Five days of being awake begin to take their toll. I feel myself getting drowsy, slipping into darkness. It’s that halfdrugged sleep that comes at the end of every run, coupled with the handful of Valiums Heidi gave me earlier. Everything fades to black.
It’s late in the morning when I’m violently awoken by a cacophony of sound: deep guttural voices, the distinct clinking of metal cuffs, and an orchestra of bleeps, blips, and chirps from a police radio.
“Wake up, ya piece a shit, and let me see your hands,” orders a red-haired freckle-faced detective with an uncanny resemblance to Richie Cunningham from Happy Days.
I get up slowly in a half-asleep, half-dazed stupor, wearing only jeans and a T-shirt. I’m still having trouble making sense of this scene when from the corner of my eye I see Billy being dragged out of the apartment by two uniformed officers. Here I am, smack in the middle of a raid. The bench warrant I have is hanging over my head like some dark and dreary cloud ready to release torrents of rain.
“Get on some shoes, pal. Had a nice run, but it’s over now,” another cop says. He reminds me of this thugged-out Puerto Rican brother I knew the last time I was on Rikers, covered with jailhouse tats. I have an eerie premonition of where I’m going and the company I will soon keep. I feel a dampness permeating my palms and can hear my heart palpitating loud enough, I think, for everyone else to hear too. Anxiety is rearing its ugly head. Rikers Island will be my new home.
Central Booking is the first stop. “Inside” again. I’m thrust into the wheels of justice and the long, drawn-out grind of due process. All of it leads up to the Day of Judgment when I will hear the inevitable: One year on Rikers.
Though I’ve taken this trip several times before, I’d usually be out within a week. But a year? A year without ice? A year without women, decent food, privacy, freedom? Despair overwhelms me. Something about this bus ride out to the Island seems different, darker. The level of hopelessness I have reached, somewhere between wanting an eternal slumber and desperately needing to see the faces of my family, is at a depth I never knew existed. An image of my mother bidding me farewell leaves a smoky crater in my mind.
I glance across the aisle and notice a heavyset Latino brother with a tear drop appropriately tattooed on his face. With a look of utter anguish, he gazes out the caged bus window.
From the shores of Queens, a mile-long bridge rises over the East River toward an island officially located in the Bronx. This sprawling city of jails waits with open arms to welcome the pariahs of the five boroughs.
As we approach C-73, the reception jail, the mood is a blend of somberness and tension so thick you could cut it with some crudely fashioned prison dagger. It takes four hours to get through the intake process; forms to fill in: name, age, height, eye color, identifying scars, religion. By the time it’s over, the Department of Corrections knows more about me than my mother does.
I strip down to my boxers. Each item of clothing examined, then packed away in a yellow canvas bag. I’m assured everything will be returned upon release. Yeah, right, I think. I’m handed a “full set-up” — towel, soap, bedding, and the green jumpsuit that will mark me a bona fide criminal for the next twelve months. Finally, I’m escorted to a housing area. Through several sets of doors, each one unlocked, opened, closed, and locked again, before going on to the next, down dimly lit, cold hallways rich with that institutional stench.
The weight of a six-day speed binge, a day in court, and another day of “bullpen therapy,” as cons call the endless hours in holding cells, have taken a toll. All I want is to pass out. Through my exhaustion I gladly accept the metal cot, thin and tattered mattress, and the wool blanket that looks and smells like it hasn’t been washed in months.
I’m assigned to housing area: 9 Main. It’s a barrack dorm with beds lined up next to each other, separated by three-foot lockers. This is how I will spend the next 365 days — stripped of everything but a locker and a cot.
It’s close to 12 a.m. when I enter the dorm. Most of the residents are wide awake, even with the facility lights out. This is the typical after-hours scene in most housing units on Rikers. It’s called “breakin’ night,” staying up after the lights are out to hustle tobacco, do push-ups, or simply pass the time by reminiscing about the street life. It’s a picture alarmingly similar to the scene on the blocks so many come from. These ghetto celebrities and ’hood movie stars are energized by the cover of darkness.
Despite the ruckus, I settle into my space and drift into a catatonic state. For a moment, I linger in that zombie-like state between wakefulness and deep sleep and think the last forty-eight hours were a surreal dream. That first morning in Main is the darkest dawn I’ve ever known.
The entire dorm is roused for chow at 4:45 a.m. It feels like the coldest winter ever as I lurch toward the mess hall. The echoes of large steel prison doors slamming wake up each and every prisoner confined within this penal colony’s unforgiving walls.
Just a harmless speed addict, I think to myself, I never intended to hurt a soul. Especially not the retired couple whose pension checks I pilfered or the single mom whose life savings account I drained. What a time to be thinking about my vics. How will I stay afloat with the weight of my conscience suddenly acting like a ball and chain? I will surely drown in the insanity of this institution, and I realize how urgently I need a life preserver.
Down the concrete and steel hallways of the jail, I walk alongside misfits of the morning. Entering the large steel dining area, still half-asleep, I’m assaulted by the echo of clanging, banging, and hammering steel. The noise, the noise! Steel walls, steel doors, steel pots, steel pans, steel benches, steel tables — all of which underscore the hell society has banished me to.
As I drag my tray down the stainless steel line, kitchen workers throw and splatter food on my plate. I don’t make eye contact, just try to put one foot in front of the other.
I sit next to an older, bespectacled junky who obviously doesn’t know the meaning of water or soap. I eat cold cereal. With my face down, I think about how I can’t wait to get out, get out and… then suddenly it hits me — I have nothing to get out for. I have no life on the outside worth returning to. The girl I loved, an addict like me, was lost to the streets last I heard. I’m a college drop-out with only lies to put on a resume. When I get out, the only choice I have is to return to the mix, the only thing I know, which will land me right back in this hellhole. For the first time, I consider hanging up, ending it all. Believe it or not, it’s hard to pull off in a place like this. I go back to my cot and sleep another eight hours.
“On the chow!” the CO barks, alerting inmates it’s feeding time again. I drag myself out of bed and kick on some slippers. I have no idea what day or time it is. I try not to think. My thoughts lead only to one place.
On the way to the mess hall I notice a door with the words, New Beginnings… Create a new life and a new future today. Why does the name resonate so much? I repeat it to myself over and over — New Beginnings, New Beginnings. Then, like some prizefighter’s left hook, it hits me. It is one in a long line of stories Billy’s told me. Last time he was locked down on the Island he managed to weasel his way into being a trustee. He was assigned to sweep and mop some program office. Bits and pieces of his tale are coming back to me. All he kept telling me is that he was so smooth he could find a vic anywhere, even on the inside. “Simple, old-fashioned justice,” he called it. It was his way, he thought, of sticking to the system that stuck it to him so many times. The last thing I want to think about is that world.