“Okay. Sorry, Mr. E.”
“Wilfred?” says Mr. E to get us back on track.
“I throw down, mister. Nobody step on my Jordans.” He slaps the back of one extra large hand against the palm of the other for emphasis.
Levon eggs him on. “You git him, Wilfred!”
Wilfred looks angry and fired up, like he’s really on the streets in his newly scuffed Jordans. He stands and starts a slow, loose shadowboxing sequence with his giant half-closed fists. “You know I will, Levon! That’s just me doing me, you know what I mean?”
Hooting and cheering ring out, and it takes a while for Mr. E and Samson to settle everyone down. In a moment Wilfred remembers where he is; he looks around, embarrassed, then takes his seat.
“Okay. Now imagine that you’ve just been released. You’re on aftercare, and probation. And your family needs you at home to help out. So if you get in a fight with this dude, it’s back to lockup. And the folks who are counting on you will be sad and disappointed.”
Everyone groans with the difficulty of this twist.
“Well, how about it?”
“That ain’t fair,” Antwon says.
“You set it up!” says Levon.
“Yo, that’s messed up!” Double X says.
Before we’re dismissed for free time, Mr. E says, “I want you all to think about it for a few days, and then I want to hear your answers.”
33
After group, Samson asks Freddie and me to stay back. “Either of you know what I want to talk to you about?”
We look at each other, shaking our heads.
“We had a treatment team meeting yesterday and scored your behavior checklists. Congratulations. You both got your A-Stage.”
A-Stage, or “Adjustment Stage,” is what you can get after three weeks of good days. To go home, you have to earn Transition Stage. You also need a positive home assessment, which means there’s enough room for you in the apartment, food in the fridge, etc. Honors is the highest stage, but Tony was the only resident in the last two years to earn it.
Samson hands us a folder that’s filled with take-out menus for pizza, Chinese food, and subs. “This Friday is Stage Night,” he says. “If you guys have enough money from chores and want to order out, write it down and I’ll take care of it. And decide what you want to do after. We can watch a movie, go to the gym, whatever. Until someone else gets it together and earns their stage, it’s just the three of us.”
On our way back to the unit, Samson says, “You guys are doing a good job. Keep it up and you’ll be going home soon.”
Freddie and I pore over the menus during free time. We weigh the merits of pizza and wings versus chicken Parmesan subs versus egg rolls and shrimp lo mein. Freddie is obsessed with food and talks forever about the best restaurants in Harlem.
“There’s this one place,” he says, “where they got these things called bento boxes that have little compartments filled with different kinds of Chinese foods, like tempura vegetables, and sushi rolls, and teriyaki chicken and shit. You have to eat it all with chopsticks, which is harder than it looks, but I’m good at it.”
He gets this far-off dreamy look on his face, but he says, “I like Asian food, but it don’t fill you up like plain old pizza and wings.”
“Okay,” I say. “We’ll have that.”
“Cool. You like Hawaiian pizza? I love that shit. We can get a large Hawaiian pizza; that’s four big slices each, and then three or four dozen wings. How many wings you eat?”
“Hawaiian pizza’s disgusting,” I say. “How about sausage and pepperoni?”
“With black olives?”
We shake on the deal, forgetting for a moment that in Morton residents can’t shake hands, bump fists, hug, horseplay, or have any other kind of physical contact with each other. It says so on the first page of the resident handbook and is followed by a list of consequences including a formal write-up and temporary loss of privileges. Maybe we forget because the guards have been preoccupied with the baseball game that is on TV, or maybe it’s because we’re having fun for a minute, feeling like normal kids instead of criminals. But right away Horvath’s voice booms across the unit floor.
“Why are you two touching each other?” he says.
The room gets cold, and I can feel the eyes of the other boys on Freddie and me. Coty and Double X are pointing, whispering. Antwon mouths the word homo.
