Mr. Gurkin never tried to help me again, and instead he turned against me. In Spanish, Craig Wyatt, a football star, a favorite of Mr. Gurkin’s but a mediocre student, sat behind me. One day Craig asked me for an answer during a test. Surely we would be caught with Craig’s unsubtle whispering, so when Mr. Gurkin turned his back, I whisked Craig’s test off his desk and gave him mine, which was already done. I filled in the answers on Craig’s test and, when Mr. Gurkin was distracted, exchanged our papers again. This became our practice for every test.
One day Mr. Gurkin noticed some movement. He stared at me. “Are you cheating?” he asked.
“No,” I said, but he didn’t believe me, the girl from the broken home who hung around with losers, so he asked Craig, the tone of his voice no longer accusatory.
“Was she cheating?”
Craig said, “No,” and Mr. Gurkin believed him, no further questions. I realized later—incredulously—that Mr. Gurkin thought I was cheating off Craig. At the end of the term, Craig gave me a bag of pot, thanked me for “passing” him.
Mr. Gurkin turned against me, and in turn I turned against him. He announced a dress-up day in Spanish—no jeans. On that day I showed up in dungarees, with a jean shirt, jean vest, jean jacket: a sartorial middle finger. “You could have worn something nice,” he said to me and Paula, the only two who’d rebuffed his “no jeans” rule, before he threw us out of class. Partly Paula and I planned to defy his ridiculous decree, but also I didn’t have many nice clothes, like the dresses and skirts the other girls wore. Mr. Gurkin knew I was from a broken home, but he didn’t understand that I was broke.
On summer days when Sally and I were in grade school, we wrote short stories, mostly about jewel thieves and bank robbers, influenced by Encyclopedia Brown, boy detective (and his helpful friend, Sally), and by our favorite TV shows, Perry Mason, starring the hulking Raymond Burr, and It Takes a Thief, with Robert Wagner, a cat burglar turned government spy. “I’ve heard of stealing from the government, but for the government?” Wagner said over the opening credits, three years before Nixon’s lackeys burglarized the Democratic National Committee’s office in the Watergate complex. In my stories, the main characters were heroines, never criminals, but years later, at fifteen, I plotted a burglary with my friends Paula and Alison.
I don’t recall how the idea germinated, but maybe from conversations with Nicky, which I recorded in my diary, my criminal education writ small in girlish cursive.
December 2, 1975—Nicky and I had the most insane talk, about finding a million dollars and going to California, and how he and Vince psyched on doing B and Es, that’s breaking and entering.
I stood with Nicky that Friday night outside Blackburn Hall, while inside a local band covered Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith, the muffled percussion thumping into the chilly night, Nicky’s honey curls lit like a halo by the streetlamp he leaned against as I leaned into him, falling into his pillowy goose-down jacket as I kissed his warm mouth, my cold cheek against his smooth cold skin. I remember that kiss, the seal of our mouths, a hollowness like a tunnel between us, waiting for his tongue.
One night Nicky was supposed to come to my house but never showed. He called near midnight, said he’d been arrested for breaking and entering. Somehow in the course of the night, he’d broken a finger. He was absent from school for a few days, but he delivered an envelope to my house, had his mother drive him over and dropped it in my mailbox. The card was a photo encased in Mylar of a rising—or setting—sun above a mountain lake, with a quotation from Thoreau: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” I can see Nicky in the stationery store with his mother—her sculpted cheekbones and slightly worn beauty, intense green-brown eyes, which Nicky had inherited—picking through cards until he found the perfect one, the ripple of sunlight on water and Thoreau’s quote as if written for us, the outsiders we felt we were. Nicky apologized for his messy four-fingered cursive and signed with an X and an O.
His arrest was listed in the police log of the Walpole Times, which I clipped and pasted into my diary, proud of him, this robber boy, like the Wild Colonial Boy, like the Artful Dodger, reckless outlaw boys I was drawn to. Obedience to rules seemed cowardly then, rebellion and daring admirable. Sally wore a button on her dungaree jacket that I coveted: QUESTION AUTHORITY.
