When Dad's grandma ran out of money, she was forced to move in with Grandpa. Grandpa had rented her house to a hillbilly who stopped taking care of the place, and when Grandpa went to talk him-the man threatened Grandpa with a shotgun. When Dad and Uncle Ronnie found out about it, they went there at night and moved the outhouse back a few feet. They covered the hole with a piece of cardboard and kicked dirt on top of it to make it look like the ground. Then they started a fire behind it and tossed a couple stones at the house to get the man's attention. When the man saw the fire, he ran out and fell into the hole. Dad and Ronnie and a couple of cousins then pissed on the man, telling him that if he didn't move out, they'd kill him next time. I didn't know if they were serious, but Uncle Ronnie said the tenant moved out that very week.
We laughed as much our parents did when Uncle Ronnie repeated that story, but soon they chased us away. We were forced to sit around our own fires and think up our own capers. Sometimes, we laughed so hard at the idea that pulling off the prank wasn't as much fun. We loved it when we could make each other laugh, because in that moment, it meant someone was paying attention. For that fleeting instant, we knew we were loved.
7
Early Induction to an Inverted World
I was given a clean set of underwear, a pair of gray socks, dark green pants with a worn-out waistband, and a pullover shirt that had Wayne County Jail stenciled on back. I got through showering without incident-I didn't know how I thought I'd get an erection when I was so frightened-but then the size of my pants was about three sizes too big, which I wouldn't know until after I was told to walk into the next bullpen buck naked to put them on. When I entered the cell, the other inmates were already dressed and sitting on benches that ran along the sidewalls. I took an empty space on the left and got dressed quickly.
A parade of naked men followed me, each entering the bullpen with bedroll and clothing in hand-their private parts pivoting from side to side. By the time the cell was full, there were two or three dozen of us. Most of them were black, well muscled, in their twenties to early thirties. I felt smaller and skinnier, and paler than ever.
I tried not to be too obvious, but I couldn't help sneaking a look. To my young eyes, everyone's dick seemed enormous. These were grown men, and I couldn't imagine what they'd look like when sporting a boner. I had run out of nails to chew, and my right leg bounced nervously as I tried to distract my attention.
I thought about music and measure and the melody of a metronome. How calming its cadence could be. I thought about the black and white of a piano keyboard, and how I'd always wanted to play. For the first time, I got a glimpse of what it must have been like for a black man, who suddenly found himself in an all-white neighborhood. I thought about old Mayor Hubbard and how it was best not to mention where I was from.
There were three whites in the holding cell, not counting me, and over twenty or thirty blacks. The other whites were older than me, in their early twenties, and one of them looked like a biker. He was big and burly, with curly brown hair and a scraggly beard. He asked for a cigarette, and when I gave him one, he didn't even bother to say thanks. His manner was cold, and his eyes were mean, but when he stepped back from the bars and almost tripped over a black guy, he suddenly looked a lot less threatening.
"Hey! Watch where you're goin', you big ass redneck."
"Hey, fuck you," the biker shot back.
The black guy and two others jumped to their feet.
"Yeah? What are you gonna do about it?"
Two more blacks stood up.
"Yeah, honky. What are you gonna do?"
A flash of fear registered in the biker's eyes.
"Nothing" he said quickly, brandishing a pathetic smile.
The biker was missing teeth, which gave the impression he wasn't so meek, but he didn't stand a chance.
"All right then," the black guy said, slowly backing down. He looked over at one of the others. "Someone's got to teach these woods."
The biker took a seat on the floor, looking more like a defeated fat guy.
The other two whites looked away, disavowing any connection.
Wood was short for peckerwood. It was used like "nigger" or "coon," "porch monkeys" and "spooks"-except peckerwood was a word blacks called whites, along with honky and rednecks, crackers and ghosts. But on that side of the bars, only blacks spoke those words aloud. The jail was located in downtown Detroit, where the whites were highly outnumbered.
