Rikers High

by Paul Volponi

  The kid begged him not to and nearly freaked when Demarco walked out the door. But Demarco only crossed over to teach his next class, shooting us all a big smile through the window when he got there.

  Miss Archer came in and put some math problems on the board. She didn’t look half as shook as I thought she would be.

  Right away, kids tried to make her feel better.

  “That dude played you too dirty,” one kid told her. “He’s lucky that he got packed up or we woulda put a beating on him for you tonight.”

  “That’s just stupid talk,” Miss Archer said. “Please, never hurt anyone over me. All right? He shouldn’t get rearrested for that either. And I’ll speak to the captain about it later.”

  I heard that out of her mouth and wondered how she could stand teaching in jail, where everybody was beat down and had been arrested for something.

  CHAPTER

  20

  Besides Officer Carter, our steady COs during the day were Dawson and Arrigo. They were both white, too, but I liked their act because they told you what they wanted up front. The first time you fucked up, they’d talk to you.

  “Tell me what you did wrong, kid,” Dawson would say, playing good cop.

  “Now, what do you think we should do about that?” Arrigo would follow, cracking his knuckles.

  The next time, they smacked you around. So when they hit you, they figured you had no one to blame but yourself.

  Dawson was tall and thick, and leaned off to one side when he walked. Arrigo was short, with greasy black hair and arms like steam shovels. He showed them off every chance he got and had a tattoo on his right bicep that read, TNT.

  “You don’t want to get hit with dynamite,” Arrigo would tell kids.

  The Department of Corrections has signs up that say inmates are in their “care and custody.” But most COs would rather keep you near and in fear.

  Arrigo came to the classroom door during math with Miss Archer and screamed, “Forty, clinic!”

  I went into the hallway and waited at the officers’ desk for an escort.

  There were always kids in the hall that had been thrown out of class. Mr. Murray, that crooked-nosed history teacher, would toss most of them for total bullshit.

  Instead of having inmates hold up the wall, Dawson and Arrigo liked to play games. They had one called “London Bridge” for kids who wanted to fight each other. Any pair caught beefing had to lean as far forward as they could, forehead to forehead. Then they had to sing “London Bridge Is Falling Down.”

  After five minutes of that crap, kids would be begging to make up and go back to class.

  They had Barnett and Shaky out there playing patty-cake, Rikers-style.

  “You act like babies, we’ll treat you like babies,” Dawson said. “Now do it again till you both get it right.”

  Barnett was pissed because Shaky kept screwing up the crossover and missing Barnett’s hand.

  I watched them do it four times and loved every one.

  Patty-cake, patty-cake, legal aid

  Get me off Rikers or don’t get paid

  Do it for my mama, do it for my girl

  I gotta make money out in the world.

  Some COs would go easy on Brick and his crew because they helped keep the house in line. But Dawson and Arrigo played them the same as everybody else. And the other kids respected that.

  The principal, Ms. Jackson, walked through the hall with her high heels tapping the floor, looking into all the classrooms. She was mad because there were kids sleeping in every class.

  “You can’t allow them to sleep,” she pecked at Dawson and Arrigo. “It doesn’t look good.”

  “If they’re not bothering anybody, we’re not gonna mess with them,” Arrigo snapped back.

  “This isn’t some kind of prep school. These kids have problems,” Dawson piped in. “Why don’t you just tell your teachers to be more interesting? Maybe that’ll help keep them awake.”

  Only Ms. Jackson didn’t break a smile at that and snipped, “I see I’ll have to bring this issue to the captain again, maybe even higher up.”

  Then she banged on a classroom window, pointing inside.

  “That one!” she screamed through the hard plastic.

  The teacher sent the kid out, and Ms. Jackson motioned him over to the officers’ desk as she stormed out of the trailer.

  The kid rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and asked the officers, “What I do?”

  “Go back to class and try to stay awake,” Dawson told him.

  “The principal’s got her period again. That’s what you did,” Arrigo said, annoyed.

  When I got to the clinic, I had to wait for a doctor to check my stitches. Other inmates were waiting, too.

  One dude told me that he’d got sliced all the way down his arm about a week ago.

  I thought something like that was better than getting cut on the face. At least he could wear a long-sleeve shirt and keep it covered. But he said that he was in pain every time he had to bend his arm.

  A nurse took the bandages off my face and cleaned the cut with some stuff that burned.

  “There, that’s not too bad,” she said with some sympathy. Only I couldn’t tell if she meant the burning or my stitches.

  That nurse was pretty and having her look over my face made me start to think. I didn’t know how shorties out in the world would react to the scar. I also didn’t want to walk around having to front and act hard all the time. I didn’t know if you could go easy with a cut on your face, without looking like a big-time herb.

  “These stitches were put in perfectly. It’s almost a shame to remove them. But it’s been six days, and they’ve done their job,” said a doctor, who pulled out all fifty-three of them with a small pair of scissors. “I know the physician on duty that day. You were very lucky to get him. Hopefully, his skill will lessen the potential for scarring.”

  I was nervous to have the sharp edges of those scissors right up against my face. And I gripped both my hands around the sides of the examination table beneath me as I felt the threads pulling through my skin.

