Just Wanted to Learn

by William Swafford

  Chuck had a .22 handgun that he kept in his closest. His brother had given it to him for his eighteenth birthday. He also had five-hundred rounds of ammunition.

  I don’t know why, but I said that I would take the gun. He loaded the gun and handed it to me. We also filled our pockets with ammunition.

  Chuck had to make sure that he had his leather jacket. He really wasn’t planning on coming back.

  We walked straight out the front door. We started our last walk.

  Chuck wanted to go back to the house that we were kicked out of, so we got on their street. He wanted to shoot the place up.

  He wanted to get out of town. He had talked about stealing a car. Then there were talks of suicide again.

  As we were walking, we had seen a car with the door open and lights on. Chuck wanted to steal it. We started walking towards it.

  I didn’t want to do it, but I said nothing and followed him. Then I had seen something move in the car seat. I got back on the sidewalk and kept walking.

  The lights were off when we got the house. I told Chuck that it was no use because nobody was up.

  He walked up to the porch and started yelling. He picked up something and threw it at the house.

  “Come on out,” he yelled. “I’ll kick your fucking asses.”

  We were drunk and stumbling around town. We got onto the main street and headed north. Then we got onto another side street. Then we found a car with the window down.

  Chuck went up to it and didn’t see any keys. He did find a pack of cigarettes that he took.

  We had even planned on trying to save the cigarettes for a long walk. The cigarettes didn’t last as long as planned.

  We got on a road that leads out to the country. We were going to leave town on foot. We had made it out of city limits.

  Chuck wanted to put our thumbs out and get a ride. When he seen lights coming our way he put out his thumb and we had gotten a ride that night.

  The head lights belonged to a State Trooper. Then they turned on the rest of their lights.

  The trooper had gotten out and talked to us first. He took our ID’s and then went back to his car.

  When he got back out, there were more red and blue lights heading our way. Chuck didn’t want to go down easy.

  “Shoot him,” he said.

  “What?” I replied.

  “Shoot him,” he said.

  I didn’t even think about it. The gun stayed in my waistband.

  We were going to be put under arrest. I was put up against the car and searched. The trooper didn’t find the gun at first. I told him that I had a gun in my waistband.

  Two city police cruisers had showed up. They were taking care of Chuck.

  We were put in separate rooms at the police station. We had somehow told the same story.

  The story was that we were only going to go out and kill ourselves. There was no talk about anything that had happened that night.

  Chuck was arrested and booked into the county jail. I was a juvenile and had to go to a detention center out of town.

  Chuck was only charged with public intoxication and disorderly conduct. He only spent five days in jail.

  I spent two weeks in juvenile jail. I was charged with carry a loaded weapon, disorderly conduct, and underage consumption.

  I had to go to have an evolution done. They said I was fine.

  They had let me out on probation. There was another problem though.

  My mom was having problems with my dad. She didn’t want him around my brother and I anymore. The judge didn’t like him anyways.

  The judge told my dad that he would have to take a drug test to see me. He knew my dad used but was going to be fair with him. All he had to do was show up and show a little effort.

  My dad had showed up drunk to take the drug test. He failed it as I thought he would.

  The judge put a restraining order on my dad. He wasn’t allowed to see my brother and me.

  I didn’t know how to feel about this. I thought that my dad would have at least tried.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I started back to school with nobody to hang out with. My brother and his friends had done graduated. Chuck had dropped out like he had planned to do. Then my brother and Chuck took off to Florida with some girl.

  They wouldn’t come back for months. When they did come back, Chuck went to North Carolina to stay. I haven’t seen him since.

  My brother had gotten his own place. I started keeping to myself more. I always did what I could to keep myself high.

  I kept playing and listening to music. I couldn’t even sleep unless music was playing. Music was the only thing that was staying in my life.

  My probation officer thought getting a part time job would be good for me. I started working at a fast food place after school and on weekends. It didn’t pay much at all, but I got free food whenever I could.

  I was staying out of trouble. I just had one problem. I couldn’t stop smoking weed. There was a drug test every week and I would smoke on the same day as the test.

  They only considered a test a positive if the test came back over a certain percent. I found out what percent it needed to be lower than. I would drink at least two gallons of water that day. My test stayed at the same low percentage every week.

  My probation officer caught on to the test results. They were all negative but after a month they should have been a zero percent. It had gone on for two months.

  My brother had been in a car accident. His friend and him were out drinking and hit a telephone pole. My brother had broken his back in two places.

  I wasn’t doing well at school. I found someone to hang out with. He was a trouble maker. We never hung out after school.

  I had gotten a fight with a kid. My friend and I had started the fight by picking on the kid. The kid ended up fighting back.

  I always hung out with guys who picked on others. I thought I was a freak who should have been picked on. My plan was to be friends with the bullies and do as they done.