It felt like I'd walked inside a photographic negative, where all the values were reversed.
The bullpen was quiet.
An inmate at the back of the cell broke the silence.
"There was this fag in here once," he said. "Called herself Angela Davis."
"I knew her," another said, referring to her as naturally as if she were a woman.
"She sucked off the whole bullpen," he said.
"The whole bullpen," the con next to him said. "No shit?"
"Square business!" He nodded. "Went right around this cell. Must've blown a dozen guys."
"I remember that," another said. "She sucked a mean dick."
"She sure did. And then, when she was done . . ." he paused, holding everyone's attention. "The bitch dropped her drawers and wanted to get tucked!"
The others laughed, and shook their heads, saying things like, "Damn!" or "Shit! Can you believe that? You'd think one dick would be enough."
"Uh, uh." The guy shook his head. "That bitch loved to suck dick!"
"She sure did," the other said, rubbing his crotch. "And I sure could use her now."
To my right, the convicts who were standing at the front of the bullpen looked out at reception with their hands resting on the cross section of bars. It was dark inside our cell, and the deputies didn't seem interested in what went on in there.
I was glad I was dressed. My right leg continued to bounce.
When the heavy metal door of the cellblock slammed shut, a shudder went through my body. A sudden jolt of panic made me want to scream out to the guards, "I was just kidding! I wasn't really going to rob that Photomat. Could I please go home now?"
But it was too late. The guards were already gone.
It was ten o'clock by the time they moved me upstairs. I was placed in a cellblock with mostly white, nonviolent offenders. They no longer segregated by race, the deputy had told me, but they did try to separate first-time offenders. I was six foot two, but at a hundred and forty-eight pounds, I wasn't much more than skin and bones.
On some level, I was still half expecting my parents to show up and take me home-hoping I'd learned my lesson. That maybe this was all just part of a Scared Straight program that I had heard about, where they took teenagers inside a prison to frighten them away from crime. But the reality of my situation was as cold as the metal slab that would cradle me to sleep that night.
I started to cry, but quickly muffled it. I was certain that if the other inmates heard me, they'd see me for what I was-a sniffling coward who was pretending to be something he's not. Or worse, they would see for me for what I was.
"Never!" My brother Rick smacked me on the chin the night before. "Never, let them know what you're thinking."
I could still almost smell the tobacco on his finger, from when he shook it in my face. He was imitating Marlon Brando in The Godfather. We shared a love of gangster films, but in that moment, I was alone in my cell, and the wall of my emotional front was about as thin as the cheap mattress that was folded over my bunk.
Inside the cell, a steel toilet and sink were attached to the back wall. Smoke rings burned on the ceiling spelled out the words Fuck and You and Hell and Here. Simon, '77 was scratched on the sidewall. It reeked of bleach and ammonia, piss and damp cigarettes. And, like the bullpens downstairs, there wasn't any toilet paper in sight.
By the time we got upstairs, we had missed dinner, so it would be morning before I'd eat again. I was hungry, but the pang of anxiety quickly took over. For the first time in over twelve hour
s, I was alone. I could finally drop the tough guy, this-doesn't-faze-me, I've-been-through-it-all-before act. It probably wasn't working anyway, but I had to keep it up. Ricky had been coaching me for weeks. My God! What'sgoing to happen to me?
I unfolded the mattress across the steel frame and wrapped the sheet around it. They didn't have pillows in the county jail, so I folded the end of the pad under itself to prop my head. I'd rather my feet dangle on cold metal than sleep with my head lying flat.
I stared up at the ceiling and tried to imagine how someone had scorched the letters that formed each word. It would have taken too many matches. Perhaps they burned their sheets?
I lit a cigarette with my last match and thought about my brother. I wondered what he was doing and whether he missed me.
The lights went out with a buzz and a thump. The light from the catwalk cast shadows in my cell. The silhouette of bars, pitched on angles, crisscrossed the walls.
