>< >< ><
He went the whole day without saying a word to anyone.
The friction of his rampaging thoughts was enough to make him tired and burnt-out, even though he did basically nothing all day, except some light reading and surreptitious “lights-out” jerking off. He wanted to get caught and punished for jerking off, so all his righteous indignation could be transferred to the worthy cause of advocating for the human right to self-pleasure. Then people would pay attention to him and congratulate him for his advocacy, tell him they had no idea he was so passionate and articulate. He was like a little wind-up toy, stuck in the corner, looking for a way to turn himself around.
He was bored, and was content with being boring for others. Let them experience a bit of this.
>< >< ><
The next day, he spoke to someone, a guard, a correctional officer maybe, he couldn’t remember, but that person told him he’d been approved for early release. He’d be out in twenty-eight days. Oh, shit. He became instantly nostalgic for all those boring days in jail. There was something cozy about how boring those days had been, something safely soporific, like a dull headache and a warm blanket. He’d never been raped in jail, never really been fucked with, just stayed by himself in his minimum-security prison with his fellow first-timers and minor drug dealers and nobodies.
Who would he live with once he was released? What would he do?
He’d have to call his mother. Fuck.
He looked around his little cell, which he had to himself. There was a toilet in the right corner, a bare bed to his left, a shelf with an alarm clock and some books. He didn’t know how big the cell was, the square footage or anything like that. He wasn’t good at that shit. Everyone assumed Puerto Ricans knew handy-shit — how to fix cars or build stuff — but he never knew any of that. If someone told him that method X was the right way to build Y, and method X had been used, Vernon would eyeball it or make a face suggesting he was familiar with the method proposed and found it satisfactory.
>< >< ><
Vernon resolved to talk to someone today. Not communicate with someone, which he did daily with his wispy head nods, but actually talk to someone. He had some acquaintances he could hang out with, all Hispanic, darker-skinned Puerto Ricans and objectively dark-skinned Dominicans.
There were three of his pals at the table, eating chicken fingers and mac-and-cheese. There was Manny, stout little dark-skinned Manny from Mexico (Mexico, was it?); Hector, a bald, skinny, relatively lighter-skinned Puerto Rican with heavy creases around his mouth, as if he were a three-dimensional model made out of paper; and Frank, a skinny Puerto Rican of no real distinction. Both Hector and Frank looked like those too-skinny hustlers you always find on an uptown 6 train, talking too loudly about pussy or a hustle or ‘dis nigga said dat’ or something of the sort. Manny looked like the beefy dishwasher you catch out of the corner of your eye at some undistinguished local restaurant, that 5 foot 2 good-natured Mexican guy who points you in the direction of the bathroom who you then instantly forget about. When Vernon was out of jail, he’d never be able to I.D. Manny out of a line-up; the only thing he’d remember about Manny was how he felt bad about not being able to remember anything about him.
“’Sup Vernon,” greeted Hector.
“Not much. Getting out of here soon, if you didn’t hear. About a month.”
“Word? Good to hear, man. Don’t be getting yourself back up in here anytime soon. Rebuild your life out there.”
“Yeah,” he nodded. Anytime anyone says they are leaving, every other inmate turns into Oprah. Providing well-meaning but clichéd advice is the only temporary salvation anybody seems to seek in here. It’s the easiest box to check off on the list of good deeds.
“No seriously man, I mean it. Look at me, man, I’m in here for fucking some dumb bullshit, black tar, stupid shit, I never even did it. I was fucking just ferrying it for some nigga cross-town. Not even fuckin’ cross-town nigga, it was fucking, I took a bus from Park Avenue out to Second Avenue, shit fell out of my fucking pocket. Fucking stupid kid shit, man. Point is, I guess, is no matter what, don’t do no stupid shit anymore, no matter how little you think it is.”
Crackhead Frank nodded solemnly. Manny was inscrutable as always, like a thought never passed through his squat, beefy head.
“Word, I’m gonna be on the up-and-up, for real. I’ll see you on the outside.” Other inmates loved hearing that: see you on the outside, like they were all going to make it out.
