by S. J. Rozan
“On the chow!” the CO barks, alerting inmates it’s feeding time again. I drag myself out of bed and kick on some slippers. I have no idea what day or time it is. I try not to think. My thoughts lead only to one place.
On the way to the mess hall I notice a door with the words, New Beginnings…Create a new life and a new future today. Why does the name resonate so much? I repeat it to myself over and over—New Beginnings, New Beginnings. Then, like some prizefighter’s left hook, it hits me. It is one in a long line of stories Billy’s told me. Last time he was locked down on the Island he managed to weasel his way into being a trustee. He was assigned to sweep and mop some program office. Bits and pieces of his tale are coming back to me. All he kept telling me is that he was so smooth he could find a vic anywhere, even on the inside. “Simple, old-fashioned justice,” he called it. It was his way, he thought, of sticking to the system that stuck it to him so many times. The last thing I want to think about is that world.
God works in mysterious ways, I think, but did he really expect me to join a stupid jailhouse program? Been there, done that. I shuffle along to the mess hall.
I get my food, some kind of slop meant to be meatloaf, and walk to a gray steel table that’s probably been painted for the twentieth time. I sit down and bury my face in my hands. I consider throwing the tray against the wall. I’m filled with rage and desperately need a hit. I haven’t felt my emotions in years and the pain is unbearable.
“Hey.” The guy sitting next to me tries to start a conversation, but I wave him away.
“Don’t wanna talk, man,” I tell him.
“Listen, I know where you’re at,” he says. “I’ve been there. I can see it. New Beginnings is what you need, brotha.” As he goes on about the program, how cool the counselors are, how they help you find a job and get clean once you’re released, I just want him to shut up. I don’t have the energy for hope.
To get him off my back, I grab an application for the program from a table and fill it out. He tells me he’ll give it to the director. The next chapter of my life suddenly has promise, however slight.
I pick up my spoon and take a portion of the meatloaf and place it in my mouth. I chew once or twice, then slowly open my mouth, letting the disgusting fodder fall back onto the tray. This isn’t the first jailhouse meal that has repulsed me, but it’s the first time the pain has run so deep. I push the tray aside and sit there staring at the New Beginnings mural and wondering what that phrase means to me.
I return to my housing unit and wait for the count to be cleared. The jangle of keys attached to the belt on the spreading waist of a CO signifies the change in shifts.
Clank! The crash of metal against metal, bouncing apart, then meeting again with another steely thump tells me that the day is beginning. Soon it will be business as usual in the facility.
By 7:30 a.m., the facility count of inmates will be complete. As I lie on my bunk, I look toward the east and catch a glimpse of the rising sun. I think to myself that no matter what, the sun will always rise and the world is given a chance at a new beginning. What we do with it is up to us.
“Laundry crew!” a CO blares as inmates move toward the front gate. I’m yet to be assigned a work detail, but maybe I’ll get into that program, I think, and I won’t have to do some grimy jail job.
As soon as the dorm CO appears to have nothing to do, I’ll approach him and ask for a pass to the New Beginnings office. Getting the officer on duty to assist you in any way requires a skill all its own. Timing is everything. Miss that opportunity and you’ll be forced to sit in the house all day, wasting away. I’m not one to let that happen. Like I made things happen on the street, I’ll make things happen here.
I’m given an “OK” and a pass to the New Beginnings office, where I hope to be screened for admittance into the program. This is my chance to make good. Redemption, they say, only comes once in a lifetime.
I enter the office and the first thing I notice is how down-to-earth the counselors seem. They’re like everyday people, hardworking and dedicated to what they do, probably like my victims, I think. That’s one thing about jail, your conscience works overtime. The guilt and shame you’ve suppressed for so long come bubbling to the surface. As I wait for the screening process to begin, I’m overcome with these thoughts. What does this all mean?
Unlike the rest of the jail, with its dreary gray walls, the director’s office is painted a calming beige. Fresh flowers sit in a vase on her desk. The sign on the door tells me her name is Ms. Frey.
