TIME DOWN

A Written Creative Work submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of / the requirements for -5 , the Degree

Master of Fine Arts ft.) GO,) In Creative Writing

by Marlene Denise McCurtis San Francisco, California May 2017 Copyright by Marlene Denise McCurtis 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read TIME DOWN by Marlene Denise McCurtis, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Fine Art of in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.

Maxine Chernoff, MA Professor of Creative Writing

Michelle Carter, MA Professor of Creative Writing TIME DOWN

Marlene Denise McCurtis San Francisco, California 2017

Time Down is collection of creative non-fiction pieces exploring the intersection of race, gender, class, mass incarceration and motherhood. Told mainly through a lyrical, first-person narrative voice, the protagonist serves as witness, questioning participant and interpreter as she journeys across America’s urban landscapes into its’ prisons and jails and back to her middle-class home and family.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this written creative work.

Chair, Thesis Committee Date TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction...... 1 A Yearning...... 3 Time Down...... 8 Ashley...... 17 The Cut -Through...... 33 Corey...... 39 My First Shot Caller...... 42 Baby Gangster...... 50 Ducted-Taped Love...... 51 About That Life...... 54 Around-the-Way Girl...... 67 Franklin...... 72 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to first express my deep gratitude to my advisor Maxine Chernoff for her continued belief in my artistry and her encouragement to complete this creative work. Her warmth, insight and friendship has been invaluable. Besides my advisor, I would like to thank the rest of my thesis committee, Michele Carter and Paul Hoover. I would also like to thank Creative Writing Department Academic Service Coordinator Katherine Kwid for her assistance in helping me submit the forms for my culminating experience and nudging me about the deadlines. My sincere and humble appreciation goes to all the teens, parents and inmates who honestly shared their pain and joy with me over the last five years. Your stories have changed my life forever. I’m forever grateful for the love and support of my husband Okuwah and my two amazing sons, Lateef and Tarik. You are truly my reason for being. And, always love and gratitude to my parents Doris and Marvin McCurtis for their steadfast support. 1

Introduction

In 2009, I began directing a documentary television series about prison and jail programs designed to deter troubled teens from ending up behind bars. The programs were harsh, hands-on and designed to “scare kids straight.” The merits of these sort of “in your face, this is the reality of jail life” programs are still controversial. It is not clear if they really help alter the behavior of teens who frankly face so many complex issues that a day in jail can’t possibly address. Many of the kids we followed did change, and some didn’t. I came to see these programs as a tool, working for those kids who had a support system—a parent, grandparent, teacher, coach, sibling—some adult who just held them close and would consistently be there for them after they walked out of the grueling, often humiliating hours spent inside the jail walls. For these kids, going through the jail was like a reboot, allowing them to realize they weren’t that tough or, as the inmates would say, “ain’t built for this.” They had an opportunity to talk with young people not much older than them, often from the same neighborhoods, who wished they could trade places with them, could get “a do over,” have listened to their moms, respected their teachers, stayed in school. Maybe their words, their experience did make a difference for a few kids. This was the hope. I have traveled from San Bernardino to Baltimore, from Oklahoma to West Virginia, filming in the homes of teens who were in trouble at school, were disrespectful to adults, drank, got high, ran away, stole, fought, and sometimes even got arrested. And each week we filmed in jails and prisons where the adult versions of these kids were locked up for everything from armed robbery to murder. Each jail, each city, each home, each neighborhood was oddly the same after a while, the brokenness of our society, of our schools, of our justice systems, and how this has broken our children was shocking and numbing. I can say without a doubt, after five years of working on this show, I was deeply and forever transformed. 2

A dear friend from South Africa once told me that “you can un-see what you have seen.” What I have seen has etched my soul, broken my heart, left it raw and open. I have lost hope during this journey, felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem, angry at the blindness and benign neglect of all of us, and slowly gained a bit of courage and determination to try to make some small difference. A Yearning

Flying home to relieve this yearning, a slow burning, hard to cure unless I’m there next to you.

A yearning push down on those days, seeking small miracles with teens, lingering on the edges.

Not seen. Forgotten. Black, Brown, poor, trailer trash. Generations discarded.

We only have a small rope, tossing out simple words of advice. Dapples of hope and $50 gift cards so they will smile pretty for the camera.

Show me your scars, I say. Daddy long gone. Gun shots down the block, meth lab next door. Sister sucking on the crack pipe. Tell me, tell me.

Smile pretty for the camera, I say, to those fresh-faced girls seeking false love in some thug’s arms. They tell me grandma don’t understand. Momma’s working a double. Too many kids, not enough time and love to spread around. False love be better than none. You feel me? You feel me? Hey, lady, You feel me? Yes, yes.

Behind every angry face is always, always pain and yearning for more.

Smile pretty for the camera, I say. Show me your scars. 5

Let me see you, smoke a blunt, drink some lean, down vodka shots. Throw up those gangster signs, Claim Piru, Gangster Disciples, Westside. What’s your clique, your crew, Who your homies be?

Show me the real for real. Rules don’t count because everyone is breaking them. Respect is a weapon, a moving invisible boundary dangerous to cross.

Tell me, tell me about the niggahs and hos who make you sick. How if you get killed, you get killed. Why at sixteen death seems like it ain’t no thing.

The camera can see the yearning, the slow burning living in the shadows. Hey, lady, Are you scared to be here? they ask, You scared of us? 6

Never, I say. Never. It’s just this yearning that I can’t shake. The ache. When you smile pretty, smile pretty. Showing me your scars.

And after it’s all done, the stories are told and the cameras are packed away, we drive off in our shiny air-conditioned rental van.

All that is left is the dissection of what the camera saw. Was it enough? Did we get it? Was it the real for real? Can some editor back in LA shape a minute-thirty piece? A glimpse into a hurt child’s life? Did they smile pretty for the camera?

And then, there is this, this quiet ache and always this yearning I bring as I run back to you. 8

Time Down

During the first season, we filmed exclusively in prisons, entering huge concrete complexes tucked behind barbed-wire-topped chain-link fences, anchored by tall, looming, mushroom-shaped towers where uniformed men with long-range rifles sat watch. There were gates, buzzers and slamming metal doors—all reminders that you were entering the world of the trapped. In the five years of working on the show, I never got used to going behind these walls, was always happy to leave. One of the first prisons we filmed at was San Quentin. The oldest prison in California, it opened in 1852 to cope with the growing unlawfulness during the gold-rush era. San Quentin is a huge beige fortress jutting out into the bay just north of San Francisco. The prison is a sprawling 275-acre complex so gigantic that the post office gave it its own zip code. An oddity in the California prison system, San Quentin is located just forty minutes outside of San Francisco. I discovered that most prisons in California and across the country are hours and miles away from the nearest cities, making it harder for families and loved ones to visit. Going to see your inmate, if you go at all, is a field trip entailing long car rides down empty stretches of highways or, even worse, bumpy bus rides. Visitors stand in line, march through metal detectors, endure pat downs and the occasional full body search. Life in prison is unpredictable. A fight, a mistaken head count, can shut visitation down for hours or even days, leaving loved ones no choice but to take the long journey back without that brief contact they longed for. Inmates will tell you that their families are doing time with them. It is one of the many things that haunt the incarcerated. 9

To get to San Quentin our two production vans maneuver their way up Main Street, a narrow winding road lined with cheery wooden houses. It is all so normal. Life goes on; garbage cans are being pulled out for weekly pick-up, a baby is being strapped into a car seat, and potted pink geraniums are being gently watered by an older woman in a yellow straw hat. We later learn that living right outside these prison walls means cheaper rent and a great view of the bay. Many of the prison officers live just beyond the San Quentin’s gates; it is one of the perks of the job. Our camera assistant, Patrick, pulls the van up to a small wooden guard shack situated outside a seven-foot chain-link gate. The officer is expecting us; our names are on a preapproved list. Patrick gathers our driver’s licenses and hands them to the smiling officer. “Good Morning,” he says. “Welcome to San Quentin.” Our licenses are our ticket in and out of this place. I imagine if something were to happen, if things went terribly wrong today, this piece of state-issued plastic would be how they could start to identify us, to notify our families. We have been warned at the other prisons that the state doesn’t negotiate for hostages. Waiting to enter this looming fortress and hearing the steady hum of crashing whitecaps makes this idea of not being rescued seem more real. My stomach tightens as we pull in past the gate and the officer wishes us a “good day.” Patrick drives the van into our assigned parking spot. The other camera assistant, Emery, pulls in next to us. There are two production teams—named for colors—green and yellow. Each small crew has a field producer, a cameraperson and an audio person. My team is green. Kristi, the other field producer, is yellow. 10

In these early days, our executive producer, Arnie, also travels with us. He started the documentation of scared-straight programs over twenty years ago. He was the first to take a camera behind the walls to observe how inmates getting in a teen’s face and sharing the reality of prison life could possibly alter a young person’s destiny. He earned an Oscar for his first film about a scared-straight program in New Jersey, and it started him on a life-long journey of filming in prisons, dealing with the throwaways of society. He is my boss, my mentor, and he has become a friend during the years we have worked together. Arnie is a slight man with a wry sense of humor along with a seriousness about this work we are doing. He keeps small pieces of paper with notes jotted down about the stops on the prison tour we need to spend extra time filming or inmates whose stories he particularly likes. These notes are folded and neatly placed in the front pocket of his shirt. He occasionally pulls one out and reads, making sure we don’t miss anything. Once the vans are parked, we pour out, and the camera assistants start unloading the metal cases with our video equipment secured safely inside. Jim and Piers, the cameramen, and our audio guys, Tony and Richard, prep the gear. The production manager, Adam, comes over to me and asks about lunch. He hands me a menu, steadying it on my clipboard against the wind whipping off the bay. I quickly glance at it—salads, burgers and a few vegetarian items. I confirm we will eat here in the visitors’ cafeteria so we don’t have to leave San Quentin in search of some local eatery. All of these details, including where and when we eat, are important to making our twelve-hour day and not going into overtime. Our crew are all white men, which isn’t unusual on these shows. Running a camera, holding a boom mic, is still almost an exclusive club of white maleness. I’m the only person of color on this crew. Before taking this job, I knew prisons were disproportionally filled with Black and Brown men, but going behind 11 these walls, where most of the faces look like those of the men I love, the fathers, sons, cousins, brothers and husbands who fill my life, is making me weary and starting to break my heart in unexpected ways. I fear for my own two sons, who are just entering manhood. I find myself calling home more, checking in, listening to them impatiently tell me about their day, holding on to their voices after they rush me off the phone...“Hey, Mom, got to go. Love you.” “Be careful,” I say, after they have hung up, “keep safe.”

