I could never bring smiles back to John and Tommy, return the sweetness that was at the core of their personalities. I could never take the hardness out of Michael and the hurt out of me. And I could never bring Rizzo back to life. A young man was dead because he went deep against the guards and reached for a ball he shouldn’t have caught. Who went deep because we asked him.

  I looked over at Michael and he stared back at me and I knew we both had the same thoughts raging through our brains. I turned away and laid my head against the pillow, staring at the white ceiling with my one good eye, listening to a voice on the radio talk about holiday sales and threats of snow. I looked down at my hands, the tips of my fingers wrapped in gauze, scratches like veins marking their way across my flesh. My eye felt heavy and tired, the antibiotics and painkillers making me as foggy as a street junkie.

  I shut my eye and gave in to sleep.

  IT WAS TWO days later when I heard the footsteps, familiar in their weight.

  “Hello, boys,” Nokes said, standing between our two beds, a smile on his face. “How we feelin’ today?”

  Michael and I just stared back, watching him swagger up and down, checking our charts, eyeballing our bandages and wounds.

  “You should be outta here in no time,” Nokes snarled. “It’s gonna be good havin’ you back. We missed you and your friends. Especially at night.”

  Michael turned his head, looking down the corridor, checking the faces of the other sick inmates. Juanito was two beds down, his face a mask of cuts, welts, and stitches.

  “It’s been nice visitin’ with you,” Nokes said, standing close enough for us to touch. “But I gotta go. I’m on shift. I’ll see you soon, though. You can count on that.”

  Michael motioned for Nokes to stop. “Kill me now,” Michael whispered.

  “What?” Nokes moved to Michael’s side of the bed. “What did you say?”

  “Kill me now.” It wasn’t a whisper this time. It was in a normal tone of voice, calm and clear. “Kill us all now.”

  “You’re fuckin’ crazy,” Nokes said.

  “You have to kill us,” Michael said. “You can’t let us out alive.”

  Nokes was still startled, but he shook it off and replaced his uneasiness with his usual smirk. “Yeah?” he said. “And why’s that, tough guy?”

  “You can’t run the risk,” Michael told him.

  “What risk you talkin’ about?”

  “The risk of meeting up,” Michael said. “In a place that ain’t here.”

  “That supposed to scare me? That street shit of yours supposed to scare me?” Nokes laughed. “Your friend Rizzo was tough too. Now he’s buried tough.”

  “Kill us all,” Michael said. “Or sign yourself up for life in here. That’s the choice.”

  “I’ve been right all along,” Nokes said. “You are crazy. You Hell’s Kitchen motherfuckers are really crazy.”

  “Think about it,” Michael said to our tormentor. “Think about it hard. It’s the only way out for you. Don’t take a chance. You can’t afford it. You kill us and you kill us now.”

  Winter 1968

  9

  I SQUEEZED THE mop through a wooden wringer, dirty brown water filtering back into the wash pail. I was on the third tier of C block, washing the floors outside the cells. It was my first week out of the infirmary, and my wounds, bound by tight strips of gauze bandages against my ribs and thighs, still ached. After a few strokes with the mop, I rested against the iron railings, my legs weak from days in the hole. It was early morning and the cell block was quiet, inmates either attending classes or exercising in the gym.

  I looked around the block, gray, shiny, and still, winter light from outside merging with the glare of overhead fluorescents that were kept on twenty-four hours a day. In its silence, Wilkinson looked serene, cell doors open, floors glistening, steam from large central radiators keeping out the cold winds of winter.

  The peace was not meant to hold. Wilkinson was a prison on the brim of a riot. Rizzo had been right. The guards did not take kindly to our playing them even. The day after the game, all inmate privileges were canceled. The late-night beatings and abuse accelerated to the point where no inmate felt safe. The most minor infraction, ignored in the past, was now cause for the most severe punishment.

  For their part, the inmates were stirred by Rizzo’s death and the conditions in which the rest of the team were released from the isolation ward. Makeshift weapons—zip guns, sharpened spoons stuck into wooden bases, mattress coils twisted into brass knuckles—now appeared in every cell block. The inmates still obeyed every order, but their faces were now masked by defiance.