  The fight had caused the kid to go home from school and school hadn’t even started the day yet. I had gotten caught when I was walking into the school building and a teacher had seen blood on my hand.

  My probation officer had found out about it. Instead of having my probation violated for the fight, it was because of the drug test. I was in trouble and it didn’t matter to the courts what it was for.

  I was giving a date to show up in court. I was told straight up that I was going to serve some time. How was I supposed to feel about this? I couldn’t blame anyone but myself.

  I was told that I might be able to go to a rehab instead of jail. I thought cool. Everyone always says that drug rehabs our easy. I only had a problem with weed. Drug rehab wasn’t what my probation officer was talking about.

  The rehab was for criminals only and you had to have felonies. You also had to have juvenile prison time hanging over your head to even be considered for their rehab program. It was for kids who had done gone too far.

  At the age of seventeen and before I could finish my junior year in high school, I went back to court. I had made only two options for my life at that time. One was to try and get into the rehab. The second was to serve up to four years in a juvenile prison.

  I went back to the same juvenile jail that they had sent me before to wait and see what they were going to do with me. I had to go through an interview to see if I could get into the rehab program. I hoped that they would hurry up and decide my fate. The jail was filling up.

  I was put into a one person cell with two other boys. There was only one bed. The other two had mattresses on the floor. You didn’t want to be the one who had to sleep by the toilet.

  I was in that ceil with those boys for two days. I was on the verge of losing my mind. It was getting to a point that I knew that I was going to end up fighting one of them.

  One of the boys
had kept trying to start of fight with me. At first he kept doing what he could to see if I would get mad and go off. Then he thought that he would try and scare me. Finally I had got the news that I had been waiting on.

  I had gotten accepted to the rehab program. I wasn’t free of juvenile prison yet. If I failed to complete the program, then I would serve my suspended time till I was twenty-one years old.

  I got transferred that day. I couldn’t get out of that ceil fast enough.

  The rehab was on the other side of the building as the jail. It was just like jail, but made to look nicer.

  We were still kept locked down in pods. They did have carpet on the floors instead of cold cement. We were kept in one man cells and their cells were different.

  They had carpets on the floor, but no toilets. You had to use an intercom to ask permission to be let out to use the restroom. The bed and mattress was the same as the jails. There was one shelf which held your towels and Bible. That was all there was except for a small window with no view.

  I had went in and tried to do what I was told. I was made to start studying for my GED.

  The rules were strict. We weren’t allowed talking to other inmates. We always had to have our arms crossed across our chest when we walked. There was no radio and music. There were groups every other day. We had to exercise for forty-five minutes a day.

  Two boys had attempted to escape. They brought everyone out at four in the morning. We got striped searched by our doors while our cells got searched.

  I did what I could to move through the program. I wanted out of there as fast I could. There were more privileges when you moved up, but you still had to behave when you did move up. If you moved up and got into trouble, you got moved back down and had to start all over.

  I knew how this was affecting my life, but I didn’t know how it was affecting whatever music I made for myself. It was hard dealing with the fact that there was absolutely no music in the whole building.

  I would sing some songs that I knew while alone in my cell. This had helped a little. I didn’t know very many songs. I had never been the type to try air guitar.

  I had moved up to the final stage of the program. Then they had decided that they wanted everyone to do a talent show.

  Nobody was into the idea, but I absolutely hated it. I am not a person of tricks. I don’t stand up and make a fool out of myself. I wasn’t going to do it and I was willing to take the punishment for it.

  The night before the talent show I couldn’t sleep. I just lied there staring at the ceiling after being locked down for the night. I was surprised by the sound of my ceil door being unlocked. One of the guards had come to talk to me.

  He had asked me if he brought in a guitar if I would play it in the talent show. I said that I would and that was the end of the conversation.

  The guard had brought in a nice guitar that his dad had given him. I didn’t sing at all. I just played the chords to a very simple song to play.

  I felt like myself for a moment. It felt good.

  The guards had gotten together and talked to the man in charge. They had talked about me.

  Several days later that guard had come back. He was given permission to bring in a guitar for me to play.

  I wasn’t able to keep it in my cell. It stayed locked up when it wasn’t played. I didn’t care if I was able to play it or not. I was just glad that there was a guitar there to play.

  I was the only one who was allowed to play it. People actually liked listening to me play. The guards recognized the songs I did.

  Music had made things easier for me. Things were getting better, but then I had a bad visit.

  My dad had come to visit and he had been drinking. The guards couldn’t tell, but I could. I hadn’t talked to my dad for almost eight months.

  He had started going off about stupid things. He had gotten upset about something. He reached across the table and grabbed my wrist. He leaned over the table to get up in my face.

  It had scared me because it wasn’t what I had expected. I couldn’t even tell him about the guitar. The guards noticed what was going on.

