I picked up the shank and knifed old boy, driving the tool into his ass flesh. Motherfucker jumped out the way, his face dripping with toilet water. He was blinking, trying to see what happened behind him. He kept blinking and blinking and blinking blindly. I tossed the tool aside and leapt for the toilet. The relief was instant.
Jacq, you remember the scene in Malcolm X where the cops come for Malcolm on larceny charges? He’s at the barbershop, gettin’ his conk. I think Shorty Spike Lee is the one cuttin’ heads, matter fact. Anyway, Denzel’s got lye all in his hair and the shit’s burnin’ like a mug, so he runs into the bathroom and puts his head in the shitter to ease the pain and escape a scalping and whatnot, and then you hear “Nigger, get your head out of the toilet.” It’s the po-lice. Shorty’s cuffed, and in a minute they both ’bout to be in blues. Well, in my situation my head’s in a toilet, too, and it’s COs in gas masks that make they voices sound like Lucifer on lithium screamin’ on me. They barkin’ at me to get my head out the toilet. It’s total chaos. Only difference is that unlike in Malcolm’s day, now behind they masks most of the COs is black and brown dudes from the same hoods that the inmates is from, so nobody calls anybody a nigger.
*
The boy who I knifed in the ass never did figure out who did it to him. The COs never figured it out neither. I made a clean getaway, or as clean and free as you can escape inside a jail. Unfortunately, there was other cats who knew exactly who punched and kicked and stabbed them. Usually, the fights for the toilet bowl was integrated ass kickin’s, but for whatever reason this one broke down along gang lines. The consequences and repercussions wadn’t confined to prison walls but instead made it back to the streets, where the aftermath went on for a long minute afterward. I was locked up at the time so I only heard tale about the street violence, but it didn’t take long for the results to show up in Youth Control—beaucoup new prisoners, casualties of the gang wars. Combined with the influx of white boys from Larry’s world, the facility got real crowded real quick.
*
“Copeland Cane, you are depressed, and as a result you are becoming violent and lawless,” Masterkov spake and spoke and stated and shit from behind her desk inside her great office. This time there was no DeMichael around to help her forget I existed. “Your fight resulted in a full-fledged prison riot. Someone could have been killed. Several boys were injured. This is not good. It is a definite infraction. It’s a sign that the antiauthority tendencies that landed you in this situation in the first place are beginning to reemerge. It would be a shame if you went down the police-hating *8:46 rabbit hole. Speaking of challenging authority, we’ve learned that your name has been included as a complainant in an inquiry into declassified information about a Bay Area environmental issue under the Freedom of Information Act. Do you know anything about this?”
“Declassified information?”
“It’s information that’s no longer classified. Anyway, that solves that. It’s probably some kind of class action crap that’s got nothing to do with you. Why would you be interested in the environment? Black people don’t care about their environment. Too abstract. You care about getting out of here, right?”
I mean, that shit was racist as fuck, but she had me scoped out. I nodded.
“Copeland, we won’t file charges against you for the fight. That wouldn’t help anyone. While this place has certainly built you up physically, which is a handsome thing, nevertheless current research and political trends recognize the fallacy in locking young offenders up for long bids. It’s just not productive. We need to find a better way to rehabilitate our youth offenders instead of simply punishing them for the sake of punishment. If society is ever to return to the safety enjoyed before the radical movements, we need to readopt the rehabilitative methods of the past, enhanced by modern science, of course, which is why medicinal intervention is so important. For decades, the State of California neglected its mentally ill. And what’s resulted? Beggars, panhandlers, madmen, roam our streets and crowd our jail cells. The state is an utter disgrace. No longer. The Youth Control will end this outrage.”
One second I was thinkin’ how I just needed to stay silent and ride this lecture on out, the next second I had zero control of my tongue. The humble church mouse child who always abided his daddy’s golden rule not to speak unless told to was replaced by a mouth that told Masterkov, “I’m sorry, I—I—I didn’t wanna fight. I was just depressed. My daddy had me on task my whole life, and then one day he let me off leash and I seen this mold, which became my fixation, the new ghetto flu. I seen that this was just the latest way to poison us to get rid of us, so I knew I had to get rid of the poison instead. Ain’t know that the poison wadn’t in the mold, it was in man. Y’all put me on the island, y’all the real ghetto flu.” I was an open book. You couldn’ta shut me up with my Miranda rights. If they add shooting Trump and killing the Kennedys to the accusations against me, you’ll know why.
