Little Boy Blue (18 page)

The inevitable came on the eighth morning.
Despite his age, the juvenile officers of the Los Angeles Police Department
took no chances. “He might only be eleven years old,” one said,
“but we know he can pull a trigger. He wasn’t in the nuthouse for
being a good boy.”
So eight uniformed officers in four
cars came as backup the morning of the arrest.
The uniformed
policemen
surrounded the garages; then the two plainclothes
officers moved in.

A kick at the mattress opened Alex’s
eyes. Morning sunlight from the open door sparkled on the drawn revolvers
pointed at him.

“Freeze,
kid…
keep
your hands in sight.”

Alex was startled, too surprised to move. He
could see the pistols but not the faces beneath the wide hat brims. For the
first time in his young life he knew the fear of death. “Put the guns
away,” he said. “I won’t run.”

A kick was his answer. Aimed blind at the
blanket it hit his kneecap, making him wince.

“Get up on your knees, hands behind
your back.”

As he followed the order, the same
policeman
who had kicked him now grabbed his hair and shoved
his head down. “Keep ‘em behind you,” the man said.

The handcuffs were snapped on, and he was
pulled to his feet and pushed toward the door. When he stepped out, blinking in
the sunlight, he was surprised to find a small crowd gathered at the back door
of the apartment building, and the uniformed officers coming from their
positions. Even Alex could read the surprise on the faces in the crowd when an
eleven-year-old appeared. A voice rang clear in the quiet: “It’s a
little boy.”

Things moved too swiftly for deep feelings to
seep into Alex, but he felt a mild, bizarre satisfaction at being the center of
attention. He met the curious stares with a defiant sweep of his eyes.

Two uniformed officers drove him to the
fringe of downtown Los Angeles, to a two-story yellow building that was an
emergency receiving hospital and the Georgia Street Juvenile Jail. The jail
occupied the second floor; it was for the temporary detention of juveniles.
The law allowed police to hold suspects seventy-two hours for investigation,
during which a complaint had to be filed or the person released. A writ of
habeas corpus could set bail before that, of course, but the poor can seldom
afford the lawyer and the bail bondsman, especially for two or three days.
Adults were held in local precincts or the city jail in Lincoln Heights, but
juveniles were kept separately. Because it was temporary the facilities were
spartan, one vast room filled with barred cages in rows. Everything but the
floor was bars—even the rear of each cage, where a lidless aluminum
toilet and washbasin were attached. There was a double bunk along the side
bars, and a prisoner lying down in one cell was intimately face to face with
anyone doing the same in the adjacent cell. Bars, walls,
bunks—everything—were enameled a brownish-yellow, and that was
defaced by jailhouse graffiti, some fresh and other names gouged so deep into
the underlying concrete that they showed through layer on layer of paint.
Pervading everything was the odor of Lysol; it hid whatever other smells there
were.

In the early afternoon when Alex was ushered
through the gate, just a few cells were occupied: one by a young Mexican from
across the border, and three by blacks (they were in a row) arrested together
for killing an elderly transient during a mugging. Alex was across the room and
didn’t speak to them, but their voices were loud and he listened,
thinking that their English was more slurred and syrupy than that of most
blacks he knew. He wondered if it was because of fear. All were obviously
terrified, two of them shrill as they blamed the third, telling him that they
weren’t going to the electric chair “‘cause a stupid-ass
niggah hadda use a rock.” The rock user raged back, but his voice was
more than shrill; it broke and quaked with terror. Somehow Alex got the
information that they were fresh from Alabama, that their sharecropping parents
had gotten together to make the exodus to the promised land away from
lynchings, where they could work in defense plants for decent wages. They were
so dumb that he felt truly sorry for them. He called out that they didn’t
have to worry about the electric chair, that they were too young to get the
death penalty. His attempt to help turned fear- filled fury on him. He was a
“stupid Paddy” who “damn sure didn’ know what the
po-leese knowed… an’ the po-leese said they was gonna burn if they
didn’t tell everything they’d been doin’ here in Los
Angeles.”

