by Jerome Gold
And the varieties of tragedy were limitless. As soon as you learned how to deal with kids in despair enough to kill themselves, you had to learn to manage one with leukemia or AIDS, which meant, of course, that you had to learn how to manage yourself managing kids who knew they were going to die sooner than the other kids they knew, perhaps while they were still in prison.
And you couldn’t ever let yourself forget what some of them had done to get here—murder, assault with a deadly weapon, rape of a child, arson as well as your more mundane crimes like burglary and robbery and auto theft—because if you didn’t remind yourself, you could not justify the unhappiness we, our system, inflicted on these kids. What people who did not know prison did not understand was that you could provide a kid with TV and nutritious food and the chance to go to school and a gym where he could play basketball and lift weights, and none of that compensated for the loss he felt at being cut off from the people he loved and who, maybe, loved him.
And you couldn’t let yourself forget what had been done to them before they did what they did. I knew a boy whose father beat him until he didn’t recognize his own face when his dad held him up to a mirror, laughing at him, laughing at his son’s reaction. I knew another whose stepfather made him watch as he raped the boy’s sister, telling the boy he was next. I knew a boy whose mother beat him so badly he thought he was going to die, another who saw his mother cut his father’s throat, another who saw his father stab a man to death. I knew a girl whose mother sold her for crack, not an uncommon story. Another common one was of the girl who was raped by her father or stepfather or her mother’s boyfriend, then called a liar and accused of trying to break up her mother’s marriage or relationship when she told her. That was the worst part, the girl always said, being told by your mom that you were lying.
So a bad day was a day in which there was an incident and a worse day was one in which there were two incidents, or one in which someone got hurt. Every incident required us to lock the kids down until we had dealt with it—we had the combatants back in their rooms or had moved them to isolation cells out of the cottage—and completed the ensuing paperwork. I always felt we were cheating the kids by keeping them down for so long, but one incident, a fight, say, could lead to others. One of a combatant’s friends might feel obligated to go after the kid who hit his homie, so staff had to be alert and thinking clearly before we let the kids back out on the floor.
We also had ourselves to deal with. Most of us did not acknowledge that we felt afraid at times, but we all knew we were angry. A kid hurts another kid who is unable to defend himself, you want to hurt that first kid. But you can’t. Not only is your job at stake, but your reputation, and the way you see yourself through your own eyes. Yet the anger is there, and following a particularly bad incident, it could course through your body so that you felt actual physical pain. It, the anger, was not something you were always aware of. Sometimes you did not feel its sensations, but recognized it only by listening to what you were saying or observing what you were doing. But it was something that could take over your life, just as it dominated the lives of most of the kids who were our charges.
TWO
I had on my caseload a fourteen-year-old named Jazz who believed he was nuts. He had spent some time in a California Youth Authority facility and a psychologist there had told him he was. In CYA, he said, he took medication to help him control his anger, but he hadn’t taken it since he left California and he didn’t know what the medication was. He was afraid of his anger and talked about it as if it were something apart from him, as if it had its own life but sometimes resided in his. He was afraid that, because of it, he might do something crazy like assaulting somebody or, if he had a shank, stabbing somebody.
He said that when he was in CYA he saw a kid raped—held down by four boys and raped by a fifth—while a guard nearby stood with his back to them. Another boy was raped in the cell he shared with five others, including Jazz, while those not involved played cards. Jazz himself once raped a kid with a broom handle while two other boys held him down. When I said that must really have hurt the kid, Jazz said he didn’t know, but the boy was crying. Jazz said he was forced to do it by some of the older boys. He said it was either that or he would have to use his dick, and he didn’t want to use his dick. Or he could have had it done to him—that was another choice, although it wasn’t really.
He was small and I wondered whether he was any of the rape victims he talked about. He wore a smile when he described what happened to them, and I took this smile to be an admission of helplessness. On the other hand, I’d known a boy years earlier who had been raped by his homies and he didn’t smile at all when he told me what they did to him. He cried and said over and over, “Why’d they do it?”
Jazz hallucinated every day. He saw people he knew were dead. He knew some of them were dead because he had been told about their being killed; others he himself had seen killed. Sometimes I would stand in the zone and look through the Plexiglas window in his door and see him talking, though he was alone. Sometimes he would be laughing. Sometimes his eyebrows raised and his eyes widened as if he had just heard something that was a surprise to him. Sometimes he would be in the living room or the dining room and his face would be working and he would be mouthing words, sometimes audibly, sometimes not. He told me he talked to his dead homies and they talked to him. At first he would not tell me what they said, but after he was with us for some months, he told me that they accused him of things. “Why didn’t you do this? Why didn’t you do that?” they said. They blamed him for their deaths.
Once, he told me, he went to a party with a homie and the homie suddenly pulled a shotgun out of his coat and began shooting people, then pulled out a handgun and continued. Jazz had had no idea he was going to do that. His homie was crazy, Jazz said.
