True Notebooks

by Mark Salzman

Silence.

  “You know what a moral is, don’t you? Come on, I know you boys are smart enough to come up with one. How about you, Hall? You’re always telling everybody what a genius you are, why don’t you share some of that knowledge with us.”

  “I don’t know what the moral is, sir.”

  “No? How about you, Wu?”

  Jimmy shrugged.

  “I didn’t hear you, Wu. What was that?”

  “I don’t know what the moral is either, sir.”

  “Chumnikai?”

  “No sir.”

  “Uh-huh. Well I know Javier knows what the moral is. Let’s hear it.”

  Francisco squirmed in his chair until inspiration came to him. “Don’t rob somebody if you don’t have a weapon?”

  Mr. Jenkins kept silent for a long time, shaking his head, then said, “OK. You clowns clear on outta here. It’s eight o’clock.” After the boys had returned to the rooms, Mr. Jenkins asked me to follow him into the office. I thought he was going to chew me out, but instead he asked me to read Kevin’s piece aloud to the other two guards on duty. When I got to the end of it, where the victim steals Kevin’s bicycle, the three of them laughed harder than the boys had.

  “Lord help us,” Mr. Jenkins said as he walked with me to the door. “What a little family we make.”

  11 / Feeling Special

  “Are you sure this is it?” I asked.

  Duane paused in front of the cinder-block fort and looked around. “Only one way to be sure, I guess.” He pushed against the door, whose window had wire mesh set in the glass, and it swung open. “If a door around here opens without having to unlock it, it’s got to be something special.”

  We entered a small office and gave our names to a secretary, then sat down to wait on a battered vinyl couch. The cushion under me hissed in protest. The secretary announced our arrival using a small intercom; when the superintendent of Central Juvenile Hall answered through it, we realized he was in the adjacent room and could be heard just as clearly without the device.

  “Mr. Burkert will see you now,” the secretary said. The couch sucked in air when I stood up.

  William Burkert, an Asian-American man in his early fifties, greeted us with a nod when we stepped into his office, but did not get up from behind his desk. “What can I do for you?”

  The writing class retreat was Duane’s idea, so I let him do the talking. He described our classes and handed several examples of the kids’ work across the desk to the superintendent.

  “I’m familiar with your program,” Mr. Burkert said, putting the writing samples aside. “Believe me, Sister Janet keeps me informed. I’m all for it.” He leaned back in his chair. “On the phone you mentioned wanting to arrange something. What did you have in mind?”

  As Duane outlined the idea, Mr. Burkert took notes on a yellow legal pad propped on his lap. He winced when Duane mentioned the time frame—all day including lunch—and when Duane mentioned that we had writing classes from five separate units to bring together for the event, he called for a time-out. “Hold on a second. Are we talking about girls here?”

  “One of our teachers works with the girls, yes.”

  “And you want to put them in the same room as the boys? For a whole day?”

  “That’s right.”

  Mr. Burkert’s jaw set and I saw him write the word “GIRLS” on the legal pad in capital letters, with an exclamation point after it.

  When Duane had finished, the superintendent took a deep breath, then said, “OK, here’s the situation. We’ve done retreats here before, mostly with the religious groups. Here’s what it involves: I have to hire a team of extra staff, working overtime at overtime pay, to be there. We can’t take the regular staff out of their units because the kids who aren’t in your classes will still be there. It also means I have to put together a special kitchen crew to bring food to you, set it up, serve it, and clean up. It also means coordinating with movement control, getting the kids to you from all of the different units and then getting them back, making sure that none of them gets ‘lost.’ ” He tossed the pad onto his desk and leaned forward. “All of that I can do, and because I think so highly of your program I’m willing to give it a try. But having girls and boys in the same room for that long—that’s a serious problem.”

  Mr. Burkert steepled his hands in front of him, as if bracing to hear our complaints, but Duane maintained his customary silence.

