Courage

This piece of writing placed second in the 2024 PEN America Prison Writing Awards.

Courage

I don’t remember the Mexican kid’s name anymore but I do remember his age which was 18. He looked young, younger than 18 although he carried himself like a man much older. Let me clarify, he was young and stupid and full of bad decisions but his stupidity was that of the young and his bad decisions were of that as well. But he was troubled is what I mean, he had grown up troubles big dog troubles not 18 year old apple pie troubles like what does it all mean or what college should I go to or is my girl gonna meet someone new when she goes off to do whatever wherever but serious troubles like his 14 year old pregnant girlfriend and his armed robbery charge sitting like over under barrels ready to turn his entire future into unrecognizable crabfood.

The Kid told me all of these things in his quiet moody way so that’s how I knew all about them. I liked The Kid, although I can’t really say why. His circumstances so overshadowed his personality that talking to him was wearying despite my own troubles, and because of this I found little to interest me in him except, perhaps, our common bond of tragedy. His girlfriend had a 22 year old sister that I wanted to write so that could have been part of it too.

He was Mexican, and not in that way people in America liked to characterize everybody south of the border as Mexican but genuinely from Mexico, although he had been brought here to this country when he was very young. At this time deportation loomed over his future on top of every other thing and when I told him so he crinkled his young smooth mochaed brow and asked me in flawless English:

“You think so?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“I know, vato,” I said. And I did.

His expression clouded further and he went back to his drawing: an imperfect ugly smudged drawing of a rose for his novia or sweetheart who liked roses he said but I suspected by the quality of his roses that she liked them a lot less than she liked him sending them to her. To be sure they would fight a great deal over the phone so it sounded like a KIND of love and although they say that people that young can’t be in love or know what love is I don’t know about all of that. HE certainly believed himself to be in love with her but he said it with the sombre tones of a funereal priest and whether or not that had anything to do with the muddying forces of those circumstances consuming his life or general misgivings towards the whole concept of love itself I don’t know. They really did fight a great deal. Love can be unseemly strange and I distrust any maxims about it other than that.

He was a fine looking kid, smooth skinned black slickbacked hair clean straight teeth rightly groomed and well civilized. He had been raised in the upper echelons of the American class system his parents having made do in some way that he never said and I never asked about. I knew he had a paid lawyer which in here is like a miracle. He had money and art supplies in the limited fashion that the jail would allow and as far as his girl was concerned I saw pictures and heard him talk about her with a lightness in his voice that made him look both younger and older at the same time. She was a pretty young thing but there was no getting around that age difference. No way he was going to be able to deny what they’d been doing. But I didn’t say anything to him about this and why would I? I liked him, you know? Better not to pile on more misery. Better to let him believe that it was going to be alright. It WASN’T, but well…you know.

I sat with him during mealtimes, him and another real Mexican named El Gato who spoke a little less English than I spoke Spanish which was hardly any. I liked El Gato immensely and in his case I knew exactly why. El Gato was always smiling and sitting in a curled up position much like his namesake with his short legs curled up underneath him and his elbow propping up his sly, grinning torso. When he laughed he shook his head and slapped his hand on the top of his head and muttered so gleefully in Spanish that it was damn near hypnotic. You felt like you were a part of some surreal two person slapstick comedy and I liked the feeling so much that I went out of my way to get him to laugh by saying the most obnoxious things I could think of to him through The Kid as a reluctant translator. El Gato was certainly crazy, or at least crazy adjacent, but only in that way that people who are always on the precipice of laughter seem to be so if it was madness it was of a sort that I would be happy to be touched by. More than a few times after a particularly obscene or ridiculous phrase I asked The Kid to translate for me The Kid would give me a look of disapproval. Our exchanges, El Gato’s and mine, were deeply human but in The Kid’s youthful or distracted world view he took them as something else and for this I pitied him, and not for the last time.

Where we lived was a dorm tank on the seventh floor of the jail, a psychiatric floor where they put people who were suicidal or had mental health issues. It held around 40 to 45 people when topped up and resembled a refugee camp with dirty white plastic bunks that you could move but couldn’t unless you wanted to get yelled at by the guards. I had another jailhouse friend in there by the name of Socrates. He was a white guy who came out of the California prison system with no particular political affiliation, a fascination with Greek philosophers and a broken mind.

I should say here too that jailhouse friendships weren’t real friendships in the way most people would define them but they were friendships that mattered in ways that only a few people would ever be in a place in their lives to understand. As far as Socrates went he was closer to me than either of my two Mexican acquaintances but never so close that I’d ever know him better than I did then. He was crazy. Crazy smart but crazy too, his crazy the sort that expressed itself most vividly in its absence. When it came on him his presentation fluttered and glitched like a wounded fan or the erratic slanking of a winded front door and I could see his truer self through his eyes which during these times became too clear, too attached to laws strange and incompatible to ones familiar. I steered well clear of him during these times. He needed a help I couldn’t give so I steered well clear.

