Prisoner F has a metal plate in his head, a once busted orbital bone, a prosthetic eye, and a permanent smile. But don’t let his upturned mouth fool you—Car accident, he explains. You can hear the sadness in his voice.
He hates me, or not so much me, but what I represent. I’m an authority figure. I’m his gateway to a minimal education. I’m Mr. Follow-the-Policy. “Do your school work,” I say, eliciting such canned responses as “school sucks,” followed by traditional chest-thumping rituals and banter. I continue, “Keep it up. I got something for you.” I ball-up my hands.
“You can’t box,” he says. He rises from his chair.
I step to his right side, out of his periscope view and take a few slow short swings at the air. The students are amused.
“You got jokes,” he says.
On one rare occasion when he actually turned in an assignment, I inked it up, made it bleed real bad, and quickly dumped it back on his desk. “You know,” he said, “would it hurt you to praise your students once in awhile?”
“What do you want,” I asked, “a gold star?”
“Yeah,” he said.
I drew a smiley face at the top of his paper. I started with the mouth, enclosed it with a circle, then dotted it once and walked away.
He laughed. His permanent smile must’ve meant something, must’ve had meaning. The other students crowded around his desk to see what I had done. “That’s just plain wrong,” someone said, but all of them were laughing, all of them were giving him the attention he so desperately wanted.
8 comments:
Attention is the most powerful drug of all.
In your line of work, being an authority figure with a sense of humour is a big plus.
Good one, man, well done.
Fade & shoot. Fade & shoot! And keep up your wonderful sense of humor.
Now that's the way to take the "wind of his sail." i'm taking lessons from you, man. brilliant!
A gold star for you...
I've got trouble with this posting.
You are streetwise but not really streetwise.
I certainly don't recommend a descent into bumhood, where I certaily spent some time, but there are cues in the jungle hard to pick up when you'd been a honcho all along.
People with terrible injuries requiring serious surgery,ending in plastic surgery are a very fragile lot. All fragiles need approval; heretofore appearing--and feeling-- not quite human they are now back into the society of normal people. But the trauma and loss of face--sometime literal--is hard to overcome...I was once something not quite human, and looked it.
So the reconstructed face and the reconstructed skull is always seeking approval among as yet untouched people.
He asks himself, "How is my image today?" And the answer is slattern and creep.
I don't now what your inmate was in for--probably for something quite horrible, but his psychology is the same as any patched-up human being after a trainwreck."How is my image today?"
And the answer seems to come back,
You're black, you have a plate in your head, you're a convict, and on top of everythihng else, probably queer. Why don't you die, you bastard?
Don't know if this particular convict's crimes came before or after the plate in his head. But there is enough infomation to suggest he got a real crack in the skull, to say the least.
Sardonic smile gets not even get what Tom Wolfe may have called "a shit-eating grin."
Chagrin.
Real powerful comment, Ivan, and point well taken. I'm not sure the descent into bumhood is near. If I were to openly mention in front of the class the specifics of his crime--the raping of an innocent child--then maybe I would be stepping into that neighborhood. But I don't think so. If I were to praise him, I mean really really praise him, or anyone else, my kindness would be mistaken for weakness. It's just the way it is. Sorry to open up old wounds for you ... ouch ... I mean ... I guess I better stop before I say the wrong thing.
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