HFR is pleased to introduce Mark Dostert and his essay, "The Saint of 3F." This is the first installment of The Dock. Look for new online content next month.
HFR: Who has had the greatest influence on your writing?
HFR: Who has had the greatest influence on your writing?
MD: I was finishing the first draft of Up in Here: Jailing Kids on
Chicago’s Other Side about the time that Anthony Swofford
published Jarhead, his marine sniper’s account of the Persian Gulf
War. In revising my manuscript and starting various adapted personal essays
like “The Saint of 3F,” an interview comment of Swofford’s proved instructive.
He spoke of a breakthrough when realizing that his task with this genre of
nonfiction was to “turn the pen on myself.” From then on with each chapter of
my book and any excerpt, I strove to expose and thus examine, for better or
worse, some part of me—something that a reader might relate to despite never having
worked in a jail. In turning the pen on myself, perhaps I could even turn the
pen on a reader. A writer I admire this way is Andre Dubus who, while an icon
of American short fiction, was a marvelously engaging essayist in his two
collections: Broken
Vessels and Meditations
from a Moveable Chair.
[Norman] “Mailer at the Algonquin” is Dubus’s chance encounter with the famed
post-war writer at a New York restaurant where the young Dubus and his first
wife were meeting the editor of his first book. His resistance to his editor’s
proposal for a major setting change while yet using his editor to meet Mailer
and then stay the night at his place rather than back at the hotel with his
wife becomes Dubus’s seduction of the reader—married or not, figuratively adulterous
or not, divorced or not—into his own guilt and struggle for spousal
integrity.
The Saint of 3F
Mark Dostert
On various
college mornings, I awoke to bloodshed. My alarm clock radio was set to
WMAQ—Chicago’s flagship news station, which announced (sometimes by name) those
bludgeoned, stabbed, gunned at, or gunned through the previous day. Dressing
myself to 670 A.M. instead of music or sports talk became compulsory during
Chicago’s crack cocaine’s heyday when reported crime happened in more
terrifying concentrations before the city began dozing subsidized highrises
like Cabrini-Green, walking distance from my dormitory, and the Henry Horner
Homes and row houses like the Ida Bees. As much as possible, I listened on,
specifically for children: injuries
suffered by the latest gang-beating kid victim, the number of youth police
arrested during school hours at drug dens on Larabee Avenue or South Langley,
and to which hospital an ambulance ferried a once-armed teen into whom a liquor
store owner had buried bullets. Not being from Chicago or even Illinois, these
facts evolved into matters of strange contemplation for me, as if an outsider
keeping mental inventory and imagining the depressing details of all those
young wasting lives somehow mitigated the waste. Four years later I wanted more
than awareness. I wanted to meet such wasting lives and try to stop the waste,
so I applied to be a Children’s Attendant at the city’s 500-cell juvenile
detention center and eventually moved back to Chicago for a position that was
actually: jail guard. So I had to
process a lot more of the city’s bad news.
I still tuned
in WMAQ on my off time though, yet the afternoon my car radio announced the
murder of two boys at 50th and Paulina Streets near the Apostolic
House of Prayer Church, I numbly dismissed such violence to thugs and cliché.
I’d already met too many kids whom I fathomed easily playing either role: the killer or the killed. But when the Chicago Tribune published what looked to
be school pictures of the victims, Delvon Harris, fourteen, and Robert Owens,
fifteen, next to half-inch headlines, I pored over their story and their faces
posing somewhere between laughs and smiles. They were no thugs and, embarrassed
by my flippant assumption, I was no longer numb. Below them in a separate
photo, Delvon’s older cousin, Angel, crouched over the muddy curb where the two
had dropped and pressed her face with both hands. A yellow Police Do Not Cross ribbon lay rumpled in the gutter’s muck and
trash. The feature offered no likeness of the suspect. Police had him nabbed
dashing from the death site carting a .38-caliber snub-nosed pistol with five
spent rounds and one live. Someone jogged up to the squad car and fingered
Patrick, ten days from his thirteenth birthday, as the trigger puller.
According to police, the boy confessed he had “wanted to go out and shoot
somebody” as part of a gang initiation. The Tribune
quoted Teddy, an admitted Latin Saint, explaining that Patrick, who lived with
his father, disabled by a stabbing, and younger brother, had tried “to prove he
is down. He wanted it for the longest time.” Administrators from Seward
Academy, Patrick’s 94 % Hispanic public school, disclosed his five weeks of
suspension for replicating gang symbols on his folders and raving about joining
the Latin Saints. I’d pegged the killings more black gang-against-black gang
bloodletting.
