We Talked Like We Were Still Locked Up Teens
The Criminal Justice System threw us in a cell on Rikers Island to rot and die. We were two teenagers from Brooklyn, born into bondage and a bunch of bad luck. Our teenage years tapered off into being animalized by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. No one had taught us how to survive prison with indeterminate life sentences. We were boys pushing the idea of dying in prison before we were adults. This started as a dark fantasy that turned into a daydream. In time, it became our very-dangerous-everyday-reality. Despite all of that, and a quarter century of pain later, we found our way back into each other’s lives. Unfortunately, we were still locked up.
Suave and I met in 1997 while we were locked up in the restraint unit of solitary confinement on Rikers Island. We were on trial for murder. We survived by having each other’s back when the police and other prisoners tried — and did for the most part — beat us mentally and physically. The administration punished us for failing to adjust to institutional life by animalizing us even further.
We spent a lot of time on the floors of our cells in solitary confinement. There were four of us locked up in the restraint unit at the time: Chulo, Sauve, Ice, and me. We were all convicted of murder in one degree or another. Suave and I were closer because we were joined at the hip. Actually, our cells connected. We were the middle of the four.
Our isolation forced us to depend on each other for the sake of our sanity, if nothing else. We placed our cheeks on the cold stone floor so we could chat about knife fighting in the yard; women we fantasied about sleeping with; and a future none of us actually believed was for us. We were young, misguided and horny as hell. We fell for the hype of “Thug Life.” It was as addictive as dope. We got hooked on it.
At the height of our youth and immaturity, we lived through our traumas pretending to be fearless. Suave was the pretty boy mastermind with a razor quick at hand. I was a broken Brooklyn boy with a pick and a hole in my heart. Outwardly, we were slim studs with a swagger that was so sturdy, you’d never guess why we were so dangerous. Because on the inside, we were scared shitless. We would strike first at any perceived threat, cop or convict alike.
This was compounded by the realities of surviving in a predatory environment where everyone was bigger, stronger, and more prison-savvy than us. Suave was five foot ten and 150 pounds. I was of the same height but ten pounds heavier. We were surrounded by grown men. Some were prisoners with malicious intentions, most of them were in super-hero shape. The officers got their orders from the administration, and generally executed those orders in a cruel fashion. The only thing we had to rely on was a sliver of our sanity, and lots of savagery. That’s what surviving our environment called for. Rikers Island was meant to break us before we even had a chance to dream of becoming good men.
They locked us up in the box. They upped our security status and made us “Red I.D.”, which meant we were to be chained, shackled and mittened up (our hands cuffed and secured in these special-made tubular mittens that engulfed our teenage hands from wrist to fingertips) any time we were out of our cages.
We took an oath to never let prison sow bad blood between us. Suave was more than my comrade. I called him “my brother.” We were so close that I used his razor to shave for court. I had to, because I had a razor deprivation/restriction order amongst the hundreds of other deprivations/restrictions against me.
There was this one particular time when Suave had my back. Some other prisoners tried to move against me when I was in a bad way. One morning, at 5:30 a.m., shit got real while we were being shackled up to go to court. The guards chained me up first and sat me in the bullpen. I was a sitting duck for any other prisoner I had a beef with, or any bandit with a taste for blood that morning in the box.
Besides keeping the jail chains on us, the guards also kept their foot on our necks. They socialized us to feed off each other’s wounds. We stayed in a state of starvation because they systemically starved our humanity. We learned how to hurt each other by the way the criminal justice system hurt us.
There was a particular group of prisoners who wanted to hurt me because I wasn’t a part of their gang or any other. I saw them approaching the bullpen. The chains jangled and jiggled a bit as I slid into a corner of the bullpen. I tried to blend in with scum, blood, piss, graffiti, shit smeared on the walls. It was to no avail. It was too late. They saw me.
They overpowered the guards escorting them and made a beeline straight for me. Things began to happen in slow motion. I saw razors being spit from their mouths and shanks being snatched from their stash in the crack of their ass. The first one was on me, but just as fast was knocked off.
Suave was on line behind my group of attackers. They didn’t figure Suave could be my comrade because he was in a gang and I wasn’t. They were too caught up in their own oppression to realize that despite Suave being Puerto Rican and me being Black, we were brothers.
We scrapped for a few minutes before the guards broke us up. No one got hurt, save for a few scrapes and scratches. Yet, it was enough to drill home the point that Suave and I were more than comrades. We were brothers and would fight back to back while figuring out how to live until we died in prison.
