by Mark Salzman
Francisco was the first to join me. “Hey Mark,” he said, greeting me with a big smile. “How you doin’?” He looked flushed, and his face and neck glistened with sweat.
“Fine. How about you?”
“Good! My arms and legs are sore as shit, but that’s OK, it means I’m gettin’ stronger. Granillo had us outside for exercise. He’s a sick motherfucker.”
Kevin joined us, looking as pumped up as Francisco. I asked what kind of exercises they had done. “Aw, you know—push-ups and sit-ups and running laps and shit. You could barely move when it’s done. But it feels good, you know? Better than sittin’ in your room all day.”
“Does everyone have to do the exercises?” I asked. “What happens if somebody doesn’t want to do them?”
They looked at each other and shrugged. “If you don’t exercise, you don’t get to go outside. Man, when you’re locked up, you’ll do anything to get outside.”
“Plus, we gotta get in shape. We got some competition with the other units coming up.”
“Yeah, a couple times a year there’s contests. We got football, baseball, track, tug-of-war. It’s about the only fun you can have in here, so we get into it.”
Francisco nodded. “There’s a big-ass trophy for the unit that wins. Sills wants that trophy, man! No joke.”
“Mr. Sills seems like a no-nonsense guy,” I said, curious to know what the boys thought of the staff. I assumed they resented all of the guards, especially the strict ones.
Kevin smiled. “You don’t want to get him pissed off, put it that way. But if you’re straight with him, he’ll be straight with you.”
“He’s awright,” Francisco agreed. “Not like some of the punk-ass staff around here. Dumb motherfuckers, they—”
Francisco halted in mid-sentence. Jimmy Wu entered the library, followed by another Asian boy who stood with his hands clasped behind his back.
“This is Chumnikai,” Jimmy said. “He wants to know if he can be in the class.” Jimmy sat down, but the new boy remained standing, as if he were in the army and needed permission.
I asked for his first name.
“Patrick, sir.”
“Welcome to the class, Patrick. Have a seat.” He was short, had an overbite, and his ears stuck out like acoustical panels. I explained the class to him, how it worked, and promised to bring him a folder if he decided to stick with it. When I asked if he had any questions, he shook his head.
Francisco leaned over the table and glared at the newcomer. “You gotta be serious about this,” he said. “This ain’t just for hanging out, it’s for writing. And you gotta write from the heart. Got it?”
Patrick nodded.
I opened up my bag and took out the boys’ essays from the previous sessions. During the week I had typed copies of all of them, explaining that I felt it was helpful to see one’s own work in print, the way a reader would see it. Francisco read over his essays, slapped the table with his open palm, and said, “Damn! I had no idea how talented I was!”
When the others laughed, he held one of the pages out in front of him like a cop showing his badge. “Check it out if you don’t believe me! There’s the title up there: COLLISION. In big fuckin’ letters! And all the little fuckin’ letters underneath tellin’ the story, just like in a book. Damn, I’ma send this home.”
Delighted with the results of this experiment, I handed out notepads and pencils, and without my having to say anything further, all four boys lowered their heads as if to work.
Then the room started to shake. Somebody was playing rap music on an enormous boom box out in the dayroom, and the bass notes were making everything in the library that wasn’t bolted down rattle. The boys jerked to attention, like soldiers hearing a bugle calling for a charge, and sprang into motion: they tapped their feet, they made percussion sounds with their mouths, they rocked in their chairs, they sang along with the lyrics, and more or less did everything a seated person can do except write.
When I got up and closed the doors to the library, the boys looked glum. “You don’t have to do that—we can listen and write at the same time! It helps us think.”
“It’s hot in here, sir.”
“Yeah, don’t close the door!”
“Let’s just try writing without the background music,” I said. “You can listen to it after class.”
The boys grumbled, but I felt I should stick by the decision so as not to seem wishy-washy. Within minutes the room turned into a sauna, and the boys started fanning themselves with their notepads instead of writing in them. The smell of sweat and disinfectant became overpowering; when one of the boys farted, I broke down.
“Kevin, you may open the doors.”
Francisco wiped his brow with his sleeve. “You think this is bad, try spending all day and night in a ten-by-twelve cell. It smells so bad you gotta breathe through your mouth.”
Jimmy agreed. “Yeah! Like on a night when your roommate begs to be let out to go to the bathroom, but the staff are too fucking lazy to walk down the hall. So he has to throw a towel in the corner of the room and piss into that. Try breathing then.”
“I get the picture. What are you going to write about today, Francisco?”
“I’ma write one a them message-in-a-bottle things. You know? Like how dudes be stranded on an island and put their last words on paper, and hope some fool finds it?”
“Good idea. How about you, Kevin?”
Kevin shook his head. “I’m stuck.”
I asked if he had any other strong memories, like the trip to the museum, that he would like to write down. He smiled but kept shaking his head.
