Juvenile Hall, I soon discovered, wasn’t the chamber of horrors I’d thought it might be. No beatings. No balls and chains. No boulders to be broken up with sledgehammers into tiny little rocks. No striped suits. Instead of hardened criminals, most of the kids in the Hall, officially dubbed ‘detainees’, were just like me: mixed up, directionless, grabbing desperately for something solid to hold onto to keep from spinning off the earth and into the deep space of a genuine life of crime. There were thirty or so boys on the Sixth Ward, where I was assigned, all of them between the ages of eight and ten. Most were petty thieves, again like me, but there were also a few fire-starters, vandals, runaways, and small-time con artists. None were yet, officially anyway, beyond help or incorrigible. Kids like that—the mean, dangerous ones—were sent to long-term facilities like the California Youth Authority.
But the Hall wasn’t exactly a trip to Disneyland, either. To a nine-year-old kid accustomed to almost no structure in his life, being sent to the Hall was like being stuffed into a metal box with barely enough room to breathe. I was confined, most of the time, to a featureless room just large enough to hold the single bed and small gray metal table and chair it contained. There were two windows: a large one—permanently locked—that looked out through a layer of chain-link fencing onto a generally empty stretch of asphalt-covered ground; and a smaller one in the door that the staff used to look in from the hallway. My door was locked, both at night and at any other “down” time when there were no activities scheduled, from the outside. I was expected to make my bed every day before breakfast. I wasn’t allowed to have a pillow, as I might use it to smother myself. The only reading material allowed in my room was the pocket copy of the New Testament all detainees were given when they were first processed in. I was allowed to eat, drink, piss or shit, talk, stand up or sit down, only after asking permission to do so. Television, movies, and radio were considered special privileges, reserved for detainees who obeyed the rules and stayed out of trouble with the staff.
Still, in many ways, Juvenile Hall was a significant improvement over where I’d come from. The food was plentiful and, to my relatively unsophisticated palate, tasty. We all wore jeans and white tee-shirts and tennis shoes that were clean and in good repair. We exercised in the morning before breakfast. After breakfast, we were marched off to sit in a rather traditional classroom for some loosely-structured study of the Three R’s. Afternoons, there was softball, football, or basketball. Evenings, after dinner, some more physical activity (to tire us out, I suspect), usually some type of relay-race. Weekends, there was the opportunity for visits from relatives. If you were “good”, maybe there’d be a movie to watch or a comic book or two to read. It was a simple life: all I had to do was follow the rules, stay out of trouble, and people would leave me alone.
At least, that was the theory. Unfortunately, I’d been in the Hall less than twenty-four hours, when I ran into my first major problem, one that would plague me the entire time I was there: I didn’t know how to make a bed.
Of course, I understood the concept of making a bed. I’d watched Mama make my bed the couple of times I could recall her doing it. She put a sheet on the mattress. Tucked it in all around. She put a second sheet on top of the first one. Tucked that one in all around. Then she put a blanket over the whole thing. Tucked. Since pillows weren’t allowed in the Hall, that was one less thing I had to worry about. How hard could it be?
The next morning I made my bed as quickly as I could and was the first on the blacktop for morning calisthenics. Hurrying seemed to be the most important thing in the Hall: the staff was always shouting, “Move it out!” for just about everything we did. I remember thinking, this really is like a summer camp. The staff inspected and graded everybody’s room while we were away at morning class, and posted the results on the ward bulletin board. Today, when we came back to the ward for lunch, I discovered a red ‘0’ next to my name, the only zero on the ward. Some of the kids pointed at it and snickered. “What a dumb shit,” I heard a couple of them say, laughing, though a few just looked at me like they felt sorry for me.
By Saturday, the highest score I’d managed to earn on my bed was a lousy ‘1’. I’d got three points for the week, with a minimum of fifteen points required to watch the movie and partake in free time. That afternoon, I sat alone in my room, flipping through my copy of The New Testament, while the rest of the kids on the ward watched Mutiny on the Bounty with Clark Gable.
