You looked at the hills and they were rolling hills that made you wonder who you were and how you got here. The hills had no more connection to your life than a calendar with a picture of hills, old rolling hills set above a river, fixed to some kitchen wall.
I sensed the river was out there somewhere, a briskness in the wind, and I took deep breaths because I was upstate and it was supposed to be healthy here.
Staatsburg was seventy-five miles from home, farther than I’d ever been, and I got settled in the dorm and took classes for a high school certificate and never missed an afternoon in the old barn where the makeshift gym was located, a boxing ring at one end and a backboard at the other.
You commit your crimes in the city and they send you upstate to take deep breaths and get a perspective on your life.
I played basketball with members of a street gang named the Alhambras after a movie theater in Harlem. They were doing nigger time, they said. They’d come up through Youth House and a number of reformatories, raised on the felony alphabet, and we pounded up and down the floor in that dusty gym, working off the effects of our transgressions.
We were all juvies, under eighteen. I was an E-felony, criminally negligent homicide, reduced from a charge of manslaughter in the second degree, and we played game after game of half-court, going all-out and taking deep and healthy breaths and having a tussle or two.
You could fight a guy here and then forget it, leave it on the court or in the ring, because you’d already mind-whipped yourself repeatedly for what you’d done out there in the streets, whatever misfit thing of rage or bleakness or stupendous aberration, and maybe you’d reached an early maturity on the subject of running a grudge — how important it is to be selective.
When I entered correction I wanted things to make sense. I kept my bed neat, corners squared, and stacked my clothes sensibly in my cubicle.
The minute I entered correction I was a convert to the system. I went out on work crews that did road repair and I was the eagerest hand, giving myself up to the rote motions of breaking asphalt, leaky-eyed and sneezing in the ragweed brush.
I believed in the stern logic of correction. I did my study assignments every night and pounded the floor and pounded the boards in the old gym, good riddance to bad beginnings, blood beginnings, and I was ready for this, hammering hard surfaces on some country road in the julepy haze of a midsummer day, feeling the dead soul slowly drain out of me, the sedimentary stuff of who I was, gone in the dancing air of insects and pollen.
The hills took on color in the fall and they had about as much meaning in your life as a poem on a calendar, four lines about rolling hills in Ronald Colman English.
At Staatsburg I heard many stories about doojee, which was one of the ninety-nine names of heroin, but I didn’t tell them my own weak-kneed story, about how I was scared of needles and drugs.
At Staatsburg they had a psychologist who wanted me to talk about the shooting.
She thought it was the way to my salvation. I told her, No, man, forget it, let’s talk about the weather. I gave her nothing she could use on my behalf.
I didn’t want sweetheart treatment. I was here to do time, one and a half to three, and all I wanted from the system was method and regularity. When the kitchen caught fire I was disappointed. I took it personally. I didn’t understand how a well-trained staff could allow this to happen. When three kids went out the gate in the rear of a bakery truck, fifteen-year-olds, junior Alley Boys as the Alhambras were sometimes called, I thought it was a tremendous, what, a dereliction, a collapse, bunched in the back of a Silvercup truck — I was shocked at the level of neglect.
In the gym that day we played half-court with our customary combat skills, hacking the shooter, wheeling off the boards with elbows jutting, but the intensity wasn’t there and the game stopped cold a couple of times so the players could talk about the escape. They cracked jokes and bent over laughing but I thought the joke was on us. We weren’t worth much if the system designed to contain us kept breaking down.
All that winter I shoveled snow and read books. The lines of print, the alphabetic characters, the strokes of the shovel when I cleared a walk, the linear arrangement of words on a page, the shovel strokes, the rote exercises in school texts, the novels I read, the dictionaries I found in the tiny library, the nature and shape of books, the routine of shovel strokes in deep snow — this was how I began to build an individual.
But before the snows came and the ground hardened they put in the golf course.
Miniature golf, novelty golf. They unloaded the equipment in a field near the mess hall on a sweet and clear November day. Plywood castles and ramps. Enough junk for nine holes. Little waterwheels and bridges and whatnot. I watched it all take shape with an odd kind of disbelief. I felt tricked and betrayed. I was here on a serious charge, a homicide by whatever name, destruction of life under whatever bureaucratic label, and this was where I belonged, confined upstate, but the people who put me here were trifling with my mind.
Don DeLillo, Underworld
I’m sitting in a cafe,
drinking a Coke.A fly is sleeping
on a paper napkin.I have to wake him up,
so I can wipe my glasses.There’s a pretty girl
I want to look at.
Richard Brautigan, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster
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