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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Although it takes a true story from a newspaper as its starting point (see the note at the end), it uses fictional characters and events in the development of the narrative, and all characters appearing in the story are the writer's invention. Where the names of real people appear in the narrative the characters that represent them are entirely fictional, and no disrespect is intended toward the real people in the use of their names or reputations. The events have been substantially altered for dramatic effect and places and names changed to respect the rights of the people involved. The institution called James Brand is fictional, although there are many like it across the country. One warning: there is a rape scene in the story, and like all the rapes I know of it's not even vaguely erotic. Thanks: I want to say thanks to Hiromi and Akiko and Bill for all the help with 70's culture, and Bob for the education about 70's music -- here I was thinking it was mostly 'Hotel California' and Kiss! I don't think I could have even attempted to write this without their help. I must also give special thanks to Geoff for his invaluable assistance as editor. He provided focus at times it was desperately needed, and he understands grammar. :) All rights reserved by the author, who can be contacted at [email protected]. Copyright © 2002. Becky *** Wild Horses A novel, based on a true story. by Rebecca A. Chapter One. Maybe times have changed enough that my story couldn't happen today. I read in the newspaper a few weeks ago that the officials at one of the state juvenile facilities are under investigation for abuse right now. That would never have happened when I was a kid. They just got away with murder then. Okay, maybe not quite murder, but they sure got away with screwing with people's lives. Perhaps the way I acted made things worse, but I was young and confused and I think they took advantage of that. That makes me sound like I'm some kind of victim. I'm no victim. I've never been totally happy about what happened to me all those years ago, but I'm not dragging the memories of it around like some ball and chain. Life was not as bleak as that first paragraph suggests. Let me begin the conventional way, with childhood: When I was twelve there were only two things to be in Cabrini Green if you were a white kid. You could be a Blue or you could be a Thin. Once you hit puberty -- if you wanted to be sociable -- you had to be a member of a group, either the Blues or the Thins. If you were a boy you were one or the other. If you were a girl you hung out with one or the other. The Blues were so named because they wore blue sweaters or t-shirts under their jackets. The boys had skinhead haircuts, wore big, thick boots and lots of leather. The girls had long hair, and wore anything short and revealing. The Thins wore the same kind of clothes as the Blues, but both the boys and the girls had androgynous David Bowie-style haircuts, short all over except for at the back. Thin girls almost always bleached their hair, and wore tight knitted tops and miniskirts with thick platform shoes. The Blues liked to hang out on trains and at stations, for some reason I never figured out. The Thins hung out in cafes, pool joints and bowling alleys. I don't know where the name "Thin" came from, but there were inevitably jokes about a few overweight members. Even in the seventies the rest of the Lincoln Park area was better than Cabrini, and so school was a kind of jumble of races and classes. Of course there were kids who weren't Blues or Thins, who dressed like 'The Brady Bunch' and did their homework and answered all the teacher's questions and are probably stockbrokers today, but the kids from the projects knew that these kids were really robots, not kids at all. Okay, so we were a minority, but we knew we were the only people who really understood the world. Being a Thin or a Blue wasn't just a matter of joining a gang. It was a style thing, sure, and there were gangs, but most kids dressed a certain way first and then gradually drifted into one of the informal social groups. From there you could become a gang member, or not. The group my older brother Danny was in was the Division Thins, named for the location of the cafe they mostly hung out at on Division Street. I thought Danny was pretty cool. He was four years older than I was, and he was a tough kid. All the older boys I knew were -- it was just one of those things that went with where we lived -- but I think Danny got that way just from standing up to our old man. He and Dad would have big arguments about anything, even when Dad was sober. When Dad was drunk the arguments got violent, and he'd hit out at Danny. Danny just took it -- he didn't fight back. After a year of that Dad changed his target. He would come home stinking drunk nine times out of ten, and beat the crap out of Mom before striking out at anyone else who was around. Mom would pick herself up along with whatever remained of dinner, and try to pretend he hadn't done anything. Most of the time when this happened Danny and I would try to get out of the apartment. We'd sit on the front step of the building and wait for the noise to stop. After a while Danny wouldn't even hang around to listen to Dad hit her, he lit out for the Division Cafe and hung out with some of the older kids. He started to dress like they did, which made Dad angry. "Damned faggot kid," he'd say, even though there was nothing about Danny you could think of as faggot-like. Dad just didn't like the long hair at the back that ran over Danny's collar. It was hard to figure out why, this was the 1970's and most guys were wearing their hair long. Danny's was short everywhere else except the back. I don't know, my father was a strange man. I liked to be at home when Dad wasn't around. Mom was great. Even Dad thought she was great at those rare times he was sober. That was what made it so awful when he hit her. When he wasn't around she was smart and funny and caring, and she was someone I could really talk to. I couldn't talk to Dad; no-one could. As I got older I noticed she smiled less and less, and after a while she never smiled when Dad was around. I couldn't say I blamed her. I liked to try to make her smile, by bringing her home things I found in the street and making up stories about how they'd got there. They were silly stories, about stuff like bottle tops and the people who'd thrown them on the ground as they were on their way to a ball game where the guy whose girlfriend threw away the bottle top caught the ball on the home run that decided the game, or the one legged man who had lost the sock I found outside the supermarket and then won the lottery. Mom seemed to like to hear my stories, I guess because they were always optimistic, and after a while, when things got worse with Dad, she would always ask me to tell her something about my day whenever I got home. I was too young to know it at the time, but I think she felt almost imprisoned in the house, increasingly isolated from the world around her. I've read that victims of domestic violence get like that. Although she was frequently bruised from Dad's beatings, Mom was a very beautiful woman. She had creamy smooth skin, and perfect, delicate features, which made the bruising even more obvious. Although she had no money to buy clothes she always managed to dress in a way that was more stylish than the other women in the neighborhood, and I was very proud of her for that. It wasn't so much the clothes she wore as the way she wore them. Mom liked music, too. She never liked television very much, but she and I used to listen to the radio a lot when I was young. She especially liked English pop music, and on the rare occasions when something had made her especially happy she would do her housework while she sang Dusty Springfield songs. When I was a little