Longer you’re in jail, the more you realize ain’t nothing happening. Just the same ole foolishness every day. Junkies trying to get over, wolves chasing pussy, punks shaking they ass, gorillas beating on people, the guards writing people up cause the guards is mean and ain’t got nothing better to do. See, it’s all just games. People playing the same ole jive games and after a while you just get sick of it. You seen it all before so you start to backing away. Don’t want to be round nobody.
That’s about where I’m at. Like a hermit most the time. Do my job at the hospital then I want to get back to my cell. Got my schoolwork. Got my own thoughts to think. Guys say, Hey, Faruq. Where you been, man? Ain’t seen you for days. But I don’t want none of it. Naw, man. Everything’s cool. You go on without me, man. I seen it all too many times before. Same bullshit. Same lies. Same games these fools be running on one another. It don’t have nothing to do wit me no more. This ain’t gon sound right but I’m telling you anyway. When I can be alone, the loneliness ain’t so bad.
Your brother’s becoming a hermit. Me. The one they used to call Peter Pan the Fun Time Man cause I said I ain’t never growing up. Just party, party all the time.
Younger guys think something’s wrong wit me now. They don’t understand. I try to explain but it ain’t no use. They got to find out for theyselves. Like I did. Mommy always said a hard head makes for a soft behind. But I had to find out on my own. Most the young guys in here never will get hip. They get hooked up in the games and they gone. They lost and don’t know it. When I first came in here 1 seen guys into a hermit bag. Some the older dudes been here a long time. I couldn’t understand it, neither. But now I do.
Me and Cecil still right. He’s a Muslim now. Ghafoor’s his new name. Ghafoor’s still my man. And I still got the Juma. That’s our church. Ain’t active as I once was. Warden called it sending away troublemakers, but what he really be doing was breaking up the Muslims. Mike’s gone and a lot of the other brothers from our group. New guys from the other end. That’s what we call Philly, the other end, brothers from Graterford and Huntingdon they kinda took over the Sunni Juma. It’s different now. To me they trying to be what Arabs was fourteen hundred years ago. Being a Arab’s not what I want to be. They too heavy on rules and regulations, the little nickel-dime shit that don’t really mean nothing. We got enough rules and regulations. Don’t need no brothers acting like they guards, telling me what to do. You wouldn’t believe how silly it can get. Like you on trial again. Is you smoking, Brother Faruq? How many times you pray last week, brother? People hung up on the rules. They stagnant to the point where they won’t change no more.
So I’m backed off the Muslim thing too. Least the organized part of it. Meetings and do. I still pray. Get strength from my prayers. I’ll always pray.
Seems to me every religion does the same thing. They all got a bunch of rules to put people in line and then when they got em in line they take advantage. I can’t buy that and that’s the way they all seem to work. Muslim ain’t no exception. But I learned to pray as a Muslim. So I’ll keep on doing it that way. Need my prayers.
Ima get that schedule written up. Most my time away from my cell is in the hospital. My schedule’s kind of different from most people’s behind me working there. I like my job. Get to be around the nurses, for one thing. You know I dig that. Being around anybody who ain’t locked up is a real pleasure, don’t care who it is. It’s nice too cause in the hospital ain’t no guards in my face all day. Sometimes I carry the meals up to the hospital so I can eat in there too. Food ain’t no different but it sure do taste better when you ain’t sitting with them nuts in the mess hall.
Superstar nuts is in the hospital. Administration calls it a hospital but part of what it is is a mental ward. We call it Fairview West. Fairview’s the state hospital where they send certified crazies, so somebody named our little unit Fairview West. They call it the Bug Center too. That’s what most the men call it. The Bug Center. Everybody in here’s a little bit crazy, including your brother, but they keep the real radical nuts in the hospital.
You ask the administration, they’ll tell you ain’t no psychiatric ward. Don’t need no psychiatric ward cause ain’t no psychos in West Pen, right? Psychos get tested out the population. But I know better. I’m in the hospital every day taking care of the nuts.