“Nice to meet you, Tron,” she says, extending her hand. The office is snowed under with books. Books on the wall, books on the floor, books to the right, and books to the left. Framed photos and artwork line the walls. A picture of a smiling little girl on a swing with Ms. Frey catches my attention. The warmth of the photo has a disarming affect on me, and anyone else who enters here, I think. The picture defines the bond between mother and child. No matter how “hard” you think you are, the image softens you.
She gestures for me to have a seat and instantly I’m attracted to her. If for no other reason, please let me be accepted into this program because the director is fuckin’ fine. I pray to whoever’s listening.
She looks at me with emerald-green eyes that make me think how easily I could fall for this woman. As she tells me about the program, I fixate on her face. Oddly, a fleeting thought tells me I’ve met her before.
The interview goes well and I’m told I’m accepted into the program. I never share my deep thoughts with anyone, but somehow she got me open. I’ve seen the inside of jails and rehabs from here to Los Angeles, and bullshit-talking counselors are a dime a dozen, but I may have found the one therapist who truly cares. My life is a mess and I desperately need the help of this program.
Days go by in this jungle, and as in any jungle made of concrete and steel or gnarled green vegetation, only the strong survive. By no means am I the super thug type; my IQ earns me respect and is regarded in much the same way as a seventeen-inch bicep. Behind these walls that’s all you’ve got, and both will earn you props.
I find solace in the New Beginnings office, exchanging feedback with others in the program and building on ideas with positive people. One-on-one sessions with Ms. Frey keep me afloat and I have found an oasis. She will rescue me from the sea of toxicity I’m floating in.
I tell her about the dark places my drug addiction brought me, about the hookers and the drugs, but I don’t tell her about the scams, spreads, and the dirty checks—I’m too embarrassed and don’t want to scare her off. Her office is where I dump my guilt and shame, and she willingly carts it away.
“You don’t have to live that way anymore,” she tells me.
What other way is there to live? I wonder. This is all I know.
About a month into the program, I’m sitting in her office talking about the future. She’s telling me about a job she thinks I’d be good at—working with a team of researchers studying patterns of drug use in the city.
“They’re looking for people who have firsthand knowledge of crystal meth,” she says. “You’d be doing ethnography—studying a subculture…” She pauses to take a phone call. “It might be my daughter’s school,” she says.
I sit there thinking about the job. From what it sounds like, I’ll be great at it. I laugh to myself and think, I study patterns of drug use every day anyway—who’s got what, where, and for how much.
Suddenly I notice her usually unflappable demeanor shift. She looks like she’s been slapped and says only a few words during the ten-minute phone call. “Never, not at all, what should I do?” she finally exclaims.
She hangs up, looking stunned, and apologizes for the disruption. She tries hard to regain her composure.
“Is everything all right?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer at first, she just picks up the picture of her daughter. She stares into it as if trying to draw strength from its aura.
“I apologize, but I just receive
d some devastating news,” she finally says. What she tells me next tears through me like a bullet. It was a credit bureau calling her, investigating “an unusual number of revolving credit accounts being opened and now in arrears.” Her savings account has nearly been drained—the account she built for her daughter’s education. Only pennies are left. Now the arduous process of repairing her credit and proving to the banks that it wasn’t her will begin. Sadness envelops me.
Images of Heidi’s apartment suddenly play like a slideshow in my mind. She had flashed that picture in my face that twisted night I found myself in her apartment. It was the ID with the pretty face Heidi was determined to duplicate. Billy’s tentacle prints are all over this scheme. Was this the “justice” he was talking about? The woman who now sits before me was our prey: chewed up and spit out like countless others. I was a part of a wicked machine that ruined lives and now I’m face-to-face with my evil. The problem is, without the drugs I have a conscience, and I’m devastated.
