Rikers High

by Paul Volponi

  But everybody knew better than to take him serious.

  One of the kids coming back must have just transferred over from Sprung #3. He held his bag up high and dropped his head behind it. Only some of our dudes recognized him and began blasting his name.

  Harris!

  It’s that deadbeat Harris!

  Brick tried to put the bite on him for whatever he owed right there.

  “Pay up now, sucka,” he snapped.

  The kid got all shook. But Officer Carter wouldn’t have any of that crap in the corridor.

  House COs can get real tight in the halls and don’t want to be shown up by their inmates in front of other officers standing post.

  “Let me hear one more word and I’ll turn this house back around!” barked Carter. “Do not disrespect me!”

  For now, Brick backed off.

  But I didn’t take him for the kind that turned the other cheek.

  We got to commissary, and I filled out an order sheet. I had only three bucks in my account. Mom filled it for me when she had a few extra dollars. I got a handful of beef sticks with it. They fit into my pocket, and nobody except the kid behind me knew what I’d bought.

  I never liked beef sticks much until I got locked up. You can heat them over a match and it’s like having a hot meal anytime you want.

  Brick carried two big bags in each arm back to the Sprungs. I watched him unload his commissary while his goons made collections. He had so much shit to put away that he had to rent a bucket from another kid.

  Barnett and Luis were walking around with a list of what kids owed. They even checked the receipts of what kids bought, just to make sure that no one was holding out on them.

  Kids go to somebody like Brick to juggle because they don’t have any money in their account.

  It’s usually two for one on the straight juggle, paying back twice what you borrowed. But if a shark like Brick has something dudes are really desperate for, or the house gets burned from commissary and nobody can shop, he can get even more.

  That night, Barnett and Luis lumped up some kid in the bathroom. They beat him with wooden scrub brushes, swinging them over their heads inside of sweat socks so that the force coming down would be even harder. The kid was the cousin of Harris, the dude from Sprung #2 who’d beat Brick out of commissary. It was a lesson for anybody that wanted to get too slick.

  Sometimes a herb gets lumped and doesn’t tell the COs. But those goons hurt him so bad that he was bleeding and it wouldn’t stop. The COs had to fill out reports and send him to the clinic.

  Before the kid left, Johnson, that grizzly bear of a CO, made the whole house stand by their beds, like in a lineup.

  “Everybody, on the double,” roared Johnson. “Let’s see who looks guilty.”

  The kid was scared shitless and wouldn’t pick them out.

  Johnson was pissed and cursed his ass for twenty minutes until the escort came to get him.

  “We can’t help you. Not if you stand there silent like a fucking mute,” Johnson yelled. “It won’t be on my conscience. No. When you don’t speak up for yourself, it’s all on you!”

  When that kid got back from the clinic, the COs packed him up to another house for his own good.

  SATURDAY, JUNE 6

  CHAPTER

  17

  There was no school on the weekend, so the COs just let us sleep late. A guy named Sanchez had the bed next to mine. At eight o’clock we were the only ones awake on the north side and started to talk.

  “My smart-mouthed lawyer told me to look at my watch,” Sanchez said. “It was 4:57. He says, ‘Three to five. That’s how much time you’re gonna cop out to on this drug charge.’”

  Sanchez told me he had turned eighteen the week before. He’d been sitting in the Sprungs for nearly seven months, and even got his GED there.

  He flashed a big grin as he reached into his school folder to show me the official diploma. And Sanchez was only still in class because he wanted to be, and because the teachers thought he was a good influence.

  Then he talked about going upstate to do his three-year bid, and the time he’d served so far on Rikers. That’s when his face got real serious and the mustache over his lip started to twitch.

  Maybe it was the bandages on my face that made him feel like I’d be as scared as he was.

  “Upstate’s going to be a nightmare. I’ve never even had to live in the main building on Rikers,” he admitted, folding his arms across his chest. “It’s been all Sprungs for me. I’m grateful my case got dragged out as long as it did. I know it’s easier down here. It’s got to be. This is all kids. That’s seven months I don’t have to do in a real joint with adults.”