“Dynamic risk assessment and confession are complete. You are not a threat. We are done here,” Masterkov said, drumming her fingers on her desk.
I cállated, kinda. Kept my mouth shut long enough to let her let me go. But whatever K2K and crack chemistry them fools dosed me with hit me hella hard, and the shit must stay in your system for a lifetime, cuz once I did come out of it, and on to this day, I cain’t keep quiet to save my life. Anyway, the COs hustled me back to my cell, where I tossed myself onto my bunk like a sack of rocks and, Jacq, I fell deep asleep. Then I was falling and falling, crashing down levels of darkness. The dream came to rest in a burst of breath and a splash of light: I could see Daddy’s black suit and the empty coffin. I looked at them floating there, so close I could touch them, tear them, break them. Then I knew I would one day bury my old man, and hell if I ain’t start falling again. I fell face-first, my arms straitjacket style at my sides. A layer of landfill, dumpster trash, smoked-out fireworks, dog shit, human shit, old hanging cables, nylons, condoms, stained towels, napkins, bottles broken jagged enough to slice your neck, fire-scarred facades, and hazard tape, all in one big skim, appeared before me and I crashed thru it. I came out the other end with some woman’s stocking stuck to my face, a thick cable noosed around my neck, and wearing an old man’s dirty drawers. This was the dangerest, nastiest shit ever. How was it a superhero could go down like this? I kept falling. I knew I had to save myself. I wanted to save somethin’. The landfill flew toward me—or, correction, I flew toward it—and it seemed like if I hit it then it would be all bad for me, but I kept falling and falling, and then right when I was ’bout to meet that trash heap, have this spine of mines redesigned, I spieled out my superpowers one last, last time and hit a super swerve: I one-eighty’d and spun my ass back the other way, g-forces like a mug. Going up and up the other way, I avoided all that mess below.
As I flew, I peeled the nylon off my face, I tore the noose from around my neck, and I shook myself like a wet dog shakes itself clean, which got rid of them drawers. Everything fell away from me super clean, and I came back to the surface of the earth. I lay in my bunk in the dark with my eyes closed.
“Cope,” a voice cooed, its tone healing as honey. “Lawrence Summerfield, the children at Treasure Island, your nemeses in the Youth Control, your friend DeMichael Bradley, whom we’ve been working with for years, with admittedly limited success, and the *8:46 movement, which I suspect you have sympathies with. All these negative influences. You can do better than them, Copeland. You can do better than them because you are better than them. You just need to give in.”
I opened my eyes the way you do after you done slept dead off for what feels like forever. One eyelash at a time. The drugs hung hella heavy on my eyelids, but eventually I managed to see Masterkov’s face above me. She was sittin’ on my chest like a heavy-ass angel.
“Give in,” she said. “Give in.”
The bed grew warmer and softer with every word she spoke. I melted into its opiate embrace. My tired body found peace, my mind found pea
ce underneath her voice, and my breath came slower and slower as her weight on my chest took my breath.
“Give in. Give in. Give in. You are better than those other boys.”
I felt my chest sink under her weight. It did not rise again, but stayed sunken. I could breathe, but only real, real shallow. I felt the drugs taking me deeper under. I tried to pray them off my chest. I tried to pray her ass off my chest. But her spirit worked under my skin and sank hard into my heart, and I had to pray that much harder just to breathe.