Jim is looking over his camera, confirming his settings with Piers. I have worked with them both before this current show. Piers is a tall, lumbering English guy with a quick smile and ready jokes. He is the oldest brother of three sisters and because of this likes to tease Kristi and me. Jim is green team’s camera man, which means we work together filming the teens before they come into the prison. Jim has an easygoing boyish face that hides his intensity, his constant push for perfection in these situations wrought with uncertainty. We are just starting to develop a rhythm together and a sensibility for how to film this show, tell these stories laid out before us. He has kids like me, three young daughters and an older son back in LA I lean against the van; looking over my notes about the inmates we are going to meet and watching the crew work. There is a surgical precision to all of this. Cameras are adjusted, white balances taken, exposures set, time codes started. Tapes are labeled and loaded. We all wear walkie-talkies on these days, speaking to each other through small mics clipped to the front of our shirts. In my ear, I hear, “Walkie, check...one, two...good check,” as the crew makes sure each one of us is connected. This is our walkthrough day at San Quentin. The day before we bring the teens in for the program we walk the route of the tour; it’s a dress rehearsal for the real thing. This is also the first time we get to meet the inmates, sit with them, 12

hear their stories. In San Quentin, their scared-straight program is called SQUIRES. Last night over dinner in an expensive Italian bistro in the North Beach section of San Francisco, Arnie talked to us about the SQUIRES, explaining that SQUIRES was an acronym for San Quentin Utilization of Inmate Resources, Experiences and Studies. He told us, like the prison, the SQUIRES is the oldest of this sort of youth deterrent prison project. There are jokes over wine and dinner about inmates considering themselves to be squires—the medieval knight’s apprentice, a criminal impersonating nobility, the murdering squire. The irony of some criminals considering themselves to have enough honor to sit at King Arthur’s Round Table isn’t lost on our crew. Joking about all of this is common, you know, gallows humor. Even now, in the beginning of our run, seeing the human suffering—teens trapped in endless poverty in this land of plenty, the victims of bad parenting, humans locked in tight caged spaces—is starting to take its toll on us all. This is our first time on the road together. It has been three weeks now, from motel to motel, driving along the 5 through the belly of California, stopping in prison towns. We are all fatigued and poking fun at inmates we haven’t met yet is an easy way to release stress, along with three bottles of wine and plates of overpriced pasta. We are finally ready. Jim and Piers swing their cameras onto their shoulders; the two audio guys have their mixers strapped in their dark-blue harnesses, boom poles in hand as we all head towards San Quentin’s main entrance. Arnie is ahead of us, leading the way up the asphalt path with the prison’s public information officer, or PIO, by his side. He pulls one of those pieces of paper out of his pocket as he walks, going over a list with the guy before we enter this vast granite and brick citadel. Oddly, now I’m not frightened to go behind the walls, these foreboding metal gates, to enter the world of the incarcerated. This surprises me. I thought I 13 would be afraid to go to San Quentin. It has a violent reputation; murderers Charles Manson and Scott Peterson sit on death row. I feel more of a curiosity, a wonderment blended with excitement. There is something about the work, having a camera pointed at people, that gives one access to a world most never get to see close-up. We feed the voyeurs among us, give them entry, bring this slightly staged horror to their living rooms, dens and computer screens. We are met in the courtyard right inside the gate by three inmates dressed in identical light-blue shirts with “CDCR Prisoner” written in large, bright-yellow letters on the back. Arnie has met them before and quickly extends his hand to a tall and stocky Black man with a white knit skull cap pressed down on his head. Kristi and I walk up and join him as he introduces us to Shahid, the inmate who co-leads the SQUIRES. It is decided that we will meet in the chapel first before touring the jail. In the two front rows of the chapel, a group of men are quietly talking and joking together. The crew takes a seat in the back as Kristi and I follow Arnie up the chapel aisle to stand in front of these inmates...the SQUIRES. The men lean in, listening to Arnie thank them for participating, allowing us to film them. He briefly goes over the plans for the day and then introduces me and Kristi. I carry a pocket-sized blue spiral notebook that I pass around to the inmates. “Please fill in your name, age, crime, your sentence and your inmate number,” I tell them. Later, after the shoot, I will go back to the hotel, write notes about what we filmed and send the inmates’ stats back to the office in Los Angeles so the editors can write this information over a freeze frame of each inmate. This will be their intro on TV. 14

I give Shahid the notebook and one pen. The pen is retractable, the kind you push on the top, not one of those Bic pens with a plastic cap. We have been told a plastic cap could be dangerous in here. Officers warn that almost anything can become a weapon in an inmate’s hands, shaped into what they call a shank or a shiv. They have shown us crudely crafted weapons which they have confiscated from prisoners and neatly arranged in plastic showcases. “Prison is a violent place,” they tell us. “Filled with violent men who arm themselves with all kinds of things.” They show us razors tied to combs, broken glass wrapped tightly around a discarded piece of wood with a piece of cloth, tooth brushes whittled to a lethal point. “Any and every thing can be made into a weapon in prison,” they say. We all are hyper vigilant about bringing everything we bring into prison out with us. One mistake could get production shut down. As the inmates write their information in my blue notebook, Arnie asks each man to tell us his stats and why he joined SQUIRES. The inmates refer to the amount of time they’ve been locked up as “being down.” In an emotionless, rote tone, they run it off; there is no shame, no honor, just what it is...time. Shahid begins after he passes the notebook along. My name is Shahid. I’ve been down for twenty-eight years on a seven to life for first-degree murder. I’ve been in SQUIRES for ten years. If I can keep just one kid out of this hellhole, then I’m good. You know." David Vargas, who is sitting next to him, his long black hair pouring out of a blue cap, continues. I’m David. I’ve been down since I was fifteen on second-degree gang murder, fifteen to life. I’m twenty-five years old. Inmate number AN7917. Quite honestly, I joined SQUIRES to save my own life by trying to save others.

Each inmate follows down the chapel row. 15

I’m Kenneth Rodgers. Forty-six years old. Inmate number J89639. Been down for twenty years on a life sentence for murder and robbery. Man, I got kids out there who I can’t be a father to. Two of my sons locked up. Maybe I can save somebody else’s kid. You feel me. Keith Warren. Thirty-seven, first-degree murder, life without parole, been down for twenty years. Inmate number AY7816.1 wish I could have gone to a program like the SQUIRES before I ruined my life. Damion Winfield, inmate AY8552. I’m fifty-two damn years old. Here on two counts of murder, got life without parole, been down for thirty-one years. I’ll probably die here. I don’t want to see nobody, especially some young kids, have to go through what I’ve been through. My name is Robert, they call me Red. Inmate number D86642. I’m forty- eight years old. Been down for twenty-five years for first-degree murder. I got a twenty-five to life sentence. I want to let these kids know that one bad choice can get you in a place like this. Listening to the men, most of them locked up longer than they have been on the outside, makes me realize how young they were when they were sentenced to life. Many of them were younger than my own sons, one who is starting college in the fall, and the other beginning his first job as an assistant teacher at the same small private school he attended when he was a child. This is the abyss I traverse each time I enter these walls, reaching across to see these men beyond their crimes, their time down. Trying to understand that their lives and choices have been far different than what I have experienced for so many reasons that I’m slowly trying to comprehend. After the men are done, David, the youngest of the SQUIRES, hands the pen and notebook back to me. The other men are chatting with Arnie and Kristi.

“You’re so young,” I say to him. “How is your mother handling this?” 16

“I grew up in prison,” he tells me. “Some of these officers are like my family now, and these men here, they are like uncles to me. I try not to think about what’s happening at home too much, about my mom, life beyond these walls.” For him and so many of the men I will meet, their lives outside, the ones they left behind, are only for late-night dreams, not to be imagined in the day-to- day survival of time down. Arnie, Kristi and I join the crew at the back of the chapel. Shahid turns to us and asks, “You ready?” No words are said. We just follow him and the rest of the SQUIRES outside. We walk between two large brick walls covered with peeling yellow paint and onto the massive prison yard to begin the tour of San Quentin—their house. 17

Ashley

She sits on the porch waiting our arrival. From our air-conditioned van we see the desert heat rise in soft waves around her. She is perched on a cheap white plastic lawn chair, mocha-colored girl, with a pink cap cocked on the side of her head. Her sandy brown hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail. Jim says, “We will shoot her there. Right where she’s at.”

We walk towards her. Quick introductions. She knows why we are here. Tony drops a wireless mic wire down her white tee and fastens it to her skin right below her collarbone with wig tape.

Ashley doesn’t hesitate, she gives it up right away, testifying like she is at a Baptist revival meeting instead of sitting in the August sun on her auntie’s porch. “Yeah, I’m straight up gangster out of Pomona. Southside Village Crips, Niggah!" She throws up the familiar gang sign, her slender brown fingers crossed and curled. “It runs in my family: my uncle bangs, my daddy bangs, my momma too. It’s what we do. No escaping that shit. You feel me.” She takes a quick drag from a Newport and tosses it onto the brown grass. Jim loves it. He moves his camera around, circling her, catching her poses and gestures. Ashley works the camera, looking right down the barrel of the lens 18 when she talks. She’s a pretty girl. Smooth skin and deep dimples. In another life this sixteen-year-old could’ve been a cheerleader, prom queen, somebody’s princess, with a name like Ashley, a white girl’s name on a ghetto child. “I smoke weed. Sell it too. I used to sell weed before school, during school and after school. If the money was right, I was selling weed at that time until I got caught with about nine bags, $90’s worth, and I got expelled.” She looks directly at me now, wanting to see my reaction. I keep it buried, not showing shock, outrage or judgment. This is not my first rodeo. I’ve heard it before: smoking, stealing, fighting, all sorts of things pour out the mouths of these teens. “What was your worst day?” I ask. For a kid like Ashley, I don’t bring out the list of questions, typed notes from the LA production office. I freestyle, cautiously dancing with her as she lays out the parts of her life she wants me to know. We twirl and glide together. I know when to press her and to dip her deeper, to get her to reveal the hidden underbelly, the real story beneath the shocking details. “Shit, a bad day in the hood is when you ain’t got no money. You broke,” she answers. “Few months ago, me and my two homies, Short Dog and Jay-Jay, were sitting around, all of us broke and wanting to get high. So, Short Dog started talking about how we could make some quick cash. Man, Short Dog, that niggah always coming up with some crazy schemes. He tells us that this ho he fucking parents got a nice flat screen, not that cheap-ass Wal-Mart shit neither. They got a brand new PS3 and cash too, in their bedroom. Fools always keep the back window up...easy hit, he says. Plus, he knows a niggah who would buy the shit from us. House right round the corner. Being broke and all...sound like opportunity to us.” 19

