Three weeks it took to get out of that fucking hospital. Three weeks of laying up looking at the blank pastel-green ceiling and the same four walls. Then another couple of weeks after that before I could take a shit without holding onto a guardrail because of the pain, or stop taking the fucking laxative to soften the shit so it wouldn’t tear the lining of my ass and so the muscles in it could heal. All those weeks of bed and doctors and television. At least I had better food than the other inmates. And I didn’t have to work on some bullshit farm for boys upstate. But they finally had me transferred there when we lost the trial. I guess I was the lucky one: hospital and upstate reform school. The others got sent to different prisons all around the state. The lawyer said the judge was easy on me ’cause I was the youngest and didn’t have a record. And the jury believed me. I was guilty of being an accomplice, they said. But not of murder. So by the time I got to the reform school I had already done time in jail waiting for trial, and time in the hospital waiting for my ass to heal. When I got upstate there wasn’t much to do except read and go to a few classes and do a few chores. I was taking mechanics training for a job when I got out because I knew something about cycles from hanging around the garage in Chelsea.

Once I was there for a while and on good behavior they gave me visiting privileges. Once a month I could go home. Moms was getting sick and Patty had to take care of her after school. That also helped me get leave. Soon, I’d be home for good. But I wasn’t going near those meat-packing warehouses on West 12th, and I was staying away from Chelsea. Maybe I could talk Moms into moving back to the Bronx since she still had some friends there. Maybe I did, too.

The country is different from the city. And it wasn’t until I was upstate long enough that I really thought about that difference. You forget things you want to remember when you’re on the inside and counting cinder blocks to pass the time. But you remember shit you want to forget. In the country I knew I was cool. Not only because I came from the city but because I had left dead leaves and cloudy skies behind me on the endless concrete. There were no leaves in the hospital and no leaves following me upstate, just snow and chores to do like shoveling snow, cutting wood, and going to class for job training: cooking, auto mechanics, even drafting if you wanted. I didn’t make many friends. How could I? I didn’t want nobody to know what had happened to me at Rikers. They might get ideas too, thinking I was really like that, or that I really wanted things to happen the way they did. Like it wasn’t even those white guys and black guys pumping into me and trying to kiss me, but in my mind it was one guy only, Cuddles. And they’d think I really liked that shit. The doctor did. He kept asking me questions about me and Pops and how we got along. I told him that Pops built things, that’s how we got along. What kinds of things? he asked. Walls, I said. We got a roomful of walls. What kind of walls? Walls that have ears and eyes and big red lips. Walls that don’t talk back and don’t even touch you, but walls that get painted very, very often.