THE AIR IN the cell was warm with evaporated piss and sweat, so eventually I took off the leather jacket I’d been wearing. Someone sitting on the bench—a young, coffee-colored guy with fat red lips tattooed on his neck—jabbed the guy beside him and pointed at me.Well, it’s about time, I thought.
“White boy,” said Lips. A thin moustache arched like an eyebrow over his knowing mouth. “Do you have a motherfuckin’ watermelon tattoo on your arm?” We were locked up in Brooklyn Central Booking, a processing plant for transgressors of insignificant laws: trespassers, blunt rollers, walkers of uncollared dogs. (I had endangered society by biking on the sidewalk.) You can try talking to a corrections officer, asking him for help or information, but you might as well petition a microwave.They’re programmed to run one routine, and to run it on everyone. They lead you around on chains and feed you sandwiches lined with what looks like lithium grease.
I was grateful, then, to share my crowded cell with a few loudmouths. They sat on a bench in the back and told jail stories, made fun of people’s sneakers and pumped human sounds over the drone of fluorescent lights.
“They got old dudes wearin’ black sneakers now,” one said, as a quiet, grizzled man stood facing the bars. “Damn, and Sean Johns, too.” About 20 of us waited in the cell, and everyone except me was black or Hispanic.
My “tattoo” was the work of my cousin Emma, who had recently taken scented markers to the tricep I’d just exposed and marked me with a cross-section of a watermelon. I tried explaining this, but I was already drowned out by an uproar of laughter.
The loudest was a guy with a diamond earring, flashing white corneas and teeth, and a face I could describe as bright black. His laughter was God-like. “Yo, where you from?” he boomed.
“Florida.” Jeers. “What?” I explained that I lived in Bed-Stuy now, near the Cascades factory at Myrtle and Marcy avenues.
“Marcy,” Deep Bass said to someone.
“I’ma beat this white nigga ass.”
I pulled my jacket back on. “I get it,” someone said. “He’s tryin’ to be James Dean.”
“That’s right,” I sighed. The upheaval in my nervous system must have shown on my face because one of them locked eyes with me. He was the oldest, a big surly heap of a man wearing a low-cocked Yankees cap.
“It’s past time,” he said. Past time for what?
What’s going to happen? “Jo-king.” Oh. Pastime. The man scowled and looked to his neighbors, then back to me. “When the last time you got laid?” I lifted my glance. “What day is today?” Laughter shook the row on the bench.
“Let me ask you a question,” said Lips.
“What’s your favorite ethnicity of girls?” I flapped my tongue helplessly against my palette.
“Naw, I got a better question,” said Deep Bass. “What’s your favorite feature on a woman’s body?” “He he. Er, I’m mostly an ass man, I guess.” Down by my shoes, an old man was thrashing in troubled sleep.
“Ass man,” scoffed Lips. “You like a little skinny bitch, right?” “Not really. I guess... I mean I like there to be some... I like voluptuousness.”
“You like big girls,” said Surly.
“Well not big fatsos, but in a way I guess that—”
“You ever fuck wit’ a Puerto Rican bitch?”
“No.”
“What about a black girl?”
“No.”
“Stay away,” said Deep Bass. “A black bitch will spend all your money. All your goddamn money.”
“What ethnicity you like, then?” Lips repeated.
“I don’t know. My girlfriend’s German. I went with a Thai girl when I was traveling.”
“Hey y’all, check it.” Lips addressed me:
“Do this.” He flung his hand in the air a few times and said, “Yeah, son!” They fell silent. A ragged brown rat crouched in a puddle of ooze, chewing its nails.Was this a test or a trap? No telling, but only action could fill this void.
“Yeah, son!” I said, with style.The crowd went wild.
“He might save him some ass beatins with that one,” said Deep Bass.
“OK,” said Lips. “Now you don’t say, ‘I went with this girl.’ You say I splashed that ass, I tore that ass up, I hit that pussy...”
“I beat her guts up?” I offered. Sighs. “Say ‘pussy,’“ ordered Surly. “Pussy.” “Say ‘bitch.’"
“Bitch,” I said, and I felt my shoulders relax.“Yeah I’ll fuck wit’ a Asian bitch.” Cackles, whoops, hollers.
“Say ‘shorty,’” Surly continued. “Shorty.” “Say, ‘Where my niggas at?’“ said Lips. “Aha,” I said. “Nice try.” They all laughed. “So here’s what you gotta do,” Deep Bass explained. “Get you some Hennessy, some Courvoisier, put some fresh grapefruit juice in there. Make a whole pitcher and put that shit in the fridge.When that bitch come over, give her two drinks,” he said, with supreme finality. “Then what you goan do?” “I’ma bust that ass.” Another uproar.
Deep Bass’s boom shook my sternum.
“Now,” said Lips, “when someone asks where you from, you just say Marcy. Don’t say Florida, don’t give the motherfuckin’ vicinity of your street block in Brooklyn. Just Marcy.”
Suddenly the gate opened and the cell flooded with bodies. And through the fray, I heard the voices of my new friends, now drawn into a high nasal creak.
“White nigga’s goan be givin’ a report when he gets out:‘Those urban people are so strange. You never know what they really mean.’” “Naw, you know that’s not what he’s really goan call us.”
“All those niggers I was locked up with.” “Those damned porch monkeys.” The laughter rippled through the inmates between us.
“Naw for real, though.You know when he back with his people, when he comfortable, he’s goan be usin’ all those words that we taught him.”
Eventually I did make it back. After 36 hours, a meeting with a public attorney through piss vapor and steel grating and a 90-second appearance before a judge, I was released at midnight to Downtown Brooklyn. I opened the door to Schermerhorn Street and space shot out in all directions. I pulled a leaf from a tree and held it my nose. All the way home, I stuck my head out the cab window.
My girlfriend was waiting at my apartment.We kissed and it was nearly unbearable.
You adapt very quickly to something like jail. It’s like learning to eat sand, to accept it—and even to like it. Such sudden happiness felt like a lie, almost.
“What’s wrong?” she murmured. I lifted my mouth to her ear.“Bitch,” I said.
“Prepare thyself. I’ma tear this pussy up.”
Justin Richards is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn.Thanks to a sound investment of your tax dollars, he now keeps his bike off the sidewalk.
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