Rikers High

by Paul Volponi

  My brain just shut down for a second, and it was like I was frozen stiff.

  I couldn’t believe it. I was going back to Rikers Island.

  Couldn’t they get another judge? Couldn’t the DA just send me home?

  I was tired of getting shuffled around, and she was the only one in the room to hear it. So I started to bark at her.

  “This is ’cause of you, right? ’Cause you’re a miserable shit lawyer!”

  Miss Thompson took a deep breath.

  “I saw your mother in the courtroom,” she said, in an even tone. “I gave her the news, and she was very upset. I tried my best to calm her down and let her know I have a handle on it—that you’ll be home soon.”

  But I wouldn’t cut her an inch of slack, and stared her down.

  Miss Thompson stood up and started stuffing papers into her briefcase.

  “Oh, yeah, and thanks for all those times you never picked up the phone or called my mother back!”

  “I don’t like the system much either, Martin. The truth is, you get what you pay for,” she popped off. “The city picks up this bill. I represent over fifty clients like you at the same time, all brothers or Hispanics. It’s delicatessen-style justice in here. Take a number and wait. That’s how it works.”

  Then Miss Thompson walked out the door and the CO came back inside to get me.

  CHAPTER

  4

  By the time I got back to the pen, it had cooled way down. Still, the dudes who were being sent back to the Island weren’t happy. And anyone who’d got off light wasn’t going to smile too much over it. Not in there.

  Sitting on one of the benches meant you’d have to move if somebody who was cranked up wanted your seat, or that you’d have to fight to keep it. I wasn’t interested in any of that shit. So I stood up, hoping to get put on one of the next buses out.

  A guy in a Nike sweatshirt was shadowboxing in the corner, trying to keep himself together. He was breathing hard and starting to really sweat. He’d rest with his hands wrapped tight around the bars, like they were around somebody’s throat. Then he’d start up again to fight another round.

  Those two kids who were ready to mix it up before stood at opposite ends of the pen now. But I sensed that any little spark in between could set things off again.

  Within a few minutes the COs called out close to twenty of us, and I got shackled to the one who wanted to take on that whole crew by himself.

  We were among the last pairs onto the bus and were sitting close to the front. He spent half the trip glaring back at two kids from that crew who were shackled together.

  Some big dude right behind us was pissed off. He kept cursing about how his own boys did him dirty in court, testifying against him.

  “I’ll kill all those bastards, and the DA. I’ll blaze somebody right here, too. Don’t think I won’t,” he warned, with his voice starting to crack.

  You’ve got to watch your back when somebody gets desperate and blind mad like that. The CO was all over that dude, and I thought he might even lock him up in the cage.

  “I’ll put my foot up your ass if you don’t stop!” screamed the CO. “Now shut up!”

  “Fuck everybody!” the dude said.

  While the CO was busy with him, my partner mouthed something to his fan club in the back. And I saw them steaming over what he said.

  The bus passed through the first checkpoint and started over the bridge to Rikers. The sun pushed through the windows and struck me dead square in the face. It was shining off the bay, too. And I tried to pretend that I was heading to Rock-away Beach instead of jail. I even remembered a day as a little kid when Pops took me fishing there and caught a horseshoe crab by the tail with his bare hands. Only that memory got bounced from my brain by the first good bump we hit.

  That damn bridge always seems longer when you’re going back. But you’d rather have it go on forever than drop you off on Rikers Island.

  Getting off the bus, that big dude broke down bawling. I guess from the stress. The CO must have taken him for a real herb, because he slapped him in the head as we were walking across the yard and said, “Shut up, crybaby!”

  But that dude turned man again in a hurry. He tackled the CO on the spot, dragging the inmate he was chained to with him.

  The other officers in the receiving yard ran over to help. That’s when those kids from the back saw their chance.

  They came at my partner, and I got caught in the middle. I’d been through enough that day and was ready to fight. But it was nearly impossible being chained to somebody. It was like two sets of Siamese twins trying to beat on each other, only that other pair was working with the same brain.

  Before I got hit, I saw the spiderweb tattoo on one of their necks and the light reflecting off the burner in his hand. I threw my arms up, swinging back as hard as I could. Then I felt the side of my face get warm, and I tried to touch it with my cuffed hands.

  The two of them jumped back into the crowd of inmates. I tried to go after them, but I got pushed down by COs.

  I could feel the blood between my cheek and the ground.

  That tattooed kid had cut me across the face with a razor.

  The sharp sting started to pulse high on my cheek. Then it went racing down my entire body, like I’d been sliced from head to toe. Suddenly, I was paralyzed with fear, and I was too shook to even cry.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Inside the clinic, COs were taking Polaroids of my face and asking me for a statement. Only I was in too much pain to even think about talking.

  Then a doctor came at me wearing a mask and gloves, saying, “You’ll barely feel this.” When I woke up from that needle he gave me, the right side of my face was totally numb. And in the metal frame of the bed next to mine, I could see the bandages taped from the top of my skull to the bottom of my jaw.

