True Notebooks

by Mark Salzman

  While Nathaniel focused on writing new pieces, the others listened as, one after another, boys from the other classes got up to read. One boy, whose father was incarcerated while he was growing up, described the moment when it dawned on him that his own son, now two years old, would have the same fatherless childhood he’d had. Another described how angry he felt after learning his grandmother had been mugged, in spite of the fact that he had been mugging people for years. Others wrote about lost freedom and the longing for home and family. We heard grievances against society, declarations of innocence, and admissions of guilt. Some claimed to have found God in jail, while others described themselves as utterly alone in the world, abandoned even by God.

  So far, however, only boys were reading. I looked over at the girls’ table and saw that they were urging the pregnant girl to get up and represent them. Karen whispered some encouragement into her ear, at which point the girl threw up her hands in a gesture of resignation and stood.

  Carrying a sheet of paper, and with her other hand resting on her swollen abdomen, she waddled to the podium, took the microphone off the stand, then sat down on the edge of the stage. “Is it OK if I sit?” she asked, looking to Karen for reassurance.

  “It’s fine, Vivian,” Karen told her. “Just make sure to read loudly enough that we can all hear you.”

  Vivian nodded. Her hair fell across her face, hiding most of it from view. She brought the microphone close to her mouth and began speaking, but no sound came out from the speakers. She must have turned the microphone off with her thumb when she removed it from its cradle.

  “Hit the switch, girl!” someone yelled. “We can’t hear you!”

  She held the mike out in front of her and squinted at it.

  “It’s on the side!”

  She found the switch and turned it on. “Like this?”

  “Yeah! We feel you now.”

  She tucked her hair behind one ear, thanked Karen for encouraging her to write and to believe in herself, then shared with us her dearest childhood memory: receiving letters from her father while he served time in prison. He addressed each letter to “daddy’s little girl,” told her he loved her and promised that everything would be all right once he got home. When he did come home, Vivian met the man she had adored from afar and experienced a profound disappointment. Like Nicqueos, she felt betrayed and started getting in trouble. She ended her essay with a confession: now that she was locked up, she prayed every night that her daddy would send her a letter and tell her once more that she was daddy’s little girl.

  Once Vivian had read, the rest of the girls felt braver and soon all of them made the trip to the podium. At noon, with all of us feeling that something magical was going on, we broke for lunch. While the rest of us ate, Sister Janet negotiated with the female guard, arguing that the boys and girls had earned the privilege of sitting together for the afternoon. The woman looked resolute, shaking her head steadily as the nun pled her case. Not even Sister Janet can pull this off, I thought, but I underestimated her. By 12:30 the guard showed signs of wearing down, and not long after that, I watched as Sister Janet and Karen led each of the girls to a different table. Their chaperone, meanwhile, looked like a hen whose chicks had just been pulled out from under her wing. She seemed uncertain of what to do with herself; she read a few handouts, glanced repeatedly at the clock, and wrung her hands. I felt sorry for her, sitting all by herself at the vacated table, so I joined her for coffee.

  “It’s gone pretty well so far,” I said.

  “So far, yes.”

  “The guys in my group have been looking forward to this for weeks. They even creased their pants and used tape to make cuffs.”

  She flashed me a taut smile. “Young people are the same everywhere.”

  “The writing’s pretty good, don’t you think?”

  “Oh yes. There’s a lot of talent here. People would be amazed.”

  After all the buildup over what we could expect if we put the boys and girls too close to each other—I was expecting some kind of sexual explosion—the reality was a letdown. The boys and girls weren’t even talking to each other; the girls stared down at their hands and the boys were all suddenly talking about cars. I said to the guard that if it weren’t for the orange prison uniforms, you might think they were ordinary high school students. She arched one of her eyebrows.

