build anything. So what does she build? A jail, of course. And she says to me all sweet-like, “I’m going to do something very bad. I’m going to put babies in the jail.” Because you can do that too.
~
THIRD week postacademy I walked with an older guard. He said, “Today’s mission: get in, get out, get paid.” He used to be a landscaper. Did it until he hurt his back. He told me, “I can make a yard look good. The right length to cut grass is three and a quarter inches. Why not three? Why not four? Because grass don’t follow standard measurements. Grass follows grass.”
Four inmates in yellow jumpsuits walked out of the control center. Another guard escorted them. Yellow jumpsuits meant they were transfers. Standard uniforms were brown.
One of them, a minisized transfer, was four foot six at most. His jumpsuit was rolled up at the wrists and ankles.
“What,” the guard walking with me said. “The fuck is that? Is this juvie now? Day care? Babies ‘R’ Us?” He yelled to the small man, “Hey, babyGap, don’t I know you?!”
The tiny man, acting uninterested, looked at him and yelled back, “I fuck your mother?”
That ex-landscaper with something like ten years in jail stopped walking. I stopped too. Jail had me confused. It was full of violent stories like “That guy threw a dude off the top range last year over a bag of pork rinds,” and “That guy decapitated his victim,” and “That guy was a chiropractor who raped women coming in for job interviews.” Guards told me this while we walked around watching guys sleep all day. They didn’t look violent. Just tired. A double murderer told me politely on my second day, “Hey, CO, I’m the night-shift cook. Do you mind turning your radio down? I need my Zs. Otherwise chow will suck . . . more than usual.” Then he laughed. Me too. He seemed reasonable. But another guy mean-mugged me for walking in front of him at the mailbox. In his hand: a letter addressed to Mamma.
And here was the smallest inmate I had seen openly challenging somebody who had been wearing that uniform for over a decade.
The landscaper ran up to the small man and demanded his ID card, which he didn’t have—he had been in the jail all of twenty minutes. “Well,” Landscaper said. “Give me your name.”
“Melvin.”
“Melvin what?”
“Melvin nothing.”
“Melvin nothing?”
“Yeah, Melvin. My mother gave me Melvin. So I’m Melvin.”
The guard escorting the new inmates said, “His last name is Pang.”
Melvin said, “My hurters are called Pang.”
“What?” Landscaper asked.
“My hurters.”
“Your hurters?”
“My foster parents.”
Landscaper paused a long pause. Adjusted his hat. Then said, “Come see me some time, Pang, I work in the AC. You know what that is?”
Melvin said, “That’s not my name.”
“Administrative Custody, that’s the place they send dickheads.”
Landscaper veered off to the AC, the place for dickheads, and I kept walking to D block, my assignment for the shift. Melvin wore state-issue brown boots and a straight back. He walked with his chin unnaturally high.
~
UP to that point, I’d been only focused on myself. 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.
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