When I saw Nicky next, he gave me an amber prescription bottle filled with coins that he’d stolen during an earlier B&E. He asked me to hold the bottle, perhaps so he wouldn’t be caught possessing stolen goods. The prescription was dated 9/16/75, from a pharmacy in Wrentham, filled not with Motrin, as the label said, but with coins, some foreign, a few worn buffalo nickels, wheat pennies.
That summer after our sophomore year, as part of his probation Nicky worked on a grounds crew, spreading cedar chips on nature trails in Walpole, a Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) job, the result of federal legislation passed in 1973 to provide public service work to low-income people, youth offenders, and newly released prisoners. Nicky was fortunate in that a couple of years before he was arrested, Jerome Miller, a sociologist and the new director of Massachusetts’s Department of Youth Services, closed all but one of the state’s youth correctional facilities, an act that the nonprofit Center on Criminal and Juvenile Justice called “the most sweeping juvenile justice reform in history.” Prior to that, the average age of a boy sent to a state detention center had been fifteen and a half, Nicky’s age, and the most common crime he’d committed was breaking and entering, Nicky’s crime.
Miller made unannounced visits to the state’s youth detention centers and documented children being beaten and raped or sent to solitary confinement, facilities in squalor. One day in January 1972, Miller staged a breakout at the Lyman School, the nation’s first reform school for boys and the most notorious in Massachusetts. Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, had spent time there. Lyman was the last of the state’s youth detention centers that Miller would close, and on that January day Miller led a one-hundred-car caravan of social workers and reporters to the school, where he and the Lyman boys, wielding sledgehammers, smashed the locks on secure cells. Then Miller and his crew drove the boys to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and lodged them in dorms while his staff found alternative community-based programs for all of them.
After Miller closed the reform schools, kids who broke laws, abused drugs, or ran away were evaluated by pediatricians, psychiatrists, social workers, and teachers, then sent to reputable private facilities like Longview Farm in Walpole or to small group homes, forestry camps, private prep schools, Outward Bound, specialized foster care, art schools, military schools, boarding schools, community drug programs, or “wherever else a program might develop in response to the needs of a troubled or troubling teenager.” Many kids, like Nicky, were sent home with oversight and a job.
Miller’s plan worked. Massachusetts, which had the eighth largest population of kids in detention centers in the early 1970s, reduced the daily population of its largest locked detention center from 250 to 25 with no increased risk to the community. Decades after Miller shuttered reform schools, Massachusetts’s one-year recidivism rate for juvenile offenders was less than 25 percent, far below that of states that still jail youths, like Wisconsin’s 70 percent one-year recidivism rate and Arkansas’s 60 percent three-year recidivism rate. Massachusetts’s confinement rate of juveniles is still among the lowest in the nation.
Thanks to Jerome Miller, instead of going to reform school Nicky worked as a landscaper. Nicky was fortunate, too, because he was white and from the suburbs. Kids commit crime equally across racial and class lines, but even wealth doesn’t defeat racial discrimination. Poor white kids are less likely to go to prison than rich black kids. One study found that only 2.7 percent of the poorest white children (the lowest tenth of income distribution) went to prison, while about 10 percent of affluent
black and Hispanic youths did. Once kids are caught in the criminal justice system and labeled—psychopath, sociopath, unsocialized, aggressive—people continue to see them that way. Worse, that’s how they begin to see themselves.
I never thought of myself as a juvenile delinquent, probably because the cultural image of a delinquent didn’t resemble me, a white girl from the suburbs. I thought I was an average teenager in the mid-1970s, taking drugs, stealing, skipping school, involved in petty crime. It seemed normal, but girls were sent to reform school for infractions far less serious than what my friends and I had done.
