"Yo Malcolm, you dropped your thing there" I said to the wild eyed crack addict whose homemade eye gouging coat hanger weapon had fallen from it's hiding place, his ass, during our strip search. Somehow, guided by the same instinct that the infant sea turtles use to sojourn their treacherous forty year, ten thousand mile odyssey from their birth place on the Western coast of the Yucatan peninsula to the Eastern shore of Australia and back again to lay their offspring on the very strip of sand they left nearly half a century before, Malcolm had a lucid enough moment to grasp that what I was telling him might to be the single most important thing he ever heard in his life. "Oh thanks." And without the "bulls" seeing, he picked the weapon up off the floor and tucked it back in it's sheath; the non existent flesh that would exist as an ass on anyone other than a boney, no assed crack head. He winked at me. I had a friend.
It had been ten hours now and I was no longer scared I would be killed and raped since beside Malcolm, who now just bounced and hummed loudly in the corner of the 15 by 15 holding cell that was home to ten of us, I had two other protectors; These huge, angry, incestuous, body building, steroidal gay brother guys with blood on their shirts. I had befriended them by giving them my quarter daily Spam, Velveeta, mustard and sugar packet sandwiches. The fear gave way to boredom. Waiting and more waiting. Slowly all of my peeps were being "processed" and leaving our dank tuberculosis den for the warm environs of the courtroom upstairs. I started to get a little concerned when even new criminals who were brought in to replace those who left were leaving and being processed before me. It had been 20 hours. The gay brothers and even Malcolm had gone. Oh but wait, Mustafa, the guard I had fallen in Patty Hearst captor love with was coming. He would take me up to the court room with him, I just knew he would.
"Mustafa, is my case now?"
"No. And if it's not called in the next round, you're going to Rikers for the weekend." There are truly no words to describe what "You're going to Rikers for the weekend" means to a nice, white, middle class honorary goy Jew from the Upper West Side.
It's the place where you will be skinned alive and your insides will be eaten while you watch until your last breath is stopped by your head being severed with a jagged chunk of glass, and then, while still just barely conscious, six giant dicks will fuck the eyes out of your free floating skull and mash your brain out your ears. On your best day. And I was headed there in an hour if I wasn't called. I was taught in my various addiction recovery groups and by my various spiritual teachers never to pray specifically for things for ourselves. I hadn't ever before. This time I did.
"Dear God. Get me the fuck out of here and I SWEAR I will NEVER EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVER do anything bad again." I fell asleep. I was awakened by Mustafa.
"Howard, Sanchez, Borden and Schaeffer?"
"Schaeffer?!" I screamed.
"Yeah," Mustafa confirmed. Going from the holding cell to the courtroom was like being dried off by your mom after your bath and put into your flannel footies. It was the best feeling of my life. She and Patty were there. I started crying. I wasn't going to Rikers. I heard the judge say something about if I never wanted to come here again they would reduce the charges to a misdemeanor of obstructing justice and I would get off with a two hundred dollar fine and 20 hours of community service but I could never run for public office. Either that or I could go to trial and take my chances.
As much as it pained me not to follow in Alec Baldwin's footsteps and give up my amazing upcoming political rise to power, I took the deal and left in the arms of my friends and family. Let me tell you my non white-trash white, and middle and upper class black friends, there is nothing like 20 hours in jail at 29 years old and 8 years sober to make you appreciate your life and what plain old ordinary constitutional freedom means in a whoooooole new light.
The next day, I and the rest of the chain gang showed up for our community service, helping the parks department. Amazingly, it was in my beloved Riverside Park. I went up to the boss and asked what he wanted me to do. He gave me a wheelbarrow and a pitch fork and said, "You see that big wood chip pile over there on that running path? Spread it out." No lie.
I got the chills as I always do when God graces me with the antidote to my doubt. His radical and clear visit. I guess the motto of this story for me was, "if you want something done, stop crying about it and do it yourself."
***
That was my worst brush with the law. The only other one of any significance happened when I was taken in for writing graffiti which caped off the worst summer of my life. We all wrote graffiti on the subway trains when we were thirteen. I was "Devil 1." My best friend Robby was "Joker110" We would steal markers from Golden's art supply store and spray paint from the hardware store and make "pieces" with our names on the big wall in Riverside Park. It was like the green monster at Fenway Park in Boston, the hundred foot barrier keeping the outside world out. Like the one at Fenway, ours also kept long fly balls from going to the upper level of the park from the lower level where the baseball fields were by the Hudson River and West Side Highway. We also used it as our canvas, along with "tagging" the trains. We rode for hours. They were our playground when we weren't playing ball.
"Taki 149," "Moses 147," and "Stayhigh" were the original Kings of the trains. Like art students copying the Mona Lisa, we copied their names, seeing if we could imitate them, then branching out in our own styles with our own names. One day Robby told me that Taki, who was a crazy murdering psychopath when he wasn't writing graffiti and had once blown up a subway car with dynamite, wanted my baseball glove or he would kill me and my mother.
"But I don't even know Taki. I've never even met him." I told Robby, terrified.
"Well, he knows you and he wants it by Friday." I gave Robby my baseball glove to give to Taki.
"Don't tell anyone about this or he's gonna kill you." I swore secrecy.
For the next three months, while I lived in the most paralyzing fear of my life, certain my mother and I would be murdered, Taki, through Robby, took everything that was precious to me. My transistor radio, my games, my allowance every week, and my basketball cards. Clyde included. My mother finally noticed something was wrong when the pool table was the only thing left in my once very cluttered room. I confessed everything and she had a black FBI agent friend of hers interrogate Robby under a single stark white G and E in the kitchen the next time he came over for my allowance.
It turned out that while Taki did exist, he knew nothing of me and Robby had been extorting me all along, which made it clear why he always had my stuff after I gave it to him to give to Taki.
"I haven't seen him yet to give it to him." He would say as we played baseball, all the while using my glove while I used my bare hands or a borrowed one. I had been cuckolded in front of the entire neighborhood of kids who all knew what was happening and I didn't. I was mortified. I couldn't face them ever again. I told my mother I wanted to live with my dad in Vermont.
As Robby and my friends looked on, my Dad, his best friend Ron, and my mom packed what little was left of my things into a U-Haul trailer as I, sick to my stomach, watched from my apartment window until it was dark and the kids left. Only then would I come down and get in the car. I finished my beer. Dropped some acid and left New York for greener pastures. Oh yeah, I had started taking hard drugs that summer.
Posted by Eric Schaeffer at 9:24 AM