kid I'd follow her around the house singing along with her. I was probably totally off-key, but she never complained. I loved the sound of her voice, which was rich and throaty and sweet at the same time. When I was really lucky she'd sing me little songs she made up herself. Although I know she loved Danny I think I was her favorite. When he hit his teen years Danny got right in with the other Thins. They spent most nights hanging out together, just walking around the neighborhood or hanging out playing video games, which had only just been invented. Sometimes they'd see a Blue gang, and a fight would ensue. Danny hated the Blues. "Fuckin' Nazis," he'd say. A couple of times he came home with bruises, black eyes or minor wounds from fights he'd been in. Once he got a broken arm. He had it in a cast for months, because he kept using it as a weapon in fights and the arm wouldn't heal properly. Danny got into occasional trouble with the police, too. It was never anything really serious, but the cops were convinced that all the Thins were troublemakers. It usually sent Dad into a frenzy whenever they bought Danny home, or called for Dad to go down to the precinct to get him. Usually Dad would hit him worse than the cops. I don't know why, really. Everyone in the projects had some kind of police record by the time they were eighteen. Heck, even I had one, from a fight I was in with Danny and from another time I stole the washing off Mrs. Bronowski's line on a dare. The washing incident had been embarrassing, because the police report detailed everything that had been taken, "brassieres, other lingerie, two dresses, one pair of shorts," and the cop had read it out really loudly when my Dad came to get me. Anyway, Danny's scrapes with the cops seemed pretty run-of- the-mill to me. But the more he hung out with the Thins the more the cops picked on him, and the worse our old man got as a result. The first item on my record occurred when I got arrested with Danny one night when I was twelve. We were on our way home from the cafe, and two Blues jumped us. Danny beat up both of them with only a little help from me. I wasn't much of a fighter, since I was very small for my age, and anyway I really didn't like all that aggressive macho crap anyway. But I provided enough distraction to one kid so that Danny could take out the other one. Danny was still pounding on my opponent while I held the limp form of the first one when a cruiser went by. We tried to run through some people's yards to get away but the cops got us in the next street. Dad was really pissed when he came down to get us out, but I think he was secretly pleased that Danny beat the shit out of the other guys. We got charged with assault because the father of one of the kids Danny beat up wanted to push the issue, but all we got was stern lectures from the judge and a caution on our records. No time in juve or anything like that. When I was thirteen Danny got a girlfriend, Maria, a chunky dark Italian girl with a great smile. He never brought her home but I saw them on the street together a lot. He wasn't allowed to see her for about two months after she cut her hair into a Thins' style look that made her father freak, but they figured out ways to sneak around together anyway. I thought she was dynamite. Big breasts, big dark eyes -- she could have shaved her head entirely and it would have been okay with me. Danny kept a couple of pairs of Maria's panties in the table between our two single beds in the room we shared. He used to take them out some nights and tell me stories about sex, and what girls were like. I hadn't gone through puberty yet, so I didn't understand a lot of what he said, but it excited me all the same. A couple of times when he wasn't around I snuck a look at the panties myself. They were kind of cute, not like the big, sexless cotton things Mom wore. Touching them got me kind of excited, in a new way I didn't understand. Even though Danny told me all this stuff about sex, I figured he was still a virgin. He had Maria's panties, but I don't think she had put out for him yet. She was a Catholic girl, even if she was kind of rebellious, and Danny complained a couple of times about how "the fucking Pope" had made all these girls "think they were gonna fucking die if they opened their legs." All the stuff he told me about girls had a kind of abstract quality. I never questioned his authority on the matter, but I wondered how far Maria let him go. Maybe he'd felt her up, I thought. He had quite a few porno magazines, which he hid in a space in the wall in back of our closet. Most of them were just Playboys, but some others I thought were kind of disturbing, even though I didn't understand everything that was in them. There were a couple which had pictures of women being whipped and chained, which I didn't like much. One that disturbed me a lot had photos with a chick who had a johnson. I couldn't figure that out. She was kind of pretty, but there was this enormous schlong between her legs. Danny used to laugh at me when he showed me that one, because he said it turned me on. I knew it didn't. But it did make me confused. That seemed to provoke Danny into bringing home more of that kind of thing to taunt me with. He developed a big collection of really weird stuff. "That gets you off, huh Mickey?" he'd say, just to get me riled. All the hanging out each evening with Maria and the Thins meant Danny never did any homework, so he started failing at school, and he quit school before he graduated and took a job pumping gas over in the next suburb. Imagine that -- this was before self serve, even. It was a shitty job, but he had a little money and that made him an important member of the group. I saw him, and Maria, quite a lot after school. They used to hang out at the Cafe together, early, before all the others would get there. I liked Maria. She was the only one of Danny's friends who didn't tease me about my height, or the fact that my voice hadn't broken yet. And she made me laugh. She was really good at doing imitations of Danny when he wasn't looking, and that cracked me up. "You and I both know Danny better than he does," she used to say to me conspiratorially. She'd wink at me and smile whenever Danny was big-noting himself to his friends. I think I was almost in love with her. Danny told me a couple of times to "watch it," and said if I was older he'd have to take me out the back and whup me for the way he caught me looking at her, but I think he misunderstood. I thought Maria was wonderful, but I wasn't into sex properly yet and I wasn't really thinking of her that way. She fascinated me in a new way. Sometimes I caught myself staring at her, or she caught me. I was amazed by everything about her, the way she moved, the way different parts of her body moved when she walked, the way she smiled, the soft, lilting quality of her voice even when she was coming down hard on Danny. I watched her, almost obsessively, every chance I got. I thought she was a goddess. Danny dropping out of school made my old man even worse. He blamed Mom instead of Danny, and he started drinking more, something I would never have thought possible. Because Danny wasn't home much Dad would lay into me if I was around. He used to get mad at me because Mom liked me so much. "Momma's boy," he'd say as he lit into me. Like Danny, I just took it. He was a lot bigger than I was, and the one time I raised my hand to hit him back he just laughed at me, which was worse than being hit. I wasn't very good at making friends, so I never joined the Division Thins even though I hung out at the cafe some nights. Danny had let me know he wasn't too keen on having his little brother around anyway. I cut my hair the same way, short at the front and long at the back, but mostly I just kept to myself, sitting outside on the front steps of our house to do my homework, or walking around Harrison Park on my own. I didn't like a few of the other Thins