Rikers Memories

"Excuse me? Is you a docta?"

Shit. She's talking to me.

"Excuse me..."

We're having a show down at the OK Corral. I hear the vultures. Sun beats down on the two of us. A tumble weed tumbles. I've got my clipboard, she a flattering brown jumper and a hidden shank. It's me and her in a freshly painted Pepto-pink hallway. Pink, the color for girls. This makes me laugh considering the location. I wonder if the men get blue. We're on an eternal wait to be acknowledged by a corrections officer who seems engrossed in everything but us. We rate low on the recognition scale, me, a civilian, her, an inmate. I'm holding my clipboard close because 1) it makes me look official and 2) it's a shield. Can a shank whittled from a table leg puncture a clipboard?

In jail, you think these things. I'm a rube. My first semester in social work school and I'm on Rikers Island. People's eyes widen at this. My gay friends with their OZ fetish's imagine Chris Meloni beating and sodomizing me. They are profoundly disappointed when I tell them The Rose M. Singer Center is the women's jail. Others stay wide-eyed. They only imagine what I've gotten myself into. I'm quite not sure. I took the internship because it paid, it was close to where I was moving with my boyfriend and because I thought it would be a way to dive right in. I'm not a diver. I can't even dive into a pool with out thinking i'm going to flatten my face and permanently paralyze myself. I usually tip-toe in. Not now.

I'm alternately overjoyed and wetting myself. Okay, I'm wetting myself more. It's everything and and nothing I'd imagined and it's only the first week. I stay shocked most of that the time. My exposure to social work jobs prior to school was as a volunteer at a safe sex hot line, where half the calls are lonely guys masturbating to your voice and the game is to see how fast you can realize this before they come. I became expert at vocal cadence and recognizing the causes for shortness of breath. "Sir you are being inappropriate!" Click.

She's still talking to me. I have contempt for her. She won't stop trying to get my attention. What the fuck do you want? Stop looking at me. Oh god I have to write these feelings down so my supervisor and I can analyze my paranoia. I pull it together. I'm not going to wite about this.

"IS. YOU . A. DOCTA?"

The clipboard is working.

"No I'm a social work...(What is she doing?)...intern...in the...(is she touching?).... "

"Cuz if you wuz, I'd find something wrong wiff me," she gyrates this and arrows her hands to her crotch.

Now I'm uncomfortable, I can't hang up, I can't get self righteous. No click. This is a client. The whole jail is a client. Client. Idiotic word. She's an inmate. A client to me, indicates something voluntary. We both enter into an agreement to do something together. What she wants to do together has little to do with social work. Well, maybe I'm wrong. It is social, work. Just not the kind I was anticipating.