Once he and his homies were walking and a couple of cars pulled up and the people inside them started shooting and some of his homies fell and then the cars stopped and the shooters got out and Jazz and those of his set who could still move ran to get away as the other set shot at them. Jazz got separated from his homies and hid behind a rock wall until he knew it was over, and then he cried. When he told me this, he asked me not to tell anybody that he had cried, but he had been so scared, he said, he couldn’t help it.
The dead people he saw in his waking life and also in his dreams were his homies who had been killed on the street that time or were people who were killed at the party or were people he didn’t know. His psychiatrist told him his hallucinations owed to his feelings of guilt and to his having smoked so much sherm. The effects of the sherm were not going to go away. Jazz would have to learn to live with seeing and hearing people who were not there, as they or something like them would be with him until he himself died. When he told me what she had said, he shrugged his shoulders and put on one of those grins he used to signify the hopelessness of something and said, “At least I won’t get lonely.”
Jazz said one day that Julius had told him he wanted to be his staff. He’d told him this the night before, after I left. “Jerry does a good job,” Julius said, “but I would do better.”
Julius had brought him out of his room and kept him out until nearly midnight, when the graveyard staff was due, telling him to help himself to what was in the refrigerator, even offering to fry some eggs for him. Jazz asked me not to say anything to anybody because he was afraid of what Julius might do if he knew he had told.
Julius was our newest hire. He had come to us as a transfer from Security. The word was that Newt Smith, the Security chief, had advised Jan not to take Julius, that Julius should not work in a cottage, but was vague as to why. Among us staff at Wolf, only Bernie had met Julius. Bernie told me that he had been working a graveyard shift once when Julius came by to drop off clean bedding. Bernie asked him to stay so he could get a kid with enuresis up for a head call before he peed his bed. Julius refused, saying it wasn’t his problem. It was, Bernie said: Julius was working Secu
rity and one of the duties of security officers was to stand by while cottage staff who were working alone gave head calls. Julius gave in but warned Bernie that next time he would not be so accommodating. Bernie had reported this to Jan.
Julius, Jan told me, had a reputation, and she hesitated to hire him. What was his reputation? That he was difficult to get along with, was all she said.
Ultimately she brought him on. She hired him, she said, because she thought he had not been given a fair shake. If he was disliked, it was because he said what he thought rather than defer to anyone. This reminded me of her rationale for hiring Frank a couple of years earlier. She had taken him in spite of his reputation on campus—I once heard Newt refer to him as “a nut case”—because he thought outside the box, she said, and while she decided later that he did not think outside the box, but simply did not recognize a box when he saw one, she stuck by him, telling the rest of us that Frank spent so much time at the computer instead of on the floor because he was a perfectionist who wanted his reports to be just right. We thought he spent so much time in the office because he was afraid to be on the floor with the kids.
It was only a few weeks after Julius came on that kids started telling me they had witnessed shouting matches between him and Dick, and him and Frank. But if Julius had problems with other staff, I represented a special problem for him. I had been an officer in the army; he had retired as an NCO. I had been in Viet Nam; he had enlisted after the war ended. I was white, but was popular with the black kids, at least those in gangs. I was a Jew; Julius believed Jews controlled the economies of the world and were, therefore, responsible for global poverty. He made the occasional acerbic comment. Once, when we were still learning about each other, he asked me if I had enjoyed the chicken we’d had for supper. I had.
“I’ll bet you’re used to eating steak at home. Top sirloin.”
I looked at him.
“If you were Jewish, you’d be eating filet mignon.”
He pronounced it mignon, with a hard g. I was certain he knew the French pronunciation, and that he knew I was Jewish.
I did not worry about his anti-Semitism or his hatred of social classes other than the one he identified with, because I knew he had found no sympathy from the other staff, excepting Jan. She may have been aware of his anger at those he believed had more or better than he, but she would have excused it as part of the price you pay should you be fortunate enough to be born poor and black in America. She treated criticism of Julius with the same disdain with which she dismissed criticism of Frank.
I attributed Jan’s thinking about Julius to her relationship with Herman who thought about race and power in the same way. Before I worked for Jan, I worked for Herman in Swan Cottage. Herman believed that anyone could be a rehabilitation counselor regardless of his personality or the baggage he carried, provided he got the right training and a chance. I had known other people who were passionate in their pursuit of social justice, but none who sought it with such fervor. Herman seemed to feel he could convince anybody to think as he did if only he approached him with enough energy.
But maybe it was the chemo that short-circuited Jan’s thinking about Julius. Her cancer had come back and she was on a chemo cocktail that often left her sick and exhausted after a treatment. Sometimes she did not have the concentration to deal with a problem, and sometimes she decided just to give herself a break from it, and did nothing.
So I was in a bind. If I told Jan, she would talk to Julius and then he would know that Jazz had informed on him. There was also the possibility that she would disregard whatever I said about Julius and not bother even to question him, but if I did nothing, he would certainly continue to try to undermine me. I wrote a memo telling Jan what Jazz had said.
A couple of days later, she called me into her office and told me that Julius denied telling Jazz he would be a better staff for him than I was.
I shrugged. What else could Julius say? I said nothing.
