by Jerome Gold
“That’s exactly what he does!” Layton said. “You’re right, Jerry! That’s exactly how he does it! He taunts them!”
“Have you talked to him about it?” Jan said.
Disbelief showed on Layton’s face with such suddenness that a laugh broke from Jan like an eruption, though she tried to choke it back. As close as he and Jan were, Layton had complained to me that when it came to Frank and Julius, she wouldn’t allow him to even hint at dissatisfaction.
“Do I have your permission?”
“Of course you have my permission. When have I ever interfered with you supervising staff?”
“O-o-o-o…”
Jan looked at Layton frozen with trying to find the combination of words that would both convey his frustration and do it in a way that would not lose him what he had just gained, and laughed again.
“When you get your tongue back from the cat that stole it, come talk to me,” she said, and returned to her office.
We had been talking beside the staff desk in the living room and now, with Layton about to say something, the kids started coming in from the classroom and our attention was diverted to monitoring them, looking for the sneak punch, searching their faces for a warning of what might be about to happen. I never learned whether or not he spoke to Julius—for all of Layton’s unhappiness with some of the staff, he preferred to avoid confronting them—but nothing changed in the way Julius dealt with the kids.
Jazz’s problem ended in a way I had not anticipated.
He had threatened to kill himself, requiring us to put him on suicide watch. He began peeing on his floor and in the trash basket in the head. He told me that he thought if he acted crazy, we would send him to Dolphin, the boys’ mental health cottage. I told him that when he smeared his shit on the walls of his room I would believe he was crazy. He said he didn’t think he could go that far. He apologized for pretending to be suicidal; he knew it made more work for me. He had been in Wolf for over half a year, longer even than Norah Joines, including periods when his behavior was commendable, and he had given up hope of transferring out. I put this in my case notes.
Meanwhile his psychiatrist, perhaps influenced by my case notes, perhaps solely by her conversations with Jazz, had been talking to her supervisor, and they decided to recommend that Jazz be transferred to Dolphin. I heard about it only when Carl, Dolphin’s director, came over to interview him. Afterward, Jazz asked me what I thought. Before I could respond, he said Carl had made the move sound pretty good. I took him into the staff office.
“He said if I behaved, I’d get my level soon—I mean soon, like a week or two—and then I’ll be able to stay up and play Playstation when the other kids are in bed.”
“You and the other higher levels, you mean.”
“Well, yeah, I wouldn’t be the only one. But maybe I would. I don’t know. The problem is that I don’t know anybody there. And I’m used to things here.”
“Julius is a problem for you, or am I wrong?”
“Yeah, you’re right. But I just stay in my room now when he’s here. Unless you’re here too.”
“Maybe you could visit Dolphin, meet some of the kids, maybe have lunch over there, before you make up your mind.” Of course, it didn’t matter what he decided. If the administration wanted to move him, they would. But it would help the kid if he believed the decision was his, or at least that he had had a voice in its making.
“Yeah, that’s what Carl said. Actually, I’m going over there tonight for supper. Carl said he’d arrange it.”
“Wow. He moves fast.”
“Yeah. Maybe too fast though. I’m really a little scared.”
“Of having supper there?”
“Naw, man, nothing’s gonna happen during supper. At least I don’t think anything will. But, you know, if somebody disrespects me, then I’ve got to…” He hit his palm with his fist.
“I don’t think they have any gang kids over there, Jazz. I don’t think anybody’s going to disrespect you.”
“They don’t let gang kids in? What about me? What do they think I am?”
“What I meant was they don’t happen to have any there now, as far as I know. It just happened that way.”
“Oh. There’s no, like, what do you call it?”
“Policy?”
“Yeah. There’s no policy against gang kids, is there?”
“I’m sure there isn’t.”
“Well, maybe it’ll be all right then.”
“Let me ask you something. I’m just making conversation now, I’m not going to hold you to anything. If you could get out of your gang now, would you?”
“I don’t know, man. My uncle wants me to get out. He used to be in a gang. He says they just want things from you. Want you to do things for them, but they don’t give you back, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“But I don’t know if I want to give it up. My uncle’s situation was different. He had a job and all, so he didn’t have time to kick it anymore.”
“So? You can get a job when you’re old enough. And you’ll be almost old enough when you’re paroled.”
“Me and all the people inside my head. Uh huh.”
I laughed.
“Maybe they can do something about that at Dolphin.”
“I hope so. Carl thinks so. I don’t know if I want them to go away though. I mean some of them are people I used to know. If they just fade out a little, you know? That would be better.”
“You mean so they don’t interfere with your life?”
“Yeah. That would be better.”
“So did Carl say when you’d be going over there? To live, I mean. When you’ll be transferred.”
“He said Monday.”
“Monday? I had no idea it would be so soon.”
“Yeah. He said someone’s paroling on Monday, so they’ll have a bed for me. Are you gonna be working Monday?”