anyway. Danny's best friend in the group was this thuggish Italian guy called Tony. He and I instantly disliked one another. He kept calling me "Pussy," even in front of Danny, and I was annoyed that Danny didn't stick up for me. I spat in Tony's food a couple of times when he wasn't looking, and made faces at him a few times, but I soon got bored with that. The funny thing was I didn't think Tony thought much of Danny either, and he was always staring at Maria in a really creepy way. I stared at Maria all the time, but this was different. Couldn't Danny see that? I think my dislike of Tony was the first time I was had a visceral response to someone's personality. If Tony had a soul it would have been bitter, dark, oily. He gave me the chills in a part of me I hadn't noticed before. I didn't make many other friends, either. I was small and kind of wimpy back then, and so I didn't get to hang with the jocks at school, and I didn't pay enough attention to schoolwork to be with the brains. Even though I got a Thins haircut, because I'm a redhead with wavy hair and really pale skin I never looked at all tough. I was part of that great amorphous mass that makes up the majority of the school population, the ones that aren't real smart or cool or good looking. The ones that just are. The truth was, I guess I really didn't fit in well with anybody, even the other 'average' kids. I always felt like there was some barrier between me and everyone else in the world, like nobody could see the real me. Maybe part of it was that people expected me to be more like Danny, but I think another reason was that I didn't feel very comfortable with trusting people. Our house wasn't a good environment for that sort of thing. It's kind of hard to explain, but I think that it was because I could sense little things about people that seemed to make me self-conscious around them, or made me distrust them. About the only person I trusted was my Mom. I didn't make many friends, but I didn't make too many enemies except for Tony. After my father hit my Mom badly enough to put her in hospital, Danny stopped coming home. He wouldn't tell me where he was staying, but he said he wouldn't be in the same house with Dad, because Danny thought he might kill Dad next time he hit Mom. With Danny and Mom away I took to staying out of the house almost entirely myself. I spent most of the time just walking around, and I took some blankets a couple of times and slept on a bench in the park a couple of nights. I don't know if Dad knew, or if he did know whether he even cared. He was usually drunk anyway. After Danny had been gone a week or so I went to look for him at work one afternoon, just to talk. His boss told me he'd been fired a few days earlier, for stealing from the register. I was devastated. Not Danny, I thought, Danny would never steal. He did lots of other things that were questionable, but he wasn't a thief. I knew that in my soul, but I could tell that his Boss honestly believed Danny had taken the money. I went down to the Division Cafe, but none of the Thins were there both times I called in except Tony and an idiot guy called Pete who hung around with him all the time. I asked Tony if he'd seen Danny, or Maria. Tony just told me to fuck off. It was a day later, while I was out in the park late one night, that I came upon something terrible. I was taking a short cut back home, through the bushes on the West side of the park, when I heard the sounds of the bushes rustling and saw a figure sprint away toward the road. As I saw the person running, I knew that there was bad shit going down. That's probably not really profound, in retrospect, but I knew, I could feel before I looked, that there was something inside the bushes that was unspeakable. Try as I might, I couldn't help myself from walking over to them. Inside the bushes I could hear a strange sound, kind of like a person gargling mouthwash or something. I parted the branches, and in a small clearing between the bushes there was a girl laying on her back, moving slightly, something dark and fluid on her chest and arms. I pushed through, and saw her skirt had been ripped off, and was caught on a nearby branch, and her panties were lying on the ground a few feet away. I looked at her crotch, first, and was amazed to see the hair there. Then she gurgled again, and I dragged my eyes away and realized, slowly, like it was some kind of movie I didn't understand too well... Her throat had been cut. The dark stuff all over her was blood, and it was still spurting from the side of her neck. On the ground beside her neck was a knife, also covered in what I assumed was blood. Without thinking I picked it up, then, repulsed, threw it into the bushes. Then I froze. There is no way to describe how I felt when I saw the girl's face. It was Maria. Even today, twenty-five years later, I remember that awful feeling as I looked into those deep dark eyes and the bottom fell out of my stomach. I collapsed to my knees, grasped her head, and tried to lift it up to support her. Blood continued to gush, all over me, into my lap. I tried to staunch it with my hands, but it seemed to come right out of her no matter what I did. Despite my first impressions, this wasn't like seeing people die on TV. It was awful. Paralyzing. I was shocked and desperate. I didn't think to call out for help or anything -- no- one else would be in the park this time of night anyway and besides I was preoccupied with trying to stop the blood from coming out. I tried to plug the wound with my handkerchief, and it stopped the spurting but the blood still seemed to be coming out from somewhere. After a few moments, I really don't know how long it was, her twitches became less frequent and eventually she stopped moving. I held her head in my lap for a while longer, then, sickened, I stood up and forced my way back out of the bushes. I staggered away a few steps and then started to run. I ran, and ran. I didn't run toward home. I just ran away from Maria, away from the park, away from everything. It didn't make any sense, but nothing that night made any sense. I figured afterward that I ran about eighteen blocks that night without stopping. A car almost hit me once when I crossed the street. I was still running blindly through the shopping strip when someone grabbed my shoulders and threw me to the concrete sidewalk. I was dazed for a few seconds, then tried to stand before a boot came down on my back and held me there. "Whoa, kid. Hold it right there." He dragged me to my feet, and threw me up against the side of a car. "Okay, kid, what's up?" he said, as he began to pat me down. "Jeeesus," he said softly as he saw the full extent of the blood all over me. "Are you all right?" I wanted to say something but my mouth didn't want to work, and I was still winded from when he had stood on my back. I could only shake my head, which he thought meant I was hurt, and I still couldn't talk. I tried to turn around to look at him, but he slapped my head straight ahead, so I stared into the flick-pulse of the red strobe stuck on the roof of the car. He pushed my back again, then leant in the window next to me and reached for something. I could hear him talking on the radio, but I can't remember what he said. The events of that night are still kind of hazy for me. Eventually I found myself in a small green-painted room with a table and two chairs. I was there on my own for a while. Then a couple of guys came in and asked me questions. I answered them as well as I could, but I can't remember what I said. Later on I found out that I didn't say anything they could make any sense of. After they left a long time passed. I'm not sure how long. Then a woman came in and asked me some more questions. After she left I couldn't keep my eyes open any more, and I lay down on the linoleum floor and fell asleep. I woke up in a strange bed. The room was gray, and there was nothing in it except the bed I was laying on. There were bars