by James, Jesse
I exhaled, relieved. I’d have a chance to finish out the season. But I’d miss the following three months of classes. If I wanted to graduate, I’d have to go to summer school for sure. Awesome. I was well on my way to being a loser.
“Hey, man, let me explain,” Bobby said, when I saw him at practice the next day.
“No,” I said coldly.
“Aw, James, you don’t get it, man. If Dave got nabbed for this, he’d do real time. You’re just going to juvie, man.”
“Beat it,” I snapped. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
He nodded. “I wouldn’t talk to me either, James. I get it, man,” he said. “I really do.” And Bobby loped away.
I walked around for my last two weeks of freedom in a depressed stupor. The football field was my only refuge. More recruitment letters arrived at my house each day. Clemson, Michigan State, Wisconsin: everybody was talking scholarship. They all wanted to come down and meet my parents “when the time was right.” I laughed drily, picturing Nina serving up a martini to a Big Ten coach, my dad trying to sell him a case of reclaimed tuna, found at auction.
Our last game was against Norte Vista. I played with a fury that surprised even me. I knew a few of the kids on the team personally, and I decided to go for each of them, one by one. I ignored the quarterback and the direction of the play, focusing instead on taking each opponent out at the knees for one last time, simply because it felt so good to smash them down to the ground.
We were down by three in the last quarter, and it looked like I might just lose the last game of my high school career. With three minutes remaining, we made our final drive down field. We drove the ball inside the twenty, and our quarterback grimaced in the huddle, trying to decide what the hell to do.
“What do you think, Jesse?” he finally said. He looked shaken.
I shrugged. “Let’s run it,” I said. “Come on, guys! This is it. Our last time. Let’s make it count.”
We ran a play for Bryson Young, our speedy halfback. The quarterback shoved it into Bryson’s chest, and he slipped around the end. Norte Vista’s defensive back came rushing in to grab him, but I leveled him with a block that put both of us on our asses.
Bryson made it to the three. We were just a play away from a touchdown.
“Aargh!” I yelled. “I pulled something!”
I lay on the ground, grimacing in pain.
“I must have pulled a muscle in my groin, man,” I told the offensive coach who ran onto the field. “You gotta get me out of here. I can’t freaking move.”
I limped off the field, my arm around my coach’s shoulders.
“Mike!” Coach barked, when we reached the sideline. “Get in the fucking game!”
Mike’s eyes were wide. He stared at me, unwilling to believe his eyes. “Jesse,” he sputtered. “What happened?”
“Mike!” our coach screamed. “What are you waiting for, an engraved fucking invitation?”
“Pull on your helmet, Mike,” I advised. I pointed to the field. “They need you out there.”
With an expression of pure dread on his face, Mike jammed his helmet over his mop of red hair.
“Go on, Mike,” I urged. “You can do it.”
He gulped big. “All right, I guess I got no choice, now.” Eyes blinking rapidly, he sped out to the line as fast as his fat haunches would carry him.
“How’s that groin, James?” my coach asked.
“Ooh, yeah,” I said, rubbing it. “Hurts bad.”
I had never before witnessed a play of high school football from the bench. It was a strange vantage point. I stood next to my teammates on the sidelines, cheering loudly as the two teams lined up for the final play of the game.
The whistle blew. Our center fired the ball through his legs to the quarterback, who in turn deked, then handed off to Bryson Young. I watched, flabbergasted, as none other than Mike threw a perfect block for him. Bryson clambered over Mike’s broad back into the end zone and scored the winning touchdown.
Our bench cleared. We ran to mob the players. Mike was standing up, waving his arms excitedly.
“Fuck, man!” he yelled. “I did it!”
The look on his face was indescribable. I’d never seen anyone in my life that stoked or that amazed at what was going on. Then I happened to look into the stands. A huge man with a mop of red hair and a hefty frame was doing a wild dance of joy.
“Hey, Mike, is that your dad?”
