Joanna kadish
April 2015, Issue 1
excerpt from graffiti planet
Chapter 1 - jail
Micah Isakson moved restlessly on the thin pad, but nothing could ease the hardness of the metal bunk. Nothing and nowhere was comfortable. His vertebrae felt like they’d been rubbed raw. His eyes wide and staring roved the pitted ceiling of the King County Jail. The cage they put him in was far dirtier and grimier than anything he had ever experienced.
Being on the eighth floor, midway up, entombed in a block of gray steel, and shivering from the cold of the place, he felt as far removed from life as if he were buried six feet under. The walls felt like they were closing in, the room appeared to be visibly shrinking, and he knew that couldn’t be happening, could it? He kept telling himself that this was not happening. But he had difficulty breathing, which made him think the air supply had been cut off. How much oxygen could he rely on, he didn’t know. From staleness of the air, he didn’t think he had long.
He imagined a medieval toilet would smell like this. He ran his hand over the bristles scraping his chin, thinking it nasty not to have proper hygiene. He hadn’t washed, brushed his teeth, or shaved in days. He had no contact lens solution, so he couldn’t take his contacts out of his eyes even though they were smarting and irritated, nor did he have a container to put them in. This was not for lack of trying. The jailers told him he had filled out the request form wrong and he had to wait two more days to fill out a new one. He looked down at the enormous neon-orange scrub-style shirt and elastic-waist pants they had given him at processing. It made him feel like he was swimming in someone else’s ocean. They had taken his phone, cutting him off from everyone, along with his necklace and bracelets, stuff he couldn’t live without. After stripping him bare of all his possessions, they treated him like they would some rabid dog, pushing him when they wanted him to move, ordering him around in harsh voices, calling him by a number. To the guards, he didn’t have a name.
He was only five miles away from home, but he might as well have been in a fishbowl, for all the privacy he had. In his mind’s eye, he could see his brother Zev standing at the lake’s edge, watching an osprey’s quick descent into the roiling, gray water, its wiggling prey leaving a trail of slivery scales fluttering. The image of the bird headed like a fighter jet straight up, into the dazzling blue ether of his imagination, seemed totally surreal compared with the environment he found himself in. He missed the forest around their house just as keenly, that vast proliferation of plant life that seemed to surge forth with such incredible audacity, growing to absurd heights, bursting with health and vitality, brimming with needles and cones. He used to spend entire afternoons lying on the grass, gazing up its dense growth of dark green thrusting skyward, tips disappearing into the gray marbling of the clouds, in parts as mottled and wattled as if the brains of the world had been dissected and exposed for public viewing. Trees changed his mood in subtle ways. They were his silent friends, calming and soothing his fears, making things seem less bleak.
The sound of heavy breathing jarred Micah back to his present reality. The roommate in the bunk below was an ogre with a broken nose and feverish vulture’s eye: a whitish-blue with a film over it that bulged slightly as if he had some medical condition. Whenever it fell on Micah, which it did every other second the beast was awake, Micah’s blood froze. He had to wait until the ogre had fallen asleep before he could close his own eyes, but even then he kept jerking awake at the man’s egregious, harsh-sounding intake of air, cutting through his intestines, making him quiver with fear. Even at that moment, with the ogre asleep, Micah was in a state of tension. His cellmate was in for first-degree murder. It was hard to wrap his head around. During a house burglary, the homeowner had been slow about telling the ogre where his money was, so the ogre put a blowtorch to his face.
The image of the burned, mutilated face of the victim seared Micah’s brain. The cellmate said he was 30, but who knows if he was lying or telling the truth, what with the scars and the tats, and his strange jokes about butt fucking and cock sucking. Micah wondered at this guy who wouldn’t stop with his dirt, telling Micah he had a big one for him when Micah got hungry. Micah didn’t say a word when he heard those jokes. Their frequency made him feel like he was hallucinating, the blood rushing to his head, firing up his brain. Mostly he tried not to look scared.
Then there was the big red-eyed vulture that flew around his head, muttering foul things, unrepeatable things. At night the voice seemed to get noisier and meaner, the sounds mixing with all the crazed animal screams of the other inmates from inside their steel coffins stacked all around him, a factory of the damned. Above all else, in the outcries of the other inmates, Micah heard echoes of words that Zev had said to him before Micah’s arrest: I wouldn’t do it and Didn’t you hear what Mom said? Zev had been right about this. What made him think that going along with those guys was a good idea? At the time it had seemed edgy and cool, but now he regretted his involvement. He should have backed away like his brother did.