on the window. A quick inventory showed I was sleeping in my jockeys and t-shirt. Eventually I got up. My other clothes were not in the room, and I discovered the door was locked from the outside. So I went and sat on the edge of the bed and waited. After a while, I don't know how long, a large woman came in, gave me some gray pants to wear and a gray shirt, and waited while I put them on. She didn't say anything when I asked her where I was, or who she was, so I dressed and she led me down a long, bare corridor, past lots of closed doors, to a little room like the one I had been in the night before, except this one was gray instead of green. I sat on the chair she indicated, and then waited. About a dozen people came and talked to me that day. I didn't understand a lot of what they said because they used pretty big words a lot. These days I'm okay at understanding most things, in fact for a while people used to joke about me and call me "the brain," I guess because after that day I discovered that if you don't know what's going on people can screw you. But back then when I was fourteen I wasn't real good at understanding older people. The first person to see me was a fat old guy. I didn't know how old, except he was older than my Dad which meant very old. He reminded me of that Ed guy on Johnny Carson, only he wasn't funny. He told me he was my lawyer. He asked me a couple of questions about Maria, and about what had happened. I told him as clearly as I could remember, but it was hard. I had to try to stop shaking when I thought of having her head in my lap like that, when she went still. After a few minutes the old guy got up and went into the corridor, then came back with a thin blonde haired woman who said she was a social worker. I liked her; she seemed reassuring. She mostly just sat there while the lawyer talked, and she held my hand when I started shaking again. After we'd been talking for a while a couple of other guys came in. They said they were cops, which figured after what had happened to Maria. I found them really hard to understand, because they were very formal and cold, but the guy who said he was my lawyer said it was okay to talk to them so I told them most of what had happened. Then they dropped a bombshell on me. Danny was dead, too. They'd found his body in the river last night. He had died around the same time as Maria, maybe a little before, drowned. I stopped listening to everything else they said, and after a while the cops gave up and left. I was stunned. Danny dead. I couldn't imagine it. I knew Maria was dead, I had held her in my arms as she died, but I couldn't believe Danny was dead. Finally the lawyer left, and they took me back to the room with the bed in it. I lay there for hours, crying softly. I knew tough guys didn't cry, but Danny had been the tough guy, not me. Late in the afternoon the social worker came in and asked me if I wanted to see my Dad and I said yes. About an hour later I was taken back to the interview room (I knew what it was called now) and a few minutes later Dad came in. He walked in with the social worker and a guy in some kind of gray uniform. I stood up. I could see straight away that Dad was pissed with me, even though he seemed sober. Probably, I thought at the time, it was because he'd been called away from work. He walked straight up to me and hit me in the face. Blam! Right in the nose. "Fucking pervert!" he screamed at me. Then he hit me again, in the side of the head and the chest, and after I fell to the floor he started kicking me until the guy in the uniform dragged him away. The social worker gave me some tissues to stem the blood from my nose. I never saw my father again. Over the next couple of days I spent most of the time in the room I had woken up in, except for when people wanted to talk to me, when they led me back down to the interview room. A doctor came and examined me on the second day, then on the fifth day a woman who said she was a psychologist came to see me and asked me a lot of questions about my childhood. The social worker asked a lot of questions, too, but seemed friendlier than the others. I think that maybe she was the only one who believed my story. She told me that the police thought I had murdered Maria. I was dumfounded. She said it was because I had handled the knife, and I had Maria's blood all over me, and because people thought I was jealous of Danny. My Dad believed the cops. Now that Danny was dead, my Dad had had some kind of change of heart, and it was like Danny was the perfect son -- and I was the faggot creep who was jealous. I don't know, I still can't figure my Dad out, even now. They couldn't pin Danny's murder on me because they didn't have any evidence, but they wanted to get me for Maria. The police had found Danny's stash of porno magazines in the back of the closet, and were convinced that since Danny no longer lived there they had to be mine. I think that's what my Dad told them. The whole thing sickened me. I couldn't believe it. How could they believe I could have killed anyone? I was fourteen years old for chrissakes! Years afterward, while I was doing a covert review of my case history, I discovered there were several odd things about the two deaths. For one thing, Maria had not been sexually assaulted, though her dress and panties were ripped off her. Whoever had done it had probably lost control of themselves, or she had struggled too much, and they had killed her before getting what they wanted from her. I often wondered whether that figure I saw running away was Danny. I've always figured it was more likely Tony. I figure Tony for killing Danny, too, though one of my lawyer friends once said he thought it was more likely suicide. I didn't believe Danny would ever kill himself. I still don't. In really dark moments I wonder if it wasn't my Dad who did it all. The figure running from the bushes didn't look like him, but... I try not to think those kinds of thoughts. The next couple of days are still a blur. I was taken to juvenile court, where my lawyer said I was pleading not guilty, and I was taken back to the place they'd been holding me to wait a few weeks until the hearing. My Mom came to visit me, still bruised on her face from where Dad had beaten her. She cried a lot, and spoke with my lawyer and the social worker, but she was too emotional to talk to me much. Mostly she just tried to hug me, and cried. My social worker, who I discovered was called Angela, brought me some stuff to read, and though at first I didn't feel like it the boredom of being locked in the small featureless room soon got the better of me and I read everything she brought me avidly. The books all featured middle-class kids complaining about how tough they had it. One was about this kid called Holden who wanted to be some kind of wheatfield hero, saving his kid sister from going over a cliff. I liked it even though I didn't understand all of it. Angela also brought me some magazines about car racing, which depressed me. Danny had always liked fast cars. He liked to help Tyrone, a guy who lived down the block, polish his Camaro every Sunday. On the cover of one of the magazines was a car just like Tyrone's, only more tricked-up. I kept thinking Danny would have enjoyed the magazine more than I did. Eventually it was time for my next appearance in juvenile court. My Mom was present, but my Dad didn't show. My lawyer didn't want me to say anything. The police went on endlessly, and I could sense that they were making me out to be some kind of weirdo even though I didn't understand all the stuff the lawyers and cops said. A lot of it was about the blood on me and my fingerprints on the knife. But they also mentioned the time I had been arrested with Danny, and the time I was caught stealing the laundry. They made it sound like I was violent, and like I had a fetish for women's underwear or something. They kept mentioning Maria's underwear in my room and all the porno magazines