How I met my friend
By Brandon “Knuckles” Smith
I met my only friend at a Juvenile detention center a few years back. I was in there for beating up 3 older students for their lunch money. The judge had come down hard on me, due to my prior convictions for similar offenses, I got sentenced to six months. This was the longest stint I was ever sentenced to in my life so far, and I wasn’t happy about it. I cursed at the judge as they cuffed me and tried to escort me out of the courtroom. It ended up taking them eight bailiffs to get me out of the courthouse and into the van. Once I arrived at the detention center, I set up my usual tough guy persona. In those centers, you better be tough if you don’t want to get bothered. My first day in, I fought three kids who tried to take my lunch. The kids ended up in the infirmary for over two days, while I only got a black eye and swollen cheek. After that, I was either respected or feared by the other kids in the detention center. None of them dared to give me a mean look, let alone lay a finger on me.
Within my first month in the detention center, I was practically running the place. When I was extra hungry, I took other kid’s meals from them. Most just gave me their meals with no resistance, but every now and then some new kid would try to fight me off, probably to try to prove they were tough or something, but every time I easily beat the little pimple invested twerps. Even the guards were scared were scared of me, they didn’t come near me unless they had to. When they did come near me, they always came in a pack of three or four of them, and always at least one of them brought a stun stick. They learned very early on in my stay that I was not one to go down without a fight. My first week in, some young, probably newbie, guard decided to be a smart a** and mouth off at me when telling me to go back to my room. I attacked the guard and didn’t stop hitting him until 30 other guards showed up and beat me with stun sticks and threw me in the hole. By then though, I had given him such a bad beat down, that he had to be taken out on a stretcher. I got two weeks in the hole for that incident, but it was worth it. Not only did the guards no longer mess with me, but most of the other kids were petrified of me. As result of that very fight, I ate very well. I would steal two or more trays a meal, kids would basically hand them to me to avoid a pounding. I was the king of not only my pod, but of almost the entire detention center, and I wasn’t even two months into my stay.
Over the next two months, I lived more like a king, than an inmate. Anything I wanted, I had and no one would stop me from getting what I wanted. If I wanted more food, I got more food. If I wanted to watch a certain tv show, I watched that tv show. Heck, I even managed to get my own cell. To ensure the new arrivals knew that I was the boss, I would call over one of the kids I sent to the infirmary on my first day and have them show the twerps their scars and missing teeth from the incident. I would then lay down the rules of ‘my’ pod and what the ‘consequences’ were if you broke one of my rules. In case you’re wondering, the ‘consequences’ were a beat down by yours truly. I also designated two or three ‘enforcers’ to dish out consequences if I didn’t feel like doing it myself. After the first couple weeks of my ‘reign’, not a single kid in there wanted to be on my bad side and I even had kids fighting each other to prove to me they were worthy of being an ‘enforcer’. This sentence was turning out to be more like a vacation then a punishment for me.
In my fifth month there, there was a new kid who entered the pod, the kid was short and bald. I knew the kid was gonna have a rough time there, nonetheless I gave him my intake ritual, just like I did to any other kid. The kid understood and left me alone, however, he did get into a few fights with kids who called him ‘Baldy’. The kid took offense to it apparently and shoved a few a kids around. The kid got beat up pretty bad by one of the older kids and was sent to the infirmary over it. That’s what you get when you try to act like a tough guy and didn’t have the size or strength to back it up. After that fight, when the kid got out of the infirmary, he was desperate to get out of there. One day, while on the ‘rec yard’, he tried to escape by running up to the barbed wired fence and trying to climb it. The kid didn’t make it a quarter of the way up the fence before the guards were on top of him like cats on a mouse. The kid was hauled off to the hole for a week over the escape attempt and the entire pod was locked down. That meant we had to stay in our cells all day except for a couple hours a day where w= were let out to eat, shower and watch 10 mins of tv, then it was back to their cells until the next meal. I started to hear rumors from the other kids in the pod about how much they hated that kid and about how they were going to kick his a** when he got out of the hole. I knew he had to be punished for what he did, but I kind of liked the kid. He had more balls than 90 percent of the whimps in this place. I respected that about him, however, the kid would still have to pay for his actions. If I didn’t punish him, I would have lost all respect and had to have started my reign all over. I did, however, order my enforcers to go easy on the kid and to not send him to the infirmary.