He put his hands on either side of his head and pressed his throbbing temples. It hurt to reflect too deeply on this. He moaned to think that his brother and friends were living incredibly normal lives, getting up in the morning and having breakfast without him, going to school as usual, and then getting together at night to smoke pot, or the Turkish blend of fruit and tobacco in a hookah that they liked.
Meanwhile his stinking carcass rotted in a tiny cell.
Micah uttered a soundless, interior scream to match what he heard through the porches of his ears. He felt full to bursting with soul scalding, mind numbing woe. Each time he reflected back, the pain burst fresh, a new wound layering over the old, creating a crusty tell of accumulated misery.
The other two boys who had been with him that fateful night hadn’t been put in jail. They stayed in juvenile detention for a weekend, a mere hand slap. They were 17 at the time of arrest, and for that reason, they were treated as minors regardless of who did what. At their release, they were told they would have to do some community service, a few months’ worth, but that would be it. Micah, on the other hand, only a few months older and considered an adult for criminal purposes, had been shunted off to the county
The judge called it a hate crime, which amazed Micah. Until his arrest, he had considered the whole thing a joke. He had gone along with the other kids on Yom Kippur to the Yeshiva and written the graffiti not out of personal conviction but to show his twin brother he wasn’t a wimp. This was after a lifetime of Zev throwing down the gauntlet, with the underlying message: Why does everyone have to carry you?
But even more damning, his name had been released in all media outlets with banner headlines “Jewish Teen Charged with Hate Crime.” The story even made the New York Times. It was plastered everywhere on the Internet never to dissolve. And then, as if he hadn’t been bequeathed enough pain, his lawyer advised him to voluntarily remain in jail for a whole month prior to his arraignment.
“If you don’t show remorse, the judge likely will have no mercy,” Michele Cottle, his lawyer, had said at their first meeting in jail, a few days after his arrest. “Having you parents post bail wouldn’t cut it. The judge might view you as a spoilt brat thumbing your nose at the law and slam you with the maximum penalty of five years.”
Michele was sitting on a tiny wooden chair at the jailhouse as she was telling him this, her thick blonde hair pulled back in a bun, her face wreathed in an earnest, caring expression. She was a small-boned, thin-lipped woman with high arched eyebrows that appeared to be painted on, and in her high-necked ivory dress, a rich jacquard fabric that fell loosely over her lean body, draping well below her knees, she looked elegant, an odd sight in that stark environment.
In a phone call, his parents told him to do what the lawyer asked. He had no choice but to obey.
He looked down at concrete floor. If he hadn’t been so scared, he might have thought her sensible white Nike sneakers comical, something like his mom would wear.
He tried to lighten the air. “I like your shoes.”
“I wear heels in court, never on the street or in jail.”
As she spoke, her soft, even tone made him feel that she was the only person who could save him in a world gone suddenly topsy turvy. He felt a huge amount of relief that she was representing him. He folded his hands, trying to still them, thinking that he was willing to do anything she said, as long as she kept him from having to endure a long prison term.
The lawyer gave no indication what she thought of him. Usually females gushed all over him, but not this one. She had this sexless look about her, as if she had been neutered at birth. Micah was striking, slender and tall, with finely chiseled features and big sensual lips in an almost pretty face, and he had long lashes like a girl’s framing these big kaleidoscope eyes that changed magically to match whatever clothing he had on. He couldn’t see himself, so he had no idea what color his eyes were with that screaming loud blood orange he wore, but that was the least of his concerns.
They sat in the only room where he was allowed to meet her, the size of a walk-in closet, where they could speak without a barrier between them. Anyone else who came to visit had to sit in smaller cubicles on the other side of thick glass and speak to him on a phone.
“I grew up on the Texas Gulf Coast,” she said. “My father worked intermittently as a fishing guide, he was what you might call chronically underemployed. I went to law school on a scholarship to save people like my brother, a drug addict. But him I couldn’t do anything for, he was long gone by the time I graduated.” She spoke to him as if he was a child who couldn’t sleep because he was having bad dreams, her low musical voice sounding like the rippling of a stream. She repeated everything twice, sometimes three or four times, and he was glad she did, the clamor in his head was sometimes too loud for him to hear her, other times he heard her words as garble and couldn’t understand what she was saying.