  “Don’t take offense,” she said, “but in my observation, you are a naïve person. You think everything’s just like in a storybook. Oh, I wish I could feel that way, yes I do. Unfortunately, I can’t. It’s my job to see the truth.” She picked up one of the pencils we had distributed throughout the room and held it in front of me. “You see a pencil here. Just a nice little pencil. It would never occur to you”—she changed her grip on the pencil so that it was clenched in her fist—“that this could be driven through someone’s ear right into their brain! You hand these pencils out but don’t pay close attention to how many come back. I bet you don’t know how many were on this table when we came in, do you? I do. There were nine.”

  She returned the pencil to the table and folded her hands on her lap like a Sunday school teacher. “But it’s OK. All of us here are like the ingredients to a stew. You volunteers are the spice. So it’s OK that you are the way you are.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nathaniel moving toward the tape deck, cassette in hand, threatening my storybook vision of a writing retreat without rap music. I excused myself and got to the podium as quickly as I could.

  “Not now, Nathaniel.” I felt my headache starting to throb again.

  “But this is the break! What better time for a musical interlude?”

  “Wait until the end of the day, Nathaniel. Please.”

  “You said I could play it after everybody read,” he pouted. “Well? Everybody read, and now you’re saying I can’t play it until the end of the day. You broke your word.”

  Remembering how easily he’d manipulated my emotions before, I struggled to think of a way to talk him into sitting down without creating a scene. Instead my mind tied itself into knots.

  “Hall! What the fuck you doin’ standing up?”

  It was Mr. Granillo. He had approached without my noticing.

  I marveled at how quickly, and how skillfully, Nathaniel managed to look injured. “I’m just talking with my teacher. What’d I do wrong?”

  “Is this where he’s supposed to be?” Mr. Granillo asked me.

  “We’re talking about a song he wrote,” I said. “He wants to perform it, but I think it would be better if it came later in the day. What do you think?”

  Mr. Granillo grasped the situation immediately. He ignored my question and got right up into Nathaniel’s face.

  “Gimme that tape, Hall.”

  “What? It’s my tape.”

  “Give it to me right now.”

  Nathaniel handed it over.

  “This is a writing retreat, not a rap concert. When your teacher decides it’s time, he’ll tell you. I’ll have the tape right here. Now sit down.”

  Nathaniel didn’t budge. The expression on his face couldn’t have been practiced, it was such a naked display of frustration. Here it comes, I thought. He’s going to blow, Mr. Granillo is going to deck him, then the other boys will start a riot. Chairs will be thrown. Tables will be used as forts. Pencils will be driven into brains. This will be the last writing retreat ever, and all thanks to me not being able to handle one testy kid.

  Nathaniel didn’t blow, however. He turned around slowly, with just enough insouciance to preserve his dignity but not enough to give Granillo an excuse to throw him out. He returned to his table, but would not look at or speak to anyone there. He also made a point of refusing to look in my direction; he stared at the wall and smoldered.

  I felt badly that Nathaniel’s day had been spoiled, but mainly I felt grateful that my day had been saved. I decided to sit with Francisco and Victor for a while. Vivian, the first of the girls to read, had been assigned t
o their table. I complimented her on the piece she’d written, but she kept her eyes on her hands, which were propped on top of her belly. “My baby just kicked!” she said.

  “Can I feel it?” Francisco asked.

  She moved her hands to one side, indicating that it was OK to touch.

  Uh-oh, I thought.

  I felt sure the orgy was about to start, but as soon as Francisco felt the baby kick, he yanked his hand back. “Damn,” he said, “it’s like the movie Alien.”

  “No it isn’t,” Vivian said, smiling. “It’s a little baby, that’s all.”

  “Hey Mark,” Francisco said, “this retreat is even better than I thought it would be. We were just talkin’ about it.”

  “You’re enjoying it?”

  “Hell yeah! It’s cool, hearing all this writing. And having so many people listen to what you wrote—it feels good.”

  “This is the best day I had since I was locked up,” Victor said. “By far.”

  “Hey Mark—you always doin’ stuff for us, let us do somethin’ for you. You ain’t even had time for dessert, I seen you takin’ care of business, talkin’ to that fat fuck staff lady. Let us get you somethin’. You want the cupcake or the cookie? Or maybe one of each?”

