A Bad Idea I'm About to Do (9 page)

When he wasn't impersonating breakfast meats, Knutsen figured out other ways to waste time, his favorite being
The
Shawshank Redemption
. That movie's long, and high school classes are short. We spent a good week watching a movie all of us had seen on TBS at least half a dozen times already. After the scene where Andy Dufresne escapes, Knutsen rewound the movie and had us rewatch the jailbreak ten times in a row. He never told us why. He just sighed each time with a far-off look in his eye.

Looking back, I realize that Knutsen must have seen a lot of himself in that moment. Andy Dufresne escaped Shawshank by using a rock to smash a hole in a pipe. He then climbed through a river of human shit and was finally free. I'm pretty sure that Knutsen saw his experience teaching at West Orange High as his own private prison. His retirement was his escape, and his final year with us was his slow crawl through a shit pipe.

And for this we loved him. But we also got the feeling that the school officials weren't quite as pleased. Many of us believed that they had in fact decided to make an example out of him; rather than allow him the opportunity to coast through his final year, one final victory lap half-heartedly incorporating his standard class routines, they made it clear that there would be no escaping so easily. Before he tasted freedom he would have to endure one final indignity. He would have to serve as the chaperone for that year's trip to the Scared Straight program.

“Well, kids,” he told us, “I won't be in class next Wednesday because I'm being forced to go to prison. Prison has a lot to do with law. Would anyone like to volunteer and come along?” I looked around. No one raised their hands.

Except me. I was shocked. Was no one else interested in seeing the inside of a jail? For about 80 percent of the people in the class, this was probably the only time they'd have that opportunity. I needed to go. Both for curiosity's sake and for the sake
of getting the reaction I got upon raising my hand. Classmates nervously glanced in my direction. It brought joy to my soul seeing that volunteering for a trip to the bowels of incarceration freaked them out—it meant they were reevaluating me. That made me happy, even if they now thought I was a little bit crazy. Willfully entering the New Jersey penal system was one of the worst ideas I'd had in a while. That's why I liked it.

Later that week, I slipped a piece of paper to my mom while we ate dinner.

“Class trip,” I said, trying to get the process done without her actually reading the permission slip. “Need you to sign this.”

“Rahway State Prison?” she asked. “What the hell is this?”

“Scared Straight,” I said. “I'm volunteering to go.”

“Are you out of your mind?” my mother asked.

“Let him go,” my father said. “Maybe it'll do him some good.”

Before we go any further, I think you should know something. At the time, this is what I looked like, roughly:

I say “roughly” because I'd also exacerbated my obvious and numerous social problems by dyeing my hair bright red. So not only was I a seventeen-year-old who looked like an eleven-year-old, but my hair was a ludicrously vibrant scarlet. Which is good,
because I think we'd all agree that I don't look feminine enough in that picture.

If this story were fictional, it would probably be titled “Encyclopedia Brown and a Bus Full of Thugs Visit a State Prison.” Unfortunately, it was my real life.

We weren't going to just any prison. We were visiting Rahway State. This is the jail where the original Scared Straight film was produced. That film has since been condemned for encouraging wholly ineffective behavior that was deemed borderline child abuse. For a guy looking to see the genuinely fucked-up parts of life, it was perfect.

I sat at the front of the bus with Knutsen. He stared out the window, ignoring us, undoubtedly dreaming of finding his personal Red and moving to a beach where they could build wooden boats. I realized that we had a lot in common. Here was a mild-mannered guy just like me, glasses and all. He felt stuck and wanted to get out, just like I did. The only difference was that he had put up with this for decades. Knutsen was exactly the type of guy I was expected to turn into. His visible frustrations were the future I feared. The part of me that climbed onto that bus was the crazy side that would not accept such a fate.

The kids in the back shouted things such as “Yo Knutsen! Call ahead and tell them I'm coming! Warn those prisoners they need to be scared of me!” and the simpler but just as effective “I ain't scared of shit, so fuck this.” But I knew better. While I would go home to a relatively normal life that afternoon, their problems ran deeper. After all, they didn't volunteer for the trip. From Kenward, a badass rumored to have thrown an Indian dwarf down a staircase, to Frank the loudmouthed football player who thought the rules didn't apply to him, this was the murderer's row of the West Orange High class of '98. But on the
bus, I sensed a different side of all of them. Their verbal sparring might have sounded tough, but there was a subtext of desperation and fear. They seemed sad and insecure outside the context of a high school.

When we pulled up to Rahway State, the bluster and posturing stopped. The prison was huge, surrounded by guard towers and fences and covered in barbed wire. Quiet fell over the bus as we all asked the same unspoken question:
If it's this bad outside, what must it be like inside?

Fear punched me in the gut. I was in over my head. I considered asking Knutsen if I could stay on the bus, but before I could, three surly prison guards leapt onboard.

“Everyone sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up!” they screamed. It was clear that these men had no qualms about murdering any of us. “I dare someone to talk! Give me a reason to spill some brains on the ground, I'd fucking love that!”

A shocked silence spread among the crowd and we sat down.

“Now stand the fuck up!” We leapt from our seats. They had us under control immediately; we sat when they told us, we stood when they told us. As they herded us into a concrete pen and made us stand in a single-file line, I understood that they were treating us as badly as any prisoner. Though I tried to stay stoic and calm, I shook like a Parkinson's patient who has recently been given tragic news. Knutsen was nowhere to be found. The only other noncriminal from my school was gone. I was on my own.

