Walter Myers - Lockdown

"What happens when one of the crabs tries to get out?" Mr. Cintron asked.

"The other crabs pull him back in," Mr. Pugh said. "No way one of them is getting out unless the rest of them are half dead."

"Ninety percent of the inmates here aren't going anywhere with their lives and they know it. It's not because they can't, it's because they simply won't. They know it, and every time they see somebody who looks like he might break the cycle and do something with his life, they want to pull him back in," Mr. Cintron said. "Especially if you look like them, if you come from the same environment they come from. If you turn your life around, you're putting the blame on them for not turning theirs around. Sanders will take another year on his time before he'd let you alone. You don't get it, right?"

"I get it now," I said.

"No, you don't get it," Mr. Cintron said. "You know it, but you don't know it well enough to control yourself. You have five days in detention and one week's loss of privileges. Take him out of here."

The detention cell is a little smaller than the rest of the cells and just about bare. There's a small window near the ceiling, but it's too high to see out of. If you run across the floor and jump up, you can see the sky, but that's about it. The toilet is fourteen inches high, which means you have to squat down to use it. There is a water fountain, with a button on top. When you push the button, the water comes up from a small hole in the middle of the fountain. The water is warm. It comes up about an inch out of the hole, so you have to put your mouth almost on top of it to get a drink. Nothing in the room sticks out more than a quarter of an inch except the doorknob, and that is tapered so you can't hook anything onto it. That way you can't make a noose out of a strip of cloth or a shoelace. In the detention cell, you can't kill yourself.

There is writing on the wall across from the bed-messages from other guys or girls who have been in the room. One says: "Time lost can never be found again." Another one says: "I hate myself." Above it, someone has written, "I hate you, too," and drawn an arrow pointing to the sign that says, "I hate myself."

Each time I think there is no place lower to go, I find that there is at least one place that will mess you up worse than you were. And there were signs that made you remember if you forgot. When I lay on the cot in the detention cell and looked at the doorknob, I knew that whoever designed the room knew I would think about killing myself. No, they were saying, we understand how you're feeling but you can't do that, either.

In the detention cell, you get fed before the others. You have to stand against the far wall with your back toward the door. Then they open the door and put your tray on the floor. When my supper came, I felt like turning around and yelling, "Boo!" But I knew that would just get me more time.

Lights-out in detention was at 8:30, same as it was with levels three, four, and five.

The first day lasted two hundred hours. Then the days really got long.

"You got five days in detention," they'd said. No, all my life I was going to be in detention. All my life I was going to be locked down in some cell or in some life with steel bars, keeping me from getting up and going someplace or dying and not feeling bad anymore.

I thought about K-Man's letter. I didn't care about Vincent being shot because I didn't know him. In my life, somebody was always being shot or being beat up or being killed. I was somebody you needed to stay away from, someone who might hurt you or get you killed. Someone I wasn't recognizing anymore.

The second day in detention. I was thinking of fighting King Kong. I wondered if he was in his cell doing push-ups and maybe some squats to keep in shape. I got up and did some push-ups but my heart wasn't in it. If King Kong attacked me I would just have to go all out and wreck the dude. Maybe they would send me upstate and I would have to be with grown men who could beat me up whenever they wanted to do it. Maybe if I found somebody up there who was cool, I could get a shank and stab whoever messed with me. That's what they did upstate. You had to let them know you would stab them to death or they would take advantage of you. A little guy like Toon would just be somebody's woman unless he found a way to kill himself.

My father had been in jail. He wasn't tough. Not inside. Outside he could beat me when I was little, or Willis before he got good with his hands, but he wasn't tough. He did a lot of cursing and throwing himself around when he was drinking, but it wouldn't be long before I could take him one on one. Although, really, it's tough to kick your father's ass because that's a little like kicking your own ass. Maybe him hitting me or Willis was like him hitting himself. I don't know.

Me, Toon, and King Kong was all in a place under the real world. If they let us loose after breakfast-just let us walk out the front door-we wouldn't have no place to go. Toon would go back to his parents so they could yell at him and go back to being small and pushed around. King Kong, he would go back to swinging on trees and climbing up buildings and being stupid, because sometimes settling for stupid was easier than reaching for anything better. If you gave him a free bus pass, he couldn't get nowhere because there wasn't anyplace for him to get to. He would just be riding around in a circle until he got to the same place he started from.

Me, I would go home, and everybody would look at me and ask me what I wanted.

"What you want?"

"I don't know," I would answer. "What you got?"

"Don't worry about it because you ain't getting what I got," they would say. "And I'm watching you too."

That was the truth. My father didn't have nothing. Willis didn't have nothing. Mom was just checking out the world to see what she could snatch off. The hurting part was that if you checked everything out, peeped what was going down, everybody knew the same thing. They knew that me and Toon and King Kong didn't have no place to go in this world and maybe we would try to slip out to dying when they wasn't looking. They knew that, so they put us in these cells where you couldn't even kill yourself.

Another morning, another cold breakfast. I dreamed about Toon. In my dream he was in the visiting room and his parents were sitting there shaking their heads and sucking their teeth and looking at each other like they were so ashamed of Toon. If they really ever got into Toon's head, they would never find their way out. They would be lost for freaking ever and be scared out of their minds because they would know what the real world looked like.

Sometimes, when I see Toon, I think he looks like how I would look if I could see inside myself. Little and stupid looking and scared, knowing I was going to get beat up every day. When I think about Toon, I want to cry. I'm glad I'm in detention. In detention you are all by yourself and nobody can see how bad you feel. Sometimes I think that people in the outside world know how bad you feel. They know it, but then they pass it off by just giving you a label, like criminal or felon.

If you're out in the world feeling bad enough to take dope to lighten it up a little, or if you're so mad at the world you're ready to break somebody up or chalk them out, then they just switch your ass from who you think you are to what they got on your rap sheet, and they don't have to feel sorry for you no more because you're not human.

Another day went by, maybe two. It didn't matter.

One day there was a shadow on the floor. I thought it might have been a bird in the window. I got up quick and looked, but it was gone. A shadow that might have been a bird.

When Mr. Pugh banged on my door, I jumped. I got up and went across the room and put my chest against the wall and my hands behind my back like I was supposed to.