Second Chances

[Before final edit.]

The Stewart Center is downtown, in this old, used to be city building, on a side street to nowhere that’s more like a parking lot for our neighbor, the Precinct 17 station. That’s why people smoking out front don’t think it’s strange to have two cruisers parked across from our front door with a pair of coffee-drinking uniforms in each one, but after an hour, word’s made it inside and a few of us non-smokers are out to have a look. I heard it from Cindy last night—we stayed up until she came home, Father and me—but no-one else knows what to expect when Johnnie, our young white rapper, comes jive-walking around the corner, there’s a crowd to watch them boil out of their cars, all blue black and shiny like roaches scuttling out from under the kitchen stove, two of them tackling the boy and pinning him to the pavement, the other two waving guns at us, yelling stay back stay back.

The boy has to be at least twenty-two to be in our program, but he looks younger, with a crooked nose he probably got in Bridgewater, the prison mental hospital where he was not long ago, his eyes still blue-shadowed where it happened. I spent time there at his age, and I know how he feels when they come up on him. I see him shut down, just a grunt when he hits the pavement face first, his arms pulled back already so they can cuff him. One of the things you learn in that place, you put up any kind of fight, it gets way worse. Better to learn that watching someone else’s beating. Of course, I learned it the other way, hard, but that’s a story for another time.

I can just see his eyes past the cop’s knee mashing down the side of his head—empty gray stones. When they drag him over to the car, blood pouring from his nose stands out bright red against his blue-white Irish chin, so the cop pushing his head down has to scrooch back to keep his nice white shirt clean as he stuffs him into the back seat for the short backwards ride up our little street to their basement garage. There’s no telling what will happen to him down there. I suppose his skin might just save him.

It’s all over by the time the cries from the crowd mix with the shouts of the bully cops and bring more folks outside, all of us buzzing about what the hell just happened, trying to figure out what we can do, which is, of course, nothing. We feel bad for the guy, but truth is, we don’t know him that well. He’s one of the sneering young men they send over here, hoping we’ll keep them out of trouble. They clump together and practice pushing us around, telling each other they won’t become one of us, the chronics folks try not to see. Anyway, he’s one of us now. Once you step in the door, you’re a member, and we care about you, no matter what.

Everyone standing out here knows life can turn brutal and unfair, and the damage, they know about that too. This is going to touch all of us, even some who got jobs and moved on from this place. Johnnie thought he could get away from a life in foster care, those years in mental hospitals, all the hard time, all that damage. Now, thirty more years in the worst of those places may be the best he can hope for, the young thug, the maniac, the killer.

This is bad for all of us. All the talk of crazed killers you hear on TV and read in the paper, it’s come right to our door. When you look in the papers after some killing, the first thing you think is let it be one of those others, not someone hears voices, not someone black. Maybe an Arab or a white supremacist, that’d be nice, except they’ll dig up some kind of history and call him crazy too. First thing they’ll ask: was he in treatment? Taking his pills? Maybe not enough. Who was watching him? Then it’s, We tried to be nice to those folks and look where it got us.

We’re all of us going back to school now, the hard one, get our lessons.