  “You have to understand,” Mr. Burkert explained, “putting girls and boys together in a place like this is a liability nightmare. They’re lonely, they’re locked up, and they’re teenagers. The boys will become overexcited and act out to impress the girls, you can count on it. And the girls will egg them on. Coed activities are very difficult to monitor.”

  Duane nodded, but a slight tilt of his head suggested that perhaps these difficulties could be overcome. Mr. Burkert became more specific:

  “We seat them apart from each other, but even then you have to watch them every second. You wouldn’t believe the things that can happen. In the bathrooms, under tables, sometimes right out in the open. You have to understand that these girls are very sophisticated in the sex department. They are experts at using sex to manipulate men—and that includes male staff.”

  More thoughtful silence. “It’s just that it would be a shame to have to leave the girls out,” Duane said. “They’ve worked so hard.”

  “Couldn’t you have a separate retreat for them?” Mr. Burkert suggested.

  “The girls only have one writing class. They wouldn’t have anyone to meet with.”

  “That is a problem,” Mr. Burkert conceded. “It’s because there are so few girls here compared to boys. They don’t get as many activities, they tend to get overlooked. But it’s getting better.” He glanced out the tiny bunker-style window facing the yard. “This place is in better shape than when I first got here, I can tell you that. There were a lot of bad apples on the staff in those days, a lot of physical abuse that went unreported. I got rid of the ones who couldn’t handle the job, and now everybody knows what to expect: if you can’t act like a professional, you’ll be held responsible. I may not be the most popular guy in the world around here sometimes, but nobody’s put sugar in my gas tank yet.”

  I thought that this might be a good time for me to join the discussion. “It must be challenging, trying to run a place like this,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s challenging, all right! Let’s just take one example. That boy in your class”— he looked at Duane and pointed at a thick manila file on his desk —“Barreda’s his name, right? Sister Janet thinks he’s the next Shakespeare. Fine. Sister Janet and I go way back, we’ve been working together here for years. We may not agree on everything, but we respect each other. But this time, she went too far.

  “Barreda is a problem. The staff tell me he gives them lip, he provokes things. They filed a complaint last week, asking me to have him transferred to county jail. It’s a standard procedure: if the staff file the complaint, I sign the form and the boy is removed. But guess what happens instead? Sister Janet shows up in my office and throws a fit. She doesn’t care what the staff think, she wants Barreda to stay so he can be in your writing class! So she leans across my desk, picks up the transfer form, and tears it into pieces right in front of me. And she says, ‘Mr. Burkert, if you do this, it means a divorce for you and me!’ I said to her, ‘I thought you were married to God!’ I like Janet enough that I said I’d do this for her, just this one time, but believe me, the staff don’t like it when I don’t back them up. I’m going to hear about it, and I’m going to have to smooth things over. These are the kinds of things I have to deal with.”

  Talking about these problems seemed to make him more comfortable. He and Duane talked about Barreda for a while, then returned to the matter of the girls. “What we were thinking, ” Duane said, “is that it might be good for the kids to see each other in a different light than what they’re used to. A lot of the acting out seems t
o come from the fact that they know so little about each other. Most of the boys in my class say they’ve never had a serious conversation with a girl. And the girls feel that boys have never listened to them, never taken them seriously as people. Hearing each other read their work aloud— work that is so personal, that isn’t about posturing—might be a good way to start.”

  Mr. Burkert picked up his yellow notepad again. Duane appeared to be wearing him down. “How many kids are we talking about? Total, if we include the girls?”

  “Around thirty.”

  “And how many volunteers would be present?”

  “At least five.”

  He wrote this information down and sighed. “I suppose if we hired a few extra female staff, sat the girls at a separate table, and watched the bathroom very carefully . . .” He made a few more notes, then said, “When are we talking about? Give me a date.”

  “How about the first Saturday of November?”

  Mr. Burkert leafed through a calendar on his desk and shook his head. “No good. We’ve got people from Sacramento coming down that day. What about the Saturday after?”