“I’ll be here. I work every Monday.”
“Yeah, I forget. It’s ‘cause I’m crazy.”
“Uh huh. Do you think you’re crazy?”
“Sometimes. But naw, I ain’t crazy.”
“Naaah.”
He laughed. Then he said, “But serious, man, do you think I’m crazy?”
“No, man, I don’t think you’re crazy. Look, it’s time for me to go home.”
“Okay, man, I’ll see you on Monday.”
“I’ll be here tomorrow too. And the next day. And Sunday.”
He slapped the side of his head. “Damn, man, all these people keep getting in the way of my thought processes.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
After locking him in his room, I went into Jan’s office. “Jazz is leaving Monday?”
Her eyes were riveted to the computer monitor. She nodded without looking up. “Carl interviewed him today,” she said.
“I know. I was here.”
“Then why are you asking me?”
“I was thinking that we should refuse to let Jazz go.
We should tell Carl that Jazz’s psychiatrist doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Frank should write a memo to the administrators, telling them that Jazz is playing them, that he doesn’t have hallucinations or hear voices, that they’re suckers for believing him.”
Jan took her eyes from the monitor.
“That’s true, isn’t it? Anybody who thinks Jazz is ill is a sucker, right?”
“You’ve made your point.” She turned back to the monitor.
It didn’t do me any good. I was angrier now than I was before I went into her office.
THREE
Jeremiah Court replaced Jazz on my caseload. He’d been in the cottage about a week. He’d been to Ash Meadow before. He’d gone to a group home but had been sent back because he beat up a kid there.
The first time we talked, he told me he didn’t want any more trouble, he just wanted to finish his sentence as easily as he could. Four days later he assaulted another boy, rushing him from the side an
d getting in three or four punches before Jamie could regain his balance.
We put him on an In/Out program, which meant that he would be locked in his room when other kids were on the floor and that he would not take recreation with them. He would be allowed to go to school, but if he continued to be as aggressive as he had shown himself to be so far, we would pull him out of school and he would spend in his room the time that he would otherwise have been in class.
“You can’t do that,” he said. “The law says you have to let me go to school.”
“We did it before, with another kid. There is no limit to what we can do if we have to.”
He spent a week on In/Out, then another week because he started refusing his meds. When I told him he had to do a second week and why, he said he’d heard that Jamie was going to jump him and he wanted to be ready for him. His meds took away the edge he needed.
“No. Jamie got his licks in on you too, and he’s content with that. Plus, he’s given us his commitment not to jump you.”
“Then I’ll commit not to jump him either.”
“I don’t believe you. Do you want to know why?”
“No. Yes.”
“When you came here you said you didn’t want any more trouble. Then you jumped Jamie.”
“He was disrespecting me!” He looked as if he were about to cry. At the same time, he looked wildly angry.
“No. You jumped him in order to dominate him, and to show the other kids that you could. He wasn’t disrespecting you. He didn’t care enough about you to disrespect you.”
I waited for him to tell me I was wrong, or for another outburst proclaiming that he himself was actually the victim, but he stared at the floor without saying anything.
“So you have another week on In and Out. Staff will evaluate your progress again one week from today. If you’re doing well, if you’re taking your meds like a good youngster”—he laughed at this. That was a good sign; he could as easily have interpreted my words as disrespecting him—“and if you seem to us to be less belligerent, we’ll take you off the In and Out program. If not, you’ll get another week, after which we’ll evaluate you again. Do you understand how it works?”
“I get the picture.” Sullen. Tears and anger gone. Could he call up his emotions at will, or did they have their own lives?
“Do you understand what ‘belligerent’ means?”
“I know what belligerent means.”
“Not everybody does.” Jazz would not have known.
We were in Jeremiah’s room, both of us sitting on his bed. I stood up. “I’ll check on you in a couple of hours. You can have a deck of cards in your room. Do you want one?”
“I thought we couldn’t have cards.”
“You can if your staff authorizes it. I’m your staff. If you want the cards, I’ll authorize it.”
“Yes, I would like some cards, please.”
“Good.”
Julius didn’t like Jeremiah. He didn’t like his swagger. He didn’t like the way he rolled his shoulders and snapped his fingers as if he were listening to music that nobody else could hear. He didn’t like Jeremiah’s sarcasm or the way he butted into other people’s conversations. He didn’t like anything about Jeremiah and when his back was turned, Julius laughed at him or called him “a jive turkey,” loud enough for Jeremiah to hear something and suspect it was about him, but not so loud that he could be certain. Jeremiah would hear it and spin around, trying to figure out who had said it, and Julius would look in a different direction and laugh as though at something entirely unrelated to Jeremiah, or perhaps not.
Once, monitoring rec, Julius hit him in the back of the head with a basketball, bringing him to his knees. Julius immediately apologized, but he was laughing too, seemingly at his error, for, he said, he had been tossing the ball to Renaldo when he hit Jeremiah.