He grinned. “Aw, yeah. That’s him.” He waved up to the stands. After a second, his crazed dad whooped it back.
“MIKEY! Way to DO IT, SON!”
It kind of gave me the shivers. I was real happy for the fucker. Yeah, sure I was.
——
The California Youth Authority was your standard concrete hellhole of a government facility. Razor-sharp barbed wire encircled the top of the aluminum fence that surrounded the unit, discouraging even the fantasy of making a run for it. Hostile guards and wary administrators patrolled the halls, looking dour and threatening. I was fingerprinted at intake, made to fill out a thick sheaf of forms, then issued a bunk in a giant room with seventeen other kids. I received two undershirts, four pairs of underwear, a tan uniform with a shirt that buttoned down the front, tan pants, and a tan jacket—a typical junior-jail outfit. I got the shoes, too, junior-jail slippers. We lacked many full-length mirrors in the facility, but if I’d been able to check out my reflection, I would have seen that I approximated the genuine article.
I was directed to a little dented locker, where I would be allowed to store any personal items I might accumulate. Then I received a half-sized green toothbrush, a travel tube of toothpaste, and a plastic yellow soap dish.
“Don’t lose ’em,” a sullen attendant warned me. “Replacements will not be furnished.”
The California Youth Authority was a transitional zone. It was more serious than juvie and the sentences were generally longer, but it was still for minors, and that meant it was way less dangerous than real jail. If you fucked up after you got done here, however, then you were probably headed to the next level, meaning grown-up prison. There, you wouldn’t be met with the same kind of mercy. Boneheads and punks roamed the hallways and the cafeteria of CYA, thinking they were tough, but I saw through that illusion pretty swiftly. The grand majority were just a bunch of confused stoners, trying not to get their heads lumped by the guards.
It was a depressing place, to be sure. The name of the game was rehabilitation, but it felt a lot more like “time-out.” We’d all done something stupid; now an annoyed parent-type was going to make us see we’d been wrong. My probation officer and the judge had promised that the CYA was the place where I’d get my head screwed on straight, but I couldn’t help but wonder, by what? All I saw around me were teenagers walking around like doped-up zombies in their prison-issued pajamas, getting yelled at every time they spoke louder than a whisper.
We had few outlets there. Sports, however, was one of them. By law they were required to exercise us, so we played touch football in the yard. No tackling allowed, which was probably for the best. Lining up, I couldn’t help but laugh: I’d played on the best teams in Southern California for years. Now I found myself next to Stinky, the bad-check forger, and Danny, the blue-light bandit. It was kind of awesome.
“Go long, dirtbags,” I called to them, inserting myself into the game as quarterback. I tossed the ball in a wobbly spiral toward Johnny Pinece, a tiny black-haired boy who’d been cordially invited to the CYA for trying to sell homemade amphetamine. His ill-considered brew, handcrafted in the privacy of his own bathtub, was remarkable for the simple fact that it contained only two ingredients: Sudafed and old bleach water.
The ball hit Johnny’s spidery hands and bounced off like a brick.
“I was that close,” Johnny swore as we lined up again.
“You were right with it,” I said. “You absolutely were.”
Kiddie jail wasn’t all bad. At least I had the ball in my hand, r
eminding me of what I’d be doing when I got out of here. Two of my football coaches, Frank Stoudemire and Bill Pfieffer, had off-season positions in the Youth Authority as administrators, and although they never said as much, I could tell it kind of tickled them to see me playing touch ball with this gang of miscreants.
One fellow, however, didn’t find the sight of me amusing in the slightest. His name was Troy Zuccolotto, and he worked at the CYA as a guard. Troy was an erect, veiny man, with gigantic muscles and skin as orange and leathery as a catcher’s mitt. “Zuke” was a member in good standing of the International Federation of Body Builders; not only that, but he’d been crowned Mr. California or something, too, several years before. A fact his frosted hair would allude to.