You got to go through two locked doors to get in. Everything’s metal in the nut ward so the nuts can’t tear it up. Iron beds, iron toilets. Five beds in there. Ain’t but about two feet apart. Don’t really matter cause the patients is handcuffed and shackled and chained to they beds at night. Daytime too, if they need it. They ain’t hardly going nowhere. Bars and locks on both doors, like I said. Nurses be complaining anyway. They scared. Ain’t no guards stationed in the hospital. Being a guard is part of my job. I got to keep the nuts in line. Nurses depend on me. That’s why we tight. There’s a story bout this dude got paroled cause he saved one the nurses when a nut attacked her. I’ll look at one real hard sometimes when a nurse is working the ward and I’ll be thinking, Why don’t you grab her, sucker? Just grab her a little bit so she screams and I can knock you out and get my ticket out of here.
See, ain’t no guards cause the administration claims ain’t no psychiatric ward. Don’t need guards if ain’t no dangerous crazies. Matter of fact, most the dudes come in ain’t really that dangerous. Weird, stone crazy, but most them just pitiful. They need help. I mean, one cat he start to jack off every time a nurse passes. Pull out his Johnson and wave it around and talk nasty. Another one a nigger hater. Cuss you like a dog. Black this and nigger that. Spit at you when you trying to do for him. Felt like busting his chops many a time but you get used to the way they be acting. They can’t help it. It’s pitiful, really, cause they be needing help and ain’t nothing nobody round here can do for them. Just keep em chained up like animals in that funky ward.
Nurses won’t go in less they have to. Then it’s only wit me or one the other dudes works in the hospital. The main ward’s one big room holds thirty beds, then there’s a separate ward for women and one for the nuts. Nurses got enough to do anyway so most the time it’s just a question of medication, pumping Thorazine in the crazies to keep em quiet. When they been quiet a day or so, you turn em loose back in the population. That’s how it goes.
Doctor visits every day and writes up prescriptions and checks out the patients but he ain’t no psychiatrist. What surprised me most when I first started working in the hospital was how many guys wind up in the Bug Center. Different dudes every day. The turnover’s something else. Might be ten, fifteen different inmates through there in a week. Stay a couple days then another one’s in the bed. All five beds is always filled. People rotating in and rotating out. It’s a damn circus. We got our regulars turn up every month or so. How do you do. Welcome back and all that. But new ones too. Goes to show you how many dudes in the joint ain’t wrapped too tight. Cause like I said, it’s only the radical nuts get sent to the Bug Center. And one gets transferred just about every day.
You see what I’m getting at. A good percentage of the population rolls through there but the administration keeps on saying ain’t no crazies nor crazy ward so nobody gets no treatment, no help. It’s a crying shame.
This one young white dude they jerked off the range. From New Kensington. Only been in a week or two. A nice-looking, clean-cut dude. He didn’t even know he was in jail. He been into something but it wasn’t just a matter of being high. This dude was stone out his mind. Screaming and crying and carrying on. Begging people not to hurt him. He thought monsters was after him. Kept screaming monsters was after him. Gon eat him up. Monsters and God. God was hooked up in it too. Dude as scared of God as he was of them monsters. Didn’t know whether he was in jail or hell or walking down the street in New Kensington.
Wasn’t nothing we could do wit him. He fought us. Flailing around. Kicking, biting, gagging. Eyes popping out of his head. Help me. Help me. Then you try and help, and the cat has a fi
t. There’s these cloth bands, like bracelets, you know. You slip them over a person’s wrists so when the handcuffs go on, his skin don’t get tore up. Well, I’m trying to slide em on and the dude’s pleading wit me stop, stop, and screaming help all at the same time. Doing my best to help the dude but he’s too wild. Couldn’t get close without getting hurt. Had to pin him down and knock him out cold before we could get him settled.
Now you know somebody hurting like that needs professional help. What’s he gon think waking up chained to a bed in a room with four other dudes chained down who subject to do anything or say anything? Most the time they be so doped up they don’t pay one another no mind. But you might get a evil one. A troublemaker. One that teases the others. The smart kind that sees what’s making another one crazy and he gets off on torturing and teasing people. Like here come them green monsters, white boy. Here they come and they sure look hungry, and shit like that.