Ashley rubs her hands together, thinking back to the thrill of it all. Jim pulls up one of those cheap white lawn chairs, sits next to me and puts the camera right in her face. “Break-in was easy. We got the flat screen, PS3 and plus a laptop. Couldn’t find no cash. Bitch was a neighbor saw us breaking in and called the cops. They roll up just as we were carrying the shit out the house. I had the laptop and the PS3.1 dropped that shit and took off across the backyard. Short Dog and Jay-Jay had that flat screen. Little punk Jay-Jay didn’t want to drop it. He trying to carry the bitch with the cops behind them. Short Dog make off, but Jay-Jay get popped holding that flat screen above his head trying to run. Yeah, that was a bad day in the neighborhood.” Ashley chuckles, rubs the back of her right hand across her mouth and then she spits. “What happened to Jay-Jay?” I ask. “Ah that little niggah only thirteen. First offense. He got a month in juvy and six-month probation. Popped his mutherfucker cherry all right. Didn’t rat us out. Although Short Dog had to leave that ho alone. She kinda figured it was him that broke into her parents’ house.” It goes on like this, Ashley telling me stories, me asking questions, prompting and gently guiding her. “Why are you living here? Why aren’t you living with your mom?” “Cuz my mom just got out of prison. She’s been away for three years. Now she trying to tell me what to do! Shit! No way.” “How long you been living here?” “About a month. Jennifer’s my uncle’s girlfriend. She got a baby boy by him. I keep running away and shit from my mom’s. So, she’s letting me stay here.” 20

“How’s it going?” “It’s better than living with my moms. I can’t stand that bitch, sometimes.” I can feel Ashley shutting down, pulling away. I know enough now that we have it. There is no need to push her. The wound has been picked. I know where it is.

Jim puts the camera down. He knows my rhythm. When I push and when it’s time to pull back with a kid like Ashley. “Thanks, kiddo,” he says. Ashley looks up and nods towards Jim as he picks up the camera, swings it onto his shoulder and calls for a tape change from Patrick, our camera assistant. Patrick and Jim walk shoulder to shoulder towards the van where they will eject the tape and put a fresh one in so we are ready for the next round. “Can I take this off?” Ashley points to the mic. “No, not yet. We’re going to film some more. We’re just taking a break.” I stand up from the lawn chair. The back of my tee shirt is wet from the desert heat and white plastic. We’re in development surrounded by identical, sun-bleached, single-family stucco homes with reddish tile roofs. At first glance, this could be mistaken for some suburban landscape, but situated in the middle of San Bernardino County, seventy-five miles east of Los Angeles, this is the last stop for inner-city families escaping the certainty of bullets flying past a toddler’s head and early morning police raids. “Hey! That’s my niggah there!” Ashley suddenly jumps up. A black Caprice with tinted windows slowly pulls in front of our white van. The crew holds for a moment and looks, not knowing what could be next. The air vibrates with the steady bass of a hip-hop beat pouring from the open car window. Ashley makes her way to the driver. A thin man in his thirties dressed in 21 all black with pants hanging low, exposing crisp blue plaid boxers, gets out of the car. Ashley grips his hand and they embrace, chest to chest. A woman gets out of the passenger side. I know it’s Ashley’s mother; same mocha skin and reddish hair. She’s thick, her big thighs squeezed into pink cotton Capri pants, topped with a tight pink and white striped tee shirt. I walk over to the car, extend my hand and introduce myself. She tells me her name is Tracy, says she’s sorry for being late. “No worries. I already started interviewing her. I have paperwork for you to sign and I need to interview you, too.” Although Ashley gangbangs, sells weed and runs away, she is still sixteen and needs her mother’s permission to be on television. She looks at me sideways, not direct. It’s hard to tell if she is high or just tired from it all. Her eyes are glassy and dazed. “I don’t want to do no interview. Why can’t you just talk to her?” This happens a lot. Some parents want their kids to do all the heavy lifting, tell the story like they aren’t one of the stars in the drama. Ashley is showing “her niggah” her mic. “Look, homie. They got me wired and shit!” She laughs as she pulls her shirt aside, exposing the black square taped to her chest.

“That’s Cheez, an old friend of mine,” Tracy explains. “I’m staying with him down in Chino until I can get back on my feet.” “He knows why we’re here?” I ask. 22

“Yea. We all want to help Ashley. She’s just so wild right now.” Cheez hands Ashley a cigarette, which she tucks behind her ear. He looks around, like he’s finally taking all of this in—the van, the white men hanging back, Ashley’s mic, and me holding a clipboard against my chest talking with Tracy. “Damn. So, ya’II Beyond Scared Straight," he says, swinging out his thin, tattooed arms in amazement. “Well, we are the crew from Beyond Scared Straight,” Jim says. Jim’s all tucked in, every hair in place. His wrinkle-free gray tee shirt is precisely placed in blue jeans held up by a brown belt. He looks like a cop or some modern-day cowboy. Jim walks over and extends his hand. Cheez takes it. The two men shake. These moments always happen on this show, the colliding of worlds. I’m the blind navigator, helping us scale canyons of race and class, my heart the only compass, seeking some small truth in this vast sensational world of reality television. There is the job, and then there is this, a white boy from Simi Valley reaching out to explain his existence to a tattooed homie on a hot August afternoon. Tracy walks towards Jennifer’s house. “I gotta get out of this heat,” she says. She waves her hand as she walks away from my questions, my demands.

The van’s back gate is lifted. I go over, sit on the van back, trying to find some relief myself from the sun.

Ashley’s arm is resting on the top of Cheez’s car. She leans into the window, laughing at something he is saying. Then she stands up and watches his car drive off through the simmering heat waves rising off the black asphalt. 23

I walk over to Ashley and ask her if she wants a snack. “Naw. I’m good,” she says. “Why don’t you come and look?” Our van is packed with kid-friendly snacks. Chips, cookies, candy and sugary juice boxes. I hand them out to teens across the country, trying to create a moment in which they are just kids, having a snack, nothing else. The cameras are put away. The performance is over. She takes a juice box and a bag of Doritos. I grab a water and sit back down on the back edge of the van. Ashley is standing in front of me. She squeezes the juice box and sucks the last drop of juice out. “Can I have another one?” “Of course.” I reach into the blue cooler, pull out another juice box, hand it to her. Tony comes over to check Ashley’s mic. Tony is tall, thin, even-tempered. He makes people feel comfortable, which is important because he has to touch them to put on their mics and is always checking some thing or changing a battery on the small black metal transmitter he clips to the waist of their pants. He readjusts Ashley’s mic and re-tapes it. “Looks good,” he says. Ashley sits next to me under the van lift gate. I ask her what she likes to do. Something we could film her doing. “I like to play basketball over at the rec center.”

“You any good?” “Hellya! I’m a bailer.” She puts her arms up and shoots an imaginary basket. 24

“Did you ever play in school?” “Yea. I was on the team in junior high, but I got kicked off cuz of my grades.” “What we doing next?” she asks. “I have to interview your auntie and your mom.” The sun is starting to move lower in the sky, and it’s cooling down just a bit. “Can I get something for my little cousin?” “Of course.” “He likes these gummy bears and cheese puffs.” “Take him a juice box, too,” I say. She grabs up the goodies and goes inside to give them to her little cousin. For a few moments, she is no longer what is written on the casting sheet from the LA office: a gangbanger, hard and unreachable, good TV; she’s a kid sucking down a few juice boxes and sharing snacks with her cousin. I follow her into the stucco house where Ashley lives with her “auntie” and her two kids. The house is dark and sparsely furnished. A lopsided couch is pushed against the wall; a few broken toys are scattered on a stained carpet. The faint sweet smell of weed mixed with the lingering scent of burnt morning bacon fills the air. In the kitchen, just left of the couch and a small sitting area, Tracy and Jennifer are standing near the sink talking. Jennifer is a short, softly shaped woman with long curly hair pulled back in a ponytail. She has a quick smile and deep dimples. Before Tracy arrived, Jennifer told me she didn’t think much of Tracy. She’d sucked her teeth and said, “Tracy’s been more of a homie to Ashley 25 than a mother.” Now, watching the two women chitchatting like housewives sharing neighborhood gossip or a casserole recipe, you couldn’t tell there was any tension between them. The crew follows me in. Jim works fast. Patrick carries in silver cases with lights and a small monitor. There aren’t a lot of options here, a large sliding glass window for a little fill, a backlight and a quickly placed rectangle-shaped Diva light. Jim asks Jennifer if he can take two white kitchen chairs and place them in the living room. There is a toddler crying in another room, a scolding male voice tells the child to “shut the fuck up.” Ashley walks out holding the sniffing toddler and another little boy, about five, with a juice box in one hand and gummy bears in the other. “I’m taking them across the street to the park. Chris is back there trippin’,” she says. “Go ahead,” Jennifer says. “I’m right behind you.” “You ain’t even going to speak to me, Ashley?” Tracy asks her daughter before she can slip out the door. “Hey, Mom,” Ashley quickly responds before she walks out into the desert heat. Tracy watches the door close, and then she takes a cigarette out of her back pocket, walks over to the stove and lights it on one of the greasy burners. She takes a long drag, blows the smoke out her nose.

