Monster

by Walter Dean Myers

  CUT TO: LS of block engaged in normal activity. THEN: MRS. HARMON rushes from house, looks desperately around, and moves quickly down the street. She gets almost to the corner, then stops, realizing she doesn’t know where STEVE is being taken.

  Friday, July 10th

  Miss O’Brien was mad today. She said that Petrocelli was using a cheap trick. The judge said he was calling a half-day session because he needed to hear pleas in another case. O’Brien said that Petrocelli wanted to leave as bad an image in the mind of the jury as she could. She brought up the photographs again and made sure that the jury saw them a second time. Miss O’Brien said she wanted the jurors to take the bad images home with them over the weekend and live with them.

  The photos were bad, real bad. I didn’t want to think about them or know about them. I didn’t look at the jury members when they were looking at the pictures.

  I thought about writing about what happened in the drugstore, but I’d rather not have it in my mind. The pictures of Mr. Nesbitt scare me. I think about him lying there knowing he was going to die. I wonder if it hurt much. I can see me at that moment, just when Mr. Nesbitt knew he was going to die, walking down the street trying to make my mind a blank screen.

  When I got back to the cell and changed my clothes, I had to mop the corridors with four other guys. We were all dressed in the orange jumpsuits they give you and the guards made us line up. The water was hot and soapy and had a strong smell of some kind of disinfectant. The mops were heavy and it was hot and I didn’t like doing it. Then I realized that the five guys doing the mopping must have all looked alike and I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t breathe. I tried to suck the air into my lungs, but all I got was the odor of the disinfectant and I started gagging.

  “You vomit—you just got more to clean up!” the guard said.

  I held it in and kept swinging the big mop across the floor. To my right and left the other prisoners were doing the same thing. On the floor there were big arcs of gray, dirty water and swirls of stinking, brown bubbles. I wanted to be away from this place so bad, away from this place, away from this place. I remembered Miss O’Brien saying that it was her job to make me different in the eyes of the jury, different from Bobo and Osvaldo and King. It was me, I thought as I tried not to throw up, that had wanted to be tough like them.

  FADE IN: Four-way SPLIT-SCREEN MONTAGE: Three images alternate between shots of witnesses and defendants. We hear only 1 witness at a time, but the others are clearly still talking on other screens. In upper left screen is DETECTIVE WILLIAMS. Lower left is ALLEN FORBES, a City Clerk. Lower right is DR. JAMES MOODY, Medical Examiner. The upper right screen is sometimes black, sometimes a stark and startling white. Occasionally the images of those not speaking are replaced with images of KING or STEVE, and we get REACTION SHOTS.

  FORBES

  It was a registered gun. Our records show that Mr. Nesbitt applied for a license to have a gun on the premises in August of 1989. That permit was still in effect. The gun was licensed to him from that time.

  VO (PETROCELLI)

  So there was nothing unusual or illegal about the gun being in the drugstore? Is that correct, Mr. Forbes?

  FORBES

  Presumably he wanted it for the store. That is correct.

  SWITCH TO: DETECTIVE WILLIAMS.

  WILLIAMS

  I arrived at the crime scene at 5:15. There was some merchandise on the floor of the drugstore in between the counters. The body of the victim was lying halfway…his legs were half sticking out from behind the counter. I looked around the counter and observed a middle-aged Black male of approximately 200 pounds. It was pretty clear that he was dead. There was an emergency medical crew there, and they were just packing it in when I arrived. I looked around the scene and saw the gun. A uniformed patrolman pointed it out to me. I didn’t know at the time if it was the gun that killed the victim or not. There wasn’t any way to tell without tests.

  The cash register was open. The change was still in there, but no bills. Also, there were several cartons of cigarettes on the floor, and the clerk mentioned that several cartons of cigarettes were missing. We chalked the body, then had it turned.

  VO (PETROCELLI)

  What do you mean when you say you chalked the body?

  WILLIAMS

  That’s when you put a chalk mark around the perimeter of the body to show the position you found it in. We had photos taken, then we chalked the body so we could turn it over and see if there was any possible evidence beneath the victim. I didn’t see anything there. From the money being gone from the register, I figured it was a stickup and homicide. The guys from the Medical Examiner’s office wanted to move the body. It was time for them to get off, and I allowed them to take it.

  VO (PETROCELLI)

  Detective Williams, during the course of your investigation of the crime did you have occasion to speak to a Mr. Zinzi?

  WILLIAMS

  My partner got a call from this guy on Riker’s Island. That was Sal Zinzi. He was doing 6 months on a stolen property charge. There were a few guys in there who were giving him a hard time. He wanted out pretty bad. He told me about a guy who had told him about a guy who was selling cigarettes. It was a slim lead, but we followed it up until we found a Richard Evans.

  VO (PETROCELLI)

  Known on the street as Bobo?

  WILLIAMS

  Known on the street as Bobo, right. We picked him up and he admitted involvement in the stickup.

  SWITCH TO: DR. MOODY.

