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Member
Join Date: Feb 2008
Posts: 1
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Memoir
Memoir
“Why the fuck would I cut ahead of you to get into class?”
The way I said it, it was more of a statement than a question, like saying: “No, I did not cut in front of you, and you’re a dumb ass.”
“Cause you’re a rich white bitch from East GR and you be acting like you’re better than me.”
“First off what does my being better than a junkie like yourself have to do with cutting in line? Second, where do you get off calling me white like it’s a bad thing? You’re last name’s Van ------, you Dutch bastard.”
“Man shut the fuck up!”
I’d hit the Achilles Heel of this gangster wannabe. Like Achilles his flaw was pride and I could tell I’d hit him where the sun don’t shine. I was about to sink his battleship.
“No, no, no, no. You’re Dutch and you’re from Grandville. You’re a honky, Kurt, same as me. A cracker. Only you are Dutch, and I am not. I’m Scotch. But for all practical purposes we are both Caucasian males.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
I’m talking about your blonde hair and blue eyes. I’m talking about the array of black track marks on your arm that your white t-shirt fails to conceal.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Kurt Van ---- was arrested for selling heroine to an undercover officer. This happened after a six month period spent on the lamb. Six months spent living in Southtown, selling drugs for his sister’s boyfriend. He got pinched about half a year after he cut his house arrest anklet off with a pair of gardening shears and hit the road with his girlfriend. What followed was an unfathomably rapid descent into the do or die world of black tar and white powder.
Right before he took off he told his mom that all he wanted to do was get high and have sex with his girlfriend. Based on what he told us he did just that until he told an undercover officer that he would gladly sell him $10 worth of heroine. The funny thing is: Kurt wasn’t holding any h that day. He was going to give the guy $10 worth of fruitless pursuit, instead, after he took his cash, of course. When the cop realized that Kurt was holding a persi sack of uppers, but not any heroine, he started cracking up.
“What’s so funny, man?” asked Kurt, slightly abashed.
“Oh, I just think it’s ironic that you didn’t actually have any heroine, and I didn’t actually have ten dollars.” Replied the Narc.
It’s funny the way things work out sometimes.
* * * * * * * * * * *
“You young bloods knock it off and sit yourselves down.”
It wasn’t a guard who said it. It was a guy wearing a slick crème suit over his large black body. He was tall and fat and bespectacled. Around him I saw an aura of sophistication and intelligence that wasn’t present in anyone working in this fucking kindergarten purgatory.
“He started it.”
Kurt pointed the finger at me and stepped forward with the immobilized leg he had injured three weeks prior.
“No one asked who started it. Shut up! Sit down!”
It was a guard speaking this time.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Our argument was one of many that I had with Kurt over a week’s time. Their length usually spanned only a moment or two, but for that brief period he and I were engaged in a battle. We were bitter rivals engaged in a power struggle of juvenile proportions, in a prison of juvenile inmates.
When I think about Kurt, I can’t help but see that little prick as the closest thing I’ve ever had to a nemesis. We sparred like weak wolves competing for meaningless dominance in a fierce pack. Our mutual goal: the status which was not omega male. I loathed him because he was like me. He was out of his element and defenseless. His arrogance, like mine, was a distraction, an illusion. It was the shield that protected us; it was the sharp set of teeth that kept our frailty and insecurity a secret. Like the shield of a barbarian gladiator, it was not something we could afford to abandon, when in Rome.
* * * * * * * * * * *
We were the last to sit down. I had to think about where to sit.
* * * * * * * * * * *
When you sit in desks you sit diagonal to each other. Like pawns about to be eliminated in a game of chess with only one player. The result is group of gray uniformed punks arrayed in a checkerboard pattern.
Everything is done with unnatural order. When you walk down the halls you walk single file, with your left shoulder touching the wall at all times. The guard walks at the end of the line, in the middle of the hallway so he can keep an eye on everyone.
The only people who are allowed to walk in the middle of the hallway are guards.
