The Way Home

PART TWO
UNIT 5
FIVE

The guards called it a room, but it was a cell. To name it anything else was a lie.

It was a six-by-nine-foot space containing a floor-bolted cot and thin mattress, a particleboard desk and chair, and a steel shitter and piss hole. There was a barred window giving to a view of a dirt-and-mud field, leading to a twelve-foot-high fence topped with razor wire. Beyond the fence was a forest of oak, maple, wild dogwood, and weed trees, but no pines. The door to the cell held Plexiglas in its cutout. Comically large Joliet keys, so named because they were originally manufactured for use in Illinois’s Joliet prison, unlocked the steel doors.

Wake-up was at 6:30 a.m., then group showers, check-in, and breakfast. Then school, 8:30 to 2:00, Monday through Friday. Regularly scheduled recreation, canceled as often as it occurred, dinner, visiting hours, and psychiatric counseling with staff who barely spoke English. The intended illusion was of routine, just like for boys on the outside.

There were a dozen units housing offenders of various degrees of criminality. The most violent boys, those convicted of second-degree murder and manslaughter, and sexual offenders, who were few, were housed together in Unit 12. That they were designated with the highest number, putting them by implication at the top of the pecking order, was a distinction not lost on the other inmates.

Chris Flynn lived in Unit 5, an L-shaped, low-slung brick building, with fourteen other young men. The residents of each unit wore the same color polo shirts, short sleeves in the summer, long in the winter, and system-issue khakis. They were allowed to wear lace-up shoes and sneaks. Their shirts had distinct colors so that an inmate could quickly be identified by his unit. The boys from Unit 5 wore maroon.

Classes were held in a building the size of a small-town elementary school. It was set apart from the housing units, close to another building that held a cafeteria that sometimes doubled as an auditorium, complete with stage. The warden and other administrators, including the central guard detail, kept offices in a separate structure.

The classrooms looked like the classrooms at Chris’s former high school, each with a blackboard, a cluster of old chairs, an opaque projector that only one kid admitted knowing how to operate, and the usual silhouette cutouts of Frederick Douglass and George Washington Carver that the boys spit on and occasionally ripped off the wall. Teachers came to work every day, same as any other teachers, but faced more resistance and saw less progress or success. Chris could not imagine why anyone would want that job and guessed that these folks were do-good types, people his father called “crunchy granolas.” What he didn’t know was that Pine Ridge was a dumping ground for teachers who could barely cut it in the D.C. public school system.

“Does anyone know who the president of the United States was at the time of Martin Luther King’s assassination?” said the teacher, Mr. Brown, a young black dude the boys called Mr. Beige, on account of he talked white. Mr. Brown’s clothes were threadbare, further lowering his status in the boys’ eyes.

“Roosevelt,” said Luther, a boy who talked incessantly to hear his own voice and always gave the wrong answers.

“That’s incorrect, Luther.”

“Coolidge, then.”

“Gump,” said a boy wearing blue in the back of the room. “Boy, you just naming high schools.”

They were in history class, the maroon shirts of Unit 5 mixed in with the navy blue shirts from Unit 9.

“No, it’s not Calvin Coolidge, either. But nice try, Luther. Anyone else?”

Chris thought he knew the answer. He was certain Ali knew. Sure enough, when Chris turned his head and looked at him, Ali Carter, seated at the desk-chair beside him, was staring down at the floor, mouthing the word Johnson.

Ali was smooth skinned, handsome, with a swollen upper body built by doing push-ups in his cell and dips wherever he could. He wore eyeglasses, which somewhat lessened the effect of his bulldog chest, and at five-foot-six was one of the shorter boys at the facility. Ali was in on an armed-robbery conviction.

“Nobody?” said Mr. Brown. “Okay. It was President Johnson, also known as LBJ. Who knows what those initials stand for?”

“Lonnie’s Big Johnson,” said Lonnie Wilson, a horn dog who tended to turn any conversation toward pussy or his dick.

“It ain’t near as big as mine,” said a boy.

A seated guard, one of two stationed in the room, chuckled, his fat moving gelatinously on the action. The other guard, a tall older man named Lattimer, who the boys called Shawshank because he looked like the graybeard in that movie, told Lonnie to watch his mouth and show respect.

“President Johnson and Martin Luther King had a cordial but sometimes rocky relationship during the civil rights era,” said Mr. Brown.

“A sex relationship?” said one of the boys, and several of the others laughed.

“That’s enough,” said Lattimer.

