Excerpt
from...
The Rough Edges of the Cross: Cry of Silence
Jennifer owned a troubled past and a troubled life, a life devoid of red
carpets and model runways.
Follow this young teenage woman's journey as she struggles and searches
for the answers to her life. Prostitution, drugs, dingy motel rooms, and smelly
back-alley streets were the norm for this lonely teen girl until a pair of
chance encounters provide her with the opportunity to choose a new direction
for her life. Will this tormented teenage woman find the inner strength
necessary to change directions in life, or will she once again fall victim to
the darkness surrounding her troubled soul?
Is there a place in this world where God can hear her Cry of Silence?
One
____________
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, 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.
Two
____________
Buffer Zone
“Escort,”
the two porters cleaning the main hall’s floors quickly stood aside as the
Correctional Officer shouted again, “Escort.”
The
floors were slightly wet from the two young female porters cleaning and buffing
efforts, so the escorting officer and two inmates walked carefully and slowly
by, smelling the chemical cleaning fumes that filled the still hallway air.
“Look,”
Maggie said to Jenny in a whisper, “It’s those two boys from the construction
project.”
Jenny
whispered back as she stood flat against the chapel corridor wall waiting for
the trio to pass, “I know… they come in every day for one hot meal. They eat
somewhere else than we girls do though.”
Maggie
commented softly, “Now, that’s a shame, they look sort of cute. Don’t you
think, Jen?”
Jenny
held back her laugh, but found it hard not to smile as the two inmate males and
their escorting officer passed.
“Don’t
step on the stripes, you’ll slip,” commanded the officer to the two young men
he escorted.
Two
stripes were painted on the floor to divide the corridor for inmate and staff
traffic and to provide an escort walkway between the two lines down the
corridor’s center. These lines became very slippery when wet and many inmates
enjoyed seeing staff slip and fall.
One
of the boys pointed to a poster locked behind a glass bulletin board case on
the chapel’s double entry doors and said quickly, “You two girls should go and
try that meeting out.”
“Quiet,
Inmate Stone,” the officer barked to Renwick as the youth attempted to
continue, “Those meetings are great and—”
“The
name’s Cornell Purdue,” the second inmate youth announced.”
“In
your dreams, boys,” Jenny shouted.
The
officer smiled slightly, reflecting on what he might do or say to two young
teen women if he were in these two young men’s circumstance. “You too, Purdue.
You two are bothering these young ladies.”
_____________________________________________
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