“We wasn’t,” says Freddie. “We was just shaking hands ’cause—”
“Save it,” Horvath says. “Nobody wants to hear the details, so just keep your perversions to yourself.”
Now the whole unit is laughing. Horvath is laughing, too. “You two can be special friends at home if you want, but not on my unit. Got it?”
I am turning deep red from embarrassment, but I can’t help it. Freddie puts his hands palms-down on the table and breathes slowly, trying to keep calm. I know that I have nothing to be ashamed of, that we’re not special friends, but the shame burns through me nonetheless. It’s crazy, but I feel totally guilty, like I’ve been caught doing something bad.
“I got it,” I say.
“Good,” says Horvath. “Now how about you, Peachy?”
He hesitates just enough to let Horvath know that he’s got some fight in him, that he’s not going to play along so easily because Horvath has a uniform and keys. Finally he says, “I got it.”
And we are spared the disgrace of losing our stages only minutes after getting them. Horvath appears satisfied, or maybe just more interested in the game. He grunts and returns to the TV.
34
At dinner on Friday (spaghetti and meatballs with buttered white bread) Antwon lines up behind me at the counter. “Yo,” he says. “Now that your spic big brother ain’t here, we gonna have that talk.”
“Okay,” I say. “No problem.” But I have no idea what to do. I can put him off for another day or two, but sooner or later I’ll have to deal with it. Gratefully, Samson pulls Freddie and me from the line and takes us for Stage Night.
“Did you two fools forget?” he says.
“No way,” says Freddie. “I didn’t eat none of that nasty spaghetti, ’cause I know we’re havin’ the good stuff.”
“That’s right,” says Samson. “You thought about what you want to do for an activity?”
“Let James pick,” Freddie says. “All I care about is eatin’.”
Samson raises an eyebrow, waiting.
“Can you show me how to lift weights?”
“Absolutely,” he says. “Come on.”
We spend the next hour in the weight room. Freddie sits on the exercise bike and watches television while Samson starts me out on the bench press. He shows me how to grip the bar and plant my feet flat on the ground. He tells me how to breathe the right way, exhaling when I push the weight up.
“Okay,” he says. “See if you can do fifteen using just the bar. It weighs forty-five pounds.”
It’s easy at first, but toward the end my arms get weak and shaky. After a short rest he puts twenty pounds on each side. “Do as many as you can,” he says. I make it to five before my chest and arms are burning with fatigue. He has me finish up with fifteen more using just the bar.
“How do you feel?” he says.
“Weak.”
“Yeah, but aside from that, how do you feel?”
“Pretty good. Like I’m doing something good for myself.” I can’t help smiling, because it’s true.
Samson puts his hand on my shoulder and says, “That’s right. You did do something good for yourself.”
Then he shows me how to do squats for my legs, dips for my triceps, and two different kinds of curls for biceps. “I’ll work with you every Friday,” he says, “so long as you keep your stage. Any questions?”
“You think I can get stronger?”
“Absolutely,” he says. “You’ll see.”
We finish the night eating take-out pizza and Buffalo wings. Freddie devours an entire piece of pi
zza in two bites. The wings he eats whole, pulling clean bones from his mouth. Soon there’s a small pile of them.
“Damn,” Samson says. “You’re a professional, Freddie!”
But Freddie doesn’t even slow down long enough to smile, or to wipe the hot sauce smeared on his face. One of the lenses of his glasses sports a fingerprint of grease. I think back to the van ride from court, how his nice white shirt was covered with food stains. As I watch him polish off the rest of the wings and all of the celery and blue cheese, I realize that he’s doing something he truly loves. He smiles placidly as he sits back in his chair and sighs.
“My fat ass is finally happy,” he says. “Thank you, Samson.”
“Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”
But he shrugs it off as though giving Freddie his best meal in months is no big deal. As though teaching me how to get strong isn’t the thing I’ve wanted from my big brother, Louis, for so long.
