When Plaid Shorts announced that we were moving, around five o’clock in the morning, the Hispanic man asked how much money I had on me. I’d covered the money clip with my hand when Tank Top passed it to me, but, clearly, I hadn’t been quick enough. The Hispanic man said I couldn’t bring in anything where we were going, because it would get taken off me. He informed Plaid Shorts, who agreed that I’d get robbed. Rona put my belongings, even my glasses, in her pocket. My property would be safer in the women’s section, the Hispanic man advised as we were put back into handcuffs and then linked to one another. I was made to lead our daisy chain of handcuffs through the precinct’s main room. As Plaid Shorts increased the pace, two officers by the front door erupted into grunting song. “Working on the chain gang, uh.”
Downtown, we hopped out of the van into a street that was still dark. A semicircle of light waited for us to approach. This was the Tombs, that place I’d heard about, read about. Two more daisy chains of prisoners joined ours as Tank Top, having rung twice, banged on the metal grating over the entrance. It rolled up. Plaid Shorts and Tank Top surrendered us in a series of rapid clipboard signatures. When I realized that they intended to abandon us at this concrete threshold, I wanted to ask them when they planned to read us our rights. I’d begun to think of them as our undercovers. They were responsible for us. But they were gone, and we were across the line, and the metal grating was coming down.
I followed a black female corrections officer’s rump up some stairs. A black male corrections officer unhooked everybody. My eyes stayed on Rona and Billie when they were ordered to move to the other side of the corridor. The women went in one direction, the men in another. Green bars streamed along either side of me as I hurried to keep up with the corrections officer who was now taking us down to the basement, and to keep ahead of someone whose footsteps menaced my heels.
The Rasta youth and I were directed into the last cell of the long jail. I insinuated myself onto the narrow metal bench that went from the bars of the cell to the rear wall, where it made a right angle toward the partition that hid the toilet. Nine mute, tired faces emphasized how cramped and stuffy the tiny cell was. One man was curled up asleep under the bench.
I didn’t want to look too intently at the other men in judicial storage, in case to do so meant something I could not handle the consequences of. I also didn’t want to look away too quickly when my gaze happened to meet someone else’s. However, no one was interested in hassling the new arrivals. Men were waking up, and their banter competed with the locker-room-type noise coming from the corrections officers’ oblong station desk. A short white girl with thick glasses and a rolling lectern called my name. She said the interview was to determine who was eligible for bail, but the questions also separated the wheat from the chaff, socioeconomically speaking. Some guys probably had no job, no taxable weekly income, no address, no mother’s address. She lost patience with the Rasta youth’s decent background. “Education? How far did you get in school?” A community-college degree. Her head was tilted up toward the spectacle of his hair. “We’ll say grade fifteen.”
Sometime later, the Rasta youth and I were summoned again. But again we were going only a few yards. A black corrections officer shooed aside someone blocking the door of the new cell, which was large and, sneaked glances told me, held some huge dudes. Fresh apprehension was bringing my body to something like exocrine parity with the Rasta youth’s. I didn’t know what to expect and so tried to prepare for the worst. We were shoulder to shoulder on a metal bench, like crows shuffling on a telephone wire. The move to this restless population had to be the final, dangerous descent, the reason I’d crammed my watch into my glasses case and handed everything off to Rona.
A black youth with his hair in tight braids called out to a new arrival, my Hispanic comrade. “Come on in.” The black youth’s knuckles looked as big as Mike Tyson’s. “They took the murderers out early.” He slapped five with a couple of his hulking neighbors and concerned himself with what he could see of his reflection in the metal bench between his thighs. He said something more. I didn’t hear what he said, but it must have been wicked.
