“Eh, they’re all the same to me.”
“Not to me.” He turned again to Vance. “Hey, next time you decide to take out some aggression, do it on a fucking K-car, huh? Do it on a Ford Escort, not a mint Bel Air, you dumb shit.”
“Sorry.”
He wasn’t sorry—in fact, he felt very good about how the whole thing had gone and knew he would relish the memory of his father’s bloody face looking up at him in terrified awe for years to come, probably forever. His feeling of self-satisfaction dwindled a bit, however, as the squad car pulled up in front of a hulking, gray institutional building. QUEENS CRIMINAL COURT AND CENTRAL BOOKING read the words embedded in the stonework by the front door, through which he was roughly escorted.
It occurred to him, at that moment, that he hadn’t entirely thought through the consequences of his actions. He’d dimly known he was risking arrest and hadn’t cared; that consideration had been dwarfed by the furious Goliath striding beside him. Now, as he was photographed and fingerprinted, the fury had absented itself and was replaced by fear and a large dose of regret. Not regret for destroying the car—he would never regret that. He regretted not running away from the scene of the crime when he could have. It had seemed important at the time to pry out the dashboard. As the enormity of his situation dawned on him, he also began to regret not thrashing his father with the pipe, really getting his money’s worth.
His possessions were inventoried and baggied, and he was led into a holding cell, half full of the kinds of people you would expect to find in a New York City holding cell. Some obviously homeless, some probably homeless, some possible gang members, some random teenagers, most drunk and/or high on something. A couple of confused, normal-looking types that were probably DUI charges. A few of them looked up and registered the new arrival, but most didn’t. He found a spot by himself in the far-right corner.
Sporadic conversations erupted in the silence, often in languages or patois or tones of voice that Vance couldn’t understand. A man catty-corner to him—dreadlocked, with pitted scars on his face and eyes like smoked glass—was the most animated, periodically railing about the police, his lying bitch of a girlfriend, the condition of the cell, his mother’s cooking. He was also clearly the most fucked up, and Vance willed the man not to notice him, arms between his knees, trembling in the corner. His fear, of course, attracted the man’s attention in short order.
“And this one over here,” he shouted to no one. “What are you in for, robbing a library?” A few cackles rang out, spurring him on. “They’re gonna eat your skinny ass up in Rikers. Probably cut you into three pieces, have you for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You hear me? I’m talking to you, scarecrow motherfucker.”
Vance remained silent, head down, but his deference seemed to enrage the man. He bounded out of his seat toward Vance, fist cocked. Vance threw his hands up in an involuntary motion, and the man stopped.
“Damn,” he said. “All right, all right.”
Vance didn’t understand, then he looked at his hands. He hadn’t noticed them since being arrested. They were swollen, like miniature boxing gloves, covered in dried and half-dried blood risen from a cross-hatching of small cuts and abrasions. It was the piece of rebar, he realized, from unloading on the car. His grisly hands throbbed in front of him, and the man nodded with an air of respect. He reclaimed his spot on the bench, where he grew mostly silent, occasionally muttering to himself, his chin down against his chest, as if he was speaking to something in the middle of his person.
After eighteen hours—a thousand or so minutes spent dozing in the cold corner, jerking awake in terror, then drowsing painfully back into tortured nonsleep—Vance’s name was called. He was led down many halls into a cold courtroom, where he sat with some of the other men with whom he’d shared the cell. He was asked if he wanted a court-appointed attorney and he said yes. A frazzled bald man in an ill-fitting suit, clutching a clipboard like an aegis, talked to him for thirty seconds and advised him to plead not guilty. It was another two hours before the judge—a small woman with a much-more-frightening demeanor than the man in the holding cell—called his name. After watching dozens of men called before him, he knew where to stand.
“Is your name Vance Joseph Allerby?”
