Ice Cream — For The First Time
“I’ve never done this before,” Daniel said.
Munching on a couple of ice cream bars I’d bought at the prison commissary. we were sitting at a plastic table in the half basketball court, multi-purpose room.
I’d been visiting Daniel for about six months now, and he’d just told me he had finished writing the narratives of him being sexually abused by four men when he was growing up. His treatment team had asked him to do that work, as part of his therapy.
He’d told me about the men who’d molested him, during one of my visits about a month ago. He’d cried and wrung his hands during the telling of those stories, including the predatory attack by his dad’s best friend when he was nine years old. I cried, too, clenching my fists with the impotent rage I’d experienced so many times before, listening to young men tell me the stories of their lives, the abuse, the neglect, the preying on the souls of innocent youth.
He knew I was a mandatory reporter of sexual abuse, and would tell his treatment team. He was OK with this, knowing I’d do my job, and free him up to talk about those dark times in his life, with the therapists who were helping him figure out his life and nudge him to move on to be a healthy young man. Prison was a safe place to do that tough work.
He had a lot of trust in me, and that hadn’t come easy in the last six months. He’d tested me a lot. He was good at feigning stupidity and ignorance, but he was a smart young man, more street wise than I’d ever be.
“What do you mean?” I asked, catching a bit of the chocolate coating on my finger, before it landed on the gray table that the inmates had set up for visiting hours.
I’m thinking the new thing is the cribbage game we are half heartedly playing. Daniel had shuffled the cards about fifty times, as he talked about his day, his school work, and his work in the prison kitchen. The card shuffling was just his way of sorting out the words in his mind, to give him a place for his energy, as he struggled to find how to tell his story.
Our visits always unleashed a torrent of words from him, and I no longer worried about how we could fill the two hours of my weekly visits. He had a lot of catching up to do, and I barely could get a few sentences in before he’d bury me in another ten minute monologue of his life’s story.
I was the first man in his life, other than someone who worked for the prison system, or the cops that arrested him for rape when he was seventeen, that he could talk to, and talk deep about his life, and, tentatively, his hopes and dreams. That was new territory for him, and words that dealt with emotion and feelings were new tools for him.
He tested them out on me, wondering how I’d react to his anger, his rage, and his grief over his dad’s death when he was fifteen, his mother’s twisted affections and misdirected attention to him over the years, and the harsh reality of his seven year prison sentence.
Still, prison was a good place for Daniel. There was structure, there was safety, there was school, and people were helping him learn about what he’d buried inside of himself over the years, the alcoholism,the drugs, the violence, the sexual perversion, and was just now learning how to express.
I’m still back on the cribbage game, and I renew my answer to Daniel.
“Is it trying to teach an old man a game you really know how to play?” I joke, my mind still trying to find out what is new to Daniel tonight.
“Oh, no, its not the cribbage. It’s having ice cream. Eating ice cream with someone, and just talking. I’ve never done that before.”
Oh. Really? Come on now, everyone eats ice cream. How can that be new?
My thoughts find words and I probe Daniel a bit.
“Yeah. I’ve really never just sat around and ate ice cream with anyone before. Not until you,” he said.
“Thanks. This is really nice,” he adds, his shoulders relaxed, a bit of a smile on his face, a bit of chocolate stuck to his lip.
The silence fills the room, the muffled voices of the few parents and prisoners in the half basketball court dying out in my ears.
Yeah. Never had ice cream before, just sitting around and having a bit of fun.