  MOODY (Nods constantly as he testifies.)

  The bullet entered the body on the left side and traversed upward through the lung. It produced a tearing of the lung and heavy internal bleeding and also went through the esophagus. That also produced internal bleeding. The bullet finally lodged in the upper trapezius area.

  VO (PETROCELLI)

  And were you able to recover the bullet from that area?

  MOODY

  Yes, we were.

  VO (PETROCELLI)

  Dr. Moody, can you tell with reasonable certainty the time and cause of death?

  MOODY

  Death was caused by a combination of trauma to the internal organs, which put the victim into a state of shock, as well as by the lungs filling with blood. He wouldn’t have been able to breathe.

  VO (PETROCELLI)

  You mean he literally drowned in his own blood?

  REACTION SHOT: STEVE catches his breath sharply.

  REACTION SHOT: KING has head tilted to one side, seemingly without a care.

  Saturday, July 11th

  Before she left, Miss O’Brien warned me not to write anything in my notebook that I did not want the prosecutor to see.

  I asked Miss O’Brien what she was going to do over the weekend, and she gave me a really funny look, and then she told me she was probably going to watch her niece in a Little League game.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to cut you off.”

  She smiled at me, and I felt embarrassed that a smile should mean so much. We talked awhile longer and I realized that I did not want her to go. When I asked her how many times she had appeared in court, her mouth tightened and she said, “Too many times.”

  She thinks I am guilty. I know she thinks I am guilty. I can feel it when we sit together on the bench they have assigned for us. She writes down what is being said, and what is being said about me, and she adds it all up to guilty.

  “I’m not guilty,” I said to her.

  “You should have said, ‘I didn’t do it,’” she said.

  “I didn’t do it,” I said.

  Sunset got his verdict yesterday. Guilty.

  “Man, my life is right here,” he said. “Right here in jail. I know I did the crime and I got to do the time. It ain’t no big thing. It ain’t no big thing. Most they can give me is 7 to 10, which means I walk in 5 and a half. I can do that without even thinking on it, man.”

  It’s growing. First I was scared of being hit or rape
d. That being scared was like a little ball in the pit of my stomach. Now that ball is growing when I think about what kind of time I can get. Felony murder is 25 years to life. My whole life will be gone. A guy said that 25 means you have to serve at least 20. I can’t stay in prison for 20 years. I just can’t!

  Everybody in here either talks about sex or hurting somebody or what they’re in here for. That’s all they think about and that’s what’s on my mind, too. What did I do? I walked into a drugstore to look for some mints, and then I walked out. What was wrong with that? I didn’t kill Mr. Nesbitt.

  Sunset said he committed the crime. Isn’t that what being guilty is all about? You actually do something? You pick up a gun and you aim it across a small space and pull a trigger? You grab the purse and run screaming down the street? Maybe, even, you buy some baseball cards that you know were stolen?

  The guys in the cell played dirty hearts in the afternoon and talked, as usual, about their cases. They weighed the evidence against them and for them and commented on each other’s cases. Some of them sound like lawyers. The guards brought in a guy named Ernie who was caught sticking up a jewelry store. Ernie was small, white, and either Cuban or Italian. I couldn’t tell. The police had caught him in the act. He had taken the money and the jewelry and then locked the two employees in the back room with a padlock they used on the front gates.

  “But then I couldn’t get out because they had a buzzer to open the front door,” Ernie said. “I didn’t know where the buzzer was and I had locked the two dudes who knew up in the back.”

  He waited for two hours while people came and tried to get into the store before he called the police. He said he wasn’t guilty because he hadn’t taken anything out of the store. He didn’t even have a gun, just his hand in his pocket like he had a gun.

  “What they charging you with?” somebody asked.

  “Armed robbery, unlawful detention, possession of a deadly weapon, assault, and menacing.”

  But he felt he wasn’t guilty. He had made a mistake in going into the store, but when the robbery didn’t go down there was nothing he could do.

  “Say you going to rob a guy and he’s sitting down,” Ernie went on. “You say to him, ‘Give me all your money,’ and then he stands up and he’s like, seven feet tall, and you got to run. They can’t charge you with robbing the dude, right?”

  He was trying to convince himself that he wasn’t guilty.

  There was a fight just before lunch and a guy was stabbed in the eye. The guy who was stabbed was screaming, but that didn’t stop the other guy from hitting him more. Violence in here is always happening or just about ready to happen. I think these guys like it—they want it to be normal because that’s what they’re used to dealing with.

  If I got out after 20 years, I’d be 36. Maybe I wouldn’t live that long. Maybe I would think about killing myself so I wouldn’t have to live that long in here.

  Mama came to see me. It’s her first time and she tried to explain to me why she hadn’t been here before, but she didn’t have to. All you had to see were the tears running down her face and the whole story was there. I wanted to show strong for her, to let her know that she didn’t have to cry for me.

