Hump Day Story #10 - Scared Straight
This is the story I told at last week's "Nights of Our Lives." Enjoy. If you want more stories in the future, I can add you to an email list and send them to you - just email me at humpdaystories@gmail.com - Thanks, Chris
Scared Straight
There are two things you need to know in order for this story to be understood.
The first is that I grew up in a town with enough rough edges that we sent a busload of kids each year to the infamous “Scared Straight” program. This is a service where wayward children are sent into a fully functioning prison, where they are terrorized by inmates in an effort to get them to turn their lives around and become fully functioning citizens.
The second is that during my senior year of high school, I took a class entitled “Law” taught by a guy named Cliff Carlson. At the beginning of the year, Carlson had announced that he planned on retiring. He had been teaching in our school district for about forty years. This meant that Cliff Carlson absolutely didn’t give a fuck about anything and would do whatever he wanted to during class. For example, he’d often stop in the middle of a lecture and do the following routine.
“I’m sorry class,” he’d say, with a straight face. “Things are getting a little too serious in here. Would anyone like to see me do my impression of a piece of bacon again?”
From there, we’d all cheer and Carlson would put his arms to his side and shake around, like he was frying in a pan. He’d scream the words “I’m burning! I’m burning!” as we all laughed. Then he’d resume his lesson on torts or how the Supreme Court is chosen.
Carlson’s level of not caring got so ridiculous that we actually watched The Shawshank Redemption in class. This sounds like it might fit in a law class environment, except when you consider that the movie is 142 minutes long, and our classes were only half an hour. We spent five entire classes just watching that movie. And when it got to the scene where Andy Dufrense finally escapes, by bashing a rock into a pipe and then swimming through the shit pipe to freedom, Carlson rewound it and we re-watched it about six times in a row. None of us really got what was going on. It was only years later that I realized that Carlson viewed his own life as a teacher much like being trapped in a prison, and that his retirement was in his mind his own version of crawling through a shit pipe and escaping to freedom.
The point at which these two pieces of information butt heads is as follows. Because of his profound level of fucking off that year, the school told Carlson that he would have to be the chaperone for Scared Straight that year. Usually, it would be one of the school’s security guards, or some meathead gym teacher. This year, as a kind of return fuck you to Carlson for his behavior, he was being forced to go. One day, he came in to our law class in a huff.
“Well kids,” he began, “I won’t be in class next Wednesday because I’m being forced to go to prison. Prison has a lot to do with law. Would anyone like to volunteer and come along?”
I looked around. No one was raising their hand. Except me. I was raising my hand.
I should probably now mention that at this point in time, I looked like this:
I had also dyed my hair bright red. So not only did I look like I was eleven years old, but my hair was cartoonishly red. As if the guy in that picture needed to be more feminine.
I don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea for Encyclopedia Brown to get on a bus full of roughnecks and go to Rahway State Prison.
And that’s another thing I should mention. This was Rahway State Prison. For anyone who knows about Scared Straight, they know the original film was made in Rahway. You know, the film that all sorts of people reacted to by saying “You shouldn’t treat kids that way, it’s borderline child abuse and is a highly ineffective way to deter kids from committing crime.” This wasn’t some pussy knock off version of scared straight. This was THE Scared Straight.
On the bus ride there, I sat up front with Carlson as the thugs in the back acted like thugs. Carlson just sat staring out the window, ignoring the melee, undoubtedly dreaming of shimmying out of his own personal shit pipe. The kids in the back were acting tough and yelling things like “Yo Carlson! Call ahead and tell them I’m coming! Warn those prisoners they need to be scared of me!”
As soon as we pulled up outside of Rahway State, all the bluster and posturing stopped. The prison was a huge structure, surrounded by guard towers and fences and covered in barbed wire. It looked terrifying from the outside, before we even got to go in and meet the prisoners.
The doors opened and three prison guards climbed onto the bus.
“Everyone needs to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up!” They screamed it, and in their voices, you could tell that these men had no qualms about murdering any of us. They quickly confirmed this. “I dare someone to fucking talk! I would love the fucking excuse! Give me a reason to spill some brains on the ground, I would fucking love that!”
Everyone was shocked and silent.