  “That’s nice of you. I’ll take one of each.”

  “You got it.” Instead of jumping up to fetch it for me, however, Francisco merely snapped his fingers. A boy from one of the other writing groups leapt up from his chair and rushed to our table.

  “Get my teacher a cupcake and a cookie,” Francisco said, as if placing an order in a restaurant, “and another cup of juice for this lady sitting next to me.”

  The boy hesitated, as if waiting for further instructions. Francisco was quick to point out the flaw in the service. “Don’t just stand there, fool—my teacher’s hungry.” Without a word, the boy hurried off to take care of our order.

  “How does that work?” I asked.

  “You mean gettin’ little homie to put in work? Hey, when I was a little homie, I had to put in work for the big homies. Now it’s his turn. No big thing.”

  The boy returned with my dessert and Vivian’s drink. “That’s cool for now,” Francisco said, dismissing the little homie with a nod. The pride in the boy’s face was unmistakable. I had just witnessed my first authentic gang transaction, but instead of being horrified, I was struck by how strongly I identified with the little homie. When I was his age, I had a kung fu teacher I looked up to, and whose acceptance I longed for. He was an abusive, self-hating thug, but at fourteen I didn’t have the experience to realize it. One day, at a martial arts tournament in New York State, he told me—he barked, actually—to run out and buy him coffee. The thrill I felt at being given this honor, and the pleasure it gave me when he sipped the coffee and pronounced it satisfactory, transformed me. I felt as if my body no longer had any weight to it, that my physical self had been replaced by a flame of pure devotion.

  I asked Francisco and Victor if, when they had been “little homies,” they had enjoyed being ordered around by the older homies.

  “Hell yeah! You just dyin’a prove yourself. You wanna show the OGs they can depend on you. You want that homie love.”

  “Homie love?”

  “Aw—I don’ even know how to say it, Mark. Some stuff you can’t put in words, it’s just too strong.”

  Victor was willing to try. “It’s when you know you’d die for somebody, and they’d die for you. No better feeling than that.”

  “Love from a female is cool an’ all, but a female can change her mind. Homie love is for life.”

  “But Francisco, I thought you said that since you were locked up, none of the homeboys have written or come to visit? That only your family still cares?”

  Francisco blushed. “That’s different,” he stammered. “On the outs, it’s for life. We’re talkin’ ’bout two different things.”

  “It ain’t different,” Victor said bitterly. “Homie love is bullshit, just like everything else. People say one thing but do another. Everybody’s just out for themselves.”

  Francisco shrugged; Vivian’s presence seemed to inhibit him. “Hey, look,” he said, pointing toward the front of the room. “Somethin’s up.”

  Sister Janet stood at the podium next to a white-haired gentleman wearing a gray business suit. She asked for everyone’s attention, then introduced her visitor. “This is Mr. Kelly. He is the head of the probation department for all of Los Angeles County. I’ve known him for many years, and he is a caring, thoughtful man. He has been with us all morning, listening to your powerful words, and he has something he’d like to say.”

  Mr. Kelly—who had been a priest before he began his career with the probation department—took the microphone and explained that actually, he had not come prepared to say anything, he only wanted to listen. “But you know Sister Janet. She has ways of making people say yes to things.”

  He complimented the boys and girls on their fine writing and congratulated them for working so hard to prepare for the retreat. He talked about how important he felt writing was, and what a crucial role it had played in his own life. Then he said, “When I retire, I’ll walk away with some very fond memories of things that went right, of people who overcame obstacles I never had to face, who showed courage beyond what I’ve ever had to show. I didn’t know what to expect when I drove out here today, but I can tell you that being here, seeing and hearing each of you read, has been one of the high points of my career. Maybe the high point. I just wanted to thank you for that.”

  His speech electrified the kids. When we opened up the mike for readings, so many of them wanted to get to the podium we had to ask them to form a line. Some returned to read four or five times. For two hours the intensity held steady, then it reached a peak when Ruben and Mario, Duane’s star students, presented something they had worked on together.

