by Mark Salzman
“Let’s see what happens,” Sister Janet said. She went to the office and spoke to the staff, who agreed to shut off the television and let her address the whole unit. She stood at the front of the room and asked how many of them knew about the writing class which met in the library. Two or three raised their hands. One boy muttered something that drew a laugh from the inmates sitting near him.
“Well, let me give you some idea of what kind of writing they’re doing,” she said. She read Nathaniel’s story aloud—the boys cheered when she came to the part where the main character starts shooting at the police—then asked if any of them might be interested in joining the class. More than thirty hands went up. Even Sister Janet looked surprised. “There might not be enough room in the class for all of you right away,” she told them, “but I’m going to pass around a notepad and a pencil. Write your name down on it so that Mark can notify you as soon as an opening comes up.”
“How long we gotta wait?” one boy asked.
“Yeah, Sister, my trial starts next month, I don’t got much time. Take me now.”
“Mine starts next week, take me.”
“I’m goin to YA soon an’ all I did was jack somebody’s car. Put me in front of those fools, they killas.”
“You can’t write, punk! You jus’ want in ’cause that teacher brought cake.”
“Take me now! I don’ wanna watch this bullshit on TV no mo’! I seen this movie ten times!”
“That’s enough,” Mr. Jenkins said. “If you’re interested, put your name down and pass the list around. If you’re gonna clown around, you can all take it down to your rooms and I’ll watch the rest of the movie myself.”
The list made its way around the room. The last boy handed it to me, pointing to his name at the bottom. “Start from there,” he whispered.
I thanked the boys for their interest and announced that I would begin taking new members the following week.
“How we gonna know if we in or not?”
“The same way as it works now—I’ll give my list to the staff, who will come get you.”
Several of the boys groaned. “They ain’t never gonna come get me.”
“Me neither.”
“Yes they will,” Sister Janet assured them. “This class is for anyone who is serious about writing. The staff won’t interfere. Mark is the one who decides who attends and who doesn’t.”
Mr. Sills took the list of names from me and leaned back in his chair, propping his feet up on his desk. He scanned the page without comment, then reached for a pen. Starting at the top, he began crossing names out.
“Nope. Nope. Nope. OK. Nope.”
By the time he was finished, the list had shrunk from an impossible thirty-two to a merely daunting eighteen.
“I hate to see a good thing get spoiled, Mark. Most of the kids I left on here’ll still waste your time, you’ll see. But it’s your class. Who you want first?”
“Might as well start from the bottom, just to be different. How about Sierra, Houston, and Johnson?”
Mr. Sills sighed, “Hey, Granillo?”
“Yeah, Sills?”
“Send in the clowns.”
Within a month, the class grew from four to fifteen members. My triage skills proved useless in the face of overwhelming need; each new boy had a roommate or friend who absolutely had to get into the class as soon as possible. The constant pestering wore me down, and I felt awful every time I walked into the unit and faced the ones who had not been chosen. Some submitted writing examples, others showed me their drawings, while most simply begged. One boy, after being turned down a fifth week in a row, muttered as I walked away, “Take my name off the list, then. You jus’ like all the rest. Get a nigga’s hopes up, then take ’em away.” After that, I gave up. If a kid with his name on the list made it past the staff and set foot in the library, he was a writer.
Naturally, the class lost focus. I spent all of my energy moving from one clique to another, trying to get them to stop talking, stop teasing each other, stop picking on Wong, stop pulling the erasers out of my pencils, stop drumming on the table. No, I can’t give your roommate an extra folder; no I can’t give you a pen; no I can’t mail that to your crime partner on the outs; no I can’t Xerox fifty copies of your poem about your girlfriend’s pussy; no I can’t bring a cake every week; please stop rapping it’s distracting the others; please don’t throw that; please don’t bring Hustler magazine to class, and how the hell did you get that in here? No I don’t want to see a nice pair of titties; no I’m not gay; yes I do have a headache so would you PLEASE stop rapping about blasting on foes and lining up ho’s? Enough with the ho’s already.