  Rikers is a jail, not a prison. Most everybody here is waiting for an outcome to their case. Anybody getting sentenced to more than a year goes upstate to do his time. And there are no adolescents up there, no kiddy playtime. It’s all man-on-man.

  I wasn’t going to tell Sanchez about all the trouble Pops got into upstate, and have him lose any more sleep worrying.

  Sanchez ran down what all the COs and teachers were like for me. Then he asked me about my face. I told him I got cut in a fight and stopped it there.

  He saw there was nothing in my bucket and asked if I wanted to juggle with Brick.

  “I could represent you,” he said. “That would help me cut down on what I owe him, before I ship out. I don’t need a debt like that following me up north.”

  I turned him down flat. I wasn’t trying to get involved with anything in this house. I was tangled up in enough bullshit already. For the next two weeks, I was willing to be poor. And I wasn’t going to let anyone suck me in.

  Later, we got a bunch of new jacks in the house. I was happy about that because it gave dudes something to look at besides me.

  One of the kids came in with a brand-new hoodie. And after the idiot let on that he’d got locked up for jumping a turnstile, it was gone. Inmates don’t have any respect for a crime like that. He should have just hung a sign around his neck that read, I’M A HERB. TAKE MY SWEATSHIRT.

  The dude who took his hoodie didn’t even pretend he wanted to borrow it. He just took it right off the kid’s back. But that herb didn’t have anything else to put on. So he was walking around half the day without a shirt.

  “Get your new-jack ass dressed,” Ms. Armstrong told him. “You’re not at home.”

  When he couldn’t, she knew he’d been jacked.

  Ms. Armstrong grabbed an old rag of a shirt from one of the house buckets in the officers’ station. Everyone was laughing because they thought she was going to give it to the herb. Instead, she found the robber and made him wear that smelly rag for the rest of the day.

  That herb got his sweatshirt back and stayed close to Ms. Armstrong until lights-out. He was tied to her so tight, dudes started calling him “Apron Strings.”

  On Rikers, most dudes wear their own clothes because they’re not convicted yet and aren’t considered property of the state. But lots of inmates wish they could wear state-issued uniforms.

  Wearing your own clothes means you have to fight to keep them. There’s always somebody who thinks your threads are better than his. Lots of kids tell their families not to send them good clothes from home. It’s not worth the trouble.

  Dudes brag about their threads at home and how fly they look when they’re on the streets. They say they’re going “undercover” on Rikers Island. Corrections won’t let you wear a pair of two-hundred-dollar sneakers anyway. That’s because they know there’s going to be a war over them, and they don’t want to have to settle one.

  I waited all day to get called out for a visit, but the call never came. This was the first Saturday I hadn’t seen my mother since I was locked up. I guess she’d juggled her workdays at Key Food to see me that past Thursday. It had been only two days since she was here, but I missed her bad already.

  SUNDAY, JUNE 7

  CHAPTER

  18

  A roun
d eleven o’clock, most dudes were just waking up. I was already sitting in the dayroom, among the plastic tables and chairs, looking out of the emergency doors. The doors are there in case of a fire or something, and they’re never locked—it’s a law. You could go charging through them and no CO could stop you. I even daydreamed about doing that, with my feet in high gear and flames shooting out of my ass. But those doors are hooked up to a loud siren. And if you ever did decide to jet, you’d only be out in the yard with a few seconds’ head start and nowhere to run.

  I watched the mess hall workers, some of them kids from our house, bringing food in from the main building. There’s no real kitchen in the Sprungs’ mess hall, so the food comes to us already cooked. They wheel it across the yard on pushcarts packed to the top. You can tell what’s for lunch by looking at what the workers spill on the way through. Only they never have to clean it up. The seagulls and cats fight each other over that job.

