Luskins

Scott borrowed the car his father had given him. He had gotten his permit a while back but there was ambiguity as to when Scott could use the car. His father had given it to him, but somewhere along the line there were limitations to when Scott could use it, possibly set by his mother or his sister, but something stricter than the just the DMV rules.

You could really sense something was changing about the culture, angles were appearing everywhere. Eyeglasses, clothes, and haircuts, but Scott's car had its four tires firmly placed in the Seventies American car opulence. It had two giant doors, a V-8 engine, electric windows, air conditioning, a caramel vinyl top, a creamy chunky bottom and a huge trunk. It was ugly. It could have been a Ford Grenada or a Buick Skylark.

I rode shotgun and Stephen was in the sticky back seat because the AC never really reached back there. Scott wore aviator sunglasses and drove fast. Years later, in a passing conversation, outside of his home, I learned that he was forced to attend driving safety classes because of speeding tickets. He told me how the class convinced him not to speed. Scott was very logical and swayed by empirical evidence. He quoted the most compelling arguments he found in the seminar. Two cars left from the same starting point. Car A disregarded the speed limit, car B maintained posted speed limits. The cars arrived three minutes apart at the destination.

Scott described the particulars of the experiment. These details worked to support Scott's acceptance of the fact that speeding does not get you there appreciably faster. It was the first time I realized Scott was making a decision about his life. He was exerting his will over his desire. Personally, it never occurred to me before. I was just starting to understand desire.

Our trip to Luskins was before all that.

Scott or Stephen, one of them had heard a story at school. You could walk into Luskins with a receipt for blank tapes and grab a cardboard box filled with a two hundred-dollar tuner and walk out. You had to have balls. You had to walk with confidence. You had to flagrantly wave the bill of sale around, you had to make sure no one stopped you on the way out.

Luskins was a Washington appliance warehouse store that had a vast collection of TVs, stereos, tape to tape boom boxes with detachable speakers. In the back was a giant sound room to test your component choices. They knew a lot about stereo equipment, about amps and watts. Each of them had a stereo. They were concerned with fidelity. I lived in a bedroom filled with my dead grandmother's furniture.

I became inaudible and all my insides started to bubble, hot. It was very hot. In the parking lot they were deciding who was going to go in with the receipt. Was I going to do it? They didn't really even ask me.

Minutes go by as I walked in circles around bins filled with plastic cases surrounded by cardboard boxes located in the front of the store. Each lap I looked around. I had lost sight of them, and was alone. They knew. Everyone knew what we were doing. Just by looking at me, they knew something was up and everyone in the store was looking at me. I was like that beaver at the Rock Creek nature center that had been hit by car on the left side. It suffered brain damage and could only walk to the right. Just looping around and around to the right in his cage endlessly as children on field trips watched. Insufferable, stuck there, I couldn't leave, where would I go?

Then here comes Stephen walking down the main isle heading towards the tinted glass door. There was no cashier in the way, just a glass top counter on the right. The store was run on a commission basis and it was expected that the stereo salesman would ring up the sale and bring the receipt back to the customer. This is what allowed the scam to work.

Stephen is struggling with the box a little bit. He was short, about 5'4" but it was an act. Stephen was strong and incredibly balanced. As he approached the door, he turned around and leaned against the door nodding his head and mumbling something towards the counter. I could not understand what he said, because he had the receipt stuck in is mouth.

I nearly puked as the bright sunlight from the outside parking lot framed Stephen's silhouette. I did one more lap then left. The box was sitting on top of the trunk. Stephen had a huge smile but was still playing it cool. The brightness was hurting my eyes. Scott comes up shortly thereafter and pops the trunk, then makes for the driver door.

Turning off Rockville Pike we took the back way home past the bike trail. Only a few years earlier we used to take that very same trail out to White Flint Mall a few miles from Luskins. Scott rode his silver Mongoose and I would ride my red Sting Ray I had won in a raffle in the sixth grade. We only went for one thing, pizza from the Italian counter at the International Eatery. Each nation lined up across from each other in a wide cafeteria on the third tier. The same kitchen replicated on down a jagged line with changes in the flag and color scheme, but I ignored the others and only went for pizza. I always got one piece of pizza because I couldn't afford more. It came as a small round whole pie. I loved that pizza. It took about an hour and a half for us to get there by bicycle. And on that final hill we would always have to get off our bikes and walk them up in humiliation. It was an all day journey and you would have to think twice before committing to it, but I loved that pizza.

Crowne Plaza Breakfast in 2004

Foul ordered breakfast. One coffee cup missing from radiated scramble. Dyed yellow grey with Mexican catsup, knife stab opening mums or dandelions on the tray with two plates and one cup of ice water. Rotting fruit sweetness permeates the chemically baked bread molded into shape, never cut. Potatoes soggy with rot absorb a hint of dyeing strawberry. The plate uncovered behaves as if flatulent. It shows three strips of last years pig, a dull sheen daring you to consume.

Scared Straight

I can't recall how I got there or what procedures I went through to get into the building. I do know that the Montgomery County Correctional Facility exterior was constructed of dull brown bricks, the kind you find in municipal buildings that have an ambiguous function. You have to learn what the building is for.

The similarity between its construction and some of the modern libraries we broke into occurred to me only later. In fact, I could be making it up, some disorder making me make connections that aren't really there.