“How you doing?” I ask. I’m in the kitchen now, standing opposite Tracy next to a sink overflowing with dishes. 26

“Not good. I don’t want to do this. You see how Ashley treats me. Why don’t you talk to her?” Tracy throws her head sideways towards Jennifer and passes her the newly lit cigarette. “She knows Ashley’s bad ass,” she says. Jennifer takes a drag from the cigarette and laughs. “Damn, Tracy,” she says. “Why the fuck you come all the way up here if you going act like this?” “I can interview Jennifer, too,” I tell Tracy. “But I still need to interview you. You’re her mother.” We need to get started, get this show on the road as they say. We only have five hours with each family. We must film two families a day to keep on schedule. Get in and get out; try to find some truth along the way. “What kind of questions are you going to ask me?” “I’m not going to ask you anything you don’t know the answer to.” This is my standard response. I try not to reveal the questions beforehand. I want unrehearsed answers, words coming from the gut, not the head, not some cleaned-up version of their lives. Tracy is already guarded. I need to chip away at her armor, get what I can. Tony comes over, wireless mic in hand, sensing it’s time to push Tracy along, get her moving from the kitchen into the chair Jim has placed in front of the camera. “May I put a mic on you?” He asks in a way that makes it impossible to say no. I stand and watch as he slips a black wire down the front of her shirt, has her pull it out from the bottom so he can plug it into a black square transmitter and clip it to the back of her too-tight pink Capri pants. 27

I take my seat, next to the camera. “Come on, Tracy, sit down,” I say, inviting her to join me. She walks over and sits across from me. I hand her my clipboard with releases full of legal language giving the network permission to use her and Ashley’s image in perpetuity, worldwide. TV wants it all. Before the camera is rolling, I try to talk to the person I’m interviewing, try to create a conversation, get them comfortable. I’m struggling to find the familiar, a way into this woman sitting before me, signing her name on my various forms. I ask her where she did her time. “Chowchilla.” “I’ve been there. We filmed there about two years ago, brought a group of girls in.” “Yeah, I was there when that happened.” “So you know Pretty Boy, Diabla?” I name off some of the inmates we filmed with. “Yeah, I know them.” Tracy looks up at me, knows I’ve been in those yards, walked the cell blocks, seen where she had to survive. “One of the girls saw her mother there while we were filming,” I tell her. Finally, we are ready, papers signed, camera set. “Where do I look? At you or the camera?” “Look at me.” It’s slow going at first. Tracy is nervous, stops and starts. Not sure of what to say. 28

Finally, I ask about the gang life, why is Ashley drawn to it?

“Six members of our family are from Southside Village Crips in Pomona,” she explains. “My father was an OG in Compton before moving out here. She seen it her whole life. But, you don’t fall into this life accidently. She had two options: you could choose this here or you can choose something else. Ashley chose to follow behind me and the gang life style. I’m trying to stop her, warn her about it. But she don’t want to listen to me no more.” There are times when I don’t say anything, let the silence lie there for a bit. I glance down at the monitor Patrick has set up just below my feet and see that Jim is slowly pushing into the single tear rolling down Tracy’s mocha-colored cheek. She reaches her hand up to quickly wipe it away like an annoying fly. “You got what you need?” she says. “I need me a smoke.” She suddenly stands up. Her head hits the boom mic and the transmitter clipped to her tight pink pants drops to the carpeted floor. I can sense Tony cringing behind me. This equipment is expensive. He has already had two mics go down, and we are only a month into our third season. “Okay, wait a minute,” I say. “You’re still wired.” If I’m doing my job, people forget about the camera, the busyness we bring. And it’s just me and them. I can grab morsels of truth, hollow out those hidden spots. For Tracy, it’s this legacy, the path she built brick by brick for her little girl to walk down. She couldn’t be a roadblock, a barrier for her only daughter. I imagine she didn’t realize she had to until it was too late.

Tony has come over now. He knows not to take off her mic. He briefly rests his hand on her shoulder, then picks up the dropped transmitter. 29

He carefully rewraps the black wires around the transmitter and re-clips it to her trousers. Tracy mumbles a quick sorry. She sits down, and I finish up a few more quick questions on the list. Then it’s over. We’re standing in the kitchen again. She smokes a cigarette. An odd intimacy has built between us. I have taken her to the edge, not letting her fall. She tells me she hopes the jail program will work for Ashley. Then she lets me know that she did time in San Bernardino County Jail on assault and gun possession charges. This is the same jail we will be taking Ashley through in a few days for the READY program. I explain to her that this jail program requires parents to attend a mandatory parents’ program. Several of the programs we film have parent- education components. Most parents want this, some help to deal with their out- of-control teens. Others, like Tracy, resist. “I don’t know about that,” she says. She puts the butt of her cigarette into the sink and turns on the water. It softly sizzles and extinguishes. “I don’t like going into those places. I don’t like cops, plus I’m on probation.” “Let me check with the people who run the program,” I say. “I’m sure you’re not the only parent who has been on probation who has a kid going through the program.” 30

I won’t press the issue now; I have time to deal with this. I’ve already decided we need to come back tomorrow to film more with Ashley. Plus, I’m used to getting what I want from the people we film with. As we talk, the crew has wrapped out the equipment. Chairs are back in place. There is no visible sign we have been here. Tracy and I walk out of the house together. I tell her we want to come back tomorrow for a few hours to film Ashley playing basketball and interview Jennifer. “It would be good to get some shots of you two together,” I say. “Yeah,” she says. “Ashley’s good at basketball, but she messed that up too, selling drugs and fighting. That girl thinks she so bad. Untouchable.” Across the street from Jennifer’s house is a small playground with a swing set and two cobalt-blue and yellow sliding boards. Two of the swings are broken. Ashley is pushing her little cousin on the one intact swing. “Pump your legs, boy, so you can go higher,” she tells him. “Then jump off. Don’t be afraid. Close your eyes and jump.” Jennifer is sitting on a nearby black wire bench watching. The crying toddler is now asleep. His head nestles in her full lap. Under the bench are several empty Colt 45 glass bottles. Tracy walks across the street and sits next to Jennifer. “Don’t be pushing that boy too high, Ashley,” Tracy warns. “He likes it, Mom. Right? You ain’t scared.” Ashley laughs. Then she grabs the swing, slowing her cousin down a bit, listening to her mother. 31

Our last shot of the day is with Ashley. It’s a walking shot—the staple of this type of television, used to cover the edits to create those precious sound bites. The sun is setting, casting a coppery glimmer against the rocky cliffs behind Jennifer’s house. This is the magic hour; the light is warm and ready. I walk over to get Ashley. It’s nice and loose between the three women now. Jennifer and Tracy are laughing as Ashley chases her cousin around the small playground in a game of tag. She’s pretending like she can’t catch him, and he thinks he’s victorious against his big cousin. The toddler is awake, clapping his hands in delight. Ashley is reluctant at first when I tell her we have one more shot. “Aw man,” she says. I explain to her that I’m trying to arrange to come back tomorrow to film her playing basketball. “I called the office. They are trying to get permission for us to film a park near here.” This excites her, makes her more palpable. Jim jumps in, camera at the ready. He knows we are losing light and he wants this shot. “Hey, kiddo,” he says. “I want you to go on the hill there, go halfway up, then turn around and walk along the path right behind the row of cactus.” “Naw. I ain’t doing that. It’s gonna mess up my sneakers.” “Come on, Ashley,” I say, hoping to persuade her. “It’s the last thing we need to shoot. Besides, I know your sneakers get a bit dirty on the basketball court.” 32

“I don’t wear these on the court,” she says. I put my arm around her shoulder. “It’s the last shot,” I say. “Please.” I’m never quite sure if it’s the idea of being on television or the way we meld into these kids, giving them some small voice against the constant static of their daily lives, but mostly the teens do what we ask. Jim sets his camera on the tripod. Patrick tightens it on top. Then Jim snuggles his eye against the rubber eye piece. “Speed,” he says, letting me know the camera is rolling. “Okay, Ashley. Just walk halfway up. And then turn around like he said,” I tell her. The camera rolls as we watch Ashley climb up the jagged cliff, her mocha body bathed in strips of dark shadows and the golden light of the setting sun. 33

The Cut-Through

Over Cobb salad and mushroom ragu our youngest son tells us he was pulled over by the LAPD, their guns drawn as they approached his 1994 faded turquoise pickup. He delivers this news while we are finishing up Sunday dinner at a local French bistro on Green Street in Pasadena, a small town just east of Los Angeles where the wide boulevards are lined with palm and oak trees and former Rose Bowl Queens reside. I put my fork down, look at him sitting across from me. “Where did this happen?” I ask. “On Alameda, right by Chinatown, at 4:30 in the afternoon.” I know this stretch of Alameda, on the edge of LA’s Chinatown. The tracks of the Gold Line subway looming high above. This is an isolated spot, a cut- through where a young man could be killed and the story never told. My son looks away like his eyes are being drawn back to an afternoon memory of officers with guns. “They came up to my truck and asked what I was doing.” I can only imagine what went through his mind. Did he think of us? Did he remember my departing words, “be safe and I love you,” said each time he walked from my door? Did he think of his father, a teacher at a high school a few miles away from where two LAPD cops have guns pointed at him? I know he must’ve thought of those other Black boys—Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin...gunned down, gunned down, their blood flowing in America’s streets. 34

“What did you do?” “I put my hands up. I didn’t want to get shot.” “What did you say?” He waits until the waiter fills our water glasses and leaves before he answers. “I told them I was moving a sculpture from my art show. Then I said, ‘What’s up, dude?’ They were young, young like me, Mom.” Our son is an artist; his rebellious nature and questioning mind was subdued that afternoon in front of officers with guns drawn. Perhaps it was the “What’s up, dude?” his hands in the air, but guns were put away. My son was told to go on, no ticket written, no violations, only by the LAPD. Somehow his Black body is a threat, his Black body can be violated, his Black body still must bow down, even now...yes’em, master. The waiter returns and asks about dessert. Creme brulee, flourless chocolate cake and a raspberry tart. What does one order when your son is telling you about having guns drawn on him? “Just two coffees, please,” my husband says. The waiter leaves. “Were you afraid?” Such an obvious question, but needs to be asked. The answer is yes, but now anger and confusion fills the table. His voice becomes louder. His fist comes down near his plate. Water spills and a couple behind us look up. This is what he knows: his white friends never have this happen. They never are pulled over for no reason, lives threatened, their mere existence questioned. 35

