Each time I think there is no place lower to go, I find that there is at least one place that will mess you up worse than you were. And there were signs that made you remember if you forgot. When I lay on the cot in the detention cell and looked at the doorknob, I knew that whoever designed the room knew I would think about killing myself. No, they were saying, we understand how you’re feeling but you can’t do that, either.
In the detention cell, you get fed before the others. You have to stand against the far wall with your back toward the door. Then they open the door and put your tray on the floor. When my supper came, I felt like turning around and yelling, “Boo!” But I knew that would just get me more time.
Lights-out in detention was at 8:30, same as it was with levels three, four, and five.
The first day lasted two hundred hours. Then the days really got long.
“You got five days in detention,” they’d said. No, all my life I was going to be in detention. All my life I was going to be locked down in some cell or in some life with steel bars, keeping me from getting up and going someplace or dying and not feeling bad anymore.
I thought about K-Man’s letter. I didn’t care about Vincent being shot because I didn’t know him. In my life, somebody was always being shot or being beat up or being killed. I was somebody you needed to stay away from, someone who might hurt you or get you killed. Someone I wasn’t recognizing anymore.
The second day in detention. I was thinking of fighting King Kong. I wondered if he was in his cell doing push-ups and maybe some squats to keep in shape. I got up and did some push-ups but my heart wasn’t in it. If King Kong attacked me I would just have to go all out and wreck the dude. Maybe they would send me upstate and I would have to be with grown men who could beat me up whenever they wanted to do it. Maybe if I found somebody up there who was cool, I could get a shank and stab whoever messed with me. That’s what they did upstate. You had to let them know you would stab them to death or they would take advantage of you. A little guy like Toon would just be somebody’s woman unless he found a way to kill himself.
My father had been in jail. He wasn’t tough. Not inside. Outside he could beat me when I was little, or Willis before he got good with his hands, but he wasn’t tough. He did a lot of cursing and throwing himself around when he was drinking, but it wouldn’t be long before I could take him one on one. Although, really, it’s tough to kick your father’s ass because that’s a little like kicking your own ass. Maybe him hitting me or Willis was like him hitting himself. I don’t know.
Me, Toon, and King Kong was all in a place under the real world. If they let us loose after breakfast—just let us walk out the front door—we wouldn’t have no place to go. Toon would go back to his parents so they could yell at him and go back to being small and pushed around. King Kong, he would go back to swinging on trees and climbing up buildings and being stupid, because sometimes settling for stupid was easier than reaching for anything better. If you gave him a free bus pass, he couldn’t get nowhere because there wasn’t anyplace for him to get to. He would just be riding around in a circle until he got to the same place he started from.
Me, I would go home, and everybody would look at me and ask me what I wanted.
“What you want?”
“I don’t know,” I would answer. “What you got?”
“Don’t worry about it because you ain’t getting what I got,” they would say. “And I’m watching you too.”
That was the truth. My father didn’t have nothing. Willis didn’t have nothing. Mom was just checking out the world to see what she could snatch off. The hurting part was that if you checked everything out, peeped what was going down, everybody knew the same thing. They knew that me and Toon and King Kong didn’t have no place to go in this world and maybe we would try to slip out to dying when they wasn’t looking. They knew that, so they put us in these cells where you couldn’t even kill yourself.
CHAPTER 22
Another morning, another cold breakfast. I dreamed about Toon. In my dream he was in the visiting room and his parents were sitting there shaking their heads and sucking their teeth and looking at each other like they were so ashamed of Toon. If they really ever got into Toon’s head, they would never find their way out. They would be lost for freaking ever and be scared out of their minds because they would know what the real world looked like.
Sometimes, when I see Toon, I think he looks like how I would look if I could see inside myself. Little and stupid looking and scared, knowing I was going to get beat up every day. When I think about Toon, I want to cry. I’m glad I’m in detention. In detention you are all by yourself and nobody can see how bad you feel. Sometimes I think that people in the outside world know how bad you feel. They know it, but then they pass it off by just giving you a label, like criminal or felon.
If you’re out in the world feeling bad enough to take dope to lighten it up a little, or if you’re so mad at the world you’re ready to break somebody up or chalk them out, then they just switch your ass from who you think you are to what they got on your rap sheet, and they don’t have to feel sorry for you no more because you’re not human.
Another day went by, maybe two. It didn’t matter.
One day there was a shadow on the floor. I thought it might have been a bird in the window. I got up quick and looked, but it was gone. A shadow that might have been a bird.
When Mr. Pugh banged on my door, I jumped. I got up and went across the room and put my chest against the wall and my hands behind my back like I was supposed to.
“Mr. Pugh, what meal is this?”
“Shut up!”
“How many days have I been in here?”
“Shut up!”
The door slammed and I turned around and went to the tray. A container of apple juice, string beans, corn, chicken wings, applesauce, bread, and a cup of ice cream. I ate it. Then I sat down on the floor and watched as the room grew darker. The light from the rectangular window made an image on the floor that went halfway across and just touched the opposite wall.
Later, Mr. Cintron came to the door.