They put it on me somethin’ ferocious. Had me drugged to where I barely wanted to live. But you know the hero of the story cain’t just die like that, not when you know he’s still got shit to do ’fore he disappears. Maybe I reminded myself that I was my own superhero, even if I wadn’t no one else’s. Maybe that little notion allowed me to survive the Youth Control. But I wadn’t thinkin’ straight back then, couldn’t even breathe with old girl on my chest like that, so I cain’t call it …
*
Whatever that mess was they put in my water, it took me down bad and stayed keeping me down for days. I retreated, went back to my cell, my bedroll and book, and I tried to read, tried like hell, but the book and me wadn’t on speaking terms no more, and that reality alone put fear into me. Afraid of what was happening to my mind, I kept my mouth closed and spoke only to myself for seven days and seven nights.
I recall like a bell rung clear in the dark the letter Momma sent me during that time. From Oakland, she wrote that Daddy’s old lady in L.A. had sent a newspaper clipping and a photograph tucked in a manila envelope to our home. The news piece announced that the body of Daddy’s estranged eldest son had been located deceased in one of the homeless camps that littered the city. The toxicology would take weeks to report, but the camp where he was found was known as an open-air drug market filled with the mentally ill, the formerly incarcerated. Overdoses was common as colds. He was your half brother, Momma wrote. When Daddy got the news, she reported, he just waved it away, said he wadn’t gonna talk about it, that he would find the money and travel down for the funeral by hisself, that his son’s addiction and estrangement was a long story without no real answers, just lotsa issues. I think Momma knew not to press him on it no further. It wadn’t really her business, nor mines, she wrote. Daddy wadn’t no deadbeat. He had fulfilled his financial obligations to this son, who was over eighteen years of age. An adult by law, at least.
The photograph his mother sent was cut from some other source, maybe a school yearbook, maybe a family picture. I thought about the woman cutting herself out the picture and sending the remains to our home. The dead young man was just a normal-lookin’ young man with thin but broad shoulders, like mines, big starving eyes on a hard dark face, like mines. He was the color of shadows. He looked like me. Our uneven crew cuts was the same, our strong jaw was the same jaw, his face was my face just a few years’ maturity and substance abuse apart, but the brother couldn’t haunt me if his ghost tried. I did not know him from Adam. His image only made me want to know the man who connected us across time and blood and death. It was so much I wanted to ask Daddy, so many questions knockin’ at my teeth that I couldn’t speak. I wanted to know about his life before my life, all the years he had piled up on the earth without ever finding the trouble his sons couldn’t stay away from. Obstinate and against the grain as that man was, how was it he had managed to keep hisself outta trouble? How was it he never taught his children that same common sense? But I never did ask. I knew I would have to sort that out on my own time, on my own terms. My questions wadn’t innocent little things. They threatened our whole family structure. I wanted to know why I had been raised as his little soldier, why I was brought into the world fighting, and what it was I was supposed to win. Mostly, I wanted to know him. I figured if I just knew him, the rest would make sense. But I didn’t know him, not really, not at all. Who was he? How did he hold love and obligation for all of us, and why was his love so peculiar, parsed out like relief money if the relief only came when you ain’t really need it? I imagined sweat cuttin’ roads down his bald head, down the sides of his face, and the muscle between his thumb and forefinger bulging up and down on rhythm like a heartbeat exposed to the world.
*
Time passed. Larry, who loved nature, got hisself transferred to the firefighting unit, where inmates traveled around the state with real firefighting crews and battled the blazes that turnt California’s mountains and woods into bacon year-round. I won’t lie, I was jealous: Larry was gonna learn real fire science skills if he didn’t get burnt up in the educational process. He would come outta jail with a chance to be a fully paid fireman.
“I can get a fresh start in the world,” he told me ’fore he left.
Another complexion-related compensation, I thought.
Talkin’ to the same boy every day for almost a year accustoms y’all to each other’s thoughts and ways. Larry knew where my head was at literally and symbolically. “It’s not your race, man, it’s your record as an arsonist: arsonists can’t be firefighters. That’s why you need to fight your case and show that you were trying to do the right thing. Your heart was in the right place. Hell, Cope, you tried to save your apartment complex from mold damage. You’re an environmentalist, damn near.”
