Arnie

“Ain’t no punk!” I heard vaguely from the side. Pausing from my duties as the computer class clerk, handing out an assignment to a student, I glanced to see Arnie, fists clenched, eyes pinned in anger, staring me malevolently down.

What the hell?!

A few weeks ago, Miss C, my computer class supervisor, had given me a new class roster with Arnie’s name on it.

“He’s housing unit one,” she said idly, “I wonder if he’ll come in.”

Housing unit one was operated by mental health for prisoners with issues. Although most felt uneasy around housing unit one prisoners, I had found that they tend to be victims not aggressors in a prison setting. It’s not unusual for them to refuse to report to the computer class.

A few days later Arnie reported to class, and I noted he was well over six feet, rangy, and had the vague off-center gaze of the perpetually homeless.

Introducing myself, I handed Arnie an orientation packet, and he almost beat me back to my desk, thrust it at me, snarling, “It’s just too hard. I can’t do it!”

“Just do the best you can, I said as softly, calmly as possible. “When you’re done, give it to me and we’ll figure something out.”

The students who work hard and try to progress in the class, I grade their work carefully, give them remedial work to assist with their weak areas to prepare them for the state certification exam.

The students like Arnie who won’t or can’t do the work, I just pass them without looking at their work, inform my supervisor and she finds something for them to do in class.

Reluctantly, taking the packet back, face full of frustration, Arnie scribbled on the packet for the rest of the two-hour class and gave it to me on his way out the door.

As I suspected, it was incomprehensible, incomplete, and Miss C put on Arnie on keyboarding lessons, so he could simply push buttons each day.

Now, he’s staring me down, raging for reasons not apparent to me. The student I had been handing an assignment faded away.

My first impulse was to snatch up the large industrial-sized stapler on my desk, and crack Arnie’s head with it. Instantly, I knew this was from the reptilian part of my brain and not an acceptable response. Since I became sober in 1991, I’ve worked hard on becoming nonviolent, taking classes in cognitive behavioral therapy including anger management and ironically had just finished a refresher anger management class the previous night.

Making certain my voice was calm, reassuring, I said softly, “What’s going on?”

“You just said Arnie is a rat and a punk, Ain’t no rat. Ain’t no punk!” he leaned into my face making me feel claustrophobic and uneasy.

“No one said anything about you,” I almost whispered.

“You calling me a fucking liar?!” His voice amped up, he seemed ready to lose it.

“I can tell you’re upset, and I’m sorry if I offended you.” | put my hands up, palms out, in a conciliatory gesture, trying to deescalate his destructive emotion. “I was not talking about you.

For a moment, he was on the cusp of insanity, but then abruptly turned and stalked away.

The student I had been speaking with came immediately to me and apologized for leaving me alone. “He came out of nowhere,” he said with confusion. “I didn’t know what to do and just left you alone.”

“Probably a good thing, having both of us there might have made him think we were ganging up on him.”

Several more of my students drifted up, wondering what had just happened. When we clued them, they wanted to push up on Arnie to back him off.

For a moment, I was tempted to follow their lead. I felt disrespected, punked, but I clicked out of emotion and engaged the rational side of my brain. Violence is easy, that’s why so many of us are in prison. Sympathy, empathy, emotional control is what’s hard.

“Not a good idea,” I disagreed with the group consensus. “I think you’ll end up triggering him, fighting him and for what? The guy has mental health issues; he’s not going to have a good life. I’m not sure what to do, but pushing up on him isn’t the answer.”

I looked up Arnie in the law library. Twenty years ago, he attacked a friend of his in a parking lot for no apparent reason, knocked him to the ground and then repeatedly kicked him in the head giving him brain damage. Arnie had been sentenced to ten years in prison, but twenty years later he was still here although he has a release date for later this year. Doing twenty years on ten must mean Arnie hadn’t received any good time, and he must have picked up new charges while in custody and sentenced to more time.

Feeling overwhelmed and more than a bit angry about having to deal with a situation where I had no training to assist me, I reached out on the phone to a member of my support network who is a therapist and has known me for more than thirty years. I explained what happened including my brief impulse to hit him in the head that I had suppressed. She told me I had controlled my emotion and handled the event in the best way possible and asked me how I felt about it now.

“Truthfully, I feel really furious that I have to deal with Arnie. I haven’t been violent for more than three decades, and I want to keep anger and violence firmly in my past.”

“Can you walk out of the classroom?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t deal with him. If he acts threateningly, just walk away.”

Thinking it over carefully, I went spoke to Miss C on Monday and told her one of the students made me feel uncomfortable.

Apparently, she had observed or perhaps heard more than I had thought. She knew what I was talking about and told me I had handled Arnie in a positive, productive manner.

“I’m not doing it again. If he approaches me again, I’m walking out…”

“If you walk out,” Miss C interrupted, “I will have Arnie removed from the classroom and he won’t be back. Do you want him removed now?”

Thinking it over for a minute and then another, I said, “I’m not even sure he remembers what happened. I don’t want custody to become involved fi at all possible. You know the guards don’t operate with a scalpel, they just swing a cleaver.”

Nowadays, I keep Arnie in my eyesight, he seems off in his own world, and I do feel badly for him and even worse for society when he’s released in just a few months.

-The End-