REHAB AS SKINNER BOX, BOYS TOWN AND HOGAN'S HEROES - - Attempts to Turn Burnouts, Gangstas and Misfits into Dale Carnegie Through Scrubbing Floors, Wearing Diapers, and Sitting Motionless on a Bench for a Month (A Memoir, sigh)

 

I Heard Fifty Cents' Toasts A Long Time Ago

At Phoenix House my parents signed the paperwork and I became an emancipated minor, a ward of the state, put on welfare. “We gave the kids over to them, you were their kids now,” my mother says today about CDC and Phoenix House, remembering the “low class shit” in the waiting room of Phoenix House. [Editor's Note: My mom is a rough lady; Em would probably be in Creedmoor if she raised him).

In Phoenix House teenagers were mixed with adults who were serious drug addicts users or who were coming out of prison.

The population was predominantly black and Latino. A majority of the teenagers had been arrested, done time in Rikers Island, some in state prisons. Most of the residents were in the program as an alternative to incarceration; if they split or were kicked out they’d go to prison.

The treatment was much less severe here, much less the classic TC than CDC. 

I was first placed in a tenement in Manhattan for a few weeks for what was called Induction. I was in a room with about eight residents. Green, an older black man who used to peddle Sam Cooke songs on 125th Street and later in morning meeting, sweated out his dope habit night and day on an army cot in my room. Eager to play nurse I brought him my juice from the breakfast he couldn’t make each morning and gave him some of my allotted no-frills cigarettes.  He later took me under his wing, along with cool ass criminal, ladies man Kevin (so cool, everyone wowed, he wore his leather pants in the dishroom scrubbing pots) who called me by the affectionate Kevi-kev. Kevin was a twenty-something with numerous arrests for dope and coke sales, who told tales of the boys on the street using Pig Latin to fool the police and hurdling the hoods of cars to escape pursuit. 

The two of them adopted me as crazy white boy novelty act/mascot and I fronted for their doo-wop group in morning meeting in my tight polyester bellbottom pants and silk shirt (I came back after a split with only the clothes on my back and they gave me a wardrobe from what was mockingly called the Phoenix House Boutique, out-of-fashion charity clothes).

Another man was recently out of prison and directed very odd, persistent rape jokes mostly toward the white teenager next to me as we exited bed on the morning wake-up.

A young black teenager bopped into the room carrying a razor blade in his mouth talking about Rikers. I stepped on someone’s foot outside on the basketball court and he started yelling jail house show-offy, “Yo, you better watch your back, you better sleep with one eye open." A teenage girl was duking it out in Encounters (the Phoenix House therapy group, their name for Synanon’s Game) with men who were telling her to suck their dick. Her screaming comeback -- surprisingly just as violent -- was that she’d sit on their face and grind her pussy into their mouths. I was out of my league, but I learned.

Eventually, when I got to the the Bronx facility, I found myself  sitting in groups listening to men talk about losing their hood in jail (being raped); walking the streets talking intimately to a woman about selling her body for cocaine; offering pop psychology to explain to Pee-Wop why he might have lost his erection with a woman.

I went into Phoenix House more a troubled adolescent than a criminal or a hardened substance abuser but I learned the part.  I used my junior high school Spanish on the handball court, embellished my autobiography, learned the slang, and gave up any hope of ever getting back on track. I reasoned that I had gone too far and now my life was pretty much over.  Subsequently,  there was very little to be afraid of.  Which led me to do things like talk back to kingpin adult residents who were running things --  people who a little bugged out 125-pound white boy  had no business even addressing, according to the social code of the facility.

 

Me and the stuttering armed robber posing jailhouse style

 

An Encounter group was casually ripping into me for not dressing properly and not combing my hair (scrawny white kid looking like a derelict -- they saw me as a defenseless, pathetic creature and they were going to score points with staff and release a little venom). I told them to go to hell. Jim stands up. Jim was a white, middle aged, powerfully built junkie from the Midwest who wore plaid shirts and was melodramatically serious. He said he shot up in a bathroom with John Belushi a few days before he died. He had wrist to elbow razor blade scars on the inside of each of his arms from a past suicide attempt. He once told the story of how he got drunk when he was twelve-years-old and chain sawed the heads off his father’s pigs. 

He walks across the circle toward me. I assumed he was going to attack me. Reflexively I stood up to accept whatever was coming. He reached out and grabbed me in a tight hug. Later he’d smile at me psychotically and insist that I was just like he was as a boy. He attributes my protestations to the angel dust still in my system (I never smoked it). 

After a few weeks I got transferred to another facility in the Bronx, another tenement in the ghetto. 

 

On the juggle no struggle

Phoenix House in 1983 was a world of speedballing, staying away from the cooker, the hole stroll, white dust patients from Queens drinking cranberry juice to detox, slow jams on BLS and everybody mentioning Nickey Barnes. Residents talked about getting high on boiled nutmeg, filtering Aqua Velva cologne through slices of bread for drinkable alcohol, coating menthol cigarettes with toothpaste to catch a buzz. 

We played hyper-aggressive basketball with a milk crate basket nailed to the wall. We slap boxed, played the corner (a jail fight game), played spades, did push-ups for card values and passed around Iceberg Slim and Eldridge Cleaver.  Du-rags, fresh waves, hard rocks ("The only real hard rocks are in the cemetery, Family"), Five Percenters (preaching that the white man has dog hair), my heart don't pump Kool-Aid, don't reach over my food, Rikers, Spofford, up north, the bing ward, sheepskins, commissary, 42nd St. photos of brothers sitting in rattan chairs holding up fans of fake cash.

Junkies with collapsed veins and abscesses where the coke missed, junkies with swollen ankles and hands with no place left to shoot except the pocket of their neck. Residents gleefully yelling out drug dealing and prison phrases: Pass me by you don't get high, on the juggle no struggle, on the lock in.

Penitentiary Muslims threatening to put crushed glass in pork dishes:

(proudly) "I don't eat no swine."  

The taunt back: Yo, swine is divine."

There were irks from orphanages, the odd intellectual, Muslims, old timers who told stories about zip guns and shooting LSD and what a trip it was, or of shooting coke to speed up their production as piece workers. Prostitutes, hustlers, mighty whities, regular Joes and Janes who didn’t seem to belong there, the bugged out, the earnest strivers carrying around briefcases, the veteran convicts, the flaming gay I'll-whip-your-ass kid with the very long nails.

A counselor who was one day supervising the House was the next day in the dish room as punishment for having sex and using drugs with another counselor. Whether she was official staff or an older resident is unclear -- typically, TCs moved residents into staff positions or sought to blur or erase the line between who was staff and who was a resident. The ideal TC used to be similar to the AA model with much antipathy toward Professionals.

I split one time from the facility in the Bronx and tried to hold out until I turned 18 and could join the military.  With the help of some friends I stole wood from houses under construction and built a chest-high shack in the woods of the Long Island high tension fields to live in.  I’d fall asleep each night with alcohol or marijuana.  I’d  wake up in the middle of the night in complete darkness and await morning by burning leaf after leaf of the Suffolk County Yellow Pages in a metal garbage can for warmth, light and activity.  I’d masturbate as many times a day as I could to interrupt the monotony.  I’d wander the roads hitch-hiking back and forth, making up songs, breaking into houses, breaking into school cafeterias, briefly  working as a golf caddie.  My friends thought my place in the woods was an adventure at first and visited for a little while, but soon they stopped coming (SATs, finals, dates) and I was alone.   I held out for about a month and then went back and was eventually transferred to a facility in upper Westchester (Yorktown) specifically for adolescents. 

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