Walter Myers - Lockdown

We got this big colored cook named Paris, and at lunch he was slapping meat loaf on everybody's plate like it was steak or something. He asked me if I wanted some gravy on it and I said, "Yeah."

"You ain't man enough for no gravy!" he said. "Get out of here."

He was messing with me but it didn't mean nothing. The gravy was probably foul anyway.

Toon was in the mess hall when we got there. He looked real sad. But even when he was looking sad he looked like a cartoon. Play came and sat across from me. I saw he had some gravy on his meat loaf.

"Diego said that Toon cried when they were jumping him in," Play said.

"Shit." I knew that meant that he wasn't jumped in. "He's going to do him again?"

Pugh came by and we kept quiet.

The afternoon was one of them terrible ones. The air was real still, and whatever Miss Rossetti said sounded like buzz-buzz-buzz. I kept falling asleep and jerking my head up until she told me to stand up. If we had been in regular school I wouldn't have stood up, but I did because Miss Rossetti was okay. She wasn't trying to mess with anybody.

After school, group was canceled again, and we just sat around. Toon was in the corner by himself and Diego was laughing at him. Cobo went over and talked to Toon, and you could see Toon was freaking out.

Play was playing Ping-Pong with Mr. Pugh, but when it was just about time that we could turn on the television, he came over to where I was sitting.

"That new guy told Toon they were going to kill him because he punked out when they tried to jump him in," Play said.

"Get out of here."

"He told Diego to do him."

I looked up and saw that Toon had his face down in his hands. Toon acted kind of simple, but he never bothered nobody. I knew he didn't go asking if he could get into the 3-5-7, either.

Something told me to mind my own business, but I went over to where Diego was sitting.

"What you want?" he asked.

"Why you messing with Toon?" I asked.

"Why's it your business?"

"Toon ain't nothing but a kid," I said. "Why don't you leave him alone?"

"Why your breath stink so much?" he asked.

"It's from kissing your mama," I said.

He stood up and I stood up with him. We were like right on top of each other and he was bigger than me, but I was looking him dead in his eyes.

Pugh came over and stood right next to us, just like we were standing, except next to us he looked like a big-assed white mountain.

"The first one of you jerks to throw a punch I'm gonna kill, bury, and then piss on his grave," Pugh said.

"Why don't you kill the guy who beat up Toon?" I said.

"You the town snitch?" Pugh asked.

I turned and walked away.

"All of you are getting a little frisky today," Mr. Pugh said real loud. "You're all on lockdown for the rest of the day!"

When Wilson marched us to dinner, there were about nine white people sitting on one side of the mess hall with Mr. Cintron. There were two guys in suits sitting a little apart from them, and I figured they were guards. Pugh said we could talk if we kept the noise down.

"We supposed to be able to talk at dinner all the time," Play said.

"Shut up," Mr. Pugh answered.

The white people kept looking over at us, and I saw that Mr. Cintron was talking to them. They were eating something but I couldn't see what it was.

"Yo, Play, you thinking they eating the same thing we eating?" I asked, pointing to my two franks, sauerkraut, and mashed potatoes.

"If one or two of them curl up and die, then you'll know they got the same thing we got," Play said.

I saw Cobo go over past Toon and take one of his franks. I think Pugh saw it too, but he didn't say nothing.

Dinner is forty-five minutes, the same as the other meals. You could eat it in ten minutes but they give you forty-five anyway. Five minutes before the dinner period was over, the visitors got up and left. Mr. Pugh told us we had to wait until they were out of the building.

"Take five!" he said. "Smoke 'em if you got 'em!"

He knew none of us had any cigarettes, or at least we weren't supposed to have them, and he would report us if we did get some. We waited for twenty minutes past the end of dinner period before Mr. Cintron came back.

"That was a facility reform committee," he said. "They've got some good ideas, but they'll never come about."

"What kind of ideas?" Mr. Pugh asked.

"To put each young person with an individual tutor," Mr. Cintron said. "They figure it'd be more cost efficient than just warehousing these kids over and over. I'm supposed to fly up to Albany tonight and plead the case tomorrow, but I know the legislature won't spend the money for it. They're not smart enough. I'll be back by the afternoon with the bad news."

"Instead of that, you could get them individual tutors to kick their butts," Mr. Pugh said. He was laughing. If the legislature was made up of people like him…

When we left we saw the girls waiting in the hallway to come into the mess hall. They were pissed because they had been standing outside the whole time.

"We ate everything," Leon said. "That's what took us so long."

We got ten minutes of free time before they put us back on lockdown, and I knew that Toon would be safe for the night. But we wouldn't be on lockdown once Mr. Cintron got back. I told Play that I was thinking about telling Mr. Cintron.

"You can't be no snitch, man," he said. "You can't be no snitch."

I knew no one wanted me to be a snitch. Even the guards didn't respect anyone who passed along information. All we had were each other and sometimes you needed some homies, even if they were just temporary, to get by. Play was cool with me, but I knew if he thought he couldn't trust me then he'd have to walk away from me if anything went down.

I thought about writing Icy a letter, but I didn't want to write nothing stupid or just something about the joint. When I was first sentenced, she and Willis were in the court and the judge let me say good-bye to them.

"Progress doesn't sound too bad," Icy had said.

She was crying because she knew I was sad. Willis was telling me to be strong, and I was saying something-I don't even remember what-and looking around him to see if Mom was going to show. She didn't. On the way to Progress I imagined her waking up off a bad high and wondering what day I would be sentenced. No way she was going to say it was her fault she didn't show.

"Somebody must have given me the wrong date," she'd say with her proper way of talking.

I wouldn't write anything about Progress. The name sounded good and we were supposed to believe we were somehow actually moving in some direction, but it wasn't nothing but a juvy jail. From the way Mr. Cintron talked, it would get a lot worse if more kids were assigned to it.

I tried to sleep without thinking about Toon. What was happening was just happening. That's the way life was. Shit just came together, and if it rolled in your direction you got messed up.

What I knew, though, was that Cobo never did want no Toon in the 3-5-7. He was just the kind of gangsta fool who always went around looking for somebody to mess with. Luther was like that too.

Sometimes I think that's how he hooked up with Moms. She was weak enough to take him in and he was mean enough not to care about nothing except himself.

A month before I got arrested, he had met me on the corner of 145th Street, near where the bus depot was. He told me he didn't think I was his real son.

That was supposed to make me feel bad and it did. It hurt, but all I could think about was how I could get back at him. I didn't say it, but I thought it.

We got up in the morning and it was lightning and thundering.

"In the old days," Pugh said, "they wouldn't execute a man during a lightning storm. Too dangerous."