For me,
raised in a Texas suburb, Chicago offered additional surprises. Patrick was a
non-Hispanic white. Had he been thirteen, prosecutors could have petitioned the
judge to transfer his case to criminal court and arraign him as an adult—a Presumptive Transfer. Caseworkers feared
that knowledge of his charge would endanger him in our jail’s vastly black
population, so Patrick began his detention in medical isolation where he stayed
barely two weeks before being transferred to a real cellblock, 3F. The week of
the shooting I was in scheduled training with my new-hire group, enjoying the
quiet of our basement classroom but wanted to see Patrick. I wanted to see a
twelve-year-old murder suspect. “Yeah, we got him,” an attendant regularly
assigned to 3F soon told me outside the five-story steel and glass facility.
Coincidentally, he then used vacation days, headed for Tennessee, and I filled
his shifts. Despite being average 3F age and height, Patrick outweighed his
cellblockmates. His buzzed head seemed round as a globe. With hair light and
skin paled like someone growing up under the perpetually cold leaden skies of
the former Eastern Bloc, Patrick hardly passed for a common Hispanic. I
wondered if this had been why he might have killed someone—the Latin Saints
wouldn’t trust him until he did something vicious and exhibited himself more
than a mascot-like groupie. Inmates on 3F couldn’t intimidate Patrick, but
integrating elsewhere was problematic. The boy’s mother then conferred with
administration, which ordered us to hold Patrick out of school. With his peers
in class, Patrick idled upstairs, lolling at a circular fiberglass table
outside the TV Area. Weekdays when I arrived at 2:00 P.M., he was flipping
through magazines or sketching. Often he laid his head down on the pages and
papers waiting for the cellblock to return from the School Area. Later I
overhead my coworker accepting movie requests from Patrick, offering to rent
the boy videos to watch during his sedentary school days. This man, a black man
who in my first month on the job warned me not to make Attending Children my
career, knew of Patrick’s indictment. We all did. “Again?” he’d said when
Patrick answered with Scream 2.
Evidently, staged on-screen slaughter could not repulse Patrick. Perhaps
witnessing real carnage neutered the mock gore of gratuitously staged carnage.
At best, Patrick watched two boys take five slugs. At worst, he performed the
slugging himself.
Patrick’s
mother further requested that her son not mingle with the general population
during Recreation or Church, claiming that other inmates plotted to hurt him.
When Patrick’s twenty-something cellblockmates marched off to the chapel with
one of us, he remained on block. If Recreation scheduled 3F for basketball or
softball, Patrick couldn’t participate but rather watched more television,
drew, or cleaned. I complimented him at least once for maintaining one of 3F’s
more spotless cells. Intellectually, I should have hated Patrick for what he
likely did to Robert and Delvon, for heaping up more white/black animosity in
America, and for how differently every black inmate at that jail must have
viewed me. Patrick had reminded them that whites continued to kill blacks,
right there and right then in Chicago—not just a million years ago in grainy
lynching stills of the Jim Crow South. Black inmates would link me to this
contemporary racial assassin and to those cinching nooses around the necks of
their ancestors. Yet no fiery rage at Patrick welled inside me. I didn’t see
him shoot Robert and Delvon. I didn’t step around their blood on the sidewalk.
I shared no wake room weeping space with their families. So far Patrick hadn’t
rendered my job difficult. He never called me “Opie” or “white bitch” like some
black inmates had. Racist as it seemed, not hating Patrick was effortless.
“His mom
requested it because she feared for his safety. But if you look at all the
reports, it was Patrick doing all the fighting,” 3F’s regular 8-4 shift
Children’s Attendant told me. “He’s been written up at least eight times and
he’s only been here two weeks—all for fighting and gang-banging,” another said.
According to one caseworker, Patrick also instigated “a gang fight” in the gym
one Saturday afternoon about a month after his arrival.
“Yeah, he’s
a Saint,” Father Kelly, the detention center’s Catholic chaplain, explained to
me after one of his sessions with the double-murder suspect when I mentioned
media reports of Patrick’s gang membership.