I sit there listening to her tell me the story I played an integral part in. I can actually feel her confusion, disenchantment, and anger, coupled with the urge to exact some sort of revenge or instant justice. If she only knew. Now here’s the question. Would she be more at ease if I were to disclose my connection to this wicked scheme? If anyone would understand, it would be Ms. Frey. She makes a living out of caring and being sympathetic, right?
Well, I never come clean with Ms. Frey. I quit the program after that day. I had a chance to make good and it disappeared as quickly as it revealed itself to me. I can’t bear to be around Ms. Frey at all. It’s true what they say: Secrets keep us sick. I’m still as sick and twisted as ever.
Months pass and I’ve got two days before I’m released. Soon I’ll be back in the abyss, and I’m sure this time it’ll be deeper and darker than ever. The game is funny that way—just when you think you’re on your way out, it pulls you back in. Rikers Island can’t change years of what life in the Bronx has bred. Who the fuck was I kidding?
LOOK WHAT LOVE IS DOING TO ME
BY MARLON JAMES
Williamsbridge
This is the year of the monkey. A Chinese john told me this after coming back from downtown to celebrate Chinese New Year. I was just shocked to see somebody Oriental cruising ass anywhere past Grand Concourse. I think he was rich too. But then they’re all rich, these johns who have wives and kids back home but then whisper to me that after feeling how tight an asshole is, could never truly love pussy. They tell me all sorts of stuff. Mostly they tell me to act like a girl, so I call them honeychile and flick my wrist like a faggot and that makes it easier, I guess.
Hey, white boy, watchu doin uptown? Lou Reed, the original signifying monkey. I’m older than I seem and younger than I look. Clever. Brains couldn’t save me last year when my dad kicked me out because I didn’t dig girls. I was like, Yo, Pops, I don’t eat pussy but I suck a mean dick. Not really. Not at all. After he got through with me, after my mom was more sick at the beating than what I was getting beat up for, she screamed and he stopped. Now I walk like Ratso and one day I’ll fuck him back up.
Right now it’s 11 in the night and I’m by Hammersley and Ely, right outside Haffen Park, watching cars go by. Cruising of a different flavor. Yeah, boyee, clever. I’m at Hammersley and Ely and I’m waiting for Gary to come shuff me off this mortal coil. Gary likes a good old mess so he’ll probably use that sawed-off of his. Or maybe his bowie knife. It’s weird waiting for somebody to kill you. Knowing that you’re going to die, knowing the end of the movie before the middle makes you do all kinds of shit. Wicked fly shit. It’s like knowing you have cancer so you can do that live-every-minute thing. So I went to McDonald’s and bought two fries. I shoplifted some Garnier Fructis from Rite Aid on Eastchester because I should at least smell good when they find me off Gun Hill Road somewhere.
A snapshot. We’re in the living room of my parents’ house on Gunther. We’re Jews, baby, the last of a dying breed in the Bronx. Gary is sprawled on the love seat, legs spread wide with boots on the chair arm. His vest is dirty as fuck and he’s wearing no shirt underneath. Baggy jeans, the brown ones I don’t like with speckles that look like dried blood. He really looks like shit, but it works. As I said, we’re in my parents’ house.
My mother is dead now. So too is my father. Both died this year. My sister Diane died several years before but just a few years after Dad stopped fucking her. Andre, he’s in jail with nothing but a conviction and no remorse. Ten months before they found him at the gate, trembling like they had dunked him in ice. Dude was still clutching the bloody hatchet and shaking like he got fits or something. The Post said they charged him for double murder and resisting arrest. My father had three hatchet wounds in his forehead, fingers chopped off, probably from trying to block the blows. My mom had to be buried with a closed casket. But enough about them. Gary is going to kill me.
Like just about everybody in the Bronx now, Gary is from Jamaica. I don’t know if he was doing guys given how Jamaicans, like, kill homos and shit, but I know he used to kill back there. Back in the ghetto and shit. See, I know, I represent. I miss him. I hate that. I sound like somebody old, and I have to be tough like him. I want to say I miss him, but I can’t. Maybe I’m just relieved. I don’t know. Some things you can’t unsay and some things you can’t undo. I’m at Hammersley and Ely and a car just slowed down. They used to kill people in this park almost every night before Rudy cleaned things up.