Mr. Sills’ prediction that most of the boys on the list would waste my time proved inaccurate. In fact, all of the boys on the list wasted my time—only not consistently. One boy, for example, spent his first three sessions in class reciting Tupac Shakur lyrics aloud. Just when I thought I couldn’t stand it any longer, he showed up for the fourth session, sat in a far corner of the room, and produced this:
Which way is home? As I look deep inside I really don’t know. I look right, I look left, I look up, I look down. I feel as though I keep running around the world. Perhaps it’s one big scattered map. In this life I hold pride and I’m willing to feed knowledge to my mind. I feel as though I run away sometimes from the troubles of the world. Maybe it hurts, maybe I just don’t want to face them. Who knows? I just hope that it may one day hit me like a diesel truck, knocking sense into me so that I can finally be free. I would really like to know which way is home so that I may be at peace within my inner soul.
At a low point in February, when I had eighteen boys in the class and it felt as if all anyone wanted to write about was pussy, bullets, and beer, I confessed to Duane that I was getting burned out. “I’ve got a dozen guys in the class who will write one good paragraph every few weeks but then fuck around for the rest of the time. They’re driving me crazy. Do you ever get kids like that?”
“All the time.”
“What do you do about it?”
“Nothing. I figure they’re probably the ones who need the class most. And sometimes they turn out to be the best writers.”
So I persevered, and learned a lot about pussy, bullets, and beer.
Another result of my relaxed admissions policy was that I had to deal with a greater variety of language skills. Up to that point, the boys in my class wrote surprisingly well; the only changes I made to their work when I typed it for them were to correct spelling and punctuation errors. Now I found myself deciphering messages like this:
700 Bloc vill life I’m showin muthafuccaz what that WACC life puttin it down 700% Village life real niggaz move in silence after I’m dumpin I’m runnin clearin the scene and I’m outie in gunsmoke bacc to the WxAxCxC out 700 blue and blacc 700 percentage getting in moe shit than denise tha menace Ha! Ha! I got a itchy YAH!YAH! trigga finger chillin wit devious locc from corrigador it’s mandatory shit get laid down for grands and indoes
Or this, from a former star athlete at a high school in South Central who was arrested during his junior year:
One tyme I halpe some one. 1 day me and my lil bother was walk’en down the street. and I sow this old ladey that looc like she need’ed some halpe with her bags. So me and my lil bother halp her with her bag. about 2. day later we saw her a gin and we halp’ed her a gin. and each tyme we halpe her we did not ask for a reword for are halpe. and buy the end of the week I falte good.
I also encountered boys with severe psychological problems. One boy, named Virgil, claimed not to be able to remember anything about his life before being arrested. He was a tall, muscular boy with a complexion so dark it looked blue, like a raven’s plumage. He never made eye contact with me, nor did I ever see him make contact with any of the other boys in the class. Each session he would come in, sit down with pencil and paper, then not move until I came over and asked if he needed help.
“Uh-huh.”
“Do
you need a topic?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How about this: a turning point in your life.”
“OK.”
Forty minutes later he was sitting in the exact same position, having written nothing. It wasn’t that he had been chatting during the hour; he didn’t talk to anyone, he didn’t read magazines, he didn’t rap, he didn’t join in any of the clowning around. He just sat there the whole time, frozen, staring at the blank piece of paper.
“I couldn’t remember no turnin’ point,” he said. “It all turnin’.”
At the next class, I suggested he write about someone who influenced him. Forty minutes later he told me that he couldn’t remember anyone who had influenced him. I tried all of the topics that had been successful with kids who felt stuck—describe your mother, a time you felt sad, a time you felt angry, a time you felt afraid—but nothing provoked a memory in Virgil. “It all just a fog,” he said. “Maybe it ’cause I been smokin’ weed since I was eight years old.”
Then one day Virgil woke up. He was sitting as usual, pencil in hand, waiting for me to give him a topic, when I said, “Can you think of a time someone surprised you?”
