One of the opportunities that the Fulbright is giving me is the opportunity to sort through my writing, the piles and piles of fragments, stories, ideas, freewriting, essays, and poems lurking in the files. It is an extraordinary experience to come across pieces that surprise you -- that are different than what you remember. This is one of them. I wrote this years ago, drawing from my first experience doing writing workshops with people who are incarcerated. I cleaned it up a bit this week, but still, here it is, rather raw.
Blue eyes, pale skin, brown hair – I wonder if I’d recognize you if we passed on the street. Maybe, when it happens, our eyes will catch. Maybe you’ll come up to me and say hello. Or else, maybe we have passed on the street, already. Maybe I walked on by, daydreaming.
I met you on a Tuesday night in November, a night when I was nineteen years old and following the rules. My hair’s tightly ponytailed. I’m wearing a loose sweatshirt, sneakers with socks, jeans with no tears or frays, no jewelry, no make-up, no pins. There, before, in the car, my fingers feel tight and unbendable. The engine’s cut. Christina breaks our pause. “Okay!” she cries, pushing open her door. I catch Kristen’s eyes, wide and brown before the overheard lit dims and she sinks into silhouette. These are my partners: Kristen, with neat blonde hair and a twitching smile. Christina, long limbs and loud talk; the first New Yorker I met who was a New Yorker.
We walk to the heavy metal door of Adrian Training School’s South Hall, my sneakers sliding in the gravel. My palms are wound tight around my notebook’s metal spirals, marking my skin red and strange. Here are the rules:
- Don’t answer personal questions.
- Don’t stand close.
- Don’t let your knees brush when you sit down. Or your elbows. Or anything.
- They will manipulate you if you let them. Don’t let them.
- They must call you by your last name. This is about Boundaries.
I cringed when you and the others called me Miss Clark. It chafed against my romantic hope that we’d meet as equals. You knew it. You would learn my real name too, but by then you’d already fallen into habit. Each time you said ‘Miss Clark,’ there was an apology in your eyes that made me smile.
Mr. John opens the metal door for us. He moves like sand is sitting thickly beneath his skin. Behind him are whoops and cackles, shuffling feet and clenched fists, unfelt grins, chatter, and dim eyes: boys in wrinkled white T-shirts. You are all teenage rapists, I think, smiling overbright.
Christina leads a theater game, an icebreaker, and this is when Dave emerges with Tom Muttonchops. This is his alter ego: a full-grown cat who loiters at city corners and brags about the time he kicked the shins of the Queen of England, because it was more polite than slapping her. “He’s real,” Dave says, nodding hugely. “Tom Muttonchops is alive.” Kristen later swears that this is a sign that he’s schizophrenic, but I don’t believe her. I think he just wants to make us laugh.
Mr. John sits in the corner, arms folded behind his head, watching us tear out notebook paper and pass it around and dig pens out of our backpacks. I begin: Tell me something you find outside. A tree? Okay. Yes, you should write all these down. Okay, what’s a musical instrument? Guitar, great. An animal at the zoo? Zebra, sounds good. We make a list, a long list, and then I say, write a poem using all those words.
Glassy stares. Oh, come on, I say.
Cortez fumbles, laboriously writing a few letters and then spending a long time crossing them out, until Jason finally seizes his paper and scribbles a quick poem for him, saying, ‘no big deal man, not your fault.’ Dywan stretches and asks why he can’t just say what he wants to say instead of writing it. Isaac is whispering to Corey about lowriders. Corey runs his thumb over the bristled hairs on his upper lip, over and over. You, you write rapidly, than drop your Bic on the floor rather melodramatically and close your eyes. My eyes follow the pen and hook onto your laceless sneakers. White rubber shoes like a nurse’s. They hang off your heel and slap like sandals when you walk. I never asked why you wore loose shoes, but every week I will check to see if, finally, you have laces. You will catch me looking.
