Richard Burkhart

 

Numbers!

When I was a kid I was arrested two or three times for stealing vehicles I wasn’t even old enough to drive. My first theft was a Moped, then a Honda 50 for which I was first arrested. I took those scooters because my (more fortunate) friends had them and I wanted to go riding around Phoenix with them late at night. I ended up in juvenile hall for five days for that, and I believe that was the beginning of my understanding of wealth. Most of the boys (you had to be under 18 to land in juvenile detention) in that place were animals. Being white was not much of a reason for these guys to hate you, they hated everybody.  Your whole day (and night) was about defending yourself. Comparing crimes was how you gained status or rank. Being a first timer and in for stealing a Honda 50 gave me a pretty low number, and being only just over thirteen meant I wasn’t worth much as trophy either.  We spent the day in a large square courtyard with a kind of a portico on two sides, a tall wall on one end topped with barbed wire which divided male and female detainees, and a smallish porch opposite that wall which led into the barracks and served as the command post for the guards. The two porticoes, which were roofed with corrugated metal and held up by wooden poles, were where the only possible shade from the desert sun could be had and where most of us sought some carefully measured spot on the ground to sit; what benches there were were the equivalent of thrones and occasionally there was one guy on an entire bench who nobody fucked with. The guards maintained control over the yard by being more criminal than the kids, and experts in the cruelties of the blazing sun. On arrival, each of us were assigned one of the numbers that were painted across the middle of the sticky hot asphalt courtyard. It was the past-time of the newly arrived shift of guards to holler out the order: “NUMBERS!” meaning we had to jump up and run out to stand on our assigned number as fast as possible, which was never fast enough for these low-humored bastards and meant that the process was repeated endless times until the heat had begun to turn the air white and burned the heart with searing hatred; at which point cool drinks were brought out to the guards and they leaned back on the rear legs of their chairs and watched the boys swaying under their frying skulls for a while before finally dismissing them to their pissy shade under the porticoes. Virtually all these boys were from the Black-Hispanic ghetto on the south side of Phoenix. One boy told me he was in for smashing a man’s head with a brick because he saw him counting out two hundred dollars while standing in the street – he said he never saw that much money in his whole life. Girls were not very well understood in my mind at that time, but for most of those boys they were only of monetary value.  I learned that even a plastic pocket comb, one of the few things they let you keep of your personal possessions while inside, could become a terrifying weapon, and that for many of these boys being inside was the safest, and maybe the cleanest, place for them to be. The part that most brought me to a halt though was the evening communal shower. Some of those boys looked at me in ways that kept my eyes open most of the night.  One particularly muscular “private-bencher”, who had a pair of lieutenants with Hulk like bodies behind each shoulder and seemed impossible to avoid, made it his privilege to walk through the shower and put his hand on every naked ass in the shower.  It wasn’t easy to dismiss that kind of helplessness, and harder to imagine what he was like when he wasn’t under guard.  I ended up going back there two more times before I reached fifteen and each time I came out a little angrier.  I didn’t hate those kids, nor did I make any friends. Instead I learned to hate the money grubbing system that could care less about the lives it destroyed and knew no shame in personal excess.  Afterwards, for as long as I lived in Phoenix, I occasionally walked down to the south side and, knowing the risk, felt the need to spend sometime on those streets.