Micah’s father had hired Michele because she had a reputation for getting youthful offenders lighter sentences. Thinking how much power she had over him, he started to shake, which invariably led to memories of how cruelly the jail guards treated
“I expect you to plead ‘not guilty’ when asked.”
“Why?” He quaked to think that he was to be arraigned at the end of his month in jail and that newspaper and television journalists would be there.
“I need more time to work on getting favorable terms for you. I’m going to ask that the judge allow you to repay your debt to society outside of prison. I’m thinking of suggesting a residential drug treatment program with an education component. You’ll have to agree to stay there for two years while you work for charities that are agreeable to putting felons to work. It’ll be like the community service that you had to do in diversion. But getting them to agree to take you on isn’t a slam dunk. Many charitable organizations don’t want to bother with the paperwork or the worries of dealing with troubled teens. And later after I’ve worked out the terms with the prosecuting attorney, you’ll be required to face the judge again. This is when you plead guilty. And the reason we do this is so there will be no trial before a jury. I’ll use the time between now and then to try and maneuver it so you’ll be seen by a compassionate judge, someone who’s more likely to treat you kindly. What we don’t want is to put you in front of one of those draconian types who like to put young people away as lessons for the others.”
“But I didn’t write the bad stuff.”
“It could have been your idea. You could have told your friend to write it.”
“We didn’t discuss what we were going to say beforehand.”
“What proof do you have that you didn’t tell your friend to write those words?”
There was nothing he could say to that. His lawyer went on to say that one of his friends, a girl he had dated a few times, had turned Micah and his two accomplices in to claim the thousand dollar reward. On the basis of this traitor’s testimony, they obtained confessions from the other boys along with the word of at least a dozen kids who said they heard about it—one of his accomplices had blabbed about it at school. And now, the lawyer said, he would have to be careful. At his arraignment, he would have to appear contrite. He listened with this feeling of unreality. It seemed so unfair. He hadn’t hurt or killed anyone. He didn’t steal anything. According to the lawyer, what he did was just as bad. He had been with others who wrote graffiti that was considered incendiary, a hate crime, something that would dog him for the rest of his life.
On the lawyer’s way out she shook hands with Micah. Her hand disappeared in his, but her slightness was illusionary. She had a strong grip.
Being on the eighth floor, midway up, entombed in a block of gray steel, and shivering from the cold of the place, he felt as far removed from life as if he were buried six feet under. The walls felt like they were closing in, the room appeared to be visibly shrinking, and he knew that couldn’t be happening, could it? He kept telling himself that this was not happening. But he had difficulty breathing, which made him think the air supply had been cut off. How much oxygen could he rely on, he didn’t know. From staleness of the air, he didn’t think he had long.
He imagined a medieval toilet would smell like this. He ran his hand over the bristles scraping his chin, thinking it nasty not to have proper hygiene. He hadn’t washed, brushed his teeth, or shaved in days. He had no contact lens solution, so he couldn’t take his contacts out of his eyes even though they were smarting and irritated, nor did he have a container to put them in. This was not for lack of trying. The jailers told him he had filled out the request form wrong and he had to wait two more days to fill out a new one. He looked down at the enormous neon-orange scrub-style shirt and elastic-waist pants they had given him at processing. It made him feel like he was swimming in someone else’s ocean. They had taken his phone, cutting him off from everyone, along with his necklace and bracelets, stuff he couldn’t live without. After stripping him bare of all his possessions, they treated him like they would some rabid dog, pushing him when they wanted him to move, ordering him around in harsh voices, calling him by a number. To the guards, he didn’t have a name.
He was only five miles away from home, but he might as well have been in a fishbowl, for all the privacy he had. In his mind’s eye, he could see his brother Zev standing at the lake’s edge, watching an osprey’s quick descent into the roiling, gray water, its wiggling prey leaving a trail of slivery scales fluttering. The image of the bird headed like a fighter jet straight up, into the dazzling blue ether of his imagination, seemed totally surreal compared with the environment he found himself in. He missed the forest around their house just as keenly, that vast proliferation of plant life that seemed to surge forth with such incredible audacity, growing to absurd heights, bursting with health and vitality, brimming with needles and cones. He used to spend entire afternoons lying on the grass, gazing up its dense growth of dark green thrusting skyward, tips disappearing into the gray marbling of the clouds, in parts as mottled and wattled as if the brains of the world had been dissected and exposed for public viewing. Trees changed his mood in subtle ways. They were his silent friends, calming and soothing his fears, making things seem less bleak.