Later, in bed, my arms and chest and legs are warm with the mild burn of my workout. It feels good, and I drift off to sleep easily, almost peacefully, for the moment forgetting all about Antwon and his boys.
35
After school we grab our Walter Mosley books and sit in a circle. Mr. Eboue and Samson sit with us.
“You guys are reading, right?” says Wilfred.
“I’ll read,” says Samson. “But today I want one of you to do Darryl’s part. You up for it, Wilfred? It’s just a few lines.”
“No disrespect, Mr. Samson, but I don’t read like that, out loud. I just want to hear about Socrates.”
Antwon, Double X, and Bobby mutter that they won’t read, either.
“Somebody’s got to step up,” says Mr. Eboue. “Who’s feeling brave today?”
I raise my hand.
“Good man,” says Mr. Eboue. We start reading this chapter called “Lessons,” where Darryl fights a gangbanger named Philip who’s been after him at school. Darryl puts up a good fight, but in the end, Philip has him pinned to the ground with a .45 automatic. Around me the boys seem to love the action, especially when Socrates sneaks up on Philip’s friends and slaps them so hard on the backs of their heads that they fall down and drop their weapons. Double X laughs out loud when Philip calls Darryl “pussy boy.”
“He is a pussy boy,” says Antwon, looking right at me. Samson holds up a finger and moves it slowly back and forth. Antwon sucks his teeth, but looks down at his book.
Samson reads the part where after the fight, Socrates says, “ ‘You stood up for yourself, Darryl … that’s all a black man could do. You always outnumbered, you always outgunned.’ ”
And even though Samson’s reading from a book, it feels like he’s really speaking to me. I’m not a black man, and I haven’t fought anyone, but I still feel proud, because Samson is someone I respect. Maybe one day I’ll hear those words for real.
Most of the guys think Socrates is right, and that you have to shoot first and hit harder.
“The chapter’s called ‘Lessons,’ right?” says Levon. “So that means you got to teach a punk like Philip the lesson before he teaches it to you.”
Mr. E and Samson try to make it a serious conversation, but everyone keeps blurting out stupid shit.
“My boys wouldn’t let no old man sneak up on them,” says Antwon.
“I’d take Philip’s gun and pop him with it,” says Bobby.
“Yeah, you know it, little man,” says Wilfred.
“Don’t call me that, mouth breather,” says Bobby.
When Samson gets control, he says, “Don’t you ever feel like the rules are stacked against you? Like you can’t win, no matter how hard you try?”
It’s quiet for a moment, and then we’re all nodding our heads, saying, “Yeah, yeah, it does feel like that.” Wilfred swears that he’s been doing his best at Morton for eleven months, and he isn’t even close to earning his stage. Bobby says he’s never going to pass the TABE test and qualify for GED prep.
Near the end of group Samson reads a scene where Socrates is cooking chicken and rice gumbo for Darryl over a camp stove: “ ‘He wished that some man had had that kind of love for him before he’d gone wrong … He was a troubled child with no father; one of those lost souls who did wrong but didn’t know it—or hardly did.’ ”
“What’s this mean?” says Mr. Eboue.
I raise my hand. “That Socrates might have turned out different if someone had loved him and taught him to be a man.” I half expect the other guys to laugh, for Antwon to call me a pussy boy. But they don’t. Nobody says anything for a long time.
Finally, Freddie breaks the silence. “That’s deep.”
“Yeah,” says Levon, “mad deep.”
36
Another Wednesday, which is visitation day, and I can’t stop thinking about Louis. After all that’s happened, he can’t make the effort to come see me or even write a damn letter. How much would it take him to write a letter? Less than is needed to blow me off, I’m sure.
But then Pike bangs on my door. “James,” he says, “you got a visitor. Come on.”
Before I can even think about it, he leads me to a small windowless room. Sports posters line the walls, along with corny motivational slogans like THERE IS NO I IN TEAM and A QUITTER NEVER WINS AND A WINNER NEVER QUITS.