“Knock on wood,” Hector added, indeed, knocking on the wood table. That’s another thing all these inmates seemed to share, some stupid belief in fate or mysticism or something. That way, they could all believe their incarceration was inevitably leading to some kind of redemption, like this was all some great big plan and not the insignificant bullshit of a bunch of impoverished nobodies. They were ledgers on a crime report, a check-mark on the C.O.’s daily log, a bit of annoying doggerel scrubbed out and forgotten about.
Nothing creates meaning like punishment. No priest or preacher in the world lived the concept of redemption like these sad fucks. All of them. Even the big bad tough guys, the hardcore guys, the guys who pretended not to give a shit. Redemption became more than a narrative with these people, it became something almost physical; you could see it if you looked, the way their heads were always nodding anytime someone spoke the Good Word (or something presented with the gravitas of the Good Word). They would even nod their heads before any of the Good Word was spoken: just participating in a public act associated with redemption and transcendence was enough to set them off, everyone vying to agree and extol the hardest, to be the most sincere, to be the most dedicated. Unnoticed competitions would ensue, where one inmate would demonstrate his sincere desire to change his ways by nodding like a happy parrot and yelling “Amen” whenever the speaker’s pitch got dramatic, only to be one-upped by someone who’d complement his “Amen” with a hand-clap, until a little passive-aggressive war of escalated woops and jeers and holy ghost conversions took place, two people not just being redeemed, but being the fucking best at redemption.
It was stupid, Vernon knew. But still, be polite … .
“Word, knock on that wood for me.”
“Will do man, for you, will do,” Hector added, “for you man, for you.”
Vernon mentally rolled his eyes at Hector’s melodrama and walked to the cafeteria door to head back to his cell.
What should he do upon his release? Maybe get a tattoo. But why? Having a tattoo was like adding value that couldn’t be taken away. You could be penniless and on-the-street, a complete piece of shit, but you still have that tattoo. When you were dead, and some stranger looked at your dead carcass — your dead nobody carcass, now even more of a nobody, literally a nobody — well, they will see that tattoo. That’s something added. Value added.
Or maybe a cowboy hat? Anytime Vernon had seen some guy with a cowboy hat, he thought, man, that guy probably isn’t ever bored. A guy with a cowboy hat looks like someone going somewhere. A cowboy hat provides context. Even if you’re bored doing nothing, sitting in a lonesome bar, well, with a cowboy hat, you’re a mysterious drifter, a brooding bad-ass. Well, maybe, but a Puerto Rican with a—
Something wrong sliced into his left ear and cascaded off the left side of his face. His ear burned, inflamed, but it was a cold heat, like the life had been drawn out of it.
He turned around hard on his right, and saw a thin black man he didn’t recognize. Well, he did recognize him, sort of. He recognized this guy as that guy he could never get a bead on. The man was so dark he was like the Alien creature, so dark you couldn’t see his eyes, which he kept at half-lid, no visible whites. This man was thin but tough, wiry, average height, maybe 5’7”, 5’8”, close-cropped hair, close-cropped everything. If this guy was out in the streets of East Harlem, he would be the hanger-on outside some head shop or barber shop, chew
ing gum, eyeing everyone but not really focusing, all tight, all coiled. And now he was uncoiling, holding some kind of something, something hard and seemingly metal.
It was a plate tray of some kind; but while all the plate trays Vernon ever saw had been plastic, this one was gleaming and silver.
They squared off at each other, maybe a foot or two away. Vernon hoped mystery-man would move first. Vernon didn’t really know how to throw a punch and knew he could only get away with that in close quarters.
He needn’t worry. Abdul — the man’s name was Abdul, Vernon suddenly remembered — roared forward, both hands swinging the tray like a pro-wrestler with a fold-out chair. Vernon barreled forward to meet him, shoulders first, jamming Abdul’s fingers against the tray and lessening its impact. There was a dramatic toppling sound as the tray fell out of sight, which got everyone’s attention. The anarchic sound of the chaos elicited a commensurate roar from the on-looking prisoners.
