Between Shadow and Smoke (Excerpt 1)
The line trudged down the long, glossy corridor that snaked through central booking. After being finger printed, photographed, and strip searched, the handcuffed detainees marched away in lockstep while retaining a rabble appearance. I can only describe their forward motion as zombie-like.
I had chosen the worse time to wind up in cuffs, Friday night. That meant waiting until Monday to go before the judge-an agonizing 72 hours as a guest of the Brooklyn House of Detention.
Just another link in a chain of detainees, I entered into the bullpen, the third and least cramped holding area since my arrest-some twelve hours ago. I chose the far corner to park my weary feet. After scanning the line of incoming detainees, I restricted my gaze to the empty space dead ahead. Any movement is good, I thought while massaging the pain from my throbbing wrist. It meant that I was one step closer to home.
As a distraction from my pain and total exhaustion, I retrieved a pack of smokes from my pocket and lit up. I took a deep gratifying pull and exhaled a puff of white smoke. The move quickly drew attention. Trying to avoid the covetous stares, I shifted my gaze downward. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted trouble hulking toward me. I turned to face him head on. A wide patronizing grin stretched across his pockmarked face.
“I want to thank you, ma nigga, for holdin’ my squares for me,” he said, no longer grinning. “Get that stupid look off your face, son. What you some kinda social worker, school teacher, some shit like dat?”
He had me by a few inches and about twenty pounds, but he was young, and he had already forgotten the first law of the jungle. This wantabe predator was underestimating his prey. One look at my work attire, and he took me for soft.
“Give up the squares, hommie, and I might let ya keep dem busted-ass kicks,” his eyes scanning my coffee-brown loafers.
The weight of a DWI charge, a three day drinking binge and less than three hours sleep caused my temper to boil over, spewing forth a primal rage. I let fly a wedge-hand strike, my hand in the shape of a V, to his Adam’s apple. After discharging the spit from the back of his craw, he clutched his throat with both hands trying desperately to draw his next breath.
With him momentarily incapacitated and gasping for air, I drove home the hard part of my lower palm, breaking his nose. What sounded like a stick being snapped into two echoed through the pen.
`
As he stood there trying to stem the flow of blood, I launched a swift kick to the side of his knee, collapsing him into a shell on the floor. The thirty or so spectators roared out, crying out for more blood. Pandering to the blood lust of the crowd, as well as my own, I launched a salvo of hard kicks to the side of his head.
That’s all I can remember because the room went black. I woke hours later face down on a bare mattress of an empty cell, kaleidoscopic visions of last night’s car chase flashing across my mental screen. The slightest movement brought a throbbing pain racing up my back, intensifying at the base of my skull. Something told me that I had been rocked to sleep by something in the form of a club.
Days later at my bail hearing I was informed that I was being charged with driving while under the influence, reckless endangerment, and a bevy of smaller charges. Nothing serious, I thought. Because I was on my way to cop, there were no drugs the car. The Judge will set a traffic court date and release me ROR. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Because, after shuffling some papers and whispering to his associate, the state’s prosecutor suddenly levied the charge of murder in the first-degree. With the mention of the word ‘murder’, the earth beneath my feet fell straight away. Any words uttered after that qualified as trivial sounds orbiting my outer awareness.
Bail was revoked and I remained the guest of the 100 Centre Street House of Detention; better known as The Tombs. My girlfriend told friends and family that I was out of town. But word quickly spread, as with all bad news. I was already enough of an embarrassment, and now this. The school, where I taught, had already been informed of my arrest by the central office.
Days turned into weeks as I remained a guest of the state. Several gang-related stabbings, toilet bombs, and mattress fires prompted a shakeup in the jail, resulting in hundreds of detainees being relocated. I ended up on the top floor of the east wing. My cellmate hadn’t arrived yet, and I was enjoying some badly needed alone time.
The harrowing clang of a cell door being slammed shut rippled through the section like a wave across a pond. Jailhouse clamor, psychotic cries, and ill-ranting snatched me back from my thoughts.
The gray walls and steel bars restrained more than my body, my detainment was but an outward manifestation of the prison that quartered my soul. My clothes reeked of the human wasteland; the air is wrought with a nauseating mix of urine, sickness, and filth.
With little else to occupy my mind, I sat stewing in juices of regret, stirring in liberal amounts of self-pity, and adding a pinch of shame. Being caged like an animal only confirmed my deepest fear that the sun was setting on my aspirations and on my life.