  I couldn’t keep track of all the fears running through my brain—about what I was going to look like, how nasty a scar I would have, if the cut would ever heal. I kept closing my eyes, hoping everything would go away. But it was just blood-soaked bandages, white curtains, and inmates handcuffed to beds every time I opened them again.

  I’d seen bad stitching on inmates before. That’s because doctors on Rikers are usually just starting out, or couldn’t keep a good job in a hospital. So they come to work in jail where nobody can fire them.

  I’d heard lots of kids talk about getting their stitches fixed up right out in the world. They say how they’re going to sue the doctor, or the jail for letting them get cut. Now there I was, seventeen years old, and I wasn’t sure if my face was going to look like a jigsaw puzzle. I just knew I didn’t want to see any more than I could in the frame of that bed.

  An officer wearing a blue Windbreaker and holding a clipboard stepped to me. He closed the curtains behind him, like the dudes in the other beds wouldn’t be able to hear us after that. He was wearing street clothes, and if it wasn’t for the badge hooked to his belt, I could have sworn he was a social worker.

  “How you feelin’, Martin?” he asked, reading my name off a medical chart.

  I didn’t have an answer for him.

  “It’s criminal what somebody did to you,” he said. “What are you gonna do to set this right?”

  It didn’t take him long to get into his rap. He was with the squad that tracks gangs through the jails, and his favorite saying was, “Just tell.” No matter what was wrong, it could get fixed easy. “Just tell.”

  “Never mind you,” he went on. “Some gangbanger put your mother through even worse pain. You’re a minor, so we had to call and tell her what happened. You know she was upset. She probably won’t get any sleep tonight because of what some punk did. Don’t let him do your mother like that,” he said. “Just tell.”

  There was nothing to say. Snitching on that kid wasn’t good enough. I wanted to cut him back. I wanted to run up and slice him across the face like he’d done to me. I wouldn’t care how much time I got for it.


  Anyway, that CO didn’t really care.

  He was just like the ones who were supposed to search that kid who’d cut me before he got back onto the bus at the courthouse. They were all just going through the motions to pick up a paycheck.

  The COs in the yard should have seen the kid who cut me. They didn’t need to play me for a snitch.

  Inmates on Rikers Island have a code: snitches get stitches. I already had the stitches. I didn’t need to be a pawn in anybody’s game.

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3

  CHAPTER

  6

  By the next day, all that medication wore off, and the right side of my face was screaming. It hurt so bad I wanted to rip that metal railing off the side of the bed and go running down the corridor with it cuffed to my wrist, sparking on the floor behind me. I wanted to run through the front gate, across that damn bridge, and all the way home until the pain stopped.

  Kids on Rikers are always trying to get sent to the clinic for medication. Most inmates will do anything to get high and kill time. The COs in the housing units can give out Tylenol, and lots of kids build up a supply. Then they take them all at once to get a buzz. Some dudes will even smoke ground-up orange peels, like weed, to get high. They’ll dry the peels in the sun, on a window ledge. Then they’ll roll up a fat “Sunkist blunt” with pages torn out from the Holy Bible.

  But I didn’t want any part of feeling good on Rikers Island. For five months I’d just wanted out of jail, and now I wanted out of the clinic.

  The COs put the phones out that night.

  One of the officers unhooked me from the bed and said, “You should call your family. Let them know you’re okay.”

  He was right. But I didn’t know what I was going to say to them.

  I practiced in my head for maybe ten minutes and kept changing it every time. I needed to sound like I could handle it. That getting cut was no big deal. Only I couldn’t lay out the words the way I wanted. So I finally just held my breath and dialed.

  “I was just thinking about you, child,” said Grandma.

  I knew right away from the sound of her voice that Mom hadn’t told her what happened. And I wasn’t going to either.

  “I was thinking ’bout you, too, Grandma. ’Bout how much I miss you, even more than your cooking,” I said.

  “I’ll make your favorite, stew, to celebrate when you get home,” she said.

  “I can almost taste it now,” I told her.

  Then Mom got on the phone and I could almost feel her standing next to me. My little sisters were calling out my name in the background when she asked low, “How bad is it?”

  “Not any worse than the cuts I got when I was a kid, except it’s on my face,” I answered. “Nothing to stress over.”

  But she wasn’t having any of that.

  “I’d have been there today if I coulda got off from work at Key Food without getting fired. But I couldn’t. So it’ll have to be Saturday,” Mom said. “I love you, Martin. I pray for you to come home every night. Just don’t do anything stupid to get even with nobody. They’ll keep you locked up longer. You hear?”

  “I love you, too, Mom. See you Saturday,” I answered, taking the phone away from the left side of my face.

  Then I thought about that tattooed kid who’d cut me. I could see every hook and line in that spiderweb inked onto his neck. And I wondered how he’d ever got so close to my family, all the way from Rikers Island.

  Later on, I got discharged from the clinic and found out they were changing my housing unit. Maybe they were screwing with me for not snitching or figured that after five months in the same place, I knew enough people to put a price on that kid’s head. But whatever the reason, I was getting moved.