The guards ran up and down the line, screaming at us. I winced, shocked that they were treating me exactly the same as everyone else. I had figured that someone would call ahead and tell them,
“Hey, go all out on these guys, except there's one volunteer, so take it easy on him. You'll know him when you see him—he's the one who wears sweater vests and looks like he's really into
Morrissey.”
No one had placed that call. I was bearing the brunt of things as much as anyone else.

When the kid in front of me noticed my trembling, he whispered, “Stay still, merigon.” For years, I thought that “merigon” was a derogatory way to call someone an American, like “gringo.” Only recently did I learn that it's the Spanish word for “faggot.”

The guards walked the line, holding up Polaroids of inmates who'd committed suicide. Mostly they'd hanged themselves with bed sheets, but one particularly gruesome image showed a man who had sharpened a broomstick and impaled it through his own neck.

Well
, I thought to myself,
I guess this is real life
.

My shaking grew. I breathed in heavy gasps, sweating as the guards brought us into the general-population area. A group of prisoners folded laundry inside a cage. When they saw us they dropped the clothes and sheets and ran to the bars, screaming.

I first realized they were shouting at me personally when one guy remained conspicuously silent and made eye contact with me. As our eyes locked he shouted just loudly enough for me to hear it: “I'm gonna fuck you, Red. I'm gonna fuck you.”

I almost shit my pants with fear. My hope was that the eventual loss of my virginity would be a tender and loving affair. If this man had his way it would be violent, bloody, and nonconsensual. I'd never felt so unprotected. And seeing the rage in the eyes of this unapologetic rapist dwarfed any anger I'd ever known. We'd been on the prison grounds less than five minutes and I'd already learned what I wanted to know: I wasn't tough, no one in my school was tough, no one I would ever meet again for the rest of my life would be tough in comparison to these men. I wanted to go home.

We went on a whirlwind tour of the prison, every step scarier than the last. The guards locked us inside a small cell with a prisoner.
We stood crammed against each other in one corner as the man laughed and stared us down.

“Anybody want to try any fucking funny shit?” he asked. No one budged. “Didn't think so,” he grinned.

We were shuffled into a dark auditorium and told to sit on our knees with our hands under our butts. The cavernous room was black save for the light on the stage.

“Stay right where you are, and don't put your hands anywhere but under your assholes,” the guards said. “We're leaving. But don't worry—the lifers are on their way.”

The lifers were the group of murderers at the heart of Scared Straight. Before we'd left on this trip, Knutsen had made it very clear that these were very dangerous men.

“Keep in mind the lifers will yell at you,” he'd said on the bus, “but they can't touch you. If they do, the guards will take them out. Hard. Because it will be bad.”

My mouth went dry.

“The reason they can't touch you is because they once put a kid in the hospital,” he continued. “Not someone from our school. Thank God. It sounds like the sort of thing you wouldn't want to see with your own eyes.”

There wasn't a single faker amongst the lifers; these were authentic killers—murderers who had killed and gone to prison, and who would one day die in prison.

The door burst open. A dozen of the hardest-looking men I've ever seen walked in and glared at us. They made eye contact, intimidating us even before speaking.

I glanced out of the corner of my eye at my classmates. Looking down the line, I saw bully after bully, each more formidable than the last. At the end of the line was Kenward. I'd never seen him look anything but aggressive. He was as scared as I was.

Finally, one of the inmates stepped forward and talked.

He seemed reasonable enough. I mean, he was still scary as shit, but within the bounds of reason. “You kids think you're bad, I guess,” he began. “Well, let me tell you something. Crime is a road I've walked down. And it's a dark road.”

With no provocation he turned into a cross between the Incredible Hulk and the Ultimate Warrior. “AND YOU DON'T WANT TO
WALK
DOWN THAT
ROAD
!” He shouted in a low guttural roar. His eyes bulged out of his head like Beetlejuice, and when he reared back and flexed his muscles, veins popped out of his arms and neck. He was easily the scariest person I'd ever seen. If it wasn't so clearly legit, his scariness would have been cartoonish. I was tempted to laugh, but was smart enough not to tempt this man's ire.

Frank the loudmouthed jock didn't demonstrate the same restraint. He smirked. After all the day's events, I didn't know why he thought this was a good idea. Frank wasn't the worst guy, just kind of a punk. He was a good-looking mixed-race athlete who saw himself as the shit and got in trouble trying to prove it. As soon as he smirked, the inmate was in his face. “Why you laughing, motherfucker? You think we boys?” he asked. “Why, 'cause you black? You ain't black, you half a nigga!”

Frank burst into tears. Seeing this football player break down so easily—a guy who could probably bench-press me—made a lightbulb go off in my brain: toughness is a defense mechanism, and all of us are just trying to make it through the day. It was the first time I'd ever felt a bond with Frank: we both had the ability to cry like little bitches.

A kid none of us recognized was led in to join us halfway through the endless parade of screaming murderers. His parents had brought him. He didn't go to our school and was four or five years younger than us. He had a bad look about him.

Apparently the prisoners had been told to go hard on this kid. They got in his face, threatened him physically, and actually pushed him around. As he sobbed, a few of them lifted him up and another prisoner tore his sneakers from his feet. He flung the shoes into the auditorium's seats. We watched the sneakers disappear into total darkness and listened to them land with a clatter among the chairs.

Well this is it
, I thought to myself.
You're finally gonna see someone get killed.

They put the kid back down on the ground and he collapsed, a crying mess.