The room looked like a cafeteria, the same brown municipal bricks on the outside were on the inside lit by fluorescent lights. The five or six of us sat on one side of a large folding cafeteria table in the middle of the room. Then after an introduction, the detective brought in the convicts. There were eight or nine of them. They walked in from two separate doors on the wall opposite us. The women came in on the right, the men from the left. Some were in orange jumpsuit. They were loud and we got quiet.

At some point after some more direction from the detective, he walked out of the room, leaving us. The juvenile side of the table was mute. I minimized my movements and sound. Shallow, light breathing, I gripped my elbows. Every muscle was frozen as if I was playing headlights. Headlights was a game where you would run around the neighborhood avoiding detection. It was never declared, but you would pretend you were a ninja or behind enemy lines and you must not be detected. When you see headlights you dive behind a tree, bush or ditch and freeze. Scott and I used to play it until we were twelve. It was really fun.

Back in the prison cafeteria they started grilling the kids on my left, making me last. One man would lead the assault by asking the questions. "What did you do?" He wasn't particularly tall or big, but he was a man. They were all fully grown people that bellowed, twitched and sputtered without suppression. They were nervous and on edge but that seemed to be from too much coffee. They seemed almost happy to be there, in front of us.

The first was a girl, she was about fourteen. Her story started with stealing liquor from the liquor cabinet, then going out after curfew, then shoplifting. Getting pregnant then an abortion. The man was pulling it out of her like taffy. We all witnessed how they worked her over. Drawing it out of her.
"What did you do?"
"Why did you do that?"
"Did it make you feel like a grown up?"
"You like fucking don't you..."
"You like speed, driving fast, and getting fucked up."

All of this was said with pride. You are a whore and you will keep getting pregnant and then abortions and the scar tissue will make it so you can't have babies and there you will be all fucked up and alone whoring yourself on the street. This is being yelled at her, while the rest of the prisoners chimed in with yodels and wolf calls and grunts of stupid bitch. She cracks.

Next up is a small guy who fights all the time and is proud of his accomplishments to date. He fights everyday and broke somebody's nose once, and broke into somebody's house and his stepfather can't tell him what to do. He is the one most comfortable here. He isn't easily scared but they go to work on him about his mother.

Then they talk about how he doesn't know a thing about fighting. In the can, where he is heading, you put someone down, they stay down. They tell him how no metal is allowed but they find it, and make a knife with it. One of the chorus guys gets up and shows a few scars where he had been stuck.

"You small skinny motherfucker is going to get cut up bad, talking all big. They will cut your ass up!" and right then it changes because now the prisoners are really getting into it, getting wound up. "Shit, I'll cut you ass up" and he is staring right down on him. He is a big black motherfucker now. No longer just a guy in a jumpsuit. And you know he will would enjoy it. The small guy cracks and starts bawling and he turns into a kid again.

We all release a little. Next up is another girl who whines about her mother forbidding her to see her boyfriend. About how she runs away and gets high. But I am not listening to the stories anymore, they are the kinds of kids I don't care about. They are the kind that would pick on me. I don't care about them, but the show the prisoners are putting on is getting more and more intense. The stabbed guy is shaking his leg which is shaking the cafeteria table. He has been doing this for about the entire time he has been sitting there. Mid-sentence the lead guy interrupts the whiner and tells us all that the stabbed guy is masturbating. The lead guy tells all this while the guy jerking off is staring at the girl who stops talking. She is scared now. "You ever been gang banged?" he asks the girl. She stutters. He keeps jerking, hitting the table. Then they pile it on, "If I had you alone , I would hold you down and fuck you in the ass." At least I think that is what he said. She cracks.

Now there is no pretending that they are there to help us. They are there to get off and they are doing it. As each kid cracks they corral the dogs and smooth things out, and then unleash them again. And now it's my turn.

Another guy in the chorus starts in on me. "You there, what did you do? You look effeminate." It was weird that he would say that, why would he use that word. Was he trying to tell me something? "Why do you have your arms like that?" I almost think I am going to get off easy. I was wearing a down puffy green jacket with my arms held across my lap, gripping each elbow, still. Here it comes. "I am cold" I saw it in a way that I hope will say, I am not like them.
"What did you do?"
"I broke into libraries and stole the change from Xerox machines."
"You what?" says new guy.
"We, I broke into libraries and stole the change from Xerox machines."
"Why did you do that?" says leader guy.
"You think that's funny" says a new guy.
Then they go to work on me.
"You a faggot, aren't you?" I had been called a faggot many times, but never by a man twice my age.
"I would knock your teeth out so that I could fuck your mouth with nothing in the way"
"You would like that wouldn't you? Faggot."
It starts to get blurry now. My reflection from that point is of hot tears rolling down my face because of the shame of being here, surrounded by these shits, who see nothing of worth in me. The shame of not being smarter, better, of being a fuck up and a loser. I am worthless gripping my elbows.

I then knew, more than ever, that people were awful and that the way they treat you would never really change no matter how old you got. I learned that what makes prison so terrifying is not because your liberty is taken away. All kinds of social norms wash away that illusion, but what makes prison so terrifying is that your liberty is taken away and given to others.

Community service and getting back to normal is what happened next.