  It was after nine o’clock when they brought me back to Mod-3 to pack up. Almost everyone was watching TV inside the dayroom, except for a few kids already asleep in their beds. No one from the house had been on the bus back to Rikers with me, so none of them knew what happened. They probably all thought I got released from court. Only there I was, walking into the house with bandages across my right cheek, about to pack all my shit into a plastic laundry bag.

  The COs wouldn’t let anyone out of the dayroom. They’re always worried that somebody will see you moving as their last chance to settle a score. But I didn’t have any real enemies, and I could see dudes pressed up against the big windows as I went through my bucket. They were pointing to their faces and looking at me, cutting themselves with a finger to see how it might feel.

  I knew some of them were watching to make sure that I only took stuff out of my own bucket. More than one guy had become a sneak thief while the rest of the house was bottled up somewhere.

  When I’d finished packing, I tied the plastic bag up in my blanket and threw it on top of my mattress. Then I pulled the mattress to the floor and started dragging it all behind me, like I’d seen other kids do when they moved out.

  Up at the Plexiglas bubble, one of the regular house COs gave my card over to an escort officer. I could see my picture stapled to the corner. Only it looked like a picture of somebody else now, somebody without stitches.

  I didn’t know where I was going and I wouldn’t ask.

  The escort officer led me out of Mod-3, and I headed down the main corridor, homeless.

  At the end of the corridor there was a woman CO at a desk next to an iron door. She looked old and tired, like a grandmother sitting behind a kitchen table.

  She stared at the bandages on my face and said, “Honey, why would you let that kind of trouble find you?”

  I dropped my eyes to the floor.

  She groaned as she got up, and I heard her turn one of the big metal keys on her ring in the door.

  Mom would warn me all the time about getting into trouble. Whenever I went out at night she’d tell me to stay home. Sometimes she’d almost beg me. But I was at home, sitting alone on the stoop outside my building, when I got arrested.

  This muscle-bound dude stepped to me, and I tried to front, acting tough. I was breathing easy when he only wanted to know where to cop some weed. I told him about the spot up the avenue and even felt good about it when he called me, “my man.”

  That undercover cop scored what he wanted, because a police cruiser rolled up my block about five minutes later. I almost couldn’t believe those cops were looking for me. But they weren’t fucking around.

  Mom saw the flashing lights through our living-room window.

  She stuck her head out and yelled, “Martin, get your ass upstairs now!”

  That’s when she saw them cuffing me. By the time she got outside, I was already in the squad car. The cops told her I was being charged with steering. She had no idea what that meant.

  I remember her screaming at them, “My son didn’t steal any car!”

  If she wasn’t crying so much, it might have even been funny.

  CHAPTER

  7

  I stepped through the iron door and was surprised to suddenly be outside in the cool night air. The smell of the jail was gone. That funk that comes with the dirty laundry and rotting garbage was behind me now.

  It was tight between the buildings of the jail, and the cement path was lined with a tall fence covered in razor wire. The path led out to an open yard I’d never seen before, beneath the clouds and stars. There were rows of lights shining high up on the tops of poles, two basketball courts laid out side by side, a handball wall, and some bleachers.

  I felt like I was back home on the playground, and my mood just picked right up. It felt like I’d carried my mattress from my real house to camp out overnight in the park. And maybe those were even the same stars I used to wish on when I was a kid.

  The officer told me to sit in the bleachers while he showed my paperwork to the CO on duty in the yard. I sat there looking up at the sky, wishing I could do my time on those bleachers. I would sit through the longest night that anyone could imagine. Then the sun would come up and I could go home.

  And d
espite the pain I was in, it felt that sweet.

  The yard was surrounded by six white bubbles, the kind people play tennis in during the winter. I never saw anyone walking around the jail with a tennis racket, so I figured that’s where they keep the inmates in this part of the jail.

  The bubbles sat together in pairs and had a big “N” or “S” painted on them. I knew from living in the main building that it meant the north and south side of each house. The sides were connected by a little station, and that was probably for the COs.

  I knew I’d be starting all over again. I’d be walking into some strange house like a new jack, with a fresh cut on my face and a lot to prove. For another sixteen days, until I went back to court, I’d have to buckle down and keep it real.

  The officer came back to the bleachers and said, “You’ve been assigned to Sprung #3, my man.”

  I put my hands up against the wall and Officer Johnson kicked both my ankles out hard. My feet were spread as far apart as they could go and still be standing. In front of us was a set of double doors that led to the officers’ station in Sprung #3.

  That’s where I’d spent all of thirty seconds before Johnson brought me outside for a private introduction and to hear his house rules. Behind us was another set of double doors that led back out to the yard. We were in his private jail now, a ten-foot space where he made all the rules and kept them with his fists.

  Johnson was big and black, and looked more like a grizzly bear than a CO.

  “I’m here from four till midnight, five nights a week,” he growled. “Do the wrong thing and I will personally shit on you. This is my house and you’re only renting. I don’t know what you did to deserve that cut. But try any of that nonsense out here and I’ll ship your ass back to the building where they can take another piece of you.”

  He ended his speech by slapping me in the ribs with a huge open hand. When I caught my breath, I stood up and followed him back inside.