My Name Is River Blue (9 page)

I was grateful
to Miss Martin, who followed the police car outside the city limits to
Stockwell and then stayed through the intake process. I have no doubt that the
staff treated me better that day because of her presence. As she promised, she visited
me every week, and more importantly, there came a day when she fought for me, as
hard as any mother would have fought for her own child, to save me from another
injustice.

CHAPTER
FIVE

June
2000

Over
two years later

The juvenile justice
system stole two years of my life and gave them to Stockwell Juvenile Detention
Center, a fifty-three year old prison of neglect and abuse, in which fearful boys
fought to survive behind walls where the rats and roaches were the least of
their worries. However, on the two days each week when visitors walked through
the front doors of the facility, the first thing they saw was the detention
center's mission statement, which led the naive and the willing among them to
believe something entirely different from the appalling reality. In the visitation
room, it was easier for an outsider to accept the lofty words on the poster
than it was to search for the truth behind the dull, hopeless eyes of a boy too
afraid to expose it.

As my story goes
on, I will share some memories about my time in Stockwell, but I won't tell you
everything that I have tried for years to keep buried in the darkest corner of
my mind. In those cases where I don't offer explicit details, you should trust
me that you probably don't want to read about them any more than I want to write
about them. What I hope to do is tell you enough about my time in the juvie
prison to make you understand how it changed me, and how I felt about the
possibility of me ever giving up my freedom to return there.

Upon my release
from Stockwell, located on the outskirts of Ackers, Miss Martin assigned me to
live in Tolley House, a group home in Harper Springs. The house held a maximum
of eight foster boys, and was only two miles from where I had lived on and off
in the Bergeron County Junior Boys Home. Miss Martin thought it would be better
for me to attend school in Harper Springs where the kids would most likely know
nothing about my stay with the Paulsons or my time in Stockwell. It would also
be easier on my guardians at Tolley House to drive me to appointments with my
parole officer and counselor, since their offices were only a few minutes away.

Boys who lived
in Tolley House had more in common than the fact that they were wards of the
state. Each boy had been paroled from Stockwell or sentenced to probation for a
first offense that a judge decided wasn't serious enough to warrant detention.
Whether he was on parole or probation, a boy was always under pressure to
follow strict rules of conduct so that his case officer received only good
reports on him. Each boy met with his parole or probation officer monthly to
review progress reports from the boy's school, guardians, caseworker, and
counselor. The meetings were usually stressful for a Tolley House boy who worried
about losing his freedom.

The morning that
Miss Martin signed me out of Stockwell, she drove me to Harper Springs to check
in with my parole officer before taking me to Tolley House. At the new Juvenile
Center, Miss Martin explained that every parolee had to enter through one
particular door marked "C5" in order to visit his parole officer or
counselor. I signed in at the reception window and sat with Miss Martin while I
waited to be called for my appointment with Mr. Harvey. She was not allowed to
go back with me.

Miss Martin
warned me that each time I had an appointment with my PO or counselor that I
would go through a security checkpoint on the other side of the door before I
was allowed into the office areas. When the woman at reception called my name
and buzzed me through the C5 door, I saw a security setup similar to that of an
airport. I walked through a scanner, and a security guard sent me on to my appointment.
Another security guard was physically searching a black kid, so I assumed that I
was just lucky that morning.

When I met Mr. Harvey,
I thought that he disliked me before he ever met me because of what he had read
in my file. After hearing some of his remarks, it was obvious to me that Mr. Harvey
was a racist redneck with a poor opinion of throwaway bastards like me. The man
didn't even try to hide it. He told me that he hoped that I would violate my
parole so that he could send my sorry ass back to Stockwell where I belonged. He
promised me that if he received one report of me losing my temper, fighting, or
refusing an order from an authority figure that he would nail my ass. He dared
me to complain about him, and he dared me to try to get him fired as I did
"those dumbasses" in Stockwell.

Howard Harvey
was a bull of a man in his forties. I'm not sure if he ever played football, but
he had the size and the attitude to be a professional middle linebacker. He
scared me because I was convinced that he would do whatever he said regardless
of the consequences to him. I wanted to tell Miss Martin how he acted, but I
decided to see how things went. I wasn't sure that I could trust her not to raise
a stink that would get me in bigger trouble, and I didn't want any trouble from
a man like Harvey. I knew that if I ever complained about my PO, I would have
to make sure that it was something big enough that he would lose his authority
over me.

Before Mr. Harvey
kicked me out of his office, he gave me a folder of information and rules. He
told me that he hoped I was too lazy to read it all, but if I did read it, he
hoped that I didn't follow any of the instructions. As soon as I got in the car
with Miss Martin, I began reading on our way to Tolley House. I had the
information memorized by the following day.

When I had time
to meet other parolees assigned to Mr. Harvey, I discovered that he scared each
new boy with the same performance at their first meeting. I found that he was
tough and strict, but he certainly wasn't the racist asshole that I first
thought he was. In time, I began to think of him as a fair but firm man who
treated all of his boys the same. I had badly misjudged him the first time I
met him because the truth was that Mr. Harvey only wanted me to stay out of
trouble.

***

One of my parole
conditions was twice weekly sessions with Mrs. Jenkins, the same dull,
ineffective, white woman in her mid thirties who was my counselor prior to my
arrest. At my first appointment after my release, Mrs. Jenkins was shocked when
she saw that I had grown so much that she had to look up at me.

I had always
been big for my age, and most people, who saw me for the first time, assumed
that I was older. In addition to having a big growth spurt while I was in
Stockwell, I became even more obsessed with maintaining a rigorous workout
routine. It left me with a well-defined, muscular body that startled people
when they heard how young I was. When I underwent the mandatory physical exam
just prior to my release from Stockwell at the age of thirteen, I found that I had
grown to a height of five feet eleven inches and weighed a lean, muscular one hundred
sixty-five pounds.