  After lunch, me and some other guys watched from the dayroom as the mess hall workers were getting ready to race those same pushcarts back across the yard.

  “Speed Racer from Crown Heights, drivin’ the Brooklyn Bomb,” screamed one kid.

  “A hundred twenty-fifth and Lexington Ave. in the house,” yelled another one. “Behind the wheel of the Booty Shaker.”

  We were hyped to see it, and even started making bets on who’d win.

  The workers lined their carts up, and then the CO in charge of the mess hall blew his whistle. They took off screeching and hollering, like they were racing go-carts at some special summer camp for kids from the projects. But the two of them reached the far gate at almost the same time, and everybody watching argued for almost an hour over who’d won.

  The TV in the dayroom had a full house most of the day.

  There’s no cable in jail, and that’s good because the eight regular channels cause enough drama. Kids are forever arguing over what they’re going to watch, and sometimes they’ll even juggle for it. Some dudes will really want to see a program, but they’ll keep quiet about it. They hope someone else will do the fighting for them or that they’ll collect off some herb who wants to see the same show they do.

  Asking a dude what TV show he wants to watch in jail is like playing cards. You’ve got to be able to read his face and keep yours still.

  “Violence. Violence. Violence. That’s the kind of programs you all are addicted to,” lectured Ms. Armstrong. “Like you haven’t seen enough of it for real in your own lives.”

  Nobody argued back at her.

  Spanish dudes had their TV time, too. Luis represented them for Brick, and he wanted to keep his customers happy. So we watched the Spanish station on the UHF for a few hours. Black kids didn’t mind because all the shows on that station had a woman in a tight-fitting, low-cut dress.

  That was one language every dude in the house understood.

  After Ms. Armstrong got off duty, some kids even put a blanket over their laps, and got busy with a Susie. Almost anything that’s soft could be a Susie. Most kids get a new rubber glove from the house gang that cleans the floors and bathroom, and they put Vaseline inside it.

  Back in Mod-3 one time, a rookie CO pulled the night tour, and dudes thought she was really hot. After lights-out, the beds all started rocking and she didn’t know what was happening. Then kids started tossing their Susies up front where she sat in the Plexiglas bubble. When the steady officers found out about it the next morning, they burned the house from commissary for two weeks.

  When the COs in Sprung #3 put the phones out that night, I decided to call home. I talked to my grandma and my sisters during slot time, but Mom was visiting a neighbor in the apartment building across the street.

  During prime time, Jersey was watching the phones alone, and it was too easy.

  “You wanna have to sit on a toilet again?” I asked, as I strolled by him.

  He didn’t want to fight and I guess he was too embarrassed to call for Brick. I was talking to Mom when Brick’s other doldier, Barnett, saw me on the phone. He went over to Jersey and started grilling him.

  When I was finished, I walked right past those two clowns and into the dayroom.

  MONDAY, JUNE 8

  CHAPTER

  19

  Demarco was waiting in the hallway of the school trailer on Monday morning. He was tossing off kids’ first names again as we walked inside, and I was surprised when he called mine.

  “Good morning, Martin,” he said as I passed.

  He must have checked the ID cards in the box on Friday. That made me want to smile. But I didn’t, because I didn’t want to look weak in front of anybody there.

  Everyone went to their classes, and Demarco was pointing at me and Ritz.

  “This way, gentlemen,” he said.

  We were in his homeroom now, the GED class.

  If you prove you can read and write on the placement test, they put you in the GED room. Most kids wanted to be in there because you get more props from the teachers, and it’s less like a zoo than the rest of the rooms.

  Sanchez and Jersey were in Demarco’s class, too. And after my stunt during prime time, Brick had cut Jersey out of his crew the night before.

  “I’m in and that Jersey kid’s out,” Shaky had boasted to the whole north side before lights-out. “I told you I pulled my weight.”

  Dudes didn’t take him serious till he said it within earshot of Brick, who nodded his head.

