Maybe it has somethin to do with order, you know? Heroes are all about restorin order or bringing balance back to things. There’s a bad guy who’s messin everything up and the hero’s gotta get rid of the bad guy, but it’s like, what does a bad guy look like here?
Before I got put in solitary, there was a couple East Coast cats who wound up here (everybody’s from everywhere) and they was talkin about street justice. And I ain’t really know what that meant and they was talkin bout how if somebody did something wrong they’d have somethin happen to them. Everybody was talkin about some kid or another who got boo-bopped by the cops and street justice meant that “aight, you goin after the kids, you gon get got” and one of them was in here and is actually servin life becuz he capped a cop who he said had killed a little black kid and gotten away with it. And it’s like, over here anybody could get it. It just happen here. Like “Oh that cop boo-bopped cuz? That’s craaaazy. Oh they robbed the bank and the little girl AND her mama got boo-bopped? That’s craaaazy.” And you just go about your day. Street justice? They talkin bout some dude from the streets puttin all they beef to the side to go down to Florida to pop George Zimmerman. Niggas in the streets got bigger things to worry about, feel me?
But I been thinkin that when I get out, I might try to learn, you know? Cuz kids out here is smart! My ex-girlfriend’s son autistic, but you give that kid a math problem? He a genius. Long division. Algebra. Three seconds, he got the whole thing figured out. And they got a Youth Program at the YMCA in Long Beach. You can learn the piano, play pool, do gymnastics stuff. Get strong and smart.
It’s tough, tho, cuz you gotta ride the Blue Line to get there and niggas be gettin in trouble for not havin a ticket. That’s one of the first cases I caught. Ridin the train without a ticket. Then they give you a ticket that’s like $500 and I can’t pay that cuz I’m 12 years old. Where I’ma get the money to pay that off? So, boom, I got a warrant. And if you already on probation on some other shit, boom, straight to jail.
How I’ma be a hero if that’s part of my origin story?
But I like what you said about not bein a hero that destroyed things but a hero that saved things. That’s how I be feelin these days. It’s weird. I thought bein in the Box would make me more selfish, you know? Make me think more about myself and about survivin. But I seen what happened to dude across the hall and one of my first thoughts was “what could I have done to keep him from doin that,” you know?
Sometimes I be hearing things and seein things that ain’t there. Feelin them too. On the dead homie, I swear the other day I swear I musta transported myself to some other nigga hood I ain’t never been to before. I know it wasn’t no kinda memory or nothin because it was all strange and new and different.
Shoes dangling from power lines like some kinda ballet over this potholed street with cracks makin a spiderweb from one small crater to another, and they was gettin made bigger from the wheels of Camaros and Hondas and beat-to-shit Subarus, all these worndown four-doors takin kids to and from school or this local park with a green-and-orange jungle gym for a afternoon where they’ll learn how to ride bicycles and where they’ll fall while speeding down that hill by the parking lot and realize that the natural way to deal with pain is to cry. There was weeds poking out above freshly mowed grass where the men in tanktops was maintainin their yards, and there was these gates of green and white and yellow, with grasshoppers playing tag, in front of two-story brown and black brick project towers where extension cords tangle and hang, pulled by gravity into a slump around their middles, between windows, and people siphoning power, sharing it, experiencing the same electricity that sparks the small satellite dishes on top of certain roofs and the bootleg cable boxes in other windows, and some other ledge was taken by an air conditioner, and it was groanin beneath the weight of this oppressive heat that just sits on your shoulders and bends your knees and soaks your shirt and makes everything too heavy. And the kids was comin out with their magnifying glasses to aim the sun on the ants scurrying out from under their badass attentions, intentions, and a crow’s head is gettin all moldy in the middle of the yellow-striped street, its body lost somewhere in the weeds of a nearby hill where other kids had tossed it. Beer cans lost in the tall grass, half-eaten chicken with the meat smoldering at each end of the wing’s bones.
And I swear on the dead homie that I was there. It was just for a second, but I was out. I was out of my cell.
Maybe, next time, I could take someone else with me. If I can figure out how to do it again, maybe I can take you with me.
Dear Quincy—
I am sorry it has taken me so long to respond to your latest letter. What you described sounds magical. Through your words, I could feel the heat on my chest. And I could feel the beginnings of a breeze on my face. I could smell the grass. I could hear the sizzle of electricity and the hum of the air conditioners. You say that it is difficult to imagine yourself a hero, but perhaps Allah has gifted you with abilities beyond our comprehension.
I have been seeing things too, but I don’t know that it is because of any gifts.
The hunger strike has entered its second week, and everything hurts. My entire body sometimes feels as though it has been swallowed by fire. My throat is a desert as I have also refused water. There is talk of forced feeding. It is when jailers bind you to a chair and insert a tube through your nose into your throat and inject liquid nutrients so that you do not die. They say it is to protect us from ourselves, but I have heard from some of the older prisoners that it is the most painful thing a man can endure. Many have been left weeping and broken by the end of it. They say it lights your brain on fire, and the whole world explodes into whiteness. It is like dying, but there is no release.
I’m scared.
I don’t know what I’ll do if they come for me. I will try to pray if they ever put me in that chair, but I fear my thoughts will become too scattered for me to form the words. I fear I will already start crying before they begin.
I am sorry for how messy my writing has become. My hands have begun shaking. I don’t know if it is because I am afraid or because my body is breaking down.
There is no real way for me to communicate with the others. We have our secrets, but they are all coded messages with instructions. I have not seen my family in over six months. I don’t know who is alive and who is dead. I don’t know who has celebrated a birthday. I don’t know who has married. The world moves on outside this cell, and I feel like the only way for me to rejoin it is to die. And I’m scared. I wish that just once I could receive a message from another one of the hunger strikers that was not a set of instructions or a number for how many days we have been doing this for already. I wish I could receive from them a poem. Or a photograph.