When she
recovered enough to begin my session, Mrs. Jenkins started by asking me how my
two years in Stockwell had changed me. Specifically, she said that she wanted
me to try to use one sentence that would best describe the difference in my
personality that day, as compared to our last session prior to my arrest. With
a thought that had crossed my mind often since my first week in Stockwell, I
answered her in a voice much deeper than she remembered.

"Mrs.
Jenkins, here's the difference. Today, if someone took any part in trying to
send me back to Stockwell on another phony charge, I would gut him like a fish
and watch his bloody insides fall in a steaming heap at his feet, and I said
he,
but I wouldn't care if it was some dude's grandmother."

I was fortunate
that she did not pass on my remark to Mr. Harvey. Instead, Mrs. Jenkins decided
that she was not the right counselor to help me because I needed a male
influence. My first session with her was my last, and my case was reassigned to
Mr. Petty.

Starting with my
first meeting with Mr. Petty, he always had an "observer" who was
"learning the ropes," and he always thanked me for allowing the
observer to join us in his office. After a few sessions, all of them attended
by an observer, it was obvious that Mr. Petty didn't want to be alone with me. I
didn't blame him. If he had known that I imagined using the heavy crystal
paperweight on his desk to smash his phony smile, he might have arranged for
two observers.

During the first
few months following my release from Stockwell, I had many moments when I was close
to exploding in violent behavior while I listened to Mr. Petty's prattle. He convinced
me that he knew nothing about the boys he counseled and less about how they
were treated in Stockwell. He acted as if my time in the juvie prison was a
positive experience, and that I should be excited for my opportunity to put all
that I had learned to constructive use.

Mr. Petty was an
idiot. In each session with him, I wished I could jerk him out of his chair and
slap him around until he understood me. I wanted him to acknowledge what the
foster care and juvenile justice systems did to me before Stockwell, and then I
wanted him to admit that he didn't believe the detention center's bullshit
boast that it caused positive changes in every boy paroled from there. Instead
of helping me in any meaningful way, Stockwell fed and fanned the anger already
smoldering within me when I arrived there.

When I left Stockwell,
I was not reformed, rehabilitated, corrected, or cured. I was an angry,
distrustful, selfish survivor, and I preferred to be a friendless loner. Although
some people would disagree, in my mind, I was not a bully who randomly took his
anger out on other kids. The people likely to see my rage were the ones who treated
me unfairly, invaded my privacy, cheated me, touched my things, or if they were
especially dumb, touched
me
without permission. Upon my release, I
struggled to fight for my rights and to defend myself without seriously
violating my parole terms to the extent that the court ordered me back to juvie
prison.

***

Hal and Jenny
Mackey, a husband and wife team in their mid thirties, were the live-in house
parents of Tolley House. They were educated and trained in social work, and
both of them had ten years of experience with child services before they took
their positions with the group home for "troubled" boys. My first
impression of the Mackeys was that they were average people from their looks to
their behavior. Their views on most subjects were moderate which led most
people in Harper Springs to see them as a liberal white couple. The Mackeys
preferred to be called "progressive." Once I knew them well enough, I
thought Hal and Jenny were decent, fair, and predictable.

As house
parents, the Mackeys closely followed state guidelines in their operation of
the home, and I believe that each boy received every dime of care that the state
provided. I never knew of a boy who lacked any basic need, such as nutritious
food, weather appropriate clothing, proper medical care, or a warm bed. There
were times when Jenny even spent her own money to buy something for one of the
boys that was not included in the home's budget.

Hal and Jenny
turned out to be the best foster parents that I ever had, but initially, we
didn't get along so well which leads me to what I call, "The Battle of
Harper Park."

During my twice-weekly
trips to my counseling sessions with Mr. Petty and his observer, one of my
house parents would drive me past the older part of Harper Park on the way to
and from the counselor's office. I first heard about the park from my Tolley
House foster brothers who often hung out there after school and on weekends. When
school dismissed for the summer, usually all of the boys, with the exception of
me, would leave the house after breakfast each morning and walk to the park
where they would stay until time for dinner that evening. I wanted to go, but
the Mackeys declared that I was not ready. Each day, the other boys told me
that they had a great time in the park, and since I initially didn't get along
with any of them, they enjoyed torturing me with stories of their fun.

For two months, I
begged my guardians to give me permission to walk alone to Harper Park and
spend the day there, as the other boys did. Hal and Jenny maintained that they
would not allow me off the grounds without supervision until they deemed that
it was the right time, which was always another week or two into the future. They
informed me that one day soon, they would allow me to go to the park, as long
as I promised to walk with my foster brothers and remain with them the entire
time, which
was not
what I wanted. Each time I discussed the park with
the Mackeys, they made me so angry that I had to force myself to get away from
them before I had a meltdown that would send me back to Stockwell.

The park was
less than a mile from Tolley House, and by adding information from my foster
brothers to what I saw from the minibus, I knew the potential recreation that
the park held for me. There was a jogging trail running through the wooded area
and an oval asphalt track next to the playing fields. In the past, the two
large fields were where the town's kids had played baseball and football in the
city recreation league. Since a new sports complex for the recreation
department had been built at the opposite end of the park, the old fields were
left for the neighborhood kids to play pickup games.

It wasn't that I
wanted to join in the other kids' games so much, but I
did
want out of
the house. I wanted the freedom to enjoy the park any way I wanted, and I
needed a daily escape from Tolley House and the depressing reality of my life.