Walter Myers - Lockdown

He beckoned Simi over and pulled her next to him. I heard him say that he didn't want me in his room.

Simi straightened up. "Mr. Hooft, you'll have to work with whatever staff we have. Reese is a very intelligent boy and he will be working with us. Now you two get acquainted, because he's going to be assisting you with keeping your room clean, with your personal hygiene, and anything else you need. He's a very good young man."

Simi patted me on the arm and walked out of the door.

Mr. Hooft looked at me and then looked toward the door as if he might have thought about getting up and running. I saw a cane in the corner of the room, so I knew he wouldn't be running too fast.

For a while we were silent, me standing in the middle of the floor and him sitting by the window looking at me. I tried to think of something good to say.

"Is there anything I can do for you, sir?"

He got up slowly and I thought he was going to leave the room, but then he went into the little bathroom. I didn't know if he was going to stay in there, maybe lock himself up or what. There was a stool near the chest, and I went over and sat on it.

I hadn't been around a lot of old people before and I didn't know how to act. There had been a program on television about teenagers robbing old people. Maybe he had seen that and was getting spooked. Simi had told me to stay with him, so I just sat on the stool.

After a while the door opened and he came out and looked around the room like he was wondering if I was still there. I stood up and he looked me up and down.

Then he went back to his place on the chair.

"You murdered somebody?" he asked me.

"No, sir," I said. "I didn't murder anybody."

"White or black person?" he asked. He had an accent.

"Sir, I didn't murder anybody," I repeated.

"You're in jail now?"

"Yes." I didn't like saying I was in jail. I remembered when I first got to Progress I began thinking about what I would say to people when I got out, what I would call the place.

"You raped a woman?"

"No, man. I didn't rape a woman and I didn't kill anybody."

"So what did you do?"

"I would rather not say."

"Simi!" Mr. Hooft called out. "Simi!"

"Sir, please give me a chance," I asked him.

"What did you do so terrible you can't even say the words?" he asked. "Simi! Simi!"

Simi came to the door and looked at me and then at Mr. Hooft.

"What happened?" she asked.

"This man, is he a murderer?"

"No, he is not a murderer, Mr. Hooft." Simi put her arm around my waist. "He's a very nice young boy."

"If he was a very nice young boy, he wouldn't be in jail," Mr. Hooft said.

"Sometimes, Mr. Hooft, people make mistakes," Simi said. "And Reese will be working with you."

She left again and I saw that Mr. Hooft had got his cane and was leaning on it as he sat. He was breathing kind of heavy. Then he turned his head toward me.

"So what did you do?"

"I needed money real bad," I said. "I knew this one guy, Freddy Booker, who hung out on my block, was dealing prescription medicines. He was getting homeless dudes to go to certain doctors and get prescriptions for painkillers and Viagra and things like that. They would give him the prescriptions and he would give them, like, two dollars apiece or something like that. Then he would get the prescriptions filled and sell the pills on the street. He would buy any kind of prescription that was either sex medicine or painkillers.

"I knew where this doctor had a storefront office. It was in a rough neighborhood and usually closed at night. I know it was wrong, sir, but I broke in and stole a whole bunch of blank prescription forms. The ones with the numbers on them. I sold them to the guy who was dealing prescription drugs.

"What happened then was this same guy was busted for dealing with a doctor downtown on 127th Street."

"In Brooklyn?"

"No, in Harlem."

"Then what happened?"

"When he got picked up, he snitched out everybody he knew, including me. They charged me with about eighteen counts of dealing drugs and unlawful distribution and stuff like that, everything the guy was charged with. I copped a plea to doing just what I did, and that's how I got to Progress, sir.

"But yo, like, I'm trying to turn my life around and I'm not going to do anything like that again. That's for sure."

"I don't like colored people," Mr. Hooft said. "Nothing personal, I just don't like them. And you're a colored criminal and I don't like criminals, either."

"Right." I had been standing up but I sat back down again. I knew if Mr. Hooft said anything negative about me, said I sassed him or anything, it was going to go against me, so I just shut up. Even if it wasn't true, it didn't matter. I was a criminal, like he said, and what really went down didn't matter all that much.

"Did you know the doctor?"

"No, sir," I said.

"But you stole from him anyway, and this other person, the one you were working for-what was his name?"

"Mr. Hoof, I wasn't working for him-"

"Hooft! With a t. Colored people can't say that? P-i-e-t-e-r Hooft!" Mr. Hooft said. "Simi can't say it and you can't say it. There are certain things in your makeup which make you who you are. You coloreds steal and use drugs and you kill people and you can't even pronounce a name. Your brains are bad. That's why you were slaves."

What I would have liked to do was to hop to this sucker and beat his head in, but it would've been the same as beating my own head in, because I would be the one doing the most suffering. I didn't feel I was letting what he said slide, but I held back from saying what I really felt.

When Mr. Pugh came to pick me up, I was ready to go back. He asked me if I had had a nice vacation.

"I was working," I said.

"What were you doing?"

"Picking up garbage," I said.

"Good job for you," Mr. Pugh said.

At Progress you could get visitors any day between 10 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon, and on Saturdays and Sundays between 10 and 6 in the afternoon. I hadn't had any visitors, so when Mr. Wilson called me out of the dayroom Sunday afternoon I thought it was a mistake.

"Who is it?" I asked.

"Your mother and sister," he said with a grin. "I might have to steal your little sister, she's so cute."

I stopped dead in the hallway and looked at Wilson to see if he was kidding. My moms hadn't visited me in months. "You sure?" I asked.

"Yeah, it's for you. Remember, they can't give you anything to bring into the facility," Wilson said. "They're supposed to leave all gifts at the office."

"Yeah, okay."

The visitors' room was decent. There were red and yellow tables you could sit at and real curtains on the windows. There were cameras in each corner of the room, but I didn't mind them. A television was tuned to the weather channel.

I looked around and saw a woman who looked like my mom standing in front of one of the vending machines. She was alone. For some reason I thought for a moment she might not recognize me.

"Hey."

My mother turned and looked at me and smiled. She was looking neat, maybe a little thinner than the last time I saw her.

"Well, how you doing?" she asked.

"I'm okay," I said.

She kissed me on the cheek. "You're taller!" she said. "They must be feeding you good."

"The food's okay," I said.

We sat at one of the tables. "They said that Icy was with you."

"She's in the bathroom," Mom said. "So what's going on?"

"Ain't nothing going on," I said. "I'm in here doing the time."

"I tried to get your father to come up," she said. "He said he was tied up and maybe he would get up the next time."

"Yeah."

"He's so far back in his child-support payments I can't even keep track of them," she said. "I got a date to take him down to Family Court and he didn't show. They don't do anything, so I don't know why I keep getting dates."