Julius demeaned him, taunted him sometimes, told him he wasn’t tough, as though challenging him to prove he was. “Anybody can hit somebody littler than him,” Julius said to him. It was true that Jamie was taller, but Jeremiah had thirty pounds on him. “Only a man will take on somebody he doesn’t already know he can whip,” Julius said. When Julius said this, everybody knew that he was saying Jeremiah was afraid of him. And this compounded Jeremiah’s problem. Clearly he would be stupid to buck up to Julius, and he was not about to. Yet there he was, Julius, mocking him in front of everybody.
Maggie tried to intervene, complaining to Jan that Julius was harassing Jeremiah, but nothing came of it. Ultimately I stopped Julius.
Jeremiah had passed the second week of his In/Out program, toward the end of which he began to take his meds again. His behavior improved, he stopped trying to intimidate other kids, his demeanor toward staff became more respectful, and we put him back on the regular program.
A week or so later, at supper, Julius stood behind the kitchen counter on which the food was set out and called the kids up for seconds. Jeremiah raised his hand, but Julius didn’t call him up, repeatedly skipping over him in favor of other kids. Jeremiah looked at me. I didn’t know what to say. I had not seen Julius do anything this blatant since before Jazz left. Finally Jeremiah stood up and walked to the counter. He picked up the tongs and put a slice of pork on his tray.
Julius said, “Just a moment. Did you have permission to come up here?”
“No, I—”
“Did I give you permission? Did Jerry give you permission?”
“No.”
“Throw that meat away.”
Jeremiah emptied his tray into the slop bucket and started back toward his table.
“Just a moment.”
Jeremiah stopped.
“Who gave you permission to leave?”
“Look, I’m not trying to—”
“Who gave you permission to walk away like you did? Did Jerry give you permission? Did I?”
Julius wasn’t looking at him. He stood behind the counter, eating a sandwich, looking over Jeremiah’s head. He seemed not to be looking at anything.
I said, “Jeremiah, put your tray down and have a seat in the living room.”
“All right,” Julius said. “If Jerry says you can leave, you can leave. But just a moment. Don’t you want a second helping of pork?”
“I’m not hungry,” Jeremiah said.
“For someone who isn’t hungry, you surely put us through a lot of trouble,” Julius said.
I got up and went into the living room. “Come on. I’ll put you in your room. You can punch your door one time. More than that, you’ll go to a quiet room.” It was a rule I’d just made up. I was trying to joke with him to help him through his humiliation.
“I’m not going to punch my door. Why does he do that? I didn’t do anything to him. O-o-o-o! Some day he’s going to do that and—o-o-o! I know I can’t beat him, but if I can hit him just once, it’ll be worth it.”
“You would be charged with custodial assault.”
“Not if he hit me first. Not if I was defending myself.”
“He’s not going to hit you first. You know that.”
“I don’t know that! O-o-o!”
“Do you want to go in the quiet room for a while? No consequences.” The quiet room was an isolation cell adjoining the staff office. Sometimes we placed a kid in it if he was disruptive or if he was in immediate danger of harming himself. Sometimes a kid who was feeling overwhelmed would ask to be locked in it.
“No. I’ll be all right.”
He stepped into his room and I locked him in. As I was walking out of the zone, he punched his door. I waited but he didn’t punch it again, and I went back out on the floor. I checked the expressions on the faces of the kids in the dining room. I wondered if they could see my shame.
I wrote Jan a memo telling her that I considered Julius a threat to the cottage. I recounted his demeaning Jeremiah and how he had treated Jazz. I wrote it only to get my concerns on record, I had no hope that Jan would do anything. So I was surprised when, two days later, she
called me into her office to talk about the memo. Then I was surprised that she didn’t dispute anything I’d said. She did say, as she’d said about Jazz, that Jeremiah could be a jerk. And she said that it wouldn’t hurt him to be taken down a peg or two.
Her concern, she said, was that Julius and I apparently were not able to agree on things that were important. Julius had talked to her about me. He said I did not support him when he disciplined the kids, that they ran to me to avoid him and that I allowed them to do it.
I said that I did not see him disciplining the kids as much as degrading them. No other staff did this.
Jan surprised me a third time. She asked if any of the kids Julius had targeted were white, if any, in fact, were not black
“Layton and I brought this up to you four or five weeks ago. He only goes after the black kids. The boys,” I said.
She looked at me.
“You’ll have to excuse me. My mind isn’t what it used to be. Not that it ever was.”
“The chemo?”
“Or age. I don’t know which I would rather it be. Anyway… Jeez, what was I saying? Oh, I remember. It was probably you who gave me that idea in the first place. But the fact is, other staff are complaining too. Not as strenuously as you, of course.”
“What are they saying?”
“The same thing you said, but about other kids. Tyrell. William.”
“He hasn’t targeted Derek, as far as I know.”
“Derek does what he’s told. And Derek likes him.”