When my name is called, I step up to take the food that is stationed at the guard’s desk in the center. Unfortunately, he is responsible for checking wristbands to confirm each inmate’s identity as the man goes to take his tray of food.
“Where’s your wristband?” he asks monotonously.
“It was too tight, so I ripped it off,” I confess.
“Back to your cell. No food for him.”
The inmates running the food cart take my tray away and I go back to my cell to starve. I am locked in for twenty-four straight hours without food as punishment for removing the band, but at least the tiny cell has a toilet, sink, and bed and feels fairly protected. Its door is impenetrable except by the guards and it feels like it’s what will keep me safe from inmates who want to kill me. I’m pretty sure that to most of the inmates, I represent the white establishment that put them here, the very system of injustice that plagues their existence as black people in America.
I soon learn that during the day, inmates have access to a common area to play cards, read books, talk, walk around, and watch a television with its volume off. There’s a half basketball court on the far end of the area, enclosed by thick glass and a heavy door, where guys pace and do calisthenics. A basketball has never been provided, leaving the hoop, backboard, and net hanging unused for years. I keep to myself as much as possible during the first day. After lights are out and all through every night, the officer in charge walks around the cell block clacking his keys together loudly and banging them on cell doors to keep us all awake, or so I assume. Somehow, my cellmate, a black guy my age, never leaves his cot, inexplicably sleeping all day and all night.
On my second morning in jail, a guard quietly slips me a new wristband that I’m able to fasten myself and I’m finally able to get a tray of food. I take it into my cell and quickly wolf down eggs that resemble a square yellow sponge, potatoes that aren’t half bad, a slice of ham, a carton of milk, a muffin, a cup of iced tea infused with the contents of a vitamin C packet, and coffee. After I finish, I return my tray and decide today will be the day I face the rest of the inmates. The cell doors lock in an open position during the day, so continuing to stay in the cell would be pointless. Besides, I am sick of sitting in a 6 by 8 foot cell.
I head to the common area, park myself at a vacant table with my back to the corner and keep a close watch on what’s taking place. Music videos play silently on BET as some guys chatter about different musicians. Others play chess or checkers all day. Some read books, but most just lay in their cells. At one point, the guard in the center station gets up, grabs some folders, his giant ring of keys, and leaves. Immediately, a large black man who stares at me whenever we’re in eyesight of each other comes swaggering toward me. I’m nearsighted and don’t have my glasses with me in jail, but from a distance I can see his dreadlocks swaying back and forth, and as he draws closer, his huge pectoral muscles, shoulders, and arms, and a neck as thick as my thigh, are revealed. I realize this could be a bad situation, but what can I do? I remain sitting and staring at the TV off to the left, with an expression that does not acknowledge the man’s approaching presence. My defense strategy is to appear utterly unfazed, ignoring him entirely.
The man comes up to the table, stops, and stares at me. I continue to ignore him and after he finishes sizing me up, he breaks his gaze and goes back to pacing around the gymnasium for the rest of the day. I let out a deep sigh of relief when he backs off. Later, a new guard arrives, a very overweight white woman. The men hurl insults at her and she replies in kind. I observe curiously as a group of inmates entertains themselves with the female guard’s intelligent quips in response to the insults.
We are locked down that night and seconds after the door closes and latches, my name is called through the cell’s intercom. A voice says, “Grab your things and come to the desk, you’re being released.” My mom of all people came down from Green Bay to get me from jail. My aunt found out when I would be released and passed the information to my mother. I hop off the top bunk to put on my orange sandals, and look around. My things? I don’t even have socks or underwear. I grab my cellmate’s foot to wake him gently and shake it with genuine affection. “Hang in there, man, you’re gonna get outta here soon,” I say. He sighs, says, “yeah,” and rolls over.
A few weeks later, near the end of the semester, I’m summoned to the dean’s office. I’ve never been summoned before, so I know it’s serious. He tells me to take a seat and then begins to talk about a paper I wrote that was supposed to have multiple sources, but for which I only listed one in the bibliography. He agrees that none of the material in the paper was copied word for word, but implies that he is nonetheless going to expel me and use this, combined with my suspect GPA—my grades are littered with A’s and F’s—as the official reason. I’m earning straight A’s in the classes that interest me, Philosophy 101, Criminal Justice 101, and Psychology 101, but I am failing the others, some of which I often don’t even attend, preferring to smoke weed alone in my dorm instead.
I suspect that part of the unofficial reason for my getting booted is the stay I had awhile back in the campus jail. It happened after my room filled up with so much smoke from pot that the smoke alarm went off. I disconnected it from the ceiling and smashed it on the floor to make it stop, and apparently you’re not supposed to do that. Campus police rushed into the room after the alarm went off and when they smelled the smoke and saw the smashed device, they handcuffed me and booked me into the campus police station jail cell for tampering with fire equipment and marijuana possession. I didn’t think too much about it at the time, but I’m pretty sure now that the dean has heard the full story.