Monday morning, however, one of the kindlier men on the staff, Mr. Jenkins, arranged that I have a brief tutorial on bed-making. One of the sharper kids on the ward, a ten-year-old whose name I never learned, came back with me from morning head call and made my bed for me, while I watched. It was a perfect example of someone being really good at something, but having no idea how to teach it. The kid said almost nothing to me, except “Watch me.” I watched, astonished, while his hands flew over my sheets and blankets, measuring, pulling, folding, tucking. He moved as if he’d been doing nothing for the ten years of his life except making beds, over and over. In minutes, I had a bed with everything pulled and tucked so tightly the mattress actually bowed. It was the sort of bed you’d expect to find in a Marine boot camp barracks, where the drill instructor bounces a quarter off of it. Even the kid was impressed with the result. “Make your bed like that every time,” he said, sniffing with self-satisfaction, “and you’ll never get less than a five.” I calculated that in my head: that was thirty-five points in a week! More than twice what I needed to stay off restriction. I felt like I’d just stumbled onto a crisp, new, twenty-dollar bill, just lying there on the sidewalk, and no one around to say it was theirs.
As a motivational “bone,” the staff sweetened the pot by giving me a ‘5’ on my bed that very day, knowing full well it had been made by this other kid. It was a heady experience to see the huge number next to my name on the weekly score board—especially when most of the rest of the other names had only 3s or 4s next to theirs—and I certainly wasn’t above taking credit for it. “I got a five on my bed today!” I bragged to the other three kids at our table during lunch. I could tell by their surprised expressions that they saw me in a new light. Everything that day was perfect: the meatloaf the kitchen staff served up for lunch was the best I’d ever had, and at afternoon PE, I kicked a home-run (on errors) during kickball, winning the game for our side. For a few hours I was a hero. It occurred to me then that life really wasn’t so bad; I could conceivably spend the rest of my days in Juvenile Hall and be perfectly happy.
That night, however, was another matter. My bed-making tutor had made my bed so perfectly (and I was so ignorant on how he’d done it), that I couldn’t bring myself to pull the covers down and get into it, even though I knew the staff would make me do exactly that during bed-check. I stood beside the bed, pondering my situation. I knew for a certainty that I’d never be able to make the bed the same way the next morning, with the intricate folds and tucks. I watched in my mind’s eye as my prized ‘5’ morphed back to a ‘1’ or a ‘0’, and my heart sank. I was doomed to eternal restriction and, worse yet, the ridicule of the kids around me. I felt like killing myself.
Then an idea came to me: if I could manage to get into the bed without disturbing those intricate folds and tucks, then I could just smooth everything out the next morning and no one would be the wiser. I figured it was my only option—I had to be in bed by lights-out—so I gingerly lay myself down at the top of the bed and slowly, carefully, set about wriggling myself between the top and bottom sheets. They’d been pulled and tucked so tightly that I could hardly take a deep breath. But the bed seemed more or less intact when I finally got my legs stretched out full and the lights went out. And when the night staff man came by and shined his flashlight into my room through the door window, and then moved on, I smiled to myself and thought, this is something that just might work.
And it did work. The next morning, after peeing and brushing my teeth with the tooth powder Mr. Jenkins sprinkled on everyone’s toothbrush as they went into the bathroom, I hustled back to my room and set about smoothing the wrinkles from the sheets and blanket, and tightening the tucks all around and underneath. It took me all of ten minutes, and it looked almost as good as the day before. In fact, I was, again, one of the first kids dressed and out on the blacktop waiting to begin morning calisthenics. Later that morning, when I got back to the ward after class, there was a great big ‘5’ next to my name on the weekly scoreboard, for the second day in a row. “All right!” I couldn’t help yelling, and even the kid who’d made my bed was impressed. He punched me playfully in the arm and said “See? I told you. You make it like I taught you, you’ll get a five every time!”