“Perhaps ‘rocky’ is too strong a term. It’s probably more accurate to say that their relationship was one of guarded respect,” said Mr. Brown, gamely plowing ahead. “Understandably, Dr. King became increasingly frustrated with the slow progress in achieving his goal of racial equality in America, and was also frustrated with the escalation of the Vietnam War… ”

Many of the boys sat slumped in their chairs, some with their arms crossed, some looking away from the teacher, a couple with their eyes closed, stealing sleep. Understandable, as the most blatantly inattentive of them could neither read nor write. Ali, by far the smartest boy in the class, understood what Mr. Beige was saying, but the majority of the other boys did not. Just as many did not have any interest in the subject matter and felt that it had no relevance to the reality of their lives. All of this stuff with Dr. King and Lonnie’s Big Johnson had happened before they were born, and wasn’t no Dr. Anyone coming to save them and pull them up out of this jail.

“… Ironically, it was Lyndon Johnson, a product of the South and its racist environment, who signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which gave all citizens in this country, regardless of their color, the right to vote.”

“He was a leader,” said Chris, not intending to speak but recalling something his father had said about Johnson at the dinner table one night. His old man was a history buff. The living room of their home was full of books on presidents and war.

“Black folk couldn’t vote before then?” said Ben Braswell, a big dark-skinned boy with soulful eyes who lived in Chris’s unit. Ben had stolen many cars and had been caught one too many times.

“Until then,” said Mr. Brown, “some white people in power found loopholes and obstacles to prevent African Americans from participating in the process. The Civil Rights Act made any kind of racial discrimination illegal.”

“What you think about that, White Boy?” said a husky voice behind Chris.

Chris did not turn his head, knowing that it was Lawrence Newhouse, who some called Bughouse, doing the talking. He did not feel threatened by Lawrence, nor slighted by the tag, which had been given to him his first day in. Everyone had another name in here, the same way soldiers did on the battlefield, and White Boy, though a supremely uncreative moniker, was as good as any other. Lawrence was stupid running to illiterate, unnecessarily abrasive at times, but not considered dangerous unless he was off his meds, though everyone knew he had shot a boy on Wade Road, which had been his ticket in. He was thin and had almond-shaped eyes and skin that in certain lights looked yellow.

“Asked you a question,” said Lawrence.

Chris shrugged, the rise and fall of his shoulders his response.

“What, you can’t speak?”

“You mind?” said Ali, turning his head to glare at Lawrence. “I’m tryin to hear this shit.”

Ali had no intention of defending Chris, but Lawrence annoyed him. Plus, there was that old thing between them. Ali had grown up in Barry Farms, a Section 8 complex in Southeast, and Lawrence had come up in the Parkchester Apartments, a neighboring housing unit. Neither of them were crew members, but there was a rivalry between the young men of the dwellings, a long-standing beef that no one, if pressed, could dissect or explain. Nonetheless, Ali Carter and Lawrence Newhouse had been assigned to the same unit. Boys with a history of animosity, gang related or otherwise, were mixed in with one another and were expected to work out their differences.

“I say somethin to you, Holly?” said Lawrence.

“My name is Ali. ”

“There a problem?” said the old man, Lattimer.

“I’m about to see you outside, little man,” said Lawrence under his breath.

But instead, when the class was done and the boys filed out, Lawrence Newhouse took a wild swing at a guard for no apparent reason and was subdued by several other guards and hustled down the hall into an empty room, from which the boys could hear shouts and sounds of struggle. The next time the boys from Unit 5 saw Lawrence, just before lockdown that night, his cheek and upper lip were swollen. He and Ali passed each other in the recreation room but said nothing and made no hard eye contact. A couple of the young men, who did not particularly care for Lawrence, dapped him up. Fights between inmates were inevitable and sometimes necessary, but they bought you nothing. When you swung on a guard, you were going to take a beatdown for sure, but you earned a little piece of respect. Even from your enemies.

Chris had been inside for several weeks and had been in no fights yet. He had been the recipient of many shoulder bumps and hard brushes, and given out a few, but they had come to nothing. As for his color, he absorbed the usual comments and chose not to respond. Truth was, it didn’t bother him to be described as a cracker. Had he called someone a nigger, there would have been immediate go, but there was no corresponding word for whites that would automatically start a fight. Because of Chris’s indifference, the other young men grew tired of using his race as a launching pad for aggression and dropped it.

Not that he was feared. He was on the big and strong side, but this did not deter anyone. In fact, it made the smaller boys more eager to drop him. But the deliberate bumps were perfunctory and did not escalate to anything approaching real violence.

