My Name Is River Blue (11 page)

I was happy to
teach John a priceless lesson, one of many I learned in Stockwell. You never, ever,
not even for half a second, take your eyes off a guy that you just called a
"half-breed piece of shit."

I turned out
John's lights with a solid, right uppercut.

As Gabby had
taught me in Stockwell, I shifted all my weight into the punch. My fist
connected solidly with John's chin, causing his head to make a dull thud when
it smacked the tile wall. He reminded me of a cartoon character when his body
slid down the tile until he was sitting on the floor with his head leaning over
on his right shoulder. He looked like he had fallen asleep while watching TV,
except for the bloody drool running from the corner of his mouth.

Malik was no
threat as he only stared curiously at John and dug both hands deep into his
pockets, a universal sign that he wanted no part of fighting.

That night,
Malik moved his things into John's room, and I had a short but productive conversation
with John after we helped him to his bed. He agreed to answer any questions
about his bruised face and two broken teeth with a story about slipping in the
bathroom.

After my
confrontation with John, he and the rest of the boys mostly left me alone. Malik
grew the nerve to refuse to sell weed anymore and others gradually followed. The
gang fell apart and in order for John to satisfy the big man, he had to sell
drugs at the park and at the area schools. It was only a few months after my
arrival at the house, when the police arrested John for selling at a middle
school. The judge sentenced him to Stockwell until he was twenty-one years old.

***

In my meeting
with the Mackeys, they continued to give evidence of my poor social skills, as
they turned to my teachers' assessments of me during the two months that were
left of the public school year after my parole. In Stockwell, we had our own
school, which was mandatory for six hours a day. I worked ahead of most of the
inmates, and I was on the right grade level, seventh grade, when I started
public school.

The teachers all
agreed that I completed the assigned work and scored above average on tests,
but they marked my daily class grades lower for refusal to participate in activities
that required interaction with other students. I would give a short answer to a
teacher who asked a direct question, but otherwise, I remained silent. I
wouldn't give my fellow students any response at all. I wasn't going to have
students treating me like a leper in the halls and cafeteria and then allow
them to act as if they enjoyed our classroom interaction in front of the
teachers.

One teacher
complained that there were times when I stared at others, including teachers,
in a way that unnerved them. My teachers agreed that some students hugged the
walls to allow me a wide path to walk through the corridors. It was true that
most of the students avoided meeting my
eyes, and none
of the female teachers wanted to be alone in a room with me. They were
concerned about my "spooky behavior" and threatened by my physical
development. There were also the rumors about me attacking a student in the
restroom.

I knew that my
house parents would again drudge up the restroom episode, which occurred about
two weeks after I started school the first week of April. They had to attend a
conference with the principal and a teacher to discuss an incident involving
two other classmates and me in the boys' restroom. Mr. Miller, the teacher, told
the Mackeys that he strongly suspected me of choking Kevin Schultz and threatening
further harm to him and Ron Simmons, his friend.

The faculty knew
Kevin, who was a repeater, as the most aggressive bully in seventh grade. Ron was
his sidekick. Both of them had a history of detentions and even suspensions for
terrorizing the other students. At the time, they were on their final warnings
before expulsion, but apparently, the two redneck bullies generated more
sympathy than a half breed delinquent from Stockwell did.

Miller told the
Mackeys that he began his science class the prior day after noticing that
Kevin, Ron, and I were absent. He assumed that we would come rushing in at any
moment, but ten minutes later, only I came in to take my seat, which I did
before anyone saw the damp spot on my jeans. Before Miller could tell me that I
had earned detention for being tardy, a very pale, tearful Ron Simmons came to
the door and motioned for Miller to join him in the hall. Ron, sniffling and
shaking, told the teacher that Kevin was sick in the bathroom and needed help.

When Miller
entered the boys' restroom, he was shocked to see the school bully on the floor
with his back pressed against the wall. Kevin's face was a mess of tears and
snot, and he was shaking with his arms wrapped around his body as if he were
freezing. Miller's first thought was that the boy was absolutely terrified, and
it took several minutes of the teacher's kindest tone of voice assuring Kevin that
he would be okay before the boy allowed Miller to check him. The only obvious
physical signs of injury were the red marks on the boy's throat, which told
Miller that some strong hands had put tremendous pressure on Kevin's neck as if
someone had attempted to choke him to death.

Miller could get
nothing out of either boy as to what had happened. Even after both boys'
parents came to school, Kevin and Ron refused to talk. The adults decided that
the boys should go home and perhaps after some time, they would be willing to
confide in their parents. After the boys and their parents left, Mr. Miller and
Principal Latham brought the number one suspect to the office. The students didn't
know that I was fresh out of Stockwell, but the staff did. The teacher was
convinced that I was to blame, and thought that he knew exactly what had happened
in the boys' restroom.

I sat in the
chair facing Latham, and Miller sat at the end of the principal's desk. I'm
sure I acted differently from most other kids under similar circumstances.
Unlike their typical student, I was no more nervous than I would have been if I
were listening to the radio in my room before I dozed off to sleep at night. For
me, the principal's office wasn't even close to being as scary as Stockwell.

Miller took the lead
in the questioning and decided that he would skip the friendly preliminaries in
which he normally pretended to want to help one of us students. He intended to
break my calm, shake me up, and gain a fast admission. Miller had a reputation
for making kids cry and blubber their promises to be angels in the future, but
those kids had not grown up in state care and learned about real fear in a
place like Stockwell. It was all I could do to keep from laughing at the skinny,
little man with his crooked nose and weak chin. And, seriously, where did he
even
find
the pocket protector?