Off the
cellblock, he counseled Patrick in a rare group of one. Maybe Father Kelly
thought the boy needed confidentiality in case he decided to talk about that
.38-caliber pistol in his jacket. Attendants on 3F then mentioned Patrick
bragging to other juveniles that he did kill Delvon and Robert. No lethal
needles threatened Patrick but Father Kelly, a white man from Ohio with a taut
brown mustache, who unlike me didn’t shelter himself in the suburbs where
everyone looked like him and spoke like him, but rather lived “in the
community,” still objected to the death penalty. Even if Patrick had been
seventeen, much less thirteen, that day racing away from 50th and
Paulina, our jailhouse priest wouldn’t have demanded that he surrender his life
if guilty. I learned this in Father Kelly’s newsletter, Making Choices, which he passed out during chapel services and
delivered in stacks to the cellblocks. Along with juvenile-penned essays and
poems, one edition recounted his trip to a suburban penitentiary to protest the
approaching executions of Durlynn Eddmonds and Walter Stewart. Eddmonds was
convicted of molesting and murdering a boy of nine whose body authorities
recovered from a dumpster. Stewart was judged liable in two slayings while
robbing a jewelry store. Father Kelly finished his editorial: “Pray that the people of Illinois and the
people of the United States demand that the government quit killing. It makes
no sense to kill in order to teach that killing is wrong.” As a child and teen
in Texas and then a younger adult becoming a Bible college student at an
institution founded by a Great Awakening tent revival preacher, I believed
capital punishment to be good, holy, and just. Grownups had forever told me
that the Bible said it should be so—a living body for a once-living body. Back
then the idea that the death penalty contradicted itself had yet to jar my
cerebrum. Twenty-seven years into my own life, Father Kelly had my sympathy. We
didn’t pin down a rapist and ram a broomstick into his rectal cavity or pummel
bloody those guilty of assault and battery. Poisoning to death Walter Stewart
or Timothy McVeigh or Joe Blow nudged us no more human. Every human life, vile
killers impossible to rehabilitate included, deserved more dignity than
syringes of sodium pentothal, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride.
Patrick’s misbehavior
persisted and 3F staff cell-isolated him over and over. The often six
hundred-inmate facility employed two mental health professionals—one was
part-time—and I never saw any inmate scheduled for regular therapy or
counseling. Meetings with Father Kelly never converted Patrick to a 3F Saint.
Days and weeks of detainment soon warped Patrick’s story into him only “holding
the gun.” The Tribune then reported
two teenage female witnesses. One claimed that a twenty-one-year-old male had
ripped off the shots. The other echoed the man being with Patrick, but said she
didn’t see the shooter. The accused adult confirmed accompanying Patrick to the
scene and providing him the gun, while claiming to have departed before rounds
rang out. The state’s attorney refused comment. Patrick’s public defender
alleged a set up because both girls provided her a different tale—the man fired
the shots, shoved the pistol into Patrick’s hands, and fled in a car.
Curious if
the boy would corroborate his own life story from the Tribune, I approached Patrick on a day he wasn’t in trouble but
rather doodling at a table because all his cellblockmates were in class. I
meandered over from the guard desk.
“So where’d
you go to school before you came here?”
“Seward,”
Patrick replied as he looked up, and without prompting, named the school that
had expelled him before he attended Seward.
Nothing on
why the previous school kicked him out. I didn’t ask.
“You goin’
back to Seward when you get outta here?”
“They
probly gonna keep me ‘til I’m twenny-one. I wish I could beat the case but they
got too much evidence on me.”
Patrick was
correct that guilty Illinois murder defendants younger than thirteen during
their crime could not be incarcerated beyond birthday twenty-one. Right then I
could have queried this particular murder defendant about who had fired the
murderous gun. I didn’t. Our interactions were amiable. No point risking
Patrick not shutting up at my next order, merely because I’d harassed him with
everyone else’s question. I’d felt indulged by that foray to 3F after recent
assignments on a far more challenging cellblock with bigger and older inmates.
The longer I worked at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, the
higher priority smooth and simple shifts became. My Children’s Attendant
existence had morphed into saving myself, instead of, as I’d once idealized,
saving the kids.
*
“Hey,
make
sure you guys clean this off,” I said to three juveniles instructed to swab
3F’s Bathroom Area floor and sinks. I figured someone had inadvertently brushed
soap or toothpaste against a steel divider anchored to the tile floor between
two toilets, creating a white splotch. I moved closer to the chest-high steel
fence. Instead of any abstract art, a capital S and N flanked a cross. Each
letter hovered below the rung. I summoned a cleaning designee and pointed.