Vernon found his arm extended — he didn’t even realize he threw a punch — and it connected. Technically. It connected in the sense that his arm extended until it ran a dead-stop into something, but there was no force there. No connection there, no depth. His arm and fist were like a middle-school teacher’s chalkboard pointer.
Vernon suddenly got very nervous.
Now Vernon had his arms wrapped around Abdul, as if to shake him. Abdul kidney-punched him hard, fast, and repeatedly. Four or five punches landed before Vernon figured out where the pain came from.
Vernon bellowed, more out of frustration than anything, and with a quick fit of inspiration leveraged his greater weight to pile-drive Abdul into the nearest table. The mass of watching men moved around them like an amoeba around an acquired pellet.
Vernon had his arms wrapped tight around his skinnier aggressor, his forehead under Abdul’s chin, nuzzling hard, jutting hard, hoping to strike Abdul’s Adam’s apple or jaw. When he could, he’d loosen his grip and hammer blows with his left hand, or throw little ineffectual punches to Abdul’s midsection. Mainly, Vernon was just trying to smother him. Fantastically, he pictured there being nothing visible but Abdul’s flailing arms tapping him on the back. Like a little boy seeing if his playmate had had “enough,” Vernon arched his back to get a better look at his opponent. Somewhere, somehow, he planned on raining down a torrent of calculated knee strikes, but that never happened.
His sense of sight must have been elsewhere because Abdul’s spindly claw lodged itself somewhere wet, somewhere unwelcome, and Vernon’s eye flooded with the sharp sting of blood and sweat. A crushing palm jammed up his jaw and caused his tongue to mesh through his teeth.
And then he was on his back and the prison guards, playing hockey referee, decided this was enough and jerked them away from each other, hard. They both sprang back like they were on bungee cords.
“You fucking punk bitch!” Vernon yelled, more indignant than angry. Why the fuck did this asshole attack him? Abdul wasn’t responding in any way to being dragged off; he just contorted and sagged wherever he was being dragged. Abdul kept his mouth shut and his demeanor unknowable, face stolid, like nothing had changed, head down, just back to the grind.
“Fucking bitch, fucking scratching little bitch. What fucking faggot scratches a nigga?” If any of his old friends had been around, they would have known Vernon was pissed (and not just by his tone): he rarely said ‘nigga.’
>< >< ><
Back in his cell, Vernon nursed his wounds dramatically. Shit stung. Fucking low blow.
The guards had seen from the outset that he’d hadn’t started it. They’d placed him in his cell brusquely and without respect, and gave him some curt order to stay put. That was C.O. speak for we know you didn’t do anything wrong, but just shut the fuck up, anyway.
“Camacho, mail. First your own suite, now full-service mail delivery.” That was Tony, the big jovial black prison guard. He always said flip shit like that. It seemed that if a black guy became too fat, he had to become nice. And jovial fat black Tony was nice. The fat creases around his eyes and those weird skin rolls made him look like a dog of some kind, some obese black Shar Pei. When Tony was walking behind you, that shit felt like Indiana Jones running from that boulder.
Tony slid the mail through the bars. It was a typical, plain letter, no return address, addressed to Mr. Vernon Camacho.
“Getting some TLC on your big day. Maybe it’s a fan of your prize fight.”
Vernon eyed the letter and liked thinking about himself as a prize fighter, with a bruised left eye, peering down at a mysterious fan letter, a letter urging him to never give up. Eh, whatever. But he enjoyed neither mysteries nor surprises, and prison wasn’t the place to cultivate an interest in either.
Vernon slid open the letter. Inside was a single page of white, standard computer paper, with four simple, declarative sentences:
You are a rapist. Your son was the product of rape. Your son is dead. We killed him.
Vernon parsed the phrases in his head, again-and-again, to see if the meaning remained the same. Somehow, the dull headache and stinging eye pain still predominated over these mysterious new feelings. But slowly, his headache went from predictable to erratic and then his insides emitted sparks, a veritable electrical storm in his chest. Again, he read the letter. Then again and again.