  It turned out they had known each other in elementary school and had even been friends, but after they got to junior high school, one of them moved to a different neighborhood. A long-standing rivalry between the neighborhoods meant that the two boys became enemies by default. They did not see each other again until meeting in prison, in Duane’s class, and there they discovered their shared interest in writing. For the retreat, they had written a series of letters to each other trying to retrace their steps and figure out how their lives had spiraled out of control. They read those letters aloud now, standing side by side at the front of the room.

  It was an extraordinary performance. Unfortunately, it was also an impossible act to follow. By three o’clock we had run into a problem: the kids had read everything they had brought to the retreat, but we still had two hours to go. They were convinced that if they stopped reading, the staff would send them back to their units early. So they began improvising at the mike, and the quality suffered. Curse words appeared more frequently, as did gratuitous references to criminal activity. Each kid pushed the boundaries a little further than the one before him, and before too long, somebody got up and delivered a rap. It went by so quickly I couldn’t understand most of it, but from the way the staff fidgeted, I gathered the content was inappropriate.

  Nathaniel made his move. He raised his hand and held it there until I could ignore it no longer. I walked over to his table and he said, “Listen. That fool just did a rap, and it was full of gang shit. Mine is about tryin’a do right, it don’t even got a cussword in it. Are you gonna let me do this thing or not?”

  How could I say no? I gathered the tape from Mr. Granillo, handed it to Nathaniel, and sat down. After putting in the tape, he took the microphone and said to the audience, “Listen up, y’all. We losin’ focus. We gotta stay on track, so I got a little somethin’ for y’all to contemplate on. Peace.” He pressed the button, and the windows started rattling.

  It was all mumbling and posturing to me, but his peers loved it. Even some of the staff applauded when he finished; as promised, he hadn’t slipped in any gang references. But sure enough,
once the rapping started there was no turning back. Now every boy and even some of the girls wanted to rap, and the experiments with gutter talk resumed. None of the writers, including me, wanted to be the first to censor anyone (didn’t we say in our classes that they could write what they wanted?), while the staff seemed unsure of what to do—who was in charge? As we dithered, the kids gained momentum until a boy finally got up and went for the big brass ring:

  Now I’m stuck ’cuz I was born into a life of crime

  Straight killin’ at willin’ and drug dealin’ to my own kind

  And never seemed to realize how fast time flies

  Sittin’ off in the halls with a rap sheet a mile high

  Foe counts of murder and premeditated manslaughter

  25 to life is the deal that the D.A. offered

  but I ain’t goin’ out like no bitch

  my trigga finga got the itch

  I’m a nigga on a mission

  Bitch, take it doggy-position

  Ain’t no sucka in the w—

  Just as the boy grabbed his crotch and shook it for emphasis, the room went quiet. The boy’s mouth kept moving, but no obscenities could be heard. A glance at the sound system explained why: the female guard had disconnected the microphone cord from the amplifier. She jabbed a finger into the errant boy’s chest and shouted, “I have heard all I need to hear! You are done for today! You are no longer welcome !”

  Sister Janet somehow convinced the woman to release the boy to her custody. As the nun escorted him outside for a talk, Duane reconnected the microphone and calmly asked if anyone else would like to read. I looked at the clock: it was 3:20. My head felt as if someone were firing a gun inside it. When no one came forward to read, Duane had the fine idea to suggest that we use the rest of the time to write, talk to friends, “or just relax. You’ve earned it.”

  I sat with Jimmy, Patrick, and Benny and talked with them about kung fu movies and Japanese manga cartoons; we were all exhausted from the day’s effort. Just before five, Sister Janet approached the podium. The boy who had delivered the obscene rap was standing next to her. The female guard stood up to object, her eyes bugging out of her head, but Sister Janet acted too quickly for anyone to stop her. “It’s time for us to say goodbye,” she announced. “We have had a wonderful day. You have made us so proud—and you should be proud of yourselves. I’m going to ask someone to lead us through a closing prayer, but first, I have someone here who would like to say something.”