  I tried not to focus on my dad’s visit. I had to get out of there. I still had something to do before they would even think about letting me out of there. If I had gotten into any trouble, then I would have to start all over again. Then the first five months would have meant nothing.

  There was no party for my eighteenth birthday. I got two cards one was from my mom and the other from my aunt.

  I still had to do community service before I could get out. I had to do it at a retirement home outside of the jail for some many hours. We didn’t travel like normal people would.

  We were handcuffed and the cuffs were held to our waist by being attached to a leather belt. Our ankles were cuffed and chained. Then one by one we were put into a small van.

  They would unchain us outside of the retirement home. They didn’t want to scare the residents like they wouldn’t notice a group of boys all dressed alike.

  The first time there I just followed the others. We were to go room to room to talk to the people. We visited the residents who didn’t have family or friends who come to visit them.

  At the end of our time they took us to their recreation room. We were to sing with a self playing piano. The piano only played really old songs.

  I wasn’t going to attempt this. The ones who tried couldn’t because they didn’t know the old songs.

  Once we were finished, we were taken outside to be chained back up. Then we were loaded up and taken back to the jail.

  The guard who had given me the guitar was one of the guards that had taken us. The guards would rotate. He had seen how embarrassing it was for everyone with the self playing piano.

  He had gotten permission for me to take the guitar with us to the retirement home. I think it benefited all the boys because there were no more embarrassing moments with the self playing piano.

  We were always in groups of two. The same boy named Eric usually went with me. We both didn’t want to talk much and most of the time we didn’t have to. I took the guitar with me to every room.

  The people liked listening to the guitar. It kept me from having to talk.

  Eric and I had met this one lady. We had seen her every time we were there. We would talk to her and there was one song she always liked. She was an interesting lady.

  She was a hundred-and-one year old clothing designer from Boston. She had newspaper clippings about the things she had done in her career.

  She had told us a story about a train ride that she had taken. On that trip she had met Emilia Earhart.

  I had also been put into a new program that they had started. They wanted to take five inmates to a joint vocational school to learn a trade. We were put in chains and shackles again.

  Walking around all chained up isn’t cool, especially when kids your own age can see you. It can also make you think about all the things that you had missed out on.

  This went on for a month and a half. It was the same routine every time.

  A few days before I was to be released, I had to go one more time to the retirement home. This was the toughest visit that we did.

  Eric and I were in a room visiting a guy that we had never met before. There was a guard standing at the door.

  The guard was very tall and had a big belly. He tried to put on like he had an attitude, but you could tell that he was a nice guy.

  The guard had gone out in the hall to talk to a nurse. When he came back into the room, he asked us to come out into the hall.

  They had told us that they lady that we had come to know was dying. They couldn’t get any response from her. She was on her death bed. They asked me to go and play for her.

  We both went into the room. I could only imagine what Eric was thinking. She lied in her bed on life support.

  I only played a couple songs and didn’t si
ng like usual. The last song I did end up singing. It was a Christian song that I had just learned.

  After I was finished, we just got up to leave. There wasn’t much else we could do. I didn’t take step before I had seen the guard pointing.

  I turned and looked back at the lady. She had raised her hand. I went over and grabbed her hand. She was looking straight at me.

  Before I could be released, I had another court hearing. At the hearing I was told that I was being released, but I was to stay at a halfway house in a different county. The halfway house was an hour away from my family.

  I went from the courtroom straight to my probation officers car. Then he took me to my mom’s house. I spent ten minutes getting my things and talking to my mom. Then I was off to another county again.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I was taken up north to Sidney. I wasn’t used to a big town. I had always been out in the country or in a small town.

  The guy who ran the place was a character. His name was Ivan and he looked just like Frank Zappa. He was from Athens, New York.

  He was tall and lean. He had black curly hair down to his shoulders. He had a mustache with a small part under his bottom lip.

  He had asked me a question that totally shocked me. He had asked me if I had ever done a speed ball. I had no idea what he was talking about. He said it was cocaine and heroin melted down and shot up at the same time.

  I said no because I don’t want a needle in the arm. He said I should have tried it before I gave up drugs. I didn’t know how to reply to that.

  Ivan was off the wall, but he amazed me. He had owned a bar in New York. Bands like the Stones had played there.

  Then he took out a picture and a newspaper clipping. The picture was of Jim Morrison’s tombstone in an apartment in New York. The newspaper clipping was out of a France newspaper about the headstone being stolen.

  I was amazed by this. I had been a Doors fan. Could it really be true?

  After settling in, I got to explore the city. I didn’t have to go far. There was a music store right across the street from the halfway house.

  It was a small privately owned music store. There weren’t many guitars, but there was a Fender twelve string that had got my eye. I didn’t have the money to buy it.