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.