there. Angela, my social worker, made a brief speech to the judge, saying that I had a difficult home life and appeared to be traumatized by the events, and that she thought that if I got probation she could put me in a foster home. My Mom burst into tears when she heard this. As Angela sat down again I looked at the judge. I didn't think she had made a very big impression after all the stuff the cops had said. Finally the sentence was handed down. I wasn't going to jail, exactly. It was a juvenile correctional facility. Same thing, really, except they dress it up with fancy words to make it sound like it's not so bad. Let me tell you, I've seen the insides of prisons, and they don't get a lot worse than 'The James Brand Juvenile Correctional Facility'. *** Chapter Two. The first few days at Brand were pretty bad. I knew lots of tough kids from the neighborhood back home, but there were some kids inside that made them look tame. Part of my problem was that, having only just turned 14, I was one of the youngest kids inside. Most of them were 16 or older. I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, but Brand was small enough that people came looking for me, the new kid, anyway. The first day I was there a slick looking kid, sleazy way beyond his 18 years, stopped me after lunch to tell me Nick Pangianis wanted to see me. I didn't know what that meant, but I was soon to find out. After I was inducted into the center they did the usual things; cutting my hair ultra-short and checking me for lice and diseases and so on. Then I got read a lecture about the rules and regulations, most of which just passed in one ear and out the other. They gave me some clothes to wear, the same standard issue everyone else got: a couple of white t-shirts, some pale blue cotton shirts and some dark blue pants along with socks and underwear. They all had 'Illinois Department of Corrections' printed on them. I'd seen movies about guys being inducted into the army, and it seemed a lot like that. Then they led me inside. I was put in a two-bed room with a guy about five years older than me, Steve Hammond. He was pretty tall, well over six feet, and he was really solid. He looked like he worked out a lot. Despite his imposing size he didn't seem so bad, really, at least not compared with the other guys there. He was civilized enough to explain how he thought things would work, the rules of the cell as it were, but it was clear he wasn't going to accept any argument from me. After a brusque opening to our relationship, I decided I like him. He came from Mississippi, and had a broad accent and a careful way with his words that relaxed me immediately. I'd only ever heard someone talk that way on TV before, never in real life, and I kind of liked it. The room was nothing special, at least not for a place that I was going to be spending so much time in. Two of the walls were almost completely covered with posters, mostly of either the Rolling Stones or of topless girls. Steve was evidently a Stones fan. The pictures of the girls were about as risque as you could get while they were still wearing panties. Totally nude pictures were forbidden. Steve motioned to the bottom bunk and I put the blanket the center had given me on it. The rooms at Brand weren't totally like a prison cell. They had the same concrete-block walls, but there were no bars to the corridor, only solid steel doors that could be locked from the outside. The windows had bars and mesh on them, and were too high for me to see much out of. Not that there was much to see around the facility, just institutional buildings and a flat landscape stretching off into the distance. There weren't any trees. Inside, the walls were painted in a pale gray, and there were no decorations other than those the inmates put up themselves. Inmates were allowed to have a few personal possessions. Most opted for a radio as the main thing, and I noticed Steve was lucky enough to have a guitar and a cassette recorder. Apart from that the place was pretty spartan. The regime was pretty prison-like, though. We were subject to random inspections, including in the middle of the night, and we were confined to our rooms except for showers, meals, exercise time and classes or workshop. Every so often Grieves and the teachers would dream up some activities that were supposed to keep our morale up, which everybody took part in just to get out of their rooms. Meals were taken in the mess (they used a lot of military terms at Brand) and there was a strict pecking order that governed where you got to sit. Nobody knew me those first couple of days and so I sat on my own, at a table at the front of the room. Otherwise we saw a lot of the same concrete block walls. I asked Steve what it meant that Nick Pangianis was looking for me and Steve told me somewhat cryptically to watch out for myself in the showers, that all new boys got an initiation. I figured Nick must be a fag. That's strange, I thought -- at school nobody was afraid of fags. They were the ones who got beaten up. I was never really comfortable showering with anyone back then, mostly because of my size. I was kind of short, still around 5'4", and pretty thin and weedy. The truth is, I hadn't hit puberty yet, really. Oh, I got a boner every now and again like every guy, but I was still mostly hairless, and when I did jerk off nothing came out yet. I still pretty much looked like a kid, too. Most of the others at school, and all the guys at Brand, were men, or at least well on the way to being men. At school I had always tried to be last one in the showers after gym, just so the other guys wouldn't notice me so much. That was my general strategy in life -- just kind of fade into the background and try not to be noticed. It worked most of my life up until then. Especially since people were always expecting me to be like Danny, loud and brash and confident. If they knew Danny they always got a big surprise when they met me. None of the guys at Brand knew Danny, of course, so they didn't have any preconceptions of me. I had decided when I was going in that I would just play things cool, at least until I found out how the place worked. But that second day, in the showers, I was new, and I suppose I was an object of curiosity. There was no possibility of a later shower -- I was in there with others like it or not. So I tried to act cool, like I wasn't afraid. Mostly I just tried not to make eye contact. I had a very bad feeling about what was going through the heads of a couple of the boys in there, and I didn't need to look at them to confirm my suspicions. I turned to the wall, and raised my face to the stream from the shower. That was probably a mistake, but then again they'd probably have grabbed me whether I was looking or not. Two guys wrapped my arms behind my back and marched me to the far side of the shower area, near the benches were a half-dozen guys were dressing. They stood me behind a guy who was toweling his near-shaved head briskly, his back to us. This was Nick Pangianis, although I didn't know it right away. He turned around and smiled at me, as though he wanted to put me at ease. The two goons holding my arms didn't ease up on their grip, though. "Hey, Red," Nick said, in a deep voice that gave me shivers. Nick was a big guy, maybe bigger than Steve was, and he looked much too old to be in a juvenile facility. He sure didn't look like a fag, I thought to myself. He was a mean-looking son of a bitch, and his thin smile couldn't hide that. That first time he confronted me, I could see him look me over thoroughly as I stood there naked, and he smirked, as though finding me wanting. Then the goons thrust me to my knees, and Nick advanced upon me as he began to unwrap the towel around his waist. I was young, but I wasn't all that naive, and I knew what was coming. I struggled, breaking my right arm free momentarily and striking out blindly as Nick dropped his towel and I saw his cock rising toward me. That