“Now stand the fuck up!” Even though it directly contradicted their order to sit down from fifteen seconds ago, we all jumped out of our seats. They herded us into a concrete pen, surrounded by fence and barbed wire, where they made us stand in a single file line our chests touching the backs of the people in front of us. I already realized that I was in way over my head, and began physically shaking.
I had figured that someone would call ahead and go, “Hey, go all out on these guys, except there’s one volunteer, so take it easy on him. You’ll know him when you see him, he’s the fay one who wears sweater vests.” No one had placed that call. I was in here bearing the brunt of things as much as anyone else.
“Stay still, merigon,” the Hispanic kid in front of me said due to my trembling. For years, I thought that “merigon” was a derogatory way to call someone an American, like gringo. It is only in recent years that I have come to know that it is the Spanish word for faggot. I only found this out after an irate Mexican man in Woodside, Queens threw a tray of jalapeno peppers on me.
The guards proceeded to run up and down the line, holding up Polaroid pictures in our faces. These pictures were of different inmates who had committed suicide over the years. Mostly, they had hung themselves with their bed sheets, but one particularly gruesome image showed a man who had sharpened the end of a broomstick and impaled his own neck with it.
From there, the guards brought us into the general population area. A large group of prisoners was in a cage, where they were all folding laundry. As soon as we walked in, they all dropped the clothes and sheets they were working with and ran up to the bars. They began shouting things at us, and I quickly realized that a lot of them were shouting directly at me.
I first realized this when one guy remained silent, but was clearly trying to make eye contact with me. When we locked eyes, he shouted just loud enough so I could hear it,
“I’m gonna fuck you, red. I’m gonna fuck you.”
From there, we were brought around the prison, and eventually shuffled into a dark auditorium. We were all told to sit on our knees, placing our hands underneath our butts. Besides the light on the stage, the entire cavernous room was pitch black.
“Stay right where you are, and don’t put your hands anywhere but under your assholes,” the guards told us. “We’re leaving. But don’t worry – the lifers are on their way.”
The lifers were the group of murderers, literal murderers, who were the heart of the Scared Straight program. Every single one of them would die in prison.
We waited in silence for about a minute, and then the door burst open. A dozen of the hardest looking men I’ve ever seen walked in and began glaring at us. They all were making eye contact, trying to intimidate us, and it was working. Finally, one of them stepped forward and started talking.
When he began, he seemed reasonable enough. “You kids think you’re bad, I guess,” he said. “Well let me tell you something. Getting involved in crime is a road I’ve walked down. And it’s a dark road.”
At that moment, with no provocation, he went from sounding like a pretty reasonable, if intimidating guy, to sounding and behaving like a cross between the Incredible Hulk and the Ultimate Warrior.
“AND YOU DON’T WANT TO WAAAAALLLK DOWN THAT DARK ROAOOOAOOAAD!” He shouted this in a low guttural roar. His eyes bulged out of his head like Beetlejuice, and when he reared back and flexed his muscles, multiple veins popped out of his arms and neck. He was easily the scariest person I’d ever seen.
One guy in our group made the mistake of smirking. He was on our football team, and wasn’t the worst guy, just kind of a punk. As soon as he smirked, the inmate was up in his face.
“Why you laughing, motherfucker? You think we boys? Why, cause you black? You ain’t black, you half a nigga!” The kid in my class, who was indeed of mixed race, started crying from the fear.
At some point, one kid not from our school was brought in to join us. His parents brought him. It was that even though he was four or five years younger than us, he was a bad kid. He had a bad look about him, and on top of that, his parents brought him to scared straight. For your own parents to bring you to a place like this, things have to be prett severe, I reasoned.
Apparently the prisoners had been told to go particularly hard at this kid. At one point, while he was sobbing, a few of them lifted him up, while another prisoner took his sneakers off. He flung the shoes into the darkness. The sight of a gang of murderers ripping a shoes off a twelve year old boy still stands, hands down, as easily the scariest thing I’ve ever seen with my own eyes.
Finally, one of the prisoners spoke to us quietly. His was a story meant to garner compassion. He was younger, only a few years older than us, and he really pleaded with us to avoid a fate such as his. It was emotional and moving, and when it was done, we figured that we were done with the Scared Straight program. We were wrong.
