I checked out Icy and she was looking around, scoping what the inside of a jail was like. Jail wasn’t the visitors’ room and I knew Icy was getting the wrong impression, but I didn’t want to say nothing.
“…they have programs at the Family Resource Center down on Worth Street to help keep the family together when you get out.” Mom was still talking. “You know anything about them?”
“Not really,” I said. “They down there and I’m up here.”
“I left some papers for you to look at in the office,” she said. “They aren’t that hard to read.”
“Yeah, okay.”
Her skin was dull and her eyes were a little watery. I wondered if she was using again.
“So if you run for president, what’s going to be your slogan?” I asked Icy.
“Okay, I got the whole thing figured out,” Icy said. “I’m going to tell everybody that they can get free food. In school we learned that the average family of four can be fed for seven thousand dollars per year, okay?”
“Go on.”
“I need you to write a letter for me,” Mom said.
“Let me finish telling him this, Mama,” Icy said.
“We can’t stay all day, girl!” Mom snapped at Icy.
“You just got here,” I said.
“I’m starting a new job tonight,” she said. “I’m going to be working as a waitress at Sylvia’s.”
Lie.
“What kind of letter?” I asked.
“Reese, I’m really worried about your brother,” she said. She put her hand on mine. “I think he’s running the streets too much. He’s either going to get himself killed or end up in jail.”
“He knows what he’s doing,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” Mom said. “In a way I think he’s looking up to you instead of the other way around. You’re in jail now, so he thinks it’s cool or something. I’m trying to get him to go into the army and do something with his life. Learn a trade or even make a career of it. You know what I mean?”
“Plus he’ll get an enlistment bonus. The man told us,” Icy said.
“And he can use that for his college education when he gets out.” Mom shot Icy a glance.
“So you can feed a family for seven thousand dollars….” I looked back at Icy.
“Are you hearing me?” This from Mom.
“Yeah.”
“So I want you to write Willis a letter telling him that you think it’s a good idea for him to go into the army before he gets into trouble,” Mom said.
“Yeah.”
“No yeah,” she said. “Do it! I don’t want to see both of you in jail.”
“Okay, I’ll do it,” I said.
“Where’s the bathroom?”
Icy pointed it out to her, and she got up and walked away.
“What you thinking?” Icy asked me when Mom was going into the bathroom.
“Tell me about your campaign for president,” I said.
“You didn’t tell me what you were thinking,” Icy said.
“That’s ’cause you’re too ugly,” I said, tapping her on the wrist.
“Anyway…so there are a hundred and ten million families in the country. So to give them free food every year will cost us seven hundred seventy billion dollars. That sounds like a lot but it’s really not that much. If you’re in a war, you can spend that much in three years. So my campaign is that you give everybody free food for four years—”
“While you’re the president?”
“Yeah.”
I loved my sister’s smile.
“And then what?”
“Then they would be fed for four years, we couldn’t afford to pay for a war, and people could turn their attention to doing stuff for themselves and be happy.”
“Okay, you got my vote,” I said.
“Can you still vote if you go to jail?”
“Not while you’re in jail,” I said. “I don’t know, really.”
“How do you think Mom and I look?” Icy asked.
“You look fine,” I said.
Mom came back and said they had to go. “I don’t want to mess this job up,” she said. “I figure if I’m making money and can help Willis, he won’t be stealing or anything.”
They weren’t there but a minute and then they were gone. If they hadn’t come at all, it would have been cool, but just to blow in like that and then blow out was hard.
“You headed back to the dayroom?” Wilson asked.
“Can I sit here a minute?” I asked him.
“Yeah.”
I sat for a while trying to think why I was feeling so bad. I was in the facility and I couldn’t go home and I was feeling lonely, but there was more to it. It was like I wasn’t connected with nothing in the friggin’ world. Nothing.
Play’s people were hugging him and I saw them leave. Then I watched some more people come in. Indian people. A man and a woman. They were kind of heavy and they sat in a corner. After a while Wilson came in with Toon. He went over and sat with the Indian people and they started in on him. Toon had his head down.
“Look at what you are doing! This is a disgrace!” the woman was saying. “Look at where you are!”
I knew Toon felt bad. I felt bad for him. Parents were supposed to be loving us, not telling us about how we were disgracing them.
I looked up, saw Wilson near the door, and went over to him.
“Can I hang in the dayroom awhile?”
“Sure, man.”
We went out of the visitors’ room. I took my clothes off and he searched me for contraband. Then I dressed and went back to the dayroom. They were watching Cops on television.
CHAPTER 9
Her name tag read Karen Williams, but all the guys were checking out the short skirt the woman was wearing. On the blackboard behind her she had written “Exit Strategy” in big letters.
“So, who knows what an exit strategy is?” she asked.
“That’s how to get out of here,” Play said.