  I WAS HALFWAY down the corridor when I saw Wilson on the circular staircase, making his way to the third tier. Wilson was the only black guard in our cell block and the only guard who shunned the physical attacks enjoyed by his coworkers. He was a big man, a onetime semi-pro football player with a scarred knee and a waistline that stretched the limits of his uniform. He smoked nonstop, and always had an open pack of Smith Brothers cherry cough drops in his back pocket. He had a wide smile stained yellow by the smoke, and big hands topped by thick, almost-blue fingers. The inmates called him Marlboro.

  Marlboro was older than the other guards by a good ten years and had two younger brothers who held similar jobs at other state homes. In summer months he was known to smuggle in an occasional six-pack to some of the older inmates.

  He was also Rizzo’s connection to the outside.

  “Seem to be doin’ a good job,” he said when he reached my end of the hall, his breath coming in short spurts, a long stream of smoke flowing out his nose. “You take to the mop real good.”

  “Some people do,” I said. “Some people teach.”

  “Got that right,” he said, laughing, a rumble of a cough starting in his chest.

  “How many of those you go through a day?” I said, pointing to the lit cigarette in his hand.

  “Three,” he said. “Maybe four.”

  “Packs?”

  “We all got habits, son,” Marlboro said. “Some that are good. Some that are bad.”

  I went back to mopping the floor, moving the wet strands from side to side, careful not to let water droplets slip over the edge of the tier.

  “How much more time you got?” Marlboro said from behind me. “Before they let you out.”

  “Seven months if they keep me to term,” I said. “Less if they don’t.”

  “You be out by spring,” Marlboro said. “Only the baddest apples do full runs.”

  “Or end up dead,” I said.

  Marlboro lit a fresh cigarette with the back end of a smolder between his fingers, tossed the old one over the side, and swallowed a mouth of smoke.

  “Rizzo was my friend,” Marlboro said. “I didn’t have a piece of what went down.”

  “Didn’t b
reak your ass to stop it,” I said.

  “Look around, son,” Marlboro said, cigarette clenched between his teeth, veins thick on his bulky arms. “You see a lot of other nigger guards around here?”

  “Guards is all I see around here,” I said.

  “I got me a good job,” Marlboro said. “Work is steady. Pension, if I make it, a good one. Vacation and holidays are paid, and every other weekend belongs to me and my lady.”

  “And it keeps you in cigarettes,” I said.

  “I hate what they do to you and the other boys,” Marlboro said, cigarette out of his mouth, sadness etched across the stark contours of his face. “Hate what they did to Rizzo. That boy was blood to me. But there ain’t nothin’ I can do. Nothin’ I can say gonna change this place.”

  I put the mop back into the pail and ran it through the wringer, hands on the top end of the handle, eyes on Marlboro.

  “You ever hit a kid?” I asked.

  “Never,” Marlboro said. “Never will. Don’t get me wrong. There’s some mean sons of bitches in here could take a beatin.’ But it ain’t what I do. Ain’t part of the job. Least not the job I took.”

  “How do the other guards feel about you?”

  “I’m a nigger to them,” Marlboro said. “They probably think I’m no better than any of you. Maybe worse.”

  “They always been like this?”

  “Since I been here,” Marlboro said. “Goin’ on three years come this June.”

  “How about you and Nokes?” I asked.

  “I do my work and keep my distance,” Marlboro said. “He does the same.”

  “What’s his deal?” I said.

  “Same as the others,” Marlboro said. “They don’t like who they are. They don’t like where they are.”

  “There’s lots of people like that,” I said. “Where I live, every man I know feels that way. But they don’t go around doing the shit Nokes and his crew pull.”

  “Maybe they different kind of men,” Marlboro said. “Nokes and his boys, they ain’t seen much of life and what they seen they don’t like. You grow up like that, most times, you grow up feelin’ empty. And that’s what they are. Empty. Nothin’ inside. Nothin’ out.”