A black corrections officer reversed himself and glared through the green bars. “What?” “Nothing, Mo,” the black youth said loudly, evenly. Only one of his neighbors giggled. “Say what, chump?” He was going for the keys at his hip. “You say something?” He was so agitated that he couldn’t get the key in. He was as tall as a basketball power forward. Everything he said was a variation of “You want to say something?” The cell door flew open, and in a few steps the corrections officer was over the massive head of twinkling braids. “A real man would say something now.” He waited for an answer. I could see him shaking. The black youth wasn’t going to feed him any lines or provocation. The corrections officer pivoted toward the door. He had a baton on his belt but no gun. He made a satisfied noise with his keys.
It was not an impressive performance. I knew that. The corrections officer hadn’t come up with any good lines. He just kept repeating himself. I could tell that all twenty-four of my cellmates were thinking how off the hook the corrections officer had been to raise up—the lingo was coming to me—on somebody like that. I was getting excited, feeling that I was on the verge of bonding with the other guys in our high and hip judgment against the corrections officer. He didn’t meet our rigorous standards when it came to “reading” someone in the street manner. The black youth with the oiled, sparkling braids delivered our verdict: “Definitely bugging behind something.”
The black corrections officer flung the metal door so hard, it bounced against the cell bars and rode back some. Giant steps put him in a place that blocked my view of the black youth. Spit was dancing from his head, pinwheel fashion, as he roared, “If I started to kick your black ass now, where would your black ass be next week?” I couldn’t remember when I’d seen such sudden rage. It stopped all other activity in the basement. The tendons in his neck were ready to explode. I couldn’t begin to think what his nostrils might be doing. Maybe our survival molecules were not the only ones to have been put on alert. Some of his colleagues had come by to monitor the situation. They turned back in a way that indicated they’d respect some code not to interfere. The cell was very still as the corrections officer made his exit. The street judgment was in his silence. Nobody wanted to look at him until he’d turned the lock. He’d made his point. He’d shown how dangerous was his longing to have a reason to lose control.
The corrections officer’s brown skin looked glazed, as though it had been fired in a kiln. He didn’t seem to know how to finish his scene and stood wheezing by the bars. I almost thought he was going to mellow into the dispersal-of-balm-and-poultice phase of tough love. The mask of the shock-tactics practitioner would drop. He’d apologize, give advice, tell the young brothers how he was once on his way to being where they were. The black corrections officer said, “Remember, I’ll be going home at four o’clock. You’ll still be here. You’re in jail. I’m not.” Maybe I should have taken into account the possibility that he had seen and had a lot of trouble doing his job. Maybe he and the black youth already had a story going, and I’d missed what started it. But that didn’t matter. Only what he’d said about four o’clock mattered. It wasn’t even nine o’clock in the morning yet. My Hispanic comrade was looking at me. He took his eyes heavenward and clasped his hands. Then he shot me an inaudible laugh.
Jail was going to get me over my fear of saying the obvious, because there was no way to ignore all morning the fact that everyone in the cell was either black or Hispanic. The irony, for me, was that an all-black gathering usually meant a special event, a stirring occasion. I thought back to some black guys I used to know who enjoyed telling me that black guys like me ought to hang out with black groups like theirs. It flattered me to believe that I flattered them with my yearning for instruction in the art of how to be down with it. But this was not what they had in mind. The mood in the cell was like that of an emergen
cy room in a city hospital: a mixture of squalor, panic, boredom, and resentment at the supposed randomness of bad luck.
Some guys, the Rasta youth among them, had elected to slip down onto the concrete floor. They were opting out of consciousness. Our cell had no television, no radio, no newspapers. There was a water fountain, a disgusting toilet, and two pay phones from which collect calls could be made. I don’t know how those guys knew when the corrections officers had their backs turned, or how they’d held on to the contraband of drugs and matches they’d been thoroughly searched for, or how they knew who in which cell had what, but at one moment, as if by secret signal, paraphernalia went flying through green bars from cell to cell. The next thing I knew, guys were taking turns smoking crack behind the waist-high partition of the raised open toilet of our cell. Right there in the Tombs. I guess they figured there was no chance of the crack out-smelling the toilet. I’d switched seats and, as a result, was too near the burning funk. I saw my Hispanic comrade casually walk away from the hot spot, and soon, I, too, got up and crossed the cell. His look of approval after I’d eased in somewhere else told me that I’d made the right move.