Red-faced, Alex pressed his lips together and
wouldn’t answer even when they called, which brought yelled curses and
threats.

During the afternoon the jail began to fill
up, mostly with teenaged blacks and Chicanos. They weren’t showered or
given denims; they were frisked, their shoes taken, and then they were locked
in a cage. Each race had a virtual uniform: the Chicanos in pomaded ducktails,
“draped” slacks or khakis, and maroon shirts buttoned to the top;
blacks had “conked” or “processed” hair, jeans and
tennis shoes, and loud sport shirts; whites had Levi’s and leather
jackets with fur collars, though they were in a severe minority. Alex was
younger than most, the average age being about fifteen, so the deputy sheriff
left him in a cell by himself. The juveniles came from barrio, ghetto, and
slum. Middle-class and rich kids were turned over to their parents. They came
for curfew violations (if a burglary had been reported in the area and they wouldn’t
confess), for carrying switchblades, for burglaries and car thefts and all
the other felonies in the penal code that poor juveniles could commit. They
came alone, in pairs, and groups. Seven Chicanos had been pinched cruising in a
stolen Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Worse than that, an ounce of marijuana in a
Prince Albert can
had
been found under the seat. Most
were familiar with this place or others like it. Some fell on the thin,
sweat-stained mattresses and went to sleep; others yelled from cell to cell,
increasing volume to compete with each other until a deputy came in, banging a
large key on a pipe and screaming for them to hold it down. Those who were
familiar with jail hated it utterly, but they were not afraid, and fear was
society’s cudgel. Conditions made the person worse. Fear of imprisonment,
not imprisonment, was what kept law and order.

About six-thirty, adult trusties pushed a
cart into the cage area. A deputy followed with a clipboard. As he called off a
name, the name called his cell number, and a trusty passed through an aluminum
bowl—they looked like small hubcaps, actually—of boiled pinto
beans, a slice of bologna, and two slices of bread. Not everyone was fed, only
those at the jail when the “count” was called to the kitchen at
four p.m. Alex was given a bowl of ugly food that he normally would have
disdained, but he hadn’t eaten since the night before, and he wolfed it
down. When voices began screaming in protest at not being fed, he stopped with
half the bowl eaten. He wrapped the bologna and bread in toilet paper for a
later snack and asked the unfed Chicano in the next cell if he wanted the bowl.

“Do people in hell want ice
water?” the Chicano quipped. He had to eat with a spoon through the bars
because there was no way to pass the bowl without spilling the beans.

Sharing the ill-tasting ration had
a compensation
. The Chicano, a slight fifteen-year-old
nicknamed Mousey, had smuggled two cigarettes in his sock through the booking
desk frisk. Discolored from sweat and misshapen, they nevertheless made
Alex’s mouth water with desire.

“You can have one, or we can fire ‘em
up one at a time and pass ’em back and forth… save one for manana
after breakfast.”

“Whatever you think,
man.
They’re yours. You
don’t owe me nuthin’.”

“I know, ese. But you did me
right… What’re you busted for?”

Alex hesitated.
“Escape.”

“Oh yeah!
Where’d you split from?”

Again the hesitation, a
fearful anticipation of Mousey’s expression if
“nuthouse” was mentioned.
“Reform school,” he said.

“Wasn’t
Preston.
You’re too young.
Gotta be Whittier.
My carnal is there. Ernie Obregon?”

Alex was shaking his head, his face hot as
the lie got bigger. He couldn’t claim Whittier because Mousey might well
know things that he, Alex, didn’t. “No, I split from reform school
in… Arizona.”

“Are you from over there?”

“Uh-huh. I just stole a car and got
busted over there.”

“Is that
right,
and they put you in reform school there?”

“Yeah.”

“They gonna send you back?”

“I dunno… Say, how are we gonna
light that cigarette? No matches.”