“Next week you go back to Evergreen,” he said through the grating. “It’s not for you, because you don’t deserve it. I’m letting you go back because I want the program to at least look like it’s working.”
I didn’t answer him.
“Anderson! You all right in there?”
“I’m all right,” I said.
I can do this.
I thought of school and what the teacher had said about sundials. All you needed was a fixed object and a shadow and you could figure out the time. But where did the first time come from? I didn’t have any markers or I could have made marks on the floor and then figured the time as the sun moved through the window. The window was the fixed object and the shadow was wherever the light wasn’t shining. The first thing I had to do was to cop the time from whoever brought me a meal. Then I would mark that off, and the next time they brought me a meal I would mark that off, and then divide that into sections.
The room was getting darker. Soon it would be so dark I would have to feel my way to the cot. But I wasn’t feeling bad about it anymore. Maybe if I stayed in detention for months, or even years, it would be different. But I could put up with bad stuff happening to me.
Then why do I fight all the time?
Because fighting is good. When you fight you’re alive, you’re somebody. You’re not standing in the corridor with your hands behind your back. Maybe that’s it, that you’re free, swinging your fists, letting people know who you are. Even if you’re going to die. That kid who beat up Mr. Hooft, maybe he knew more than Mr. Hooft thought. Maybe he knew he was going to die but needed to be somebody for that minute. Like the guys in the hood running down the streets throwing signs and spitting smack like they’re bulletproof but knowing they aren’t. Knowing they aren’t.
I could do detention. Sitting there in the dark, trembling as the minutes slipped by. It didn’t make
any difference how slow it went. I was locked in and the rest of the world was locked out. I couldn’t touch them, but they couldn’t touch me, either.
I’m all right.
When they finally let me out, I was jumpy, off balance. It’s how they wanted me to feel.
CHAPTER 23
“Where’s your beard, man?”
“What beard?”
“In the movies when a guy gets out of the hole, he comes stumbling out and he’s got a beard and everything,” Play said. “You supposed to be squinting and staggering around.”
“It was kind of hard,” I said.
“It was hard out here, too,” Play said. “Since they had you in detention, we were getting steak every day to see how we liked it. Steak with mashed potatoes and gravy. Man, you know how boring that gets?”
“Get out of here, Play,” I said. “You guys weren’t getting no steak. If they gave you steak, you wouldn’t leave when your date came up. You’d be hanging around for the eats.”
“I decided what I’m going to do when I get out of here,” Play said.
“What?”
“I’m going to be a rich white dude,” he said. “Then I won’t have to do nothing but sit around and worry about people like you coming into my neighborhood.”
“Yeah, well, I decided what I’m going to do too,” I said. “I’m going to look around for a rich white dude like you and take his stuff.”
It was good talking to Play again. It was good just talking. I could see guys going crazy being locked up for years like they did in the max prisons where you were on lockdown twenty-three hours a day. In a way I didn’t seem to be alive when I was in detention. Being alive wasn’t about just breathing and whatnot. It was like you could look around and somebody else would notice that you were alive. Talking helped a lot, because when somebody answered, it meant they heard you. Even if somebody was yelling at you, it was better than silence. I knew if I was in lockdown long enough, I would probably talk to myself.
On my first day back from detention, I sat with Play at breakfast and listened to him complain about the eggs. I wanted to say something about the eggs being different when you ate them in the dining room, but I couldn’t find the words that made it sound right. Eggs are eggs, and they shouldn’t taste different if you ate them in one room or the other. But they did.
King Kong looked over at me from the corner of the room, and it made me laugh because he was still trying to look hard even though I had put him down good.
I didn’t say nothing in school, even though I wanted to. When we left class for lunch, King Kong came real near me and brushed me a little. I gave him a look and he stopped and turned toward me, and Mr. Pugh came over and pushed us both against the wall.
“Cool it, girls!”
I knew Play was in because he cut a dude on Clinton Avenue in Brooklyn. King Kong wasn’t keeping his square ass together after a beat down and I was wondering if I would have to shank him to get him off my case.
“Yo, Play, how it feel to cut a guy?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I was just swinging and it happened. I won the blade playing Horse. I hit five shots in a row and I got the guy’s blade, which wasn’t no big deal because he had a whole trunkful of them.”
My first afternoon out of detention was cool. Group was canceled because Miss Dodson’s car had broken down on the highway and she couldn’t make it. We went right to recreation and personal hygiene, and I checked myself out for a beard. Nothing.
Toon came over and sat with me in the rec room. He handed me a book.
“It’s a gift,” he said. “From me to you.”
The book was Lord of the Flies.
“You don’t have to give me a gift,” I said.
Toon shrugged and looked down at the floor. “It’s because in my heart we are brothers,” he said. “I had a brother. In our family, he was the hero. My father said his name should have been Rama, but he wanted him to have an American name so he named him Raymond. When my brother Raymond was alive, he was the center of my family. He was smart and tall and looked very handsome. When he became sick and died, my family was very hurt.