I ask the dean if I can just drop the courses I’m failing and he says it’s not that simple. He then mentions that he knows about the time I got in a fight with the tenant who lived above me and was arrested by the city police and taken to jail, and ultimately placed on probation. I have no idea how he found out about this and wonder if the campus police pulled my file prior to our meeting. He doesn’t mention the campus jail episode, but I guess that feels light in comparison to the city jail one. The dean mentions this as if to convey it as the cherry on the university-has-had-enough-of-me sundae. In the end, the dean doesn’t expel me, but he does put me on academic probation for one semester. This means I can’t live on campus or take classes.
I am severely tempted to object to the ruling and profess my innocence by pleading my case regarding the paper, which I am fairly certain will be considered legitimate. After all, it was a decent piece of work, with original material, where I had simply written what I knew, writing in a random source afterward to legitimize it in the professor’s eyes. I understood that it wasn’t perceived as a legitimate research paper, but it certainly was not plagiarized. However, I know better than to argue, thinking that no matter what I say, he will be disgusted with my approach to school, so it would be a hopeless endeavor.
As I leave the dean’s office, I’m pretty upset—but since it’s Friday, I decide to go to a party and figure it all out the following week. I get to the party in the late afternoon with two of my buddies, both from Chicago, one a psychology major and the other in urban planning and development. (The latter will later earn a master’s degree from the University of Illinois, and the former will become a server at a Mexican restaurant.) We arrive at a sprawling two-level home located on a very steep hill in the north side of the city. The house is split into two large apartments, one on the basement level and the other on the second floor. Both living spaces have street entrances due to the structure being built into the hill itself, one on the front of the building and one in the back, as the hill rises.
We know ahead of time that it will be a skater party, so we dress the part and walk in talking like surfers from California and pretending to be from Dogtown. Two kegs sit in barrels of ice on the street next to both entrances and a cul-de-sac shields this area from public view. W
e make ourselves at home, getting drunk and smoking blunts while observing the skills of some of the partygoers who brought skateboards strutting the mastery of their craft. Most of us simply sit by and enjoy the atmosphere and hilarity of the theme party. Several people have brought a number of longboards to sell that they had apparently made by hand, and eventually I begin to consider purchasing one, but opt to try to ride it first. I approach one of the guys and he speaks to me in skater talk: “Sure bro, they’ll be gnarly on this hill, man.”
I walk to the top of the hill and with a beer in hand I ollie over small potholes in the pavement and turn like a snowboarder on a high peak, making it safely to the bottom and the crowd of people. A small applause sounds, so I decide to continue showing off to the guests, as several more rad dudes join me to get sicky gnar on the pave.
“I’ve never seen a shorter longboard than that one,” I say, having narrowed down the selection to two boards.
“Alright, man, try ’er out.”
I grab the mini-longboard, which is pretty close to the size of a skateboard, and carry it to the top of the hill, going up for what has to be the fifth or sixth time that day. I’m genuinely interested in checking out its parameters and handling ability. I think its larger-than-average wheels could handle the city sidewalks with much greater ease than a normal skateboard—but I’m proven very wrong. Smaller boards have looser trucks and the problems that come from this become immediately apparent as the board begins to wobble violently as I go downhill. I regain control and decide to head straight down, turn at the bottom to avoid crashing into the bushes, and come safely to a halt. The only obstruction I will have is the large pothole that I, along with other boarders, have been jumping and riding over with relative ease on the longer boards.
As I gain incredible speed, time seems to slow as everyone near the kegs and entrance to the party points and shouts some surfer-stoner encouragement. I approach the pothole and ready my stance to hop over, or ollie it, but the shortness of the board makes that impossible. With the front wheels not making the lip on the far side, the board halts, its curvature at both ends acting like a springboard and flinging me into the air like I am being shot out of a cannon at the circus. I fly about ten feet and land so hard that a girl later tells me, “It looked like you hurt the pavement.” It hurts, but I get up quickly and play it off, trying to laugh and crack a joke. “I don’t know if I want a board, man,” I tell the disappointed hippie as I hand back his skate.
I go back into the party and numb the pain of the fall with heavy beer drinking and pot smoking. I even solicit some low-grade painkillers and take all of them, something like twenty pills in one fell swoop with a full beer bong. I quickly feel much better, but when I wake up the next day I can’t piece together what happened after the beer pong. I’m waking in my own bed, in the apartment I share with my cousin—yes, the same apartment where I got into a fight with the guy upstairs—yet I can’t remember going home. I try to reach for the TV remote on my desk, but pain shoots through my hand and wrist and I realize I can’t even squeeze my right hand. I reel back in pain. I slowly get out of bed, and try with my left hand to open my bedroom door, but the pain is so bad that I have to sit down on the floor. I close my eyes and see white flashes, like lightning; each one comes with a pain so searing that it springs from my hands and wrists and shoots through my whole body.
After walking a few blocks to the university hospital, X-rays confirm my suspicion: I somehow broke both my wrists. Now facing a semester suspension due to academic shortcomings and having two useless hands, I decide to take time off from school beyond the required suspension. This is a fight I’m going to sit out.