was evidently something he hadn't expected, and he doubled over in pain. Immediately I was hit from behind, and my face was ground into the concrete floor. I felt a foot strike me in the side, and then another, and another, and finally another blow to the back of my head before I lost consciousness. I woke up in the infirmary. Nobody asked me what had happened, how it was that I'd suddenly had my nose all banged up or my ribs so badly bruised. I decided not to volunteer anything. That had always been the code in our neighborhood. Never Say Anything. The doctor was a creep, I decided after he had seen me. Not just ugly and grumpy, but kind of sleazy, too. I didn't like the way he looked at me, or touched me, when he examined the bruises, and despite my trepidation about going back out with the rest of the guys I was relieved when they sent me back to my room after a few days. "You said no, huh?" Steve said to me when I showed up at the door to our room. I tried to smile, but it hurt. I told him I didn't want to talk about it, so we lay on our respective bunks for an hour or so in silence. It was Sunday evening, and there were no set activities or chores. After a while, out of curiosity, I started asking Steve about himself, and he answered most of them, out of boredom I guess. The question everyone asks inside when he first meets you is "what did you do?" Kind of like the way people on the outside ask what kind of job you have soon after they meet you, to get a feel for the kind of person you are. It's taken for granted most times that everyone inside is innocent, even though almost nobody is. It's almost a joke. "I'm in here for murdering my parents, but I didn't do it," a mousy high- voiced Polish kid told me while we were in the queue for dinner. Steve was a little different. He was inside because he had stolen a car one night, and been involved in a high-speed chase with the cops in which another kid had been killed, and he'd been convicted of second degree murder as a result. He freely admitted that he'd done it, and that he was sorry he'd done it. I told him my story, and that I was innocent, but I suppose he received this information with the same grain of salt everyone inside gives 'innocence'. I was pleased Steve was prepared to talk with me. It was unusual for an older guy like him to waste time with a kid like me, and I appreciated the gesture of friendship. "You're okay, Mike," he said. He didn't need to add "for a kid" -- I knew that was part of it, but I liked the company anyway. We talked for most of the evening, and I came to like him more and more. Something in him, maybe the way he paused to make a point or the twist to his mouth when he was going to say something funny, reminded me of Danny. I was going to tell him that before I went to sleep that night, but I thought it would probably sound kind of sappy, so I shut up. Next day the incident in the showers was repeated. Nick's goons grabbed me, and dragged me to him. Once again, he tried to get me to suck his cock. I refused again, and so I ate concrete a second time. "You got guts, kid" I heard him say as feet went into my back and ribs. "You're fuckin' stupid, but you got guts." After they let me out of the infirmary that time I went back to my room. I didn't say anything, just went to my bunk and lay down. After a few minutes I heard Steve sigh and fold the magazine he was reading, then saw him swing down to take a look at me. "Turn over," he said. I stayed put, until I felt his hand at my shoulder, beginning to turn me anyway. I rolled over to face him. He whistled. "I don't know if your face can take too much more of this." "We'll see," I said, with as much conviction as I could muster. "He only does it once," Steve said. "Huh?" "He does it to everyone, once. Then he mostly leaves you alone. It's not a sex thing really. He has some kid Cary takes care of him that way. It's just his way of letting you know he owns this place." "He doesn't own me," I said, and rolled over again. "Suit yourself," Steve said, climbing back onto his bunk. "But he's gonna keep trying until you let him do it, or until you can beat him and his goons in a fight. You're an okay looking kid, Mike, you don't want to screw that up for life." I lay awake for hours after lights out that night, thinking about what Steve had said. Perhaps if I did it, just the once ... but visions of Danny taunted me. I knew what he would have said. It would be better to be dead than to suck some guy's cock. 'Is that true, Danny?' I wondered. I thought of Steve. Had he sucked Nick's cock, just for peace? I was going to ask him, but something made me hold back. He had been nice to me, before, and that was the first time anyone at Brand had been nice to me. And I had a good feeling about Steve. I didn't know whether to trust my feelings, but there was something about him that was -- good. We had talked for hours again that evening, and I had felt a real bond with him. It was almost the same bond I had felt with Danny. No matter what terrible things either Steve or Danny had done, they both felt like guys I could trust. Next morning I was going to skip showers, but Gonzales, the guard, came looking for me and told me in no uncertain terms to get my butt in there. As I walked down the corridor I was growing increasingly nervous, but to my surprise Gonzales followed me in to the showers. In the showers nothing untoward happened. There was only the sound of the running water. I could see Nick's goons on the other side of the room, though there was no sign of Pangianis. They eyed me the whole time I was in the shower, and when one of them thought Gonzales wasn't looking he made a motion with his finger across his larynx, like he was going to cut my throat. I finished my shower in peace, dressed, and went back to my cell escorted by Gonzales. "Thanks," I said to him as we walked back, but he just grunted, as though he could have cared less what happened to me. At the door to my room he spoke for the first time since the shower. "Downstairs in five minutes for breakfast." Steve walked with me downstairs, but separated from me as soon as we hit the mess hall. "No offence, but I have a regular place," he said. I knew what he meant from my experience during the first couple of days at Brand. All the guys were crowded around nineteen of the tables, with no seats spare. The one table at the front of the room I had eaten at last time was vacant except for a fat kid who kept his eyes on his food. I got in the food line, picked up a tray and was served what passed for breakfast, and began to make my way back to the table with the fat kid. I knew I would have to earn a place with anyone else, and I hadn't had a chance to do that, yet. I sat and ate breakfast, deliberately avoiding eye contact with anyone else. I had a really bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, but I wasn't sure if it was just the unfamiliarity of the place or any real threat, so I just focused on the tray in front of me. So rigorously was I focusing on my food that I didn't notice that half the hall had emptied out, and I was startled when I noticed two guys had sat down beside me. Looking up and to my left I could see one of them was Pangianis. On the other side was Sonny, a stoned-looking thug of his. The fat kid hurriedly stood up and nervously took his tray over to the clean-up area. I flicked my eyes toward the serving area but noticed there was no-one there, and the guard who had been at the door was occupied talking to three guys about something, his back to me. Pangianis observed me scoping the room, and smiled. I did not like his smile. "Wanna do it here?" he said quietly. Just by reflex, because the idea was so ridiculous, I said "huh?" "You heard me, fuck. Get under the table." "Fuck you," I said. I waited for the thump, but none came. Instead, he and his goon grabbed my arms. I was going to cry out, to attract the guard, but the goon grabbed my mouth as well, and it