  I wasn’t sure if I could believe him about how it was going to look, or that other doctor. People who work in jail are always covering up for each other.

  But at least it felt good to hear.

  When that doctor was done, he gave me a legit hand mirror to see for myself. I held it up to my face and saw the smooth, raised line, maybe four inches long, running down my right cheek. And I knew it was a mark that would stay with me forever, like everything else that had touched me on Rikers Island.

  He put new bandages on and told me to leave them for a few days. But I was tired of how they made my face feel heavy, so I took them off on the way back to the Sprungs and left them in a trash bin in the main corridor.

  Everyone stared when they first saw me. But that wore off pretty quick, probably because they’d seen enough cuts on kids’ faces before.

  That night Brick came up to me in the house.

  “Yo, Forty. I hear you used the phone on my private time. I’ll have to start you an account,” he said, walking away without waiting for an answer.

  It didn’t pay for him to press me too much. He had almost everything in the house locked down tight. Right now, I was the only joker in the deck. And he didn’t need to chance me flipping the script on him.

  TUESDAY, JUNE 9

  CHAPTER

  21

  In English class, Demarco broke us up into groups of four. I was working with Sanchez, Ritz, and Jersey. Each group got a different photo to look over. Ours was a black-and-white picture of a boy swinging on a tire that was hanging from a tree branch. The boy was wearing a cowboy hat and six-shooters, and he had a big smile on his face.

  I looked at that picture and started to feel sick. I just wanted not to worry anymore, like that boy.

  “What’s this got to do with us? We’re not in kindergarten,” groaned Jersey.

  But Demarco shook him off and told e
ach group to make a list of reasons why the person in the picture seemed so happy.

  “He’s happy ’cause he don’t know any better,” smirked Sanchez.

  “Write that down if that’s what you believe,” said Demarco. “I want only one answer sheet per group.”

  That’s when Sanchez pushed the pencil and paper toward Ritz, who didn’t argue about doing the writing.

  “He’s happy ’cause he’s in his own backyard,” said Jersey. “Nothin’ can happen to him there. No New York po-lice to set his ass up.”

  “He’s just a kid. He doesn’t have to worry about anything,” said Sanchez, scratching at his mustache.

  Ritz stopped writing and said, “You can’t get locked up for cap guns.”

  “At least a white boy can’t,” added Jersey.

  I said he was happy because somebody wanted to take his picture for something good, not for a jail ID card.

  Then Demarco asked us to give the boy advice on how to stay happy when he got older.

  We decided that he should stay away from drugs and be serious in school. We laughed at saying that kind of crap, because none of us had ever listened to that rap, even after hearing it a million times.

  I wanted to put in something about staying close to his family. But the time ran out and Demarco collected our work. I just kept staring at that picture till I finally folded it up and put it in my pocket.

  Miss Archer came in looking at Ritz and me like she’d never seen us before.

  “When did the two of you arrive in class?” she asked.

  I guess she was too occupied with putting on a good front yesterday, after that kid did her dirty. She added our names to her roll book and wanted to know what kind of math we’d done out in the world.

  I told her I was finished with everything in the eleventh grade.

  “I’m not sure,” Ritz said. “I know I’m solid up to the part where numbers change into letters, like X and Y.”

  “Yeah, it’s fucked up the way math changes into Chinese,” somebody said.

  “That’s why all those Chinese dudes are so good at it,” said Sanchez.

  And lots of kids agreed with him.

  I could see Miss Archer was getting all uptight with kids talking like that.

  She started us doing examples from a worksheet.

  Dudes kept asking her to work the problems out on the board. And every time she turned around to write, the whole class stopped to look at her ass. Some kid even knocked the eraser down. But Miss Archer never bent over to pick it up. She just wiped the board clean with her hand.

  It was like she knew, but just played it off. And it always felt like she was still in control, and could take care of herself.

  Kids wanted to know if she saved the dude who got caught jerking off from getting a new charge.

  “I wrote up what happened because I had to,” Miss Archer said. “But I’m not happy with the way the captain’s pushing it. And no matter what, I won’t go to court against that boy.”

  Three more teachers came to our room that day after Miss Archer.

  I’d missed them all my first day when I went to the clinic.

  Mrs. Daniels, an older lady, was the science teacher, and it was like being in class with your grandmother.

  If you said fuck, or nigger, she’d be all over you.

  Kids took her serious and even stopped each other from cursing.

  She had a big card on her desk with an F on one side and an N on the other. If you slipped up and said one of those two words, she’d flash the card at you and keep right on teaching.

  Kids would get her to talk about how the COs hit us anytime they wanted.

  “It’s not right,” she said. “I can’t stand it. I’ve discussed it with the other teachers and our principal. If nothing changes, one day I’m going to do something about it myself.”

  While the class was working, Mrs. Daniels sat down right next to me.

  “You want to tell me about what happened to you?” she asked. “And what about your family?”

  I didn’t say much because I didn’t want other dudes to hear.

  “Just jail stuff,” I told her.