Suave and I were trying to figure out how we were going to survive a concept of time and life we couldn’t comprehend. The criminal justice system made us pay by a crooked kind of calculation. We survived in brotherhood and comradery for as long as we could, until the system sentenced me and snatched us apart. They gave us more time than we were alive. I got 25 to life. Some months later they gave Suave 33 and 1/3 to life. Before we could figure that out, they snatched us apart and shipped us in opposite directions of the carceral state.
The State sent me to Attica and him… well, I didn’t know where they sent him. In the joint they never tell you where you’re going. The officers just strip you and maybe throw your property in bags, then they shackle you, and you go on a bus. It’s not too dissimilar from how they transported slaves during the Atlantic Slave Trade. The last thing I remember before we parted was two teens telling each other to “Man up. Be safe and hold it down.”
It always go down right before dawn. That’s when the guards come to get you. They know you’re disoriented. Plus the procedure of chains, cuffs, and cruelty is an all-day process. We both sat with our backs against the wall, in our cells that look alike, wondering where our fates would take us. For a while we had forgotten we were convicted murderers and wards of the carceral state. For a minute we imagined that we would see the streets again. We smoked the last of our stashed cigarettes before the guards came to get us.
The twisted up rope made of toilet tissue we kept burning as a wick to light us up went out. The smoke left a stream of tendrils in the dark before it disappeared into the night. They came for me first.
Hard goodbyes always try tough guys like me.
“OPEN ARTHUR” The guard yelled followed by the mechanical “BUZZZ” of the steel door sliding open.
Moments later, I cracked along with the cell. It’s always during those last few seconds that a hard nigga could let his guards down and bust a wet one. I literally thought I would never see Suave again. It’s the way they taught us die to one another inside the carceral state.
Neither Suave nor I would ever admit it, but neither one of us was brave enough to wish or want a tomorrow. Tomorrow came with an uncertain kind of hurt. We already made it through today. We at least knew we could take that. Somehow back then, at the time, it seemed good enough. Without either one of us realizing it, we had just committed a powerful act of manhood. We became vulnerable and licked our wounds disguised as tears, albeit from a distance.
After being stripped, frisked, and cuffed in my cell, the guards prepared to escort me to the bullpens. I gave a tug and resisted the guard just a bit. I planted myself firm in front of Suave’s cell. The youth in his face was already pressed against the dull scratched-up-pleix- glass. I bumped my forehead against the same glass. We made contact though the reverberation of a “CLUCK CLUCK” — the box talk for “Love is Love.” The thick cloudiness of the glass didn’t stop the message we communicated. It was a silent moment right before the guards pulled me away to strive or die during my travels through the wastelands of the carceral state.
Over the course of 25 years we walked our individual journeys and lived our respective lives. I never saw or heard word of him again. Then two weeks before I began writing this essay, mad prisoners came running up to me saying: “Ceez, a new guy pulled up and was asking about you.” They said they weren’t sure he was looking for smoke (i.e., trouble) or not. Sooner or later, I would find out what he came checking for.
Word in the yard was: “Ceez is doing good things.” The same yard talk told me, he was too. The meaning of good things had changed considerably since the days when Suave and I broke night laying on a cell floor plotting and hoping.
Now-a-days good things meant getting a college degree. It meant becoming emotionally and intellectually mature enough to accept responsibility and take accountability for our past actions. It meant that we grew into men vulnerable enough to make amends, atone, and work towards healing ourselves and those we’ve hurt. It meant taking responsibility for the positive growth of our community in and out of prison.
At this point the entire prison knew we were looking for each other. They told me, “Son name is Suave. He Spanish boy. Ain’t nothing soft about ’em though. He got time in like you and gets busy. You probably know the nigga.” It never dawned on me that he could be the same Suave I called my bro from back in the day. Days after hearing about him, the new guy pulled up to the dorm where I live. The muscular bald head Puerto Rican guy with designer frame didn’t look like anyone I knew other than a Puerto Rican version of myself.
Amongst forty other prisoners with nothing but air and opportunity between us, our prison instincts kicked in. The carceral state built us for this kind of action. It took a few days, but we got to it. Instead of racing, my heartbeat slowed in time with his incoming approach. We’ve been about this life our entire adult lives. Fortunately, the pain of the bid also taught us to give the other time and space, so that we wouldn’t box ourselves into a corner without any other options.
