15
HAVING GROWN up in a housing project, Rafael found many aspects of Rikers Island familiar. He was used to harsh institutional surroundings. Jail was worse, of course: the brutal, numbing fact of confinement, the claustrophobia that came with knowing you were stuck, barely seeing the light of day, the constant hum of menace from both fellow prisoners and the guards. At least you could leave the project when things got to be too much, just head out the door and keep walking.
Rafael was doing his best to keep to himself, head down, not draw any attention. The place was too crowded and intrusive to allow someone to go unnoticed, but Rafael could carry himself hard enough that nobody was looking to punk him.
The one good thing coming out of facing a murder charge was that it got Rafael his own cell. For his first week at the jail, he had been housed in what was known as the projects, large open bullpens with fifty or so bunk beds. But then he’d been moved to maximum security, where every inmate got his own cell.
Rafael had been placed in a block of seventy-five prisoners. It was split roughly evenly between blacks and Hispanics, plus a handful of white guys. During the afternoon their individual cells were unlocked and they were allowed to hang out in the common area, which was basically a stretch of brightly colored plastic chairs, with a small wall-mounted TV on either end. People generally clustered around the tables near the TVs, blacks around one, Hispanics the other. There were four phones in the common area, which were also divided up by race. A white guy who wanted to use the phone had to pick his spots, and make it quick.
There was a delicate balance of power between the black gangs and the Latino gangs; from the phones to the cafeteria tables, pretty much everything was controlled by one group or the other. Segregation was virtually complete: everyone stuck with their own kind; doing otherwise risked violence. The racial hostility was far worse than anything Rafael had ever experienced.
Rafael got the bitter joke that what was keeping him relatively safe in jail was that as an accused murderer he was considered too dangerous to be put in the general population. But on the other hand most of the people in his cell block were facing charges on a violent crime, and the peace that endured was tenuous and uneasy.
The man in the cell next to his, Luis Gutierrez, was also Puerto Rican. Luis was in for armed robbery. He was a few years older than Rafael, short, but with a wrestler’s build, a spiderweb tattoo on the side of his neck. Luis clearly wasn’t someone that anyone with any sense would ever want to f*ck with.
At first glance Rafael had been worried about Luis, but instead the man was friendly from the jump, calling Rafael his brother, introducing him to other Puerto Ricans on the cell block. Rafael couldn’t help but appreciate it, but he also knew not to let his guard down.
Other than meals, showers, and exercise, the only time Rafael left the cell block was to work in the jail’s laundry room. He’d been hoping to get assigned to work in the kitchen, but no dice. Nobody accused of a violent crime was allowed to work there; the kitchen had more actual and potential weapons than anywhere else in the jail. Instead he spent most of his time preparing the setups for new prisoners. These consisted of a blanket, sheet, towel, soap, toothbrush, and toothpaste. He wrapped everything together in the blanket, creating a little bundle, which he then piled on carts.
He’d spent the morning in the laundry room, his shift ending at noon. From there he went straight to the cafeteria. Like most of Rikers, the dining area was full of bright primary colors—the pastel greens and yellows making Rafael feel like he was stuck in some sadistic version of a preschool. He’d managed to find a seat at the far edge of a table, nobody right near him.
Lunch was a meat loaf so brutally awful Rafael suspected the kitchen of deliberate sabotage. It crumbled, dry as burned toast, and tasted like it had been made out of cardboard mixed with cigarette ash. Rafael was halfway finished eating, forcing the food down, chewing as little as possible to keep actually tasting it to a minimum, when a man sat down directly across from him, looking right at him as he did so. He was a compact Hispanic man, mid-thirties, with buzz-cut hair and a small goatee, a prison tattoo on his right hand. But the striking thing was his direct, friendly look: eye contact with strangers was a rare and potentially dangerous thing at Rikers.
“Buenos días,” the man said.
“What’s up?” Rafael replied, instinct telling him to reply in English. He didn’t know who this guy was or what he wanted, which meant he wasn’t to be trusted. Answering in Spanish would have created some slight bond between them that he was not willing to concede.
“You don’t speak Spanish?” the man asked, looking surprised. His English was good, but with a heavy accent, not that of a native speaker. “You Rafael, right?”
Rafael didn’t like it that the man knew who he was. He nodded curtly.
“I’m Armando. Where you come from, Rafael?”
“The Alphabet projects.”
Armando cocked his head. He hadn’t touched the food on his plate. “No, amigo, I mean where you come from.”
“I’m Puerto Rican.”
Armando waved his hand dismissively, apparently finding that only a statement of the obvious. “Where in Puerto Rico?”
“Vieques,” Rafael said. It was basically just a name to him, not a place he had any real sense of connection to.
“My people are in San Juan,” Armando said. “We keep track of our own up in here, you know.”
“You keep track of all the Ricans in here?” Rafael said. “Must be a busy man.”
Armando looked surprised for a moment, then chose to laugh. “It’s true they got a lot of us in here, but that’s not no joke. You’re in here for shooting a white man.”
His lawyer had told him not to talk to anyone about his case. Rafael didn’t understand how Armando knew so much about him, how he’d come to be on the man’s radar. “What you in for?” Rafael said, adding some street to his voice.
“Because I’m a brown man who knows our people got to do for themselves. That makes me a threat to them who run this country.”
Rafael tilted his head, not wanting to show too much skepticism, but not buying this either. “They got you in here for representing?”
“They got me in for something they want to call racketeering,” Armando said. “But that’s just their way of making it into something they know how to deal with. You come up from nowhere, try to get your own for you and your people, they call you a criminal. You go to one of them Ivy League schools and do it, they gonna call you a businessman.”
“Got that right,” Rafael said. He was pretty sure he saw where this was going, and was confident Armando posed no immediate threat. But that didn’t mean Rafael wanted to make an enemy out of him.
“You recognize that we’re a people with our own country, right?”
“I grew up here in New York,” Rafael said.
“Look around you, yo, you see America here? You think this is what America look like to the white boys with all the money? Who you think they put in here? We’re the people they don’t want out in the street. That includes you, amigo, because you’re sitting here same as me. A man’s gotta know where he’s from, because it’s only your own people who’ll have your back. Not too many can get through this place by themselves.”
“I been okay in here. Don’t take no shit, don’t give no shit—same as out on the street.”
“Same game as the street, sure, but motherf*ckers play it harder up in here. And it ain’t just being safe. It’s about doing together with your people.”
“I hear you,” Rafael said.
“That’s all I’m talking, my brother, just listening. Maybe you can learn something about where you belong in this world.”
Rafael knew the worst mistake he could make in jail was to get on the bad side of his own. Word would spread that he was unprotected, and the black gangs and the skinheads and every other racist dumb ass would want to take a shot. But he also knew that this was all a sales pitch, and that what Armando really wanted was to recruit him. “I’m doing all right on my own in here,” Rafael said. “Going to keep my head down, do my time.”
Armando smiled slightly, although his eyes didn’t change. “You’re going to need your brothers here,” he said. “Everybody does.”