I wadn’t no environmentalist. I hated my environment. And I didn’t think fighting my conviction would do anything but scare the authorities into thinking I wanted to resurrect *8:46 from the ashes. Better to lay low and tranquilo. I turnt over in my bed and put my face in my pillow. Even though Larry was on the lower bunk and couldn’t see me, I knew he knew by the sound of my movement that my mind was made up about folks having they mind made up about me.
The cell went quiet, which wadn’t unusual. We lapsed in and outta conversation without any pattern or apology and would just start talkin’ again whenever the spirit struck us.
“I’m the same as you,” I said after a while, turning back over and unmuffling my mouth. “I’m a product of my environment just like you are of yours. My record is a product of my fuckin’ environment. The only difference between us is my conviction.”
“You ain’t lying about that, brother,” Larry conceded.
Then he was gone.
*
Due to not murdering nobody, I was soon transferred to a low-security detention center. Larry was in my rearview. DeMichael, too—too big to move. At the new facility, they stopped giving me crew cuts. My Afro came back, half Congo jungle, half Sahara desert. My depression diagnosis disappeared. Things got easier for me. It helped that everyone at the new facility was an actual child. Also, compared to the other jail, this place was not really a jail. On a piece of gated farmland, we lived in these long old shotgun shacks in rooms that everyone called “cells” but that were really just rooms like you’d find in a janky old house. We moved freer, too, tasked with chores to keep the facility running and hella “walking time,” where we could socialize outside just so long as we didn’t start nothin’ nefarious.
In this re-laxed setup, I used my newfound talkativeness to keep myself on everybody’s good side. Being incarcerated is not fun. People liked me cuz I was quick with my wit, always having funny observations about this and that, determined not to let our universal undiagnosed depression get us too down. That wit and determination, along with the way my body was bricking up, made me much less of a mark.
As my time ticked away and freedom came upon me like a brightening shadow, I felt a new kinda uneasiness. Brothers on probation will tell you that when they time is ’bout to be up and any little slip-up can have you violated and sent back to square one, you clinch yourself up in unaccountable ways. I started to notice little things, like the auras of white light that an early-morning sunshine will throw against uncurtained glass, calling you from your dreams with a suddenness that just opening your eyes never will.
I returned to my reading. Books and more books: The Talented Tenth and Sister Carrie, Mrs. Dalloway and Black Boy, Anoth
er Country and The Sellout. These stories spoke to me. I listened as I read, which don’t even make sense, but hear me out: as I read, I heard how these writers built sentences, stirring and holding a cadence like a preacher; how they found the riffs and rhythms between the lines and ran with symbols and metaphors for days like the bridges in a song. I could see myself in the characters again, and again I thought about what I would do if I was faced with what they was faced with based on what I knew and what I had lived thru. I could see myself in Miguel, too, when one day he appeared straight out the blue.
*
At first, me and pretty boy just exchanged a few black nods, even though blood was mixed Mexican, Puerto Rican, Tongan, which makes him hella POC but only exactly 28.275 percent black.* The nod was just a way of sayin’, What up, Rockwood, without the words. It was also a way of us lettin’ each other know we knew the deal: a run-in with the law, Treasure Island day school, a run-in with the judge, and now baby-boy prison. Everybody’s story was the same story.
I had always liked and admired Miguel. From genesis, we had spent time hanging out at the barbershop listening to men talk, and from them we constructed speech, learnt language, and got game. He had always had much more game than me, was flyer, flashier, and smoother with girls. He hustled, too. Had to. His fam was the type where both Momma and Daddy was liable to get laid off whenever the ghetto flu swept thru and the mayor closed the restaurants and choked off low-level labor. In the Bay don’t nobody give a fuck about you if you’re poor. Miguel’s folks got laid off a lot. I guess the man of the house got tired of that shit and took one deportation chance too many, got locked up, sent back, and after that it was just my boy and his momma making ends stretch (and ain’t met yet). Miguel had been hustlin’ since Oakland was black, been sold fabrics, oils, weed, pills, whatever he could get his hands on and turn a profit. My situation was never as hard as his, so I never had to hustle like he had to. Was never about that life. But my life had gone thru changes; I had gone thru changes. We needed to speak, me and him.
The Confession of Copeland Cane Page 10