Pieces of a Dream

Pieces of a Dream

by Arvan Washington

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arvan Washington is a freelance writer who began composing works while in prison. He is the recipient of two honorable mentions in the PEN prison Writing Contest. He says he “utilizes the freedom [he] discovered through writing to remain out of custody.”

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PIECES OF A DREAM

Ready by Anonymous

Smacking gum, smiling, and wearing a

tight mini-mini that barely covers

the imagination, she looks like she

belongs in a junior high somewhere—

and even that might be a stretch.

It’s two a.m. And the stroll is popping.

Pimps are dinosaured; The Crack Age

decimated their ranks in the Eighties

and they never recovered. Rocks

control the block now.

She struts with the poise of a

runway model, swinging hips

just beginning their womanly spread;

bra-less breasts, overly developed for

any age, bounce, swell, and spill out of

a top two sizes too small.

In the four plus months we’ve been

friends, she’s been beaten—twice,

raped—once, and infected with HIV.

I interrupted an attempted rape

and became her avenging angel,

get high partner, and occasional lover—

I’m sixteen and dying and caring for

a pseudo-child.

I’m an old man on the streets:

homeless since my AIDS-riddled uncle

decided to keep a family tradition

alive, and came to me when I

turned nine. Nearly seven months later

I ended his comings by ending his life

and fled into the night.

She and I click on several

levels, and actually have a few things

in common outside of getting high,

HIV, and being sex toys for elder family

members. Who knows, in another life,

another reality, we might’ve been able to

have something resembling a normal

relationship—then again, what’s normal.

When ARC hit me, she put down

her pipe, dated only a few regs, and

Florence Nightengaled me back

from the brink. She got us a hotel

room that we cling to, and mastered

the art of hot plate, microwave culinary

preparation, producing delights worthy of

an Epicurean gourmand.

And along the way, we convinced ourselves

that maybe God, Allah, Jah, Whoever, cared

just a tiny bit about what happened in

our insignificant, minuscule lives, that hope

became a vibrant thing. And foolishly,

we began to dream.

Our dreams were simple: a pain-free day,

a tearless night, a place called home.

An end to the nightmares: those relentless

memories of family that still disturbed

our sleep. Her screams had awakened me

far too many times to keep track of. And

the things she murmured in slumber,

reliving events no child should ever live through,

chilled me like an iced frappaccino. She

deserved peace; and the scars traversing her wrists

bleakly recounted all her attempts

to obtain it.

On her fifteenth birthday, a few days

before my seventeenth, I decided to

surprise her. Using the proceeds from

a convenience store robbery, I threw

a bash for two: ice cream and cake,

balloons and orchids, and take out from

Ching Min’s Golden Dragon—her favorite.

I got her a stuffed giant panda toting

a miniature purse with a quarter piece and

a sack of weed hidden inside.

She was delighted; surprised I cared.

We ate, sipped Boone’s Farm, smoked weed

and dope, and then made delicious before

doing it all over again. High, tired, and

feeling at ease, I relaxed in her embrace

and slipped into a somnambulistic euphoria.

She was awake with two dubs left

when I winked out. And gone when I awoke.

I found the note she left on the table

held down by a doubled up fifty piece,

and quickly scanned. It said she

went to meet a regular and would be

back at eight. I read it at nine but

thought nothing of it—dates ran long,

sometimes. I went out boosting,

got home that night, and still saw

no sign. I started to worry then.

Her body was found three weeks later

putrefying in an empty house of 56th.

Cause of death was listed as suspicious,

possible homicide. No one heard, seen,

or remembered anything. She was just

a forgotten nobody, a non-entity. It was only

by happenstance that Marguerite, a

mutual acquaintance, had discovered the body.

She had been looking for a trap to

trick in, and fell back on an old, out of use

favorite. I thanked her for telling me

what she didn’t tell the police.

Marguerite had found the purse she had

when she died. Her wallet was still in it—

no cash, just flicks—the only pictures either

of us had ever probably taken wearing a

genuine smile. I remembered the day

we took them: at an amusement park

with a disposable camera, we’d asked

another couple to capture our joy.

As I sat with them, sipping bumpy

face and seven*, I felt tears rolling down

my whiskered cheeks. So this is how a heart

feels when it is breaking.

Amazingly, I never knew her real name.

I called her Pandie because she loved

panda bears; found them so adorable.

I had meant to take her to the zoo

to see a live exhibit, but kept finding

too many excuses to find the time to

take her. Funny, you never realize

how much you care for a person until

they’re gone. Looking for her memory,

her picture, I told her for the first time,

“I love you, Pandie.” And then, I

washed down a handful of pills

and went to join her.

Pieces of a Dream -

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THEMES

HIV and Incarceration

As described in the curatiorial note accompanying this pieces, incarcerated people are uniquely vulnerable to HIV. When confounded with issues such as poverty and racial discrimination the challenges that HIV positive prisoners face in terms of managing their illness are unique, and HIV negative prisoners face high risks of contracting the disease.

Primary drivers of HIV risk is prisons includes drug use and needle sharing, tattooing with unsterile needles, and high rates of unprotected sex and sexual assault [1]. For prisoners who are infected with HIV, overcrowding can lead to increased risk for opportunist infections. This is coupled with stress, malnutrition, drugs, and violence, which can weaken the ability of HIV positive individuals to fight infection [2].