  The visitors’ room was crowded, noisy. We tried to speak softly, to create a kind of privacy with our voices, but we couldn’t hear each other even though we were only 18 inches away from each other, which is the width of the table in the visitors’ room. I asked her how Jerry was doing and she said he was doing all right. She was going to bring him tomorrow and I could see him from the window.

  “Do you think I should have got a Black lawyer?” she asked. “Some of the people in the neighborhood said I should have contacted a Black lawyer.”

  I shook my head. It wasn’t a matter of race.

  She brought me a Bible. The guards had searched it. I wanted to ask if they had found anything in it. Salvation. Grace, maybe. Compassion. She had marked off a passage for me and asked me to read it out loud: “‘The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped: therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth; and with my song will I praise him.’”

  “It seems like you’ve been in here so long,” she said.

  “Some guys have done a whole calendar in here,” I said.

  She looked at me, puzzled, and then asked what that meant. When I told her that doing a calendar meant spending a year in jail, she turned her head slightly and then turned back to me. The smile that came to her lips was one she wrenched from someplace deep inside of her.

  “No matter what anybody says…” She reached across the table to put her hand on mine and then pulled it back, thinking a guard might see her. “No matter what anybody says, I know you’re innocent, and I love you very much.”

  And the conversation was over. She cried. Silently. Her body shook with the sobs.

  When she left I could hardly make it back to the cell area. “No matter what anybody says…”

  I lay down across my cot. I could still feel Mama’s pain. And I knew she felt that I didn’t do anything wrong. It was me who wasn’t sure. It was me who lay on the cot wondering if I was fooling myself.

  CUT TO: EXTERIOR: MS of MARCUS GARVEY PARK in HARLEM. STEVE is sitting on a bench, and JAMES KING sits with him. KING is bleary-eyed and smokes a joint as he talks.

  KING

  Yeah, well, you know, I found where the payday is. You know what I mean?

  STEVE

  Yeah, I guess.

  KING

  You guess? What you guessing about when I’m so flat I ain’t got enough money to buy a can of beer? I need to put together a payroll crew. Get my pockets fat. F-A-T. I talked to Bobo and he’s down, but Bobo liable not to show. When he shows, he shows correct but sometime he act like a spaceman or something.

  STEVE

  Bobo’s not Einstein.

  KING

  Whatever. You don’t have to be no Einstein to get paid. All you got to have is the heart. You got the heart?

  STEVE

  For what?

  KING

  To get paid. I got a sure getover. You know that drugstore got burned out that time? They got it all fixed up now. Drugstores always keep some money.

  STEVE

  That’s what Bobo said?

  KING

  Yeah. All we need is a lookout. You know, check the place out—make sure ain’t no badges copping some z’s in the back. You down for it?

  CUT TO: CU of STEVE looking away.

  CUT TO: CU of KING.

  KING

  So, what it is?

  This phrase is repeated as the camera moves farther and farther away, growing louder and louder as STEVE and KING become tiny figures in the bustling mosaic of Harlem.

  Sunday, July 12th

  They had scrambled eggs, potatoes, and corned beef hash for breakfast. A lot of guys don’t go to breakfast on Sunday, and the ones that do can just about eat as much as they want. The guy behind the steam table put a lot of food on my plate and gave me a smile. In here you don’t smile back at people who smile at you, so I just walked away.

  They had church services and I went. There were only 9 guys in the service, and 2 of them got into a fight. It was a vicious fight and the minister called the guards. They came in and started saying things like “Break it up” and “Okay, back off.” But they said it in this calm voice as if nothing was really going on and they didn’t care if the two guys were fighting or not.

  We got locked down because of the fight and we were told we had to stay in our cells until 1 o’clock. One o’clock is when the visiting hours start on Sundays.

  In the cell we played bid whist and another fight almost started when one of the guys thought somebody had dissed him.

  I think I finally understand why there are so many fights. In here all you have going for you is the little surface stuff, how people look at you and what they say. And if that’s all you have, then you have to protect that. Maybe that’s right.

 
When we got out, most of the guys drifted into the recreation area, and somebody put the television on. There was a baseball game on but it didn’t look real. It was guys in uniforms playing games on a deep green field. They were playing baseball as if baseball was important and as if all the world wasn’t in jail, watching them from a completely different world. The world I came from, where I had my family around me and friends and kids I went to school with and even teachers, seemed so far away.

  I looked down in the street from the corridor leading to the recreation room. Downtown New York was almost empty on Sundays. The thousands of people who streamed through the streets on weekdays were away in their homes. I was looking for Jerry. They didn’t allow kids in the visiting area, which was funny. It was funny because if I wasn’t locked up, I wouldn’t be allowed to come into the visiting room.

  At a quarter past one, some women were down in the streets calling up to other women. Then I saw my parents and Jerry.

  Jerry was tiny in the street, standing on the corner. The window was screened and I knew he couldn’t see me, but I raised my hand anyway and waved to him. I wanted to tell Jerry that I loved him. I also wanted to tell him that my heart was not greatly rejoicing, and I was not singing praises.