From the first time I saw him, I knew he was a pro at prison like me. Suave kept his hands concealed and his eyes trained on mine. He always moved forward, but at an angle and in slices. Suave displayed a smoothness that only a yard gladiator would move with. I’ve taken those same steps before. We both had blood in our eyes. I wasn’t sure if his was the reflection of someone else’s wounds or his own. Had I caused them? Had he once wounded me? We both saw traces of familiar and foul blood when we could catch a glance at each other’s hands. We moved around the spacious dorm like we were checking for it. Because now we really were.
I felt a fragment of familiarity. I saw a tinge of it in him too. Yet we couldn’t place each others’ faces. Then, after stalking each other around the dorm we finally sat down at my cube to kick it. It was a dark blue kind of blackish in spots of color outside. It was the time of day when predators strike at close distance. Suave and I simultaneously sat, leant over, forearms on thighs, and ready to attack if necessary. It wasn’t a theatrical performance, just a potential violent one.
We name dropped for a while, talked about the different prisons we’d been to feel each other out. Then things got mixy and messy. “A yo, remember Carlito. Didn’t he catch a buck fifty for sneak thieving in the four building,” Suave said.
“Word. Son got split to the white meat. Ya heard?” I replied.
It wasn’t the story, rather it was how our vernacular and code speech changed throughout the course of our conversation. We sounded like two throwback thugs from the 1990s, and not like two college graduates and men of positive change. There was one slight moment of tension when we both knew, we knew each other from somewhere but we just couldn’t place when and where the action took place.
At first, we both thought we were enemies from some teenage beef on Rikers Island. Then it was a micro tick in each of our faces that blew it up. Neither one of us recognized the grown man that was sitting in front of them. I only recalled the brief images of the boys from our shared past. I remembered the boys that fought back-to-back against older prisoners and police; I remembered the two teenagers handcuffed and hog-tied, bloody, broken, and bruised laying on the cold cell floor groaning and grunting in pain, because we had too much pride to cry out.
Yet, what I remember wasn’t what I saw in front of me. I saw my long-lost brother as an adult. His pretty boy smile told me he recognized me too. That sense of uncertainty turned into an eruption of joy. As fate would have it, our journeys came around full circle.
“SUAVE ITS ME BRO. CEEZ.” I screamed as if yelling would make him remember faster.
“CEEZ, WHAT THE FUCK!” He shouted.
We jumped up and embraced each other and the rest of the house gave a sigh of relief. At the time I had been going through a lot. No matter how much I changed for the good, the parole board refused to let me go. There were times I would wonder if I could go on. Then, I saw my brother. He had grown into a man neither of us could conceive when we were two imprisoned teenagers. Hope washed over me anew.
Despite being broken in different parts of the carceral state, we kind of healed the same. We both hold college degrees. I’m a writer. He’s an editor. We both work towards our redemption by living the words of our apologies. We’re both active in social work with the youth free society. Most of all, we have sincerely changed to become better men. Suave saw his first parole board this January, just one month before I went to my 3rd. I wondered it we would both make it, me arriving to the prison’s front gate to pick him up and bring him home.
I tried to do that but reality failed to meet me where I was at. I got hit at the board with two more years. Fortunately, fate didn’t fake me all the way out. Suave made his first parole board and came home this May. The reunion I had hope for wasn’t just a mirage, only half realized. The part that survived was made of bottom boy magic, because it was suspended in time. It’s driven by the imagination of two fallen sons fighting to flourish, fly, and eventually find their way home from the worse choices we’ve ever made.
Not every fairytale forges its final draft in fairness. I long ago forfeited any claim to what is and what isn’t fair. Rather, I’m thankful and blessed that I had a chance to be with my brother before we parted ways again. For twice in one lifetime I embraced him before the carceral state broke us up again. Although, this time I pressed my body to his in brotherly love, instead of a three inch thick scratched up plexiglass widow. I gave him everything I ever dreamed I would do when I was free. I gave him every hope that I’ve hung onto ever since they locked me up. In return, he left me with a bread trail of hope and love to look for and follow until we meet again.
Corey Devon Arthur is an incarcerated writer and artist. His writing has been published in venues including the Marshall Project and Writing Class Radio. In March of 2023, he exhibited his art show, She Told Me Save The Flower, at My Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. He cooperates with Empowerment Avenue, an organization that uses art, writing and journalism -- pre-entry -- to empower people in prison. Empowerment Avenue’s mission is to normalize the inclusion of incarcerated writers and artists in mainstream venues by bridging the gap between them and harnessing this creative proximity as a path to de-carceration and public safety.