came out muffled. Then I felt a strange sensation on my left wrist, a sharp pain that burned, and then felt it again. Wrestling myself around to the right, I tried to bite the goon's arm. I felt the same sensation on my right wrist. What was going on? Were they trying to tie me up? It didn't make any sense. Eventually I got one of the goon's fingers inside my mouth, and I bit hard. Really hard. He let go of my arm in surprise, and took his hand from my mouth. Immediately I lashed out at him with my right hand. It was hard to get at him, since he was on my right, but I hit him a glancing blow across the face and he overturned his chair. I was aware as I hit him that something was wrong with my arm, and that Pangianis had let go of me as well, but it didn't stop me. I lashed out with my leg, kicking, then spun round to hit out at my main oppressor. Pangianis was gone. He was at least a table length away. Then I saw the guard coming for me, and I ran toward Pangianis, wanting to hurt him before the guard could break us apart. Something was wrong with me, I thought dimly as I started to move. I felt weak, and my arms were wet. Especially the left one. I have a dim memory of looking down, seeing my left hand covered in blood, before I passed out within a few feet of Nick Pangianis. I woke up in a room that wasn't part of the Brand facility. I knew that right away. For a start, it was cleaner, and also better finished. All the walls at Brand were roughly rendered brick, and these looked like plaster, or at least good quality concrete. There was a more obvious guide to where I was: the IV dripping into my left arm. I lay in bed for a while before I remembered the events that had led up to where I was. I extracted my left arm from under the quilt and saw that my wrist was wrapped in a bandage, and further up the arm from the bandage was a leather cuff and a chain to the side of the bed. My right arm was bandaged and restrained in the same way. My face felt kind of numb, but I discovered that I couldn't bring my hands up far enough to touch it, since the straps restrained my arms. Running my tongue over my lips I felt a bandage above my upper lip. I was still exploring my circumstances when a nurse came in to the room. "Oh, you're awake," she said. "Uh huh," I nodded, trying to sit up. It was impossible because I couldn't move my arms far enough back in the bed. "Can you help me sit up?" "You have to stay in the bed until the doctor says you can move," she said, but she helped tilt the bed up so I was more or less sitting. I tried to engage her in conversation about where I was, and what had happened, but she said, in a friendly way, that I'd have to wait until the doctor talked to me. "And Mr. Grieves," she said. I found out who Mr. Grieves was immediately after she left. A tall, graying and conservatively dressed man walked in to the room. He looked like he was about to come to the side of the bed, but then he seemed to change his mind and stood at the foot instead. I was glad I was sitting up so I could see him properly. "Good afternoon, Michael. I was hoping to meet you in somewhat different circumstances." His voice was polished and resonant, like Charlton Heston's. I nodded hello, unsure about what he was talking about, but not getting a good feeling from him. "I'm John Grieves, Michael. I run James Brand," he said, sensing my confusion. "Ordinarily I would have met with you on your second day with us, but you have had a rather, ah, unorthodox few days with us so far, wouldn't you say?" "I wouldn't know," I said. "I like my boys to say 'Sir'," Mr. Grieves said firmly. I thought about bucking this, but in the circumstances -- what with hospital and feeling strange and all -- I decided against it. "Yes sir" "That's good, Michael. Am I going to have a problem with you?" "Pardon?" "I am, it seems." "Pardon, sir," I corrected myself. "I was just wondering whether I was going to have a problem with you." His eyes flicked over me as though he was appraising livestock. "No, sir" "Well, you're off to a bad start so far," he said. "We don't often get boys for sex offences, let alone boys your age, and --" "-- I didn't --" "-- I don't like people interrupting me" he continued, his mood souring. "We've never had a boy involved in as many fights as you in such a short time. You've spent more time in the infirmary than you have out of it so far." I said nothing. There didn't seem any point in explaining that I had nothing to do with Maria's death. Nor that I had never had any sexual experience at all. Mr. Grieves had made his mind up about me from reading my file. Mr. Grieves seemed to weigh my silence and find it wanting. "I can't allow this behavior at James Brand," he said gravely. "You must realize that. It disrupts the discipline of the other boys." He raised his hand as though to forestall another interruption from me. "Now, I don't care what the reasons for your fighting were, or whether you were actually trying to kill yourself ... " What? It took me a moment to realize he was talking about the cuts Pangianis had made to my wrists. Shit. How could anyone be stupid enough to think I had been trying to kill myself? I was flabbergasted! "... But I take a very dim view of sharpened knives and such like," he went on. "Your possession of such an implement is, on its own, sufficient for me to keep you away from the other boys, and keep you out of the mess hall. You'll eat alone, with plastic implements." "Sir?" I said timidly. "What?" he said impatiently. "I didn't have a knife, sir. I didn't cut myself, someone else cut me." "We found a knife beneath the table you had been sitting at. Quite expertly sharpened, I must admit. Who do you think cut you?" Once again I couldn't say. The code of the neighborhood. Never tell. Not even on Pangianis. "What about the others?" "Taylor saw you attack two other boys before you went down, he didn't know why," Grieves said. "They said they were trying to stop you hurting yourself" "It was my first time in the mess hall, sir. Where would I have gotten the knife?" He considered this for a few seconds. "You could have had it in the infirmary. It would probably be easier to have obtained it there. In any case, it doesn't excuse your behavior in the preceding days." His mood was even uglier, now that I had questioned his version of events. I was screwed. I saw that. He had made up his mind about me, and changing it was going to take action from me, not words. If I could ever change it. I looked down at my hands, glumly. "You weren't feeling remorseful about what you did to that girl?" Grieves continued. "I didn't do anything to her." I knew this was the wrong thing to say but there was no way I was ever going to admit to something as hideous as that. "You are clearly a very, very disturbed boy, Michael. On the basis of your offence alone I would have referred you to the counselor, but since this attempted suicide and your consistent fighting and aggressive behavior I'm afraid I'll also be referring you to Dr. Blaha for regular therapy. You will see him every week, starting tomorrow." Almost as an aside, Grieves changed his tone and said lightly "Quite apart from anything else, it reflects badly upon us to have you look like this. Imagine if you had a visitor, what they would think to see you look this way! Of course, I've forbidden you any visitors for the next three months, as punishment for this." And then he was gone. I lay back in the bed and thought about where my life had gone to in the past three months. To shit, I thought. My life was shit. The next day I met Dr Blaha for the first time. He swept into the room soon after breakfast, accompanied by a nurse. "Untie him immediately," he said brusquely to her, and my spirits improved. At last, someone who thought I was a human being. But then he turned to me, and flipped the file he had in his hand briskly through the air, as though he was about to toss it away. "You have given a lot of people cause to