“It’s how to get out of here in a way that means you won’t be coming back,” Miss Williams said. “Or does anybody here want to come back?”
Nobody answered the lame question.
“One of the things you want to have in hand is either a GED or a head start in taking the GED exam,” she went on. “Employers want to see what you have accomplished in life, and one way of showing them is to have your GED.”
“What they know most from that is that you didn’t finish regular high school,” Diego said. “That puts you on a whole different level than kids who finish high school with a regular diploma.”
“I think it shows initiative and a willingness to work,” Miss Williams said.
“But they know you ain’t in the top set,” Play said. “If I was going for a job, I wouldn’t be waving my GED in front of anybody unless they asked me for it. And what they mostly ask you is if you’ve been arrested or anything.”
“Which is illegal,” Miss Williams said. “They can’t ask you if you’ve been arrested, and if they did ask, you don’t have to answer. Did you know that?”
“Did you know that if you don’t answer, they won’t hire you?” Play said. “And if you go and make a complaint, all they got to say is that they were thinking about hiring you in a job that handles money and you had to be bonded. Then they can ask you anything they want.”
“A lot of what you’re saying is true, but that’s why we have courts, to fight abuses,” Miss Williams said. She had her legs crossed and we all took a look. Not bad.
“So you got your GED,” Diego said. “Then they’re going to want to know what you’ve been doing for the last year. You tell them that you’ve been in church, see—”
“Redecorating the confession box,” Leon said. “Putting in a tile floor like they do on television.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Diego went on. “Then your probation officer gives them a call to see how you doing. Or he comes around with a little cup for you to pee in. Then the job is
gone because everybody knows where you’ve been.”
“Okay, a lot of what you’re saying is true,” Miss Williams said. “On the other hand, if you show up with no high school diploma, and no GED, how does that help?”
“At least you won’t be disappointed when they turn you down,” Leon said.
Some of the guys laughed. I looked over at Toon. He wasn’t laughing.
Miss Williams kept on talking but it wasn’t coming through. What all the guys knew was that there was a world on the outside and we didn’t belong in it. Maybe we could get over once in a while, but we really didn’t fit in.
When the session was over, Miss Williams handed out a form that listed all of the papers we were supposed to have once we got out. That was cool, because whenever you go someplace, you have to start all over again or they turn you down for something because you don’t have the right papers.
The right papers didn’t mean anything. You were still yourself in your own black skin and you couldn’t sound like some white dude or some la-dee-da black dude who was heavy into what was going down with education or being middle class.
My moms had left the papers for me to sign, but when I took them to Mr. Cintron and he was telling me how cool the family program was, I saw that she could get some money from it and figured that’s all she really wanted. That’s what I thought. And Icy had given me the 411 on Willis going into the army. The enlistment bonus. If he got that, Mom would try to con him out of it. That’s what she was about.
I wondered if she had been different at one time. Maybe she even thought about being the first woman president. And then, maybe, things just started happening that turned her around. I felt for her, but I wished she was stronger, someone that me and Willis and especially Icy could depend on.
After group skills we went to the B wing to get our teeth checked. While we were waiting, we sat with some new guys and one girl. The orientation flick was on television. The new kids were looking at the TV screen, but out of the corners of their eyes they were checking us out. I saw Diego trying to look hard.
Diego, in my mind, was a punk. But his head was so messed up that he was a dangerous punk. Every morning between breakfast and school he was on the med line. I had seen a lot of the guys do that, but I couldn’t figure out how they knew who needed the pills. The nurse gave them one or two pills in a small cup, and another cup filled with water. They took the pills and then drank the water. Then she made them stick their tongues out and move them around so she could make sure they swallowed the pills.
CHAPTER 10
The dentist was white with dark hair and big eyes and this sincere look on his face. He asked me how often I brushed my teeth and I told him once a day.
“Why not twice a day?” he asked.
“I don’t know, man,” I said.
“It only takes an extra two minutes a day,” he said.
“Okay, I’ll try it,” I said.
He thanked me and told me it would be worth it. I had never seen anybody get into teeth before. But two minutes a day made sense.
At dinner one of the newbies sat across from me and Play. He was my height but wide and ugly. Sucker looked like King Kong with a nappy ’fro and a jumpsuit.
“Where y’all from?” he asked.
I didn’t say nothing and Play didn’t say nothing. The newbie started puffing up like he was mad and asked us again where we were from. We still didn’t say nothing, mostly just because he was a newbie, and he picked up his knife from the table and held it in his fist. That cracked me up a little because it was just a plastic-ass knife.
“I just came in from your mama’s house,” Play said. “She told me to tell you hello.”
The guy looked at us like he was ready to go off. Then he said that he was from the Duncan Avenue projects in Jersey City.
“We kill a guy just for smiling at us,” he said.
