Part II - Cry of Silence
Sixteen
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Time Out
“That was great, baby… great!”
the pudgy balding man said as he buttoned up his polyester shirt. “Just how old
are you, sweetheart, if ya don’t mind me askin’?”
“Eighteen.”
“Ya know, you look a whole lot
younger, but… I’m payin’ for your body not a birthday party,” the man laughed,
but the girl did not.
Once the customer departed the
cheap hotel room Jenny freshened up as best she could, until a loud knock
interrupted her street celebrity makeover. “Yo, your one hour nap
rental time is up,” the desk clerk reminded Miss Philips, “clear out. I got
people waitin’.”
After leaving the musty smelling
motel room, Jenny walked the grey dismal sidewalks of the inner city streets
looking to hook up with her usual connection in hopes of purchasing a
little ‘motivation’ with her newly acquired pocket of temporary wealth, but her
usual dealer was nowhere to be found. She canvased the back alleys that
reeked of stale wine, urine and rancid garbage until someone hailed her, “Hey,
babe.”
Jenny turned around and replied,
“I ain’t your babe,” then proceeded to walk onward.
“Hold on,” the young man said,
“I ain’t the enemy. I got a little pick me up for sale, if ya know what I
mean.”
“No, I don’t know what you
mean.” Jenny walked on.
“Wait, wait, I’ll show you.” The
man pulled a small bag from his jacket pocket.
“Soap crystals, it ain’t my wash
day creep, get lost.”
“Just one hundred-fifty bucks
for you, honey.”
“Seventy-five and you got a
deal.”
“You’re killin’ me, babe,” the
man thought for a moment, “One hundred then.”
Having only two tricks under her
belt for the day, Jenny made one last offer for the heroin, “Eighty-five, or I
walk.”
“Ok, ok,” the man agreed.
In another alley behind another
street Jenny sat and listened to the sounds of fighting cats as she fed her
hunger for another moment, another day. Jenny faded in and out of
reality’s realm as the stench of darkness slowly weighed her down like each
single spadeful of earth does as it is shoveled onto a casket resting
deeply in a freshly dug grave.
Her faint cry of silence
whispered from her cracked lips, “Oh, God, please….”
When Jenny awoke the nurse
informed her that she was a very lucky girl to be alive; her doctor informed
her she should recover without any significant problems and recommended
strongly that she receive follow-up rehabilitative drug addiction treatment;
the serious looking police detective informed her she was under arrest; the
wall-mounted television set informed her of low level pressure zones and local
weather conditions.
Jenny’s plea bargain was
gracefully orchestrated by a young public defender eager to climb the
politically corrupted ladder of judicial success. He arranged for his young
client to be housed in the newly constructed Youth Maximum Security Detention
Facility for teenage women, Y-MAX-Women’s, to fulfill her criminal
sentence under the guidelines of Supervised Assimilation Therapy. SAT was
designed by prison psychologist Wendell Patterson, whose goal was enabling
teen offenders with the necessary skills they would need to reenter society
as productive young law-abiding citizens.
Jennifer Philips had spent her
youth in and out of various detention facilities. She was well known by the
courts for her involvement with drugs and prostitution, but prior to her
prison sentence, judges, lawyers and police had taken a softer approach to
dealing with Jennifer’s criminal history. Sexually abused by an uncle from
her early youth and later by a music teacher in middle grade school, she had
developed a hard, antisocial shell around her fragile
personality. Jenny’s placement at Y-MAX-Women’s awakened her to the
harshness surrounding the consequences of choices better not made in life.
“Philips,” the female officer
addressed her wing’s most abrasive inmate, “you got a cell move, get your stuff
together.”
Third cell move in two months, Jenny hashed the thought through her mind. Who’d I piss off now?
As a smiling correctional
officer escorted Jenny to her new housing unit, Jenny snapped abruptly, “What
are you smilin’ about?”
Having years of experience with
the callous and childish personality displays teen inmates project, the C/O
simply replied, “Cyrene Youth Ministries will begin having meetings here
soon, that’s what I’m smiling about, Inmate Philips.”
Jenny’s silence echoed against
the sanitized white walls of the prison’s mainline corridor.
“You should attend one of those
meetings, it’ll do ya good.”
How could this smiling blob with
a badge know what would do me good? Jenny’s anger rose.
“Anyway,” the C/O continued, “it
gets a soul out of the house for an evening.”
That was a concept Jenny did
understand. Being in a cell day after day was less exciting than a familiar
boring businessman’s cash being laid on a hotel room dresser before
services are rendered.
“Here we are,” the C/O
announced.
The pair entered the sally port
and waited for the outer door to close and the inner one to open.”
Jenny made a choice between
those two Control Officer operated doors, “I’ll think about it.”
“Ok, young lady, but my advice
is for you to think hard.”
Five victorious fights with
other inmate teen girls provided Jenny with the reputation of one who wanted to
be and should be left alone and ignored. Numerous negative encounters with
prison staff ensured Jenny would always receive a strong reaction to her
actions; verbal counsel was no longer a viable option. Jenny was assigned
to work with maintenance, cleaning the prison corridor floors.
Jenny knew that she would never
forget the smells of the prison, the odor of fresh concrete, the moist aroma of
shower water vapor, and the chemicals, though supposedly all natural, that
she used in her job as a porter… cleaning, waxing, and buffing floors. She also
knew she would not forget her dreams, dreams of abuse, prostitution,
drugs, and those assorted miseries she had exposed herself to over the early
years of her teenage life. She would also never forget her visits with the
prison psychologist and her reluctance to open up and expose her
life experiences and inner feelings in any significant detail. Jenny
preferred to remain generic in her dealing with the psychologist, but
open enough to be considered on the way to recovery and rehabilitation.
Jenny possessed all of the abilities necessary to manipulate people
and circumstances whenever the need arose.
Prison life had its way of changing people, some
softened over time while others grew worse and harder in character. Jenny did
not know if these attitude changes people experienced were due to prison
life itself, or to the fact that everyone in prison ages and does that
aging behind concrete walls separated from society’s ever-changing
norms. Jenny was not perfect in any sense of the word. She responded
sarcastically and short with staff and found she had few inmate friends.
Jenny felt alone.
Next Chapter: Buffer Zone
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