He looked up from the table, his mouth slightly open.
“Yeah,” he said. “I ’member somethin’ now. I ’member.”
He began writing, and spent the next half hour with his entire upper body leaning over the page, struggling to form each letter. At some point during class I noticed that he had stopped, and was looking at me instead of writing.
“Are you finished, Virgil?”
“No.”
“Is something wrong?”
“I need help with somethin’.”
“With what?”
He paused. “Spellin’ a word.”
It was the kind of moment all teachers dream of, a Helen Keller moment, where a young person who has been locked in a box all his life hears you tapping on the outside, and taps back. If you handle the moment right, that kid just might dare to find his way out of the box.
I moved my chair closer so he would not have to say the word loudly and feel embarrassed.
“I’m happy to help, Virgil. That’s what I’m here for. What is the word you need help with?”
At last he looked straight at me; his eyes were bloodshot.
“Titties.”
I helped him spell it, and this was what he handed in:
It start like this. I woke up to go to school a new school I am a boote in the 10th grade and allraty fucen with to meny girls but a nigga don’t think befor he do. I get to school and for some resin I felt werde. All day girls wer loocen at me with a fuc you looc. You know. So most of the day I just stayed by my sister and her homegirls. But it all came out by lunch tyme. My x and a girl I was fucen with big titties was talken the hol tyme. My x was salting me up. That whole day. But in the end I stell got my pussy so I did not give a fuc. You know. That surprise me.
It was the kind of moment all teachers dread, a Jack Henry Abbott moment, when a protégé emerges from the box and you wonder: How can I get him back in?
Albert, another reticent student, spent his first four sessions in the class cowering at the far end of the table, unwilling to write because he was afraid the staff might see his handwriting and send him to the hospital to be lobotomized.
“What makes you think that?” I asked.
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was on TV last month,” Benny said. “Now he thinks they’re gonna cut his brain out.”
I promised Albert that no one would cut his brain out, but still he would not write. I asked Sister Janet to look into getting some help for him, but before she could do anything he was shipped off to prison.
A more forthcoming boy, Ibrahim, wrote a series of fictional stories about a thug named T-Bone who robbed stores and shot the helpless clerks for “disrespecting” him. When I asked the plump, baby-faced inmate what constituted disrespect, he shrugged and said, “Tellin’ me to pay for stuff.” When I told him that his stories upset me, he looked confused.
“But why?”
“Because your main character is mean, Ibrahim—he kills people for no reason, he shows no remorse or empathy for other human beings, and he gets away with it. Why would anyone want to read something like that?”
“But it’s not for no reason—I just told you, they disrespected him.”
“But that’s not a reason to kill someone, Ibrahim.”
He seemed utterly unaffected by this conversation, as if it were taking place on a movie screen rather than in real life. I was hoping, frankly, that he would take offense and not show up for class anymore, but he was the first in the library at our next meeting, greeting me with the same pleasant smile. This time, he wrote an essay rather than a story:
People look at the outside of a person and judge them on that. When society look upon me they see a hoodsta and a madman, lost in the street with no shoes on his feet, but am I really lost and mad or am I free? It’s all on your mind state, and what God want you to be. What is mad? Is it me? What I feel inside is all I can be, and that good for me. I guess they call me mad because I killed and robbed but I feel I was just doing my job. Now I see that it was the evil in me.
Ibrahim left for prison a week later. And then there was Jeffrey, one of the few white boys I had seen in K/L unit, who became obsessed with reducing the total experience of his life to one sentence. After weeks of agonized cogitation, he settled on this formula:
If the answer to the all of being stood firm, more bad than good would the puzzle be solved.
Once he’d completed that sentence, he had nothing more to write, and came to class only for the opportunity to stare out the window facing the yard. The window in his cell, he told me, faced a brick wall.