“I don’t have a whole lot of memories. Most of my past is like a fog.”
“Maybe you could write about that.”
“How you supposed to write about nothin’?”
“By describing what it feels like to want to remember things, but to have them seem out of reach.”
He kept still for a moment, then shrugged. “I’ll give it a try.”
I saw that Jimmy was focused on whatever he was writing, so I didn’t disturb him. The new boy looked stumped.
“I can’t think of anything, sir.”
I suggested several topics, but none of them seemed to interest him. Desperate for ideas, I looked out the window and saw a jet leaving a vapor trail across the sky. I wrote the word “distance” on the top of Patrick’s notepad and told him to write anything that the word brought to mind.
He nodded, then hunched over the notepad so that no one could read over his shoulder as he wrote.
The boys struggled to concentrate in the heat. After half an hour I could tell they had all had enough, so I asked if anyone would like to start reading. Before Francisco could volunteer, Jimmy pointed out the window. “Check out the front door. We got a visitor.”
Sister Janet was using her key to let herself into the unit. As soon as she got inside she froze, squinted toward where the music was coming from, and asked me, “Has this been going on the whole time you’ve been trying to write?”
“Yeah,” Francisco said, “and it’s been really hard to concentrate.” Francisco, I realized, was somebody who knew how to stir up trouble.
Sister Janet’s expression hardened. She told us she would be right back and marched toward the staff room.
“Uh-oh!” Francisco said, wringing his hands with glee.
We couldn’t hear anything over the music, but could see Sister Janet pointing toward us, then at the boom box on in the hallway, then at Mr. Sills and Mr. Granillo. Their faces remained impassive, but even from across the dayroom I could see their jaw muscles twitching.
The boom box went silent.
Sister Janet returned to the library. “I want to apologize to each of you,” she said. “I should have been here earlier to make sure you were being given the help you need. I won’t let it happen again.”
“Aw, it ain’t your fault, Sister,” Francisco said. “We coulda asked ’em to turn it down, but we didn’t.
You know us—we like that music.”
“That’s not the point, Francisco. It’s a matter of adults having respect for what you’re trying to do, and supporting it. But that’s for me to worry about, not you. Were you able to write today?”
“Yeah, I did! Wanna hear me read?”
“I’d love to.”
“OK,” Francisco said, taking charge. “But Chumnikai’s gotta read first. He’s the new guy, he’s gotta show he’s serious.”
Patrick seemed resigned to being told what to do, at least at the beginning. “The assignment was to write something on the word ‘distance,’ ” he said, his voice barely audible.
“Could you speak a little louder?” Sister Janet asked. “When you get to be my age, you don’t hear as well as you’d like to.”
“I wrote about somebody distant,” he said, not much louder than before.
There is a distance between a person and me. He and I are very very close, yet so far away. Far away not like in miles or inches, but something else. He’s been there since I was brought to this world and lived with me for a long time. But he is like a stranger to me. He is there to help me, but he does not help me. He is there to take me places to have fun, but he is busy watching TV. He’s been there all my life, but it seems like he’s not there at all. I’m happy when he visits me here, but he hardly talks and leaves early. So what! I love him! We may not talk to each other much and see each other for a little while, but he traveled far away from his work to see me, and after, he goes back to his work. Even though we are distant, I still love him. I love my dad!
Patrick slid his paper toward me, then appeared to be bracing himself to be teased.
“This was your first day in class?” Sister Janet asked him.
“Yeah.”
“And already you were able to write something so beautiful?”
Patrick kept still.
Sister Janet let the room stay quiet for a few moments before asking, “Have you ever told him how you feel? That you love him, but wish you could be closer?”
Patrick shook his head.
“Why not?”
“It’s hard to say that kind of stuff.”
“Yes, it is.” She pointed to the sheet of paper in front of him. “What about sending him this essay? Do you think you could do that?”
Patrick thought about it, then nodded. “Maybe.”
“If you did that, I promise you he would cherish it.”
“Yeah. I’ll think about it.”
“Let me know if you need an envelope or a stamp.”
“Thanks.”
Now Sister Janet turned to face the original three in my group. “Well,” she said, smiling, “I’m curious to know what you’ve been up to. Mark tells me you’ve done remarkable work. There are a lot of people out there ready to say that nothing good can come out of this place. You’re going to prove them wrong, I’m convinced of it.”
“They don’t know anything about us!” Francisco protested. “All they know is what the newspapers say. They don’t know the whole story.”
“Then it’s up to you to tell them, isn’t it? Are you prepared to make that effort?”
Francisco’s eyes blazed. “I wanna do somethin’ with my life, Sister. I pray to God every night, askin’ him to help me.”
“Let’s hear what you wrote, then.”
“I wrote about a message in a bottle. You know what that is, right?”
“Yes. Go ahead.”