“Yo, Tony. Tony! Tony! Tone-eeee!’
He lost himself for a moment, somewhere.
“What the fuck is it, man.”
“Who sent this?” Vernon pushed the letter out toward him.
“Shit, how am I supposed to know. You know as much as I do,” Tony responded, dumbstruck. Tony’s brow furrowed and he looked exasperated and somewhat repulsed, as if Vernon had just offered him a blow job. This was an abrupt, unexpected, and unwelcome frivolity, and best dismissed immediately. “What the fuck is this shit, man? A rapist? This shit probably sent to the wrong dude.” Tony’s heart beat faster with thoughts of Vernon bringing a lawsuit for negligent infliction of emotional distress. Tony had to suppress the urge to crumple up the letter and throw it in the trash. But he flipped the envelope and checked again and, indeed, it was addressed to Vernon Camacho.
“Do you even have a son?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Fuck man, you never mentioned a son ….” and then Tony stopped himself, because why should Vernon tell him these things?, and there was an incipient tension in the air, and now it was best to shut up and do something. He gave the letter back to Vernon. “You wait here,” Tony said without thinking, only days later realizing how self-evident that piece of advice was, “I’m going to go, get, talk, to someone.” As Tony hustled out of sight, Vernon sat back down on his bench, staring.
Days later, the following facts were confirmed: Vernon’s five-year old son, Cruz Luong, had been stabbed twice in the back of the head less than a block from P.S. 20, his elementary school, which was located in the neighborhood of Flushing, Queens. The murder had occurred only two days ago. There were no witnesses, no suspects. The only evidence was the two holes in the back of young Cruz Luong’s head: mechanical, emotionless holes, as if they were created by the human equivalent of a paper hole puncher.
As most of the men in prison generally had not left childhood without some sort of scarring — be it mental or physical — an attack on a child, let alone the murder of a child, was a crime for which there was no pardon. The language of equivocation and the insistence on context that prisoners internalized to make sense of the trajectories of their lives was absent where a child was concerned. Where children were concerned, prisoners were the starkest of Manicheans.
Everyone learned about what happened, and everyone was consoling. The guys who had actively disliked Vernon now gave him sympathetic nods; people he was only casually acquainted with consoled him openly; and his actual friends swore to him a blood oath of fidelity that would rival the familismo.
�
�No one deserves that, man, no one,” everyone said — at this moment, it was Tony saying it — and Vernon just nodded without affectation.
So sympathetic were his fellow inmates that none expressed any jealousy when Vernon’s sentence was expedited and commuted to parole. His son’s death and the decision to release him occurred within two days of each other. No one batted an eye.
Between being present with Vernon when he learned the news, and being keenly aware of Vernon’s impending release date, Tony, whenever he was on mail duty, took it upon himself to rhapsodize at length with Vernon, his captive audience. Mailmen out on the street delay their route for a quickie or other mischief; Tony delayed his to play-act psychiatrist.
“And I ain’t ever even see you cry, man. I have two kids, man, two boys, and I can’t even imagine what you are going through. I feel you man, I feel you. I just want you to know, if you bottling all that shit up, man, it’s ok, it’s ok, you got to let that shit out sometime.”
And Vernon just nodded, without affect. There was no point in talking about it. He felt gray and dull, a rainy immutable sky in human form. No one mentioned the reference to rape in the letter, and that was the only line of questioning, Vernon realized, that would wake him from this stupor. It’d leave him stuttering and dissembling, but he’d be awake, at least.
A couple of days before his release, he was given time to take care of some of the prosaic details of his release, i.e. make a few phone calls. Vernon moved with all the vigor of a man whose spine was parallel to the earth.
“Mom?” he asked when he heard the ringing end and the receiver click.
“Vernon.” He heard the edge in her voice already. Well, it wasn’t fair to call it an edge in her voice; it was just her natural timbre. A yappy dog about to go off.
With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer Page 24