Chapter 6
Back at the Russos’, where I go to recover, it becomes clear that our trust in one another has deteriorated right along with my way of living. There’s a heaviness that hangs over our interactions and I’m sure that by now Greta and Francesco know I’ve always looked them in the eye and been polite in order to basically have fun and escape my nightmarish household. I get the feeling that Francesco thought I would come around once confronted with the reality of life, that I would make a good choice about how to live and stick to it in order to get somewhere. I think he thought the power of La Cosa Nostra would win me over eventually. But I have gone from an affluent drug dealer’s trusted soldier to a full-on drug addict and petty criminal unwilling to even get a job. They cut me off for the most part, but say, “Our door is always open,” which I take to mean that if I ever choose to take La Cosa Nostra seriously, they will be willing to have me back.
I reach out to Lucas, my old friend who helped me once before, and take him up on his offer to live with him. He is living a similar lifestyle, and his mother is all too happy to cosign the lease on an apartment for the two of us to get him out of her house.
In our new home, our lives continue to spin out of control at an alarming rate. On a typical evening, if we have no drugs or party to host, we arrange a drug deal with someone through mutual friends in order to rob the dealer of his drugs. The first time, I drive us to the deal not knowing what Lucas is planning, until he suddenly breaks into a sprint from the dealer’s vehicle, hops back into my car, and shouts, “Go! Go! Go! I got it! Go!” It became a fast habit for us to steal drugs from a dealer who was usually some high school kid.
Every time it seems like we’re running low on drugs, Lucas, who is well known and has a lot of friends, reaches out to someone and is able to score. Meanwhile, I reason that while I’m connected to the robberies, as long as I’m not the one tricking the person into handing over large amounts of weed or pills, I shouldn’t feel guilty. When a few of Lucas’s friends realize what we’re up to, they want in and soon end up moving into our small two-bedroom apartment to join in on the loot.
One evening, when we meet a dealer in a large grocery store parking lot just after dark, the guy figures out what is happening and takes off before handing anything over. Rather than call it a night, the guys tell me to follow him. A high-speed chase ensues, and I manage to drive up alongside his vehicle and ram it off the road in a residential area. The guy manages to control his vehicle without any real damage, but I get up next to him once again, steadied by the adrenaline pumping through my veins, and one of the guys in our SUV rolls the window down and chucks an old broken PlayStation console at his car, along with a few hand weights, denting the roof and hood severely.
“Get him, get that fucker!” I yell.
The chase comes to a screeching halt when the driver turns a corner and pulls into his driveway. He leaves the car running and bolts inside his house, locking the door behind him. One of the guys quickly runs to the open car, grabs all the weed and pills from the center console, along with all the loose cash, and takes off.
Looking back, I realized that any one of us could have easily been killed in the course of one of the robberies, and all of us condemned to long-term prison sentences, but at the time it seems like easy fun. It’s not so much that we trust one another, but that we share a common interest in getting high and scoring with girls and are willing to sacrifice our morals, if we have any. Spurred on by one another, it becomes like a competition of one-upping each other in doing whatever it takes to make the score.
Each time one of us makes a big bust, which takes place on a weekly if not nightly basis, we share it with the group. We also reminisce and share stories long into the night about our past while we smoke insane amounts of weed. We may not be the best influence on one another, but we more or less look after one another, and so we continue living in that two-bedroom apartment. Lucas and I have our own rooms; Avery and Gottfried share the living room with a massive couch, and their close friend Skyler often comes over and spends the night, though he has his own place. If one guy has a girl, the two of them crash in Lucas’s closet, which has been converted into a tiny bedroom. It is the common bond that we all need one another in order to get by and survive that ensures th
e loyalty that we each invest in the crew.
One day my sister Allison’s roommate, Dusty, calls. I haven’t seen him since Lindsay’s wedding, and when I answer, he sounds very sad. He and Allison spent some time hanging out with me during those few weeks leading up to the big day. It was evident that he was into her, but she led him on something fierce. However, since then, they moved in together in Madison, and they were now living about three hours away from me.
Dusty tells me not to tell Allison that he called, but he’s concerned about her and not sure what to do. He says, “She passes out to the point that I can’t wake her up . . . . It’s not normal, it’s from the drugs she’s taking.”
I know Allison is taking meds to treat her shingles disease and the resulting severe nerve pain, and I’ve long suspected that she might be doctor shopping to get multiple prescriptions, and going overboard with how much medication she takes, but I didn’t think that if she was doing this it was out of control. Dusty’s words make my heart sink. I thank him for letting me know and tell him I’ll talk with her. We hang up and I immediately dial her number. When she picks up, I tell her that I’m sorry we’ve been out of touch. I try to keep things light at first, but I quickly drop that Dusty called me. I ask if she’s okay and if she needs me to come down there. “Can you please take care of yourself?” I ask, worried.
She says she’s fine and tells me not to come, so I say okay and tell her that I love her and I am there for her, and will see her sometime soon. There’s nothing I can do, and I’m sure as shit not going to be harsh with her. Who am I to tell anyone to calm the hell down, that they’re going too far?
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