The next morning, the lights came back on with the same buzz and thump that accompanied darkness. I hadn't slept well, tossing and turning on the slab, my head full of visions of street fights and gladiators, drag queens and bikers. It felt like I'd just fallen asleep.
I lay awake for several minutes, wondering if I'd be transferred to Jackson today. An old timer, down in the bullpen, had mentioned the economy and prisons and a shortage of beds. I drifted back to sleep, but the sound of the door to my cell sliding open and scuffling feet woke me up. I looked out and saw several inmates running past my cell.
I jumped up to look out.
Inmates at the end of the cellblock were grabbing milk, juice, and small wax paper bags from the cross-section of the bars. Breakfast consisted of three whitepowdered donuts, a half pint of milk and a four-ounce container of orange juice. I walked down to get it, but when I got there, there was only a carton of milk left.
"You snooze-You lose," a white inmate said. He was holding an orange juice and milk, but someone had taken his bag as well. "You gotta get here quick or some motherfucker steals your donuts, man."
I took the milk from the bars and looked to see if I could spot a deputy through the small opening in the outer door.
"Don't even bother to call the deps, Little Bro." He walked hack toward his cell, "They really don't give a fuck."
I was hungry. I hadn't eaten since the steak dinner my brother bought me two days earlier. The next morning, when the light came on, I was up and ready for the mad breakfast derby. When the deputies pulled the brake, like a horse bolting from the starting gate, I was off and running to get my three powdered rings from the cross-section of the finishing line. Win, Place, or Show, I was sure to get mine. But this time, when I arrived at the front of the line, the same white guy from the day before, was there to greet me. As I took my share, I watched him snatch two bags of donuts and stuff then into his underwear, grab a third in his hand and quickly pull his shirt down to hide it.
He shot me a look that said, don't you dare say a fucking word.
As I walked hack toward my cell, I overheard him telling the new fish behind me, "You snooze-you lose, Little Brother. But don't even bother to tell the deputies. They really don't give a fuck."
8
The Big Blue Wagon Ride
The Detroit Free Press was delivered in the morning, The Detroit News in the afternoon. I once won a sales contest by delivering the paper as early as anyone wanted it. I converted several News customers to Free Press accounts by delivering before 6:00 A.M. The papers were ready as early as 3:00, but I preferred getting them at 4:00. That way, I could be back in bed by 5:30 to catch an extra hour of sleep before school. Even in the summer, I was up and out before dawn. I loved how peaceful it was, being alone on the street, with the solitary sound of my rusty red wagon's rickety wheels.
"Does anyone have a cigarette?" I yelled through the screen of the hippies' home. They were early on my route and often still up when I got there by 4:15.
"Who's that?" one of them asked.
"It's the paperboy!" a guy yelled from the couch.
From the porch, I watched as he passed a joint to the gal sitting on his lap. She was in cut-off jeans, with filthy feet, and her long brown hair looked as scattered as her speech.
"How cute," she stammered, handing the joint toward me. "Do ya wanna hit, toke smoke off of this?"
Her name was Crystal, but she sometimes answered to Joy.
"Na," I said. "But I'll take a cigarette."
Her eyes looked red and watery.
Zingy, the guy who let me in, must have used the same barber.
I was about to turn fourteen, and like most kids in my neighborhood, I had started smoking that year. I didn't like it at first, but we all thought it was cool to smoke Kools. The hippies were always good for a cigarette, or a beer, and if I wanted it, pot, but it made me feel stupid and fearful, so I stuck to the smokes and an occasional brew.
Pretty soon, the hippies' home became a regular hangout for me.
An aging poster of Jimi Hendrix hung on the wall above a large stack of albums. A beat-up sofa, a beanbag chair, a few overstuffed pillows, and three dead houseplants completed the living room. An uneven beaded curtain hung from the doorway that led to the kitchen. The quadraphonic stereo was their only decent possession. They said things like shedding the shackles of social conformity and ridding the mind of material illusions. The house reeked of patchouli incense that camouflaged the smell of marijuana.