When the person in front comes to a point where they must turn a corner, they stop and wait for the okay from the guard before proceeding down the next hall. Doors are locked remotely and must be opened from a central hub. The guards have to memorize the two Greek letters that designate each individual door so that when they call the central hub on their black radios they can say:
“Open Alpha Delta” and hear a buzz followed by a heavy click.
After a while the Greek and the buzz and the click develop a magical quality. It’s like a magic trick you can’t perform or even understand. You just stand there, impotent, until the guard says some Greek into their black radio.
When you get out, it doesn’t get out of you for a while. When you come to a corner you stop instinctively, like you’re still inside. When you come to a doorway, you find yourself waiting in front of it, unsure of what to do. It’s not locked. You can open it. No one else is going to do it for you.
What are you waiting for? Turn the knob and open the goddamn door, Jack!
* * * * * * * * * * *
The man in the slick suit said his name was Dr. Martin and told us he was a professor at GVSU. Sociology, criminology, he taught something along those lines. He asked us all where we were from and we listed, individually and collectively, various places in Kent County, MI that one can be from. I was from East Grand Rapids but when he asked me I said Grand Rapids.
“So today I’m here to talk about what you young folks done that got you in them lovely white uniforms y’all are wearin’.” When he spoke he spoke with subjective class and intellect but not formal elegance. “We’re gonna to talk about how those same decisions can turn your colorful world into a world of black and white.”
He was referring to the black and white stripes that adorn the stereotypical prison uniform. Our uniforms were white. Like us, they were halfway there.
“Fuck that I’m innocent.” Someone said it.
The Professor explained that we were all there wearing white because we had made a series of decisions that landed us here. Not just one. There was what we did that we were caught and incarcerated for, and then there was all the stuff that we’d done before that that led up to it. E.G. a drug dealer sells a lot of drugs before they’re caught for selling a ten sack of high quality nothing to a broke plain-clothes.
“The reason they keep you locked up in here is so they can protect the streets from you, but also so they can protect you from the streets.” There was a long pause as he waited for our reaction. When none came he trudged onward through our indifference.
“Now I’m going to tell y’all a story about why y’all need to be protected from the streets. It’s about where y’all ’ll end up if you don’t start to change those decisions that got you here.”
His story began with a bone-chilling screech as he wrote four names on the chalkboard behind him.
* * * * * * * * * * *
It started in Detroit in the early nineteen sixties. It was a time when Detroit was called Motown by other cities who said it with a faint hint of jealousy. An inner city neighborhood was plagued by the presence of four juveniles, one of whom would eventually refer to himself in the third person as he stood in front of a checkerboard of juvenile inmates wearing lovely white uniforms.
So these four boys would roam the neighborhood everyday. They got into some trouble here and there. Small time stuff, better described as shenanigans than crimes. But this was Motown baby, where small time leads to big time in the turn of an engine.
They were inseparable, like peas in a pod. Dr. Martin, DeShawn, Tyrone, and Taylor. Tyrone and Taylor were identical twins. You couldn’t tell the two apart, even if you asked them, because they were liars. Liars like their father, who told their mother he wouldn’t abandon her.
Time rolled along like a Cadillac down an assembly line.
The four friends gradually parted ways. By the time they were fourteen only two of them were still in school. The two brothers had dropped out because no one cared if they went to school. Their crimes like their clothing grew in size. They started hanging out with a gang and using drugs. They roamed the streets like they were vikings, more pillagers than thieves. Hoodlums. Smashing and grabbing their way to that next blissful injection.
DeShawn was always a hot head. He learned to channel this trait appropriately. He was a small time prodigy in a boxing gym by his house and that kept him off the streets. He never really had time to pursue a career as a boxer though. He was drafted into the army after high school. Cannon fodder. He was sent to the jungles of Vietnam.