The experience of standing in a courtroom, in handcuffs, being asked these questions by a judge wearing a big black robe was wholly unreal. He’d only ever seen the inside of a court, and this kind of proceeding, on television and in movies; the cognitive dissonance that this could really be happening to him was so intense it made him feel distant and faint, although that may have been the nearly twenty-four hours he’d gone without food.
“Yes,” he croaked out.
“Mr. Allerby, you’re being charged with three counts of disturbing the peace, criminal mischief, and felony destruction of property. Mr. Carney,” she turned to the public defender at Vance’s side, “how does your client plead?”
“Not guilty, Your Honor.”
“Bail is set at ten thousand dollars.”
The bailiff wordlessly led him to an area with pay phones. He stood dumb in front of it. The situation both magnified and particularized his panicked sense of utter disorientation and helplessness. The majority of his fellow prisoners conducted themselves with the confidence and lazy efficiency of men at a job they’d held for years, decades. There was a lot of familiar banter between the jailed and jailers, and if you took the guns and uniforms away from the guards, it would have been difficult to tell the difference. The guard behind him sighed and motioned vigorously at the phone. Not knowing what else to do, Vance picked it up.
“Operator,” said a female voice he was surprised to hear.
“I, uh. Hello?”
“Yes, operator,” the woman said again, unmistakable irritation pulsing through the distance and static.
“I. Um, can I place a collect call?”
“Number?”
What was his mother’s cell number? He didn’t know. He didn’t know any numbers offhand besides the old house line that he’d had to memorize as a child, so he told her that one. The line rang—miraculously, it seemed to be working. He imagined the phone, sitting on the floor by the old hutch in the living room, half buried under an avalanche of magazines. After six rings the line clicked off. He desperately attempted to remember another number, any number, but the guard was already yelling at him to put the receiver down and move on.
He was led with a group of men into another holding cell, this one without a clock on the wall. Some very long amount of time later, the door opened, and everyone in the room was put in two lines. Two guards holding guns watched as a third went down the line and shackled each man to the one next to him with handcuffs, hand and foot. He was cuffed to a small Mexican with gelled hair and delicate, pretty features. The man was nearly a foot shorter than Vance, and as they were marched down the hall, he had to hunch and walk with tiny, mincing steps to avoid jerking the man off the ground like a doll. Several times, in spite of trying not to, he yanked the little man’s ankle and wrist, which elicited a muttered torrent of Spanish invective—he understood pinche and culo, but he didn’t know what joto meant.
They shuffled outside, into the gray afternoon, where a bus waited for them in a parking lot surrounded by a fence topped with coiled barbed wire. Vance and the little man instinctively turned toward each other and edged up sideways, one foot at a time, successfully boarding the bus. They maintained this close posture—like old dance partners preparing to clasp or spring apart into synchronized ballet leaps—all the way to an empty seat. The wordless cooperation lasted until Vance was situated on the plastic bench and began to weep. His seatmate made a puffing sound and averted his gaze, staring out the window in disgust.
———
A swell of conversational volume on the bus roused Vance just in time for him to read the white sign they passed at the intersection. RIKERS ISLAND, with subscript that announced, oddly, HOME OF NEW YORK’S BOLDEST. He hadn’t
believed they’d really be going to Rikers Island, a place he’d heard used solely as a byword for terrifying and inhumane incarceration. The bus bounced over a grooved metal seam and up onto a long bridge. Gray water crashed against the retaining walls on either side. Gradually, the indistinct shape in the distance resolved itself as a cluster of parking lots, gray buildings, guard towers, all surrounded by and topped with the ever-present whorl of razor wire.
They were taken off the bus and led into the main building, unlocked from each other, and ushered single file into one of the large central cells just past the guard station. This cell was bigger than the last, but there were also more men. On the edge of the room sat a toilet that looked as though it had literally never been cleaned. It was streaked with shit and clogged in useless protest with rotting food that writhed with maggots. He swallowed the vomit that rose in his esophagus and sat against the wall on the filthy floor, careful to keep his bloody hands on full display.