“Look at that,” Mousey said,
pointing at the bare hundred-fifty- watt light bulb in the ceiling above the
bars. It was within arm’s reach. It was over Alex’s cell, so he
followed Mousey’s instructions, putting a sock over his hand before
unscrewing the hot bulb. Mousey meanwhile made a string by shredding the corner
of a blanket and then dug a hunk of cotton from the mattress, fluffing it out.
He fastened the cotton to the bulb by wrapping the string around both.

“Screw it in,” he said.

While they waited, he told Alex of another
way to “hit” the lights if the bulb was too small. Get a pencil or
paper clip and wrap the cotton around that. Unscrew the light and stick it up
there. Bang! “The sparks light the cotton, but sometimes it blows all the
lights out. It ain’t what they teach in the Boy Scouts, but…”
He shrugged.

A thin tendril of smoke started in two
minutes. Another two went by and the smoke increased.

“Blow on it,” Mousey said.

Alex stood on the top bunk, tilting his head
to the overhead bars and blowing as hard as he could. Suddenly the cotton,
which had already darkened, smoldered orange. Alex pulled it away without
unscrewing the bulb. Moments later they were puffing on the cigarette,
passing it back and forth.

The smell wafted through the large room.
Delinquent, caged youths began calling out. “Hey, somebody’s
smoking.
Hey, gimme one!”

“Damn assholes,” Mousey said.
“The deputy is sitting right outside. He hears everything. I’ve
been in here and heard guys confess without knowing it… just yelling to their
partners.”

The first smoke he inhaled made Alex dizzy
for half a minute, a pleasurable dizziness, cousin to when he huffed and puffed
and held his breath. Then it was really good, and even in jail he was momentarily
happy.

The cell on the other side of Alex’s
had two sixteen-year-old blacks, one with a heavily blood-spattered shirt.
Usually just the jailer deputy came in to lock up new arrivals, the delivering
deputies waiting beyond two sets of steel gates. But four burly deputies, two
to each youth, had brought in this pair—and they didn’t remove the
handcuffs until after the gate was closed. From sentence fragments he
overheard from the deputies, Alex had learned that the pair had fought in the
substation. “If they weren’t juveniles they’d get an issue,”
one deputy said while leaving.

The blacks, feeling their bruises, had lain
down until now.

“Hey, Paddy boy,” one of them
said, standing at the bars, “let us have a cigarette.”

“I haven’t got any
cigarettes,” Alex said.

“Whaa!
What’s that—you punk motherfucker!
Lyin’ junior redneck.”

The words felt like slaps. Alex enjoyed being
generous, would have shared even the butt if it had been his. But at insults,
and especially at threats, something short-circuited in his brain and
throbbed hot in his skull. “Your mother’s a lyin’ punk
motherfucker,” he said.

“Wha
… ?”
The second black rose into sight from the bunk, standing beside his partner.
Both of their faces were lumpy with rage.
“Little white
punk!
I’d put this black dick in your ass if I was over there.”

“You’d suck a dick,” Alex
retorted, but into the momentarily mind- blotting temper came some reasoning.
And fear. Either of the older, muscular youths would mangle him without
difficulty. Not that he would ever back down. “I really don’t have
any cigarettes,” he said in a conciliatory voice, thinking the situation
senseless and unnecessary.

“Naw, white boy, you can’t clean
it up.
You been
talkin’ ’bout my
mama.”
To his partner.
“Look at this jive
punk motherfucker tryin’ to clean it up. Talk all that shit behind bars.
He’d scream like a bitch if I got at his ass.”

“Well, fuck you in your black
ass.”

“Better hope they don’t open our
gates at the same time.”

“If they do, do what you’re big
enough to do.” He turned away to Mousey, who had been a silent spectator,
boldly puffing the last of the first cigarette in hope that they would say
something to him. “Most of ‘em are bluffs,” he said. “I
live in the projects in Hazard with lots of ’em. Some are cool, but most
ain’t shit. They talk bad, bad, but mostly it’s a fake.”