Dr. Martin was the lucky one. He came from a family in which he was not allowed to dine until his homework and chores were finished. He was top of his High School class. He was class president. He was the captain of his track team to boot. He received a scholarship that got him out of the draft and into the University of Someplace Decent. He left his neighborhood and didn’t return for years.
He didn’t hear the stories of his ill-fated friends until after the fact.
DeShawn came back from Vietnam a decorated war hero. It was easy for him to get a gig working for one of the Big Three in Motown. When he started boxing again he discovered that he was better than when he left. He was on his way to the big times until his famous temper landed him in the big house.
So a boxer walks into a bar…sits down orders a drink. And this beautiful blonde chick walks in through the door. This guy sitting next to the boxer says something to the effect of: “Hey look at that white chick. Fuck her.”
As it were, the boxer was DeShawn and the blonde bombshell was his recently acquired girlfriend.
It’s funny the way things work out sometimes.
So the two start to argue. Argument escalates to scuffle. Scuffle becomes:
“Holy shit, DeShawn! You just sliced that guy’s throat open with a broken bottle! You’ve only been home for six weeks, and you will be arrested tonight and go to prison. After three years in prison someone will stab you to death.”
He didn’t tell the story like a joke, but if he had the punch line would have been: “So it goes.”
Tyrone and his duplicate Taylor started using heroine when they were in high school. Or should I say when they were not in high school. Soon after the time that they would have graduated they started working for a local drug lord. They were essentially serfs of this lord, pushing H at his behest on a meager fief. The terms were absolute loyalty in exchange for meager earnings.
They were treacherous men, however, and they thought they were smarter than the average bear. They started pinching from their allotted product.
When their boss inevitably became suspicious, he tested the duo with a batch of tainted heroine. He laced it with the rust that accumulates around the terminals of a car battery when it ages and gave it to Tyrone.
That night Taylor lovingly injected his brother with battery acid.
Taylor was fucked. He didn’t even make it to his brother’s funeral. He was found in an alley one morning with a pillowcase over his head and two bullets shot unceremoniously into it.
* * * * * * * * * * *
“Is there a John C--- here?”
I looked for the speaker of my name and I saw that it was a lovely looking lady wearing a dressy black skirt and a white blouse.
“Call me Jack.”
“You wanna come with me Jack?” She said it with a toothy smile.
I got up and started to follow her out of the room.
“You gettin’ out?” Someone said it.
“I donknow.” I said hopefully. I didn’t have any wood to knock on.
Dr. Martin continued with his spiel.
“Now it aint too late for you youngbloods, but that, as y’all just heard, can change in the pound of a piston. So y’all gotta change now’s what I’m sayin’. Y’all gotta open that door to change. No one else can open it for you. You gotta open it for yourself”
* * * * * * * * * * *
I checked out her ass while she led me down the hallway into some little room on the left. I was all excited because I thought I was about to get out of this hellhole, and that this gray skirted angel was to deliver me from it. Like she was some kind of heroine.
“My name is something or other.” She introduced herself. “I’m a social worker here at the Kent County Whatever. I brought you here because we try to give all of our inmates a chance to talk to a social worker about concerns, blah blah blah…”
“I just thought I’d get your hopes up by pulling you out of class and then tell you that I just want to talk about how you’re obviously feeling low because you’re incarcerated. How do you feel right now? Miffed? Teased? Do you feel like this is a waste of time? Are you too arrogant and ashamed to talk about yourself honestly? Does your arrogance conceal a deeper self loathing? Do you project this self loathing and your present irritation onto me and onto others? Me, in my black and white? Others, who wear other colors?”
“Jesus Christ lady.”
I felt teased and cheated. I was irritated. I was miffed.
I didn’t feel like talking.
“There’s no need for that kind of language.” She said, appalled. “If you don’t want to stay here, the door is right there.”
“Fine.” I said it standing up.
I stood in front of the door and waited for her to radio in some greek.
“It’s not locked. You can open it…(pause)”
No one else can open it for you.
So open it, Jack.
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