“They took his ashes to India and scattered them in a river near where our family had lived before my grandfather came to America. I was very excited to go to India for the first time, but my father was mad at me for thinking about what I would see there instead of mourning for my brother. After that, he hardly ever spoke to me.”
“What was India like?” I asked.
“Like the Bronx, but with more animals and older buses,” Toon said.
“Your brother got shot?”
“No, he had a cough and his chest hurt, but my father said it was nothing. Even when he coughed a lot, my father said it was just making him stronger. Then he had to go to the hospital, and after two days, he died.”
“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “But you don’t have to give me your book.”
“You don’t want to be my brother,” Toon said. “But in my heart, you are.”
“Okay, you’re my brother too,” I said.
Toon smiled and then went back over to where he had been sitting.
Toon was okay. He wasn’t like a real brother. He wasn’t like a real friend like K-Man or even Play. He was little and weak and goofy looking, the kind of kid anybody could mess with. In a way I wanted him to be okay all the time, but in another way I felt bad about him, as if it was something bad about him that made him weak. Even though I could get busy with my hands and could deal if I had to, there was also something in me that could be hurt like Toon. Not hurt, maybe. Not even bruised or nothing. Just fucked with.
I took the book back to my room after rec time. I didn’t know if I was going to read it or not.
Sometimes, when things get stupid, I just shut it all out and, like, start all over again. So when I woke up in the morning in my own room, I was feeling good and thinking good stuff. Usually when I woke up, it was five thirty or five forty-five, before the rooms were unlocked, which was exactly six. I must have been tired, because I woke up just as the bell rang and I got up real quick, cleaned the room for inspection, and got dressed.
Mr. Pugh took us to breakfast, and Diego asked him what we were having.
“Eggs, sausages, hash browns, and juice,” he said. “Real eggs today, not that crap that comes in a box. They’re buying them from local merchants now, so we blend in with the community.”
“We could go out and rob a local bank,” Play said, “and then spend it on some local girls.”
“Shut up!” Mr. Pugh said. He was smiling.
Mr. Pugh was right. We did have real eggs instead of those scrambled eggs.
“How you want your eggs?” the fat round cook asked me. Griffin could make the eggs either hard or almost hard. He wouldn’t make them over easy no matter what you said.
“Poached,” I said. “With some caviar on the side.”
He broke two eggs and dropped them on the grill, and I watched as they got done on one side before he flipped them and cooked them hard on the other. No big deal.
Toon sat by himself two tables down from me and Play, and I was wondering if I should ask him to come over to where we were sitting when Mr. Wilson entered. He looked around and called over to me.
“Anderson, let’s go,” he said.
“Where I’m going?”
“Get your ass up out of the seat,” he said, “and let’s go.”
I didn’t like Mr. Wilson’s tone and figured something was going on. When he took me out in the hallway, King Kong pointed at me and started laughing. I figured that ugly sucker must have told some lies on me.
We got to the administrative wing and he unlocked the doors and my heart went cold.
“Yo, man, they sending me upstate?”
Mr. Wilson was a cool guy, but he didn’t answer me and I figured I was gone. Nobody had said anything about me going upstate, but I knew I had had two fights. I thought about Cobo, the guy I had fo
ught when he first came to Progress. They had sent him upstate, but he was headed there in the first place.
“You need to pee?” Mr. Wilson asked me. We were standing in front of the bathroom.
I went in but I couldn’t pee. I felt like I had to but I was too uptight so I came out.
“Wash your damned hands,” Mr. Wilson said.
I went back in and washed my hands. When I returned, Mr. Wilson took his cuffs and made a spinning motion with his index finger.
No matter how bad you feel when you’re locked up, you feel worse when you get cuffed. It’s like you ain’t human or something. You’re some kind of thing that needs to be restrained.
Mr. Wilson took me to the office and signed me out. The clerk, a little fat lady, was looking at me and I felt naked.
“I can’t take none of my stuff with me?” I asked.
Mr. Wilson took me by the arm and started walking me through the wing toward the side door. We went into the yard and it was a nice day. Sunny, bright, with birds walking around on the grass.
The back of the transportation van has rings on the sides and I was cuffed to one of them. We drove for almost two hours. I could tell because Mr. Wilson was listening to the news on the radio the whole time. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see out the back window but I could see through the front window when Mr. Wilson moved his head a little. I could tell we were in a city and I could see black people. I thought that maybe something had happened at home, somebody had died or something, and they were taking me to the funeral. I figured it had to be either Mom or Willis. They wouldn’t take me to see my father because he didn’t live with me, and I couldn’t imagine anything happening to Icy. I didn’t think God liked me, but I didn’t think He would let Icy get hurt.
When the van stopped and Mr. Wilson came to take me out, I saw a small crowd of Puerto Rican–looking people on the sidewalk. I wondered if they were waiting for me. Mr. Wilson got me to the sidewalk, locked the van, and then started making a call on his cell. I looked around and recognized where I was. I was in front of the 135th Street precinct and I figured I had been right—that something had happened in my family. Mr. Wilson finished his call and then took me into the precinct.