Survival

Tripp Robinson
EVWP Summer 2009

It sounded like a possibly destructive, but pretty mild, water-based college free-for-all. But it made the papers and turned out to be at the jail. Regular apple pie, red-blooded male sort of stuff: The guys having a water fight get shut down by tear gas. Hey, he phoned me, we’re having the greatest water fight ever. And guess who started it? Me! He was delirious. As well he should have been, a male at 19, on a miserably sweaty day. The heat that summer day would prod even Quakers into fighting. And water, the stuff of baptism, was a peaceful solution. While DJ, my foster son, still on the phone, keeps filing his dispatches from the benign front, fluid battles rage behind him. Water lurches, launches, seeps, slickens, clings, drips, attacks, breaks rules, cools. Floors are black ice, sinks stopped up, toilets overflow, soggy toilet paper rolls soak cots. Standard college fare. Better water than blood I think. Presently a wet comrade beckons, sparking in DJ an impulse to leave the phone and wade back into the fray. I’ll call you later. He hangs up.

Nothing about this wet caper at city jail provokes in me the angst his hot water fight in the winter did. Knowing anger pretty well first hand, I don’t have to work too hard to imagine the rage it must take to motivate an assault. But I have to work to get my mind around such a hurtful expression of that rage as hurling a hotpot of near boiling water, heaving superheated powerlessness into another guy’s hapless, by-standing face. Attempting to imagine the pain, I think first of how the hurt might start. I’ve been punched in the nose. The initial, unexpected shock’s not bad, just impact, virtually painless. But how then to imagine the impact of the steaming water. Its savage bite must bring excoriation, excruciating agony, as the wet heat settles in. Shit, man, it didn’t hurt him that much. Besides he deserved it, DJ asserts. He was being a dick, Tripp. You a pussy. Man you just don’t get it. I’m scrambling. Maybe it’s that hot water’s better than a bullet? Vainly trying to find a shred of compassion in this discomfiting bit of DJ’s rationalization, I know he wants nurture, and the skills for deciding not to attack are not yet his, even at 19. And maybe never will be. He is the streets’ disciple, and he yet too much savors the perceived manliness of violence, the very force with which he has sustained his life.

Two days after the floods came, the sheriff himself came. He talked personally with guys on the tier. No one hurt, no damage done, incendiary weather. Boys will be boys. Sorry about the tear gas, guys. So he lifted the lockdown. The phones returned and DJ called to report his surprised relief from a fear that he was going to be on lockdown for months. Fascinated he hung on every word I read from the little story in the Metro section. Ineffable melancholy absorbs me: The pride of leading his men into the cool waters is as close to Joe College as DJ’s ever going to get.
****
DJ’s calls from city jail are prepaid collect. Three bucks a pop. For those who can find someone to prepay the minimum 50 bucks, they are a lifeline. Every word is recorded, many times listened to. A stern, matronly synthesized voice warns of the impending end of a call in 60 seconds; and at 15 minutes, the call clicks dead. So inmates call them “clicks”—that is, a call, a conversation, is a click. Can I call back for just one more click, Please? The phones are supposed to be turned off at 11 p.m. Some nights they are. But not predictably. So if they are still on at 11:09, giving into the power of intermittent reinforcement and DJ’s loneliness, we occasionally may decide to try for one more click. Chances are the line will go dead randomly mid sentence somewhere in the click. That sudden silence feels really bad. But we take the chance because some nights the phones run until almost 11:30. Those nights if he’s talking from a certain phone DJ can see the deputy getting ready to throw the switch. One time only, ironically our last conversation from the jail, providentially, miraculously, the night he was to be transferred from jail to prison at 3:00 a.m., the phones stayed on into the night until his transfer. He was anxious, jumpy—had bubble guts as he said—about going to a state prison, moved with no preparation, to a strange place in the middle of the night, and having no idea who might befriend him there. He was being moved to a DOC diversion center, designed for offenders committing low-impact crimes—on the website it’s ramped up to seem school-like. If I had not called months before to ask when he might be moved, DJ would have been awakened at about 3:00 a.m. and told to get anything he had and be ready to leave. No transition, no good-byes, no nurture, nothing even grasping at the basement of Maslow. So by repeated redialings he stayed grounded in our ramblings until very early morning, and we, wondering if we’d exhaust the money in his phone account, amazed ourselves by keeping the line open and that thread of security intact straight through. Or almost. Pretty late I finally gave in to sleep and the need to be alert in class the next day, and he, as he said, went hard—went the last part of his pilgrimage into the unknown by himself.