When he was a baby I would kiss him over and over again, telling him how beautiful his dark skin was, it was the best. He believed me and as a boy always thought this skin, his skin, his deep dark blackness, his fine mind were blessings, something to be honored and praised. He now stomps around our home, declaring that young Black men are engaged in an endless battle, “They are trying to kill us, Mom. It’s a war.” Each death is personal to my boy. “It’s worse because Obama is president!” he says. “A Black man is president, and they still can do this shit to us.” My husband says he understands. “I used to get pulled over all the time back in Boston. The cops always said a car that looked like mine was involved in a robbery. I drove a silver vintage 1965 Mercedes. There were no cars like mine.” The waiter brings the check. A credit card is placed down on a silver tray. “When did this happen?” “April.” It is now December. “Why didn’t you tell us then? Why did you wait?” My son looks at me now. “Because, Mom, you already worry enough. I didn’t want to scare you.” So this is what it looks like when you unpack this oppression, this seemingly bottomless pit of racism. He carries the responsibility of protecting himself, of calculating how to walk safely in the world that often doesn’t see his worth. In his America, where he knows his education and class sometimes 36 protect him, his “What’s up, dude?” might have saved his life, this time. He feels he has to shield me from this. “You should have told us then. Maybe we could have done something.” These are hollow words, seem empty as they leave my mouth. I wonder what we could have done. Two armed police who left no visible trace. They hadn’t killed him after all, only drawn guns. What harm in that, easily erased, never recorded? Dinner is over. The table is cleared. We make our way towards the door. The restaurant is more crowded now. The hum of conversations mixed with laughter and a mother soothing a crying baby fill the air. On top of each linen- covered table is a small candle, giving the restaurant a soft amber glow. Most times I would have been comforted by this place, by a good meal out on a Sunday night, knowing we have earned membership in this world of candle-lit dinners, chilled wine, and crusty bread pulled and delicately dipped in seasoned virgin olive oil. Yet, tonight this restaurant with its seemingly polite people dining on carefully crafted plates feels like a surreal tapestry, weaving itself around me as I try to find my way out. In front of me I see a white middle-aged couple with their adult son. They are laughing. The mother reaches out and rubs her son’s arm tenderly. Clear long-stemmed glasses filled with deep ruby-colored wine are raised in a toast of celebration. The mother glances up at me and smiles. She thinks we are the same, out on a Sunday evening with our grown sons. She looks like someone I could have been friends with once. We would have shared a carpool, arranged play dates, worried over how to set limitations for our little boys while we organized a fundraiser gala for the PTA. I would have been her one Black friend. Yet, we would never truly talk about how my concerns for my little boy might be different than hers. She would never ask and I wouldn’t reveal the things that 37 divided us. I have no smiles for her tonight, no balm for her guilt or my own rage. I look away and follow my son’s lead out of the restaurant. I pause at the glass door, waiting for a moment before stepping out into the night. There are little sparkling white lights strung outside along the restaurant’s wrought-iron patio railing. Beyond the lights, I see my son and husband standing side by side. These two men, one young, the other older, sharing the same American story. My husband reaches up, hugs our son in a deep embrace. It is winter in this desert. A cold chill sweeps across my face as I step outside. My son puts his hands in his jeans’ pockets. I’m standing next to them now. “I love you, son,” my husband says. “Me, too.” My boy is lighter now, the dinner conversation behind him. “Where are you heading?” I ask. “Over to Echo Park to meet some friends. It’s still the weekend, you know, Mom.” He smiles. “Okay. Be safe and I love you.” He grabs me around the shoulder, kisses my cheek and then makes his way down the alley towards his truck. My husband and I watch as he walks away from us. We don’t say anything, just watch his tall thin frame in black skinny jeans and a blue oversized jacket go off into the night. 38

Before he disappears, he turns, waves and smiles. Standing there watching him walk away from us, I tell my husband about a time when our son was seven years old, just beginning to be a big boy. “I would drop him off at school,” I say. “And all of a sudden he stopped letting me kiss him good-bye. He would turn around and just wave while he ran off to join his friends. So, I told him one day how I missed those kisses. Well, you should have seen him. He looked at me, his small face full of concern. Then he told me, ‘Mommy, when I wave it’s really this.’ He kissed his little hand and waved at me. Letting me know in that wave was his sweet kiss.” As we stand there in the cool dry desert wind, our son is now a dark shadow moving away from us. Still I kiss my own hand and wave, sending my own sweet kiss towards him. My husband grabs hold of my other hand, and I begin to cry. 39

Corey

Short twisted dreadlocks on top of dark-brown-skinned boy, Started stealing cars at eleven years old.

Corey tells me he learned to steal cars from the older dudes on the block. “I’ve stole over thirty cars.” “Honda Accords and Jeep Cherokees are the easiness,” he says. “Put money in my pocket.”

He leans against a car in front of his momma’s house on the outskirts of Atlanta. “Make me feel rich. That quick cash.” “I’d steal cars to get to school, go to parties. Mostly to make me money. Sometimes steal two cars a day, Make me 300-400.”

Momma turned a blind eye at first cuz that money Helped keep the lights on, Put food on the table. Never asked where the extra hundreds came from, just knew it was needed. I guess she imagined him mowing lawns in the concrete projects.

“Stealing cars is my crack.” Corey’s eyes are direct and bold. “I’m addicted to this shit.” He breaks a smile, looks like the kid he is. “They call me ‘Hot Boy’ cuz I do anything, man!”

Momma could look away until he flipped a stolen car during a police chase. Now got cases piling up. Juvy for six months, then another three. Next year he turns seventeen and Georgia declares him man. Then he can go to big-boy jail.

His momma snatched him and his younger siblings, Moved them across town, Away from men who teach eleven-year-old children to steal cars or make them dope boys.

Corey hates his new neighborhood. No action. No money in his pocket. Tells me everybody got a hustle. “You either sling dope or rob people.”

“I think your momma’s trying to save your life, son,” I tell him. “Yeah, you right,” he says. “You right.” Looking like the kid he is 42

My First Shot Caller

I started calling Oklahoma our sweet spot. To follow the rules of the TV world, we must throw in a few white kids on the jail tours. Often it’s not possible in places like Atlanta where the officers tell us the white parents don’t want their kids going through a program with Black kids. But here in Oklahoma where Interstate 40 stretches across south from Barstow, California, to North Carolina, there is this perfect mix of Black gangster kids, Mexican wannabee bad-asses and poor white trash kids being raised by meth-head mommas. Poverty, drugs, lack of opportunity combined with a deep dose of Christian intolerance, and a wild, wild West appetite for punishment, makes Oklahoma an ideal place for our show. During our second season, the crew started complaining about having to spend so much time in jail, so Kristi and I met with the inmates a few days before the jail program and not on our walkthrough days. On these days without the crew, it’s more relaxed. Kristi and I catch up, discuss the upcoming kids, the inmates, and figure out when we are going to pick up groceries for the week-long stay. We usually fly in the night before. Our bodies are tired from the hustle of traveling with ten people, thirty-plus pieces of luggage, and the routine of checking in to another hotel room so similar to the one you just left you have to remind yourself what city you’re in when you wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. We are now on the road three weeks each month, back in Los Angeles for a week and then back at it. TV is a hungry beast. Our production manager, Adam, drives us from the hotel to the jail, with his usual breakfast of Diet Coke and Cheez-lt sitting in his lap as he navigates the empty freeway. The Oklahoma County Detention Center is a seven-story, tan 43

tower sitting on the edge of downtown and a few blocks from Chesapeake Arena, where the Oklahoma City Thunder play basketball. In these flat lands you can spot the jail from the highway. At the jail, we ride a metal elevator to the seventh floor, where the most violent offenders are. It is there where I first see Playboy Gangster. He is standing in the brightly lit green concrete hallway, hands and ankles chained like most inmates’ when they aren’t on the block. He isn’t one of the inmates we are supposed to meet, but I spot him, tall and tatted, his arms bulging under his orange cotton jail shirt. Next to him is a short, clean-shaven kid. Marco, the officer who is taking us around, asks if we want to meet him. “He’s in for double murder—a real OG,” he says. “Sure,” I say. “Of course.” Playboy towers over me even though I’m a tall woman at almost 5'10". He looks like he could’ve been on the court a few blocks over shooting hoops with the Thunder instead of facing a double murder. We speak quickly—I tell him what we’re up to, filming in a few days, bringing teens in to show them life on the inside, and would he be interested in talking to them, getting in their faces? Then I ask him about himself, what he wanted to be when he was nine, expecting to hear “fireman” or “football player.” Instead he looks me straight in the eyes and says, “A gangster.” It throws me off, his honesty. I chuckle. “I guess you got what you wanted.” “Yeah.” On his neck in swirling black cursive letters is tattooed Certified Gangster. 44

Marco feels good after the encounter. Kristi tells him we want to use Playboy on the show, hands him releases for Playboy to sign. “He looks scary,” she says. “See, I told you,” Marco replies. Often these officers become local celebrities being on the show, recognized at Wal-Mart or teased at their neighborhood bars. While they all do it to help troubled teens and the programs run whether the cameras are there or not, their mere presence does transform them. Some don’t like the attention and must be coaxed to participate. Others pretend modesty and blush a bit when they share how often people come up to them in the paper-goods aisle, asking if they were the ones on Beyond Scared Straight last week, or how the cashier wants to know how they could get their grandbaby on the show “cuz he’s been suspended half a dozen times, smokes weed and keeps running away.” Then some like Marco step gladly into the limelight, enjoy being a part of making TV and must be kept in check not to play it up too much for our cameras. I think this is why Marco took Kristi and me to Playboy’s cell. It gives him a bit of swag, that Hollywood aura. We aren’t supposed to go into the inmates’ cells just us and one officer, but we do. Marco tells us that Playboy is a shot caller, big on the streets. Your rep follows you through the doors and onto the cell block. Playboy doesn’t have to brag about his position. It just is, earned doing things I couldn’t possibly imagine. I’m not in this world, only dancing on the edges. Later, he tells me he thinks he is going to beat this murder rap—has a high-price lawyer, plus he is innocent of this particular crime. Playboy shares his cell with the short, clean-shaven kid. I imagine he is some sort of protege—a lieutenant to the commander. What Marco wants to show us is Playboy’s currency. Stacked high against the concrete wall of his 45

nine-by-twelve-foot cell are boxes and boxes of ramen noodles, packages of sticky honey buns and over thirty chocolate bars. It’s impressive to see so much ramen noodle lining a jail cell like bundles of cash. This stack can be traded for drugs, haircuts, phone cards, a new jail house tattoo, protection and a beat down on another inmate. In here ramen means you are a high roller. Other inmates hand over their ramen, honey buns and chocolate to Playboy for whatever services he and the kid provide in here. Still, trading in the ramen noodles instead of dollar bills signals what it is: you are locked up, not free. “They’re not supposed to have all of this,” Marco says. “But we look the other way.” The two men exchange a quick smile. This is something that is common, this camaraderie among inmate and staff, the wink-wink between them. In a small city like this, the officers and inmates are often from the same hoods, facing limited choices: criminal or cop. Marco comes from a family of gangsters. Mexican Mafia. He’s got family serving life sentences in prisons across America. The youngest of eight, he chose the military, and then law enforcement as a path out of the gang life. Still that bit of gangster lurks there. He knows this world, is familiar with the trappings and the pitfalls. I spot two small pictures of little girls, their hair cornrowed and covered with purple and pink barrettes. The snapshots are taped to the concrete above one of the beds. “Whose girls are these?” “They’re my daughters,” Playboy says.

