by Mark Salzman
“ ’Cause you never asked, Javier.”
“I’m askin’, then.”
“All right, I will. Anyway, I want to hear what Martinez wrote.”
Things I don’t remember:
I don’t remember to write back to people.
I don’t remember to pray over my food.
I don’t remember to react to things fast.
I don’t remember to fight for my rights.
I don’t remember to be kind to people.
I don’t remember to introduce myself.
I don’t remember to tell Mark thank you.
I don’t remember to say good night.
I don’t remember to say good morning.
I don’t remember to pray at night.
I don’t remember to thank God for life.
I don’t remember to tell my family I love them.
I don’t remember to write slower.
I don’t remember to remember things.
“There’s nothing stupid about that,” Ms. Brigade said. “It’s a poem, really.”
“Naw, I could never write poetry.”
“Why not?”
“You got to be a certain kinda person to write poetry. You know—kinda . . .”
“Kinda gay,” Jose said, snickering.
“That’s the ignorant view,” Ms. Brigade said. “Most people grow out of it.” Jose slumped in his chair and didn’t say anything more after that.
“Now me,” Duc said. “This about a person who surprise me.”
Five months ago when I stepped out of my class and joined the line movement I saw a guy, he is looking like a guy that I know. When we went back to the unit, the staff did a search, I saw his tattoo on his arm and I know that he is my victim’s brother. I shot my victim, but he lived. I looked at this guy real mad and I just wanted to take off on him but I know if I take off on him the staff will stop us and send me to the Box. I tried to hold my anger to looking for a better chance to beat his ass. After the search he passed me in the hallway, he looked at me with a scary face and told me with a scary voice, “I’ll talk to you later.” It made me think of myself when I first got locked up. Scared, worried, and don’t know what’s gonna happen. I felt sorry for him but I was still mad because his brother is a snitch and came to court to testify against me. I think he talked to me because he was scared and afraid that I would beat his ass.
That day when we were showering in the bathroom, he asked me with a scared voice, “Duc, how are you?” I was afraid of getting locked down because the staff don’t let us talk in the bathroom. I didn’t say anything to him. After that, every day he tried to talk to me and I was cool with him because I didn’t want to beat a scared guy and someone smaller than I am. Then one day I go into my room and there he is. The staff make us roommates. Because we are both from Vietnam, I find out we are almost the same in everything. He surprised me. We became friends.
One day I ask permission to apologize to his brother, and his mother. He said yes, so I apologized. Now I could see his brother, my victim, and his mother every Sunday when they come to visit him.
I looked around the room, wondering if the boys had been as moved by Duc’s story as I had, but they looked ready to move on to the next essay. Ms. Brigade and I shared a glance, then I asked Duc if he could tell us how he apologized. “What did you say when you first saw them?”
“I do it Vietnam-way. I gotta go down on the floor, on my knees.”
“He did it in front of everybody, out in the dayroom,” Benny said. “On Sunday, when all the families come to visit. There’s no privacy, it’s all in one room.”
“That was a long time ago,” Victor said. “There’s a bunch of people in here who shot at each other on the streets but now they get along. It’s not that unusual.”
“And what does that tell you?” Ms. Brigade asked.
“That we’re not that different,” Francisco answered.
“Does that change how you feel about gangbanging?” she asked him.
“Yeah, but that ain’t gonna solve anything. What we think in here don’t matter to people on the outs. When I was in YA, we had all these guys who did hard time come and talk to us minors about don’t do drugs, don’t join gangs. But nobody listened. I guess you just gotta live through it to know.”
“I don’t believe that,” Ms. Brigade said. “I think if you tried hard enough, you could change some people’s minds. You have a little brother, right?”
Francisco nodded.
“What do you tell him?”
“I tell him to stay in school and not fuck up so he don’t end up like me.”
“Does he listen to you?”
“He better. I told him if he fucks up, I’ll kill his ass.”
“Jones, you gotta read,” Kevin said. “You’re the only one left.”
Dale kept his eyes on the table and mumbled.
Ms. Brigade wouldn’t let him off the hook. “I hear you rapping in your room all day, Jones, I know you’ve got things to say. Don’t be shy.”
Dale rubbed the back of his shaved head with his hand, then rubbed his forehead. “Nobodygon’unnerstan’me. EverybodysayJones, you a mumblin’ muthafucka.”
Ms. Brigade waved her finger like a metronome. “So . . . read . . . slowly. Like that. It’s a technique, that’s all. You break it down and put it together one word at a time.”
Dale rubbed his head some more, then shrugged and started reading. He was, in fact, difficult to understand—we had to ask him to read the piece twice—but his writing was surprisingly coherent:
Deep down inside, this angry person awakens. Another day facing perpetual incarceration behind no mercy walls, as we are inmates.