“That’s
Patrick’s. That’s how he makes his set,” the slender boy answered.
S for
Saints. N for Nation. Evidently excused to the Bathroom Area by himself,
Patrick had soap bar scrawled his Nation
onto the toilet partition, the way unincarcerated gang-bangers all across
Chicago inscribed tenement breezeways, alley walls, El train girders, and the
sides of parked eighteen-wheelers. Patrick just hadn’t wielded a magic marker
or can of spray paint.
“Patrick,
who told you to come over here?” I asked the next evening while monitoring
inmates stacking extra mattresses in vacant cell number three during 3F’s
weekly cell-straightening time. My coworker and I couldn’t assign that cell to
anyone because a jagged piece of metal protruded from a back corner where a
steel beam and brick column met.
“No one,”
Patrick looked away, knowing that he broke a rule. “I just wanted to see if my
writing was still there.” Cell three was near the Bathroom Area. Patrick’s
behavior had improved enough to merit him a cell closer to the TV Area where he
could see the screen from his bed.
“Go back to
your room and keep cleaning,” I said. Patrick meandered off down the cell row
with no guff. A boasting potential double-murderer accepting my directive like
rain on a parched lawn surprised me. I swung back and forth on whether if in a
dissimilar environment, Patrick might also follow different command—a command
to shoot two people. I waited for the mattresses to be organized and stepped
into Patrick’s former cell. High on the wall above the steel toilet and sink
almost to the ceiling, etched in four lines of white chalk, was his “writing.”
Patrick must have pilfered his chalk stick from a classroom before Mom put the
kibosh on him going to school, or he’d traded a dollar bill or twin-pack of
chocolate chip cookies for it at dinner without us noticing. That night he
mounted his sink and scripted away. Each written line ran four or five
consecutive bricks and contained:
Almighty Saints—the gang’s trademark halo symbols, more S’s and N’s,
Joe-Joe (Patrick’s nickname cited in a Tribune
article), and inverted Gangster Disciples pitchforks. To blaspheme other
gangs, kids drafted their symbol upside down.
*
A year later,
Patrick, his left eye bruised, attended his verdict hearing. By mom’s account,
other juveniles had beaten him. Patrick was guilty in both killings and a judge
sentenced him to five years at the Illinois Youth Department of Corrections.
Patrick wasn’t as bad off as he feared—just wrong about being held until he was
twenty-one. In my closet I found the Tribune
front-page section with Delvon and Robert’s pictures. I’d saved it. I held
up the unfolded paper and studied the two soft faces and four curious eyes,
Robert’s angling off to the left away from the camera as if discomforted by
even the most basic attention. Their faces inches from mine, I tried to
conjecture what force had intersected their lives with Patrick’s. At Patrick’s
age, I played backup linebacker for the Harwood Junior High Blackhawks and
counted months until Christmas in San Diego where my cousin and I would execute
our annual blockbuster baseball card trades. Anticipating my aunt’s peanut
fudge shortened the drive through cardboard bland west Texas and southern New
Mexico. My parents were together. No one had knifed my father. I never stressed
about impressing gang members. Food filled our fridge. Mom’s scratch bran rolls
graced the dinner table. Now the minutiae of Patrick, Delvon, and Robert
translated meaningless. If Patrick did it? Why Patrick did it? Two guiltless
kids were still dead. And a boy whom I’d known, a boy who always did what I
told him to, would be warehoused away for five years. By then the death count
might be three.
________________________________________________________________
Mark
Dostert is the
author of Up in Here: Jailing Kids on Chicago’s Other Side, forthcoming from University of Iowa Press in September 2014. He holds a Master of Arts in
History from University of North Texas. His narrative essays have appeared in Ascent, Cimarron
Review, Houston Chronicle, Southern
Indiana Review, and The Summerset Review,
and been cited/listed as Notable in The Best American Nonrequired
Reading 2011, The Best American Essays 2011,
andThe
Best American Essays 2013. He holds 33 hours of graduate English
credit at University of Houston and has studied creative writing at Inprint in
Houston and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop in Portland, OR.
You can find Mark's new book, Up in Here, from Brazos, University of Iowa Press, Barnes and Nobles, or Powell's.
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