"Mr. Blue, because
of you, Kevin and Ron were so upset that their parents had to take them home. Tell
us what you did in the restroom?"

I calmly locked
eyes first with Miller and then with Latham before I responded with, "I pissed."

"You know
that's not what I meant," said Miller. "I want an answer."

I silently
stared at Miller.

"Answer my
question, Mr. Blue. What did you do in the restroom?"

"Pissed."

"Young man,
do you know that you're in a lot of trouble?"

"No."

"Don't you
think Kevin and Ron told on you?"

My mind drifted
to the image of me choking Kevin against the restroom wall while I listened to
his feet kicking, trying to find sold footing. His face turned crimson as he
grunted his agreement with my conditions for allowing him to live. I was
confident that Kevin and Ron had said nothing about me, and I was equally
confident that Kevin would never again shove me from behind when I was using a
urinal. It was difficult to keep a straight face when I remembered the boys'
reactions to the promise I made them before I left the restroom.

"Answer me,
Mr. Blue. Did you honestly think they wouldn't tell on you?"

"Mr.
Miller, I
know
they didn't tell on me. I didn't do anything."

"Mr. Blue,
do you know you could be expelled from school?"

"No."

"What did
you do in the restroom?"

"Pissed."

Miller and
Latham never coaxed anything out of me and with Kevin and Ron both vehemently
denying that I ever touched them or even said anything to them, the men took no
disciplinary action against me. All they did was call in Hal and Jenny Mackey
to apprise them of the situation and register their concern that I might have
anger management issues or even a personality disorder that might cause future
problems. They informed the Mackeys that they would closely monitor my behavior.
At home, when Hal and Jenny attempted a discussion with me about Kevin and Ron,
they achieved the same level of success that Miller and Latham did.

The Mackeys gave
me more examples of my behavior at home that convinced them that I was not
ready for an unsupervised day in a public park. They continued to dwell on the
fact that I had declined participation in any of the home's group activities,
choosing isolation instead. I stayed in my room and never spoke a single word
to anyone unless I had no choice. I would give my house parents the briefest
answer to a direct question, but if they merely said, "Good morning"
or "Have a good day in school," I ignored them. I quietly did my
assigned chores and tried to follow each house rule, but I never volunteered to
do anything extra and refused to lend so much as a sheet of notebook paper to
any of my foster brothers.

In one instance,
Julio, a Latino boy about my age, but much smaller, came into my room and
without asking, grabbed some blank sheets of notebook paper off my desk. He
muttered something about paying me back and turned to leave. I can only guess
that since I'm part Latino, he thought it was unnecessary to ask permission to borrow
some paper. In response, I jumped off my bed, grabbed his right hand, and
pulled back his index finger until I heard the bone break. I promised to break
the rest of his fingers, if he told on me, and then I tossed him into the hall where
he crashed headfirst into the wall beside the bathroom. Hal and Jenny were a
little skeptical of his explanation that he broke his finger when he tripped in
the hall.

Since my efforts
to gain permission for daily visits to the park only generated more comments about
my anti-social behavior, I took another approach. I proved to them that their
own system showed that I followed their rules better than the other boys did.

Hal and Jenny
maintained a merit system for rewards and punishments and used a grease board
outside the office for all the boys to see where they stood. Each week, the
Mackeys tallied every boy's total merits and demerits to see if he earned a
reward or a punishment for each rule, behavior, chore, or goal. I informed them
that according to their grease board, I was the best-behaved boy in the house
for the two months I had lived there. I had only earned one punishment, and I
was the only boy who had done every chore on time for the same period.

The only
demerits the Mackeys gave me were for using profanity a few times, and I earned
enough demerits for punishment. I never argued or complained if I deserved
punishment, as I did for the cursing. That first time, since I was new, they
were more than fair because they warned me several times before they wrote me
up on the board.

Since I couldn't
go to the park, the only place I could exercise outdoors was in Tolley House's
big back yard where I ran laps around the inside perimeter of the fence each
day. My choices for punishment were confinement to my room for a week, or Hal
giving me three licks with his paddle. I didn't even have to think about it. I apologized
for my cursing, took the three licks, and kept up my running in the back yard. The
paddle stung like crazy and was enough to make my eyes water, but staying
inside would have been far worse to me.

At Tolley House,
the funny part of house discipline was that Jenny and Hal didn't like punishing
us, but with the kind of boys we were, their other choice was losing their
sanity. As far as the paddle, Jenny refused to use it so that left Hal, who
hated it almost as much as she did. Even though Hal didn't like using the
paddle, if we chose it as punishment, he did his best to make us think harder
about breaking the same rule again.

After showing
the Mackeys that I had followed their rules better than the other boys had, I
told them that I planned to call Miss Martin the next day to complain of unfair
treatment. I would tell her that my house parents had to be punishing me for
personal reasons because their own merit system proved that I deserved to visit
the park more than the other boys did. I promised that if I got nowhere with
social services, I would call the news media.

I ended the
discussion by saying that I was sorry if I sounded disrespectful, but my right
to enjoy the same freedom as my foster brothers was very important to me. I
assured the Mackeys that if I didn't have permission to walk to the park in the
morning, I would do whatever was necessary to gain equal treatment.

At bedtime that
night, the Mackeys came to my room to inform me that I could walk to the park
on my own, but not because of my threat. After giving my point of view some
serious thought, they saw that my freedom was a much bigger issue to me than to
my foster brothers who had never been locked away in juvie prison. They believed
that they were wrong not to give me a chance to show that I could be
responsible, but they sternly warned me not to make them regret their decision.
I thanked them and promised that they would not be sorry.