“They are so cute! How old are they?” “Five and seven.” 46

Here it is: the tender buried in the hardness. This is the place I will try to lean into, not the double murder charge, the Playboy bunny tattooed on the side of his neck or the stack of ramen noodles. It is this, the smiling innocence of two girls over a metal bed. The faces he looks at when he falls asleep at night and wakes up to in the morning. Our tour is over; it is time to leave. It’s always a bit awkward in jail. I tend to fall back on social decorum, thanking Playboy for letting us into his cell, extending my hand to shake his like I’ve just finished an afternoon luncheon at his home. “I’ll see you in a few days,” I say.

*********

There is a room in the Oklahoma County Detention Center on the sixth floor for low-risk, non-violent inmates. The room has the feel of a peculiar sleepaway camp for adult men. Dozens of metal bunkbeds are cramped together dorm- style. Dingy towels and stiff white socks hang from the black metal rails of several beds. Each bed has a rubber mattress covered by a thin gray blanket. There is the heavy musk of men living together and showering only twice a week in the air. Next to the dorm room is a smaller room with several phones and metal stools. This is where the inmates can talk to those on the outside. Jim likes to film up here, away from the noise and interruptions of jail life. No slamming doors, no inmates being moved from place to place. Our team is the senior team, and Jim is the head cameraperson. He usually gets what he wants and he wants to be tucked away in this room with its concrete walls, metal stools and phones. This is where we conduct our inmate interviews. For this to happen, twenty-six inmates must be moved, and their phone calls delayed. The officers tell us not to worry about this. These are inmates, and they do what they are told. 47

I’ve already spoken to Jim about Playboy, told him about the stack of ramen, the tattooed body, his clear intellect and his shot-caller status. When he walks in the room we are ready. Jim places him in front of the chipped white concrete wall. He lights him so there are shadows falling off his brown face. Playboy has almost five inches on me. Jim gets a small metal equipment case for me to stand on so Playboy can look directly at me. While these inmate interviews are only short blips on the show, I often use them to find out more, to dig beyond what the rap sheet and time they are facing. Sometimes this information helps when they talk to the teens. I coax them to share a story with the teens of a first arrest or a brother shot and killed. In Playboy’s case, there is this mixture of wonder and displeasure. I can imagine Playboy out of his orange jail scrubs in a Brooks Brother’s suit, yet he stands in front of me claiming PBGC, Playboy Gangster Crips, facing a double murder charge. “How did you become a gangster?” I ask. “You are obviously very intelligent.” Playboy laughs. “Yeah, I get that a lot. My mom’s side of the family is straight. You know. I have cousins and uncles who are accountants, school teachers, businessmen. My daddy’s side of the family is more street. I was drawn to that. It was exciting to me growing up. The gangsters, gamblers, pimps and drug dealers. The money and the power.” “Tell me about high school. Were you a good student?” “Straight As. Played football and basketball, but I was still gangbanging.” “Could you have gotten out?” He hesitates, then answers. 48

“I went to college. I thought I might be an engineer. Did two semesters. Then my girlfriend got pregnant. I didn’t know any other way to make money but to hustle. I left school and came back to take care of her and our baby.” “Was that one of the girls in the picture?” Playboy says yes. He tells me that he married his girlfriend. They have two daughters now. “I take care of my family. We live well. They are in Edmond, a suburb with excellent schools. My girls are good; they are provided for. I talk to them every day.” “What about your mother?” “She loves being a grandmother, but it didn’t turn out the way she wanted it to.” He softly laughs. “What are you looking at?” “If I get convicted, life, possibly without parole. I have a good lawyer, though. Best money can buy.” Playboy is twenty-eight years old, a few years older than my oldest son. He stands before me like a fallen warrior, captured behind enemy lines, hoping for the best, but knowing fate might not be on his side.

*********

The next day on the rec yard Playboy will be the gangster he is when we bring the teens in for the Reality Check program. He will confront Damon, a fifteen- year-old claiming Rollin 60s Crips, put his face up to his and make him look him in the eye, tell him he “got no love for Rolling 60s, just kill ’em.” Then he will make the boy get down on the ground and do push-ups. 49

Playboy will command him to say, “I’m not from 60s. I’m not going to gangbang anymore,” over and over again, as Damon pushes himself up and down on the cold concrete. Playboy will get in front of him, matching him push-up for push-up, making him swear that he will tell his mother when he leaves here, he will not gangbang anymore. “Say it again,” he will yell. “You’re not going to gangbang anymore.” 50

Baby Gangster

Precious aka Baby Gangster. Little bitty yellow-skinned, thin-boned, green-eyed girl child. Claiming Piru. Ride-and-die chick preaching to a group of girls brought in for the day to see the reality of life behind bars. “These niggahs ain't shit. They be whispering in your ear, don't give a fuck about you. Get you dancing on a pole, put you on the stroll. Believe dat, I seen it.” They listen and watch. It is a girl like Precious who can reach them. Make them think before they hit that blunt. Slam the front door. Hold a piece for some gangster, claiming they love them.

“Why are you here, little darling?” I ask. A juvenile locked in Oklahoma County Jail. Sharing a corner of a small cell with two other fallen angels. “Armed robbery, unauthorized use of a vehicle. Shit, I didn't even do the robbery. I was just sittin’ in the car. Missing my court date. So, I'm back here.”

She tilts her head away from my gaze, exposing three small little cornrows on the right side of her head. I imagine her mom telling her to sit still so she can put barrettes on the ends of her braids. A spunky little girl on the block, jumping double Dutch. Racing around the corner, always ready to fight. Teacher's pet because she's smart and cute, and maybe could be saved.

When did it happen, baby girl? When did the streets take you? When did Piru become more important than baby dolls, hop scotch and pillow fights? 51

Duct-Taped Love

Our love is not new love. It’s duct-taped love, Thirty years in the making. Pieced together with broken promises, Disappointments, accidental slights and mistakes. It’s resilient love. Stood against time, Raised babies, wiped noses, cried and fought over Birthday messes, forgotten anniversaries. Knows the meaning of “through sickness and health.” It’s sticky and stained. Duct-taped together against thoughts of walking out the door, Of workplace crushes and drunken nights of near mistakes, Of secret laughs shared with an almost lover and Hugs that last too long. Our love still stands. It is here waiting for me when I return. Our love doesn’t need to come to LAX for hello hugs at baggage claim. Our love takes the FlyAway bus. No breathless phone calls, promised passion, 52

Merely a simple text: Union Station in ten minutes. Our love knows you are always running late, Keeps me waiting, Left feeling not missed, unwelcomed. And you know soft humor and a gentle hi, honey, slowly melts my anger away. There is ritual to our love. We will drive through downtown onto the 110, head to Eagle Rock for Pho and shredded tofu spring rolls. You will order me a beer. Our love doesn’t have to chatter, fill space. Although sometimes I will Tell the stories I’ve heard, The pain witnessed in America. Our love can stand it. Our love can absorb it all, My rage, fear, and confusion. In this messy, ducted-taped-together love There is room for that. 53

And later After the bags are unpacked, Under the soft blue glow of Jimmy Kimmel Live, I will pull our love close to me, Wrap your arms tight around me, Holding on, holding on, holding on Until I fall asleep. 54

About This Life

“You ain’t about this life, Niggah!” “You bitch-ass niggah, you ain’t shit.” “I’ll kick your ass, Niggah, if you come in here.” “You can’t handle a real niggah, Niggah! You pussy ass niggah.” Niggah, niggah, niggah echoes like some ancient primordial scream off concrete walls.

We are in the holding cells of the St. Clair County Jail in Belleville, Illinois. Kristi and I are pushed against the walls outside of the camera’s view. Jim swings his camera around, away from the yelling inmates, and catches Officer McPeak shove the eight teens we are following closer to the bars. This is part show, part reality. Our other cameraman, Mac, is on the inmates. Young men hang from the cell bars; shirtless, dreadlocked boys showing off newly formed muscles from daily jail-house push-ups. Their arms and chests are tatted with dollar signs, baby mamas’ names and “R.I.P.” Several have a single teardrop inked in the corner of their eyes. Black ink on brown skin. Fourteen-year-old Jamal, a quiet, skinny boy who fights in school and is a chronic runaway, is taken closer to the caged men by McPeak. “Why you here, little niggah?” one inmate asks. He is older than the rest, looks to be in his late twenties. Jamal can hardly speak. His eyes dart around, looking at the other taunting men. “Look at me, Niggah! I asked you why you are here.” 55

Jamal whispers, “I don’t know.” Then McPeak answers for him. “He likes to fight, keeps getting suspended from school and can’t bring his skinny ass home at night.” “Bring his little ass closer to me,” the inmate snarls. Jamal’s face is pressed against the bars. His fists are balled up. This anger, this rage, his way of coping with any stress, is coming up. I whisper in my walkie for Jim to pan down. “Look at his hands,” I say. There is always this tension between capturing the action and hoping that something clicks for Jamal today. He’s one of those kids you root for. He is not a bad kid; he’s just fighting to make sense of a life that has boxed him in. His mother, Karen, has been off heroin for two years now, but those lost years still haunt Jamal.

********* Karen is one of those mothers who cries in her interview from the very start. Two days ago, we sat together in her small apartment. Karen told me that she’d recently moved from the projects in East St. Louis to this two-bedroom unit in a small complex in the town of Cahokia. “I had to get out of East St. Louis, girl," she said. “It’s so bad over there. I grew up there and it much worst now. My momma still stays over there. I had to get out for my kids.” The living room in her new apartment was sparsely furnished with a second-hand couch, two lamps and a scratched coffee table. She offered the crew and me instant coffee and small white sugar-covered donuts on a chipped 56

pink plate. I had a cup of coffee and half a donut. I’ve learned to take what is offered. We sat on her green, threadbare couch next to a two-paned window; she on one edge, me on the other. A soft morning light from the curtained window dappled her pretty, smooth face. Jim sat on a metal case behind me. He knew to start rolling without me asking. I looked back at him. He nodded, letting me know we were ready. Karen sighed and looked down when I asked when Jamal started to get in trouble. “The thing is, he was one of those perfect kids. Always doing everything right, you know. Kept his room cleaned, picked up his clothes, helped around the house. I used to call him my little man, you know. Never did think I was gonna have trouble with him.” I looked at her. Waited until she caught her breath before I asked, “Why do you think he changed?” I know her story. I have read the casting producer’s notes, pregnant at fifteen, but still graduated high school on time, was in community college studying to be an X-ray technician when she got hooked. She paused before she answered. “Look, I know I haven’t always been the best mother, but I love my kids. I had my troubles. I used smack for ten years on and off, but I never lost my kids. I kept them together. Probably depended on Jamal too much. But, he knows what I been through. When I was using sometimes I couldn’t pay the light bill or our phone got shut off, but I always kept me a little job.” In Jamal’s interview, he’d told a different story. He remembered dragging his mother into the shower, drenching her in cold water after finding her passed out on the toilet, a needle rolling on the white porcelain floor underneath her feet. 57