“You motherfuckers stay right the fuck where you are,” one of the prisoners yelled when a few people began to shift or get up. “Crazy Chris ain’t got here yet. He’ll be here any second now.”
From there, they all began yelling things about Crazy Chris coming. Even they seemed weirded out at the knowledge of his arrival. Then, the room fell silent. Then, the door was kicked open.
In walked a white man, probably in his early 60s, who sported a grizzled beard, lipstick, and women’s clothes. As soon as you saw this guy, you knew he was bad. Who survives in a place like this dressed like that? I felt like I was going to get murdered for having red hair. This dude wore lipstick. Clearly, out of all the bad men in the New Jersey prison system, this guy was the baddest. That legitimately might make him one of the scariest people in the United States of America.
He walked in, took center stage, and grinned at all of us. After a dreadfully long moment, he spoke.
“My name is Crazy Chris.” He paused for dramatic effect. “And sometimes, my dick gets hard like Christmas candy.”
The level of silence in the room was astounding. None of us were moving, none of us were swaying, none of us were even breathing. We were just holding our breath, hoping that this guy would go away. He didn’t. Instead, he kneeled down and got inches from the face of a classmate of mine.
“What happens to Christmas candy?” he asked the boy. The kid didn’t answer. “I SAID, WHAT HAPPENS TO CHRISTMAS CANDY?”
The kid realized he wasn’t getting off the hook.
“It –“ he shut his eyes with the realization of what level of shame he was about to reach – “it gets sucked.” His voice broke with tears as he said it.
“That’s right,” Crazy Chris said. “Christmas Candy gets sucked.”
And with that, he walked out the door. No lesson, no moral, nothing like the other guys had given us. Just a threat of mouth rape and he was out.
We left, and as soon as we were back on the bus, everyone acted like they hadn’t been scared at all. I myself never got in jail-worthy trouble after that. I don’t think I was ever the type. And besides, I don’t even like Christmas candy.
Scared Straight
There are two things you need to know in order for this story to be understood.
The first is that I grew up in a town with enough rough edges that we sent a busload of kids each year to the infamous “Scared Straight” program. This is a service where wayward children are sent into a fully functioning prison, where they are terrorized by inmates in an effort to get them to turn their lives around and become fully functioning citizens.
The second is that during my senior year of high school, I took a class entitled “Law” taught by a guy named Cliff Carlson. At the beginning of the year, Carlson had announced that he planned on retiring. He had been teaching in our school district for about forty years. This meant that Cliff Carlson absolutely didn’t give a fuck about anything and would do whatever he wanted to during class. For example, he’d often stop in the middle of a lecture and do the following routine.
“I’m sorry class,” he’d say, with a straight face. “Things are getting a little too serious in here. Would anyone like to see me do my impression of a piece of bacon again?”
From there, we’d all cheer and Carlson would put his arms to his side and shake around, like he was frying in a pan. He’d scream the words “I’m burning! I’m burning!” as we all laughed. Then he’d resume his lesson on torts or how the Supreme Court is chosen.
Carlson’s level of not caring got so ridiculous that we actually watched The Shawshank Redemption in class. This sounds like it might fit in a law class environment, except when you consider that the movie is 142 minutes long, and our classes were only half an hour. We spent five entire classes just watching that movie. And when it got to the scene where Andy Dufrense finally escapes, by bashing a rock into a pipe and then swimming through the shit pipe to freedom, Carlson rewound it and we re-watched it about six times in a row. None of us really got what was going on. It was only years later that I realized that Carlson viewed his own life as a teacher much like being trapped in a prison, and that his retirement was in his mind his own version of crawling through a shit pipe and escaping to freedom.
The point at which these two pieces of information butt heads is as follows. Because of his profound level of fucking off that year, the school told Carlson that he would have to be the chaperone for Scared Straight that year. Usually, it would be one of the school’s security guards, or some meathead gym teacher. This year, as a kind of return fuck you to Carlson for his behavior, he was being forced to go. One day, he came in to our law class in a huff.
“Well kids,” he began, “I won’t be in class next Wednesday because I’m being forced to go to prison. Prison has a lot to do with law. Would anyone like to volunteer and come along?”
