Intro: How Could Hell Be Any Worse?
MCJDC
The ideas that drive me:
Women.
Success.
Unnecessary obligation.
His bones creaked as though some sadist had tweezered the cartilage out from between his joints while he’s slept. My nervous system pulses rhythmically in anticipation of the next burst of tingling anxiety that I know will soon fork its way through my extremities. Like a current through a worn out extension cord.
When I strutted into this room last night, I exuded the arrogance - and ignorance - of a young actor at the first press conference after he makes it big. Like a young DiCaprio or McGregor walking out of a scene from a 1990s drug film. Cool, dramatic, Gen X.
But stories about Iggy Pop and old movies about heroin can’t extricate me from the diseased body I occupy anymore than it can break me out of this room. There’s nothing cool or ironic about any of this. The adjectives, sleepless and miserable, have always been interchangeably accurate descriptors of my experience as a human being. But they’ve never been this accurate.
It’s cold and dark and clean in an industrial bleach and incandescent lighting sort of way. My attempt to force my eyes shut is a failure spectacular enough to rival my attempts at being a competent 17-year-old in the New Jersey (White) suburbs. So I just stare at the tiles. And I blink when my central nervous system—such that it is—demands that series of involuntary movement from my eyelids.
The tiles lining the floor are the same tiles slapped up on the walls which are identical to the tiles clinging to the ceiling. My stainless steel cot is too shiny, too icy, and too sterile. Not comfortable. Its position in the extreme corner of my cell means that when I lay on my left side, the tiles are less than a meter from my face.
My retinas scan the pocked, pale green surfaces of the tiles, and the discolored grid of grout that separates them from each other, as if in search of something—some element or idea—that might distract me from my jangling nerve endings. I can’t find anything, but I keep searching, and as I do, I reflect, crazily, on an argument I’d had with Rachel not long before we broke up.
The memory is hazy in the way opioid memories are always hazy. But that particular, pointless melle stands out because it coincided with the death of the only car I’d ever owned. As, I guess, an emphatic gesture to make my point, I tried to jam the rust red, 80s-era Buick LeSabre into park before the car had come to a complete stop. What a terrible car that was.
During that argument, Rachel had, for some reason, called into question the extent of my visual acuity. I still resent her for it. It’s a distraction from my nerves, anyway.
No one ever seems to believe me when I tell them—always with just a bit more enthusiasm than seems reasonable, and often out of context— that I have 20/20 vision. But I do have 20/20 vision. And grinding, as I am, through this disjointed fog of detoxification, I greedily accept as incontrovertible proof of my supreme visual acuity that my eyes are able to perceive all the imperfections in these tiles. I’m deeply grateful that there’s at least one part of him that isn’t broken. My eyes.
A metallic-sounding click splits the silence and disrupts my inner monologue. Mercifully. I’m satisfied that the sound had been grating enough to have roused every guy in the pod. And with deep selfishness, I feel, for a moment, a tad less terrible about my predicament knowing that I’m not the only person who’s not asleep.
A loud creaking places the metallic clicking noise I heard before into context. In my mind’s eye, I can see the tiny, rust-lined paint chips falling off the hinge as the grumbling door to the pod makes its way open. The mental image conjures a pleasant memory of the garage Grandpa’s house. Back in the 80s before Mom ran out of money, and the house fell into disrepair.
The door to the pod is open and closes quickly. Having re-secured the door to the pen, the man I would come to know as Officer Braithwaite, struts his way down the cold corridor. As he passes each room, he shines his flashlight in through the small aperture in the heavy, iron door. The window is about the size of a CD case.
I never did ask any of the Officers why they conducted this hourly ritual. Even after I’d achieved Gold status, and had become friendly with with some of the Officers. I assume there’s a rule buried in some rulebook that mandated that already troubled youngsters, locked inside unescapable rooms, should be further troubled by having their sleep disturbed every single hour.
Braithwaite hasn’t disturbed my sleep though because, as already discussed, I hadn’t been asleep in the first place. Quite to the contrary, I’m exuberant. I want more than anything for someone who holds any sort of useful power —bureaucratic, or political, or supernatural, or otherwise— to deliver me from this predicament.
A surge of energy charges my exhausted muscles in a way I didn’t realize was possible under any circumstances, but especially under my current circumstances. I leap from the thin mattress, toward the iron door, and toward, most importantly, the door’s CD-sized view port. That “mattress” —a glorified yoga mat, really—is supposed to separate my bony shoulder and hip bone from the stainless steel cot on which it lays. It doesn’t though. And even in my haste to beg mercy from whoever’s on the other side that door, some part of my tired mind registers relief in the recognition that my hip and shoulder are off the mat.