dislike you," he said to me severely as the nurse undid the chain on my right arm. He had a peculiar accent I couldn't put a name to. It wasn't difficult to understand, but I figured it was something European. "This ..." He motioned to the file. "This is shocking, I must say. At your age. I have had some troublesome adolescents referred to me before, but never one as young as you with such a record, Michael." The nurse released my other arm and I rubbed my face lightly. I had a bandage across my nose and on my forehead. It seemed to cover most of my face. Dr. Blaha seemed distracted by my actions. "No need to worry about that, I'm sure Dr. Singh did a good job on it." He turned to the nurse then and lowered his voice. "Would you give us some privacy, please?" The nurse left and he continued in a lower voice. "You don't need to worry about the bandage, the surgeon just fixed your nose and stitched up the cut above your eye. I'm assured you won't notice anything after a few weeks." He lowered the bed slightly and pulled over a chair so we were more or less level as he continued. "I am Dr. Blaha, I believe Mr. Grieves has spoken to you about me?" I nodded, and he went on. "I am a psychiatrist, Michael, and I have been asked by Mr. Grieves to talk with you to see what is at the heart of your problems." I didn't say anything, just waited for him to continue. He talked for a while about his expectations for me, and then warned me against any uncooperative behavior. "You must understand, Michael, that although you are only in a juvenile facility, I have the legal authority to do anything I feel is necessary to rehabilitate you. Anything. Are you clear on that?" Again, I didn't say anything, just nodded. I had pretty much made up my mind that he was going to be no help at all. Untying my hands had just been a gesture to try to win my confidence -- this guy was a part of the system that had put me here. He went on for a long time after that, asking me lots of questions about my life, about how I felt about girls, lots of other stuff about how I felt about life in general and about my feelings toward suicide. I tried to explain that I had not been suicidal, and I almost told him about Pangianis, but there was something about him that I didn't trust, and I held back. After Dr. Blaha left I went back to total boredom in the hospital room. The next day they transferred me back to the infirmary at Brand, and then a few days after that removed the bandages. They gave me a mirror, and I could see that although my nose and eyes were still very swollen they looked like they would heal up without any scars. I was given my own room at Brand, and -- as Mr. Grieves had said -- kept entirely separate from everyone else. There were three rooms in the isolation section but I never saw anyone else in the corridors in the time I was there, or heard anyone but the guards. I showered alone in a single stall shower in the block, and had my meals brought to me in my room. There was a small outside space -- hardly a courtyard, more like the bottom of an air shaft -- at the end of the corridor of the isolation section where I was allowed to spend an hour a day in the open air, although sunshine never seemed to hit the ground there. Even though I had only been at Brand a few days, I kind of missed Steve. He had helped me fit in with a lot of things there and I missed having someone to talk with to fill in the long days. Grieves came to see me my first day out of the infirmary and explained that I would be excluded from the general activities the other boys were involved in, but that he would expect me to do some reading so I could keep up with studies when I went back into the general population at Brand. The days were very long and boring, so I started reading some of the books, just out of desperation. I had been neither a good or bad student when at school -- good because I was reasonably smart I guess, but bad because I didn't much care about it. Studying was what the Brady Bunch crowd did. But I got through the books Grieves left pretty easily. They were just novels and a couple of history books. There were some textbooks but I didn't pay any attention to those. I saw Dr. Blaha a few times in a small room off the infirmary, and he got me to tell him a lot of details about my past and my family. He was a strange man. There was something about him that made me uneasy, although he was always polite with me. At the end of the second session I had with him I felt somehow dirty, almost like there was something about him that was rubbing off on me. Perhaps it was the way he looked at me. I felt like he was looking past me to someone who wasn't there, even when he looked me straight in the eyes. Each visit with Dr. Blaha lasted about an hour; one or two ran longer. Otherwise I only got to see the guards when they woke me, escorted me to the small shower block in the isolation wing, or brought me my meals. Each week they sprung a random inspection on me, looking through my room for drugs or something I guess. I also saw the guards when I got an hour in the yard by myself every day, but otherwise it was just me, in that room, by myself. A few weeks after I was released from hospital one of the guards came to fetch me to see Grieves. Maybe he had relented, I thought, and I was going to be allowed to rejoin the rest of the guys. The idea gave me mixed emotions. I was lonely, but I still hadn't worked out a way to deal with Pangianis. It was Dr. Blaha who opened the door to the office. Grieves was sitting at his desk, but he stood as soon as the guard and I came in. The atmosphere in the office was bad, gloomy, and I knew immediately that Grieves hadn't summoned me there to tell me everything was going to be okay. "I have bad news," Grieves began. I don't remember too much past that point. Dr. Blaha said later that it was because of stress or something. Grieves went on to tell me that my mother was dead, that my father had finally hit her one too many times and she had died in the ambulance on the way to hospital. Dr. Blaha said later that my father's rages had become worse after Danny had died and I was locked up. Whatever the truth was, I did not take it well. Though I don't remember it, I've been told I didn't say anything, just stood there with my head hung for about two minutes, and then I went berserk, rampaging across Grieves' office, heading straight for him and destroying everything on his desk until the guard was able to restrain me. I had dim memories of it later, when I lay in my room, but I think that was mostly because I felt sore from the bruises from where the guard had hit me. As I rubbed my aching arm I thought again of Mom, and of the way she used to be, when she was happy, singing along to Dusty Springfield. I knew tough guys didn't cry, but I couldn't help it then, and I blubbered for at least an hour while I thought of how life should have been for her. Dr. Blaha came to my room an hour or two later, and wanted to talk to me, but I was still in turmoil from what had happened. I was over my tears, but I wanted to find my Dad, and hurt him, badly. I hadn't felt this way since Maria had been killed, and now there was the same small dark hard thing at the bottom of my soul that wanted to explode outward in retribution for this injustice. My mom had deserved a better life. I refused to say a word, and eventually, after a small, ill-tempered lecture from Blaha about needing to cooperate, he left. I was called out on the following Monday to see Dr. Blaha again. We got off to a bad start with the session. I had decided I would start talking to him, but instead of talking about Mom now he wanted to ask me questions about Maria and what had happened that night, and wouldn't believe me when I said I was innocent. Instead, he got off into a rage about how we could never have a relationship of trust so long as I could not be truthful, and that it was just my screwed-up relationship with sex and women that wa