It’s possible that Nicky’s B&Es inspired mine. I didn’t just want to be with reckless outlaw boys or listen passively to their escapades. I didn’t want to be a cheerleader on the sidelines as I had been the year before. This was the second wave of feminism, a term I didn’t know but absorbed through osmosis. Paula and Alison and I could get wasted just as well as the boys. We could skip school and hitchhike and have sex and swear. Alison spit—this striking girl who drew attention from men and boys whether she wanted it or not—could hawk a loogie as well as any boy, her act the antithesis of femininity, a rebuke, perhaps, of men ogling her. She’d clear her throat to gather phlegm, forming her pretty mouth as if she were going to whistle, her chest heaving, then thwoop and the triumphant splat on the sidewalk. Alison ritualized this act she’d appropriated from boys, got a kick from their surprised or disgusted reactions. I envied her ability and her nerve.
For my part, in Miss Geoghegan’s social studies class, “America in the Twentieth Century,” I argued that girls could do anything boys could do. “ANYTHING!” I screamed at David Simpson across the room after he smugly touted the superiority of boys. I despised his proprietary sense of privilege, how he assumed the power to limit what I—or any girl—could do in the world. I raged. Miss Geoghegan smiled, her shiny, bouncy brunette hair always slightly mussed, and tried to calm me with her hand on my shoulder.
After I was no longer babysitting, after I quit my weekend job selling hot dogs at the stadium, I had no money for drugs. At the mall, Paula and I sold raffle tickets we’d stolen from a school fundraiser and used the money for angel dust. Paula stole scales from the science lab. While our classmates put away the Bunsen burners and washed test tubes, she’d tuck a scale under her snorkel jacket. I acted as the lookout. In the hubbub of the cleanup, the bell ringing, everyone gathering their stuff to leave, nobody noticed Paula carrying a bulky object under her coat and walking out the back door of the classroom. She sold the scales to her brother, Duane, for his angel dust operation. After she stole the fourth one, Mr. Hood, the chemistry teacher, must have noticed, because the scales were then tagged and tracked, stored in a locked cabinet.
One night Paula and I made an interesting discovery when her mother sent her to Barnes’s corner store for a carton of cigarettes. Each night from six to seven, Mrs. Barnes worked at the store so that her husband could walk to his house next door and eat dinner. Mrs. Barnes was tall and thick but seemed frail, with hunched shoulders. She wore pink foam curlers in her pink-hued auburn hair under a hairnet and a snap-down housecoat under a sweater, even in summer. That night when Paula asked for the cigarettes, Mrs. Barnes shuffled into the curtained-off back room and yelled, “What was the brand?” In the dozen steps from the counter to the back room, she’d forgotten.
While she was searching for the cigarettes, Paula eyed the tackle box on a stool behind the counter. Mr. Barnes had stopped using a cash register after Doreen Randall’s older brother, Dale, with a nylon stocking over his face, conked Mr. Barnes with a baseball bat and grabbed the cash drawer. Dale ran down Bowker Street, dollar bills floating out of the tray. That was the story, anyway, which was why we combed his getaway path for stray bills. But the newspaper tells a different version, with Mr. Barnes doing the conking, perhaps in a different robbery.
Walpole Times, Dec. 4, 1975—Clifford Barnes Sr. said two youths entered the store and demanded his money. When one of the youths pulled a knife, Mr. Barnes hit the youth in the hand with a club, and the two would-be robbers fled down Bowker Street.
While Mrs. Barnes fumbled in the back room, Paula hoisted herself onto the counter and grabbed a few bills from the tackle box. After that, every couple of weeks when Mrs. Barnes was on duty, Paula fished money from the tackle box. She grew more daring, grabbing fives and tens, though never enough to arouse suspicion, we thought. One night Paula paid for the cigarettes with a $20 bill and we watched Mrs. Barnes place the twenty in an empty plastic half-gallon ice cream tub set atop a refrigerated case, hidden behind a rack of chips.
The next time Mrs. Barnes was in the back room fetching the carton, Paula reached into the plastic bin and took a $20 bill. Like all thieves, Paula got greedy. One night she grabbed a fistful of bills from the tub—$80. I worried that the sizable amount would be noticed. I thought she’d gone too far, even though I was happy to share the drugs she bought with the money. We waited a few weeks before entering Barnes’s again, but when we did, we encountered the old man at the dinner hour. Mr. Barnes glared at us. “You weren’t expecting to see me, were you?” We shrugged as if we didn’t know what he was talking about. “Get out of my store,” he said. “And don’t ever come in here again.”
