Chapter Nine
The last couple of months before I was going to jail, the house was being sold and we were getting rid of everything. We had seven rooms to empty out, stuff to sell and give away. Michelle was moving into an apartment on Kings Highway. My two kids were going to one sister and my other kids were going to another. We were breaking up and, as they say, “Breaking up is hard to do.” It was getting sad.
It was Father’s Day, and I was on my way to jail. A cop comes over to me at the Brooklyn House of Detention and says, “You’re in jail and you’re here on Father’s Day, what do you think about that?” I looked at him and I said, “So what, you’re here too on Father’s Day, what’s the big fucking deal?” I was there for the crime and I wasn’t with my kids. He was there for the money, and he wasn’t with his kids.
Then I get to jail on Rikers Island and I’m saying, “What the fuck happened?” I’m thirty-five years old, I’m on methadone, I’m sweaty, kicking, sick as a fucking dog because they don’t know I’m shooting bundles of dope over the methadone. I get in there and go through all this shit. They spray you down with DDT, you take a shower and they throw you some clothes. I see the doctor and he tells me, “I’m going to detox you from the methadone—gonna put you in a fourteen day detox.” I said, “Okay, we’ll do that.”
So as I’m walking up the corridor to my cell, all of a sudden one of the deputy wardens in white shirts pulls me out of line. Who is it but one of my best friends I grew up with? He gave me some money, put money into my commissary account and he says, “If anybody bothers you, try to get word to me and I’ll straighten them out,” meaning any of the inmates, any of the blacks or any of the Puerto Ricans. “If you get bothered by anybody you let me know.” So that was a very comforting feeling to know that one of my good friends who I grew up with, drank with, partied with when we were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen years old, worked on Rikers Island. I didn’t know he became a deputy warden. Skippy was great, just to know somebody was there was reassuring to me. It was scary for the first time, and me a weakened heroin addict. He knew I was one of the guys from the neighborhood and he was taking care of me. I thought that was great, so I passed that little word around, naturally very quietly, that one of the deputies was one of the guys I grew up with. That little word got around, and I pretty much took care of myself. I didn’t have any fights, I minded my own fucking business. I stayed with the white guys, which you have to do. Up there they got Harlem, Spanish Harlem, and the white neighborhood, and that’s how the bunks go in the dorm.
Michelle snuck stuff in for me and I got high. She’d put reefer in these little tiny balloons and bring them to me in jail. I would swallow them and then go back to my cell, drink a big glass of soapy water and puke them up. If that didn’t happen, I would have to shit them out in a plastic bag and then feel for the little rubber balloons between the shit, wash them off, get the pot and roll it up. That’s what I did in Rikers to get roast beef sandwiches and “tailor- made jailhouse clothes,” jumpsuits with pockets and stitching all along the sides in exchange for some reefer. They would give you a shirt; you’re small and they give you an extra large. He cuts it down, makes it a medium to fit you so you look good. You have to look cool. It was important because what you did in jail—and this wasn’t even big time, this was a “skid bit”—gets around. I did all skid bits in my life, ten, fifteen, twenty days, six months was nothing. I knew guys that did ten, fifteen, twenty years. So I was doing six months on Rikers Island, which was like being in the fucking Plaza Hotel compared to going upstate. I was very grateful, even though I didn’t know the meaning of the word then.
I didn’t want to be there, I wanted to get out. It took me two weeks just to get out of bed in jail. It was about a week before they helped me to the shower. I was so sick after I detoxed from the methadone in the infirmary. I went back to my cell, back to the dorm. They gave me nothing and I was sick as a dog for the next two months. I finally detoxed from the methadone. That means they gave you 20 mg, 10 mg, 5 mg, 2.5 mg, every day a little bit less and after fourteen days in a hospital ward they put you into population and you’re supposed to be cured. I felt like a piece of shit, like I was dying. The fucking air I breathed hurt. This is the first time there’s no toxins in my body, there’s no flu like that, it’s very painful. Your legs, your joints in your body, all your bones hurt like you’ve got arthritis, your hair hurts, your face hurts, your fingertips hurt, you constantly got the dry heaves, you’re always throwing up nothing, you can’t walk, you can’t eat or drink, even though you might be able to put some water in your mouth and spit it out. Being on Rikers Island and being sick for two months from going cold turkey, you are physically and mentally a wreck; going to the bathroom all the time and constantly gagging. I was sick as a dog and swore to God I’d never get on methadone again, and that was the end of it.
I started eating a piece of bread with some jelly, a little bit at a time, a spoonful of beans. It took about two months for me to be okay and then after the following two months I was out of there, working with a gang called the Ghouls.
The Ghouls were the people who buried the dead bodies that were found on the streets of New York, and we buried them on Hart’s Island. There was the Big Ghouls and the Baby Ghouls. The Baby Ghouls were the ones that buried all the babies from hospitals, stillborns, kids in car wrecks, unknowns. We would carve their serial numbers on the pine boxes because no one knew their names; they were unclaimed bodies. Some had IDs but no one claimed their bodies. We would dig a six-foot trench and put a pile of three or four on top of one another, then a bulldozer would come and throw a foot of dirt on them.
We had to go from Rikers Island to Hart’s Island by bus. The bus would go onto the ferry, which was very scary. They’d open up the back door of the bus when you’re in the middle of the ocean in case the fucking bus fell off the ferry. I said, “Yeah, and what, how do you get out of the fucking bus? You’re dead.”
When the guys came from the funeral parlors to confiscate some of the bodies that were numbered, if maybe somebody identified a body, we would dig the body up. These guys would come in the funeral hearse and sometimes they would slip us some booze, a pint of Fleischmann’s Rye whiskey or a pint of something else for digging up the dead bodies. They’d say, “It’s in the back seat of the hearse” and we’d each take a few swigs, two or three slugs each, get a little buzz on.
We would go to the island and we’d stay there all day, from seven in the morning to four in the afternoon and come back. We’d feed the seagulls, watch the water, hang out, fry up the baloney, bury some bodies, dig up some bodies, and then go home. A day in the life of a ghoul, that’s what we did.
I remember Michelle bringing my son to Rikers Island for a visit. I thought that was so cool; it was the fucking worst thing I coulda done. Why would I want my children strip-searched and seeing me behind a glass partition?