I got up and went to another table because I really didn’t want to fight the sucker. Play got up with me, and we sat with some white dudes from the Special Attention wing. Those were dudes who were all messed up and were in the special watch-these-guys-because-they-might-hurt-themselves area in the back of the classrooms. One guy we sat with didn’t look up from his tray. The other guy put his hands, palm down, over his plate like we were going to take his food.
Toon needed to be with these guys.
When we finished eating and Pugh lined us up to go back to our wing, King Kong came over and got behind me.
“Me and you got some business to take care of,” he growled at me.
I thought back on what Mr. Cintron had said. All these dudes in here had run stupid until they found the front door of some courthouse, and half of them were still running on empty.
“You think you can kick his ass?” Play asked me later.
“I don’t know if I can kick his ass,” I said. “But if the deal got to go down, I can sure make it a war he didn’t want to be in.”
Lights-out and I was lying in the dark thinking that King Kong was going to get both of us screwed up. I wondered if he knew it too.
CHAPTER 11
So what happened is that Mr. Pugh brought me a candy bar and talked to me decent on the way to Evergreen. I don’t like people giving me nothing, but I took it and said I would eat it later.
“So, you looking forward to going home?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
I wasn’t sure. I knew I didn’t want to be in Progress anymore, but I wasn’t sure what home was going to mean. Just the way King Kong was messing with me, I knew the streets were waiting to mess with me. All my homies hanging out and dealing whatever they had were waiting, all the suckers leaning against the rail on the corner and looking to see who was weak were waiting, and all the gangbangers with nothing to do but cook up some mad were waiting. Yeah, home.
The papers Mom had left were about some program that New York City was running. They said that anybody who was accepted for the program would be eligible for help in getting affordable housing and more money on their Family Cards. I knew it was all good on paper, but in real life it didn’t go nowhere. In a way all the programs were alike. If everything worked out perfectly, you should be doing okay. But the deal was that you were going back into the same hole you had slid down before. It was like Toon. His people talking about how he had messed up and how embarrassed they were and him sitting with his head down thinking that the best thing going for him was to get out and go back to the same family. I could see him wanting to stay at Progress.
CHAPTER 12
It was raining when I got to Evergreen. I had gone to class from 8 to 8:30 and King Kong had sat behind me. He kept bumping the back of my chair. I felt like turning around and lighting him up, but I knew all I had to do was get into one more fight and my game would be over.
I was cleaning up some soup in the hallway that had been spilled by one of the residents when a real dark sister came over to me.
“What you doing, cute boy?” she asked.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Nancy Opara from Nigeria,” she said. “I’m an exchange student and I work once in a while here for extra credit.”
“You don’t get paid?”
“I get extra credit from Saint Elizabeth’s,” she said. “Simi told me about you. She said you were nice.”
“I’m okay,” I said.
“I think I’m going to recommend you for mayor of New York City,” she said. “The city needs a nice young mayor.”
“I think that job would be too hard for me,” I said.
“All you got to do is to hire a lot of smart people to work under you,” she said. “You don’t have to know anything yourself.”
She was kidding around with me and I liked it. At Progress nobody kidded around with you. Even when you were talking to your friends it could change in a minute. You said the wrong thing and somebody would get mad and swing at you, or they were having a bad day and you didn’t know it, or their medication wasn’t working. You c
ould never tell.
When I was collecting the garbage, the seniors looked at me careful but they didn’t say nothing. I figured in a couple of weeks they would start thinking of me as somebody who worked for Evergreen. That’s what I wanted to do, to fit in and be nobody special.
After I collected the garbage, I went in and cleaned up Mr. Hooft’s room. He wasn’t there when I first started cleaning, but then he came in. He was slow getting up on his bed and I thought maybe he wasn’t feeling good.
“Good morning, sir,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
His room was clean to start with and I finished pretty quick. “You need me to do anything else?” I asked.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“I’m thinking you might want me to do something else and I can get it done,” I said.
“You don’t like me?”
“I guess you okay,” I said. In my head I was thinking, No, I don’t like you.
He picked up his paper and started reading it, and I sat down on the chair in the corner. He looked over at me and asked me again what I was thinking.
“Why you got to know what I’m thinking?” I asked.
“You could be thinking of stealing something from me,” he said. “You see that soap dish in my locker? It’s solid silver. Go ahead, look at it.”
I looked in his locker, saw something shiny, and picked it up. It was a soap dish, like he said, with a little scene on the top part. Some kind of birds under a tree.
“It’s nice,” I said, putting the dish back into his locker.
“So you’re thinking of stealing it?”
“Mr. Hooft, I didn’t even know you had the dish,” I said. “I was thinking of this guy who wants to pick a fight with me. He keeps messing with me, but I know I need to maintain my cool so I don’t get into trouble. I can control myself, so it’s okay. I don’t think about stealing or nothing like that, because that won’t get me anywhere.”
“He wants to fight you in jail?”