A black guy with broken teeth, dressed in a torn car coat, emerged from behind the toilet. He ambled around and then seized the floor. “You remember Lucky Lou Diamond? I had twenty thousand dollar over to Jersey City.” I tuned in, eager for a jailhouse Richard Pryor who could turn the cell into something else. “Nineteen seventy-five? Bunny hat on my head? Your Honor. There’s no mouth on the girl he touched.” His free association promised much, but it gutter-balled into such incoherence that the black youth with braids spoke for everyone when he barked, “Sit down.”
It was quiet for a while, but then the Rasta youth snapped to attention. Something jerked him to his feet and set him standing squarely in front of the cell door, his right knee pounding out a steady rhythm. I thought, Just when things were manageable, my brother in Selassie has to flip out. I braced myself for his rap. But he was ready for his lunch. He was first in the line we were commanded to make; first to march out of the cell toward stacks of chalk-colored squares on long, low trolleys that looked like what bricks are transported on at a building site. We were to pick up a sandwich, turn, take a plastic cup of grape juice from another low trolley, and then march back to the cell.
A black guy in an orange jumpsuit—a trusty—called after me to let me know that I’d missed my allotted sandwich. Something about being urged to march rendered me unable to lift anything other than a cup of juice. Very soon the cell was strewn with sandwich remnants. Leaking sachets of mustard and mayonnaise found their way under the bench. A wedge of cheese crowned one of the pay phones. Lunch added to the odors of incarceration. However, there was plenty of room, because some of the men whose size so alarmed me when I first entered the cell had dived to the floor. I counted nine guys asleep in the grime, six of them in the fetal position, their wrists between their knees. Heads had to loll down some broad shoulders before they could touch concrete. A young, crack-thin guy woke and, using his palms for locomotion, crawled along on his stomach to the trash can, where he reached up to extract sandwich remains.
I overheard some of the guys say a little while later that the police had arrested so many people in the sweep of the previous evening that two special night courts had been set up to process the haul. They would start to call names at four o’clock. Waiting might have been easier had there been no clock. At the appointed hour, the only official movement came from the black corrections officer who’d flipped out that morning. I’m sorry to report that he went through all the transparent maneuvers of rubbing it in. He paraded by us on his way to the oblong station desk, ostensibly laughing at himself for forgetting something. And just in case the black youth with braids was pretending to take no notice of him, the corrections officer brought over a white officer holding a clipboard and pointed at the youth. His colleague tapped him a have-a-good-night. “I told you when you got here not to give me any problems.” The black youth looked toward the bars, at last, his arms hugging his chest. The black corrections officer flicked a salute.
“Yo, Pops,” I heard the black youth say once the air had calmed down again around us. “Pops,” he called again in my direction. I couldn’t believe that he was talking to me. Pops? Everybody in the cell who spoke to someone he didn’t know said, “Yo, G.” I pointed to myself. Who, me? “Mind my asking what you’re in for?” I made a smoking gesture with two fingers of my right hand. “Uh-huh. You dress Italian. But.” A neighbor of his wanted to give him five for that observation, but he just looked at him hard. It was true. The soundtrack of brotherhood in my head was nearly all Marvin Gaye. It had finally happened: I was older than a cartoon father on television. I was older than Homer Simpson.
I wasn’t sure if Old Four Eyes in the Robert Hayden poem fled to “danger in the safety zones” or “safety in the danger zones.” It was important to me, sitting there in my concrete elsewhere, which seemed dirtier and dimmer the longer I had to wait.