I made sure you were in my small group. Christina gave me a pinched-sour look when I wrote your name below mine first thing when, back in the car, we divided everyone up. It was you, Corey, Dywan, and me. Sometimes I brought in poems, maybe by Frank O’Hare, maybe by my friend from high school, and I would ask you what you hated about them. Dywan liked writing when I gave him a line to start with, leading ones like “I’ll never forget ….” Corey wrote about proposing to a girl with a pearl necklace; he called it “The Fantasy.” And he wrote about his brother crawling into bed with him on the Fourth of July and putting a bullet in his own head. You always acted liked you had a point to make. Slumping, sleeping, laughing when nobody said anything funny, always in front of me. And you wrote this:
Try to heal myself with happiness and Joy Knowing that Deep Down inside I carry the pain of a little boy, crying screaming bleeding as he takes it all away, one step ahead of me, Knowing I have no eyes to see, Knowing I have no words to say, And how simple it was for you, To Take what you’ve took from me, turning my heart to stone and kissing my innocence history. Brother sitting in the county jail, knowing what you Did to him, And what you Did is killing him, but the Lord is healing him, Taking your soul out of him, what you did burns Deep inside, got to face the fire though nowhere to hide, and ten Seconds ago in my mind you died, Cause I killed you with Love And forgiveness for all that you have done us, Depriving us drugging us hurting us, you’ve probably been hurt too. So you do onto me what was done to you.
Corey tried to write like you, you know. I’m not sure if you ever noticed. You, on the other hand, kept saying you didn’t care about what you wrote. You said: I can always write it again if I want to. It’s just words. It’s always me. This made me crazy. You knew this. You pricked at it, purposefully.
One night, I’m on the couch talking to Corey. He’s stumped. The blank page feels, to him, like a punch in the face. I say to him, what do you want to say? What do you have inside you to tell us? And there’s you, Kyle, in a plastic chair, with a deliberate look that razors into me. Iced-over blue eyes. I keep talking to Corey. With a brutal rip, you tear out a page of writing in your notebook that I’d told you I liked, leaving the metal coils sagging from the pull. You crumple up the paper and pitch it on the floor between us with your eyes still trained on me. There is nothing for me to do but ignore it. Well, Corey, what’s the last thing you wrote that you liked? You saunter over to the crumpled paper, pick it up, spit your gum in it, then jumpshot it into the trashcan. I will not look back at you. Would it help if I gave you a first line?
Kyle, how many times did we have this conversation?
Me: How can you not care about what you write? Your own voice? When it’s so personal?
You: I can not care because I don’t care.
Corey and Dywan would look back and forth between us. Our voices would rise, until Mr. John’s heightened eyebrows quieted us again.
There was a boy who came to our workshop only a few times before he was released. His gray eyes squinted like he could never believe you. One night, the messy whispers circling the room told me that his girlfriend had sent him a letter that day, breaking up with him. Kyle, I remember your slanted smile. You asked Isaac to sing the love song he’d written, a sentimental piece that went on as long as anyone kept watching. Isaac scampered to the front and gave us all he had, an eager voice and his biggest thoughts on true love, on how there’s one meant for each one of us, on holding each other until eternity. You looked between Isaac and the gray-eyed boy and when you saw the boy’s face reddening as he tried to muscle away the water brimming in his eyes, you laughed out loud. “Cmon, keep going, keep going,” you urged Isaac, who beamed and reprised the chorus. The others snickered and elbowed, and you got your face real close to the gray-eyed boy’s, so you could see each tear and let him know you saw it. The boy folded his arms and turned away. “Fuck you,” he whispered. “Fuck you all.” Christina asked Isaac to sit down and let someone else have a chance to perform. Nobody wanted to. We left early.
Another time, you wrote:
I like a close game, I like it even, I am iller than the illest, but I am not a heathen, I’d like to hurt you for no reason, why I do I do not know why.
I gave you a poem of my own once. Do you remember this? A piecey poem with the inflated title of “Reincarnation” – I’d written it after liking poetry that was nothing like what I usually write. And on that day, with a half hour before time’s up, I’d run out of things to say to you. You were drawing triangles and laughing at Dywan, and you wouldn’t speak to me again, or write. But when I pushed my notebook across the table toward you, you looked at me. You grabbed the notebook and turned away from me: bent your neck, covered your ears with your fists. You read it.
“This is beautiful,” you said finally, your eyes still latched to the poem. I had my heels crossed on a plastic chair, my pen a baton in my fingers. “This is really beautiful." I thanked you. I asked what you thought would make the poem better. You twisted back around and set the notebook between us. I propped my chin on my fist and looked between you and the piecey poem.
“Well, I think you could think more about how words sound. Words all have beats, right? And if you put them together right, you get the poem in a rhythm. The right words fit in this natural order. It’ll be better if you really listen to how all the words sound all together, you know.”