Most of the men slumped exhausted on the wooden benches or on the floor. The ones who didn’t were in the grip of some kind of drug withdrawal—fetal, vomiting—or in the grip of some kind of drug, scratching, pacing in tight, hostile circles. After an hour or so, a guard brought in a plastic bin filled with trays of food. The smell may have been unappealing on its own, but here it was a rare perfume that temporarily masked the stench of shit and piss and BO. Vance waited until most of the men had grabbed a tray, then took one and ate. He would previously have considered the beef stew completely—definitionally—inedible, but as he swallowed the mush and gristle, he considered how flexible a word “inedible” really was. Almost anything was edible, given lack of options. The trick was not chewing.
The stew was seawater salty, but they were given no water. Many more hours later, several guards came in and escorted the prisoners out of the intake cell into a large tiled room, where they were told to undress. The showers were turned on, spumes of freezing water that rapidly warmed up to just regular cold. Despite the temperature, Vance stood under a showerhead and drank the water, choosing not to care or think about the condition of the pipes and spigot it was traveling through. Most of the men had the same idea—although the most drugged out or drug sick hunched hydrophobic in the corners—but unlike Vance, they cupped the water in their hands to drink it. He kept his hands away from the water as best as he could, desperate for them to remain bloody.
They were strip-searched, given ill-fitting orange DOC clown pants and tunics to put on, and divided into several groups—housing units A, B, C, and D. Vance was D. An older guard with a feathery blond mustache, who looked like a gym teacher, led them to an interzone between buildings, toward what looked like an airplane hangar with a giant D on the side. They moved past a guard station to a chained-off area inside the building, where they were again searched and then gave their names to another guard carrying a clipboard. Vance’s name was checked off the list, and he was ushered through a door, into the jail area proper.
It was a two-level building with a large common area on the lower level, which mostly seemed to be used for clustering in suspicious groups, wandering around in menacing circles, or doing push-ups, or just shouting incoherently. There was one main staircase, lined with green railings; from both sides muscular, shirtless men did implausible numbers of pull-ups, dangling for minutes at a time like overripe fruit. The second floor was invisible from the first. Vance asked the blond guard which cell was his—the guard laughed and said in a passable British accent, “We have you in room fifteen, sir. When would you like your supper to be served?”
At the far side of the common area, there were two telephones. Vance moved hesitantly toward them, but there was a long line against the wall. Two men toward the rear got into a minor scuffle over who had gotten there first. Lacking any better plan, Vance climbed the stairs to the second floor. At first glance, it seemed preferable, in that less of the population was upstairs, and the overall volume level was much lower. On the other hand, the still silence of the prisoners here, lolling half hidden in their cells, somehow conveyed more menace than the yelling and carrying on downstairs. Individual voices coalesced into a soft, generalized moan, a murmur that expanded and contracted like breathing. Vance walked around the large circle until he found a cell that only had one man in it, a small white man in a knit cap, taking careful notes in the margin of a book.
Vance said, “Can I stay here?”
Without looking up, the man said, “You set foot in here, I’ll kill you.”
Farther around the block, he found a room housing a man who seemed terribly ill, gibbering and sweating on a stained gray cot. Though the concrete floor was spattered with yellow bile, which probably explained the absence of other cellmates, Vance entered and lay down, and immediately fell asleep.
———
The next day, late in the evening, he got to use the phone. His roommate, Danny, a friendly young junkie from Staten Island, explained the process to him between bouts of dry heaving into (also at, around, and near) the disgusting stainless-steel toilet. You could make two phone calls a day, provided the phones were available. You charged the calls to your commissary account. When Vance told him he didn’t have a commissary account, Danny frowned with worry, a troubling look to be receiving from a guy with crusted vomit all over the front of his shirt.
“No one knows you’re in here?”
“Not yet. That’s why I need to make the calls.”
“Oh, man. Okay, wow.”