I looked around. No one was raising their hand. Except me. I was raising my hand.
I should probably now mention that at this point in time, I looked like this:
I had also dyed my hair bright red. So not only did I look like I was eleven years old, but my hair was cartoonishly red. As if the guy in that picture needed to be more feminine.
I don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea for Encyclopedia Brown to get on a bus full of roughnecks and go to Rahway State Prison.
And that’s another thing I should mention. This was Rahway State Prison. For anyone who knows about Scared Straight, they know the original film was made in Rahway. You know, the film that all sorts of people reacted to by saying “You shouldn’t treat kids that way, it’s borderline child abuse and is a highly ineffective way to deter kids from committing crime.” This wasn’t some pussy knock off version of scared straight. This was THE Scared Straight.
On the bus ride there, I sat up front with Carlson as the thugs in the back acted like thugs. Carlson just sat staring out the window, ignoring the melee, undoubtedly dreaming of shimmying out of his own personal shit pipe. The kids in the back were acting tough and yelling things like “Yo Carlson! Call ahead and tell them I’m coming! Warn those prisoners they need to be scared of me!”
As soon as we pulled up outside of Rahway State, all the bluster and posturing stopped. The prison was a huge structure, surrounded by guard towers and fences and covered in barbed wire. It looked terrifying from the outside, before we even got to go in and meet the prisoners.
The doors opened and three prison guards climbed onto the bus.
“Everyone needs to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up!” They screamed it, and in their voices, you could tell that these men had no qualms about murdering any of us. They quickly confirmed this. “I dare someone to fucking talk! I would love the fucking excuse! Give me a reason to spill some brains on the ground, I would fucking love that!”
Everyone was shocked and silent.
“Now stand the fuck up!” Even though it directly contradicted their order to sit down from fifteen seconds ago, we all jumped out of our seats. They herded us into a concrete pen, surrounded by fence and barbed wire, where they made us stand in a single file line our chests touching the backs of the people in front of us. I already realized that I was in way over my head, and began physically shaking.
I had figured that someone would call ahead and go, “Hey, go all out on these guys, except there’s one volunteer, so take it easy on him. You’ll know him when you see him, he’s the fay one who wears sweater vests.” No one had placed that call. I was in here bearing the brunt of things as much as anyone else.
“Stay still, merigon,” the Hispanic kid in front of me said due to my trembling. For years, I thought that “merigon” was a derogatory way to call someone an American, like gringo. It is only in recent years that I have come to know that it is the Spanish word for faggot. I only found this out after an irate Mexican man in Woodside, Queens threw a tray of jalapeno peppers on me.
The guards proceeded to run up and down the line, holding up Polaroid pictures in our faces. These pictures were of different inmates who had committed suicide over the years. Mostly, they had hung themselves with their bed sheets, but one particularly gruesome image showed a man who had sharpened the end of a broomstick and impaled his own neck with it.
From there, the guards brought us into the general population area. A large group of prisoners was in a cage, where they were all folding laundry. As soon as we walked in, they all dropped the clothes and sheets they were working with and ran up to the bars. They began shouting things at us, and I quickly realized that a lot of them were shouting directly at me.
I first realized this when one guy remained silent, but was clearly trying to make eye contact with me. When we locked eyes, he shouted just loud enough so I could hear it,
“I’m gonna fuck you, red. I’m gonna fuck you.”
From there, we were brought around the prison, and eventually shuffled into a dark auditorium. We were all told to sit on our knees, placing our hands underneath our butts. Besides the light on the stage, the entire cavernous room was pitch black.
“Stay right where you are, and don’t put your hands anywhere but under your assholes,” the guards told us. “We’re leaving. But don’t worry – the lifers are on their way.”
The lifers were the group of murderers, literal murderers, who were the heart of the Scared Straight program. Every single one of them would die in prison.
We waited in silence for about a minute, and then the door burst open. A dozen of the hardest looking men I’ve ever seen walked in and began glaring at us. They all were making eye contact, trying to intimidate us, and it was working. Finally, one of them stepped forward and started talking.
When he began, he seemed reasonable enough. “You kids think you’re bad, I guess,” he said. “Well let me tell you something. Getting involved in crime is a road I’ve walked down. And it’s a dark road.”