I loved having older friends, and even better, it made some of the younger ones jealous. My brother was away in the military, and they somehow made missing him easier-even when they ragged on me about the Vietnam War. It didn't seem to matter that my brother was in Texas, or that the war had ended earlier that year.
The hippies were good tippers too-that is, when they paid their bill. Each week when it came time to collect, they'd pass a hat and fill it with coins, cigarettes, and joints. I gave the pot to my friends, keeping the cigarettes for myself. Most of the time, there wasn't enough change to cover the cost of the paper, but since I never saw anyone reading it, I figured it was a fair trade. I enjoyed their company and with the cost of cigarettes and beer I came out ahead, especially when my other friends and I needed someone to "buy." The drinking age in Michigan was eighteen.
Every third or fourth morning, I'd find the hippies had crashed, and the house lay quiet. Bodies were strewn on the sofa, sprawled on the floor, and sometimes even in the hall. One time, when I went to use the bathroom, there was someone sleeping in the tub. On these occasions, I'd just step over the bodies, grab a beer from the fridge, a cigarette from the table, and toss the paper onto a chair.
It was on one such morning that I discovered my first addiction-stealing cars. There, next to the cigarettes, an overflowing ashtray, and a baggy of green and white pills, lay a set of car keys. Out the kitchen window, their rusty blue station wagon sat tempting me in the drive. It was a 1968 powder blue, Ford LTD station wagon.
Well, if I'm old enough to smoke and old enough to drink, then why shouldn't I be able to drive? I stared at the keys and the bag of drugs on the table. "One pill makes you larger," Ziggy would say, quoting Jefferson Airplane. I'd have it back before they'd wake up and they'd never know it was gone. And besides, I'd probably have my papers delivered in half the time.
I grabbed the canvas sack from my little red wagon and tossed it onto the passenger seat of the Blue. I didn't want to risk waking them with the sound of the starting engine or the muffler that needed replacing, so like my Dad and Uncle's prank of years before, where they pushed all those cars down their driveways, I slipped the transmission into neutral and gave it a shove. I was wrong about the time it took to deliver my papers. I was done in a third of the time. I could have finished sooner, except that I pulled into each driveway along my route, tossing the paper onto the porch or lawn. It was riskier doing it that way, but since everyone was asleep-no one was the wiser.
Instead of returning the car back when I had finished, I drove
around awhile enjoying my newfound freedom. Driving came easily to me. I'd been driving a mini-bike since I was eleven, and now driving a car was way too much fun to have to wait two or three more years till I was old enough for Driver's Ed. Down with the established order!
My sister was in summer school, so I decided to go home and pick her up. "Do you want a ride to school?" I asked, beaming. She hated taking the bus, especially on hot humid mornings, but she struggled to comprehend what I was saying.
"It belongs to the hippies," I said. "They're letting me borrow it."
It was sort of true, I thought. I was just borrowing it, and considering the way they were all passed out, they were in a sense letting me.
It was 7:30 in the morning, and they often slept till noon, but since I wasn't sure when they had crashed, I figured I had until about nine o'clock. Connie didn't have to be at school until 8:30, so we picked up her girlfriends along the way. They were fifteen, and I wished it wasn't so early, so that my friends could see me driving around with three older girls.
We were on the other side of town when I realized how much gas we'd used. I wanted to make sure there was enough in the tank so they wouldn't know I had taken it. But when I pulled into the gas station, I misjudged the right front corner of the car and the bumper caught the edge of the pump. It collapsed rather easily. Too easily, and when I put the car in reverse to back up, I stepped on the gas too hard, squealing the tires, and hit a pick-up truck behind me. Inside the wagon, the girls were screaming so loud, I couldn't hear the screeching and grinding of the ignition as I tried to re-start the engine, even though it was already running. Everyone at the station had stopped, as if frozen in place, and stared at us. I slammed the transmission into park and leapt from the car.
Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in Man's Prison Page 4