  Duane didn’t need to check his calendar. “That looks good to us.”

  “All right, then. A week before that date, I’ll need a list of all the kids in the classes so we’ll have a precise head count. And I’ll need the names of the volunteers or any guest speakers so they’ll have clearance to come in. Will you need any special equipment?”

  “We bring our own paper and pencils. It would be nice to have a microphone.”

  “No problem. Anything else?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “It’s a deal, then. There’s just one thing I’d like to say before you go, however. It’s a comment I’d like to make about your program.”

  Duane said we welcomed any comments or suggestions.

  “I appreciate that. Here’s my comment: my staff tell me you make the kids in your classes feel special.”

  I smiled, assuming that this was a compliment. Mr. Burkert noticed this and focused his attention on me. “You may think that’s a good thing, but it isn’t. You pay lots of attention to them and they get used to it. They come out of your classes feeling like something special, which makes it hard for them to leave your program and have to go back to our program. It makes them resent being told what to do by the staff, so they resist in subtle ways. This is exactly the problem we’re having with Barreda. We can’t have it.”

  Since he was directing his comments to me, I felt obliged to respond. “What do you think we should do?”

  “At the end of each class, you might have a little debriefing session. Remind them of where they are, and of who’s in charge.”

  While I tried to picture myself finishing each class by reminding the boys that they were in jail, Duane affirmed that we would have a head count of both students and volunteers ready a week before the retreat.

  “And I’ll take care of everything else,” Mr. Burkert said. He pointed to the writing samples Duane had handed him earlier. “May I keep these?”

  “Of course.”

  He stood up and stretched. “My daughter wants to be a writer. She is one already, I guess, but she wants to make a living at it. You guys have any advice?”

  “Change professions,” Duane suggested.

  Mr. Burkert sighed. “I’ll pass that on.”

  12 / Mother’s Day

  I attracted plenty of attention as I pushed my oversized cello case, which looks exactly like a coffin, through juvenile hall on my way to the chapel. I was assigned to play at two o’clock.

  After passing through a maze of cyclone fencing, I reached a building with a cross on its roof surrounded by statuary. The statues were all busts of women, but they did not look like religious figures. They wore wreaths of flowers and necklaces of fruit, like courtesans attending a Roman dinner party.

  A group of probation department officers stood outside the front door to the chapel. Over the roar of amplified music coming from inside, I introduced myself to someone with a clipboard and a walkie-talkie, and he leafed through a schedule until he found my name. “Oh yeah, you’re up next. Right after this group.”

  He led me to the chaplain’s office, where I could unpack my cello and warm up. “When we call you, you just go through that door and you’ll be right on the stage,” he explained. After he left, I decided to open the door just enough to peek inside; I was curious to see what kind of act I would be following. The group had eight performers, one playing electric guitar and another playing the organ. The rest played handheld percussion instruments. Their music, which seemed to be a combination of hip-hop and 1960s-style street poetry, was heavily amplified and the audience of prisoners was swaying and clapping along with obvious pleasure. One of the performers was an attractive young woman wearing tight-fitting jeans and a shirt which revealed her belly button. Although she did not sing, and her use of the tambourine suggested a minimum of training, a glance at the all-male audience confirmed that she was the star of the show.

  Standing in the aisle between the rows of pews, staring straight ahead and looking none too happy, was Mr. Sills.

  I closed the door and slumped into the chaplain’s chair. “Am I disturbing you?” a voice asked from behind me. It was Sister Janet, looking radiant as always.

  “I don’t think having me bring the cello was such a good idea,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Listen to what’s going on in there! They’re all stomping their feet and hooting and working up a sweat, and that’s just from watching the girl in the bikini, never mind the music. Can you imagine what a letdown it’s going to be when I go out there with a cello?”

  “They’ve got a girl in a bikini?” Sister Janet asked.

  “Well, it might as well be a bikini. You watch, this is going to get ugly.”