The nature of Chris’s crimes gave him a certain mystique that was useful on the inside. He was the crazy white boy who had cold-cocked a kid for no reason, led the police on a high-speed chase, and outrun them. When asked, Chris told the story true, but in its telling it did sound as if he had no regard for consequences or respect for the law, when in fact, on the night in question he had just acted impulsively. Chris believed it was wise to take this rep as a gift and did nothing to dispel the notion that he was a little bit off.

The other thing that served him well was his ability to play and sometimes excel at basketball. The Pine Ridge half court, out in the field, was an asphalt surface land-mined with fissures and weeds, equipped with a slightly bent rim with chain netting. The rim was unforgiving, but once Chris learned its idiosyncrasies, he was good with it, and word quickly got around that he could ball. At first he wasn’t chosen for pickup because of his color, but the guards forced the issue, and soon he was out there, getting hacked and bumped like everyone else. Playing those games on Saturday afternoons, and holding the court and bragging rights with what would become his team, which included the tall and athletically gifted Ben Braswell, was the high point of his week.

There were no other peaks. The boys were indoors most of the time, and the atmosphere in the unit buildings fostered depression. With clouded Plexiglas substituting for glass, little light entered the structures, so even on sunny days, their world seemed gray, colorless, and grim.

By design, the boys did not have a say in the rules or conditions at Pine Ridge. There was no suggestion box. The boys took orders or they didn’t. They were ordered to go from one place to another, to keep in line, to get out of bed, to get in and out of the showers, to get to the cafeteria and to leave the cafeteria, to hurry into class and to leave class, to move into their cells. The guards didn’t ask. They shouted and they commanded, often with obscenity-laced language.

Chris found himself bored with the sameness of his life inside. He was smart enough to know that he was being punished, that the boredom, the attitude of the guards, the tasteless food, the scratchy old blanket on his cot, all of it was intended to make him want to act right so he could be released and not return. But still, the treatment and surroundings didn’t have to be so harsh all the time. The boys got it, they knew they weren’t on some field trip, but it seemed counterproductive to get shit on day after day. After a while, the way they got treated felt less like punishment and more like cruelty.

So with bitterness they acted out and broke rules. They talked out of turn in class and swung on guards and one another. Many smoked marijuana when they could get it. It was brought in by a guard who walked it through the gatehouse by taping it under his balls, and it got paid for by money the boys’ relatives gave them on visiting days. The weed, stashed in ceiling tiles, was occasionally potent but frequently was not, and most times it produced headaches over highs, but it was something to do.

Because the scent of marijuana was often in the air at Pine Ridge, and because the high was evident in the boys’ eyes, this indiscretion was not a secret and the boys were piss-tested and strip-searched at random. They knew they would most likely be caught and that a drug offense would potentially increase their time inside, but most of them didn’t care. The warden ordered urine tests on the guards, too, and some of them came up positive. The guard who was selling, a man who arrogantly drove his BMW 5-series to work and thereby generated suspicion, was eventually served a warrant at his residence, where a search turned up several pounds. He was fired and prosecuted, but another guard saw an opportunity and stepped into his shoes. Wisely, this guard continued to drive his old Hyundai.

It was said by some that the juvenile prison system tainted everyone, employees and inmates alike.

Not all succumbed to the atmosphere. There were guards who did their jobs straight and felt they were achieving some kind of good.

Pine Ridge’s superintendent, Rick Colvin, was one authority figure most of the boys liked. He managed to remember their names and ask after their well-being and their families. He was decent, and the boys felt better when he was on campus. But Colvin was not always around. His was a nine-to-five job, and his absence was felt at night. The regular guards went home in the evening, leaving duties to the crew of the midnight shift, who the boys considered to be the scrub members of the security team. Ali said, “The low end of the gene pool get the shit hours,” and it seemed to be so. These were also the men and women who woke them up in their cells at 6:30 in the morning. They rarely did so with empathy or kindness.

The night after Chris assured his dad he knew how to jail, he was in the common room of Unit 5, hanging out on an old couch, reading a paperback novel, not paying attention to what he was reading because as usual the boys in what was called the media room next door were arguing about what they were watching and what they would be watching next on the scarred television mounted high on the wall. Also in the common room was an old Ping-Pong table, looked like a dog had been chewing on its corners, where two boys played. One of the boys liked to slam the ball and then ridicule his opponent about his inability to return the slam. It was hard for Chris to concentrate.

Ali Carter was seated in a fake-leather chair with riveted arms, ripped in spots. It was comfortable and he had commandeered it. Most of the other furniture here had been purchased out of a correctional facility catalogue, items made of hard plastic, indestructible and impossible to sit in for long periods of time. Ali, like Chris, was reading a book, but he did not seem bothered by the noise.