Deep down inside this angry person there is an image of a rejoiceful person who’s facing perpetual incarceration behind no mercy walls. Just like your fellow inmates, as you think about the happiness in the past you’ll like to shout out for mercy upon your life. But living in darkness for so long, you’re taught not to express certain emotions. The voice no one hears is the voice that yells out for freedom in the mind of a forbidden child. Struggling to survive in an ongoing war that seems to have led me and my fellow troops to a meaningless situation. But as I’m found innocent in God’s prison, the light should shine on this voice of mine that people just can’t seem to follow and understand and I could say farewell to all my hidden voices. And the loneliness in my life shall run for cover.
When Dale finished reading, he looked up at me, then seemed to notice something over my shoulder. He winced, then looked back down at the table. I turned around and saw Mr. Sills standing in the doorway, staring at Dale through the window. He came inside, picked up Dale’s notebook, then said, “Time to set up for lunch. Everybody take it down. Everybody except for Jones.”
The boys filed out in silence. When they were gone, Sills asked, “What are you doin’ in here?” When Dale didn’t answer, he said, “You look at me when I’m talking to you. What are you doing in this class?”
Dale looked up. “Jus’doin’somewritin’.”
Mr. Sills paused, then said, “I asked you if you wanted to be in this class and you said no. You remember that?”
Dale nodded.
“So what happened? Why are you in here now?”
“Changemymind.”
“You changed your mind.” Sills looked at me and asked, “Did he write?”
“Yes.”
“Did he read it aloud?”
“Yes.”
“I want to hear it, Jones. Read to me what you wrote.”
He handed the notepad back to Dale and sat down. Dale read his piece a third time. When he finished, Sills kept silent for a long time, staring out the window toward the yard, then said, “I understood that.” He looked at Dale. “I understood that. You know what that means?”
Dale shook his head.
“It means you’re not retarded, Jones.”
Dale rubbed the back of his neck and smiled.
“You j
ust look that way, that’s all. Now get on outta here.”
After Dale had left, Mr. Sills leaned back in the plastic chair and smiled. “I like those results,” he said.
22 / Window Tappers
“Ms. Brigade brought her poem,” Victor said, using The Truth About Hell—an evangelical tract popular around juvenile hall— to scratch a rash on his neck. “She said when we start readin’ to call her in.” He looked out the window and pointed. “Damn, look at that moon. In the daytime an’ all.”
“It looks fake,” Francisco said dreamily. Since his conviction he had become strangely docile.
“It is fake,” Patrick said. “At least, according to Hall it is.”
“What kinna stupid shit is that? A course it’s real.”
“He said it was something the government put up there to keep everybody’s mind off poor people in the ghetto.”
Victor rolled his eyes. “Dumb-ass! He said ain’t no astronauts really gone up there, that that was fake. Everybody knows the moon is real, fool.”
“I’m not saying I thought it was fake. I was just quoting somebody.”
“Mumble-mumble . . . t’sitfor?” Dale asked, squinting upward.
“Huh? Can’t hear you, fool.”
“What’sit for? The moon, know’umsayin’?”
“Ask Mark, he’s the teacher. What’s it for, Mark?”
“As far as I know, the moon doesn’t have a purpose. It’s just there, the way the earth is here.”
Dale rubbed his head. “Butthesun, itgotapurpose. Mumble-mumble giveoff light sowecanlive.”
“Well—that’s what the sun does, but it doesn’t do that on purpose, the way you might decide to do something. Do you see what I mean?”
Dale shrugged. “Whatmakesit shinin’, then?”
“The sun?”
“Naw. Sunshine’s’causafire mm-hm. I’msayin’, howcomethemoonshine?”
“It shines because the sun shines on it. The light gets reflected off it, then comes to us.”
Dale looked skeptical. “Howcomeit changeshapethen?”
I asked Kevin if he could go into the office and get the staff to lend me a ball—any kind of ball—and a flashlight. He returned with these items and I gave a little demonstration of the moon’s phases, using the flashlight as the sun and a softball as the moon.
“Mmm . . . no shit,” Dale said when he made the connection between the model and the actual moon. “Neverlearnnothin’likethatinschool.” He rubbed his head again. “Mm-hm kinda nightsun.”
“Talk louder, fool.”
“Alwaysthoughtthemoon . . . somekinda night sun. Givin’somekindaorganisms, youknow, energytoliveoffof.”
He squinted out the window again and frowned. “Sohowcomeallthe stars bemovin’? Like thatone, see? Inanhour, itgonnabegone. Mm-hm. Iknowfromwatchin’it everydamnnight.”
I explained that the apparent movement of the stars was caused by the earth’s rotation. Then I asked if any of the boys could explain to me why the North Star alone never moved from its position in the sky. Only Benny knew the answer. Once I had explained the phenomenon to the rest of them, I suggested that they might use it as a topic. “Can you think of some aspect of your lives, or some person, or some idea, that never changes while everything else in your life seems like chaos? Do you have a personal North Star, in other words?”
At the end of the writing period, we invited Ms. Brigade to join us. She sat at the table—the first time any of the staff had done that during class—between Francisco and Kevin. We decided to move clockwise through the room, starting with Kevin and finishing with our guest.