Most of em ain’t gon try and kill you or nothing like that but then again some of em is stone crazy. Don’t know what they doing. They can hurt they selves or hurt you, you ain’t careful. Puts me in the position of being a guard. Have to get physical sometimes. No choice. That’s why I’m here. Keep the nuts in line. Do the dirty work. Protect the nurses. Gets wild sometimes. Stone snake pit. Don’t like to do some the things I got to do, but ain’t no other way to handle them. They ain’t getting no professional help, so we try and do the best we can.
Quiet most the time, though. Dudes is so drugged up they be sleeping they lives away. Gallons of Thorazine. Shoot em up. No problems.
One thing I’ve noticed since I been working in the hospital. Now I ain’t no expert on nuts or nothing but being around them all the time I gets to talk wit em when they ain’t nodding. Just like normal people once they calmed down except most the guys come in the Bug Center got more intelligence than the average person. Anyway, when we be rapping, sooner or later God comes up. The Bible or God or Jesus always hooked up with madness. God be punishing or chasing or talking to these guys. God or Jesus. Jesus told me set my mattress on fire. Jesus told me throw shit on the guard. It’s like religion is the thing drives men crazy. Religion’s hooked up in it one way or another.
Faces change but the beds always be full. One comes and another goes. Probably be my turn one day. Whole lotta guys a little off in the head before they get socked in jail but it’s this place too. I mean plenty people just can’t take it. If they wasn’t crazy when they come through the gate, the joint drives them crazy. It’s the same thing happens with a lot of guys who fuck up one way or another in the world. You know. Get theyselves jammed up and wind up doing a light bit. They ain’t real crooks. Neophytes. You know what I mean. Got caught in the cookie jar so to speak. Ain’t into no life of crime or nothing like that. Just ordinary dumb dudes tried to get away with something and got caught. Well, this is the place of knowledge. By the time a dude gets out of here, most likely he’s a stone criminal. Or thinks he is. They got professors and Ph.D.’s in crime giving crime lessons in here. What else dudes got to talk about besides crime? You learn how to go for the big time. Fuck robbing some two-bit gas station, ain’t but thirty dollars in the cash register, or breaking into some nigger’s house poor as you is. That’s for chumps. And you get put away for that bullshit same as they jam you up for robbing a bank. So why not hit Mellon Bank? Or Pittsburgh First National? Or Fort Knox if you got the heart and the smarts? Dig? What I’m saying is a dude comes out the joint worser off than he was when he came in. And it’s spozed to be that way, far as I can tell. They saves you a place in the chow line cause they know you’re coming back.
What time you have, Bro? Ain’t told you nothing about running yet. Must be close to three hours, ain’t it? Seems like we just started talking a minute ago. Wall clock says 1:50. I hate even looking at that damn thing. One-fifty is right, though, ain’t it? Leaves us fifteen minutes if they give us a whole visit. You can be sure they won’t stretch it. Not by a minute. Might cut it short a hour but you don’t never get no extra minute.
I remember when it got near time for Tanya to leave. Somewhere inside my chest I was counting every second. Ticking them off one by one. Got so I knew exactly how long we had left. Didn’t need to look at no clock. I’d push the clock out my mind. Course, it didn’t really go away. Hands kept turning. I knew it was running down, knew it was getting closer and closer to the time for her to go. I played like if I kept my eyes off the clock it would slow down. Like I could be with Tanya another hour and the hand would only move a minute, if I didn’t look at it. Like maybe she could be wit me forever if I didn’t look. But I always did. I’m telling you, Bro. You gets crazy in here if you ain’t careful.
* * *
Robby’s silent. Twelve minutes or fifteen or seventeen left. Depends on whose clock counts. My watch has a blue face. The date is displayed in a slot to the right of center. Sixty dashes fence the perimeter of the face. If I observe long enough the minute hand’s slow progress will register as it slips from one dash to the next.
