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)

 

Upstate

In Yorktown we played handball for gym credits, worked in the kitchen for shop credits, ate blocks of welfare cheese at meals. Coffee was put on a ban because it was wildly abused (we’d smuggle around envelopes of Bustelo). Residents broke into the facility’s bomb shelter and took the Phenobarbitals they found there. We broke into the kitchen, stole staff's shrimp and cooked it in our room on an overturned iron in a tinfoil tray.

A resident vaguely, emotionally, alluded to a murder in group therapy while his co-defendant tries to get him to shut up. Residents screamed, cried and beat pillows in stay-up-all-night "marathons." 

Staff accidentally showed Bad Boys (Sean Penn in juvie) on Friday night and there was a small riot on the floors. I was running a little wild.  I came across my roommate and my friend, the stuttering bisexual marital arts expert dust patient armed robber from Hollis fighting off (using a belt like a whip) the overweight adult resident from next door who got busted stealing girls panties from his job in the laundry). Not quite sure why, but hyped up pure unfocused energy, I snatched the belt that they they were warding him off with and gave it to the panties fiend and ran off.  When I came back to the room that night I was pinned down while one resident hit me, the other kissed me on the chest - - I had an iron in my hand and I was going to hit them in the head, could’t bring myself to do it).  Mitch Rosenthal, tell me about treatment.

I’d get stoned all night on coffee and sleep deprivation and hang out in the morning talking maniacally with the matronly librarian. There was a creative writing teacher who let me go off in his class. We played crazy, gleefully masochistic, exuberant games of football in the snow. We’d run into the arms of the largest boys and they’d throw us as far as they could -- Hurt us. Hug us. We’re going crazy in here -- everyone hitting and piling madly on top of one another. We played frenzied, violent, games of deck hockey in gym.

Cindy was a white girl from Queens, the only white girl in the facility who would go on the dance floor with the black and Latina girls and be accepted. There was a meeting one night where the family was to decide if a young man who had been probated to the program would  be kicked out and sent to prison for smoking marijuana.  The family became a lynch mob; jeering, gleeful, one speaker after another whipping up the crowd. He was made to scream over and over, "I'm Sorry," (louder) "I'm Sorry" (at the top of your lungs, like you mean it), "I'M SORRY FAMILY.” The family was giving him the thumbs down, thrilled to see him shipped off to prison.  I sat there in the audience disgusted but said nothing.  And then Cindy spoke up (very unusual for a white girl to do) and made an impassioned speech that turned everything around and saved the boy. 

 

Buddies

We flirted in the kitchen while wearing Hefty bags as aprons and scrubbing dishes and pots as punishment. Emergency family meetings would be called in the middle of the night because a grown man was found in bed with one of the boys I was shooting pool with the day before. Two girls copped to having sex in a janitorial closet. Residents on night watch duty would boast that some girls got funky on the flashlight beam when they looked in as they made their rounds. Rick, a flaming white teenager would provide Herbie, a barely literate Latino from Rikers, with blowjobs. 

The boys stole me some cupcakes for my birthday; where you going to get that among teenage boys in 1983 - - faggots and asses up and M-80s in mailboxes - - if you're not locked up or away.

One day Cindy herself was caught getting high and placed on a work contract and made to wear a stocking cap, covering a full head of long black hair.  In the mixed up bureaucracy of an institution, I took over the position of kitchen department head and no staff member questioned it.  When the family was given time off to watch television, a staff member told me to take all the contracts up to the kitchen to clean (they weren’t allowed any privileges).  I led a parade of people in signs, costumes, stocking caps, and shaved heads up to the kitchen to work.

Cindy and I were friends.  I would steal her loaves of bread from the kitchen and trick for her on the chow line.  She and her roommate would horseplay and wrestle around with me on the floors.  After she got high and was placed on a ban with The Family, they moved her into an isolated empty room and I’d wake her up gently (at a very early hour to stat her scrubbing and other punishment duties)when I was nightman and she’d make sure to reward me with an affectedly sleepy, sweet Thanks, Kev. 