By Saturday, I’d accumulated twenty-three points (counting the demerits I couldn’t seem to avoid for talking without permission), still more than enough to earn a seat in the day room to watch the movie. That week, it was Ulysses, with Kirk Douglas. I savored every moment of it, though the film broke twice and Mr. Jenkins had to splice it, and I really didn’t understand much of the plot, and the popcorn we got was stale. It didn’t matter. For now, I was one of the privileged kids, and that was all I cared about. That night, after dinner and a little quiet-down time in our rooms, my door popped open for play time right along with the rest of them, and I was almost giddy walking down to the day room. I read Superman comics for nearly an hour, then played Ping Pong and checkers, and even watched a little TV before it was time for one last head call and evening lock-down. Once again, I felt like life just couldn’t get any better.
The following Monday, when we got back from morning class, I was shocked to find a red ‘0’ for my bed-making score next to my name, and, again, a lot of the kids were snickering at me, calling me a dumb-shit. The kid who had first made my bed was looking at me, too, as if I’d just been caught stealing something from him. I looked at the zero again, wondering if I were reading it wrong, there had to be some mistake. But when I got to my room, I saw there hadn’t been a mistake at all: the bed—mattress, sheets, blanket and all—was torn from the rack and lay in a heap in the middle of the floor. It didn’t take much thought to figure out what had happened, though I never heard from the staff about how I was found out, and I never asked.
I never again scored more than a lousy ‘1’ for making my bed. The rest of my Saturdays, while the kids who weren’t morons and losers were down in the day room, munching on their stale popcorn while the film projector clacked away behind them, I lay on my bed and closed my eyes and saw, again and again in my mind’s eye, Kirk Douglas in Ulysses, shoving a big stick into the eye of the Cyclops, and scenes from any other movie I’d ever seen in my life that I could conjure up. I figured, at least they couldn’t take that away from me.
Mama finally came to visit on the fourth Sunday. I was surprised, actually: after three weeks of spending visiting hours locked in my room, while everyone else sat down in the dayroom with their families, I figured she was still mad, that she’d done her best to forget she even had a son.
We sat on opposite sides at one of the round dining tables next to the day room. She said she was sorry she hadn’t been able to visit before then, God knew how busy she was, and besides, there hadn’t been anyone to give her a ride. She reached into her purse and pulled out a couple of Archie comic books. They were new—which was another surprise. “I know you like Archie,” she said.
“Thanks, Mama” I said. I couldn’t tell her that, since I seemed to be on permanent restriction, I wouldn’t be allowed to read them until I’d been released. I knew I was supposed to be happy to see her, but for some reason all I felt was a knot in my stomach.
She looked around the day room. “Hey, this is pretty nice,” she said, nodding approvingly. “How’s the food?”
I shrugged. “It’s okay.”
“You getting enough to eat?”
“I guess.”
She nodded some more. “Did they give you some turkey for Thanksgiving?”
“Yeah.”
We sat there like that for a few more minutes. Then she started looking antsy, like she wanted a cigarette or something. “Well,” she said, sighing, “Elsie’s waiting in her car for me, and besides, we’re probably at the end of the—the, uh—session. You know.”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. There was a clock on the wall behind her. Families were allowed to visit for up to thirty minutes. I could see we still had ten minutes left. But I didn’t say anything.
She stood up then and when I did too she pulled me toward her and hugged me. “I’ll try to make it more often,” she said. “But you know how hard it is to get a ride.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
She nodded again. “You behave, now,” she said, gathering her purse up and putting on her scarf.
“I will,” I said.
She left then. I watched her stride down the hallway to the ward entrance doors, watched as she pulled the door open and walked through without looking back.
I picked up the comic books. Mr. Jenkins at the desk gave me a look that said: you know you’re not supposed to have those. I walked over to the desk and gave him the books, and went back to my room. I slept until dinner.