  “Have a little faith! You’ve got friends in the audience. I made sure that K/L unit was invited. The boys from your class are all there.”

  To kill time, I asked her about the statues planted all around the chapel.

  “Oh, those! Somebody donated them to us years ago, after his company ran out of business. He made statues for cemeteries.”

  At precisely 2:00, the amplification was unceremoniously turned off and the hip-hop group was led off the stage. They carried their instruments and amplifiers with them. Unlike at most concerts, where the audience cheers and yells for encores at the end of a performance, this audience had to sit quietly, with staff members posted throughout the room to keep an eye on them. No one looked happy about the hip-hop band being sent away.

  A man with an ill-fitting toupee shuffled down the aisle between the pews, turned to face the audience, then read aloud from a clipboard: “And now, Mr. Slazman will play the violin.” He shuffled back down the aisle and right out of the chapel.

  The silence in the room so unnerved me that I failed to see the raised platform on the stage. I walked right into it, stubbing my big toe and careening forward. I narrowly avoided a fall by using the cello as a ski pole, planting the end-pin into the dais and pivoting toward the audience. I hadn’t intended to enter like Buster Keaton, but that’s how it came across, and the inmates rewarded me with hearty laughter and a round of applause.

  Just as I started to feel at ease I caught a glimpse of Mr. Sills and became tense all over again. He looked like a drill sergeant stuck with chaperone duty during a bad USO show. I stalled for time, explaining to my audience that everything they saw on the cello except for the metal strings and end pin had once been part of a living thing. The spruce top, the maple back with its tiger-stripe grain, the ebony fingerboard, the snake-wood bow with its hair from a horse’s tail, and the pieces of ivory which came not from an elephant but from the tusks of a mammoth preserved in frozen tundra for tens of thousands of years. When we play the instrument, I told them, we bring these pieces to life again by letting them speak to us and affect us and, hopefully, inspire us to live more fully.

&
nbsp; When I had run out of little-known facts about the cello, I advised the boys to let the music wash over them and not to feel they had to “understand” it. I encouraged them to daydream. I told them that the first piece I was going to play— “The Swan” by Camille Saint-Saëns—always made me think of my mother. Then I started playing.

  With its high ceiling, bare walls, and hard floor, the chapel was as resonant as a giant shower stall. It made the cello sound like several instruments playing at once. The instrument sounded divine in that room, which excited me, but then a rustling from the audience brought me back to reality. The kids were bored, as I had feared.

  The rustling grew in intensity, but something about it didn’t sound right. It wasn’t quite the sound of fidgeting and wasn’t quite the sound of whispering either. I glanced at the audience and saw a roomful of boys with tears running down their faces. The rustling that had distracted me was the sound of sniffling and nose-wiping—music to any musician’s ears.

  I played the rest of the piece better than I had ever played it in my life, and when I finished, Francisco started clapping like a madman. A moment later the applause became deafening. It was a mediocre cellist’s dream come true; I had stumbled into the musical version of Shangri-la and been welcomed as a god, and vowed never to play anywhere else.

  For my next piece, I chose a saraband from one of the Bach suites. The boys rewarded me with another round of applause, but then someone shouted, “Play the one about mothers again,” and a cheer rose up from the crowd. I realized then that it was the invocation of motherhood, not my playing, that had moved the inmates so deeply.

  I played “The Swan” again, then more Bach, then “The Swan” a third time. Between pieces I told them stories of cello-related mishaps, like the time I had to go to the bathroom during a lesson but was too embarrassed to tell my teacher. I ended up wetting my pants during the allemande and just had to hope the teacher wouldn’t notice since I had a cello between my legs.

  At two-thirty sharp the man with the toupee reentered the chapel and signaled that my time was up. The inmates booed, then gave me a final ovation. I packed up my cello and went out the same way the hip-hop band had: down the center aisle, through the silent audience, and out into the garden of funerary statues.