Outside I burned with shame. I hadn’t stolen the money with my own hands, but I was an accomplice, there for immoral support. We justified stealing from Mr. Barnes because he was a “perv” who used to grab our sweaty pudgy hands when we passed him money for penny candy and held those hands for an uncomfortably long time, the price girls paid for a sack of Mint Juleps and Red Hot Dollars and Atomic Fireballs. Worse, when my mother sent me to the store for baking soda or condensed milk, shelved in the dark corner behind the ice cream freezer, Mr. Barnes would come around the counter to assist me. He’d put his arm around my waist, crawl his fingers across my back if I was wearing my two-piece bathing suit because I’d been playing in the sprinkler before my mother had sent me to Barnes’s for the thing she needed.
Still, I felt horrible. I’d been going into that store since I was a girl in a bathing suit on a bike buying Bonomo Turkish Taffy or freeze pops. Mr. Barnes had watched me grow up, as he had all the kids in the neighborhood, but now he hated me. I suppose he could have told our parents, but he never did, because none of them ever said anything. He could have called the police, but he didn’t do that either. Perhaps Mr. Barnes was more hurt than angry. He seemed disappointed, in me particularly. I sensed that he didn’t like Paula, who was tainted by the reputation of her brother, who’d been a star athlete in high school but years later was known for trouble.
One day on the way to school Paula was near tears, worried that her brother might be sent to jail after his trial that morning on a charge of possessing stolen property, valuables from a house that had been burglarized. But when we walked into Paula’s kitchen after school we found Duane, still in his suit coat, celebrating his acquittal. The police had found the stolen items in his family’s garage, but Duane had been saved by the Fourth Amendment, which bars illegal search and seizure; the search warrant had not listed the garage in the description of searchable areas.
The B&E might have been Alison’s idea—the house we planned to rob was across the street from hers. I could imagine Alison looking out her bedroom window, thinking about how the family went skiing, the mother and father and their three children, whom Alison used to babysit, how they left behind two spinster aunts who were half deaf, how they kept money in their refrigerator.
Paula and Alison and I spent weeks rehearsing the B&E, our burglary premeditated to an absurd degree. Planning the B&E felt like writing a short story about cunning thieves with a clever plot, every angle studied, the escape route mapped, though never once did we think about the consequences, about the possibility of getting caught, about the two old women in the house. If circumstances were different, we might have been planning a play we wanted to stage, with costumes and set designs. We might have channeled our
rebellious energy toward political protest, environmental action. I’d participated in the first-ever Earth Day in 1970, when I was ten, picking up litter along a stretch of road, and in seventh grade, for my science report on “any animal,” I’d chosen “man,” the only species that pollutes its habitat. I shot Polaroids of the car dump in the woods behind my house, and my father drove me into Boston to photograph pollution billowing from factory smokestacks. Instead, at fifteen we put our heads together to plot a crime.
In spite of our elaborate discussions, our plan was simple. We reviewed it again and again, maybe to convince ourselves we’d go through with it. We would do it when the family was away on vacation. The back of the house abutted woods, so we’d approach and escape through the backyard after the aunts were in bed. We’d sleep at Paula’s house so Alison wouldn’t have to go home afterward; she’d have an alibi. Because we spent so much time planning our B&E, we were compelled to follow through; the momentum, the commitment we spoke aloud—nobody wanted to be the one to chicken out.
That Friday night, drinking cans of beer Paula snuck from her refrigerator, she and I took a shortcut through the woods, cat-footing on a plank across a stream, emerging at the train trestle behind Friendly’s plaza, where we waited for Alison underneath the overpass. I lit a cigarette, fetishizing the ritual—tapping the pack against my palm to compress the tobacco, pulling the cellophane tab, crumpling the silver foil, striking a match, then the pleasing scratch and burst of flame, the whiff of sulfur sharp in my nose, the heat on my face as I sucked in smoke, snapping my jaw to blow smoke rings.
Body Leaping Backward Page 12