Another snapshot. When I met Gary I was already turning tricks, like four months after Daddy kicked me out of the house and I went downtown just to see the river. Nothing but boys in the street. I was so fucking hungry, yo. One of the boys was eating fried chicken. He handed me a piece and I ate the bone. Mad hungry. Chill, bitch, he said. I asked where he got the chicken, and he said I should let an uncle pay for it. One of them will be driving up in his Chrysler minivan soon enough. I’d only have to do two things. One was wait. He didn’t tell me what the other one was.
A car pulled up. He got in and waved at me. Darkness was hiding everything. I turned to go back to, I don’t know, uptown, I guess, even though that would take forever. Then this car pulled up and stopped beside me. “You’re new,” the man said. I didn’t know what he meant. I asked if he could get me some KFC and he said, “Get in.” I’m not stupid. I was sixteen and I knew a lot of shit and it’s not like I was going to vomit. Part of me wanted to be in the car. He got me some chicken and when I started to eat he unzipped his pants and took it out. I thought jacking off a dude was the same as jacking myself off and I was hungry. I grabbed his cock and he said, “No, baby,” and pointed at my mouth.
Gary’s coming for me. So stupid, all the shit that lead to this.
Third snapshot. So one day, or night, rather, I’m walking down Baychester, looking for a better highway to sleep under, I guess. First mistake, nobody looks for cock on Baychester. One person in the car says, “Yo, you one of them good-time boys?” and me, I’m thinking that I’m a pro so I can show some sass, so I say, “What kind of time you think is good?” And I’m riding this moment because I get to be all witty and shit, clever, and the car stops and he tells me to get in. And I’m looking around because this is the Bronx yo, not Chelsea, and I don’t want any trouble. But the man shows me some cash and I get in. Second mistake: Don’t jump in a car with a john without checking the backseat first. And the man, another Jamaican, says him don’t buy puss in a bag so open the bag and make me see the goodies, and I zip down my pants and take it out, and then he asks me to jack off and I’m feeling weird, like this is one of those real freaks who just wants to watch me cum, so I start to rub my cock even though it feels really, really weird, and suddenly the car stops and three guys jump out from the backseat. “Fuckin’ batty boy,” one of them says, and they open my door and pull me out. I didn’t even notice that we had turned down some lane and the only witnesses would be rats. So they form this circle and one by one they grab me by the shirt, spin th
eir arms like a whirlwind, and punch me in the face or the stomach, and every time I get hit it’s like another explosion, and I vomit and that just makes it worse. And if I fall they pull me up and punch and kick me over to the next one, who punches and kicks me in the balls and I fall to the ground again and taste the garbage on the asphalt, and my eyes are so blurry that I can’t see nothing. All I see is four blurs bent over me, then all of a sudden there are three blurs, then two. Two blurs jump up and try to fight a new blur. The new blur is black and white at the same time. The new blur flashes something shiny and plunges into one of the two. The last blur runs to the car and drives off. The new blur smells like sulphur. I see a hand coming toward me and I try to push it off, but this last blur is too strong. Then I realize that I was in the air. Gary picks me up and carries me back to this place.
I’m in this shack for I don’t know how long. Back then I thought he was a miracle, but not long after that I realized that the only reason he was on that street was that he was cruising for ass too. I would have laughed if it wasn’t so hard. A gunman on the road, Jamaican at that, looking to pick up a male whore. That said, I barely saw him. His room stunk. It was a hotel room—no, it wasn’t, it was some Christian-home thingy. I soon realized that it was not his house that stunk, but outside. One of those places where garbage is never picked up on time. I didn’t care, I would have followed him anywhere. I was there weeks or months, I don’t know. He was barely there though. Sometimes I would wake up in the night only to hear heavy breathing beside me. He would smell like sulphur and he would be fast asleep. I’m wondering if people have asthma attacks in their sleep.