The lockdown was lifted a day before the kid was released from the hole. Kids were angry at Baldy, very angry. I had to call a ‘meeting’ in the rec room, telling everyone that I would handle it. If anyone other then my crew got to the kid, it wouldn’t be pretty. It would turn out that I was right. The next day, the kid was released from the hole. Within minutes, he was being surrounded by the other kids in the pod, every single one of them full of anger and hate for getting us put on lockdown. I had to have my enforcers do something before the rest of the pod jumped the kid. I reminded my enforcers to go easy on the kid, then ordered them to begin the ‘punishment’. My enforcers nodded and cornered the kid into a corner and began kicking him repeatedly. Within seconds, three other kids, who weren’t in my crew came over and starting punching the kid in the face and throwing him into the wall. I knew had I to stop this before the kid got too badly hurt. I walked towards the corner and shouted “THAT’S ENOUGH! BACK OFF OF HIM!”. When no one listened to me and kept beating the poor kid, I got really angry. No one disrespected my authority like that, especially not members of my own crew. I ran over and grabbed my two enforcers by their shirts and threw them into the wall. I then grabbed another kid by his shirt and threw him into the opposite the wall. When one of the two remaining kids turned and swung at me, I punched him four times in the face and kicked him in the groin. He keeled over in pain and then I shoved him into the wall too. I then went over to the third kid and pushed off him off Baldy. The kid tried to swing at me too, actually hitting me in the face hard. This made me 10 times angrier, so I punched him five or six times in the face, when the kid fell to the ground holding his face, blood already gushing from his nose and lips, I picked him up and body slammed him onto the ground with all my might. The kid was knocked out cold the second he hit the floor. The other kids now backed off and threw up their hands, not wanting me to body slam them as well. As 20 or so guards rushed over to see what was going on, I shouted out to everyone “BALDY HERE IS NOW UNDER MY PROTECTION. IF I FIND OUT ANYONE SO MUCH AS LAYS A FINGER ON HIM, THEY WILL BE DEALING WITH ME!”. He knew he was risking losing the respect of the pod by protecting the kid who gotten us all on lockdown, but I felt I had to. They would never leave the kid alone otherwise. Right as I finished screaming that out, the guards reached me and hit me with their stun sticks, not even taking the risk of trying to fight with me while I was so enraged. After being stunned two or three times, they double cuffed me and took me off to the hole, along with the five other kids involved in the attack.
I got out of the hole two weeks later. I immediately went to see the two enforcers who had disobeyed me during the Baldy beating. I, along with three of my other enforcers, ordered them into one of the blind spots where the cameras could not see us and then I beat them both. After I finished, I said to them “You ever disobey me like that again, I will see to it you don’t leave the infirmary for a month. Also, when the po po ask what happened, you tell em you tripped, do understand me?” The kids nodded silently and then me and my crew left to go back to the main rec room. I found Baldy, with one of my crew that I had assigned to protect him while I was in the hole. I said to the boy “So what’s your name Baldy?” The kid looked me in the eyes and said nervously “Oberon”. I held out my hand to shake his hand (something I rarely do and only do for people I greatly respect) and told him “As you know, I’m Knuckles, but my real name is Brandon” as I shook the kid’s hand I continued “That was some stunt you pulled in the rec yard a few weeks ago, that took guts. I respect you for that”. As we talked one of the kids from the fight walked by and shot us a menacing look, one of my enforcers told him to keep moving and the kid did. Oberon said “Thanks man, and I am sorry that I caused you guys to be locked down, but I just couldn’t take it here anymore.” I said in response “Don’t worry about it man, all is forgiven. How much extra time they give you for that stunt anyway?” He answered saying “A month, I was supposed to be getting released this week actually, instead I won’t get out of here until next month now”. I understood how it felt to have your sentence extended, after I beat that guard my first week in, they added another month to my sentence, making it a total of seven months. I nodded my head at Oberon and said “Ah gotcha… I also get out of here in a month, so we should be released around the same time, until then, you will remain one of my people, anyone bothers you, you let me know and I will take care of it”. I meant it to. Oberon said, then the guards called lunchtime and we all went over and got in line to get chow.
A month flew by pretty fast. Luckily my reign had held up despite protecting what the pod considered for awhile as public enemy number one. I made Oberon my right-hand man for the rest of our time there. I got him extra meals and tv time and we continued to grow closer the more we talked. We both told each other a little bit about our lives, I explained how I lived with my uncle, but that I was never there because I always ran away. He explained how he was abandoned and left outside a fire station when he was just a baby. I wondered what kind of monster would abandon their child like that. I swore if I ever found Oberon’s real parents, I would beat them up for that. He also explained how he was here for robbing a store just to impress a girl. This made my respect for him grow even more. By the time release day rolled around, we were both friends. He was and still is my only true friend. I was released two days before him, but on my last day at the detention center, we exchanged phone numbers and addresses and promised to keep in touch. That was a promise that was kept, we continue to be great friends and together we have committed many petty crimes. Oberon is the brains; I am the muscle. We work together, but he sometimes gets annoyed at my sometimes-reckless behavior. This relationship continues in this manner today, as we work together to complete missions for Mars and Team Galactic. And that’s the story how I met my one and only friend.
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