  Demarco started his English class, and we read a story written by a man who’d been locked up for ten years. He wrote about what he would do if he had just one day of freedom: take his twelve-year-old daughter to the park. Then Demarco asked what we would do if Corrections let us go home for just one day. Some kids said they would see their families. Others wanted to be with their girls or homeboys.

  “I’d spend the day on my couch eating my grandmother ’s biscuits and gravy,” Jersey said fast, like it was a race. “In Newark, New Jersey—not New York.”

  It was the first time I’d ever heard Jersey say anything, besides his name that first night in the bathroom. I was surprised at how he sounded. His voice was high and he talked superquick. I had to replay everything he said in my head to slow it down so that I didn’t miss any of the words.

  “If I had one day off this island, I’d run off and nobody would ever find me again,” said Sanchez.

  “You can’t run away from the world,” Demarco told him.

  “It’s not the world I want to run away from,” Sanchez came back. “It’s jail!”

  Ritz talked about splitting the day in half and seeing his two girlfriends.

  “Both of them are pregnant,” Ritz said. “So I don’t want to choose one over the other.”

  Then dudes said if they ever found out that either girl was black, they’d kill him.

  I didn’t have a steady girl, and only Mom came to visit. So I said I’d take her someplace nice for dinner—that I wanted to pay the bill and bring her back and forth by cab, instead of the subway or bus.

  Right before Demarco’s class was over, there was fussing in the hall right outside the door. Kids ran over to the big plastic window to see what was happening.

  The COs had pulled some dude out of class and threw him on the wall. You could tell by the way they dragged him out that he must have really pissed them off.

  Demarco was already in the hallway talking to Miss Archer, the math teacher.

  Sanchez had told me all about her. She was a dime piece with straight brown hair, and she wore long skirts that showed off the curves of her hips.

  A kid from another room snuck over to ours, and he couldn’t stop laughing. He said the dude on the wall got caught jerking off to Miss Archer. And that he was really into it when she saw him and called for the COs.

  The classrooms are real small, and there’s only room for two rows of chairs. So he couldn’t have been more than ten feet away when she nailed him.

  Someone yelled, “Captain on deck!”

&
nbsp; Kids scrambled to get back in their seats, and everybody got silent.

  Captain Montenez walked into the trailer and just ripped into the dude. “You lowlife bastard!” he screamed. “You won’t be living in my Sprungs much longer!”

  By the time the COs were ready to send that dude back to the house to pack up, he was flat-out bawling.

  Captains wear white shirts to stand out from the COs, who dress in blue and report to them. I had seen Montenez operate in the building before. He always acted real cool in his captain’s duds, until he exploded on you. Montenez was tall and lean. He would wave his arms and scream at dudes until his shirt almost came out of his pants. Then he’d fix himself up and walk off like he owned the jail.

  The COs called the whole house into the hallway and we deuced it up.

  “Keep your dicks in your pants!” yelled Montenez. “If you masturbate in class, it’s a sexual assault on staff. That’s not just bing time. That’s a new charge. It means you get rearrested, right here on the Island.”

  Then he paced up and down the line looking for kids to crack a smile or suck their teeth, so he could run them out, too.

  The bing is the place they send you when you really fuck up. It’s like solitary, and you’re locked down twenty-three hours a day, with an hour outside for exercise. But they can’t just send you there. They have to write you up and serve you with the papers. Then the bing court captain hears your case, like a judge. It’s never fair because he could be good friends with the captain who wrote you up. They give you a chance to tell your side of it, too. But I never heard of an inmate beating his case. Once you’re there, you’re guilty. Plain and simple.

  We went back into the classroom, and Demarco came with us. It was Miss Archer’s time to rotate into our room and teach us math, but she was still in the hall with Montenez.

  “I don’t know what that dude was thinking,” some kid said. “She’s my girl.”

  A couple of us laughed low, and Demarco said, “Wait here, I’ll tell the captain she’s yours!”