My fourth week in juvenile hall, a plump, gray-haired man named Mr. Kemp, whom I learned would be my permanent probation officer, came to tell me there was a family who wanted to take me in “for an unspecified time” under the foster-care program. “They’re a wonderful family,” he said to me, beaming. “Young. Very attractive couple named Cushman.” He scanned a paper in his briefcase. “Yes. Larry and Charlotte. They have a son named Butch, a few years younger than you.” He looked up at me. “I see you’ve already met Mr. Cushman. There’s a statement here saying he talked with you for some time, shortly before you were brought to the Hall. Do you remember?”
A light went on in my head—the policeman! Larry Cushman had spent more than an hour sitting with me outside my apartment, listening to me complaining about Mama, and giving me fatherly advice on the importance of leading an honest life. I’d liked him immediately. He’d been one of the few adults I felt I could connect with, who’d seemed genuinely interested in hearing about the demons I carried around in my head. He’d been touched, I could tell, when he learned my family didn’t have enough food or clothes, and that there wasn’t a man around the house to show me how to behave.
But my chest ached when I thought of living away from Mama, though I certainly couldn’t explain it. I didn’t understand it myself. Tears suddenly welled up in my eyes. “I don’t want to go to a foster home,” I said to Mr. Kemp. “I want to go home with my mother.”
Mr. Kemp looked surprised—maybe even amazed. “Well, I’m sorry, Billy,” he said gently, “but you can’t. Not right now, anyway. The judge won’t allow it until you’ve shown that you’re able to clean up your act. You understand that, don’t you?”
I wiped my eyes and nodded, though the ache in my chest seemed to grow sharper, as if I was somehow betraying Mama.
“Let’s see how things go,” Mr. Kemp continued, “after you’ve had a good, solid role model to follow. Officer Cushman is a fine man. He can do a lot to help turn a young boy’s life around. And he’s very excited about the prospect of having you come live with him and his family.”
I didn’t seem to have much choice in the matter. Mr. Kemp told me he’d pick me up the next afternoon to go see the Cushmans, who lived out in La Mesa—a long way from Ocean Beach. “Just spend a couple of hours with them,” he said. “See how it feels. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
When I got into bed that night, I tried to imagine living with a policeman. My own father had certainly been no great shakes as a role model. But a policeman? What did policemen do when they weren’t being policemen? Somehow they were like teachers to me: they weren’t the sort of human beings you’d think of as sitting around watching Ed Sullivan on TV or going to the bathroom or buying milk and bread and toilet paper at Safeway. Even seeing one once in awhile at the A & W Drive-in, having a greasy hamburger and a root beer, seemed strange, out of place, even if he was wearing his uniform. And a wife? It’d never occurred to me that policemen even had wives and kids. I didn’t recall seeing a policeman on TV with a wife or kids. What sort of wife would a policeman have? What sort of kid?
And what did they do to you if you screwed up, did something bad?
I slept an uneasy sleep, troubled by the prospect of living apart from Mama. Why? Why would a child cling to his mother, though she seemed to have even less regard for him than for the family cat? I thought back. Had Mama ever told me or my sisters that she loved us? I couldn’t remember. Once, maybe, and then in not so many words: late one night when I was maybe six or seven years old, I awoke to find her sitting on the floor next to my bed in her nightgown and robe. She was stroking my head, the way I’d seen her petting Tom, our Siamese cat. Her eyes glistened in the dim light filtering into my room from the hallway. “My baby boy,” she whispered.
“Mama?” I said. “What—?”
“Sshhhhhhh,” she said gently. “Go back to sleep.” She didn’t say anything else, and I closed my eyes wondering if she might be drunk—sometimes Daddy acted that way after he’d been drinking—or if it’d just been a dream. When I woke up the next morning, it was to her yelling up the stairs for me to get up, now, or she’d make me sorry I was ever born. That was the Mama I knew. I never saw that other strange woman again, though I often wondered where she’d come from, where she’d gone.