Even at seven he knew not to call the police, but called his auntie instead, so she could help revive her overdosed sister. He looked away, past me and the camera, when he talked about leaving a cold, dark apartment after his mother had been gone for two days, slipping his little sisters into their winter coats and boots and walking across the large grassless field that separated him from his grandmother’s apartment. He’d pulled the edges of his blue basketball shorts, rubbing his hands against his thighs, and told me, “She don’t do that anymore, though. That was a long time ago. She’s good now.” I believed him and I believed Karen as I sat there watching her struggling with the murky edges of her life, the deep regrets, trying to re-shape her past so she could survive the present. I’ve found there always seems to be one child that carries the scars and pain of the neglect. In this house, it was Jamal. Karen’s kids did seem well-cared for. There were several pictures drawn with crayon, stick figures with smiling faces held up by cheap plastic flat magnets on the refrigerator. One had “I love you, mommy” in huge purple letters, surrounded by yellow hearts. Along with the drawings were school papers and a certificate declaring one of her kids student of the month. Karen has two girls and another little boy, all younger than Jamal. She told me it was her last baby, the little boy, who finally got her clean. She never would use when she was pregnant, somehow had the will power to stay clean for months after, but with this one, her baby boy, she stayed determined, “worked the program,” she said. Later, off camera she told me, it became easier to not use with the kids’ father locked up. He’s doing twenty-five to life for a robbery that turned into a homicide. “We’d known each other since junior high,” she said. “Without him I didn’t have any protection out on the streets. I’m not one of those tough girls, you know. I’d rather just work, come home, make dinner and play with my kids.” The last question I ask the parents is always the same. “Why do you want your child to go to the jail program?” 58

Karen turned her head away from me and tried to swallow down the tears. I paused and then gently asked her again. “You have to look at me when you answer,” I said. These are the answers that always make it into the show. My job is to capture this moment, to not let it get lost in her emotion and pain, to not stop her tears, but capture them. I have to hold back, comfort just enough so we have it for television. She turned towards me; tears rimmed her eyes. “Jamal isn’t a bad kid, you know,” she said. “I want him to see what could happen to him if he don’t straighten up. His daddy’s in prison, two of his uncles are locked up. I don’t want him to pay for my mistakes. I want better for him. Jamal’s smart. He should be going to college, not to jail like so many of these other boys out here. I don’t want that for my baby.” The camera continued to roll, filming her eyes, desperate and confused by a future that seemed already carved out, beyond her control.

*********

I want it to work for Jamal as I watch McPeak push his body against the bars. At this point, after three years of witnessing so many teens go through a brutal day of these jail programs, I know they aren’t magical. All I can hope for is that perhaps a word spoken by an inmate, the sight of a dirty, foul, mustard- stained toilet, the rancid whiff of forty men locked up together twenty-three hours per day, will set something in motion for Jamal today. Tears are now streaming down Jamal’s thin brown face; his breathing is rapid and raspy like he’s trying to gasp for air after being submerged under water. Jim pans up from Jamal’s tight fists to his rolling tears and then to the 59

inmate’s face, daring Jamal to raise his arms, to release the anger clinched inside those two closed hands. “Why you balling up your fists?” the inmate asks. Then he whispers, his lips close to the metal bars. “I’d eat you for breakfast, Shorty. McPeak, put his skinny Black ass in here with me so I can make him my bitch.” Those words cause Jamal to raise his fists and just as quickly as his hands go up, McPeak lifts him off the floor, pushing him against the metal in-take counter. Jim swings to catch the action. He lifts the camera above his head to capture a high angle shot. I ease my way closer, switching the small knob on the IEB unit clipped to my belt until I can hear McPeak’s mic. His words are pointed and direct. “I take it as an act of aggression when you raise your fists.” McPeak is a large, towering man with a blond crew cut and muscles bulging out of the sleeves of his blue police shirt. He lifts Jamal off the floor with one hand. Jim pans down to sneakered feet dangling like a rag doll’s. “Un-ball your fucking hands before I cuff you.” This is how quickly things can change. We walk this tight rope with the officers. If they feel a teen is out of control or a threat to safety, they can shut us down, refuse to let a teen go through the program. I’ve worked with law enforcement for years, and often the line between criminal behavior and their tactics gets blurry for me. But, in here they are our protection. For these days that we film, we are embedded with them. We take them to lunch, hang out after the program, share conversations over beers and nachos. Without the officers, there is no show. I look around for Annette, the female officer who runs the Scared Straight program here at St. Clair. She is a kind of den mother; she plays soft against the 60 hard of the male officers. I find Annette over by a group of teens waiting to get fake mug shots taken. I tap her on the shoulder, pull her towards McPeak. She knows to go in, to defuse this situation, calm them both down.

*******

When we filmed with his mother, she’d laid out his suspension papers and referrals on the small wooden kitchen table. Jim panned the camera across the papers and then stepped behind me, pointing the camera over my shoulder and at Karen. “This boy’s always getting in trouble. Talks back to the teachers. Can’t keep his mouth closed. Thinks he’s the class clown.” Jamal had snuck out from the back of the apartment to watch us film his mother. He giggled as his mother showed us evidence of his bad behavior. Karen turned around, disappointment and anger sweeping over her face. She is a small woman, with a skinny, tight body. “That’s the problem right there, Jamal. You think this is funny.” She walked over to him, her hands placed on her hips. We continued to roll. Jim moved from behind me. We stood side by side, just away from the action. Jamal hung his head, said nothing. Karen turned to me. “See what I have to deal with? He just shuts down. Don’t want to talk.”

*********

“Get ready. Annette is coming in,” I whisper on the walkie to Jim as she makes her way over to where McPeak has Jamal suspended from the wall. She takes 61

Jamal aside, places her arm around his skinny shoulders, tells him to slow his breathing. “What’s the matter with you? Do you really think you can fight those guys in there?” she asks. Jamal shakes his head no. “Good, well that’s a start,” she says. Annette has always reminded me of a blend of Project Runaway host Tim Gunn and the over-the-top talk-show host Wendy Williams. She possesses Gunn’s Midwest solidness, can-do attitude and purity of heart combined with Williams’ cut-to-the-truth toughness, and bit of sass. She seems out of place here, with her perfectly manicured fingernails, fake eyelashes and wig styled into a ponytail that drapes to her mid-back. Yet, she has told me that she took down her share of inmates back in the day. “Don’t let the nails fool ya!” she said, laughing over a plate of Buffalo hot wings and ice tea. Annette started the Scared Straight program at the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Department She started out working in the jail and now is the administrative assistant to the Sheriff. She’s committed to keeping teens off the conveyor belt that runs from schoolhouse to jailhouse. Many of the officers, particularly the African-American ones, talk to me about this. How hard it is for them to see faces that look so similar to their nephews, sons and cousins come through the jail doors. Good kids gone bad under the pressures of gangs, drugs and lack of resources. Annette is one of those officers, trying to reach into the community to slow the flow to jail and save a few kids. Annette is talking to Jamal now. Her voice is low, mother-like. He has stopped shaking; silent tears still slowly roll down his brown cheeks. “I want you to stay close to me, okay?” she tells him. He mumbles a soft “yes.” I look around. Jim is pushed in a corner, out of Jamal’s eye-line, so he can capture this moment. 62

I know we’ll follow Jamal today as Annette navigates him through this program. He will definitely make the show. If he can accept her help, it will make a good story. If not, she will give him back to McPeak, let him handle Jamal with his force and that too will work for television, make the producers happy. Annette takes Jamal over to where the rest of the teens are sitting on a low narrow wooden bench. She hands him an orange jumpsuit, jail attire. “Put this on,” she says. Jamal obeys. He quietly slips the suit over his legs and pulls it up on his slender shoulders, takes his place next to the rest of the kids on the bench. He rubs his hands nervously along his thighs. McPeak comes over, looks at this group of teens about to enter the St. Clair County Jail. “Y’all look like inmates now. Don’t get lost or we might not find you and leave you in here,” he threatens. “Now get the fuck up. Walk in a single line and follow me.” The teens all stand up. Jamal is at the end of the line. Annette walks beside and softly whispers to him. “It’s going to be okay,” she says. I see Jamal ball up his hands, ready for battle as we all go through the heavy metal door and enter the brightly lit corridors of the jail. A part of me wants to rush to him, tell him to un-ball his fists, to calm down, don’t let McPeak see you, but my job is to observe and let it happen. In the beginning, I worried about this, how our presence, the cameras and mics, would impact the teens. Would we interfere with their experience? Prevent them from getting what they needed from their day in jail, impede their chance for transformation? Would they try to perform for the camera and get in more trouble? But, the teens told me, they forget we are there after a while; their time 63 in jail is so intense we disappear. I’ve stopped worrying and let what is going to happen, just happen. The first half of St. Clair’s Scared Straight program is a tour. The kids move along the jail’s green hallways from stop to stop. Jim takes the front, walking backwards with his camera to capture the teen faces. We move from the line-up room to the infirmary, the kitchen, and pass rows of cells with inmates yelling and threatening them about what will happen to them if they come here. There is a red line painted on the floor a few feet from the wall. This narrow pathway is where inmates walk when they are not locked up on the cell blocks. They are not free to wander down the middle of the hall, must always be next to the wall so they can be watched. The kids are instructed to stay in those lines. I look for Jamal. He is still in the back of the line. Annette is talking with another teen, a girl who likes to hang with gang members and smoke weed. We’ve stopped in front of the isolation unit. The teens are lined up against the wall, waiting for McPeak and his counterpart Officer Collins. The two men look the same, tall and muscled, their chests and arms seem ready at any moment to burst out of their uniforms. Only difference is Collins’ head is shaved and he’s Black. The isolation unit here is a long, dark hallway lined with small cells. Because the space is so tight, the officers take the kids down two at a time. One camera follows the kids, the other stays in the hallway with the waiting teens. Inmates are put in isolation for many reasons. Often it is because their charges are deemed too risky for them to be in general population or they have gotten so many violations the staff wants them off the jail floor. The young, the vulnerable and the mentally ill are often kept in isolation cells. At first, Jamal doesn’t want to go in, is frightened to enter the dreary hallway. But, no is not an option in jail, even if you are only here for a short visit. 64