Chris had been given his book by the reading teacher, a young woman named Miss Jacqueline who wore white shirts with black brassieres underneath and tight pinstripe pants to their school. Miss Jacqueline came to school twice a week and worked with the boys individually, and after she visited she was the subject of much talk in the units and fantasies that led to masturbation when the boys got into their cells. Chris had heard Shawshank, the old guard, talking to Superintendent Colvin one day, complaining about Miss Jacqueline’s style of dress, and how she “oughtn’t be looking like that in here,” and how she was driving all the boys crazy, walking around with her behind “all tight and full in them pinstripes.” Chris agreed, but he liked looking at her just the same, and he liked the way she smelled of lavender when she leaned toward him. It was nice of her to give him the book, too.

“All right,” said Ben Braswell, entering the room, tapping Chris’s fist, and sitting down beside him. “Those pieces took my head up, man.”

Chris had bought some marijuana with the money his mother had slipped into his pocket and had passed a couple of buds on to Ben.

“What I owe you?” said Ben.

“Nothin.”

“I’ll get you later, hear?”

“We’re straight,” said Chris. Ben never had money and had no way to get it. No one visited him, ever.

“We gonna ball this weekend, son?”

“No doubt,” said Chris. “Better play while we can. It’s startin to get cold out.”

“Cool weather means gobble time,” said Ben. “They’ll be servin a special dinner on that day, too. Turkey and stuffing, cranberry sauce, everything. They did last year, anyway. It was tight.”

Thanksgiving was just another day to Chris. But he said, “Sounds good.”

He didn’t want to taint Ben Braswell’s vision of the upcoming holiday. More than any other boy Chris had met at Pine Ridge, Ben saw the brightness in things. His attitude was positive, he was never cruel to be cruel, and he didn’t bully anyone out of boredom. Ben kept stealing cars, though, and the court kept putting him back inside.

“Hey, Ali, what you reading, man?” said Ben. “That book looks thick.”

An open hardback book rested in Ali’s lap. He took his eyes off the page and looked over the top of his specs at Ben. “Called Pillar of Fire. Miss Jacqueline gave it to me, said it came out just last year.”

“That’s a big-ass book.”

“You can read it when I’m done, you want to.”

“I ain’t gonna read shit, Ali. You know that.”

Because you can’t read, thought Chris.

“It’s about that time Mr. Beige was speakin on,” said Ali. “The Civil Rights Act, Dr. King, LBJ, all that stuff. You know, that president Chris called a leader.”

“He was,” said Chris.

“Yeah?” said Ali.

Chris concentrated, tried to arrange his thoughts in a logical manner so he’d sound as if he knew what he was speaking on. For some reason, he wanted to please Ali.

“He did good, even though he wasn’t all pure inside. My father told me that Johnson was… he was a product of his environment.”

“Your pops meant that Johnson was racist,” said Ali.

“More like, he couldn’t really help what he was.”

“Way I heard it, the man told nigger jokes at the dinner table,” said Ali.

“Maybe he did,” said Chris. “But he signed that act because it was the right thing to do, even though he might not have been feelin it in here.” Chris tapped his chest. “That’s what I meant when I said he was a leader.”

“Okay,” said Ali. “You’re right. Not only that, he lost the South for his party when he did that, and they ain’t never got it back.”

“What the fuck are y’all talking about?” said Ben.

“You ain’t all that stupid,” said Ali, looking directly at Chris for the first time. “You just tryin to act like you are.”

Chris blushed. “My father told me that, is all.”

“Your father read books?” said Ben.

“History books and shit. He’s got a library, like, in our living room.”

“Your father,” said Ali with a small smile. “Your living room. Books. A library.”

“What?” said Chris.

“How you end up in this piece?” Ali shook his head and lowered his eyes back to his book. “You don’t belong here, man.”

IN HIS cell that night, Chris lay on his side on his cot and looked at a charcoal sketch that Taylor Dugan had done of him, taped to the wall. It was made from a photograph she had taken of him in her mother’s basement, the night he was arrested. The sketch showed him shirtless, drinking a beer, with a cocky, invincible smile on his face. It had come to him through the prison mail, along with a note that simply said, “Thinking of you and miss you.” On the bottom of the sketch, Taylor had put her signature. Underneath his figure she had printed the words “Bad Chris.”

That’s me.

It was me. And now I’m here.

The smile in the sketch seemed to mock him, and Chris turned his back to it. He stared at cinder blocks and felt nothing at all.