1. Avert. "Prisoners and HIV/AIDS." https://www.avert.org/professionals/hiv-social-issues/key-affected-populations/prisoners#footnote3_28gfrbr

2.UNAIDS (2014) 'The Gap Report 2014'

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ABOUT THE PERFORMER

This piece is read by another anonymous artist who is a black man, a spoken word performer, and a formerly incarcerated Duke junior. Given how college applications require you to disclose any criminal/arrest record, even if your original charge was mediated to a lesser offense to not harm your future, the stigma against formerly incarcerated people in college admissions is clear.This student was able to side-step some of this discrimination by their offense being when they were a juvenile, and after serving their time in a juvenile correctional facility, their record was expunged when they turned 18. Nonetheless, the stigma against formerly incarcerated people kept this student from wanting their name associated publicly with this monologue, and this stigma against formerly incarcerated people lives very clearly in the United States.

All American citizens are eligible to vote with the exception of convicted felons, who lose their enfranchisement and ability to have their voices heard in government as punishment for their crime. Most job applications require potential new employees to disclose any former criminal record, so the discrimination against formerly incarcerated people in hiring is clear, even after they have done their time that supposedly repays their debt to society, but their inability to get hired or vote represents that they continue to pay for their entire lives.

This stigma is also related to HIV-AIDS related stigma. In the past, inmates who were HIV+ and being held in South Carolina prisons were forced to have red ribbons disclosing their status to everyone they interacted with emblazoned on all of their clothes and were denied access to some programs and services while incarcerated, though this practice was stopped after former inmates filed and won a lawsuit against the South Carolina Department of Corrections for violating their rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act and their 14th Amendment guarantees of equal protection under the law.

However, this was far from the end of the intersection of stigmas against HIV+ people and current/formerly incarcerated people. Prisons are a high risk environment for HIV/AIDS transmission, given the added vulnerability of people housed in prisons to be raped/engage in consensual (predominantly anal, or the highest risk sex in terms of HIV/AIDS transmission) sex without access to safer sex supplies, to engage in body fluid transmission through hand-to-hand combat (there is more risk for transmission if the only weapons you have are your fists, teeth, and shivs you craft with your own hands than if you fight with guns or other long-distance fighting weapons that are not allowed in prisons), and to continue using injection drug use with the added risks associated with having to hide the use from correctional officers preventing inmates from getting the health care they need/the shortage of injection drug-related supplies among inmates all but guaranteeing that needles used to inject drugs will be shared among inmates.

The expectation for prisoners to not have sex in prison flies in the face of the basic human need to express sexuality, and not providing prisoners with access to safer sex supplies in order to reduce the risk of contracting HIV/other STIs (that, in turn, make people more likely to contract HIV due to having genital warts/open sores on their genitals that make for easy transmission points for HIV) makes prisons into a hot-bed of HIV/AIDS transmission, even if you assume that the prisoners do not fight or use injection drugs while in prison (which, as you can see from the sources provided, is far from a fair assumption to make). Additionally, many prisoners receive tattoos while in prison, which the unsafe and unhygienic environment under which these tattoos are given as well as the shortage of supplies necessary to not share tattooing needles and properly clean needles between tattoos given provide additional risk factors for contracting HIV and other blood-borne illnesses while incarcerated.

Overcrowding in prisons worsens these effects, making supplies even shorter, tensions that evolve into fights even higher, and the access to health care/the privacy needed to self-administer health related services even lower. Research from the U.S. Department of Justice show that while black substance users are 40% of the population in prison, they make up only 13% of the population of substance abusers in the U.S., which shows a 27-percentage-point disparity that suggests that black people who use substances are more likely to be incarcerated than their white counterparts, who this research shows are the majority of substance abusers/drug dealers in the United States but are the minority of those incarcerated for drug-related offenses.

Additionally, because of laws criminalizing sex work and the fact that black women are disproportionately vulnerable to become sex workers or substance abusers, these facts relate back to many of the themes we engaged with through viewing and discussing All of Us.

Moreover, because of the ways in which black/Latinx men are disproportionately incarcerated in the United States, which has only 5% of the world population but a quarter of its prisoners, these facts are additionally troubling in making black/Latinx men more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS. However, black/Latinx women are the fastest growing demographic of HIV/AIDS patients, and the most common mode of transmission/spread in the U.S. is through heterosexual contact. This ties back to prisons in that, for black/Latinx women even who have never committed a crime or been incarcerated, because of how the United States is disproportionately targeting black/Latinx communities in our carceral system, how it is normalized for men to have many heterosexual partners whereas women are expected to have fewer, and how intraracial relationships are still somewhat the societal norm in the United States, we are causing black/Latinx women who have never been to prison to contract HIV/AIDS by sleeping with the same black/Latinx men who we put at disproportionate risk for contracting HIV/AIDS due to their exposure to the carceral system. Essentially, we are putting black/Latinx women at risk by incarcerating their boyfriends/husbands/other sexual partners who are black/Latinx men, exposing them to HIV/AIDS while in prison, and then releasing them back into their communities full of black/Latinx women with the social capital as men to have many heterosexual sexual partners (who, because of who is in their communities, are largely black/Latinx women) and determine condom usage but not ever get tested/treated for their HIV/AIDS because of the stigmas associated with living with HIV/AIDS and the poverty enabled by legalized employment discrimination against formerly incarcerated people preventing them from getting the health care they need even if they overcome the hurdle of getting tested.

These statistics and trends show that the themes in All of Us continue into the present day, and show that the intersection between HIV/AIDS stigma and the stigma that surrounds formerly incarcerated people causes problems that continue into the present day.