So once in the kitchen I told her not to worry about working.  Although she was banned from talking to anyone in the facility I ignored this and started speaking with her, knowing she was probably lonely.  But she was stammering, lowering her eyes, acting uncomfortable.  I didn’t know what was wrong.  And then she started to cry.  After many What’s the matters she told me that she couldn't talk to me or even look at me because she felt so ugly without her hair.  C’mon, Cindy you look okay, get back on your waitress/secretarial track. Let’s just pretend we’re at the Bandshell in Forest Park -- the 125th St. for white bad boys in NYC - - and you’re not wearing pantyhose on your head.

 

“Yo, he’s a Jew,” he accused

My roommate was a black teenager from Brooklyn who dreamed of entering the Air Force.  Each night we would lay in our beds talking and we became very close. But things changed when staff made me take a visit home with Anthony as my escort.  He had to sit in the car outside when we went to visit my quasi-girlfriend because the girl’s father didn't want a black person in his house. Earlier in the day Anthony was at my house and saw an old photo of me wearing a yarmulke at my sister's wedding.

Back in the facility I was escorting a server out into the dining facility with a tray full of plates; it was my responsibility to verbally beat off the residents who mobbed him and tried to steal extra plates.  I had a little bit of juice at this time.  One resident who I threatened, stretched out his arm, finger pointed in accusation and loudly announced to the dining hall, “Yo, he’s a Jew.” Anthony, shocked and disappointed, had spread the word back in the facility that I was a Jew and I had to answer for it.

At one point the director ordered that all tables in the dining room be integrated.

There were a small pocket of whites, mostly from Queens, who stayed separate from the black population and mocked their speech patterns and would use black slang as a form of  mockery Yo, yo, yo, I’m down. Some blacks returned the racism and called the white man a devil with dog hair. A few whites were accepted either for their sheer strength or their affinity toward black culture and were referred to as mighty whities.

Cindy’s roommate was a pretty, anorexic-thin, ghost-pale blonde girl, also from Queens.  The rumor that preceded her entry was that she was dusted out and let neighborhood boys sodomize her with a fence post.  She was extremely quiet and shy. When we talked privately I was taken aback by the venom with which she condemned the "niggers" in the facility. For some reason the black population was being so overly solicitous and gentle toward her - - girls would stroke her hair during Family Meetings - - and they had no idea.

Timothy was a black teenager who was good with his hands, a natural athlete, so street cool and criminally suave that the adults let him sit in on their Spades games.  I got to know Timothy because he used to come to my room to visit Anthony. Initially, he was indifferent, hostile and contemptuously amused by me -- loser white boy with dog hair.   But in the classroom I became a peer tutor and started helping him with his schoolwork --  previously Kenneth was his peer tutor (Old Greenwich Connecticut Kenneth; he killed someone while driving high and was probated to Phoenix House).  It was a situation Timothy  hated (a pu-putt white boy who doesn’t even know how to clean his ass teaching him).  I treated him with respect, deferred to his juice.   I helped him write a card to his girl, we partnered together on the handball court, we’d talk together. 

I made a conscious effort to bridge the racial and social gaps.  I took it as a challenge, thought it was a good, decent thing to do and it gave me satisfaction.

But I was still a child; naive, egoistic.

I’d try to infiltrate Five-Percent meetings.  Though I never used an iron in my life, I  made another transition into homeboy (years before wiggers, Vanilla Ice, etc.) and began to iron my pants and shirts meticulously each night, creating patterns and creases under pockets and along sleeves.

And I was going to be the Jimmy Stewart of the cell block, break the race barrier with abject honesty.  I psyched myself up for months to say it and then one day at the pool table, as if it were natural:

"Damn, niggers be talking shit,"  I said.

Pause. 

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