Ultimate control over every individual is what this is about. It’s how the system runs. Collins is standing in front of him. Jamal’s narrow back is against the concrete wall. “You think you have a choice?” he yells. “That’s what’s wrong with you, you know. You think you can do what you want to do. That kind of thinking will wind you up in here.” Collins grabs Jamal by his arms and takes him alone down into isolation. I walkie Jim, giving him a heads-up. “Collins is coming in with Jamal.” There is a young man in isolation I want the teens to talk to. A gangbanger in for murder. He’s notorious on the streets, a young shot caller who is known to be ruthless. He’s never been allowed to go into general population because of his rep. I spoke with him a few days ago. He told me he had been in isolation for two years now. Spent his twenty-first birthday behind these bars. Then he spoke about an incident a few months back when he was talking to an inmate in the next cell. “He was a white boy from Bellevue, stabbed his girlfriend to death when he was high out of his mind on meth,” he told me. “He had a lot of anger issues, so he kept violating and being put in here. He couldn’t sleep at night, so we’d talk. He played Little League like I did when he was kid. Loved sports. One night I’m talking to him, telling him about this letter I got from my daughter. She’s just six, but makes my momma write down what she wants to say to me in a letter cuz I don’t want them bringing her up here to see me locked up in these oranges. So, I’m just talking to him and he doesn’t answer. I figure he must’ve fallen asleep. A few hours later the guards come in and find him hanging from the bars of his cell. I was talking to a dead man all that time.” “Tell the kids that story when we come to film in a few days,” I told him. 65

There’s a moment sometimes when you can see the change, the wheels turning. It’s often in the quiet times like this in a dark, cramped hallway away from the yelling and threats this happens Jamal listens to this young inmate talk about his life, leaving his family and his daughter behind. Then he tells him about his late-night conversation with another inmate, who was slowly strangling himself to death with his own tee shirt. I’ve snuck in behind Jim, pressed against a wall covered with peeling green paint, so I can watch Jamal, look into his face to see if perhaps this is his moment.

**********

When the day is over and the orange jumpsuits are removed, the teens can finally leave, return to their lives. Hopefully, they will think of this place when they make a decision to do something or go somewhere that could lead them back here. Jamal’s mother is in the lobby of the St. Clair Sheriffs Department with the rest of the parents waiting for their children. You can see the worry melt away in her face when she sees Jamal and pulls him in her arms. It is not easy to willingly give your son over to the police in hopes of altering his path, to admit you can’t help him yourself. Annette comes over to talk to Karen and hands her a business card. “Please call me,” she says. “If you need anything, I’m here.” After the jail programs, we interview each of the kids, find out what they thought and if anything they saw or heard will change their behavior. 66

The crew is tired, ready to go. They are busy setting up for the post interviews, fussing in our walkies, telling us to hurry up while Kristi and I talk to the parents, hug the kids, tell them how good they did.

I walk up to Jamal. “You ready, kid?” I say. “We have to do your interview.” He seems happy, relieved to be out of jail. “I’m ready,” he says. Before he leaves, he gives his mom a hug and then walks outside with me. 67

Around-the-Way Girl

I was that around-the-way girl raised up on Yates Avenue. My knees scraped and scarred on Newark, New Jersey’s hard concrete. Running in petal pushers. Playing until the street lights came on.

I was that around-the-way girl, raised on the block. Legs strong from kickball and tree climbing. Each summer morning, I couldn’t wait to eat my cereal and cinnamon toast, So I could knock on your front door.

We were girls on the block. Sweat poured down our faces as we ran, biked and twirled hula hoops around our thin waists. Loose strands of hair stuck out of the three braids our mothers carefully plaited tight to our heads. I was the one who insisted we dig to China with plastic spoons, small shovels and our bare hands. Searching for some exotic place beneath the dirt of our own backyards. 68

We spent long hot summer afternoons playing jacks on my front porch. I would break my grape Popsicle in half to share with you because I was an only child and my mom always had an extra dime for the ice cream man. I was that around-the-way girl who stuck my tongue out and grabbed your hand as we dashed away from boys with dirty hands wanting us to pull down our shorts and count to five so they could see our cotton panties. I was the first to yell “hey move out the way” when cars sped through our asphalt playground where we jumped double Dutch, singing the rhyme of rope and the beat of sneakered feet against the pavement. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety. One, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety. Two, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety and on and on until the next turn.

I was the one who climbed the high branches of the cherry tree, but was afraid of the Doberman at that yellow house on the corner because it snapped at me five years ago on the way to kindergarten. And you always walked next to the fence when we passed by even when the dog wasn’t there. We were girls on the block, running our small part of Newark when it was called New-Ark because the revolution was coming. And along Hawthorne Avenue young men wore dashikis and flirted with teenage girls in hot pants and big afros. We would giggle as we ran past them to the corner store, nickels held tight in our fists to buy lemon drops and Bazooka gum. We knew never go to the store up on Hawthorne past Seymour alone because the old Jewish guy who lived above the store sometimes would be outside. 69

He had asked me once to come upstairs so he could touch my barely blooming breasts. You were the only one I told and we made a pinky promise to never go past that store without each other.

We caught lightning bugs, holding our small hands glowing above our heads in the dark. We watched lady bugs crawl up thorny rose bush branches. Once we discovered a dead baby bird. You cried and I planned a funeral, burying the fragile creature in an empty Cracker Jack box stuffed with a pair of my lace- topped blue ankle socks. We held hands as we prayed for the bird’s soul and sang, “Yes me, Jesus loves me because the Bible tells me so.” After school, we shared thick Italian hot dogs topped with grilled peppers, potatoes and onions stuffed into oil-soaked pizza bread and sipped from the same can of 7Up soda. On Saturdays, we lay across my bed, the breeze floating the white curtains over our dangling feet, listening to WWRL’s Top Ten Soul Hits on my pink transistor radio. Sometimes, we would pretend we were the Supremes, perfecting the hand moves to “Stop in the Name of Love” and “You can’t hurry love, you just got to wait.”

You were always Diana Ross and I was your Supreme. 70

It was 1970 right before Christmas when my parents packed up our house in Newark and moved to Montclair. My father had moaned for years about “it getting bad in Newark.” After the riots and our house had been robbed three times, my teacher parents wanted a safer place with good schools for their only daughter. We sat on the floor, face to face, legs crossed. Pricked our tender fingers with a safety pin, pressing our tips together, pledging blood sisters for life. I left early one blue cold winter’s morning, watching the block disappear from the rear window of my parent’s red Chevy Impala. In Montclair, I learned there were different rules. No one cared how high I could climb or that I was the best double Dutch turner on the block. These girls with skin lighter than mine and straight permed hair only let a few of us darker girls in. I was the outsider, a ghetto girl with scarred legs and quick talk in my mouth. I wasn’t from around here. I bent and reshaped myself. Fell into Baldwin, discovered Nikki and found some solace in Sonia’s verses. I made myself into a smart girl and learned it could be just as powerful as having ash-red straight hair and skinny thighs. I wore peasant tops and wrote Love, Not War on my tainted jeans. I let my hair go natural and flirted with a long-haired white boy named Chris, who sat behind me in most of my classes. I had a dull ache in my heart for months after he was killed during our senior year in a car crash with two cheerleaders. You’d joked that I sounded like a white girl when you came for the weekend to visit me in my parents’ ranch suburban home with its wide yard and trees canopying the street, but still you could see me, knew I was that same girl from around the way, raised up on the block. 71

And you changed too. You had done it by now and said you like it. Showed me how to French kiss, twirling your tongue in my mouth. You decided to have a baby at sixteen, drop out of school, married that boy who my mother said seemed like he wasn’t quite right because he never took off his coat inside. Was he the one who first stuck the needle in your arm? I never knew, but you eventually left him when you found out he had touched one of your daughters. This broke your heart, you said. You kicked heroin, went to nursing school, only to find out you had AIDS. And I was now across the country in Los Angeles, living the life my parents had imagined, college-educated with a husband and baby boy, when you died one spring afternoon. I cried and wrote you a poem; my mother read to your daughters after your funeral. Sometimes I think of those hot summer days, our backs pressed against the cool grass in your backyard, as we shared a bottle of orange soda, singing along to my pink transistor radio. Me being the Supreme to your Diana Ross. We were around-the-way girls and that was enough. 72

Franklin

The news of another inner-city youth’s life cut tragically short by gun violence is a far-too-common occurrence. Most of us don’t pay attention to these anonymous teens. Frankly, it seems like their lives have little to do with our own. Their deaths are only reported on the local news as evidence of the growing violence in our urban centers, and then only briefly. Rarely do these deaths make it to the national circuit of endless twenty-four-hour news coverage, and almost never do they invade our social media space where we are busy liking pictures of cute dogs and taking quizzes to find out who we were in a past life. When seventeen-year-old Franklin Morris became the 205th homicide victim in Baltimore this year, one of those anonymous teens became a familiar face to me. Franklin was just fourteen years old when we filmed him in the summer of 2012. Our cameras followed him and several other teens as they went through the RESET program. This is a four-day-long program, so we spent six days with Franklin. First, filming him in his grandmother’s home—-just a block from where he was gunned down—and then for four days during the program. We came back to interview him a month later after the program. All the kids impact us. Some we remember and quite honestly, after five years, some we don’t. Franklin was one of those kids you remember for so many reasons. First, he was difficult to interview, refusing to be on camera, running away, but never too far and still engaging with us when the camera wasn’t on him. He was smart and challenged us with his own questions. We finally got our interview when I made his mother sit down next to him. The love between them was obvious. She was frightened for him and was willing to have a part of her life 73 played out on TV to get him some help. The one thing he wouldn’t talk about that day was his dad, who had been shot and killed just a few months earlier. Over the next few days, we got to know Franklin even better. He listened and cooperated with us, and with the folks who ran the RESET program. He liked to joke with the crew and was quick to smile, his round baby face blooming with deep-set dimples. Still he kept reminding us that he just “wanted to be outside” instead of home. In some ways, he knew that his insatiable attraction to the streets and “being about that life” would do him in. Like so many of the kids we filmed, Franklin had no exit strategy, at least not one he could hold on to. Yes, Franklin was special and now he is gone, far too soon. This hurts all of us who knew him for those brief few days, and the rest of us who lived with his footage, crafting his story for television. For me, what makes Franklin’s death even more tragic is we met so many Franklins while filming the show. Good, smart, kind, funny, talented, special teens who were victims of decades of a harsh, uneven justice system that divided families and destroyed communities, of poor schools, lack of resources, and just plain neglect by all of us in society. These kids become disposable to those outside of their communities, and they know it. One of the many things I learned from working on this show is that we can all do just a little more. So, I ask you to seek out an organization in your community, or one nationally, that works with teens. Donate time, money or both.