Louis sits in a fabric waiting-room chair. He’s wearing a plain black T-shirt that stretches tight over his shoulders and biceps. Physically he looks the same, but something is different about the way he carries himself. It’s not like his posture is slumped or anything; it’s more subtle than that, but I can’t put my finger on it.
Pike sizes Louis up and stiffens a little the way dogs do when they’re trying to decide who is alpha.
“You James’s brother?” says Pike.
“Louis.” He offers his hand, but Pike doesn’t take it. Instead the guard stands with his arms crossed, scowling at Louis, who is obviously bigger and stronger. But he doesn’t have the uniform. Or the radio. Or the cuffs. And in here that means something.
“Maybe you can talk some sense into your little brother before he goes down a bad road.”
“I thought he was doing okay.”
“Who told you that?”
“African guy. Mr. E-something. On the phone. He said James earned his stage and would be eligible for early release.”
“Eboue.” Pike says it like he’s got a bad taste in his mouth. “Did he tell you that kids lose their stages all the time? You should ask James about his new friend. Let’s just say his friend is a bad influence.”
Louis digests this. “Can we have our visit now?” he says. And a tiny bit of pride swells in me to see how Louis handles someone like Pike. He might not keep his promises, or give two shits about me, but still … he doesn’t let the assholes of the world mess with him.
Pike hooks his thumbs into his belt loops. “Go ahead. I’ll be outside.”
When we’re alone, Louis says, “What’s his problem?”
“Everything.”
“God, what an asshole,” he says. “I don’t know how you can stand it here.”
“It’s not like I have a choice, you know.”
The comment hangs in the air, until Louis slides a paperback across the table. “I brought your book,” he says.
I look at the cover of the ship crashing through a dark sea. I pick it up and hold it; it feels good in my hands, like a Bible might to a religious person. I’ve got the Walter Mosley book in my room, and now I’ve got this one. It’s only two books, I know, but it feels like I’m building my own library of great books that are going to help me. I’m going to spend every spare moment reading them, until I find what Samson and Mr. Pfeffer want me to see. I’d like to stop the visit right now. I could go back to my room, bury my head in the pages of the book, and disappear for a few hours. Louis can go home or to Dirk’s Gym or wherever the hell he wants. He can feel good about himself because he drove out here to see me and did his brotherly duty.
But I stay in my se
at. “Thanks.”
He looks away.
“How’s everything at home?” I say.
“Fucked up. The Bronco’s gone for good. I still owe money.”
I nod, but I don’t really care. I know how he feels about that thing, but I’d trade ten Broncos to get out of here. “You seen Mom?”
“You know I don’t go over there.”
“Does she even care that I’m here?”
“Honestly, I don’t know what she cares about.” He tugs at the collar of his T-shirt as though it’s choking him. “Listen, James. I’m sorry.”
It’s strange to hear him say that. I’ve never heard him apologize. For anything. How can you live nineteen years without ever once being wrong?
“It’s okay,” I say. But the truth is, I’m not sure if it’s okay. I need to think. Things are different now and I’m not going to follow Louis blindly just because I want to be cool. Those days are over.
“No. It’s not.” He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. His words come out haltingly and shaky. “It’s not okay. I’m your brother. I’m not supposed to set you up.”
“I knew what I was getting into.”
“No, you didn’t.”
And I begin to wonder, because his eyes are filled with terror, like he’s about to tell me something bad, something that will change everything forever. Like the time he told me our father was leaving for good. I had only known him as a man who was sometimes home, sometimes not. But he always brought us presents, cheap balsa gliders, cap guns, and rubber balls that bounced super high. He’d pull up to the house in his white Jeep Comanche, and we’d all run out to the porch to greet him. And then, a few days later, he’d be gone. It’s funny, but I remember the presents more than I remember him.
When Louis first told me he wasn’t ever coming back, I said, “I don’t believe you.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Louis. “He’s still not coming back. Mom says.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t love us anymore.”
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