No numerals circle the watch face. Inside the fence of dashes a second ring of twelve broader, longer strokes designate the hour. Twelve o’clock is a triangle instead of a slash, the window for the date is three; six, and nine o’clock are marked by slightly fatter dashes. The watch was manufactured by Seiko; it’s “Automatic,” contains “17 Jewels”—that official information lettered in white within the smallest circle defined by the outer rings. A second hand sweeps the blue face. Its greenish tip, luminous in the dark, orbits once, then again. Starts a third trip before I realize how long I’ve been staring in silence at the clock on my wrist.
I’ve learned to expect these silences that punctuate the talks with my brother in the prison visiting room. At first they made me uneasy. Were they a sign that we didn’t have as much to say to one another as we’d thought? Would one of these pauses be the beginning of a long, embarrassing silence neither of us would be able to break? The time for visiting was so short. I felt compelled to use it, fill every second. My mind would race looking for a thread, a natural, easy way to resume the flow of talk. In the classroom when I was teaching, these kinds of pauses made me extremely uncomfortable. Had I run out of pertinent information? Had I been unmasked? Could the students see the naked emperor?
Silences troubled me—where was Robby, what was he thinking, why didn’t he say something, why didn’t I—until I learned to accept the quiet interludes as breathing spaces, necessary reminders of the medium—time—in which we were working. Because when we talked, we did lose track of time. And time was all we had. Time ticked or circled or dryly extinguished itself. Time was the sound of one hand clapping, a moving stillness, a roaring silence always there beneath our voices. When we stopped talking we heard it. We needed to hear it, although it contained no message except the infinite, irreducible hum of its presence.
I learned to anticipate the silences and learned to take my measure, the measure of what my brother and I were attempting to do in the few hours allotted to us in the visiting room. The silence was a reminder of limits. Mine. His. The people we had been, the likelihood or unlikelihood of our ever changing. The silence defined our mortality. Our soft individual pasts, our memories and dreams slowly taking shape, making sense, if they ever do, because they must and will form and reform within the iron silence of time.
In the quiet that swallows even the babel of the visitors’ lounge I think of cages, of steel bars and locks and keys, of the thin human skin impermeable as the granite blocks of the prison wall. Against the silence I recall a world I long for in my best moments, in my freest moments, when I go about my business as if walls and limits didn’t exist.
I breathe deeply. Raise my eyes from my watch to my brother’s face. Robby is not waiting for me to start talking. He’s not searching his mind for something to say. Silence does not stretch between us, separating us. It joins us. A common ground, a shared realization that for the moment we’ve come as far as we can, said what we ha
ve to say and maybe . . . maybe there will be more, but there’s nothing to say now . . . just wait now for what may . . . what must come next. . . .
* * *
Mize well get back to the running, man. Mize well start telling you about it. Got a few minutes till the man’s gon grab my ass out here so mize well get it on. . . .
POSTSCRIPT
Omar, Robby’s son, made his first visit to the prison, then another; and it seems as if both Robby and Omar are beginning to understand how much they need each other, what they can do for each other. Father and son. Man to man. Geraldine, Omar’s mother, understands also and she is generous and willing again to bring father and son together. That’s the good news. Or part of it. Also, Robby completed his degree program and was the main speaker at a graduation ceremony in the prison, a special affair at which the graduates wore caps and gowns, and guests from the outside were allowed to attend. Mom says Robby was eloquent. I knew he’d be. Had the people clapping, rocking in their seats. Like a preacher, she said. And what kept going through her mind over and over as she listened was the phrase, A mind is a terrible thing to waste. She was torn by a thousand different emotions, conflicting, overwhelming emotions she didn’t have time or space to sort out; but the swelling current of her son’s voice, the sound of what she’d always known was inside him, suddenly, brilliantly flowing forth, made her think A mind is a terrible thing to waste. That phrase, riffing and twisting counterpoint through the words of Robby’s graduation address, helped name what she was feeling.
Brothers and Keepers Page 30