At that moment, with no provocation, he went from sounding like a pretty reasonable, if intimidating guy, to sounding and behaving like a cross between the Incredible Hulk and the Ultimate Warrior.
“AND YOU DON’T WANT TO WAAAAALLLK DOWN THAT DARK ROAOOOAOOAAD!” He shouted this in a low guttural roar. His eyes bulged out of his head like Beetlejuice, and when he reared back and flexed his muscles, multiple veins popped out of his arms and neck. He was easily the scariest person I’d ever seen.
One guy in our group made the mistake of smirking. He was on our football team, and wasn’t the worst guy, just kind of a punk. As soon as he smirked, the inmate was up in his face.
“Why you laughing, motherfucker? You think we boys? Why, cause you black? You ain’t black, you half a nigga!” The kid in my class, who was indeed of mixed race, started crying from the fear.
At some point, one kid not from our school was brought in to join us. His parents brought him. It was that even though he was four or five years younger than us, he was a bad kid. He had a bad look about him, and on top of that, his parents brought him to scared straight. For your own parents to bring you to a place like this, things have to be prett severe, I reasoned.
Apparently the prisoners had been told to go particularly hard at this kid. At one point, while he was sobbing, a few of them lifted him up, while another prisoner took his sneakers off. He flung the shoes into the darkness. The sight of a gang of murderers ripping a shoes off a twelve year old boy still stands, hands down, as easily the scariest thing I’ve ever seen with my own eyes.
Finally, one of the prisoners spoke to us quietly. His was a story meant to garner compassion. He was younger, only a few years older than us, and he really pleaded with us to avoid a fate such as his. It was emotional and moving, and when it was done, we figured that we were done with the Scared Straight program. We were wrong.
“You motherfuckers stay right the fuck where you are,” one of the prisoners yelled when a few people began to shift or get up. “Crazy Chris ain’t got here yet. He’ll be here any second now.”
From there, they all began yelling things about Crazy Chris coming. Even they seemed weirded out at the knowledge of his arrival. Then, the room fell silent. Then, the door was kicked open.
In walked a white man, probably in his early 60s, who sported a grizzled beard, lipstick, and women’s clothes. As soon as you saw this guy, you knew he was bad. Who survives in a place like this dressed like that? I felt like I was going to get murdered for having red hair. This dude wore lipstick. Clearly, out of all the bad men in the New Jersey prison system, this guy was the baddest. That legitimately might make him one of the scariest people in the United States of America.
He walked in, took center stage, and grinned at all of us. After a dreadfully long moment, he spoke.
“My name is Crazy Chris.” He paused for dramatic effect. “And sometimes, my dick gets hard like Christmas candy.”
The level of silence in the room was astounding. None of us were moving, none of us were swaying, none of us were even breathing. We were just holding our breath, hoping that this guy would go away. He didn’t. Instead, he kneeled down and got inches from the face of a classmate of mine.
“What happens to Christmas candy?” he asked the boy. The kid didn’t answer. “I SAID, WHAT HAPPENS TO CHRISTMAS CANDY?”
The kid realized he wasn’t getting off the hook.
“It –“ he shut his eyes with the realization of what level of shame he was about to reach – “it gets sucked.” His voice broke with tears as he said it.
“That’s right,” Crazy Chris said. “Christmas Candy gets sucked.”
And with that, he walked out the door. No lesson, no moral, nothing like the other guys had given us. Just a threat of mouth rape and he was out.
We left, and as soon as we were back on the bus, everyone acted like they hadn’t been scared at all. I myself never got in jail-worthy trouble after that. I don’t think I was ever the type. And besides, I don’t even like Christmas candy.
posted by Geth at 1:20 AM
4 Comments:
Great story Chris!
Dugg!
Super story, Chris! FYI, as a gay man I can offer you a small copy edit: the correct spelling of the ad hominem is "maricon." Dave
I saw you read this at the UCB one night and I couldn't stop laughing about it for the next week.
Thanks for giving me a reason to look forward to Wednesdays.
“My name is Crazy Chris. And sometimes, my dick gets hard like Christmas candy.”
Holy crap.
I'm surprised Crazy Chris wasn't a model for your professional wrestling aspirations.
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