  But I appreciated her sitting in the chair next to me like that, even though she was a bit of a pain.

  It’s hard to find people in jail who say they’re worried about you. I guess that’s why other dudes put up with her, too, and showed her mad respect.

  Mr. Murray was the next teacher. As soon as he walked in, Mrs. Daniels touched a kid on the head who was sleeping. The kid opened his eyes to see Murray and woke right up. The whole feeling in the room changed when he got there. Everybody got stiff, and it was like having one of the COs in class.

  “Can you explain how that photo-synth-esis works again?” some dude asked Mrs. Daniels.

  Murray made a noise in his throat and tapped on his watch.

  “I’ll go over it again tomorrow,” she said.

  Then Mrs. Daniels picked up her books and said good-bye to the class. But she and Murray never said a word to each other.

  Murray pushed his little glasses back toward the bridge of his crooked nose and handed out thick history textbooks without any covers.

  “Corrections takes the hard covers off so we can’t use the books to beat somebody over the head,” Sanchez whispered to me.

  Murray wrote on the blackboard, “Read chapter 8 and answer all questions on page 179,” using a chalk holder so he wouldn’t get his hands dirty. His letters were small and straight, like he was using lines on the board that no one else could see.

  “Do the assignment while I check the work in your folders,” he said.

  I didn’t have a folder. But I wasn’t going to say anything to him unless he talked to me first. Dudes just sat there quiet, reading and answering questions from the book. Only no one looked happy about it.

  Sanchez had told me that Murray never taught a lesson. He just wrote down what pages to look at in the book. The GED class had it easier with Murray because everybody knew how to read and write. But in the dumber classes, kids got bored and would start to screw up. Then Murray would pitch a fit and kick them out.

  Murray went over the answers with us. But he only knew one kid’s name in the class, and that was Jessup.

  Dudes called Jessup “Toothpick” because he was skinny like a rail. And some of them wanted to snap him in two because of the way he sucked up to Murray.

  “Toothpick needs one history class to graduate high school,” whispered Sanchez. “So he’s always showing Murray how much work and extra credit bullshit he’s doing.”

  Murray called on me for one of the answers.

  “You there,” he said, pointing at my face.

  I read him the answer straight from the book, and then it hit me what Demarco had said about names. And it felt like Murray really had just called me “Table” or “Chair.”

  At the end of class, Ritz and me decided to put our work into Sanchez’s folder, just to not talk to Murray.

  Lunch was next, and when we got back from the mess hall, Mr. Rowe was already in our room. He was a short, old white man, with even whiter hair. Dudes grabbed worksheets off his desk, but no one paid any attention to them. Sanchez said to hold one just in case the principal or the captain came walking through.

  Mr. Rowe just let us sit and talk. He wasn’t even busy doing something else, like reading a newspaper. He just sat there quiet, staring off into space. I finally looked at the worksheet and saw that Mr. Rowe taught life skills.

  We ended the day in the computer room. The man that ran the place wasn’t a teacher.

  “I’m a paraprofessional,” he said. “I don’t get paid to teach, so I don’t.”

  There was no Internet connection, and those computers looked old enough to come from the Stone Age.

  The man handed everybody a book of lessons, but most kids knew the code to get into the games. Jersey was that man’s helper, and he hooked me up.

  Jersey didn’t seem to hold anyt
hing against me. I even started to like him, since we were in class together and he was on the outs with Brick.

  I played solitaire and Pac-Man.

  Dudes were wild to play some computer game where you’re an ace detective. You chase a lady spy named Carmen Sandiego all over the world, trying to put her in jail. I didn’t know why they liked that game so much. They were all pissed off that some cop did that to them for real and dropped them on Rikers Island.

  That night I was sitting on my bed talking with Sanchez. When it got quiet, I took the picture of that boy on the swing out of my pocket and looked it over again.

  I said, “I wish I could go back in time and be that age,” and then tears started down Sanchez’s face.

  Tears are nothing new in jail. Dudes cry all the time on Rikers Island and nobody makes fun of them. A kid could be laughing and joking with everybody one minute, then crying by himself the next. Sometimes the stress is too much and it breaks you.

  I cried a couple of times back in Mod-3, after I didn’t go home from court. But I got past all that, and a lot of those feelings just got hard.

  “My moms died of pneumonia last year, and there’s nobody left I’m close with,” said Sanchez. “I remember my father being a real prick, and with any luck he’s dead someplace.”

  I’d seen lots of kids like Sanchez on Rikers Island without anywhere to go. But he was doing the best out of all of them, and even had his GED.

  He kept talking about going upstate and how it had him worried.

  “Things are different with adults,” he said through the tears. “There, you’ve got to watch your back and your ass. If you need protection, you become somebody’s boy. Then he can do what he wants to you, or even rent you out.”

  I couldn’t understand why he was so shook. Sanchez held his own in the Sprungs without being anybody’s doldier or Maytag. But he had it in his head that he was going to get ripped off—raped—upstate.

  Adolescents on Rikers Island don’t run that game. Dudes with that kind of juice here want to prove how tough they are or how many girls they’ve got out in the world waiting for them.