Kevin explained to her what the suggested topic for the evening was, then apologized for not being able to follow it. “There’s no North Star for me,” he said. “Nothin’ in my life ever stayed the same.” Instead he had written about his ambition to become a chef.
Patrick, Benny, Victor, Jose, and Duc all wrote about their mothers, who never gave up on them. When it came Dale’s turn, he said, “Jus’likeJackson overhere. NoNorthStar. Nothin’butchaos.”
“What did you write about, then?”
Dale frowned at his notepad. “Ifeelbadtoday, Mark.”
“His roommate got sent to county yesterday,” Kevin explained.
“I’d like to hear what you wrote about him,” Ms. Brigade said. “I know how close you guys got.”
He mumbled a question which I didn’t understand but Ms. Brigade did.
“I just know, Jones.”
Dale pursed his lips and brushed some eraser fragments off his essay.
When we first met it was an unworthy first-time impression. We exchanged many unlikely words but after a while it was like, whatever. As my time here in K/L was growing, slowly but surely we was speaking to each other but not on a friendly-type conversation level. But once I moved next door to his room, for some reason things changed. It was like, we thought alike, did the same things at the same time, we was just so much alike. Then we became roommates. We adapted to each other’s situation right off the bat. I didn’t look at him as just a regular person, ’cause neither one of us was. We would stand out from all the rest of the guys here at Central, not just at K/L but throughout the facility. As we talked every day, all day, we found out we WERE each other. He was me and I was him, but I couldn’t understand it, I never thought I would share so much, and have so much feeling, emotions for someone I really didn’t know. But little did we know we knew each other, but it took us seventeen years to find each other.
Now he’s gone. I miss him. Most of all, I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.
When Dale finished, he stared at the table and no one said a word until Francisco asked, “Is it my turn?” He hadn’t written on the topic and offered no explanation for it; I suspected he had not been paying attention to what we’d been talking about earlier. He read as if he were in a trance:
Every time I look out my window, I see new inmate girls walking by. I just see them waving at us, but we can’t be next to them. Then, all of a sudden, I’m next to one one day. She caresses my hand and then it’s time for her to go. She stands up, looks at me, blows me a kiss, and she waves at me as she walks away.
People may think this is ordinary, but in the situation we are in, it’s a miracle to get the chance to kiss a girl, because we may never get the chance to be with a girl again.
“It was at the retreat, Mark,” Francisco said. “I’ll always have that memory.”
Normally Francisco’s essay would have triggered a discussion of male-female relations—and a viewing of Jose’s latest issue of Hustler —but Ms. Brigade’s presence made everyone act like a gentleman. Her turn to read had come at last.
“Well,” she said, taking a few sheets of paper out of a manila folder, “I brought something that I wrote one night about you—not any one of you in particular, but all of you. You may think that when I and the other staff go home we don’t think about you at all, but it’s not true. We think about you a lot. So listen up.”
Window tappers
I hear you tapping for me
To come see what you need
So when you hear my steps
You know I have the key
You stare at the wall
You wanna take a little walk
up the hall
For a sudden head call
I know y’all
Sometimes it’s nothin’ at all
Window tappers
Still hungry you say
Hate to throw food away
Sometimes it’s OK
I’ll kick you down with an extra tray
Then you want rec today
And dominoes to play
First, tighten up that room
Take the mop and broom
Sweep out trash like this
Mop up that piss
Stop spittin’ on the wall
Like you ain’t got no sense
And taggin’ the bunk
Then cry like a punk
When you sand that stuff up
Window tappers
Tappin’ for attention
Sometimes conversation
Potential rappers
Finger snappers
Three-minute crappers
Teenage nappers (babies sleep at noon)
Slipper-wearin’ flappers
Whassup! Whass in
y’all be trippin—need to see the chaplain and
psych
And the man in white (straitjacket)
You tap
For pencils and pens
To pass games to yo’ friends
To ask how have I been
Can you go pee again
Would you play Boyz II Men
Can we hear “Kirk Franklin”
We goin’ to school when?
You tap
For the hour
Like you got somewhere to go
You and I both know
That you have lots of time
So relax your mind
Practice pullin’ yo’ pants up
on yo’ behind
Learn to walk in line
Without throwin’ up your signs, fool
Window tappers
I see you on Sundays
As I walk away
I hear what your hearts say
Wish I was goin’ home too
What chu gonna do
When I look back at you
I see my little brother
Tapping for my mother
Only now there is no reply
And all the years she tried
All the nights she cried
To God
For him to straighten up his life
And the day she died
He realized
What was happening
Shortly thereafter
He stands at his door window tapping
I hear you.
The boys cheered her poem. They would not let her leave until she’d given it to me to type up and I’d promised to make copies for each of them to keep in their folders. After she’d gone, Dale mumbled something which only Kevin could understand.
“Translate for us, fool.”
Kevin smiled. “He said next time he gotta take a crap, he gonna send a telegram. ’Cause it’s harder for the staff to rhyme on.”