We had only one weight machine in the CYA, a square, rudimentary Universal bench press with stack plates. We all fought among ourselves for the privilege of using it, but Troy used the petty power and candy-ass authority granted to him as a prison guard to skip the line and claim the machine as his own.
“What do you want it on, Zuke?” asked one of his little sycophants, readying to move the weight pin for the master.
“Whole stack,” Troy said, grinning proudly. “This is Zuccolotto we’re talking about.”
I despised him—his ego and his strut. Even worse, he was a bully. Our football games were touch, but when Troy would participate, they magically became physical tests of endurance. He was brutal, crushing kids seven years his junior and a hundred pounds lighter. Troy insisted on playing running back. Every play went through him. Stoner after stoner would come at the guard, and he would stiff-arm them in the face, or simply mow them over with the brute force of his testosterone-fueled rage.
“Chill out, dude,” I finally told him, one day when we found ourselves on opposing squads.
“Yeah? Who the fuck do you think you are?” he spat. “Are you tough, is that it?”
“They’re about ten times littler than you,” I said quietly, “so why don’t you just take it down a notch?”
Troy’s huge jaw tensed and clenched. I could see the cords of his neck pumping a quick slug of extra blood to his reptilian brain. “Tell me again what to do, fucko.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Ball,” Troy ordered.
His hapless quarterback handed it to him.
Troy came running straight at me. Steam was coming out of his nostrils. I held my breath as the huge, tanned wildebeest swung the full weight of his perfectly sculpted deltoids and trapezius into my teenaged body.
I had no helmet on, of course. The only thing I could do was square up. I dipped my shoulders down, got low to him, and at the last possible moment, I extended straight into him, with my shoulder on his chin. The force of the impact lifted Troy Zuccolotto into the air and put him on his back. GUUHH!
Total silence fell over the yard for a good fifteen seconds, as Troy lay on the ground.
Finally, Johnny Pinece whispered, “Fuck.”
All the stoner kids were stunned. No one had ever touched Troy, because he was a guard, and he was a bully, and he was huge.
Troy came to his feet slowly. He dusted himself off, and cradling the ball in his hands, he approached me. I was kind of laughing. I couldn’t help it.
“You think that’s funny, you punk asshole?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
From four feet away, he winged the football at my face. From the crunch it made as it bounced off my nose, I knew that he’d broken it. As I bent to staunch the flow of blood, he walked slowly toward me.
“Still funny, right?” Troy hissed. “Still funny?”
I reached out and grabbed a hank of his precious blond hair and wrenched it downward, so that his head bent toward me. His huge neck strained like a bull, reddened and possibly about to burst. Amid his confusion, I smashed the side of my elbow into his temple. He looked at me, dazed. A river of crimson blood dripped down the front of my tan uniform, soaking and ruining it.
The guards separated us. I got put in an isolation cell for a month, for striking a guard. No surprise. By now, I knew the drill.
——
There is nothing to do in the isolation tank: absolutely nothing. Still, I thought it would be more of a party than it was. No roomies to bother you, and sleeping in every day—cool, huh? But I did all my sleeping on the first two or three days. After that, my body just wouldn’t sleep anymore. It was too rested. I just had the walls to stare at, and my hard iron bunk to lie on.
My immediate surroundings offered little in the way of distraction. My cell was tiny and cramped, its only outstanding feature a stainless-steel toilet with no lid.
So I would do Nothing. All day long. These days they would call it meditation, but for me, it was just survival. I had been hurt so badly for my entire life, and repeatedly so. But in isolation, I found a center of me that had never been touched. I don’t know how to describe it: all I was doing was sitting and being silent. But somehow, I found a way to go inside myself.
And to my surprise, I found a calmness there, the peace that comes with inspecting yourself and knowing that although you might not be perfect, you’ve sort of done the best you could. Defying all reasonable expectations, I actually still kind of liked and respected myself.