Fourteen was another youngster although not as young as The Kid so I’d put his age at around 20 or 19 or so or even maybe 18 but I doubt it. I called him Fourteen because he claimed to be a Norteño but I had my doubts. I’ve known my share of North Siders and if that dude was one of them I’d eat my plastic shower shoes. I know that on my second day in the tank this guy we called the Garbage Disposal on account of his compulsion to eat anything that wasn’t nailed down called Fourteen into the showers to fight and Fourteen refused. Any gang member worth his weight in homemade tattoo ink would have spent about zero seconds mulling that proposition over so I knew Fourteen was a phony but I didn’t begrudge him this because really, what did I care?

However Fourteen suffered from something else in addition to his wounded status and pride that went deeper and was more intrinsic to his character than that simple black mark of cowardice upon him. Physically he was of little consequence. A bit taller than average if my memory serves me and long of limb, although I may be confusing his height with his length of limb which was long. But Fourteen simmered with a common and petty meanness that radiated off of him like a bad smell and when he sat in his corner and ate his food alone his small pluglike eyes darted around the room searching for something smaller than himself. After the incident where he backed down he had become hungry, almost ravenous. He took on the look of a wild animal standing on the periphery of a kill that had been taken from it by something stronger. I despised him a great deal and feared him more than a little for this reason and no other.

What set Fourteen and The Kid at odds is something else I’ve lost over the years, but I know it began with something small. Looking back on it now it seems to me that there is a good possibility that Fourteen had initiated the conflict in the probing fashion of an unsure predator. Offense is cheaply manufactured in these settings and once events are put into motion it can become impossible to arrest them. I know that something as simple as The Kid’s personality could have been used as the crack through which the miasma of a greater conflict had been poured. The weight of his troubles gave him an air that could easily been mistaken for snobbery. He was not particularly well liked so when Fourteen got it into his head that he could begin preying on him without consequence no one but El Gato and I cared and as you’ll see I tried to help The Kid, I really did.

It began when Fourteen called The Kid a punk and a bitch, two of the worst insults a person can use in here. Not fighting after being called such almost always leads to others perceiving you as weak and then to even worse consequences. The Kid’s response was to glare at Fourteen for a moment, then go back to drawing his roses and muttering away in what I expected was a slew of angry Spanish insults but since nobody understood him nobody said anything. He sneered at him, his grin a dead and crooked branch on an oily pile of water.

“Fuckin’ punk. I knew you was weak.”

Fourteen laughed but there was no humor in it. Waited for The Kid to do something. When he continued drawing Fourteen laughed again, then swaggered back to his corner like a prizefighter wrapping a round untouched. There was no doubt The Kid was pissed. His hands shook, ears flushed skin tight under the light brown jaw working like he was chewing on a bitter bit of gristle and bone. But he said nothing. Nothing in English. Nothing that I could understand.

As the sound wooshed back into the tank I caught The Kid’s attention.

“You can’t let that go.”

He said nothing, so I pressed.

“You gotta do something or it’s gonna get worse.”

He stopped drawing and looked up at me. The fear and rage in his eyes gave them a clarity. They shone like morning color, bright and clear.

“What should I do?”

“Fight him. Next time he says something sideways to you call him over to the showers.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I know,” I said. “But if you don’t you’re going to have to do all sorts of things you don’t want to and by that time you won’t have any choice in the matter.”

He didn’t answer just went back to his drawing. I don’t know if he was considering what I had said or had already decided what to do but either way he let the subject drop so I did too.

That night at dinner Fourteen came over from where he was sitting with his new cache of friends and as he passed The Kid he reached down and grabbed a packet of cookies off of his tray. The Kid jumped up and squared off with Fourteen his smaller frame rigid and straight and vibrating like a string. For a brief moment Fourteen’s face cracked and you could see what lay beneath all of that rankness and foul hostility and then it was over and he was back as though in response to some cue picked up from The Kid’s trembling form and he said:

“What the fuck are you going to do about it?”

In some incomprehensible way I felt The Kid’s mind flick in my direction and in that same way I swore that Fourteen was aware of it as well. Into that empty space The Kid spoke.

“Let’s go. In the bathroom.”