“It fits in with what we’re talkin’ about just now, ’cause—” He stopped short and looked at me. “Hold on. Should I read mine from Wednesday instead? The one you typed? It looks more, you know, professional.”
“You can show that to her at the end of class. Let’s hear the new one.”
“Yeah, I see what you’re sayin’. This way she gets both.”
Dearest Stranger:
This is my last statement on earth. I know people look at me like a criminal and a no-good person. A gang member that’s a menace to society because I’m incarcerated, but it’s not true. I am a person who is discovering who he really is. I found out that I am a person with many talents.
I know in here sometimes I have to put a mask on and become somebody that I am really not, but that’s how you survive in here. I might seem like if I’m big and tough, as if I’m hard as a stone on the outside, but deep inside of me, I am a person with fear, anger, and hurt.
If I was to die today, and you tell people about me, just tell them that I’m finally free, because I don’t have to be nobody that I don’t want to be.
Francisco beamed at Sister Janet, as if expecting her to throw a parade in his honor, but she merely nodded and smiled and turned to Kevin.
“You’re next,” she said.
Francisco looked disappointed but kept quiet.
Kevin explained that he was having difficulty remembering his past, and that I had challenged him to write about not remembering. “So I came up with this. I’m not sure it’s what he wanted, but it’s all I could think of.”
As I sit here and think, I really can’t remember too many things I’ve done with my mother. It kind of hurts when I think about how stupid I was for not trying to hold on to those memories, but I was young at the time and felt that if I just forgot about my parents it wouldn’t hurt so much. I was wrong. I tried to put my memories aside for almost nine years, and now when I’m all alone I try to bring my memories that I had tucked away back, but I only remember about one-third of the things that happened. I feel depressed sometimes about not being able to remember the most important people in my life, and I try not to let it get me down, but I think it would get anybody down. I guess I just did too much forgetting. Now I regret it.
Sister Janet nodded again, took a breath, then asked Jimmy to read. Jimmy spread several sheets of paper out in front of him, each page crammed with writing, cross-outs, and editing marks. “I’ve been working on this for a while,” he said. “I read a version of it at our play last month. You probably already heard it, Sister Janet.”
“I’d like to hear it again.”
Jimmy checked the order of the pages, rested his hands on his hips for a moment, then thrust them into his pants pockets.
Here I am
In this lonely place that has become my life,
I am all alone.
My family, my friends, even my dreams are all gone.
Everyone and everything that I’ve known.
All I do all day is think really hard
about how my life went wrong.
Let me tell you my story. Let me tell you about me.
Don’t worry, it won’t take very long.
I was born in Taiwan in the year ’79
and my father named me Jimmy.
My parents held me in their arms, they gave me a kiss,
they were as proud as any parents could be.
When I was two, we came to the States
and my parents opened up a shop.
We sold some ice cream, we sold some shakes,
but eventually, we had to stop.
From there we moved on, my parents found new jobs,
they began to work for the county.
The hours were long, but the money was good.
Everything went smoothly for all I could see.
When I turned nine, my parents gave me a brother,
and I got to choose his name.
When he entered this world, when he entered our lives,
I knew nothing would ever be the same.
For the next few years, everything was fine,
and my bond with my brother grew.
Then something terrible happened. It caught me by
surprise.
It hurt me like a hurt I never knew.
When my brother was three, my parents divorced,
they said it was for the best.
The yelling, the screaming, the physical blows,
had finally all come to a rest.
I moved out with Mom,
little brother stayed with Dad,
but we’d still see each other on the weekends.
I became a loner, I became withdrawn.
It seemed so hard to make a single friend.
Two years pass, and my brother turns five.
He has grown into an adorable little boy.
He is full of life. He is full of love.
And in his heart, he is full of joy.
Then we noticed something, about the way he walked.
He was always moving and walking on his toes.
So we took him to a doctor, to let him be examined,
and slowly, more changes in him started to show.
He was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy,
which is a neuromuscular disease.
When I heard the news, my heart was torn apart.
And hurting, I collapsed and fell to my knees.
The doctors say my brother won’t live past the age of
twenty,
and when he goes, it will be full of pain.
His muscles will start to shrink, he will be unable to move.
The only thing left untouched will be his brain.
And so I tried to ignore him. Tried to unattach myself.
’Cause it hurt too much to be around.
I couldn’t stand to see him. I would start to cry,
and burning, my tears would fall to the ground.
So I started cursing God for allowing this to happen.
To my sweet, innocent, beloved little brother.
Why did this have to happen? Why did He hurt us so?
I always thought that we’d be together. Forever.
And then my dad got married. To a person that I disliked.
When that happened, he really let me down.
I began to hate my father. My heart was full of anger.
In the sea of rage I began to drown.
I started to hang with gangsters. Gave up on my
education.
I felt that everything was just a waste of time.
One thing led to another, somehow I got pulled under.
The next thing I knew, I was in jail for committing a