How did I get to this wretched place maligned by the shadows of iniquity and the clamminess of self-deprecation? A murder of crows had descended down upon my field of dreams. My inner self, stands idly by while my spiritual harvest is ravished by thousands of tiny, ravenous beaks.
I could tell from the desperate pleas of nearby voices and the faint jiggling of keys that the CO (correction officer) was nearby. Scanning the tier using only my ears was one of the first things I learned. I got up and pressed the side of my face to the bars.
“Officer, I didn’t get my attorney visit last week.” I knew somebody messed up my paper work. “Officer, could you please check to see if I’m on today’s list!” His answer struck me with the force of a punch.
“Negative, looks like the jail’s on lockdown indefinitely,” the officer answered back, his tone as callous as the system itself.
My hope of speaking with my lawyer was smashed like a small vessel against a crop of jagged rocks. Having received my answer, I threw back on my mattress and shut my eyes.
I started to backpedal across the dense forest of my mind, back over a landscape filled with troubling memories. I’d been a drug dealer, pickpocket, mugger, burglar and a pimp. I’ve kept close company with killers, con artist, kingpins.
I have unleashed my share of wrongdoing into the world. For that I have paid and continue to pay a karmic price. From me the devil has deducted his pound of flesh. My life has been a staircase spiraling downward into a great cavern. Seeking escape from my dark cave of dreadful despair, I chose lust over love to be my torchlight.
The selfish and unprincipled path that I chose has cost me my pension after nearly twenty years as a teacher. I have next to nothing to live off of after I’ve cross the finish line to retirement. Foolishly, I’ve squandered a modest salary with no thought to the golden years.
I married badly, perhaps wretchedly would be more like it. It ended the only way that it could with hefty portions of pain and suffering served all around. Any woman crazy enough to stick by me has received only the promise of a ‘good life’.
Years ago, I walked out on my three adorable children in search of the effigy of happiness. I had made a silent vow to each of them, while they slumbered, blissfully, in their cribs that the stars would desert the heavens before I left them to face a cold, unforgiving world alone. So much for promises: because that’s precisely what I did.
Lying on my cot, I was seized by a powerful urge to know where things went wrong. I was moved to know myself. The person that I knew (as myself) loved life. However, I was not that person any longer, and I hadn’t been for some time. I had gradually and imperceptibly become a stranger to myself.
But, if I was no longer myself, then whom had I become? I had become a scornful mystery to myself, a conundrum in need of solving, and a riddle for my mind to try to unravel.
Was it my selfish deeds that were to be my undoing? Did a mind beclouded by years of drug abuse and drinking give rise to my downfall? Was my fierce temper a result of my violence filled upbringing?
Was it my whorish lust or my prodigious thirst for approval that led me to interpret life in a sexual language? Was my need to feel in control a side effect of my being twice sexually molested as a child? Did I inherit my deep-seated abandonment issues from my mother’s early exit?
Or maybe shit just happens.
As I searched the thickly tangled jungle of my repressed memories, the answer surged up from somewhere within. There was only one way to surmount the lies and uncover the truth of the tragedy that had become my life.
For only the truth mattered now, or as much of it that remains unsullied by the gauzy veil of my faulty perception. Sometimes an embellished portrait of truth is all we have to go on. One’s adulterated truths told to self and others become the pretentious ground on which our world rest.
Over the next year, I wrote, forsaking all else. Here, are the thoughts that poured, splattered and sometimes dripped on to the pages that bore my life story. Reflections and remembrances twisted into a cadre of fibrous strands bounded into a self-assessment. I can only remember the moments as I lived them. This assures that my non-singular truth and life stories are fact and fiction, real and imagined lies and gospel.
From the very start, my heart shuttered at the thought of journeying back to the furthest region of my childhood. A past that until now I’d only visited by way of dark dreams and macabre images rising from inside, like long, forgotten wreckage rising from the surf after a turbulent storm.
The thought of holding the actions of my loving parents, who are both deceased, up to the light of scrutiny terrified me. But, the thought of examining my own deleterious thoughts and misdeeds frightened me even more. So much so, that I thought of scrapping the project more than once.
However, in the end, I knew that I have no other choice but to plunge headlong into the icy-but often healing-waters of self-examination. I prayed that absolution and spiritual redemption lay in wait on the distant shore, waiting to caress me, suckle me and restore me.
In addition to the therapeutic reasons and the compelling urge to tell my story, I reveled in the thought of revisiting my childhood and all its tragedian twist. I longed to again set eyes on the salubrious faces of my childhood, I missed them so. I truly missed them so.