Some nights DJ has to stand in line a couple hours so we can talk one click. When he can let go of his bedtime snack, he barters for an extra click with one of his four-dollar Cup-a-Soups from the canteen. Many times, because he has to call when he can get the phone, he’ll call when I can’t talk; rebuffed after waiting so long in line, he’ll sound angry, but I know he’s feeling very, very sad. He hangs up curtly as if I personally screw up his life. Truth is there are occasional times when I don’t feel so much like talking—maybe just worn out or in the middle of dinner. But I steel myself knowing his contact with support from the outside is for him imbued literally with life itself. And I want DJ, who has been denied self-determination by every authority in his life, to practice making decisions that impact him and that have outcomes he desires, so that he can nurture a nascent realization that it is he who ultimately has control over his life. So almost always I push myself to talk.
****
Too’s killer, though handcuffed, tried to strangle DJ in the jail. He has this opportunity because both he and DJ chance to be in the isolation area together, march to meals in a line, cuffed. Both there for violence, are seen as threats—DJ to himself for hanging himself. Foiled and lifted up by a friend, his treatment is to be isolated, naked, in a tiny cell. There he ruminates, remembers dangling suspended by his bedsheet from the bars near his bunk, ponders having been on the brink and almost free of pain; he is in a fury at still breathing. His antagonist and he are in the special breakfast line when dude who killed Too recognizes DJ as a witness.
****
A year and a half after Too died, one of our clicks from city jail wanders into conversation about women. DJ repeats his request that I send him pictures of some “bitches.” I’ve been slow. His request is not only for pictures of random women—random as in potluck glamour shots from the internet—but also of his girlfriend. The jail forbids nudes. So I call Nessie and do a quick photo shoot of her. For her part Ness is only too pleased to put on a fly, but somewhat restrained dress and mischievously stick out her nice, tight ass for her horney boo. To meet jail guidelines I have to mail real drugstore prints. While I’m cranking them out I include a couple shots of his moms and little sis I think he might find comforting. Since I’m revved up printing pictures, without much thought I toss in a random photo of Too. DJ likes the Nessie and family pix a lot.
Why you send me that picture of Too? You dumb and slow, Tripp. You so stupid.

Sensing my insensitivity, I apologize, but he doesn’t listen, abruptly changes the subject. It’s a year before we talk again about Too. By then we are face to face. Maybe two sentences.
****
In light of the absence of AC in hot weather—barring all-out water wars—if the heat’s particularly brutal, the guys on the tier may be given a bucket of ice to fight over. No matter the weather, if an inmate is pissed or just wanting entertainment, he may randomly surprise another with his fists to discharge his frustration. So DJ is always on red alert, not out of fear, but cautious to forestall an ambush. DJ, who will talk shit to a gun jammed in his face, relishes demonstrating his prowess with his fists. More than once he has, by slugging the guy using it, commandeered the phone when he was tired of waiting. And more than once he’s sneaked a random guy, dropping him with a brute punch to his nose. This lashing out erupts when the turmoil of helplessness battling hopelessness puts a tension in his chest that he cannot still. Under more considered conditions, he will call and ask me for music. He says it calms him better than punching out a guy. So my telephone receiver funnels Lil Boosie’s familiar voice for an entire click, or even two or three, at full volume from my computer straight into DJ’s soul,
“You don’t know my struggle,
So you can’t feel my hustle,
You don’t know what I done been through…”
When he comes back on the line, DJ’s voice is lower, relaxed; his urgency, stridency has turned conversational; he smiles a little; and his thanks are profound. That was spiritual Tripp. It feels like someone cared enough to write down my life. Makes me feel like I exit.

In 45 minutes Lil Boosie—Torance Hatch of Baton Rouge—speaking to DJ in his vernacular has stilled DJ’s heart. At this moment DJ is a different person.