Every other day, I would receive a break from my Zen-like routine of doing Nothing, and thinking of absolutely Nothing, when I’d get handcuffed and escorted sixty feet down the hall to take a shower. The guard who took me to my beauty appointment would never speak to me. He wouldn’t even look at me.
“Doing good today?” I’d ask.
He’d respond with Nothing.
“Me? I’m terrific. Thanks for asking.”
The shower for those on isolation was tiny. The tile was scummy and the water never got warm. Five minutes in there was your max. Then the guard would bang hard on the door and you had to dry yourself off fast.
“That was fantastic,” I’d say, on the way back to my cell, my hands in cuffs, my face tingling from the cold water. “I feel utterly refreshed, thanks.” Zero response.
The key to not going completely batshit crazy, I quickly learned, was to keep moving. If I stopped moving, time stopped moving with me. So I stretched. I did push-ups and sit-ups. I stood on my head in my little square cell. I tried to jump straight up and land flat on both feet with my knees bent. It was a kind of Yoga for Delinquents, and I practiced it like a freakish devotee.
But after a week alone, I started to lose my focus. There were no books in isolation for me to Malcolm X myself into a genius. This was the eighties, and all the California Youth Authority could spare was a couple of Highlights magazines.
Eventually, without my permission, my calm evaporated, and my mind began to show me pictures of my past. It spun rapidly, a laser-light show of all the things I’d rather be doing than sitting in a dank padded room wearing prison jammies. I dreamed of punk shows, crowd-surfing, and killing the world. I dreamed of Rhonda. I dreamed of my mother. I dreamed of touchdown after touchdown in front of screaming fans. I dreamed of lightning-quick motorcycles and stolen IROC-Zs with wobbling steering wheels and my friend grinning next to me. I dreamed of long stupid letters from an apologetic Bobby and swap meets with Johnny and Quick Rick laughing in their leather coats and day after day I was locked inside this fucker and please won’t you let me out I mean what exactly did I do?
“Jesse,” came a knock. “Hey. I’m coming in.”
It was Coach Pfieffer. He had something behind his back.
“How you doing in here, kid?”
I shook my head, feeling a little dazed. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s pretty . . . weird.”
He laughed shortly. “I figured as much. Here.” He extended his compact little hand. “Brought you something.”
It was a McDonald’s Happy Meal.
“Jesus,” I breathed gratefully.
“All yours,” Pfieffer said. “I figured the food had to be killing you in here.”
“It’s awful,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Pfieffer. “I know. Eat up.”
I wolfed down the hamburger and French fries, then ate the apple pie in two bites. I swear, it was the best-tasting food I’d ever had in my entire goddamn life.
“Thanks,” I said, embarrassed, as I realized my coach had watched me tear into the food like a starving coyote.
“No problem,” he said. “Hey, give me that box. Can’t have people saying I give one of the football kids special treatment, you know.”
I crumpled up the greasy paper, placed it carefully inside the box, and handed it to my coach. He accepted it and turned around to go, but stopped before his hand turned the knob.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ve got something I need to tell you.” He looked grim.
“What?” I said.
“Jesse, you made Parade.”
“Really?” I felt myself break out into a real smile for the first time in over a month. “Coach, are you serious?”
“You’re an All-American, Jess. It came out a couple of weeks ago. I just thought you’d like to know.”
“Wow,” I said. But there was something more. I could tell by the way he was staring at me. “That’s great. Why are you looking so down?”
“They came, Jesse. They came and went.”
“Who did?”
“The coaches,” Pfieffer said slowly.
My lips tightened.
“When the season was over, they all were calling. We had requests from all over to see you. Stoudemire had OSU in his office. Kansas and Nebraska sent their people, too.”
“What happened,” I mumbled, already guessing the story.
“We had to tell them the truth, Jesse. There was no way around it.” He shook his head. “I’m real sorry, son. I know you would have done a great job at any of those schools.”
“They don’t want me anymore?” I asked, unwilling to believe my own ears. “Just because I’m in here?”
Pfieffer looked pained. “They withdrew their scholarship offers.”