The sound of heavy breathing jarred Micah back to his present reality. The roommate in the bunk below was an ogre with a broken nose and feverish vulture’s eye: a whitish-blue with a film over it that bulged slightly as if he had some medical condition. Whenever it fell on Micah, which it did every other second the beast was awake, Micah’s blood froze. He had to wait until the ogre had fallen asleep before he could close his own eyes, but even then he kept jerking awake at the man’s egregious, harsh-sounding intake of air, cutting through his intestines, making him quiver with fear. Even at that moment, with the ogre asleep, Micah was in a state of tension. His cellmate was in for first-degree murder. It was hard to wrap his head around. During a house burglary, the homeowner had been slow about telling the ogre where his money was, so the ogre put a blowtorch to his face.
The image of the burned, mutilated face of the victim seared Micah’s brain. The cellmate said he was 30, but who knows if he was lying or telling the truth, what with the scars and the tats, and his strange jokes about butt fucking and cock sucking. Micah wondered at this guy who wouldn’t stop with his dirt, telling Micah he had a big one for him when Micah got hungry. Micah didn’t say a word when he heard those jokes. Their frequency made him feel like he was hallucinating, the blood rushing to his head, firing up his brain. Mostly he tried not to look scared.
Then there was the big red-eyed vulture that flew around his head, muttering foul things, unrepeatable things. At night the voice seemed to get noisier and meaner, the sounds mixing with all the crazed animal screams of the other inmates from inside their steel coffins stacked all around him, a factory of the damned. Above all else, in the outcries of the other inmates, Micah heard echoes of words that Zev had said to him before Micah’s arrest: I wouldn’t do it and Didn’t you hear what Mom said? Zev had been right about this. What made him think that going along with those guys was a good idea? At the time it had seemed edgy and cool, but now he regretted his involvement. He should have backed away like his brother did.
He put his hands on either side of his head and pressed his throbbing temples. It hurt to reflect too deeply on this. He moaned to think that his brother and friends were living incredibly normal lives, getting up in the morning and having breakfast without him, going to school as usual, and then getting together at night to smoke pot, or the Turkish blend of fruit and tobacco in a hookah that they liked.
Meanwhile his stinking carcass rotted in a tiny cell.
Micah uttered a soundless, interior scream to match what he heard through the porches of his ears. He felt full to bursting with soul scalding, mind numbing woe. Each time he reflected back, the pain burst fresh, a new wound layering over the old, creating a crusty tell of accumulated misery.
The other two boys who had been with him that fateful night hadn’t been put in jail. They stayed in juvenile detention for a weekend, a mere hand slap. They were 17 at the time of arrest, and for that reason, they were treated as minors regardless of who did what. At their release, they were told they would have to do some community service, a few months’ worth, but that would be it. Micah, on the other hand, only a few months older and considered an adult for criminal purposes, had been shunted off to the county
The judge called it a hate crime, which amazed Micah. Until his arrest, he had considered the whole thing a joke. He had gone along with the other kids on Yom Kippur to the Yeshiva and written the graffiti not out of personal conviction but to show his twin brother he wasn’t a wimp. This was after a lifetime of Zev throwing down the gauntlet, with the underlying message: Why does everyone have to carry you?
But even more damning, his name had been released in all media outlets with banner headlines “Jewish Teen Charged with Hate Crime.” The story even made the New York Times. It was plastered everywhere on the Internet never to dissolve. And then, as if he hadn’t been bequeathed enough pain, his lawyer advised him to voluntarily remain in jail for a whole month prior to his arraignment.
“If you don’t show remorse, the judge likely will have no mercy,” Michele Cottle, his lawyer, had said at their first meeting in jail, a few days after his arrest. “Having you parents post bail wouldn’t cut it. The judge might view you as a spoilt brat thumbing your nose at the law and slam you with the maximum penalty of five years.”
Michele was sitting on a tiny wooden chair at the jailhouse as she was telling him this, her thick blonde hair pulled back in a bun, her face wreathed in an earnest, caring expression. She was a small-boned, thin-lipped woman with high arched eyebrows that appeared to be painted on, and in her high-necked ivory dress, a rich jacquard fabric that fell loosely over her lean body, draping well below her knees, she looked elegant, an odd sight in that stark environment.