“Like how you do. Except you don’t think about it.”
“I guess. Here, let me show you what I mean.” You wrote beneath my poem:
I really love you mom
And I want you to know it
Then you marked the downbeats. When you read it out loud, you enunciated each syllable so I’d be sure to understand you.
Back in high school, when I learned meter and feet, dactyls and iambs, I’d pictured black-and-white poets bloodying their fingers in a frenzied fever, slicing words to fit an unforgiving pattern, their neat anthologized poems carrying the ghosts of burnt kerosene lamps and scratched knuckles.
Slowly, sometimes stories about yourself would trip at your tongue. Basketball, and the only two pieces of your writing that you kept, under your mattress, thin sheets of paper, much-fingered, folded into small squares. The calls from home that the whole group listened to on speaker-phone, part of the detention center’s Awareness principle. How you’re sick of the new guy getting the whole group punished. How you’re getting out of here soon. You’re fifteen and you raped a girl named Sarah. Your father hurt you and he’s locked up too.
And me – who the hell was I? What did I know? I was ponytails and good intentions. I was working late at the college newspaper, before walking across a quiet campus to a dorm, where I crawled into a twin bed beside the boy I was dating. I slept all night next to him. There were sunrise hikes, and late-night reading aloud. I took photos constantly, I transcribed the conversations of the people around me, I was missing all of this before it was gone.
To fill the space, I told you too much. Clumsily. Christina and Kristen scolded me a on the way home a few times. I told stories to make you laugh, fighting hard for each punch line. You had a baggy laugh, like there was room for more.
In the spring, we brought you guys to the university for a reading and dinner at Pizza House. A thin clear late afternoon. Supervisors crowded with you in a sweaty van for the drive to Ann Arbor. I skipped a class to set up chairs in the Union gallery. The seats filled quickly, shining eyes, bookbags crammed under chairs. People stood in the back with bright scarves slung around their necks. Painted ceramic masks lined the walls, pencil drawings, handprints, construction paper cutouts, all products of the art workshops. You guys had complained about getting writing instead of art. There were punch and cookies in back. You were all lined in seats that faced the audience. Tom Muttonchops jostled his knee. Dywan had his head in his hands. You all paged through the anthology we made, looking first for your own writing, your own names. Cortez muttered his poem under his breath, the first one he wrote by himself, about when he was a high school football hero. “The name of the team was the East Side Raiders,” I heard him say quietly to himself. “And everyone loved us, and I loved them also too.”
“Miss Clark, would you sit by me? It’d make me feel better. That’d make me feel better.” I drop cross-legged to the floor by your feet, gratefully. Before the whole room, you read one of the two poems you kept under your mattress.
I feel so bad, It Hurts so much, I’m so damn sad, Thinking about family and such, I don’t want no pity, I can’t help it, life is shitty, I don’t know whether to let someone read this or not, But I’m twisted up inside like a full tied knot, I know I can do it, I’ve been planning for awhile, I’m always going through it, And a voice keeps saying, Do it Kyle, I know I’m not crazy but the voice tells the truth, I’m an old ass soul, stuck in the body of a youth.
Later, I will talk with a few friends of mine who came to the reading. I will ask them what they think. One of them, someone who I was a week away from never seeing again, told me that he was struck by you. He said that he thought you had the most "soul." I will say, I know what you mean.
The next week we came back to Adrian with chocolate cakes and juice. You all meet us, breathless and damp, after your basketball game. We brought the book filled with messages from the audience. I think some of the messages are condescending, but I stay shut-mouthed, and you guys are grinning and shining and crowding close so you can all get a look.
Kyle, you had one week to go before you left—where you were going to live, I have no idea. I shook your hand, feeling silly as I did. You told me, “I’ll probably write you a letter, Miss Clark.” I said, “I hope so. I really hope you do.” You never did, but you said it.
About the Images:
1. One of the prettier buildings at Adrian Training School: the school. A few years later, I returned to Adrian to work with young girls (and one sixteen-year-old in particular). After a drawn out period of reducing the number of people at Adrian (both staff and teenagers), the detention center was finally closed in January 2008 as part of Governor Jennifer Granholm's budget cuts. And I feel weirdly sad about it. Credit: Dangerous Architects.
2. The kind of building at Adrian that I remember best. Credit: The Daily Telegram.