Fourteen never hesitated. I went to sit on my bunk by the bathroom to watch for cops and to observe the outcome. I had a bad feeling about what was about to go down. The Kid looked real unsure and that was a bad sign. True that overconfidence was the father of many a loss, ambivalence never got anybody anything but beat bloody. Fourteen was taller and had the reach, so if The Kid thought he would be able to box with him he was in for trouble and The Kid was slight to boot. I just hoped he was quick. I’ve seen little quick guys turn bigger slow guys into hamburger. If he was quick he would have a shot.

It was no contest. When Fourteen began laying into him The Kid just stood there like a goddamn Weeble Wobble. On one hand he did keep his head down, which kept Fourteen’s jabs from splitting his lip and his lazy haymakers from dotting his i’s but otherwise The Kid just stood there and got pounded. I yelled at him to get his hands up and to his credit he did try but it was no use. At one point I could have sworn he had his eyes closed, but that couldn’t have been right. He had his back to me the entire time so there was no way I could have seen such a thing.

Finally The Kid ran out of the bathroom and over to where his tray had been sitting. One of Fourteen’s new cronies had taken the tray and was eating off of it while staring a fanatic fuck you at him. The Kid looked away and instead went and picked up his art supplies, putting them into the grey tub beneath his bunk. Then he rolled up into his blankets and turned towards the wall and was silent. Fourteen came out of the bathroom, an arrogant, adrenaline fueled grin hacked into his face. He looked over at me on my bunk and for the first time our eyes met. He knew very well that in a way I had been The Kid’s champion and his look hummed with a dangerous, post victory energy. It was a singular moment, an equilibrium dangerously formed. A rationless state of nulling where things could have gone in any old direction at all and the only rules bringing one moment into the next were made of teeth and blood and claws. But he must have seen something in my eyes because his certainty faltered, the scene closed. He looked away.

Back in his corner it was all smiles and high fives their smiles like snails their glee a salve of larvae triumphantly devouring the remnants of his previous shame. I looked back over where The Kid was laying. He was silent, but I could see his body shaking under the blanket. El Gato had left, no longer smiling, but quiet in a way that I knew held thoughts that he would never share and that I would never know. It was late then, the night shining through the thin windows was black and cluttered with the yellowwhite light of the skyscrapers all around and I felt real goddamn tired even though I didn’t feel like sleeping and my dinner tray sat untouched so I knew I should be hungry but I didn’t feel like eating. I actually felt like praying which is funny because I don’t even believe in God.

In the morning at breakfast The Kid stayed in bed. When our food came I went over to him and tried to get him up but he just muttered angrily at me in Spanish and pulled the covers up over his head. I left him there and settled down in my usual spot next to El Gato and got started in on my lukewarm cornmeal mush. I had no idea what to say to The Kid and anyway like I had said before my Spanish was pretty terrible and also my stomach was hurting so I didn’t feel like talking to anybody and instead I went to bed right away after breakfast.

Lunch came and went without The Kid getting up which I couldn’t figure out. I mean the fight was over and his face wasn’t beat up or anything so there was no reason to hide. Shame is a motherfucker, of that there’s no doubt, but laying there was only going to make things worse. I could’ve told him that and I did want to but he wasn’t speaking to anybody and I guess that meant me too. What was I supposed to do? Prop him up, shovel food in his mouth? I mean, I wasn’t the kid’s FATHER or anything. He’d get up when he got too goddamn hungry to lay there anymore and that was that.

He did get up at dinner time although he only picked at his food and didn’t eat hardly any. Had he not been so in his head he would’ve seen the trouble that was brewing. Fourteen kept throwing black looks in The Kid’s direction. And since The Kid wasn’t looking at Fourteen those looks weren’t for anybody’s benefit and instead were a symptom of something dark and sour wriggling towards the surface in Fourteen’s mind. Whatever was coming, it wasn’t going to be pleasant.

He waited until The Kid went to the bathroom before he made his move. By this time dinner had ended and I was sitting on my bunk where I had a clear view of the whole thing. As soon as Fourteen went into the sectioned off area of the tank he pounced onto The Kid, driving him into the wall with a furious hail of fists. The Kid never saw it coming. Blow after blow rained down, slamming into his face, his ears, his head, his neck. The soft underbelly of his ribs. Fourteen was a violent blur. Each crack of flesh on flesh, each smack and thud and moan and yelp from his victim only seemed to fuel his rage. Every time he struck The Kid he would spit out words like blows from a hammer.

“Bitch. Punk. Fucker. Faggot. Piece. Of. Fucking. Shit!“

Amazingly The Kid managed to spin away and made a dash towards the entrance to the bathroom but Fourteen was faster. Laughing he grabbed The Kid around the waist and yanked him back inside, slamming him onto the concrete floor. The Kid let out muffled scream when Fourteen began kicking him in the head. He tried to protect himself, curling up into the fetal position and with each solid blow to his guts The Kid let out a weeping, grunting sob that sounded like the crying of an animal lost and wounded.

