I mainly wanted to not screw up. I gripped keys tightly. I ironed my uniform. I left the house a half hour early. Here’s what I cared about: that deadly force could be used to prevent serious bodily harm to oneself or others, that inmates had to stand for count, that pat-downs included a thorough search of armpits. Never mind that I only found warmth and moisture in those pits. There could be a bulge. Something dangerous. Maybe a ketchup bottle melted into a knife grip around a sharpened nail. That was something to care about.
But then Melvin walked in with his hurter speak.
~
WHEN I got to D block I told the sergeant that I had just met an odd inmate. He said, “Jail odd or free-world odd?”
I said, Both?
He said, “Nope. There is no odd inside.”
Jail has its own measurements.
Then he said, “Apparently there’s a pile of shit, actual human feces, somewhere up on level 2. Find a block worker to clean it up. Tell me if it contains contraband.”
~
AFTER shift I looked Melvin up. He was state-issue, supposed to be living in a youth group home until the age of twenty-one for burglary. But he walked away one night and broke into a house, burned it down with a piece of paper, then tried to enter a second house with a sledgehammer, then stole a gun from a truck outside a third, then went to a fourth and shot himself in the right foot while standing on the porch.
~
ON his second day at Rockview, I saw him in his temporary holding cell. I asked him why he was using his underwear for a do-rag.
“They stunted me. They beat me. They starved me. They got paid to do it.” That was his answer.
A sledgehammer, a fire, a gun, and many broken things—that was Melvin’s perfect life of demolition. His mother was addicted to crack and other drugs that she used heavily while pregnant with him. The state took him in. But he was abused in foster care. So off to the residential treatment facilities he went. These are the state-funded facilities with missions to help and heal. But when the helping and healing fails, they pretty much just chemically manage kids until they’re old enough for jail. I would work in one later in life as a junior high teacher. Melvin sent me. In essence. He made me want to help.
I would go on to have dynamic classroom conversations with a twelve-year-old who witnessed his father cut his mother’s throat (she survived).
Example conversation:
Me, Let’s talk math now.
Him, “Let’s talk fuck-you-bitch now.”
But five minutes later he said, “I’m sorry, Mr. B.” Then he hugged me. Which was progress. The first twenty times he had rolled his worksheet into a paper bong.
He also shrieked any time a classmate touched his sweatshirt.
So they all touched his sweatshirt.
Of course.
Another kid left my classroom in handcuffs. He had punched a teacher down the hall in the face because he did not know why.
Melvin’s crime spree, the randomness of it, a kid walking around in the night angry, didn’t seem so odd. If you were ever to learn that people got paid to hurt you, expect to be confused and angry.
One news article calls him a “mentally challenged man” with an IQ of fifty-eight, which is below the threshold a person can be considered competent to stand trial. Below seventy is classified as feeble-mindedness. His counselor at the residential said he had the mentality of a five-year-old.
As I write this, my daughter is five. She sings. She makes up words. She would be happy to not take a bath for a month.
Melvin committed crimes. And, according to the courts, knew the difference between right and wrong. This is what he was: old enough and dangerous enough for jail. Melvin told the judge, “I’m sorry for what I done.”
~
ON his third day at Rockview, Melvin walked onto D block wearing state-issue browns and holding all his possessions in the world: a brown bag of state-issue toiletries. Once he met his celly, an oldhead, and climbed up into his top bunk, I asked Melvin why he was here.
He said, “Too strong to be poor.” He rolled over and faced the wall.
I walked down the range. The guy next door was squeezing a pimple on his nose. While I was new in the jail uniform, if inmates spoke to me, they said things like, “How ’bout them burgers?” Small talk. But Melvin spoke about strength and pain and anger.
I heard him tell his celly, “No jail big enough for me.”
At the end of the range lay another pile of feces. I backtracked and found a block worker to clean it up. He said, “I’ll catch another case if I find the motherfucker doing this.” He meant he’d get another criminal case.
I didn’t want to catch the motherfucker either.
At Melvin’s trial he said that he had made a “bad mistake.” He said, “I need help, like serious help.” And he got it: eighteen to thirty-six months in a state prison with seven impossible-for-him-to-stay-right years of probation afterward. Which is to say he didn’t get any. Which is to say nothing new for him. Which is to say welcome home. Ignore the shit stains.
How to Stop Being Too Poor to Propose
TO work in jail you have to pass the interview. Which means entering a dark room and siting at a table across from five uniformed officers. Spotlights illuminate each officer. Another lone light shines on a pad of paper and pen at your seat. Now answer:
Are you afraid of contracting tuberculosis?
Are you afraid of contracting the AIDS virus?
Are you afraid of contracting hepatitis C? Hepatitis B? Hepatitis A?
Are you afraid of being assaulted?
Are you afraid of being sued?
Are you afraid of the debilitating stress associated with this job?
Are you afraid to work here?
So what are your hobbies?
For the last question, I told them that I loved woodworking, martial arts, and canoeing. I raced my canoe, I told them, down rapids. My girlfriend and I placed fifth in a race the month before. But, I told them, we were just going for survival. No flipping, no lost paddles, no being crushed between our seventeen-footer and the boulders in front of the drunks camped out at the roughest part of the creek.
No laughs or smiles from the officers. Before the interview I had expected my answers to sound like this: I feel my best quality is attention to detail. And: I have no problem staying late or working weekends. Instead, I found myself answering to fear. I hadn’t considered fear. I hadn’t considered incurable diseases, punches to faces, or public records of litigation and condemnation. It was a pay raise. So to fear I answered: No, I’m sure that the jail has procedures to follow, I’m good with procedures, I’ll follow the procedures . . . just what are the procedures? Do we get gloves?
The answer to my question was that when a guard gets a cup of shit liquefied with piss and spit and maybe blood in the face, he has to go to the hospital to pick up a seven-day regimen of pills, which will hopefully kill any life-threatening viruses that may have just swum through the mucous membrane of his eyes and begun the rampant replication, which would only stop once his body was embalmed and wearing its best suit, or sometimes a brand-new suit because maybe his body-that-used-to-be-a-person didn’t own a suit yet because it was too young and oblivious to need one, which is why it allowed itself to get the shit cocktail thrown like a fucking mythical rising fastball into its open-but-not-seeing eyes in the first place. But yes you get gloves.
That’s not what the major said. But that’s what I got from her tone. She mentioned the pill regimen and asked, “Sound good