I press my face against the window. Half of my face, anyway. That’s the maximum portion the CD-sized aperture can accommodate. Even then, my one-eyed view is obscured each time my lungs’ choppy exhalations fog the window. I’m surprised. I’ve spent so much time in the last seven hours shivering that I can’t comprehend that my body is warm enough to fog the reinforced, shatterproof glass.
The beam of Braithwaite’s flashlight beam collides with my wide-open eyeball, blinding me in a flash. My vocal cords are still in working order though. “I need help!” leaps from between my lips, and the desperateness of my tone surprises me. I continue to cry-shouted through the door, “I’m withdrawing from heroin, and I need help!”
II. The Officers
Difo was quite ignorant of a great many things the night he implored Officer Braithwaite through that tiny window at Morris County Juvenile Detention Center (MCJDC). In the coming months, he would discover the natures of the sort of people who sign up for duty at a correctional facility. A jail for children in one of the Whitest, wealthiest, and safest counties in New Jersey.
There were differences among the officers, of course. Some were obviously in outstanding physical shape, for example. Others just as obviously were not. Some were White, others were Black. Most were male and some were female. A handful of officers were lifers, in it for the generous benefits a long haul career in local, suburban government could yield a person with few marketable skills.
For most officers though the gig is little more than an expedient, aggravating rung on the ladder to a cushy job in the Morris County Sheriff’s Department. Officer Joseph G. D’ALessio III is typical. He’s about 6’1 and his build signals that he rarely skips gym days. His impressive physique draws attention away from his prematurely thinning hair. The hair makes D’ALessio look and feel older than he is, which was a boon to him when he was in highschool five years ago, but feels now like an impossibly heavy ball and chain. The terrible feelings that wash over him each time he sees his hair accumulating in the shower drain confirms for him that he understands human suffering.
and he knows it. and it belies his young age. Until his uncle—a captain in the Morristown Police Department—was able to pull some strings and land him this gig at MCJDC, D’ALessio lived with his parents in Ringwood. That, and the realities of his struggle with male pattern baldness, are facts he’d hides, desperately, from the women he meets in the New Jersey club scene.
D’Alessio’s interactions with MDJDC’s adolescent inmates are characterized mostly by disinterest and mild contempt. He has experienced no internal conflict wasn’t above joking around with an inmate, usually at the inmate’s expense
There was a smattering of true believers at the margins of the officers’ ranks at MCJDC. Sergeant Burgess had been mentored, in his youth, by a cool, young pastor who moonlighted as a football coach. Burgess credited Pastor, and Coach April with changing the direction of his young, ill-directed life back in 70s. Burgess completed high school—a feat that wasn’t a forgone conclusion in his world—and went on to serve with distinction in the United States Marine Corps. He’d turned down a shot at the State Troopers because, as he tells it, “I had to give those kids the same chance to change their lives that I was given.”
[a April’s intervention and guidance felt approached his billet as though it really were a step in a process of rehabilitation for the teenagers in their charge. Those officers really did care, and they saw their role as something akin to that of a 90s-era U.N. Peacekeeper.}
A larger minority of MCJDC officers were in it for the power. Purely and outright. Even at age 17, Difo learned to identify the elements that separated those dangerous, authoritarian officers from the rest. They were predators. Casually sadistic in a way that had no analogue in Difo’s deeply sheltered, suburban background. Difo had certainly run up against shitty people during his time in the rarefied bubble in which he’d spent much of his youth. A time that he did not realize was, as of the moment the judge remanded him to MCJDC, had come to a end. Teachers, and classmates, and classmates’ parents had frequently been casually racist in a way they wouldn’t have if they realized how their words and actions had affected Difo. Never had Difo witnessed, much less experienced, the sor
MCJDC’s authoritarian cohort seemed to derive genuine pleasure from punishing—physically wherever possible—the disproportionately black and brown children under lock and key at MCJDC.
Black Officers and Black Men
Difo had far more difficulty getting along with the Black officers that patrolled his tiny life than he had living with similarly situated White offifers.
Black officers were more likely than White officers to be lifers. Black officers we’re more apt to flex the near-absolute power they wielded over the lives of MCJDC inmates. They also tended to be older, and even the younger ones were more resistant to appeals to their human emotions—like compassion and empathy—than the White officers.
Braithwaite a mix of confusion
Someone’s in hallway now. I don’t know what time it is other than that it’s in the middle of the night. The non-light from the window,
There was also an overwhelming sense of dread — and shock, I guess — I the night I woke up, in the middle of the night, at Morris County Juvenile Detention Center.
Mom advocating for me to go to Jail - it was a joke - last bag of heroin in transport.
2021: Practice Note