Whimpering with sickness, lying on his side with his arms crossing his stomach, Danny told him to just use his account. His parents put money in it, he said, it wasn’t even his money, he didn’t deserve it. He repeated the eight-digit code several times.
“Thanks,” said Vance. “Can I get you something?”
“Nah. I just gotta wait this thing out, nothing else for it. Hey, buy yourself a candy bar or something, too.”
Vance made his way downstairs and took a place in the line, which didn’t seem to have moved at all in twenty-four hours. And after an hour of standing in it, it still didn’t seem to have moved. By the institutional white clock up on the wall, it took three and a half hours before he was in front of the guard booth, giving them Danny’s commissary number. He held the phone to his ear, and his breath, after giving the operator his mother’s number. This time, a man answered.
“Vance? This is your uncle Joe. What’s going on?” Uncle Joe was a dubious personage who lived in Idaho and operated some sort of heavy machinery, whom they had last visited when Vance was thirteen. He remembered a fat, floridly pink-faced guy wedged into an armchair in front of the TV, so inert as to seem helpless, paralyzed by the spectacle of the World’s Strongest Man competition.
“What are you doing there? I’m in jail.”
“Yeah, the operator said. The fuck.”
“Put Mom on.”
“What the hell’s going?”
“I fucked up. I’m in jail. Put Mom on.”
“Vance, she’s in the hospital.”
“What?”
“We’ve been trying to get ahold of you, but your phone was off.” An image flashed through his mind of the dead phone, cocooned in a plastic evidence Baggie in a bureaucratic mausoleum of former possessions.
“Is she okay?”
“No. She’s having heart problems. Not enough potassium or something. They said she was severely malnourished.”
“Malnourished?”
“I guess she hasn’t eaten in a month or something, weighs like ninety pounds. She’s hooked up to machines, under observation. Critical condition.” His uncle sighed, and Vance could very clearly see him standing there in the filthy kitchen, feeling nothing at the moment besides put out. “Well, anyway, sorry. What do you want me to do for you?”
“I don’t know. Post bail. They set it at ten thousand.”
“Jesus H. What did you do, rob, uh, Carnegie Hall?”
“I beat a car up with a pipe.”
There was a pau
se as Joe considered this information. “We don’t have ten thousand dollars, you know that.”
“I don’t think you have to pay that much, just call down here and give them my name.”
“How long they got you in for?”
“I don’t know, I could be in here months before they even have the trial.”
“I mean, maybe it would be good for you, you think of that? You can’t just go around fucking cars up with a pipe.”
“Tell Mom. Is she awake?”
There was another long silence at the other end. He suddenly desperately wanted to get off the phone—Danny’s gracious company seemed like a tropical paradise compared with the prospect of continuing this conversation. Joe said, “I’ll see what I can do,” and the phone clicked off. Vance hung up the greasy chipped plastic receiver and headed back upstairs to his cell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The water felt and tasted even worse than it had looked and smelled when he’d been standing far above and peering down at it. His mouth and nose were filled with a thick putrescence, bitter chemical rot, that seemed to contain every horrible thing mankind was doing to the planet. He gagged underwater, swallowed more of it, and came to the surface flailing for purchase against the concrete wall beside him. He had changed his mind, he wanted out. But there was too much accumulated slime on the wall to get a grip. Cans, cigarette packs, rotten food, sodden cardboard, and an interstitial green foam created a solid layer of scum that he disturbed with his thrashing. He went under again and came back up, his face barely breaking the surface of the water. His loathsome leather shoes, the orthopedic clodhoppers he’d bought for the tour, were like concrete blocks on his feet. He went under again and couldn’t make it back up but continued to thrash ineffectively, while some corner of his mind waited impatiently for the peace and acceptance everyone said comes to drowning victims. It didn’t seem to be happening—where was this goddamned fucking peace he’d heard so much about? Where was it? All he felt was an angry and terrified desire to live more and remorse at the life he’d lived, which was, thankfully, not flashing before his eyes.
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