Julius did admit to having brought Jazz out of his room and allowing him to raid the refrigerator, but he said he did it only because Jazz was so skinny that he felt sorry for him.
“He isn’t skinny anymore,” I said.
“If you were Julius, everybody would look skinny to you.”
Julius carried thirty or forty extra pounds around his middle. But forty pounds was not a tremendous amount for the frame it hung from. He was only three or four inches shy of seven feet and he weighed three hundred pounds or more. He had been an athlete—even now, in his mid-forties, it was a pleasure to watch him on the court—and he observed the way other men moved and he knew how to estimate their abilities from the proportion of shoulder to hip and upper arm to forearm. Jazz was small but moved with grace and he did not need to pack on more weight. But I decided not to say anything more.
Julius retaliated.
At six-thirty I read from the point sheet to the kids seated in the living room how many each kid had lost that day. Julius had taken a point from Jazz. When I read it, Julius put in that he had actually taken two points but hadn’t marked the second one yet. One point was bad because it would keep Jazz from earning his next level: a kid needed three consecutive weeks without a point loss to get his level. Jazz was four days away from his three weeks. Two points were worse. Not only would he not get his level, he would have to sit Tables tomorrow. When the other kids were outside playing ball or in the living room watching TV, he would have to sit silently at a table in the dining room, facing a bare wall.
After I finished, Jazz asked me if he could earn his points back. It was Julius who took his points, I said—for what, I didn’t know; Jazz didn’t either—so it would have to be Julius to decide whether or not to give them back. Jan had left, so Jazz could not appeal to her. Julius was in the staff office now and Jazz walked across the living room to the office doorway. I could see him talking to Julius, and Julius answering, and then Jazz came back.
“He said he’ll talk to me later.”
“Good.” I knew it meant a tremendous loss of self-respect to beg for his points.
Late in the evening, Jazz approached him again. Julius said he wouldn’t allow him to earn back his points. Jazz still didn’t know why he lost them.
At eight, Julius began giving out meds. Jazz asked me if I would give him his. I couldn’t: Julius was in the office, so I had to be on the floor. Jazz went to the office. I didn’t hear what happened then, what Julius said or what Jazz said, but Jazz left the office and went to his room. On the way, he ripped some papers off the announcement board beside the office door. In his room he started punching his door and I called Security to move him to a quiet room in another cottage. Kids often regained their composure faster if they were moved out of the cottage, away from the kids who knew them best.
I filled out the incident report and the heading on the tracking sheet and Julius wrote the log entry. On the incident report I gave Jazz four hours OP for banging on his door. When I looked at the log later, I saw that Julius had given him twenty-four hours for having cursed at him. Julius and I had been over the issue of disproportionate punishment before.
When I came in the next day, I found another log entry by Julius saying that Jazz would serve an additional twenty-four hours for destroying state property and for calling him “stupid” when he came back from Swan Cottage’s quiet room. Julius did not say what he meant by “state property,” but I guessed he was referring to the papers Jazz had torn off the announcement board. Julius was on his weekend; I couldn’t ask him.
About five, Corey came down to the cottage to have supper with us. Security often ate with us; Wolf was more structured than other cottages and most kids, all who had lost a point the day before, ate in their rooms, so we could afford to relax a little while we ate. Flipping through the pages of the log, he settled on the previous night’s entries.
“I brought Jazz back last night, Jerry. He didn’t say anything to Julius. I put him in his room and he went to bed.”
; “There’s nothing I can do. I’ve tried.”
You often found staff whose judgment was flawed, but you rarely found one who acted out of malice. I didn’t say this.
Corey stabbed his spork at the food on his tray, then stood up and walked over to the counter and scraped the contents of the tray into the slop bucket. He left the cottage without signaling goodbye.
Jan said that Julius had become enormously popular with the kids since he started working at Wolf. I looked at her to see if she was serious. Layton shook his head.
“Watch him,” Layton said. “Look how much he’ll send a black boy to his room and how much he’ll send a white boy. The black boys are always spending time in their rooms when Julius is on duty. Read the log. He’ll give an African American boy four hours in his room for the same thing a white boy does, but he’ll give the white boy one hour. Two at most.” He looked at me as though for support.
“I haven’t tracked his punishments, but I’ve seen how he’ll taunt the black kids—the boys, at least—until they say something that will get them sent down. And once they’re there, he’ll keep them in their rooms for the rest of his shift.” This was not something I would have said to Jan if we were alone, but she respected Layton’s opinion on some things and she knew Layton respected mine. (There had been a distance between Jan and me since Frank had convinced her that I was allowing Jazz to play me, that he did not hallucinate and he did not hear voices and he did not have a problem with reading, but said he did in order to get over on me. When I countered that his psychiatrist said he hallucinated and his teachers said he couldn’t read, she didn’t say anything, but pursed her mouth as though to dismiss anything a psychiatrist or a teacher might say. I understood then that I was her target; she really had no interest in psychiatrists or teachers or in Jazz. She was doing Frank’s work for him.)