In a phone call, his parents told him to do what the lawyer asked. He had no choice but to obey.
He looked down at concrete floor. If he hadn’t been so scared, he might have thought her sensible white Nike sneakers comical, something like his mom would wear.
He tried to lighten the air. “I like your shoes.”
“I wear heels in court, never on the street or in jail.”
As she spoke, her soft, even tone made him feel that she was the only person who could save him in a world gone suddenly topsy turvy. He felt a huge amount of relief that she was representing him. He folded his hands, trying to still them, thinking that he was willing to do anything she said, as long as she kept him from having to endure a long prison term.
The lawyer gave no indication what she thought of him. Usually females gushed all over him, but not this one. She had this sexless look about her, as if she had been neutered at birth. Micah was striking, slender and tall, with finely chiseled features and big sensual lips in an almost pretty face, and he had long lashes like a girl’s framing these big kaleidoscope eyes that changed magically to match whatever clothing he had on. He couldn’t see himself, so he had no idea what color his eyes were with that screaming loud blood orange he wore, but that was the least of his concerns.
They sat in the only room where he was allowed to meet her, the size of a walk-in closet, where they could speak without a barrier between them. Anyone else who came to visit had to sit in smaller cubicles on the other side of thick glass and speak to him on a phone.
“I grew up on the Texas Gulf Coast,” she said. “My father worked intermittently as a fishing guide, he was what you might call chronically underemployed. I went to law school on a scholarship to save people like my brother, a drug addict. But him I couldn’t do anything for, he was long gone by the time I graduated.” She spoke to him as if he was a child who couldn’t sleep because he was having bad dreams, her low musical voice sounding like the rippling of a stream. She repeated everything twice, sometimes three or four times, and he was glad she did, the clamor in his head was sometimes too loud for him to hear her, other times he heard her words as garble and couldn’t understand what she was saying.
Micah’s father had hired Michele because she had a reputation for getting youthful offenders lighter sentences. Thinking how much power she had over him, he started to shake, which invariably led to memories of how cruelly the jail guards treated
“I expect you to plead ‘not guilty’ when asked.”
“Why?” He quaked to think that he was to be arraigned at the end of his month in jail and that newspaper and television journalists would be there.
“I need more time to work on getting favorable terms for you. I’m going to ask that the judge allow you to repay your debt to society outside of prison. I’m thinking of suggesting a residential drug treatment program with an education component. You’ll have to agree to stay there for two years while you work for charities that are agreeable to putting felons to work. It’ll be like the community service that you had to do in diversion. But getting them to agree to take you on isn’t a slam dunk. Many charitable organizations don’t want to bother with the paperwork or the worries of dealing with troubled teens. And later after I’ve worked out the terms with the prosecuting attorney, you’ll be required to face the judge again. This is when you plead guilty. And the reason we do this is so there will be no trial before a jury. I’ll use the time between now and then to try and maneuver it so you’ll be seen by a compassionate judge, someone who’s more likely to treat you kindly. What we don’t want is to put you in front of one of those draconian types who like to put young people away as lessons for the others.”
“But I didn’t write the bad stuff.”
“It could have been your idea. You could have told your friend to write it.”
“We didn’t discuss what we were going to say beforehand.”
“What proof do you have that you didn’t tell your friend to write those words?”
There was nothing he could say to that. His lawyer went on to say that one of his friends, a girl he had dated a few times, had turned Micah and his two accomplices in to claim the thousand dollar reward. On the basis of this traitor’s testimony, they obtained confessions from the other boys along with the word of at least a dozen kids who said they heard about it—one of his accomplices had blabbed about it at school. And now, the lawyer said, he would have to be careful. At his arraignment, he would have to appear contrite. He listened with this feeling of unreality. It seemed so unfair. He hadn’t hurt or killed anyone. He didn’t steal anything. According to the lawyer, what he did was just as bad. He had been with others who wrote graffiti that was considered incendiary, a hate crime, something that would dog him for the rest of his life.
On the lawyer’s way out she shook hands with Micah. Her hand disappeared in his, but her slightness was illusionary. She had a strong grip.
Joanna lives in Seattle with her pet werewolf. She has an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College, Vermont and is working on a novel about the drug scene in Seattle.