Eventually all of the boys from Sister Janet’s wait list made it into the class, but by then I’d learned my lesson: too many clowns spoil the circus. I announced a moratorium on new admissions until the class had dropped back down to a maximum of eight. I told the boys I didn’t even want to hear about it if someone was interested in joining. Every week we lost someone to either prison, county jail, Youth Authority, or the Box, until finally, in early April, we lost two boys on one day and found ourselves down to seven members. In addition to the original five—Kevin, Francisco, Victor, Benny, and Patrick Chumnikai, who had returned after a two-month stint at YA— the class now included Jose Renteria and Duc Bui.
Duc had arrived as a refugee from Vietnam only two years earlier and had a limited English vocabulary. He was short and squat, with protruding lips and a voice that unfortunately sounded ducklike. As anyone might have predicted, Duc suffered endless torments at juvenile hall.
“Quack quack quack! Here comes Duck!”
“Waddle on over here, Duck. I got some pieces a bread for ya. Quack quack!”
“Shoddop, assho’.”
“It’s assHOLE, Duck—quack quack!”
But Duc, as the boys say, maintained. He got sent to the Box for fighting every other week or so, but the staff sympathized because it was obvious Duc had no choice. If he was to survive, he had to stick up for himself.
His name had never been on my waiting list; Duc hadn’t understood Sister Janet’s Christmas Eve recruitment speech. He thought she was giving a sermon. Duc got into the class because Mr. Sills shoved him into the library one day, told him to sit down and shut up, and said to me, “Here’s your new student, Mark. Good luck.”
At first it was difficult to know what to do with Duc. His small vocabulary prevented him from expressing anything but the simplest facts about his life:
My name is Duc. I’m locked up. I don’t like the people, don’t like the food. I miss my family.
One day I asked if he owned a Vietnamese-English dictionary. “No way. Don’ got nothin’ in here.” That week I bought one in a used bookstore for five dollars, then asked Mr. Sills if Duc could be given special permission to keep it in his room.
“OK,” Sills said, “but if Daff
y Duck tears out the pages and stuffs ’em down the toilet, I’m gonna make you pull that shit out.”
When I presented the dictionary to Duc, he pored over it as if it were the Rosetta stone. At our next class, he handed me this essay, which he’d completed in his room using the lead from a pencil hidden under his thumbnail:
Sometimes I am in the room with the darkness, I could feel the light inside my heart. No one could understand how light it is. The people just think I am a piece of shit, but they never know I feel remorse. And I try to be a good person without my freedom, I lonely. I need help. Sometimes I wonder how can I get back my happiness without help?
From that day on, Duc became the most hardworking student in the class, and his language skills improved at an astonishing rate.
Jose Renteria was Victor’s roommate, and the two of them had become close friends. Jose was a perfect example of what Mr. Sills called a “clown”: he seemed to expect nothing from the class except an excuse to get out of his room, and made no effort to take writing seriously. If I left him alone, he talked the whole hour and brought in pornography to distract the others. If I got fed up and insisted he write something, he would rein himself in just enough to prevent himself from being expelled, but always with a smirk and a few inaudible comments that let everyone know he wasn’t giving in, just making a temporary concession to strategy. When he did write, I often wished I had let him keep talking instead:
one day I woke up in the morning kind of mad cause I didn’t have no sex I was very mad but when I got up my girl gave me some so that made me feel really good and also I still remember that when she asked me if I wanted anything to eat I was tripping out because she never did nothing like that before and one day she hooked it up with some good-ass food I was so happy that I gave her some dick
Jose was a pain in the ass, but the others all agreed that the class worked because it was the one place they knew they could express themselves without fear of being judged, and I was the one adult they could count on not to play the role of authority figure. If I threw Jose out, I worried how this might affect the rest of the class. Also, I couldn’t dismiss what Duane had said about the most troubled boys needing the class the most— Francisco, after all, was supposed to have been the biggest clown in the unit. And finally I had managed to survive seven months in that library with as many as a dozen clowns at one time without ever losing my temper; I was determined not to let this one spoil my record.