As the cell emptied, it got eerier. The few new guys, dressed in their garrulous night selves, were out of sympathy with the general tone of exhaustion and passivity. One new guy ranted about calling his girlfriend to tell her to hook up a plane to Canada, because after he made bail he was going to step off, boy. Another, the lone white, clung to a pay phone. He suggested to a friend that they deceive his brother-in-law. “Don’t tell him it’s for me.” He could press telephone numbers with amazing speed. He insisted to the next friend that she had to get the bail money out of her mother, because he could not, he said, shooting his eyes across us, the nonwhite, do Rikers.
My name was called, the cell door gapped open, and I floated out. Neither my Hispanic comrade nor the Rasta youth followed. I regretted that I would not have the chance to thank the man who had watched my back. Very soon I found myself upstairs in a new cell that had an iron-lattice screen. Beyond it was the outside world. I heard the voices of what I supposed were women corrections officers, and then over the walls I heard Billie and Rona in their interview cells. They heard me; we heard one another. The public defender on the free persons’ side of the barrier was a heavyset white woman. She went from cubicle to cubicle, guiding us toward a plea: Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal, or ACD. If we didn’t get picked up for the same offense within a twelve-month period, then the charge would be dropped, ACD.
I told the PD that I’d used the pay phones. I knew that that afternoon a friend of mine had come zooming down with newspapers and a criminal lawyer and had been denied access. She said they were entitled to hold us for at least twenty-four hours before they had to do anything with us. I said that being in custody was the punishment. I said prosecution of so-called quality-of-life crimes was a form of harassment. She explained that under the circumstances they didn’t have to read us our rights. I was about to compare such offenses to civil disobedience, but the last thing this calm and capable PD was interested in was anybody’s vanity. She said that high arrest figures justified the large increase in the number of police on the streets. It was that simple.
In the courtroom, I felt as though we were guest speakers at a high school, the offenders with us behind the court reporter looked so tadpole, so young. We stood when the judge entered. “He’s not that kind of judge,” a black bailiff said. Maybe because I was minutes and a plea away from getting out, tenderness got the better of me. I thought of my older sister and her practice in defense of juvenile offenders valiantly conducted from files in shopping bags in the trunk of her car. Our case was called, and we sat some rows back from the attorneys’ desks, where we were unable to hear the grim PD, even if we could have concentrated enough.
God bless the old-hippie souls who still believed in public life and social responsibility, I thought, but the PD had no time for effusive thanks. I’d been so hypnotized by green bars that the marble floor outside the courtroom was dazzling. The white clerks behind the counter in a payments-and-records office were ac
customed to a stressed-out public and were rude back. Down in the lobby, Rona and Billie ran for the door marked WOMEN. I rushed over to a rickety blue booth for my fix of those former slave crops—tobacco, sugar, coffee.
Perhaps our elation on Rona’s rooftop was unearned, but we felt like released hostages. We made jokes as soon as we had an audience of friends. Even the squalid bits, when told the right way, got laughs. Maybe we were defending ourselves against our deeper reactions to what had happened to us. Rona’s husband said that now that his little boy was old enough to play in the street, he had had to tell him what to do should the police ever stop him. Don’t move; do exactly what they say; take no chances; give no lip. We wondered how popular these sweeps would be after more white people had been caught in the net.
We’d been abruptly deprived of our liberty, and that would always make for a chilling memory. And as I’d learned sitting in the cell with all those guys whose stories I didn’t know and couldn’t ask for: the system exists, the system—for the nonwhite young, the poor—is real. New arrest records had been created, but we were out, and friends were standing in wreaths of smoke, savoring the night view of fire escapes, water tanks, and lights in distant windows.
Six days after my release, I was back on the Lower East Side. I understood what Rona meant when she said that she fell in love with New York the day she realized that she could get a candy bar on every corner. But jail worked; it won. I thought, I’m not doing that again. The romance was over. For me, the changes in the streets went with everything else. Once upon a time, people moved to New York to become New Yorkers. Then people moved to New York and thought it perfectly okay to remain themselves. Goodbye, Frank O’Hara.
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 6