Suddenly Fourteen stumbled while cocking back for another headkick and fell against the far wall. The Kid wasted no time: scrambling to his feet shooting out of the bathroom and grasping onto the call button by the large sliding tank door like it was a floating piece of wood in the center of a sea gone mad. He started pounding on the button and sobbing like a small child. By some miracle he wasn’t bloody but his face was discolored and blotchy and swollen and his once perfect hair was wrecked and patches seemed to be torn out. I could see him very clearly then. He was so close I could reach out and the whole time he stood there weeping tears pouring down his face breath hitching as he tried to breathe he never looked at me, not once. When the guard finally came he had lost completely his ability to speak English his previous articulate diction replaced by a desperate, childlike Spanish. Because of this the guards, used to dealing with inmates with serious mental health conditions, just figured that The Kid had completely lost it and handcuffed the kid and took him out of the unit. I heard the radio call for one to transfer to the next floor into the suicide cell. And just like that, they were gone.

As soon as they left Fourteen went over to The Kid’s bunk and upended the grey tub underneath it, spilling his property out all over the floor. He tossed the hygiene to his new friends, collected the art supplies and food and envelopes. Tore up the drawings of roses into tiny pieces. Took the pictures of his family. The ones from his graduation. Of his parents, smiling. Standing next to him while he held up his diploma. He tore these to bits. Scattered them everywhere. As to the ones of his girl and his sister he held them up. Showed them off to his new friends. They wrote down the addresses. Talked in great detail about what he had planned for them when he got out. By the time he had finished there was nothing left to indicate that someone once slept there. Nothing but a crumpled blanket and a faded sheet.

When the guards came back to ask what had happened everybody in the tank spoke up with the same, clear voice. He just went nuts they said. He wasn’t taking his meds they said. He’d been acting like a freak for days they said. Well, almost everybody spoke on it. El Gato was quiet and I didn’t say a goddamn thing either. But then, what was the point? One more statement about the whole wretched affair wasn’t going to make any goddamn difference anyway.

The next day we got some new guys to fill the bunks which were empty one of which being The Kid’s. The man who filled it was a tall dirty homeless guy coming off a drunk. He had shoulder length hair greasy and knotted bad tattoos and rotten, fucked up teeth. Something about him pissed me off to no end although I had seen plenty of his kind over the years and there wasn’t anything in particular that I could point to with him that made me so angry. I mean I was already in a mood on account of my stomach which hadn’t gotten better but had, in fact, gotten worse. On top of that I had a really bad headache and the jail doesn’t care if you have a headache. It’s not an emergency so they won’t do anything about it and this one was a real bastard of one. As to the homeless guy I hated him from the jump. One reason could have been that I kept thinking that I was looking down the barrel of a life sentence and this no account fuckhead was pissing away a perfectly good life in 6 month jail jaunts like it didn’t matter I don’t know if that had anything to do with it. It was a reason. It certainly was that.

It was sometime in the afternoon while Socrates and I were sitting on our bunks talking when it happened. I don’t remember what we were discussing really but I remember being deep into it because I was taken completely by surprise with what happened next. Without warning the tall homeless guy who had been up to that point curled up inside his blankets and dead to the world leapt out of bed, marched over to where we were sitting and screamed at us like a madman yelling at cars.

“Oh why don’t you shut the fuck UP?!?!”

I hesitated for only a second. I jumped to my feet and squared up to him face to face, my nose inches from his chin. I suddenly felt like a massive stone had been lifted off of my chest and all of those shadows enshrined and welded to my guts broke free. I had become kinetic, clear at last and unfettered. Free.

“Let’s go motherfucker let’s take it to the bathroom I’ll break your goddamn face.”

I didn’t wait for his response. I was in the shower quick and fast shirt stripped barefoot fists curled a twisted spear of certainty and rage.

“C’mon asshole you wanna talk shit? Let’s go you fuckin’ punk.”

When he failed to appear I went back into the open tank and saw that he was in his bunk curled up under his blanket. I strutted back over to Socrates still crackling with a black fury, eyes boring deep into the homeless guy’s back. Socrates smiled at me, big. Laughed outloud. I saw that a couple of new people I didn’t know had joined us and were grinning up at me. It was Socrates that spoke.

“I can’t believe he didn’t do anything.”

“I know,” I said.

But I didn’t know. I mean I knew he wasn’t going to do anything. In fact I had known that all along. But that didn’t matter, see. Because I went into the bathroom to fight him and he didn’t. I was strong and he was weak. Nobody could call me a coward.

The End